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Title: Mrs. Harter

Author: E. M. Delafield

Release date: February 12, 2024 [eBook #72945]

Most recently updated: June 21, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers

Credits: Emmanuel Ackerman, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. HARTER ***

Mrs. Harter

Mrs. Harter

By

E. M. Delafield

Author of “The Heel of Achilles,”

“The Optimist,” Etc.

Publishers

Harper & Brothers

New York and London

MRS. HARTER

Copyright, 1925

By E. M. Delafield

Printed in the U. S. A.

First Edition

c-z

To Phyllida

Mrs. Harter

Mrs. Harter

Chapter One

MOST of us, at Cross Loman, have begun to forget about Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch, and those of us who still remember—and after all, it was only last summer—hardly ever speak their names.

I know that Mary Ambrey remembers, just as I do. Sometimes we talk about it to each other, and exchange impressions and conjectures. Conjectures more than anything, because neither of us has the inside knowledge that alone could help one to a real understanding of what happened. Mary goes by intuition a good deal, and after all she did see something of Mrs. Harter. Personally, I know less than anybody. Bill Patch was my junior by many years and, though I saw him very often, we were never anything more than acquaintances. And Diamond Harter, oddly enough, I scarcely spoke to at all. And yet I have so vivid an impression of her strange personality that I feel as though I understood her better than anyone now living can ever do.

It is partly to rid myself of the obsession that she is to me that I have set myself to reconstruct the affair of last summer. It is said that antiquarians can reconstruct an entire monster from a single bone. Perhaps, as an amateur psychologist, I can reconstruct a singularly enigmatic personality from—well, more than a single fact, perhaps, but not much more. Impressions, especially other people’s impressions, are not facts. Besides, the most curious thing of all, to my mind, is that they all saw her quite differently. The aspect that she wore to Mary Ambrey, for instance, was not that in which Claire, my wife, saw her.

And yet Claire—about whom I intend to write with perfect frankness—is not devoid of insight, although she exaggerates everything.

Claire lives upon the edge of a volcano.

This is her own metaphor, and certainly represents quite accurately the state of emotional jeopardy in which her days are passed—indeed, it would be truer still to say that she lives upon the edge of a hundred volcanoes, so that there can never be a complete absence of eruptions.

She has really undergone a certain amount of suffering in her life, and is, I think, all but entirely unaware that most of it was avoidable.

Her powers of imagination, although in the old days they helped to constitute her charm, are, and always were, in excess of her self-control, her reason, and her education. There are few combinations less calculated to promote contentment in the possessors of them.

She is really incapable now of concentrating upon any but a personal issue. Yet she expresses her opinion, with passionate emphasis, upon a number of points.

“An atheist,” says Claire, frequently, “is a fool. Now an agnostic is not a fool. An agnostic says, humbly, ‘I don’t know.’ But an atheist, who denies the existence of a God, is a fool.”

It is perhaps needless to add that Claire considers herself an agnostic.

She generally speaks in capital letters.

When she dislikes the course of action, as reported in the Times, taken by any politician—and she has a virulent and mutually inconsistent set of dislikes—Claire is apt to remark vivaciously:

“All I can say is that So-and-so ought to be taken out and HUNG. Then he wouldn’t talk so much nonsense.”

Claire is, of course, an anti-prohibitionist because “just look at America—it’s a perfect farce”—and an anti-feminist because “women can exercise all the influence they want to at home. I should like to see the woman who can’t make her husband vote as she wants him to vote!”

Socialism, in which Claire includes the whole of the Labor Party, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and a large number of entirely non-political organizations, she condemns upon the grounds that “it is nonsense to pretend that things could ever be equal. Place everyone upon the same footing in every respect, and in a week some people would have everything and others nothing.”

Upon the question of birth control, so freely discussed by our younger relatives, her views might be epitomized (though not by herself, since Claire never epitomizes anything, least of all views of her own).

The whole subject is disgusting. All those who write or speak of it are actuated by motives of indecency, and all those who read their writings or listen to their speeches do so from unhealthy curiosity. God Himself has definitely pronounced against any and every form of birth control.

Of this last, Claire seems to be especially positive, but I have never been able to find out from her exactly where this revelation of the Almighty’s attitude of mind is to be found.

It need scarcely be added that, to Claire, all pacifists are unpatriotic and cowardly, all vegetarians cranks, and all spiritualists either humbugs or hysterical women.

Sometimes, but not often, she and I discuss these things. But when I object to sweeping generalities, Claire, unfortunately, feels that I am being something which she labels as “always against” her, and she then not infrequently bursts into tears.

Few of our discussions ever survive this stage.

It is very curious now to think that fifteen years ago I was madly in love with Claire Ambrey. She refused to marry me until I was smashed up in a flying experiment in America.

Then she wrote and said that she loved me and had always loved me and would marry me at once. I suppose I believed this because at the moment I so wanted to believe it, and because also, at the moment she so intensely believed it herself.

The generosity and the self-deception were both so like Claire. Her emotional impulses are so violent and her capacity for sustained effort so small.

It would be ungracious, to say the least of it, to dwell upon the failure that we both know our married life to be. It is sufficient to say that, in tying herself to a semi-cripple, with a too highly developed critical faculty and a preference for facing facts stark and undecorated, Claire, in a word—and a vulgar word at that—bit off more than she could chew.

We have lived at Cross Loman Manor House ever since my father’s death. The Ambreys, Claire’s cousins, are our nearest neighbors, but they have been at the Mill House only for the last seven years, and Cross Loman looks upon them as newcomers. The Kendals have been eighteen years at Dheera Dhoon, which is the name unerringly bestowed by General Kendal on their big stucco villa at the outskirts of the town. Nancy Fazackerly was born at Loman Cottage, lived there until she married, and came back there, a few years afterward, widowed—and so on. It is just the same with the tradespeople and the farmers. Applebee was always the baker, and when he died, Emma Applebee, his daughter, remained on in the business. A boy, whom Emma Applebee has always strenuously impressed upon us all as “my little nephew,” will succeed Emma.

Halfway up Cross Loman Hill is the church, with the rectory just below it. Bending has been there for thirty years. Lady Annabel Bending, who was the widow of a colonial governor when the Rector married her, has been among us only for the last two years.

We all meet one another pretty frequently, but I seldom care to take my wheel chair and my unsightly crutch outside the park gates, and so my intercourse is mostly with the people who come to the house.

Mary Ambrey and her children come oftenest. Claire’s feelings, on the whole, are less often hurt by Mary than by most other people. Claire neither likes, admires, nor approves of Sallie and Martyn Ambrey, but she is at the same time genuinely and pathetically fond of them—a contradiction as painful to herself as it is probably irksome to Martyn and Sallie.

Martyn has always been her favorite because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn-God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up and has ceased to be chubby—which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all.

On the whole, Martyn and Sallie do not behave well toward Claire. They are cold and contemptuous, both of them conscious of being logical, impersonal, and supremely rational, where their cousin is none of these things, but rather the exact contrary to them.

Martyn is twenty-one and at Oxford.

Sallie is a year younger, a medical student at London University.

Neither of them has ever been heard to utter the words “I’m sorry” after hurting anyone’s feelings. Claire noted this long ago—but she has never realized that it is simply because they are not sorry that they omit the use of the time-honored formula.

They are both of them clever and both of them good-looking. But I often find it strange that they should be Mary Ambrey’s children.

She, too, is clever and good-looking, but in thinking of her one substitutes other adjectives. Mary is gifted, sensitive, intelligent, gracious, and beautiful, and pre-eminently well bred.

The description reminds me of the game we called “Sallie’s game” that she invented last summer. It was that afternoon, incidentally, on which I first heard Mrs. Harter’s name.

The Ambreys had come up to the Manor House on the first day of the long vacation. There was the slight constraint that is always perceptible when Claire is present, unless she is being made the center of the conversation. One felt the involuntary chafing of her spirit.

After tea, she suddenly suggested that we should play paper games.

“I’ve invented a new paper game,” Sallie said, joyously, her eyes dancing. “It’s called Portraits, and there are two ways of playing it. Either we each write down five adjectives applicable to some person we all know, and then guess whom it’s meant for, or else we all agree on the same person and then write the portraits and compare them.”

(“This,” thought I, “is the sort of game that ends in at least one member of the party getting up and leaving the room, permanently offended.”)

“Let’s try it,” said Claire, eagerly.

Personalities always appeal to her, until they are directed against herself. But it is a part of her curious pathos that she never really expects them to be directed against herself. I looked at Mary Ambrey, and she looked back at me with the faintest hint of resigned amusement in her hazel eyes.

Just as Martyn had finished distributing pencils and strips of paper the Misses Kendal were announced.

It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen.

They wear their hats on the backs of their heads, and their skirts a little longer behind than in front, as do all the Kendals, but they are nice-looking girls in a bovine way. It is hard on them to compare them with Sallie, who is ten years their junior, as slim and as straight as a wand, and whose clothes invariably produce a peculiarly dashing effect.

No Kendals are ever dashing.

“You’re just in time to learn a new game,” said Martyn, proceeding to explain.

“We’re no good at this sort of thing,” said the Kendals, with cheerful contempt for those who were.

“We shall be thoroughly out of it all, but we’ll try and struggle along somehow.”

The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thorough-going, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”

Inquiries after Alfred, who is in business and comes home only for week-ends, always elicit the assurance that he is “struggling along somehow.”

General Kendal, known as Puppa, and Mrs. Kendal—Mumma—also “struggle along somehow.”

When they were told about Sallie’s new game, Dolly and Aileen Kendal looked horribly distrustful.

“How can one ever guess who it’s meant for, I should like to know. It would be impossible,” said Aileen.

“Would it?” Sallie remarked, dryly.

She caught her mother’s eye and relented.

“Of course, you can take a public character for your portrait, if you like.”

“That would be much easier,” declared the Kendals in a breath.

We all wrote on our pieces of paper, and bit the ends of our pencils, and finally folded up the papers and threw them into a bowl.

“Here goes,” said Dolly Kendal, recklessly.

“It’ll be all the same a hundred years hence,” Aileen added, with her air of philosophical resignation.

The first slip read aloud by Martyn was my own.

“Kind-hearted, Indomitable, Pathetic, Unscrupulous, Cheerful.”

“Nancy Fazackerly,” said Mary, instantly.

“But why indomitable?” I heard Dolly ask, in a puzzled way.

“Excellent. Now here’s someone you’ll all guess,” said Martyn, with a glance at his sister. “Rational, Sympathetic, Intelligent, Reserved, Elusive.”

“Elusive is very good,” said Sallie.

“You’ve got it?” her brother asked.

“Of course.”

“Wait a minute,” said Claire. “Read it again.”

Martyn read it again, refraining from glancing at his mother.

“Queen Mary,” Aileen Kendal suddenly suggested, brightly.

Martyn considered her gravely.

“What makes you think it might be?” he inquired at last, evidently honestly curious.

“Oh, I don’t know. You said we might take public characters, and she was the first one I thought of.”

“It might be me, I suppose,” Claire said, thoughtfully, “only it leaves out a good deal. I mean, I don’t think those characteristics are the most salient ones.”

“Besides, some of them wouldn’t apply, Cousin Claire,” said Sallie, ruthlessly. “For one thing, I should never call you in the least—”

“Tell me who it is, Sallie,” her mother interrupted her.

“You, of course. I guessed it directly and so did Cousin Miles.”

“It’s good, I think,” said Martyn. “Elusive is the very word I’ve been looking for to describe mother’s sort of remoteness.”

I saw the Kendals exchange glances with one another.

Certainly, it is quite inconceivable that in the family circle at Dheera Dhoon Mumma should ever be thus described, in her own presence, by her progeny.

“Read the next one,” said Claire, coldly.

The Kendals had each of them selected a member of the royal family for analysis, and the adjectives that they had chosen bore testimony rather to a nice sense of loyalty than to either their powers of discernment or any appreciation of the meaning of words.

Then came the catastrophe that Mary and I, at least, had grimly foreseen from the start.

Sallie, of course, was responsible. She really has very little sense of decency.

“Imaginative, Temperamental, Unbalanced, Egotistical, Restless.”

There was a short, deathly silence.

“Did you mean it for Cousin Claire, Sallie?” said Martyn, at last.

One felt it was something that he should even have put it in the form of a question.

“Yes, but there’s something missing,” Sallie said, bright and interested and detached. She and her contemporaries dissect themselves freely, I believe, and they are always bright and interested and detached. “There were dozens of other things that I wanted to put down, all just as descriptive.”

“My worst enemy could not call me egotistical,” said Claire, in a trembling voice. “And it’s neither true nor respectful, Sallie, to say such a thing. A game is a game, but you show me that I’m foolish to allow myself to take part in this sort of amusement with you, as though I were of your own age. You take advantage of it.”

“My mistake, Cousin Claire,” said Sallie, not at all sorry, but evidently rather amused. “I just put what I really thought. It didn’t occur to me that you’d mind.”

“Of course I don’t ‘mind,’ my child.” Claire’s voice had become a rapid staccato. “It makes me smile, that’s all. What do you mean by calling me ‘unbalanced?’ I suppose there isn’t a woman of my age anywhere to whom that word is less applicable.”

“Hadn’t we better play at something else?” said Dolly Kendal. “I knew before we began that if anyone put in real people it wouldn’t be a success. That sort of thing always ends in somebody being offended.”

“There’s no question of being offended,” said Claire, more offended than ever.

“Mumma always made the rule, when we were children and used to play games like Consequences: present company always excepted.”

“I should call that dull. But perhaps it was safe,” Sallie conceded. “Shall we try the other game? Choose a person, and then each do his or her portrait, and compare them afterwards.”

The Kendals looked as though they did not think this likely to be a very great improvement upon Sallie’s last inspiration.

“Do me,” said Sallie, shamelessly.

“I think”—Mary’s gentle voice was unusually determined—“I think we will adopt Mrs. Kendal’s rule this time.”

“Then let’s do that Mrs. Harter, who goes to tea with Mrs. Fazackerly. We all know her, don’t we?”

“Only very slightly.”

“All the more interesting.”

“She really has personality,” said Claire, who had been silent, with compressed lips and a look of pain in her big dark eyes. I think she felt that no one was looking at her and so gave it up.

“But you’ve never seen Mrs. Harter, have you?” Mary asked me.

“No, but carry on. Who is Mrs. Harter?”

“Old Ellison’s daughter. You remember Ellison, the plumber?”

“Quite well. Is this the girl with the odd Christian name?”

“Diamond—yes. She married young and went out to the East about five years ago. I don’t think she’s been to Cross Loman since. Now she’s here for a year, I believe, having left the husband behind. The children have met her with Nancy Fazackerly and Martyn introduced her to me.”

“In the old days, of course, you’d have seen her behind a typewriter in her father’s office?”

“Exactly.”

Mary smiled. The changes that the war has brought about in social intercourse do not perturb her in the least.

She can afford to accept them.

“Mother,” said Sallie, “have you finished Mrs. Harter?”

“One minute.”

The portraits, when they were read aloud, struck me as forming rather an interesting comment upon the person who had inspired them. Of the writers, only the two Kendals were negligible as observers of human nature.

“Bad-tempered, Determined, Intelligent, Pushing, Handsome.”

That was Martyn’s version.

“Handsome!” ejaculated Sallie. Her own paper began with the word “Repellent” and went on with “Determined, Ambitious, Straightforward, Common.”

“I’ve got her down as ‘Common,’ too,” said Claire. “Common, Self-willed, Good-looking, Obstinate, and Hard.”

“What a pleasing aggregate!” said I. “Mary, what do you make of Mrs. Harter?”

“Sincere, Unhappy, Reserved, Ill-tempered, Undisciplined.”

“It’s queer,” said Martyn. “We’ve all been impressed by that woman more or less. And yet we’ve all noticed different things about her.”

“Two people said she was common,” Sallie pointed out.

“I don’t agree.”

“Well,” said Dolly Kendal, “it’s not a very nice thing to say about anyone, is it?”

This comment did not materially add to the value of the discussion and met with no rejoinder.

