“Yes, I know,” said Mary. “Of course that was horrible--but she refused
to see the Rector, too, and Nancy.”
“So I should have expected.”
“I don’t know. The Rector is very gentle, and she’s known him for
years--and he was very fond of Bill Patch. But, anyhow, she didn’t see
either of them. As far as I know, she saw nobody except the doctor and
one nurse until she gave her evidence. And after that, Miles, she had
to go back to Queen Street.”
“And you went to find her there?”
“Oh no, I didn’t. She found me there. I can’t exactly explain what
made me do it, Miles. I think--stupidly enough--it was the thought of
her packing. I couldn’t get it out of my head that after the whole
appalling business was over she’d have to come and see all the clothes
she’d been wearing, and the little, inanimate things, and the sitting
room with the bow window, where she’d waited for Bill. And I thought
that it would be less frightful if she found someone there and the
packing done--and even if it made her very angry, it would be better
than seeing it all again just exactly as it had been before. But
she wasn’t angry. She came much sooner than I’d expected and walked
straight into the sitting room, and I don’t think she remembered who I
was or anything. She sat down by the table, I remember, and folded her
hands in her lap and never said a word. And I finished the packing.”
“Without speaking?”
Mary nodded.
“I was crying, Miles. I didn’t know that one _could_ cry like that any
more--at my age. But if you’d seen her face--”
She broke off, and then after a minute or two spoke again.
“If the people, like Lady Annabel or General Kendal, who talked about
her having done so much harm, and wrecked Bill’s life, and so on, could
have seen her then, surely they’d have realized that she was paying
for everything--over and over again. There’s nothing anyone can say of
her that she can’t have said to herself--you see, she’s intelligent,
isn’t she? She knew what she’d done far better than any of them could
ever tell her. That’s the point of the whole thing, really, isn’t
it? Mrs. Harter was capable of things, good as well as bad, that the
rest of us didn’t even begin to apprehend. If the Kendals--I’m using
them as a symbol, you understand--if the Kendals think that she was
‘unhappy’ and it served her right, it’s only because they attach such
a trivial meaning to the word. I saw her once when she was happy, out
with him one morning, long before we really knew anything about her and
Bill--and I can’t forget it. Her emotions were in a different plane
from those of the rest of us. Her capacity for feeling was different--I
suppose it was really that which we all felt about her in the very
beginning, when we discussed her. Life must always have been much more
difficult for her than for most people--and yet all the time, one
knows, it might have been so much more beautiful.”
“Do you really believe that?”
I was remembering Mrs. Harter’s sullen, contemptuous expression, her
ungracious manner, even that characteristic middle-class phraseology,
those intonations and inflexions that placed her, so unmistakably, in
the aristocratic judgments of Cross Loman--
After all, I had never seen her, as Mary had, illuminated.
“Do you really think that Mrs. Harter’s life might have been
something--beautiful?”
“Might have been?” said Mary. “It ought to have been. Sometimes I’m not
even sure, Miles, that it won’t yet be, in spite of everything. She’s
got it in her.”
Mary stopped--not hesitating, but giving additional weight to her low,
earnest speech.
“Mrs. Harter is capable of tragedy--that’s why it came to her, I
suppose. The majority of people aren’t.”
I found that I rather resented that remark of Mary’s. It was so
true--the last half of it, I mean. Inevitably, I made the personal
application that Mary had certainly not intended.
No, my warped, fretful, sometimes rather spiteful outlook on life does
not constitute tragedy, any more than does the flat, jarring inharmony
of the relations between Claire and myself. My futile repinings, all of
them translated into terms of mental values, are not tragedy.
For a moment I wondered about Mary Ambrey herself. I looked at her and
she smiled.
“Oh no, Miles. One may be conscious of having missed actual, positive
happiness, perhaps, even, of having lost the power of feeling anything
very vehemently, but that’s disappointment, not tragedy. All I’m
capable of is of recognizing it when I see it.”
“And you saw it in Mrs. Harter?”
“Yes.”
“Mary, where is she now? What happened when you had packed for her in
the lodgings in Queen Street?”
“She went to London, but I don’t know where she is now. I asked her
where she was going and she said, ‘London first, to get a job. Abroad,
I expect.’ There wasn’t anything I could do to help her, she said. She
went away that night. I went to the station with her. And on the way
there she talked a little, though I don’t think she had much idea of
whom she was talking to at the time. She spoke about Bill, and she said
quite calmly: ‘One reason why I’m telling you about it is that it will
help me to remember it longer. One day all this will fade away--I know
that very well. One’s made like that. What it’s done to me will stay,
but the memory of _this_--even of him--will grow dim, like everything
else. This torture will stop, in time, and I shall remember less and
less.’ Then she told me about her second meeting with Bill. They went
up Loman Hill and came here. She knew he’d fallen in love with her,
of course--I imagine that quite a lot of men have been in love with
her--and she half thought it was different to anything else that had
ever happened to her before, but she wasn’t absolutely certain. You
know, Miles, personally, I think it was rather wonderful that she
should have recognized that--that quality when it did come. I don’t
think anything in her life had helped to make her able to recognize it.