“Mrs. Harter is common,” said Claire, with that air of finality with which she invests an assertion of her own opinion, particularly when it is contrary to that held by other people. “But she has personality. That’s why we’re all discussing her, I suppose—old Ellison’s daughter!”

“She doesn’t look like old Ellison’s daughter,” Martyn observed, replying, perhaps, rather to the spirit than to the letter of Claire’s assertion. “It was a stroke of genius on his part to have christened his daughter Diamond.”

Sallie looked intelligently inquiring.

“Don’t you see how it suits her? The mixture of hardness and of depth, and the slight tinge of vulgarity that one can’t help associating with that sort of name—and, of course, the unusualness. By the way, didn’t anyone put her down as unusual?”

Claire shook her head.

“She may be good-looking, but she’s as hard as nails, I should say—and she’s common.”

I began to feel that I should be interested to meet Mrs. Harter.

Ellison, the plumber in Cross Loman, was a decent old fellow—he died a few months ago—a very ordinary type of the tradesman class. His wife had been dead many years and I knew nothing about her. I could not remember anything about the daughter except that I had always heard her spoken of by her full name—Diamond Ellison—and that the singularity of it had remained somewhere in the background of my memory. “I should like to see her,” I said.

“You can see her if you go to the concert at the Drill Hall on the fourteenth,” Aileen Kendal told me. “She is singing.”

“She’s musical, is she?”

“I suppose so. Lady Annabel arranged it all.”

“Why is Lady Annabel having a concert at all?”

“Something to do with the Women’s Institute,” said Dolly. “You know she is always doing things for them, and she has quite worried Mumma about belonging, or letting us belong.”

Mrs. Kendal still “lets” or does not “let” her daughters, in the minor as well as in the major affairs of life, although Blanche, the eldest, must be thirty-seven.

“Mumma always says, ‘Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,’” Aileen solemnly quoted. “She says that Women’s Institutes are a new movement, and she wants to know rather more about them before she gives them her support.”

The Kendals are not naturally sententious, but when they quote either Puppa or Mumma they become so to an unbearable degree.

Claire, who is patient neither of sententiousness nor of quotations from other people, changed the subject.

“I’ve taken tickets, Miles, of course. Shall you want to come? It will only be the usual kind of Cross Loman concert.”

“Everybody is going, as usual. Nancy Fazackerly is taking her paying guest.”

“Has she got one?”

“Hadn’t you heard?” cried everybody except my wife and Mary Ambrey.

“He is a man called Captain Patch—quite young—and he is coming next week. Nancy Fazackerly told us all about it after church on Sunday.”

“She is coming up here to-morrow, so we shall hear about it,” said Claire.

“I shall go to the concert,” I said, decidedly, “if it’s only for the sake of seeing Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.”

It occurs to me now, as I write, that perhaps that was the first time we heard their names thus coupled together—Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

Chapter Two

MRS. FAZACKERLY, whom we all call Nancy, lived with a very old father at Loman Cottage, just on the outskirts of Cross Loman.

No one, in speaking of her behind her back to anybody unaware of her history, is ever strong-minded enough to refrain from adding, “Her husband threw plates at her head.” The first time that this was said to Bill Patch, I remember, he inquired with interest if the late Mr. Fazackerly had been a juggler. It was explained to him then that the late Mr. Fazackerly had only been of a violent temper.

No one, however, has ever heard Nancy Fazackerly allude to the conjugal missiles that tradition has associated with her dinner table. She is, indeed, wholly silent about her short married life. She was twenty-seven years old, or thereabouts, when she married and went to live in London, and it was five years later when she came home, widowed and childless, to Cross Loman again.

About everything else Mrs. Fazackerly talked freely. We all knew that she and her father were entirely dependent upon his tiny pension, and it was common talk in Cross Loman that Mrs. Fazackerly would sell anything in the world if she could get cash payment for it.

Her astuteness over a bargain is only to be equalled by the astonishing unscrupulousness with which she recommends her own wares to possible or impossible purchasers.

Many people disapprove of her, but everyone is fond of her, perhaps because it is a sort of constitutional inability in her to say anything except the thing which her fatally reliable intuition tells her will be most acceptable to her hearer.

When she came up to tell Claire about her paying guest, she pretended that it was because she wanted to consult Claire upon the business side of the question. Claire, being naturally unpractical, and with far less business experience than Mrs. Fazackerly, was, of course, susceptible to the compliment.

“I hope I have come to a satisfactory arrangement with him,” Nancy said. “I think so. Of course, I couldn’t bargain with him, and I’m afraid, being entirely new to this sort of thing, that I shan’t be up to any of the tricks of the trade and may find myself making very little, if anything at all, out of it. He is to have the little spare room, of course. It’s delightfully warm, now that we’ve got the radiators, though I don’t suppose anyone would want a radiator on in the summer, but still, there it is, and so I thought I’d simply make an inclusive charge for heating and lighting.”

“Lighting?”

“We only have the humblest little oil lamps all over the house, as you know, but I thought I’d move the blue china standard lamp into the spare room, and then it will always be there, although, with daylight saving, he will hardly use it, I imagine.”

“I see.” Something in Claire’s tone indicated that she was wondering upon exactly what grounds Mrs. Fazackerly had contrived to base her claims to payment for a radiator and a lamp that would be required to perform no other functions than that of a diurnal acte de présence.

“I believe it’s professional etiquette to have a few items that are called ‘extras’,” pursued the prospective hostess. “So I explained that the use of the bathroom—unlimited use—would be an extra, and then little things like bootblacking, or soap, I believe one ought to make a charge for. Laundry, of course, I wouldn’t undertake at all, with my tiny establishment, but it can go into Cross Loman with ours, and I can take all the trouble off his hands, and separate the items, and go through his things when they come back. A very small additional sum would cover all that, as I told him.”

“You seem to have thought of everything—”

“Well, one must, when one has no one to think for one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with her pretty apologetic smile. “And I’m not very practical and have had no previous experience, so that I do want to be on the safe side.”

“I’ve very often wondered if I shouldn’t have done well as a business woman, personally. I am really, in some ways, extraordinarily practical,” mused Claire, following her usual methods.

“Yes, I’m sure you are.” Mrs. Fazackerly’s voice denoted admiration and agreement. “I’ve always felt that about you. I shall come to you for advice, if I may, once I’ve fairly started.”

Mrs. Fazackerly seldom goes to anyone for advice, but she has an unequaled capacity for making her friends and acquaintances feel as though she had done so.

“About meals, of course, he’ll have them with us—except when he’s out, as I told him. I hope he’ll make simply heaps of friends here, and be out as much as ever he pleases. There won’t be any nonsense about people having to ask our leave before they invite him to lunch or tea or dine out. We shall,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, I feel sure with truth, “be only too delighted. And when he is in, I shall try and have everything as nice as possible for him. Of course we live very simply indeed, but I told him that. I felt it was much better to be perfectly candid. And of course I know nothing about wine, so I thought I’d simply make that an extra and have up what we’ve got in the cellar. It’s doing nothing there, but I’m sure Father would take some if it were actually on the table, and I expect it would do him good.”

“How is your father?”

“He’s wonderful,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with determined enthusiasm.

Her parent was then nearer eighty than seventy, and quite famous locally for the strength and the irrationality of his violent prejudices, but Mrs. Fazackerly gayly made the best of him.

It was her way to prepare strangers for an introduction to him by declaring, brightly, “Dear Father is rather a personality, you know.”

“Is he quite ready to fall in with your scheme—as to the paying guest, I mean?” Claire inquired, delicately.

“Oh, quite, I think,” Mrs. Fazackerly replied, in a slightly uncertain tone that conveyed to anyone conversant with her methods that she was adding yet another item to the long list of her deviations from perfect straightforwardness.

“Of course, Father is not a young person, exactly, and one didn’t put the whole thing before him quite as one might have done, say, a few years earlier. But he took it all very well indeed, and Captain Patch is so nice and such a thorough gentleman that I’m sure we shall have no friction at all. And really, it’s impossible not to think what a relief it will be to have anything—however little—coming in regularly once a week toward the household books.”

“It ought to be a great help.”

“After all, it needn’t really cost more to feed five people than to feed four. A joint is a joint, and we always have one a week—and sometimes two. The amount of meat that even one maid can get through is inconceivable, simply. I don’t grudge it to her for a moment, of course,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, wistfully. She looked thoughtful for a few minutes, and then said: “That does remind me of one thing that I rather wondered about. What about second helpings?”

“Second helpings?”

“I know that in boarding houses and places like that it’s an understood thing that there are no second helpings. Especially meat. But in the case of a paying guest, it seems to me that one really couldn’t think of anything like that,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, evidently thinking of it very earnestly indeed.

Claire, who is lavish alike by temperament and from a life-long environment of plenty, was eloquent in her protestations, and Nancy Fazackerly thanked her very gratefully indeed, and said what a help it was to have someone to consult who always knew things.

Although, theoretically, Claire, in common with the whole neighborhood, perceives and regrets certain by no means obscure failings in the character of Mrs. Fazackerly, she finds it impossible not to like her very much indeed when they are together.

“Let me know how it turns out, my dear. When does Captain Patch arrive?”

“On the first of June.”

“We’ll arrange some tennis next month, I hope.”

“He ought to get quite a lot of invitations,” remarked Captain Patch’s prospective hostess, thoughtfully. “I do want it to be pleasant and amusing for him, and he’s so nice I’m sure everybody will like him and want to ask him to tea and tennis. Or lunch. I want him to feel perfectly free to accept all invitations, and I shall make that quite clear from the start.”

One is always somehow exhilarated by a visit from Nancy Fazackerly. Claire was able to retail an amusing and exaggerated account of the conversation to Mary, a few days later. She is an excellent raconteuse, and always makes a success of her stories, except in the case of the literal-minded Kendals. To them, a raconteuse is simply a person who does not speak the truth.

The Kendals were candidly self-congratulatory at the prospect of having a strange man in the neighborhood of Cross Loman during the coming summer.

“It isn’t as if we ever saw a man down here,” they said, “especially since the war. There’s only Martyn Ambrey, who’s hardly grown-up, even.”

“If only Alfred had friends!” groaned Dolly. “I’m sure Mumma has told him often enough to bring any of his friends down, whenever he likes, but he never does.”

“Poor old thing, struggling along in an office all the time! I don’t believe he has any friends,” said Amy, pessimistically.

The Kendals are not given to illusions. They know well that Alfred is stolidly unattractive, unenterprising, and quite unlikely to provide himself or his sisters with interesting friends. And yet, in their matter-of-fact way, Blanche and Amy and Dolly and Aileen all vehemently desire that “something should happen” at Dheera Dhoon, and the only happenings to which they have ever been taught to look are matrimonial ones of the most orthodox kind.

“Girls,” I can imagine Mrs. Kendal saying to them in her direct way, “I think two of you might very well walk down to Nancy Fazackerly’s and find out something about this paying guest who’s coming to stay with her. We must have some tennis, later on. Ask her if she’d care to bring him up one afternoon.”

“Which afternoon, mumma?”

“Whichever afternoon she likes. Find out when he’s coming. I think it’s next week. I was thinking of having a tennis party one day before the end of the month.”

I am sure that Dolly and Aileen forthwith put on their hats—on the backs of their heads—slung woolen sports coats of dingy gray, and sickly green, respectively, across their shoulders, and walked to Loman Cottage; and that they did not talk to each other on the way. Unlike the Ambreys, the Kendals seldom have anything to talk to one another about. Abstract discussion does not interest them in the least, and they confine their remarks to small and obvious comments upon things that they can see.

“Two cart horses,” Aileen might say when they were exactly abreast with the gate over which the two cart horses could plainly be seen. And a quarter of a mile farther on Dolly might perhaps remark:

“The stream’s pretty full. That’s all the rain we had last week, I suppose.”

“I suppose it is.”

After a pause Dolly might say, thoughtfully, “I suppose so,” and after that they would walk on in silence, both slightly swinging their arms as they went.

Their conversation with Mrs. Fazackerly was afterward repeated to Claire by Aileen Kendal.

They found her with her head tied up in a becoming purple-and-white-check handkerchief and wearing a purple-and-white-check cotton frock with short sleeves, turning out her spare room.

She does a great deal of her own housework, and always does it very well.

“You’ve got on a very smart frock,” said Aileen, whose tone is always disparaging, not from any ill will, but because it is the Kendal habit to make personal remarks and to give them a disparaging inflection.

Mrs. Fazackerly, who is used to this, said that she had made the frock herself, and it washed well, and wouldn’t they sit down.

“Thanks. Mumma wanted to know when your paying guest is coming and if you’d like to bring him up to play tennis one afternoon, and if so, when?”

Thus, untroubled by subtleties of diplomacy, did Miss Kendal accomplish her mission.

Nancy, with equal straightforwardness, selected a date about a week after Captain Patch’s expected arrival, and at once wrote the engagement down in a little book.

“I am delighted with him, you know,” she said. “You’ll all like him—such a nice fellow.”

“What sort of age is he?” asked Dolly Kendal, suddenly.

“Twenty-six,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with precision.

The Kendal twins, on their way home again, dispassionately remarked one to another that they thought Captain Patch would have been older.

“It’s perfectly proper, of course, because of her old father.”

“Good gracious, yes! Besides, what is Nancy Fazackerly? At least as old as Amy.”

“That would make her thirty-three.”

“She looks younger than that, doesn’t she? It’s funny to think of her having been married, and out in India and lost her husband, all inside five years, and come back again to this dead-alive place after all.”

“Oh, well,” said Aileen, with the philosophy due to other people’s troubles, “I daresay she’ll manage to struggle along somehow, like the rest of us.”

The Kendals, who seldom know cheerful anticipations, were more surprised than anybody when their own predictions as to the gain of an additional man to Cross Loman were realized.

Captain Patch was a tall, copper-headed young man, who gazed with a certain beaming friendliness at everybody, out of very short-sighted brown eyes from behind a powerful pair of thick lenses. He had something of the happiness, and the engaging ugliness, of a young Clumber spaniel.

As Mrs. Fazackerly had told us he would, he got on well with everybody.

It was at the Dheera Dhoon tennis party that he was first introduced to the neighborhood. The Kendals were evidently rather glad of that, when they saw how very popular Mrs. Fazackerly’s paying guest seemed likely to become.

“I think you met him at our house, didn’t you?” they said, firmly, when Sallie Ambrey, in her casual way, spoke as though she and Martyn had known the newcomer for years.

After a time it became known that Captain Patch was writing a novel.

“He writes, I believe,” people told one another with tremendous and mysterious emphasis, quite as though nobody in Cross Loman had ever got beyond pothooks and hangers.

“Of course, he’ll put us all into his book,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her large, tolerant smile. “We expect that. Novelists are always on the look-out for what they call copy, we know.”

Mrs. Fazackerly, closely interrogated, admitted that she knew Captain Patch was writing, but that he did not seem to require quiet, or solitude, or even a writing table. Quite often he sat under the pink May tree on the circular bench in the garden, with a pencil and a small notebook. At intervals he wrote in the notebook, and at intervals he talked to Father. He did not seem to mind interruptions.

“Come, come!” said the Kendals, rather severely at this. They knew better than that, even though authors had been hitherto unknown in Cross Loman. But then Nancy Fazackerly’s statements were never to be relied upon.

“She likes to put herself forward,” was the trenchant verdict of the Kendals. “I don’t believe she knows anything at all about his writing. She only wants to sound as though she did.”

They did not say this at all unkindly. It is the natural instinct of them all, from Puppa and Mumma downward, to adopt, and voice, a disparaging view of humanity.

They did not, however, disparage Captain Patch. They liked him.

Everyone liked him, even old Carey. To those who did not employ the filial euphemisms always made use of by his daughter, Nancy’s father appeared as an aged, unreasonable bully, known to have driven his daughter into an improvident marriage.

It being supposed that Mrs. Fazackerly elected to return to her parents’ house after her widowhood for reasons of finance, quite a number of people, that summer, frequently informed other people that she would certainly marry again at the earliest opportunity. An impression gradually began to prevail that the opportunity might be at hand. The Kendals steadfastly reiterated; “He’s years younger than she is,” but they said it without very much conviction.

Only Sallie Ambrey declared that Captain Patch was not, and never could be, attracted by Mrs. Fazackerly.

“But why not, Sallie? Do you know anything about it, or is it just that you like putting yourself forward?”

“It’s a case of using my powers of observation,” said Sallie, perfectly indifferent to the uncomplimentary form of the Kendals’ characteristic inquiry. “He is nice to everyone, but he’s a hopeless and temperamental romantic, and I believe he’s one of the few men I’ve ever met who is capable of a grande passion.”

“What can you know about it?” murmured Dolly, almost automatically.

“As for Nancy Fazackerly, I don’t believe she’d inspire anyone with a grande passion, and I’m certain she’d have no use for one herself. She’s essentially practical, and he is essentially an idealist.”

“I agree with you about her, of course,” Martyn said to his sister, “but I admit that you’ve gone further than I should be prepared to go about him. You may be right, of course. To me, he’s simply a curiously straightforward, rather primitive person, with limited powers of self-expression. Take his writing, for instance—”

“Oh, if you’re going to talk about books, we’ll be off,” said Aileen Kendal, hastily.

The disappearance of the Kendals, however, was scarcely noticed by Sallie and Martyn, who are always perfectly content to talk vigorously to one another.

Early in June, Christopher Ambrey, Claire’s soldier brother, came home from China. Mary, Sallie, Martyn and I all endeavored by various means, direct in my own case, and indirect in that of the others, to persuade Claire not to go to the docks to meet his ship.

“Why not?” said Christopher’s only sister, her voice trembling.

She knew very well why not, and so did we, but nobody had the courage to say brutally that it was because she could not be trusted not to make a scene.

In the end she remained at home, excited and restless, while the car was sent to the station. Before it returned one felt fairly certain that Claire, walking aimlessly all over the house, had mentally received and opened several telegrams respectively announcing Christopher’s death, a fatal accident to the train, his arrest and imprisonment in London, and the immediate cancellation of his leave. Also that she had held several imaginary conversations with her brother of so dramatic a character that she found herself bewildered and trembling when Christopher actually arrived and said nothing more sensational than—

“Well, Claire—this is splendid”—one of the noncommittal clichés of which he so frequently makes use, and which always fall like cold water upon poor Claire’s emotionalism.

She herself has a keen, if exaggerated, feeling for le mot juste in any situation, but this is shared by none of her family except Mary, and Mary’s words, at any time at all, are very few and Claire does not attach to them the importance that she does to her brother’s.

Christopher and Claire, the only children of their parents, are both victims of Christopher’s reaction from Claire’s temperamental excessiveness. He once told me that even as a little boy he had known himself unable to live up to his worshiping sister’s demands upon a degree of sensitiveness and intelligence that he did not possess.

She tried passionately to shield him from spiritual hurts that he would never have felt, and to exercise nursery influence over him long after he had outgrown the nursery. Her vicarious sufferings when Christopher first went to school must have been of dimensions that never came within the range either of Christopher’s limited imagination or of his experience.

He is uneasily, gratefully, and resentfully fond of his sister when he is away from her, and it is, I think, always on his conscience that he never quite manages to read the whole of the immensely long and rather illegible letters that she writes him—but when they are together Claire makes Christopher feel self-conscious and inadequate.

I am sorry for Claire. She spends her life and her strength in making the wrong demands on the wrong people. In middle life she still retains all the passionate desire of youth to be wholly understood. It has never yet occurred to her that, in the majority of human relationships, it is still more desirable not to be wholly understood.

When Christopher comes home on leave, she is as frightfully and pathetically excited as though he were not one of the most real and poignant disappointments of her life.

And yet, her bitter resentment of Christopher’s emotional inadequacy occupies her mind for hours and hours, and days and nights, and fills pages of her diaries, and reams of her notepaper, besides forming a sort of standing item in the list of miseries with which it is her nightly habit to keep herself awake.

(Like all neurasthenics, Claire is always complaining of sleepless nights).

Christopher, having spent part of each of his previous furloughs with us, is always looked upon as belonging to Cross Loman, and the welcome accorded to Captain Patch was of course extended also to him by the whole neighborhood.

It was I who suggested, tactlessly enough, that Mary and her children should come up to dinner on the evening after Christopher’s arrival.

Claire’s enormous dark eyes were turned upon me with tragic reproachfulness.

“His second evening with me? They can come next week, if they like.”

Unfortunately, before the close of his first evening with us Christopher said: “Why didn’t you have Mary and the two kids here? Let’s walk down and see them after dinner.”

“Certainly,” said Claire, her lips compressed, her spirit descended into fathomless depths of depression. But Christopher, the sturdy and, to be honest, rather stupid Christopher, has no clue to Claire’s mercurial sensitiveness. When she is most profoundly wounded by his matter-of-factness, Christopher regards her pregnant silence and her tragic eyes as an all too common phenomenon which he describes as “Old Claire being a bit put out about something or other.”

“Mary’s children have grown up, you know,” I said to Christopher. “Martyn is twenty-one, and Sallie is now a medical student. She wants to specialize, eventually, as a psycho-analyst.”

“Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded.

“Very.”

Claire did not look delighted.

“I’m not so sure, Miles, that Sallie is really very clever. She’s sharp, in a way, and of course she thinks herself tremendously clever, but all that talk, and the opinionative way in which she lays down the law, doesn’t impress me very much. Sallie and Martyn are both crude in many ways.”

“But is Sallie really going to be a lady doctor?”

“So she thinks at present,” replied Claire, with a tolerant smile that I think relieved her feelings. “Girls have these wonderful opportunities nowadays. I’ve sometimes thought that if it had been possible, I ought to have gone in for that kind of career myself. I believe I’ve got a natural turn for that sort of thing.”

Claire almost always believes herself to possess a “natural turn,” whatever that phrase may denote, for any form of achievement in which she hears of someone else’s success. I am prepared to agree with her, within limits, but when it comes to science, I can only preserve an indiscreet silence.

Claire, pathetically dependent on the appreciation of other people, fathomed its meaning all too easily.

Her gloom deepened.

“Youth, to-day, has opportunities such as we never dreamed of,” she said, and then looked still more dissatisfied. And indeed she detests a truism, and is not often guilty of uttering one.

“Opportunities? I’m sure I can’t think why a pretty girl like Sallie should want opportunities of cutting up dead rabbits and things,” said Christopher, simply. “Morbid rot, I call it.”

Chapter Three

CHRISTOPHER had been with us for rather more than a week when the concert arranged by Lady Annabel took place at the Drill Hall. We all went, and were given seats in the front row, with the Ambreys and the Rector and Lady Annabel. Immediately behind us sat Nancy Fazackerly, with Captain Patch and two Kendals. Two more Kendals, with Puppa, Mumma and “poor old Alfred,” were just in front.

“We couldn’t get seats all together. I was so vexed about it,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her usual emphasis. “Aileen and Dolly are sitting with Nancy, which is very nice indeed, of course, but we should like to have sat all together. Alfred is at home for a holiday, and it would have been nicer if we’d all been together. A very poor program, isn’t it? What do they mean by ‘Mrs. Harter, Song’? Who is Mrs. Harter? Puppa, do you know who Mrs. Harter is?”

“Never heard of her in my life.”

Undeterred by a certain ungraciousness in the reply, Mumma addressed the same question collectively to Amy, to Blanche, and to Alfred. Unenlightened by them, she gazed wistfully at the inaccessible twins, and then remarked, with stony pertinacity:

“It would have been nicer to have had seats all together. I wonder if Aileen or Dolly knows who Mrs. Harter is. I could have asked them, if we’d all been sitting together. I must say, I do wish we could have got seats all together.”

I explained Mrs. Harter to her.

“Oh! The daughter of old Ellison, and she married and went to Egypt. I always say,” Mrs. Kendal rejoined, with that emphasis which characterizes so many of her remarks, “I always say that the world is a very small place, after all. Puppa, do you hear that? This Mrs. Harter, who is put down on the program as Song is the daughter of old Ellison who married and went to Egypt, Sir Miles says. I suppose that means she’s come back from abroad.”

“Her husband is a solicitor in Cairo, I’m told,” said I.

“Oh, I see!” said Mumma, so emphatically that it seemed quite a visual achievement. “I see. We had some dear friends in India, who stopped in Cairo once on their way home, and they liked it very much. The wife, I’m sorry to say, was drowned in a boating accident there. That rather spoiled their stay.”

It seemed almost unnecessary to agree with so self-evident a probability, and only Sallie Ambrey murmured to herself, “Oh, surely not!” and then giggled inaudibly.

Then Lady Annabel Bending came in, and we all clapped, not only because she was the promoter and organizer of the concert, but because she had, as usual, so obvious an air of expecting it.

Lady Annabel cannot forget her Government House days. She occasionally alludes to her present husband as “H. E.,” and then corrects herself and says, “The Rector, I mean,” and on entering a public place, such as Church, she has a curious way of bowing her head graciously from side to side as she slowly walks to her place.

Where she is, one looks for a red carpet. Lady Annabel is a small woman, but she dresses beautifully and carries herself with great distinction. In many ways, she resembles the late Queen Victoria.

She received the applause with bows, and a slight, grave smile, and then mounted the platform and gave us a short speech, to which I confess that I did not listen very attentively. The usual Cross Loman entertainment followed. We have, for the most part, fathomed one another’s talents by this time, from the piano solo with which Miss Emma Applebee begins to the “Imitations” given by young Plumer, the butcher’s assistant.

“... With your kind permission, I will now give a rendering of a small boy reciting The Six ’Undred at ’is mother’s party.... Imitation of an ’en that ’as just laid an egg.... I will now conclude with a short sketch of my own, entitled The Baby in the ’Bus....”

“That,” said Mrs. Kendal, turning to me, “is what I call lifelike. And yet not vulgar.”

I was still pondering on the exact significance of the “And yet” when Mrs. Harter came on to the platform.

It was a small platform, with an upright piano set across one corner of it, a pair of worn plush curtains drawn across it, and a painted background of pallid sky and consumptive-looking marble pillars, well-known to Cross Loman during many years. Potted plants and ferns, and oil lamps, and little flags, were ranged above and below the three red baize steps that led up to the stage. At the conclusion of an item, the performer may openly descend these steps and return to the body of the hall, but in order to mount the stage from the auditorium, it is customary to edge round to a side erection of red baize-covered boxes, placed one upon another, and just too high to admit of either comfort or elegance in mounting. No Cross Loman audience ever applauds, or even perceives, any performer until this acrobatic feat has been accomplished, and the singer, or player, or reciter, stands safely facing the room, panting slightly from the achievement, but bowing pleasantly in acknowledgment of greeting claps.

It was left to Mrs. Harter, perfectly well-known in the town before her marriage, to astonish Cross Loman by departing from precedent. She walked up the steps at the front of the platform, her back to the audience, and then turned round and faced them, not panting in the least, and bowing, if at all, without urbanity.

“Nodding, I should call that,” Mrs. Kendal remarked, sharply, in a critical manner.

“How absolutely right I was, when I said ‘personality’,” I heard Claire murmur to herself. I looked at Mrs. Harter, remembering the day when I had heard her discussed at the Manor House. She was a tall young woman, in a black net evening dress cut square at the neck. She was standing very erect and gazing straight in front of her with no slightest appearance of nervousness.

“What a curiously defiant face!” whispered Sallie Ambrey to her brother.

Martyn nodded. “Rather attractive.”

Sallie looked dubious, and certainly Mrs. Harter’s expression was rather more than slightly disagreeable-looking. Her squarish jaw was slightly underhung, her somber face almost colorless, and her heavy-lidded eyes, set beneath thick, straight black brows, expressed nothing so much as resentment.

Her hair was dark, and in exaggeration of the prevailing fashion was taken straight back from her forehead and brought low over her ears, accentuating the Slavonic suggestion of the high cheek-bones and broad, flat modeling of the features. Her skin, very dark, was coarse, rather than fine, in texture.

“No,” said Sallie. “No. I can’t agree with you, Martyn. Not attractive.”

“Unusual, anyhow. Arresting.”

“She doesn’t look like Cross Loman, I grant you that.”

“Mrs. Harter—Song,” said Mrs. Kendal, for—I should think—the fourteenth time. “I suppose that means she’s going to sing.”

It did.

Mrs. Harter’s singing was calculated to please the unsophisticated, rather than the critical, among her audience. As in most audiences, however, the number of the former predominated over the latter.

She had a good voice, a very strong and very true mezzo-soprano. She had, also, a number of cheap tricks whereby to produce cheap effects, and she made full use of them.

“Third-rate teaching of the worst kind,” whispered Claire. Behind me I heard Captain Patch say to Mrs. Fazackerly, “I like her voice,” and Mrs. Fazackerly, the most musical person in Cross Loman, replied, eagerly, “Oh, so do I!” for once enabled to combine responsiveness and truth in a fashion that all too often eludes her.

The Kendal family applauded with a detached, deprecating air at the end of the song. “I may not know a great deal about music, but I know what I like,” Mumma remarked, as she has very frequently remarked on other occasions, and Puppa hummed something to himself, which I think he honestly believed to be a true and faithful repetition of the last line of Mrs. Harter’s song, and waved his head about from side to side in a musical sort of way.

The applause in the room was prolonged.

The song had been a very popular one, a modern sentimental ballad with all the sham values of its kind, and set to a tune that frankly was a tune, and could be trusted to “run in the heads” of those who heard it for hours after the concert was over. Mrs. Harter received an enthusiastic encore.

There was a whispered consultation between her and the accompanist, a youth who always plays at all Cross Loman concerts, and whom we look upon as being almost part of the piano.

To the surprise of everybody, and to the delight of a few, he struck up the air of “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

“‘Oh, where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?

Oh, where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?’

‘He’s gone with streaming banners where noble deeds are done,

And it’s, oh! in my heart, I wish him safe at home.’”

The simplicity of the air was suited to Mrs. Harter’s clear voice, and she sang it without affectation.

“That’s more like,” Mrs. Fazackerly murmured to Captain Patch, who nodded emphatically. The accompanist was introducing an immense number of runs, variations, and repetitions of the well-known theme, between each of the verses. But while she was singing he subdued his accompaniment to the merest murmur:

“‘Oh, what, tell me what, if your Highland lad be slain?

Oh, what, tell me what, if your Highland lad be slain?’

‘Oh no! True love will be his guard and bring him safe again,

For it’s, oh! my heart would break, if my Highland lad were slain.’”

The accompaniment ended in a torrent of notes, out of which the gallant, plaintive air emerged for the last time.

“I liked that,” said Claire, softly. Her eyes were tearful. Almost every tune that she knows very well indeed will bring tears to her eyes, by rousing associations with a past that she always rates higher than she does the present.

“She doesn’t look like the sort of person to sing that sort of song,” analyzed Sallie Ambrey. “She looks hard.”

“She looks unhappy,” said Mary.

Christopher leaned forward. “Who is Mrs. Harter?”

“A girl called Diamond Ellison—old Ellison’s daughter. She married and went out to the East a few years ago.”

“It’s a pity she looked so bad-tempered all the time she was singing,” observed Dolly Kendal.

“Good-looking woman,” General Kendal muttered, and Mrs. Kendal, Claire, Sallie, and Aileen Kendal all said, “Oh, do you think so?” in tones implying surprise, or disagreement, or both. But Nancy Fazackerly agreeably said, “Yes, isn’t she?” after her fashion.

But when Mumma in the interval remarked, weightily, “That Mrs. Harter may be a good singer, but she’s a very plain woman,” I distinctly heard Nancy Fazackerly, ever obliging, say, “Yes, isn’t she?” all over again.

Captain Patch, like Christopher Ambrey, asked who Mrs. Harter was, and said that he would like to hear her sing again.

“If we can persuade Father—who is sometimes a wee bit inclined to be conservative, as you may have noticed—we will have a musical evening and ask Diamond Harter to come,” said Nancy Fazackerly, who has learned nothing from life and the late Mr. Fazackerly if not complaisance. “I’m sure Sallie and Martyn would come—and Major Ambrey?”