“So she told him about herself--the truth, not the subtle dramatization
of it that one mostly offers to other people--I don’t mean that she had
any special revelation to make, you know. But she just let him see her
as she honestly saw herself--and she’s an extraordinarily honest woman.
And she said Bill understood. She said that he asked what difference
that made, at the end of it all. Can’t you hear Bill saying that, very
literal, and serious, and gentle, and looking at her through those
queer, thick glasses?”
For a minute, as Mary spoke, something caught hold of me, and I passed
through one of those vivid moments of almost intolerable intuition in
which one lives imaginatively through the profound emotional experience
of another.
The compensatory reaction followed, as it always does.
“Even if the quality of which you speak were really there, in the
link between those two people--and I’m inclined, too, to think that
it _was_ there--haven’t you ever wondered what would have become of
them--of their love itself, if Bill had lived? Everything was against
them--everything was there to divide them--difference of age, class,
traditions, outlook. Those things are bound to count in the long run.
Can you see Bill and Diamond Harter together in twenty--even in ten
years’ time?”
“I don’t think they’d have been together,” said Mary quietly. “As it
happened, the thing was arbitrarily settled for them--but if Bill
had lived, they would have had to make a decision, and I don’t think
they’d have decided to go away together. Bill said once--not to me, to
Nancy--that he knew it would be an--unsporting--thing to do.”
I think she saw, although I said nothing, that, to my captiousness, the
word came as something of an anticlimax. It suggested bathos.
“As she so often does,” Mary replied to my unspoken comment.
“That’s the idiom of Bill’s generation, isn’t it? An earlier one spoke
of ‘honor’ and one earlier still of the Ten Commandments. I can’t
imagine Bill or Mrs. Harter taking the Commandments, as such, very
seriously--can you? The form in which that ideal has been cast is out
of date. But the ideal is still there. Personally, I think they would
have subscribed to it--in their own way.”
“Translated into the terms of the football field,” said I coldly.
“If you like,” Mary agreed, unruffled. “Although Bill doesn’t suggest
that particular association to my mind in the very least.”
Nor to mine--as she well knew.
“What has happened to Mrs. Harter?” I asked, not caring to pursue the
other issue just then.
“I don’t know. She’s quite clever enough to have found a job, and kept
it, if she wanted to.”
“If--yes. But what about all the years since her marriage--Egypt,
and the dances, and the cocktails, and the men who fell in love with
her--you remember the stories that fellow Leeds told us?”
“She won’t go back to that. Bill spoiled all that for her, you know.
And, anyway, she has no money now, has she?”
“Harter?”
“She isn’t going to see him again.”
“She’s deserted him?”
“If you care to put it like that, yes. I suppose one can say he’s been
sent to prison and when he comes out he’ll not find his wife. She’s
deserted him. But, on the other hand, she would also have ‘deserted’
him if he hadn’t been sent to prison at all. It isn’t because he’s gone
to prison that she’s left him. I don’t know why I tell you these things
in so many words, Miles. You know them as well as I do, really.”
I did, of course. Perhaps, like Claire, I understood more about Mrs.
Harter than I actually wanted to understand.
She remains, to me, entirely unforgettable. I think of her when I go
down Queen Street past the hideous bow window, set in yellow bricks, at
which she sat and watched for Bill Patch. I think of both of them when
I go up Loman Hill and turn round at the crossroads to look over the
gate under the big beech tree. Again and again I find myself wondering
where she is now and whether she will ever come back to Cross Loman.
Mary says that she never will.
No one has heard from her, no one knows whether she is alive or dead.
The charitable Lady Annabel once murmured a suggestion to the effect
that “that infamous woman” would, no doubt, have changed her name,
discarding the one which she had covered “with enduring shame.”
I disagree with Lady Annabel first and last. I cannot imagine Mrs.
Harter changing her name, even though it belongs to her husband, and I
do not consider that she has “covered it with enduring shame.” These
phrases....
The personality of Diamond Harter outweighs them all and leaves one
confronted only with a sense of stark tragedy.
And that, to my mind, remains the last word in the case. Tragedy,
one of the rarest things in the world, came into our midst, and came
through the only two people capable of tragedy. Most of us, as a
matter of fact, did not even recognize it. The Leeds couple saw a
scandal agreeably shocking and terrible, the Kendals saw folly, and
impropriety, and the sad, sad death of one of the few young men of
their acquaintance, Lady Annabel saw outraged laws and well-merited
retribution, Sallie and Martyn Ambrey saw themselves seeing a very
interesting psychological study--and so on.
The affair of Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter was all of those things,
was fitted by all those labels. But they miss the essence of it, as
labels always do.
I am constantly reminded, odiously, and against every æsthetic canon,
of a homely French saying: _A bon chat, bon rat._