She looked at Christopher.

“I’d like it very much,” he said.

“I can play accompaniments, and we could have some songs, and it would be so nice,” said Nancy eagerly.

Her obvious capacity for enjoyment, taken in conjunction with the very few and poor opportunities of gratifying it that have ever fallen to her lot, struck me as rather pathetic.

I heard her give her invitation to Mrs. Harter at the end of the concert, as we were all leaving the hall together.

Mrs. Harter, who did not appear to be an enthusiastic person, accepted curtly. Her voice was low, and had not the intonation of good breeding, and when she passed under the flaring lights at the end of the room I saw that the sulky lines of her face had hardly relaxed at all.

“Thank you, I don’t mind if I do,” was all that she said before walking away.

“What an ungracious manner, and how typical of her class! I said she was common,” Claire observed when Mrs. Harter had disappeared.

“I think she’s shy.”

Nancy Fazackerly is always ready to sacrifice truth to kindliness, as we all know. Perhaps it is the effect of having successively known a father and a husband, both of whom appear to have lived in a chronic state of annoyance with everybody.

“It was a nice concert, wasn’t it?” she added, with her childlike appreciation of any form of pleasuring.

We said that we had enjoyed it very much, and Mrs. Kendal added that the only thing she regretted was that the Kendal family had not been able to get seats all together. It being impossible to remove this blot on the evening, her complaint was received in silence by us all.

Then Lady Annabel came out, bowing in an indiscriminate sort of way, and saying, “Thank you—thank you so much,” to anyone who accidentally stood in her way.

“Quite a success, wasn’t it?” she asked us, and we all said at once that it had been a great success, and Nancy congratulated her.

“It entails a good deal of work, getting up this sort of thing and it is all so different when one cannot delegate part of the work to the A. D. C.s,” said Lady Annabel.

If the rector of Cross Loman kept a curate, I feel convinced that Lady Annabel would speak of him as “the A. D. C.” or perhaps “the P. S.”

“I hope you will have made a good deal of money,” said Mrs. Fazackerly. “I always think it’s wonderful, the way in which people here are always ready to spend money.”

“We must try and get up something else one of these days,” said Lady Annabel with vague graciousness. “Perhaps for the King’s birthday. Good-night—good-night. Thank you so much. So glad you were able to come—”

Until Lady Annabel came to the rectory, Cross Loman, although entirely loyal, had never been in the habit of concerning itself with the King’s birthday. But we know better, now.

“Do you have a birthday ball at the rectory?” asked Christopher, grinning.

“I wish we did,” said Sallie. “Couldn’t we have a dance? Oh, Cousin Miles, the Manor House would be the place for it.”

I looked at Claire.

“I should like to arrange something of that sort,” she said, thoughtfully, and I knew that it was in her mind to show Lady Annabel Bending that Government Houses are not the only places where these things can be done.

“Come up to tea on Sunday and let’s talk about it,” I suggested, and Claire extended the invitation to Nancy Fazackerly and to Captain Patch.

We took Mary and Sallie back to the Mill House in the car, and I remember that Christopher Ambrey began to ask about Mrs. Fazackerly.

Of course Sallie told him instantly that her husband used to throw plates at her head.

“What a hound the fellow must have been!”

“She shouldn’t have married him,” said Sallie. “Though I believe she only did it to get away from her father. If people are mad enough to bind themselves by those preposterous vows, what can you expect?”

“Preposterous vows?” said Christopher, surprised.

“Don’t you call the marriage service preposterous?” returned Sallie, equally surprised.

“No,” said Christopher, stoutly, “I don’t. I suppose I am old-fashioned. I like the Prayer Book, and songs with tunes to them, and pictures that tell a story you can understand, and—and Christmas carols.”

“Well done!” said I.

“Talking about songs with tunes,” Mary asked, “what did you think of Mrs. Harter, Miles?”

“I agree with you that, as an unusual type of person, she’s interesting.”

“Her choice of songs was interesting, too—that atrocity about cabbage roses—I beg your pardon, Christopher!—and then ‘the Bluebells of Scotland.’ The first one was so exactly what one would have expected, and the second one so exactly what one wouldn’t have expected,” said Sallie.

“I like the good old ‘Bluebells of Scotland,’” Christopher said. “We must make her sing it again when we go to Mrs. Fazackerly’s house.”

I was glad that he seemed to be looking forward to that pleasantly.

Claire and I are not lively people, but we both wanted to make Christopher enjoy himself, although I think Claire resented his Philistine forms of enjoyment a good deal.

Both he and Captain Patch went often to play tennis with the Kendals at Dheera Dhoon.

“He couldn’t, surely,” Claire said to me, desperately, upon this subject.

I know what she meant. Christopher’s possible—or, more probably, impossible—marriage, was always one of Claire’s deepest preoccupations. And she has always been victim to an intensive system under which her hopes and her fears alike leap to gigantic proportions within a few seconds of their conception.

I had no doubt that she had already endowed Christopher and one of the Kendals—probably Dolly, the one she dislikes the most—with a family of which all the members would have inherited the Kendal temperament, which Claire finds a singularly unattractive one.

“I don’t think he could,” I assured her.

She gazed at me out of her enormous, tragical eyes.

“I am living upon the edge of a volcano, Miles.” And as, I suppose, my silence appeared to her to be an inadequate rejoinder—as indeed it was—she added, with violent emphasis, the word: “Literally.”

Poor Claire!

The Kendals, than whom no young women in this world have ever been more devoid of a dangerous fascination, continued to exercise their harmless hospitality, and in return, Christopher begged us to let him ask them to the Manor House.

They played tennis moderately well, but I found that all of them looked upon it as a matter of course that they should take it in turns to sit by my wheel chair for five or ten minutes and talk to me very brightly and conscientiously.

I think they looked upon this exercise as something which cheered up that poor Sir Miles Flower, and no doubt, had they been Boy Scouts, it would have been counted as the One Good Deed, or Kind Act, or whatever it is that Boy Scouts are presumed to perform daily.

The Kendals, in reality, are a pre-war survival.

“Nothing ever happens to us” might be taken as their motto.

They frequently proclaim this negative state of affairs in the tones of aggressive resignation peculiar to themselves, rather as though they resented this absence of drama in their lives, and yet regarded it as a mark of superiority.

During the war, Blanche Kendal, the eldest daughter, stayed at home “To help Mumma,” and Amy, whom Mumma has decreed to be delicate, was not allowed to do anything except what her Mother called “cheering up poor Puppa in the evenings—that must be your war work, darling.”

Dolly and Aileen, after an inordinate number of family conclaves—the Kendals are nothing, if not tribal—had, in 1915, been permitted to go daily to the County Hospital, where they had zealously washed dishes and listened enviously to the talk of girls much younger than themselves, who worked in the wards as nurses or masseuses.

Alfred, whom neither parent would have dreamed of trying to coerce, did not succeed in passing as fit for foreign service, and had to content himself with Salisbury Plain.

It follows that the Kendals, although they would no doubt repudiate the suggestion indignantly, have, for all practical purposes, completely forgotten all about the war.

Where Puppa previously condemned and denounced the Radicals, he now condemns and denounces the Labor Party; and when, as sometimes happens, he loses his temper for no appreciable reason, Mumma explains the lapse by saying, “Poor Puppa is so worried about this wicked Income Tax” instead of, as in former days, “Poor Puppa is so worried about this nonsensical Servants’ Insurance Bill.”

Mumma herself never loses her temper, but, even as she, once upon a time, allowed herself to speak of the Suffragettes as unsexed, hysterical idiots, so she now condemns as wicked, irreligious, and immoral, the increased scope of the Divorce Laws and the new independence of Domestic Servants. Since the thirtieth birthday of the twins, Mrs. Kendal has allowed herself more latitude in mentioning such subjects in their presence. She quite believes, and often proclaims, that she has the complete confidence of all her children.

Dolly and Aileen are affectionately regarded by the whole family as being the emancipated members of it.

“No one ever allowed us to read the books they read,” Blanche told me, after Mumma had actually left a library copy of “Women Napoleon Loved” lying about the drawing-room, without troubling to shroud it in a brown paper cover.

And Amy pointed out, quite unresentfully, that she and Blanche had always been made to dress alike, at the twins’ age. This was when Dolly boldly appeared in a tailor-made shirt with pink stripes, although Aileen had not yet discarded her winter “everyday” cream-colored flannel.

Variegated sweaters and low-necked silk jumpers, such as Sallie Ambrey wears, Mumma has pronounced to be in bad style.

Dolly, who was my informant upon this point, seemed to think that I might get a false impression of Mumma and her ideals from it, for she added at once:

“Not that Mumma is in the least narrow-minded about things of that sort, or indeed of any sort. Long before the days of women’s suffrage—although of course she disapproved utterly of the militant ones—Mumma always said that she saw no harm whatever in a woman having a vote, so long as she could find a good wise man to tell her how to use it.”

I could only feel thankful that neither Sallie nor Martyn was present to hear this remarkable testimony to Mumma’s catholicity of outlook.

It was the summer that Christopher Ambrey spent at the Manor House with us, that Puppa acquired a motor car.

The girls were not allowed to drive it. Two of them sat on the back of the car, poised upon the extreme edge of the seat, while Mumma sat in front and Puppa drove. Christopher once told me that it took General Kendal five-and-twenty minutes to drive from “Dheera Dhoon” to Miss Applebee’s shop—a distance of perhaps half a mile. Mumma, sitting beside him, and diffusing a general sense of tension, adopted the role of look-out.

“I should bear a little to the right here, Puppa—you remember the bad place in the road? Not too much, dear....”

Sometimes she cast a worried look behind them, and discerned something on the sky line almost invisible to less anxious eyes.

“Something coming, Puppa.... No, not just yet, dear, but I thought I’d warn you, as it will want to pass us. I suppose they will sound their horn before they get quite close up. Girls, there’s a car coming up behind us.”

Poor General Kendal gripped the wheel tighter and tighter—until, Christopher said, the veins sprang out on the backs of his hands—and drove slower and slower.

“A cart coming towards you, Puppa ... take care, the road is so narrow here ... it’s coming towards us—it’s just a little way in front, isn’t it? Don’t get fussed, dear.”

I have never been out in the General’s car myself, but I believe that he has never become a really confident driver, and that to this day Mumma sits beside him and keeps up a running fire of warnings.

As for the Kendal girls, they go almost everywhere on their bicycles. They say that having too many people in the car always makes poor Puppa so nervous.

Chapter Four

IT WAS Nancy Fazackerly herself who subsequently told me all about her musical evening. She very often comes to see me, and, unlike the Kendals, never causes me to see myself in the unpleasant light of something accomplished, something done, for the good of somebody else’s soul.

The party, it is perhaps needless to say, was invited to come in after supper.

“So many people prefer to dine quietly at home,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.

Captain Patch, one of the few people with whom old Carey—Mrs. Fazackerly’s father—had not had time to quarrel—put him into a good humor in the morning by presenting him with a small work entitled “Poison Crimes of the Past.”

Old Carey’s hobby is criminology.

“All full of old friends!” said Mrs. Fazackerly delightedly. “Palmer, I’m sure I remember him—and Pritchard? I’ve often heard you speak of Pritchard, I’m sure, Father.”

She tries very hard, I know, to be interested in these rather sinister celebrities, but old Carey never meets his daughter halfway.

“Pritchard was a bungler of the first water,” he witheringly replied. “That servant of yours has no sense, Nancy; she hasn’t filled the tea caddy.”

“I ought to have done it myself. I never let her touch the China tea, you know.”

“This isn’t China tea.”

“Oh, Father, it is indeed. I had it specially down from the Stores, only a week ago.”

“Then why did you tell me yesterday, when we were talking about the weekly books, that you hadn’t had anything from the Stores for six months?”

Old Carey is always laying traps for his daughter, and she is always falling into them.

“Did I say that? I suppose I forgot about the tea,” she said valiantly.

“You are the worst housekeeper in England, I believe,” was her parent’s dispassionate retort.

Captain Patch broke in with some inquiry about the little book on poison cases. Unlike Mrs. Fazackerly, he never confused the Mannings with the Seddons, and he always appeared to be genuinely interested in the records of their activities.

Mrs. Fazackerly looked at him gratefully. She had a strong feeling of friendliness for red-headed Captain Patch. He was always so ready to put kindly interpretations upon everything, and she sometimes felt that there was a good deal in her life, both past and present, that positively craved for kindly interpretations.

Mrs. Fazackerly told me that sometimes she sighed with relief, as she woke in the morning to the remembrance of her paying guest’s presence. She had never before known such an easy summer.

The money from Captain Patch was paid into her account regularly and he not only gave no trouble, but was the only person to whom her father, for many years, had taken a liking. Since Captain Patch had been at the Cottage talking and joking, and above all, always ready to listen, Mrs. Fazackerly’s father had found fault with her less often and had made fewer demands upon her.

“It would be nice to have a little fun,” Mrs. Fazackerly may have thought to herself, wistfully, from time to time.

“The fish is here please ’m. He would like to speak to you.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Fazackerly, startled. “The fish. Very well; thank you, Bessie. I will come and speak to the fish at once.”

She turned towards the house again, recapitulating mentally the points to which she had already decided that the attention of “the fish” must be drawn.

After that, she certainly had no more time in which to think about improbable accessions of happiness to herself. Old Carey, whether or not at the suggestion of Captain Patch, announced his intention of spending the afternoon and evening at the Club.

“You can be ready to take me there at three o’clock,” he told his daughter, to whom belonged the privilege of pushing the heavy wheeled chair in which he took his exercise.

“I wish you’d let me do that, sir,” said Captain Patch. “I really want a job this afternoon.”

He nearly always found some good reason for relieving his hostess of this fatigue duty.

That evening, she put on the only evening dress that she possessed, a black crêpe-de-chine one embroidered with silver crescents, and looked long and critically at her reflection in the glass.

She powdered her small, straight, impertinent-looking nose, admired her really beautiful teeth, and wished, as she had often wished before, that her complexion had been anything but the creamy, freckled pallor of a blonde cendrée. Just before going downstairs, she allowed herself the comfort and pleasure of inspecting, with a hand mirror, the reflection of her back hair.

As she went down, she was still smiling at the thought of that soft and fluffy twist of thick, pale gold hair.

Nancy Fazackerly told me that she very often thought of her hair resolutely, when other people displayed new and charming clothes, such as she herself had never possessed.

Sallie Ambrey’s frock that night was one that Mrs. Fazackerly had not seen before, a straight, slim, green-and-gold little frock, with no sleeves at all.

“It’s lovely,” said Nancy frankly.

“Christopher is so old-fashioned that he’s been objecting to it as indecent,” said the girl with perfect unconcern.

“So it is,” Christopher asserted.

“Surely decency and indecency are out of date, nowadays,” Martyn suggested. “Like talking of people being shocked. I believe it was quite usual to be shocked, some years ago, but one never hears of its happening now.”

“Nancy,” said Sallie, “will your Mrs. Harter be shocked? She looked rather as though she might be, at the concert.”

“No, she won’t,” Mrs. Fazackerly asserted positively. “And she’s not my Mrs. Harter. I know very little of her, except that she hasn’t many friends.”

“Is she amusing?”

It might have been truthfully asserted that no one, on that first evening, found Mrs. Harter exactly amusing. It was, indeed, very difficult to make her utter a word, from what I was told.

She sat on the edge of an armchair, wearing the same black dress that she had worn at the concert, and twisting her wedding ring round and round on her finger. Her dark face wore a look of resentful shyness, her voice was low and abrupt, and all her replies were monosyllables. She did not originate any remark at all.

Her evident sense of constraint began to affect everybody in the room.

Sallie, who believes in letting people alone, leaned back on the sofa and smoked a cigarette and said very little. Martyn looked at Mrs. Harter, his young expressive face more and more sharply critical.

Then Christopher Ambrey and Captain Patch broke the silence simultaneously.

“Did you see the—”

“Have you been to—”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I beg your pardon. Go on.”

“Oh no, it wasn’t anything.”

“Please say what you were going to say—”

“Please—”

Sallie Ambrey laughed, but the others were all in painful earnest.

“It really isn’t worth saying,” Captain Patch truthfully remarked. “I was only going to ask if anyone had seen the eclipse yesterday. There was supposed to be an eclipse, I believe.”

No one seemed to have known or cared about this phenomenon, and after it had been briefly dismissed from life, there was another silence.

“How is Mr. Carey?”

“He’s had some quite good days, lately, and he’s really wonderful, considering.”

“Hullo, a moth!”

“How still it is, to-night, isn’t it?”

“Mrs. Harter, do you sing a great deal?”

It was all very disconnected, and spasmodic and embarrassing. Mrs. Fazackerly felt that never would these six people unite in singing “My old Kentucky Home” and “Swanee River” as she had intended them to do. The presence of Mrs. Harter, and her ungracious self-consciousness, were making havoc of the party.

It was red-headed Captain Patch who saved the situation. He boldly went over to the piano and threw it open.

“Mrs. Harter, we’ve wanted to hear ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ again ever since the concert. May we all join in the chorus?”

Without waiting for any reply, he began to play, with one finger, and the others thankfully took up the well-known air.

After that there was no more constraint, and Captain Patch made Mrs. Fazackerly take his place as accompanist and stood behind the rest of the group, and eventually went away and returned carrying a laden coffee-tray.

Presently there was a great deal of cigarette smoke in the room, and a great deal of talk and laughter.

Mrs. Harter looked quite different.

“Thank goodness, it’s going to be a success after all,” Mrs. Fazackerly thought. She had an absurd feeling that the rescuing of her party from failure was a good omen for the future.

It was past twelve o’clock when the Ambreys went home in Christopher’s small car, and Captain Patch escorted Mrs. Harter to the narrow house in Queen Street where she was living in rooms.

“Good-by. Let’s do it again soon,” cried Sallie. “Why don’t we all meet this day week at our house and sing some more?”

“Let’s,” said Christopher.

“Mrs. Harter, can you?”

“Thanks very much.”

“About half-past eight then, all of us. I’ll look up some part-songs and things. Good-night.”

The car moved away.

Captain Patch escorted Mrs. Harter to the house in Queen Street....

Nancy Fazackerly told me the fact when she gave me the account of the party. And I have wondered so often what took place in the course of that short walk—the first time that those two people were ever alone together, after the evening of music and talk and laughter—that I have come to evolve a sort of imaginary conversation. It is based, like almost all my conception of Mrs. Harter’s personality, on conjecture, on the judgments of Mary Ambrey, who alone, of all those who watched the events of that summer, combined clear vision with pitifulness—and on what I saw of Bill Patch.

I don’t know—no one ever will know—what passed between them as they went up the still, moonlit street and across the little open square of the market place, their footsteps sounding very clearly in the absolute quiet of the night-time.

But I have sometimes fancied that I could reconstruct the lines of that conversation—and, for what it is worth, I shall put down what they may have said, as though I knew that they really did say it. Certainly, Diamond Harter dropped her guard that night. I am sure of that. Perhaps it was something as follows—but perhaps not.

“Were you long in the East?”

“Nearly five years. This is the first time I’ve been home. Cross Loman hasn’t changed much.”

“You must be glad of that, I should think.”

“Why?” said Mrs. Harter sharply. “I think it’s a horrid little country town, and the people in it mostly snobs.”

“Why do you think that? I’ve found them all so kind and friendly.”

“You! Yes. That’s different. But you don’t suppose I should have been asked to-night if I hadn’t happened to sing at the concert the other day. That Mrs. Fazackerly is a kind little soul, and everyone knows she’s had a hell of a time. But I’ve not any use for the Ambreys—especially that girl.”

“I’m sorry you feel like that.”

“I know you all thought I was going to spoil the evening, at first. I couldn’t help it.” Her voice softened a little in the darkness. “I felt such a fish out of water.”

“Sometimes I’ve felt like that myself. I used to when I was in the Army, very often. But one gets over it. People are awfully kind, really.”

“Martyn Ambrey is all right, and Mrs. Ambrey, that girl’s mother. Do you know her?”

“I’ve met her.”

“They weren’t living here when I was at home. As for the high and mighty Lady Flower, you saw what she was like that night at the concert.”

“Was she especially—anything?”

Mrs. Harter gave a short laugh.

“I don’t know why I’m giving myself away like this, I’m sure. Only you somehow got things going to-night, just when I was cursing myself for having been such a fool as to come.”

“I’m glad you did come, and I hope you’ll come to the Ambreys.”

He spoke simply and deliberately, and her reply was equally devoid of any hint of conventional intention.

“Why?”

“Because you sound so lonely,” said Captain Patch. “I expect you’d like people better if you saw them more often.”

“One doesn’t generally,” she said with an odd laugh.

“Give it a try, anyhow.”

“I shall. I always found this a dead-alive place, and after the East it would be duller than ever if one didn’t know people.”

“But you must have plenty of friends if your home is here.”

“I was away at school before I got married, and anyhow, I never was much of a one to make friends. The people I wanted to know didn’t care particularly about me, and the ones that did want to make friends I wasn’t particularly keen on. You see, my people sent me to a school where there were a set of girls that thought themselves a great deal better than the tradesmen’s daughters, and that sort. I was with them, mostly, at school, but after I left it was different. I was supposed to be going to teach, and one girl wrote and asked if I’d like to come as governess to her little sister. When we were at school, she’d invited me to go and stay as a friend, and I’d spent the holidays there. So I knew what it was like. And I wasn’t going to go back there as the governess after being a visitor in the house, thank you.”

“What did you do then?”

“Nothing. Stayed at home and did the typing in the office. I hated Cross Loman.”

“Did you like Egypt?”

“Yes,” said Diamond Harter slowly. “I liked Egypt. I got all the dancing and the riding and the parties out there that I’d wanted and hadn’t been able to get down here. Have you ever been to the East?”

“No.”

“It’s all quite different, of course. Everyone knows everyone, in a way. There aren’t ‘county’ people and other cliques, like there are here. One got the chance of knowing people whom one wouldn’t even have met at home.”

“Then,” said Captain Patch, rather doubtfully, “you’ll be glad to go back there again, I suppose?”

“For some things. This is my door, Captain Patch. Thanks for bringing me back. I suppose you wouldn’t care to come in and see me one day?”

“I’d like to very much,” said the red-haired young man, with his friendly smile. “Can’t I come and call on you?”

“I’m always here. Come and have tea with me on Thursday.”

“Yes, I will. Thank you very much.”

Her face in the moonlight looked strangely softened. “Have you got a latchkey?”

“Yes. Good-night.”

Mrs. Harter held out her hand and he took it for an instant. It was a strong hand, unusually broad, and capable of transmitting in contact a faint, magnetic thrill.

“Good-night,” she repeated as she went up the three shallow steps that led up to the neat, mean little door, with its liver-colored paint and tarnished brass.

Captain Patch, on the pavement, watched the door open, saw the tall, square-shouldered figure for a moment against the light that hung in the narrow entrance, and then heard the slam of the door and saw, through the ground-glass fan-light, the light go out.

Then he turned down the road again, softly whistling to himself “The Bluebells of Scotland.”

Sallie Ambrey has not her mother’s intuition, nor, naturally, has she Mary’s experience. But she has great acumen, and—that rarest and most invaluable asset—a mind trained from babyhood to clear thinking.

And, personally, I hold that she was absolutely right when she once called Captain Patch a hopeless and temperamental romantic, capable of a grande passion. One doesn’t associate it, somehow, with red curly hair, and a slouch, and a very frank smile on a boyish mouth and behind a pair of strong glasses.

Incongruity, in a way, was the keynote of the whole thing.

Diamond Harter wasn’t in the least beautiful, and certainly not charming. She was his senior by a year or two and, as Mrs. Kendal said later on, with her extraordinary gift for emphasizing the unessential:

“Mrs. Harter was not, in any sense of the word, a lady.”

One is left wondering how many “senses of the word” exist, and what they all are.

A few days after the concert, we decided that we would give a dance.

The Ambreys had come up to tea, as they often do on Sundays, and Mrs. Fazackerly came, and Bill Patch. I remember that Nancy Fazackerly looked pretty that day, in a hat trimmed with blue daisies and a blue cotton frock that seemed to be striped with a darker blue.

(Amy Kendal, who walked up later, with Mumma, of course, said to her, “How smart you look!” in a reproving way. And Christopher Ambrey, to whom the Kendal manner is not the familiar thing that it is to us, asked me what that odious woman meant.)

“This is the very place for a dance,” said Sallie, looking round the hall. “I can’t imagine why no one has thought of it before.”

Sallie is always rather apt to assume that because she has not thought of a thing herself, nobody else has done so, and this is a trick, among many others, that exasperates Claire.

“There were dances here before you were born or thought of, my child. It may seem very strange to you,” said Claire ironically, “but I happen to have been rather an unusually good dancer.”

Her annoyance was so obvious in her voice and manner—Claire never attempts to dissemble her feelings—that Nancy Fazackerly characteristically came to the rescue.

“I love to see you dance, Lady Flower,” she said earnestly. “I believe you’d even make the new jazz dances look graceful.”

She said it so naturally and sincerely that I felt I was an ungrateful brute for reflecting that she had probably never in her life seen Claire dance a step.

Sometimes I think that a long course of being told that she is the worst housekeeper, or the most inadequate manager, in the world, varied only by the nerve-shattering experience of plates hurled at her head, has altogether destroyed Nancy’s capacity for distinguishing fact from fiction. I am sure that she does not consciously fib. It is simply that her sense of expediency has completely got the better of her. Truthful, she undoubtedly is not, but I have always believed in her sincerity. And we were all secretly grateful to her for restoring Claire’s good humor.

“I may not have a staff of A. D. C’s., but I have had quite as much experience in entertaining as Lady Annabel Bending, I imagine,” said Claire, with some elasticity of statement. “And I should like to do something of the kind.”

“The difficulty will be to get men,” Mrs. Kendal stated, with all the Kendal directness. “You know how few men there are anywhere near Cross Loman. The girls often say that it’s next door to impossible to get a man for anything round here. Of course, Ahlfred would come down for it, and perhaps he could bring a friend—that would be two men.”

We tried to look encouraged.

“Let’s make a list of the people you want to invite, Cousin Claire.”

Claire dictated names, and Sallie wrote them down, and we all made suggestions. The monosyllable “men” must have resounded through the hall fifty times, in Mumma’s emphatic contralto.

The list approximated to about forty couples when it was done. I said that I thought we ought to do the thing properly and invite the whole neighborhood, not merely dancers. “Can’t we have bridge or something to amuse the older people?” said I, not without a thought to my own entertainment.

“I know!” cried Martyn. “Let’s have theatricals—ask everybody to come and see them, and then have a dance afterwards for those who like it.”

Christopher, Mrs. Fazackerly, Sallie, and Captain Patch received the suggestion with such clamorous enthusiasm that Claire and I exchanged a glance and a word under cover of it.

“Would you care to, Claire? I’m quite ready, if you are, and it would amuse Christopher.”

“Yes, it would. We haven’t done anything for a long time, either, and Cross Loman really has had enough of the Drill Hall entertainments, I should imagine.”

I knew that she was thinking of Lady Annabel again.

“You can have theatricals, Martyn,” said Claire graciously. “I think it’s rather a good idea, and we’ll have dancing in the saloon afterwards.”

The list was revised, added to and discussed all over again.

“But who will act in the theatricals?” Mary said. “And what are you going to act?”

“Captain Patch will write something—Oh yes, you must, or what’s the good of having an author here at all?—and we’d better tell him just how many people there are who can act, and then he can have the right number of parts,” said Sallie rapidly. “And anyone who can’t act, and wants to, can be told that there isn’t a part.”

“None of us can act to save our lives,” Amy Kendal superfluously informed us.

“I cannot write a play,” said Bill Patch very firmly indeed. “But we could get up something musical, if you liked, and write our own libretto, and just set it to any tune that fits. I’ve seen that done very successfully at short notice, and it’s all there’ll be time for, if Lady Flower’s dance is to be three weeks from to-day.”

“Fancy your saying that you couldn’t write a play! I’m sure you could write a play, Captain Patch,” said Mrs. Kendal amiably. “If a book, why not a play?”

Bill Patch looked rather desperate, and said he didn’t know why not, but he couldn’t, and Mumma remarked again, three or four times, that she was quite sure he could easily write a play.

“Miles, why don’t you stage-manage it for them?” said Mary Ambrey. “They’ll want someone....”

In the end, they settled it that way, after talking until nearly eight o’clock.

The last thing I heard, as everyone took leave of us at the same moment, was Mumma reiterating, pleasantly but steadily, her conviction (a) that it would be difficult to get enough men, and (b) that she was quite sure Captain Patch could easily write a play.

Chapter Five

TWO days later, Bill Patch and Mrs. Fazackerly came to consult us about their joint production.

“It isn’t a play,” Captain Patch said, his red hair standing up on end. “Whatever Mrs. Kendal may think about it, I cannot write a play. But we’ve strung something together, more or less—mostly a few songs.”

“We thought you’d know more about it than anybody else and would advise us,” said Nancy Fazackerly prettily.

“Even Mrs. Kendal has never suggested that I could write a play, my dear.”

“But I’ve sometimes wondered whether I oughtn’t to have gone in for writing,” said Claire. “Only I haven’t had the time.”

“It’s more about the performers than the actual play that we want advice,” explained Captain Patch. “Though even that isn’t going to be all plain sailing. General Kendal—”

“Most kindly,” said Nancy Fazackerly.

“Most kindly,” Bill repeated, in a worried, obedient sort of way, “most kindly turned up last night with a pair of Hessian boots.”

“Hessian boots?”

“He thought they’d make such a good stage property and that we ought to write something that would make use of them. He really was most awfully keen, poor old fellow, and of course it isn’t a bad idea, in its way. Hessian boots, you know—you don’t see them nowadays.”

To this we assented.

“One could do something with a uniform, and the boots would give a finish, as it were,” Mrs. Fazackerly suggested.

“Hessian boots, and a belt, and a busby, would give the idea of a Russian, I thought,” Bill Patch explained. “And we thought of doing something with that old song, ‘The Bulbul Ameer.’ You could make quite a lot out of it, and it would be much easier to dress up to that sort of thing than to a regular play. You remember the song I mean?”

“I brought it with me,” said Mrs. Fazackerly. And then and there she read it aloud to us, in her pleasant, rather pathetic voice.

“The sons of the Prophet are hardy and bold,

And quite unaccustomed to fear;—

But, of all, the most reckless of life or of limb,

Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

When they wanted a man to encourage the van,

Or to shout ‘hull-a-loo’ in the rear—

Or to storm a redoubt, they straightaway sent out

For Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

“There are heroes in plenty and well-known to fame

In the ranks that are led by the Czar;

But among the most reckless of name or of fame

Was Ivan Petruski Skivah.

He could imitate Irving, play euchre or pool,

And perform on the Spanish guitar;

In fact, quite the cream of the Muscovite team

Was Ivan Petruski Skivah.

“One morning the Russian had shouldered his gun

And put on his most cynical sneer,

When, going down town, he happened to run

Into Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.

Said the Bulbul, ‘Young man, is your life then so dull

That you’re anxious to end your career?

For, infidel, know that you’ve trod on the toe

Of Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.’

“Said the Russian, ‘My friend, your remarks in the end

Will only prove futile, I fear;

For I mean to imply that you’re going to die,

Mr. Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.’

The Bulbul then drew out his trusty chibouque,

And, shouting out, ‘Allah Akbar,’

Being also intent upon slaughter, he went

For Ivan Petruski Skivah.

“When, just as the knife was ending his life—

In fact, he had shouted ‘Huzza!’—

He found himself struck by that subtle calmuck,

Bold Ivan Petruski Skivah.

There’s a grave where the wave of the Blue Danube flows,

And on it, engraven so clear,

Is, ‘Stranger, remember to pray for the soul

Of Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.’

“Where the Muscovite maiden her vigil doth keep

By the light of the true lover’s star,

The name she so tenderly murmurs in sleep

Is ‘Ivan Petruski Skivah.’

The sons of the Prophet are hardy and bold

And quite unaccustomed to fear;

But, of all, the most reckless of life or of limb,

Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.”

“It’s not a bad tune,” said Captain Patch. “You see, someone comes on and sings the whole thing straight off—just to put the audience in touch with the general hang of affairs—and then, I thought, we’d act it. This fellow Abdul, you know, full of swagger—dressed up like a Turk—nothing easier than to dress like a Turk, on the stage—a towel twisted round your head, and shoes turning up at the toes, and a bill-hook or something for a scimitar, and everyone tumbles to it directly. Well, Abdul could get quite a lot of laughs by putting on tremendous side and all that sort of thing. Then the Russian chap—or we could just call him Slavonic, if you think Russians are rather a slump in the market just now—of course he’s in love with Abdul’s girl, the Muscovite maiden. He’d have to be the hero of the piece—Ivan Petruski Skivah—flourishing about with a sword and that kind of thing—and in uniform—”

“The Hessian boots?”

“Exactly. The Hessian boots. A note of realism introduced at once—”

“And what about the Muscovite maiden?” said Claire.

“She’ll sing duets with Ivan Petruski, of course, and she’s easy to dress, too. A veil over her head, and slave-bangles, and perhaps a Yashmak. An eastern get-up is always effective, and so very economical to arrange,” said Mrs. Fazackerly with satisfaction.

“We’re going to put in extra parts as well—chorus of Eastern maidens, and Cossacks, and things like that. But those are the principals.”

“And how have you cast it?” I inquired.

“Sallie must be the Muscovite maiden. She’ll look sweet,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, “and she can sing, too.”

“Will Major Ambrey take on the Bulbul Ameer?” Captain Patch asked.

Christopher was not present. We were both positive that he would refuse the suggested honor, and we knew well, moreover, that Christopher is no musician. I have heard him sing in church.

“You’ll have to do it yourself, Captain Patch,” said Claire. “How about the Hessian boots?”

“We thought of Martyn. And someone will be wanted to sing the song itself, as a kind of prologue, before the curtain goes up,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.

I remember that she looked as much pleased and excited over their plans as a child over a party.

“You see, that song is meant to be a sort of recurring motif throughout the whole show,” Bill said. “When we’re at rather a loose end, someone can play the refrain or sing it, and it will buck things up at once. It’s extraordinary how pleased an audience always is with anything that’s repeated often enough. They know where they are, I suppose, when they recognize an old friend. And at the end, we can all stand in a row across the stage and sing the chorus together. You know the kind of thing—just to bring down the curtain.”

He looked just as much pleased and excited as Nancy Fazackerly did. They were like two very nice children.

“It sounds all right,” I said. “I take it that we really want to do the acting among ourselves, as much as possible, and entertain the rest of the people and then all wind up with a dance.”

“Exactly,” said Claire.

“The only outside talent, as far as one can see at present, will be Mrs. Harter,” said Bill Patch—and he was genuinely quite unconcerned about it, too.

But I saw that Nancy Fazackerly knew well enough that Claire wasn’t going to stand for that.

“Mrs. Harter?”

There was more than one note of interrogation in Claire’s way of saying it—quite three or four.

“You remember how rippingly she sang ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ the other night?”

“Oh, yes, I remember that.”

“We thought of her, for the ‘Bulbul Ameer’ song at the beginning because one really does want someone who’ll pronounce all the words distinctly. And she’s got a good ‘carrying’ voice, if ever I heard one.”

“I daresay,” said Claire distantly.

Bill Patch looked from one to another of us, and I remembered how, the first time I saw him, he had reminded me of a Clumber spaniel—so young, and awkward, and eager—and now, evidently, so much puzzled as well.

“Her voice really is a very good one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly pleadingly. “And I’m rather sorry for her, do you know. After all, in Egypt she must have had a very amusing time and known heaps of people—and now to come back to Cross Loman—”

“Where she came from!” ejaculated Claire.

“I know—but that makes it harder, in a way. She’s outgrown the people whom she saw most of when she was Diamond Ellison—and after all, she wasn’t so very much more than a schoolgirl when she married and went away. I think she feels a little bit stranded sometimes.”

“Where is Mr. Harter—and what is he?” Claire demanded.

“He is a solicitor—and he’s still in the East, but he may come home this summer. I don’t think the marriage is a very happy one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, looking down.

I fancy that to all of us there then came a momentary vision of crockery, propelled violently through space, after the reckless habit that report had imputed to Mrs. Fazackerly’s excitable partner.

“It would be so very kind of you, Lady Flower, to say that we may ask her to help with the show,” said Nancy, raising her pretty eyes to Claire’s face, and speaking with her habitual flattering deference. “You see, if once you gave a lead, Mrs. Harter wouldn’t feel out of things any more.”

“And,” said Captain Patch, not quite so diplomatically, “it would be such a shame to waste that beautiful voice.”

“Who is going to play your accompaniments—or do you rise to an orchestra?” I interrupted.

“I can play the accompaniments,” said Mrs. Fazackerly radiantly. “It’s all I’m good for. I have no voice and I can’t act. Which reminds me that some of the Kendals really ought to be asked to take part, oughtn’t they, after General Kendal has so very kindly provided those boots?”

“Perhaps Alfred and two of the girls might do something in the chorus without damaging it.”

“We must go and find out. And—what about Mrs. Harter?”

Claire shrugged her shoulders.

“I think it’s rather a mistake to ask her, myself. But please do exactly as you like about it. If her voice is essential, then I suppose she must be asked.”

“Now, what about the stage itself?”

Nancy Fazackerly was quite wise enough not to press the question of Mrs. Harter any further, and they went off into a discussion as to the structure and position of the stage.

I asked Claire afterwards if she really objected very much to letting old Ellison’s daughter take part in the performance.

“She won’t expect to be asked here afterwards, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“How do you know she won’t? I thought that she looked like a pushing sort of woman, and common.”

“Do you remember how they did those portraits of her in Sallie’s game the other day?”

“Yes. Why?”

“It struck me as odd that they’d all thought enough about her to find it worth while—although not one of them knows her in the least intimately.”

“As I said at the time, Miles, she has personality. I suppose I have personality myself. It’s an indefinable sort of thing.”

We left it at that.

Mrs. Fazackerly and Captain Patch were to have a week in which to prepare their program, and after that there was to be a general assembly of the prospective performers.

“And you’ll preside, won’t you, to settle about parts, and then no one will be hurt or offended,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, speaking, I fear, from a wide past experience of the wonderful capacities of other people for being hurt or offended on the very slightest provocation.

I asked them to hold the meeting in the library and promised to do my best that no one should be either hurt or offended.

On the day that I was expecting them I drove down to the Mill House in the morning to see Mary. I drive out in a low basket-carriage drawn by a very old pony, because that is the only safe way in which I can convey my semi-helpless person about without assistance.

She was in the garden, as usual, doing something with a trowel.

Mary never seems surprised to see me, only pleased, and she does not stand by with an anxious frown, brightly and carefully talking about other things while I adjust my crutches and lower myself out of the pony carriage.

“Sallie and Martyn are rolling the tennis lawn. Isn’t it energetic of them on such a lovely day? Let’s sit in the shade.”

There is a big beech tree on Mary’s lawn, and we sat under it and watched the tiny little stream that runs at the bottom of the garden. The sound of it, more than any other sound I know, always recalls to me the summer days of childhood.

Presently I consulted Mary about the theatricals and the assignment of the parts.

“Sallie for the heroine, of course—she can act and she can sing. Nancy Fazackerly can’t act and can’t sing, but she’s going to play the accompaniments for all the songs. They suggested Martyn for the hero and Patch for the villain—dressed as a Turk. I don’t know what other parts they’ll put in, but apparently the whole thing is perfectly elastic and can be added to or taken away from as desired. It’s all to be Eastern dress, more or less—as being easy to arrange. And they’re very keen to have Mrs. Harter to sing the ‘Bulbul Ameer’ song. It’s the keynote of the whole thing, that song.”

“What does Claire say?”

“She says they may do as they like, but she doesn’t care for the idea very much. For one thing, she thinks Mrs. Harter—Diamond Ellison—will feel out of her element.”

“I wonder. After all, she’s been for years in Cairo, and must have met all sorts of people. And I’m convinced that she’s intelligent, Miles, and probably very adaptive. Martyn says that she’s an exceptional person altogether.”

“Does he know her?”

“No. But both my children tell me that they are natural psychologists of a high order.”

We laughed and then Mary said:

“I sometimes wonder if it’s a mistake to have let their critical faculties—Sallie’s especially—develop quite unchecked. She finds people more interesting than anything else, but it’s all so very impersonal and analytical.”

“You might divide humanity into those who put people first, those who put things first, and those who put ideas first.”

“Which do you put first, Miles?”

(Claire would have said, “Which do I put first?”)

“People, of course. So do you. But it’s the people who put things first who are in the majority. In the ultimate issue, they weigh what Mr. Wemmick called portable property—things like houses, and furniture, and money—against the personal relations, and the portable property counts most.”

“I know. They are called practical people because they would never postpone a business appointment on account of a child’s birthday party. The birthday party would have to be postponed. And what about the ones who put ideas first?”

Of course, Mary knew as well as I did—or better—what about them. But she also knew that I like long, wandering, impersonal discussions of the kind that I can indulge in with no one else.

I smiled at her, just to show that I knew quite well how she was humoring me.

“The people who put ideas first are, I think fortunately, in a very small minority. Religious enthusiasts, of course—and perhaps the few people who really are thorough-going, matter-of-fact conventionalists.”

“You are thinking of the Kendals,” said Mary unerringly.

I admitted that she was right.

“Can you imagine Mumma, for instance, on a jury, admitting ‘extenuating circumstances’? ‘A crime is crime,’ she would probably say, and as she would say it not less than fourteen times, she would end in hypnotizing all the other eleven into agreeing with her. People like that ought really never to be allowed to have any say in any question affecting their fellow-creatures, but unfortunately there’s generally a sort of spurious worth and solidity about them that compels attention.”

“I remember,” said Mary, “that once at Dheera Dhoon we were talking about a man who had become a Catholic, and someone said that it would be very difficult and require a good deal of moral courage to take a step of that sort. And Mrs. Kendal answered, ‘How can there be any courage in deliberately going from the true to the false? Nothing of the kind.’ And one felt that she would never, by any possibility, see it in any other light.”

I made Mary promise that she would come and help me at the meeting in the library that afternoon. Sallie and Martyn were to be there, of course, and the authors of the production; and we felt that it was probable that one or two of the Kendals might appear in order to inform us that they couldn’t act.

“What about Mrs. Harter?”

“Oh, no. You see, she won’t be actually in the play, anyhow. They only want her to sing before the curtain goes up and then again at the end.”

“Do you know that they are all coming here this evening to sing? Sallie invited them that time they went to Nancy Fazackerly’s. Mrs. Harter, too.”

“I’m glad.”

So I was. What Nancy had told me of Diamond Harter made me feel sorry for her, in spite of her aggressive airs. I wanted her to go to Mary Ambrey’s house, in the atmosphere of sanity, and kindness, and serenity, that belongs to Mary.

When I got home, I found Claire entertaining Lady Annabel Bending.

I felt sure that she had come to hear about the dance that we proposed to give. The invitations had only just been sent out, but in Cross Loman we are never long in ignorance of one another’s arrangements.

Miss Emma Applebee, before now, has darted out of her shop and inquired of me solicitously how her Ladyship’s cold is, when I myself had only been made aware of its existence about an hour earlier.

Lady Annabel was inclined to be rather grave, although courteous, about our entertainment. Did we realize quite what we were undertaking, especially—if she might say so—with an invalid in the house?

She glanced at me.

I have reason to believe that Lady Annabel speaks of me behind my back as “our afflicted friend, Sir Miles Flower.”

“I have done so much—so very much—entertaining myself, and necessarily on such an enormous scale, that I perhaps realize better than most people what it all means. When I heard what you were contemplating, I felt that it would be friendly to come round at once and offer you the benefit of my experience.”

“Thank you,” said Claire.

Her eyes were so large and scornful and her voice held so satirical an intonation that I interposed.

“Claire’s young cousins are very anxious to get up some theatricals and to take advantage of having that young fellow here—Patch—to do some writing for them. They’re working up something musical.”

“Delightful, indeed,” said Lady Annabel in a severe and melancholy voice. “And is there much musical talent hereabouts?”

“Sallie Ambrey sings rather nicely, and Mrs. Fazackerly is really musical—she is adapting Captain Patch’s libretto—and then there are one or two others.”

“Let me warn you—” began Lady Annabel.

She suddenly glanced to the right and to the left of our not very large drawing-room as though we might be suspected of having concealed one of the servants behind a bookcase.

Then she sank her always low voice to a pitch that was all but a whisper and most impressive.

“You understand that I am speaking in the utmost confidence? It must never go beyond the walls of this room”—we all three instinctively gazed with deep distrust at the walls—“I’m not thinking of myself, but of what it might do for the Rector if it got round that I had said anything about one of his people—you understand what I mean—in the Rector’s position—”

Of course I said at once that I quite understood what she meant, although one couldn’t help feeling that this was one of the moments when Lady Annabel was perhaps confusing the Rector with “H. E.,” the late Sir Hannabuss Tallboys. (We have all learned to think of him as “H. E.”)

Claire did not join in my protestations. I judged from her expression that she was, once more, living upon the edge of a volcano.

“Absolutely between ourselves, I should very strongly advise you not to let anyone suggest that the young woman whom I most mistakenly allowed to sing at the concert the other night—Mrs. Harter—should be asked to perform. I should think it most inadvisable.”

“May I ask why?”

Lady Annabel looked distressed.

“You do understand that I am speaking entirely unofficially?”

Not only did we understand, but, personally, I really did not see how she could speak in any other way.

“Then,” said Lady Annabel, “the fact is that I have, since the concert, heard one or two things about her. Naturally, I have links all over the Empire, as I may say, and this Mrs. Harter, as you know, has just come from the Near East. It seems that she and her husband are on most unhappy terms—no doubt there are faults on both sides; in fact, my correspondent said as much—but she has made herself quite notorious in a place where everyone in the European colony is of course watched and commented upon. And I noticed at the concert the other evening that there was a tendency to bring her into notice, simply, I suppose, because Cross Loman thinks it a fine thing for Ellison the plumber’s daughter to have married a man socially above her—Mr. Harter is a solicitor—and to have lived abroad. If they only knew what I know as to the sort of people one is obliged to receive out there!”

Lady Annabel Bending is not a spiteful woman. She would just as readily, I am sure, have come to the Manor House in order to sing the praises of Mrs. Harter as to disparage her. All that she ever wants is still to be as important as she believes herself to have been in her colonial service days.

Her admonitions clinched the question of Mrs. Harter’s inclusion in the theatricals. Claire sent a note to Mrs. Fazackerly that afternoon, I believe, to the effect that Mrs. Harter must by all means be asked to sing, and if possible to act as well.

And if Nancy Fazackerly was at all taken aback by so rapid and complete a volte-face, she was far too tactful ever to give any signs of it.

Lady Annabel was not offended when Claire made her intentions evident. She is never offended; she only becomes more remote and her graciousness less smiling.

“I shall speak to the Rector about your invitation as soon as I can, and hope to send you an answer to-morrow. You know what the correspondence of a man in his position is. Pray don’t get up, Sir Miles. Good-by—Good-by. So very glad—it all sounds charming. I hope—we both hope—that it will be the very greatest success. But I’m sure it will be. Good-by again.”

I rather think that she bowed, in an absent-minded way, to the footman who opened the hall door for her.

The rectory possesses only a small governess cart and pony, and Lady Annabel is driven out by the gardener’s boy. But she always, by means of smiles and bows, and small waves of the hand, makes a kind of royal progress for herself. It is her boast that she never forgets a face, and in consequence a great number of the tradespeople in Cross Loman are gratified by the marks of recognition lavishly showered upon them from the rectory pony carriage.

I was told afterwards by Miss Applebee, who saw it happen, that on that particular day Lady Annabel was nearly run down by General Kendal’s new motor car, which he was slowly driving up Fore Street.

Mumma was at her usual post of observation, beside him, and no doubt she had said, “There’s the rectory pony cart coming towards you, dear—I should sound the horn, if I were you.” But perhaps she said it too soon, or repeated it so often that poor Puppa’s senses became rather dazed and he ceased to take in the meaning of the words. At all events, he appeared to drive the car deliberately, and very, very slowly, straight at Lady Annabel.

But she never flinched at all, even when the gardener’s boy almost—but not quite—drove her into the gutter in order to avoid a collision.

And when she subsequently mentioned the incident to Mary Ambrey, Lady Annabel said that she did not wish any official notice to be taken of it. Her manner distinctly gave Mary the impression that General Kendal had narrowly escaped excommunication at the hands of the Rector.

Chapter Six

MRS. HARTER did not come to discuss the play with the others that afternoon, but Captain Patch went straight from the meeting to the house in Queen Street and told her about it, and made her promise to sing the “Bulbul Ameer” song.

Again I shall have to fall back upon what, in reality, can only be guess-work, based upon what was afterward told me by Mary Ambrey.

It was their second meeting, and it clinched matters, so far as Bill Patch was concerned. Mrs. Harter may have known, too—probably she did—but she held complexities in her nature that would make her surrender a less simple and less instantaneous affair than his.

I can imagine that, realizing as she certainly did, the strength of the extraordinary thing that was coming, inevitably, to overwhelm them both, she may have hesitated for a moment—not from doubt or fear, but simply in order to gauge, in one breathless instant, the smashing force of the storm before it should break.

He went to see her, and they walked out of the narrow Queen Street house and up Loman Hill to the crossroads there. She told him about her life.

I have put together what I heard in the time, later on, when we were all talking about her, and the little that she said to Mary in their one interview, and the facts that afterward Nancy Fazackerly gave me. And, knowing her turns of phraseology, which remained characteristic of her class and of the defiant streak that ran all through her, I have made out my own version of what she said.

She had been an ambitious girl. Cross Loman had not liked her and she had not liked Cross Loman. Although she was not beautiful, she possessed very powerful sex magnetism and had love affairs from her schooldays onward. But the hard, practical vein that had come to her direct from Ellison, the successful tradesman, never failed her. She never lost her head. She despised her country-town lovers, even while she flaunted their admiration in the face of all Cross Loman.

But she knew very well that only marriage could give her her chance. Mr. Harter (I am sure that she spoke of him as “Mr. Harter” throughout) was the uncle of one of her school friends. Diamond Ellison went to stay with this girl at her home in one of the London suburbs, and the solicitor—twenty years her senior—came to the house and fell under one of the brief, incomprehensible spells that young women of a certain type sometimes exercise over men no longer in their first youth.

He misjudged her from first to last, probably misled by the boldness of her mere physical outlines and the mixture of contempt and familiarity in her manner towards men. His first proposals were received by her with no sense of shock—she was both too experienced in men and too ruthlessly cynical for that—but with utter disdain.

“You can ask me to marry you—or you can clear out,” said Diamond Ellison.

He married her.

In the East, she had all the success that she had expected and intended to have. The women never liked her, but she knew herself to be essentially a man’s woman, and she was indifferent then and always to the opinions of her surroundings. The men fell in love with her, and Harter was furiously jealous.

On her own showing, Harter had everything to complain of in his wife. She did not pretend to care for him, she flirted with other men, she was notorious, even judged by the lax standards of the East, and she replied to his incessant, nagging remonstrances with sulky, curt indifference. The only thing that he could never charge her with was extravagance, for she was far too practical a woman to squander money, and perhaps also too proud, since she had not a penny of her own. (Mrs. Ellison was dead, and she had long ago quarreled with old Ellison, who gave her nothing at all.)

Harter threatened to send her home, and she replied that she would not go. Nor did she.

A far stronger man than Harter would have found it impossible to get the better of her. A combination of recklessness and absolute determination made her very nearly impervious.

She even took her pleasures sulkily and without enthusiasm, although she never missed an entertainment or an expedition.

They had no child, of course.

Harter got her back to England at last, after nearly five years of it, by pretending to book his passage as well, and then backing out of it at the last minute.

She despised him all the more for the subterfuge. She herself was never anything but absolutely direct.

She told Patch that she would not have come home even then, but that she was ill, and it is very certain that only a woman of iron physique and resolute will could have stood the climate, and the racket of her days and nights, for that length of time.

As it was, she’d been a month in a London nursing home before she came to Cross Loman. It was in the nursing home, I imagine, that Diamond Harter took stock of life. She’d been in that home for weeks and not a soul had been to see her. There was no one to come. Her father had retired from business and lived by himself at Torquay. They hadn’t even corresponded for years.

I have heard Mrs. Harter’s speaking voice—a voice stronger and more abrupt than that of most women—and her tones ring in my ears now, sometimes, so that I think I can distinguish the very words that she may have used on the day that she and Bill Patch went up Loman Hill together. But there must have been an intonation in her voice then that neither I, nor anyone else, ever heard there.

She told him that she’d never been in love. Men had stirred her senses, and one or two of them had excited her half-resentful admiration. She had a most acute power of distinguishing nuances of breeding, and in the East she came into contact with a class of man of very different caliber from that of Harter.

Not once, in all her twenty-eight years, had she even wished to establish a permanent link between herself and a fellow creature. And Bill Patch, who liked everybody and who was everybody’s friend, listened to her.

I suppose it was just that element in Bill Patch that made a writer of him, which enabled him to understand. Something rather beyond the apprehension of most of us, to whom he was simply a good-tempered, red-headed boy with an unexpected brain power. Only Sallie, justifying her determination to specialize in psychology, had seen rather further than other people when she said that Captain Patch was a temperamental romantic, capable of a grande passion.

He listened to Diamond Harter and came, I suppose, as near to perfect comprehension of her as one soul can ever come to perfect comprehension of another. That is to say that he not only understood what her words told him, but that he saw far beyond them to the Diamond Harter that she might have been, and that—almost unknown to herself—she must, sometimes, have dimly felt a wish to be.

Whatever else there is to say about Mrs. Harter, it is indisputable that she possessed a character of unusual strength and that there were in her latent possibilities almost frightful in their intensity.

Bill Patch saw straight past everything, accepted everything, and somehow made her see that he understood and that he accepted. He was passionately in love with her—but that day on Loman Hill he did not speak a word of love to her. There were no preliminary explanations or tentative confidences between them. The whole thing was too vital for that.

At the top of Loman Hill, at the crossroads, is a beech tree, on which lovers have carved their initials for generations. It stands beside a low hedge in which is set a rickety five-barred gate. It was at that gate that they must have stood, as everyone stands, gazing at the blue haze that lies over the hills beyond and at the square, red sandstone tower of Cross Loman church below them.

I have stood at the crossroads on Loman Hill many and many a time and looked over the five-barred gate, at the tower of St. Andrew’s, and when I went there last, I thought of those two who must have stood there together—Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

She was a tall woman, and her shoulders and his were nearly on a level; and his red head topped hers only by a matter of a quarter of an inch. I never saw Bill Patch wear a cap or a hat. Her clothes were rather distinctive, and she wore them well. She had a figure for tailor-made suits, and they were nearly always dark in color, and she wore with them a white silk shirt, open at the throat. Her hats were always severe—dark velours, of the plainest possible contour. Mary says that she knew her style, and stuck to it.

It was characteristic of her to keep her hands thrust into her coat pockets, and I always fancy that it was so that she leaned against the rickety gate, her shoulders as erect as Bill’s were slouched.

He was so short-sighted that he never took off his glasses, and through those queer, thick lenses he must have looked at her, as he listened. His eyes always had that friendly smile in them, and that odd, pathetic look that had reminded me of a Clumber spaniel. It was his mouth that betrayed him, with the sensitive line of lip that was visible only when he was not laughing. That gave one Bill Patch, the writer and dreamer—Sallie’s potential romantic.

They stood at the crossways for a very long while, and, after a time, in silence. Bill Patch knew, absolutely for certain, that he loved her, and that they belonged to one another. The supreme importance of it, in his eyes, made everything else of so little account that he did not even wonder what would happen.

Mrs. Harter was different. She had never waited as Bill, quite unconsciously, had waited. The thing had come upon her unawares, and part of her—the part that had made her marry Harter, and then flirt with other men—had absolutely denied the existence of the one supreme reality.

But the capacity for recognizing it had been there all the time, smothered under her cheap cynicism, her ruthless ambition, and the streak in her of sheer, iron hardness.

She had to recognize it, when it came, and to surrender to it.

And so she was frightened, or at least overwhelmed, at first. Bill’s intuition told him that, and he gave her time.

He told her that he’d been very happy all his life, even during the war. His mother had died when he was too little to remember her, and his father had married again. He was friends with his stepmother. She and his father had two jolly little kids.

He had heaps of friends. A good many of them had gone west in the war.

His writing, Bill Patch said, was a frightfully real thing in its way, but it actually only took a bit of him to do it—he looked on it as a sort of trick. He thought perhaps his subconscious self did most of it, and that was why he could write so easily, and didn’t mind old Carey chatting about poisoners all the time, or people talking in the room, or anything. He knew it was a form of self-expression, for some people, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t, in fact, think he needed a form of self-expression. He had always, he said again, been very happy.

And all the time he had known that he was waiting for something, and that it was something very great. But he hadn’t known at all what it would be.

Sometimes I have wondered what Mrs. Harter made of it all, as she listened to him. He was so much younger than she, in experience, and in knowledge, and most of all in spirit. Mrs. Harter was, one might say, temperamentally sophisticated, and Bill Patch, who was two years her junior, was most essentially childlike. It is the only adjective I can think of that comes anywhere near to describing that quality in him that had made him, all his life, always happy.

There had never been any woman at all, “to count” he said. He had gone straight from school into the Army, and he hadn’t thought about girls much, although he greatly admired the pretty ones.

Always he came back to it again—he’d had that queer feeling of waiting for something. He didn’t mean someone—a person—no, it was more like a job, something that only he could do. It sounded odd, Bill admitted, but there it was. Something to do, in a way, with God. Yes, he believed in God.

And Mrs. Harter, who didn’t, and who never had, didn’t say a word.

It was Bill Patch who said at last that they ought to go. One supposes that no single one of all the men whom Mrs. Harter had known would have been sufficiently lacking in the technique of that sort of situation, to propose putting an end to it. She wouldn’t have given them the chance, probably saying it herself, with her most disconcerting air of suddenly finding their company not at all worth her while.

But when Bill Patch said that it was late, and that he ought to take her home again, Mrs. Harter acquiesced, simply. They must have taken a last look over the five-barred gate at the evening sky, against which the red church tower always stands out with peculiar, clear-cut precision of outline, before they turned away, and went down the long slope of Loman Hill, which lies between high banks where the green almost meets overhead.

Bill asked her about her singing, and she said that she’d learned at school, and taken a few lessons just before she married. She used to sing a good deal, in Cairo, because the men she knew liked it. Did he understand, she asked him, that she was the sort of person who sang only for that sort of reason? Once, at a party in a man’s rooms, they’d put her right up on the top of the piano, and she’d sung there, and they’d said it was worth a double brandy-and-soda. Men were always wanting to stand her drinks, and she took them, partly out of devilment, and partly because her husband hated it. She’d got a strong enough head for anything.

I can quite imagine her facing Bill, as she told him that, her mouth hard and rather mocking, and perhaps in her eyes the dawn of a hope that she strove to believe was an incredulous one.

And Bill said that had nothing at all to do with it. He didn’t specify what it was, that it had nothing to do with—but that was the last time Diamond Harter ever thought it necessary to point out to him the things about herself, by which the rest of the world judged her.

Chapter Seven

MOST of us, no doubt—except, I must once more add, the Kendals—hover between two planes of consciousness: the inner life and the outer existence. The predominant values of either remain fairly well defined, and vary very little.

But for Captain Patch, that summer, the inner life and the outer one must have mingled strangely.

In the mornings, he listened to old Carey’s chatter of Crippen, and Mrs. Maybrick, and all the other figures in his rather macabre gallery of celebrities, and he gardened with Mrs. Fazackerly, and they worked at the “Bulbul Ameer” show together. Very often, in the afternoons, there were rehearsals, sometimes there were tennis parties. Very often, though not always, he and Mrs. Harter met at the latter. She was invited to quite a lot of places, partly thanks to Nancy Fazackerly’s efforts, and partly because she played a hard game of tennis quite extraordinarily well. Bill Patch always saw her home afterwards, quite openly. And every evening they were out together, often going very far afield, for she was a good walker. Once Martyn Ambrey met them, and it was after that, when someone spoke of “that Mrs. Harter,” that he said to Mary:

“Do you remember our saying she had such a defiant face, and you said she looked unhappy?”

“Yes. The night she sang ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert.”

“And cousin Claire said she was hard.”

“Did she?”

“Of course, cousin Claire is almost always wrong.”

“You only mean that you and she generally hold different opinions.”

Martyn laughed, but after a minute he said reflectively: “That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about.”

It is not Mary Ambrey’s way to ask questions, and Martyn did not elucidate. He only looked as though he were seeing again something that might have struck him that afternoon, and repeated, with a rather derisive inflection in his cocksure young voice, “That woman hard?”

The “Bulbul Ameer” play was gradually being built up, under the usual frightful difficulties, by a number of people who were all determined to help.

The Kendals faithfully attended every rehearsal en bloc, although only Alfred and Amy were to take parts, Amy being alleged by Mumma to be possessed of a voice.

“Not a great deal of Ear perhaps—not one of them has an ear, I’m afraid—but Amy certainly has a Voice. I’ve said from the days when they were all little tots together, that Amy certainly had a voice. Don’t you remember, girls, my telling you long ago that Amy was the only one with a voice?”

The Kendals, of course, remembered quite well. They never fail Mumma.

Amy and the Voice were admitted into the cast and that, as Bill Patch said, was all right. But it didn’t entitle Alfred Kendal to come out in the new, and insufferable, guise in which he presently appeared.

(“I do think that amateur theatricals bring out all that is worst in human nature,” Sallie thoughtfully remarked to me once.)

“Ahlfred,” as his family persist in calling him, was at home for a few weeks. During the hours of rehearsal, from regarding him as a pleasant, if unexciting, fellow creature, we all came to look upon him as something that could only have been sent to try us.

It was disappointing when Amy read the words of the opening chorus for the first time, that her only comment should be:

“Well, I suppose if we’ve got to make fools of ourselves, it can’t be helped, and once we’re worked up to it, I daresay it won’t be so bad”—but it was positively infuriating when Alfred, in an instructive voice, began to make a number of suggestions all beginning with “Why not.”

“Why not alter this a bit, here, Patch—you see what I mean? You say ‘The Muscovite Maiden comes on from the O. P. side.’ Now, why not have her come on from the other side?”

“Why?”

“Well, wouldn’t it be effective? And why not bring in an allusion to the moon, in that final song? Always a success, the moon, in a show like this. Why not arrange an effect of some sort with a moderator lamp behind the scene? I’ve seen wonders done with a moderator lamp.”

“Fancy, a moderator lamp!” said Mrs. Kendal.

“I think, as it’s supposed to be early morning in the first scene, that perhaps the moon would be out of place,” Nancy Fazackerly suggested apologetically.

And Alfred, with something of his mother’s singular powers of reiteration, said, “Why not make it the evening instead?”

“I think we ought to get on a bit. We’ll take the Muscovite maiden’s song. Sallie!” I called.

She sang it well, and the lyric was rather a pretty one.

“What about encores?” Alfred Kendal enquired, looking alertly round him.

“We haven’t quite got to that yet.”

“I say, why not have one of the verses of the real ‘Bulbul Ameer’ song brought in each time as an encore? I call that a piece of sheer inspiration, don’t you?”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bill Patch grinning; and was further, and unnecessarily, supported by Christopher Ambrey, who said that personally, and speaking quite dispassionately, he called it a piece of sheer senselessness. The “Bulbul Ameer” song was already being given at the beginning, and at the end, and played at all sorts of critical moments throughout the piece, and surely there was no need to hear it more than forty-eight times in one evening?

“Do you really mean that one song is to be played forty-eight times?” said Mumma. “Fancy! forty-eight times! Do you hear that, Puppa? Why, we shall all know it quite well.”

General Kendal gave no assent to this proposition, reasonable though it was. He had been fidgeting for some time.

“I say, Patch, do you remember a pair of boots of mine?”

“Hessian boots,” put in Mumma, helpfully.

“That’s right, Hessian boots. It’s not of the slightest consequence, of course, but you don’t often see those Hessian boots about, nowadays. How would it be to give them some sort of prominence? Just draw the attention of the audience to them, in some way, if you know what I mean. I should think it could be worked in, somehow.”

“Why not make an allusion to Puss-in-Boots—something of that kind? All those old stories come more or less out of the Arabian Nights, don’t they, and this is supposed to take place in the East?”

“If you’re going to have Puss-in-Boots, you may as well have Dick Whittington,” said Dolly Kendal brightly, and quite as though she was making a relevant and reasonable observation.

“I don’t somehow quite see Puss-in-Boots, or even Dick Whittington, in the piece,” said Nancy Fazackerly—but she said it with so much hesitation, in her fear of hurting anybody’s feelings, that one quite felt they might very well have been there all the time, without our having been clever enough to recognize them.

“Why not little Bo-Peep, while we’re about it?” Sallie asked sardonically. “Do let’s get on, instead of wasting time like this.”

I saw Mrs. Fazackerly gaze at her with fearful admiration. Perhaps Claire saw it too—and she does not ever think that admiration, of any kind, is good for Sallie.

“I don’t want to interrupt,” she began smoothly, and I got ready to be interrupted at once. “But you do the whole thing so well, Sallie darling, that it’s a shame it shouldn’t be absolutely perfect.”

Claire has not yet discovered that, to Sallie’s generation, tact is as objectionable as plain speaking is to her own.

“I want you to see how a real Eastern maiden, which is what you’re supposed to be, would move. You walk like a European. Now look at me.”

Of course, that was all she wanted. We looked at her.

Claire has a beautiful figure, and she moves very well. But I do not know that she has any particular claim to expert knowledge about Eastern women. However, there she was, in her own house, and of course everybody looked at her while she gravely walked up and down—everybody, that is to say, except Sallie, who was ostentatiously lighting a cigarette.

“You see what I mean?” said Claire, but she was wise enough not to say it to Sallie, who quite obviously neither wished nor intended to see.

Of course it was Mrs. Fazackerly who murmured, “Oh yes—how well you do it!” and then Claire sat down again, her insistent egoism satisfied for the moment.

“I should like to go through the whole of the first scene again,” said Bill Patch, looking harassed.

“We haven’t settled anything yet about Puppa’s Hessian boots,” one of the Kendals reproachfully observed.

“They come in later. Ivan Petruski Skivah will wear them. That’s Martyn. And I should like to know, if possible, whether you can undertake Abdul the Bulbul Ameer, Major Ambrey?”

“Dear me, haven’t you settled that yet?” Mrs. Kendal asked, in amicable surprise. “I should have thought the parts would have been settled long ago. We seem to be getting on very slowly, don’t we?”

I agreed with her and called upon Christopher to make up his mind. To my surprise, he did not utter the uncompromising refusal that I had expected. He only said that if Patch would take his oath not to ask him to sing anything by himself, or speak a single line, or do anything of that sort, he’d think about it.

“But Abdul is the chief character in the piece. I can’t very well make him deaf and dumb,” expostulated the author.

“Well, then, some other chap had better take it on. I should only make a mull of it.”

I heard Nancy Fazackerly softly protesting at this, and Christopher crossed over to the piano, where she had been patiently sitting all the afternoon.

“I’ll turn over the pages for you,” he suggested, and he remained standing behind her head, looking down at the pale gold knot of her hair and saying “Now?” anxiously at short intervals.

The tune of “Abdul the Bulbul Ameer” rattled through the room again and again, and Martyn and Sallie and Alfred and Amy all sang it, and General Kendal boomed his usual accompaniment of some rather indeterminate monosyllable repeated over and over again. All the rehearsals seem to me now to have been very much alike.

Bill Patch was always gay and light-hearted and more or less distracted, and Mrs. Fazackerly was always good-tempered and obliging—and almost always untruthful, when appealed to on any question of conflicting opinions.

Sallie Ambrey was always competent, and her acting was very clever. So was Martyn’s. Eventually, they made Bill Patch play the villain’s part himself, after Christopher Ambrey had declined it.

“I’d rather turn over the pages for the orchestra,” said Christopher, and the orchestra smiled at him gratefully in the person of Mrs. Fazackerly.

The Kendals almost always came to the rehearsals. I think Puppa had some idea that his presence inspired the whole thing with a spirit of military discipline. At any rate, he said, “Come, come, come,” every now and then when Bill or I had stopped the rehearsal in order to confer with one another.

And Mumma, I feel sure, enjoyed watching Amy and Alfred on the stage and Blanche and Dolly and Aileen among the audience.

Claire was there, of course. From time to time she interrupted everything, in order to show somebody how to do something. Most of them were very patient with her, and Patch, in all simplicity, always thanked her. I daresay that the others didn’t see it as I did. I find it difficult to be fair to Claire. Mary Ambrey, I noticed, used to find a seat near her and used to listen while Claire explained in an undertone that, funnily enough, she had a great deal of the actress in her and other things like that. So long as one person was exclusively occupied with her, Claire was fairly safe not to make one of her general appeals.

Mary Ambrey was to prompt, and during the first few rehearsals she had nothing to do and could attend to Claire.

“Why not do without prompting altogether?” said Alfred Kendal. “We can always gag a bit, if necessary. Topical allusions—that sort of thing.”

“I couldn’t,” said his sister Amy firmly. “I’m sure you’d better have a prompter.”

Mumma supported Amy. “Some of you are sure to get stage fright and to break down on the night, and that’s when the prompter is useful. When someone gets stage fright, you know, and breaks down.”

Captain Patch asked me afterwards if it was absolutely necessary for General and Mrs. Kendal to attend every rehearsal. He said that Mrs. Kendal was breaking his nerve. And the General thought, and spoke, of nothing but his Hessian boots. Bill put in a song about them on purpose to please him and Martyn—Ivan Petruski Skivah—sang it.

Mrs. Harter did not attend any of the early rehearsals. She had nothing to do with the play, really, and was only to sing “The Bulbul Ameer” before the curtain went up and again at the end of the play. I think Nancy Fazackerly had made Bill understand that Claire would not welcome Mrs. Harter to the rehearsals.

One day old Mr. Carey came. He made us all rather nervous, and his daughter, at the piano, lost her head completely.

“Father is such a personality,” I heard her murmuring to Christopher—a phrase which she generally reserved for those who had no personal experience of her father’s peculiarities.

That was after old Carey had criticized a bit of dialogue which he attributed to his daughter’s authorship and which afterwards turned out to have been written by Bill Patch quite independently.

“I know nothing whatever about writing,” said Carey, who, like many other people, appeared to think this in itself a reason for offering an opinion on the subject. “In fact, I’m willing to admit that it seems to me a damned waste of time for any full-grown person to sit and scribble a lot of nonsense about something that never happened, and never could have happened, for other full-grown persons to learn by heart and gabble off like a lot of board-school children. However, that’s as it may be. What you young people don’t realize is that there are things going on all around you every day that would beat the plot of any story, or any play, hollow.”

When old Carey had said this, he looked round him triumphantly, as though he had just made a new and valuable contribution to the subject of literature.

He also said that anyone could write, if only they had the time, and that reading novels was only fit for women, and that generally he had enough to do reading the Times every day, with an occasional detective story if he had nothing better to do.

Mrs. Fazackerly looked unhappy, but Bill Patch was impervious to it all.

He sat down beside the old man and listened to him quite earnestly, and presently I heard old Carey, evidently intending a concession, inquire whether authors thought of their plots first and their characters afterwards or their characters first and their plots afterwards.

I have often wondered whether there is any writer in the world who has escaped that inquiry.

“I have often thought that I should like to write a book,” said Mrs. Kendal in a tolerant way. “I’m sure if I put down some of the things that have happened to me in my life, they would make a most extraordinary tale, and probably no one would believe that they had really happened.”

I fancied that Amy and Alfred Kendal cast rather a nervous glance at their parent at these implications, but the General remained entirely unmoved, and I found that, instead of listening, he was offering, in a rather uncertain manner, to drive Mrs. Fazackerly and Sallie into the town to choose material for the costumes that were to be worn in the play.

“What is the use of having a car if we cannot help our friends out of a difficulty?” said Mumma, with her large, kind smile. “Let us all go in this afternoon—you and I, Puppa, and Nancy and Sallie. The girls can keep Ahlfred company at home.”

If Mrs. Kendal is obliged to go out anywhere without her family, she always arranges some occupation for the absent members of it. I think it gives her a sense of security.

“The car holds four very comfortably, but more than four are bad for the springs, I believe. One has to think about the springs, especially in a new car. Springs are so important,” said Mumma.

“If my tin Lizzie can be of any use, I’ll drive anyone anywhere,” said Christopher Ambrey eagerly. “And in Lizzie’s case there’s no need to consider the springs, as there aren’t any to speak of. Look here, I suggest that if you and General Kendal can really find room for Sallie, I should drive Mrs. Fazackerly in, and—and then you can take, say, Patch. I’m sure Patch ought to be there to settle about the clothes and things—or Martyn. I should think Martyn ought to go, if anyone does, to make sure you get the right things for those boots.”

“We’re only going to buy materials—not clothes,” said Sallie. “But, still, I daresay that Martyn could be quite useful.”

“I think Bill had better go,” Martyn firmly declared.

“I can’t. It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Kendal, but my partner will do all that far better than I could.”

He smiled at Mrs. Fazackerly, who was smiling back at him happily, when the unexpected sound of old Carey’s voice suddenly and completely extinguished the brightness in her face.

“Nancy can go with you, Mrs. Kendal, as you’re kind enough to propose it, and there are one or two things I want done in the town. Nancy can see to them.”

Sallie’s clear, intelligent gaze went from one to the other of them. She sees a great deal, but she has not yet learned how to look as though she didn’t see it.

“If Martyn and I may go with you, Mrs. Kendal, we’ll sit in the back of the car and rehearse to one another. (Yes, Martyn, we must—time is frightfully short, and you know how woolly you are about your words.) And then Chris can take Nancy, and we can all meet somewhere for tea. What time, Mrs. Kendal?”

Sallie is always so confident, and decisive, and resolute, that she can carry things off with a high hand. Old Carey subsided again and Mrs. Kendal said, some seven or eight times, that as they always had tiffin early at Dheera Dhoon—“a reminiscence of our Indian days, I’m afraid—” she thought that they had better start at two o’clock.

“Besides,” said Captain Patch to me, aside, “I believe it takes the General nearly an hour to do the ten miles.”

At the last minute, the whole thing was nearly wrecked by General Kendal, who suddenly observed: “Then I am to have the pleasure of driving you, Mrs. Fazackerly? I hope that you will not feel nervous. I am something of a tyro still, but I believe I am a careful driver.”

“Thank you—not a bit—but—”

“I think Sallie goes with you, General,” said Christopher.

And I saw Claire look round at the tone in which he said it.

Then the rehearsal broke up. Sallie and Martyn disappeared, but Mary Ambrey stayed and had lunch with us.

As soon as the servants had left the dining room, Claire wrung her hands together and looked despairing.

“Did you notice Christopher?” she asked in husky misery. “Surely, surely he couldn’t?”

Of course, both Mary and I knew what she meant. We had heard her say the same thing so often.

“He only offered to take her in the two-seater. There really need not be any very great significance in that,” I pointed out, although I knew very well that, to Claire’s type of mind, events are of two kinds only: the intensely significant and the completely non-existent.

“I thought you wanted Christopher to get married,” said Mary calmly.

Claire nearly screamed.

“Why shouldn’t he marry Nancy Fazackerly? Not that I think he wants to marry her just because he offers to take her for a drive—but supposing he did, Claire—I can’t see why you shouldn’t be pleased.”

“A woman whose husband used to throw plates at her head!” said Claire. “Have you forgotten that?”

“Mary cannot very well have forgotten it,” said I, “as no one ever allows it to rest in peace. If I’ve heard that story once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And I fail to see, Claire, why the fact that Fazackerly had an unbridled temper should be supposed to detract from the desirability of his widow.”

I really did believe that Christopher was attracted by Nancy Fazackerly, and although I did not—as I believe women do—immediately begin to think about choosing them a wedding present, it had certainly crossed my mind that it would be a pleasant thing to see little Nancy happy. As for Christopher, I knew perfectly well that any nice woman, especially if she liked gardening and children, would make him happy.

Claire, however, credited him with all her own exigencies.

“Nancy Fazackerly is all very well in her own way, perhaps, but she isn’t the sort of woman I expect my brother to marry, Miles. It may not be her fault—I daresay it isn’t—but she has some very odd ideas. I shall never forget how she talked about taking in a paying guest, and whether he was to have second helpings or not.”

“I imagine that Christopher could regulate the number of helpings that he required, at his own dinner table, for himself.”

“You know, Claire,” said Mary Ambrey, “if Nancy was away from her father, she would be quite different. It’s only his endless naggings about expense that has infected her. You know how adaptable she is.”

“I know that she is the most untruthful woman of my acquaintance,” returned Claire vehemently.

“That must have been the plates,” I affirmed positively. “I am convinced that Nancy would not tell so many fibs as she undoubtedly does tell if she could be brought to forget the outrageous Fazackerly and his plate-throwing. Don’t you agree with me, Mary?”

“Yes, I do. And in any case, Claire, you know we really are taking a good deal for granted. At one time you were afraid it might be Aileen Kendal.”

“Never,” said Claire, with a total disregard for accuracy that would have done ample credit to Mrs. Fazackerly herself.

Christopher brought Nancy back to the Manor that afternoon for a very late tea.

He was in excellent spirits, and they told us about their afternoon’s shopping.

“We got in long before the others. The General positively crawls in that Standard of his. And Patch did turn up, after all. We met him with Mrs. Harter.”

“That Mrs. Harter?” said Claire.

“We all of us got the things together, and we decided that Mrs. Harter ought to wear an Eastern dress, too, for singing ‘The Bulbul Ameer.’ She’s very clever at dressmaking and she and I can easily make the things ourselves. That’ll save expense,” babbled Nancy.

“Why didn’t you bring Captain Patch back with you? I like Captain Patch. He and I have so much in common.”

“He and Mrs. Harter were going to have tea together somewhere in the town.”

Claire drew her brows together for an instant and then raised them, as though puzzled.

“But how nice of him, to be kind to Mrs. Harter!”

“I think he admires her, if you ask me,” said Christopher easily. “They came in together by ’bus to-day from Cross Loman.”

Then they began to talk about the play again.

It was then, on that same day, that Mary Ambrey and Claire and I had begun to ask ourselves if Christopher was falling in love with Nancy Fazackerly, that the first suggestion was made of anybody’s having noticed the friendship between Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

Chapter Eight

AFTER that, the two affairs in one sense ran concurrently, so far as the outer world was concerned. In that other world, of course, that I have called the inner life, they were on altogether different planes.

As far as I know, Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter knew no hesitations at all. The day after that evening when they had gone up Loman Hill he said to Mrs. Fazackerly that he could not come to the rehearsal and that he wanted to be out all day. At nine o’clock in the morning he was at the house in Queen Street, where she was waiting for him.

He saw her, as he crossed the road, sitting at the execrable little bow window of the dining room, her hands clasped in her lap, quite obviously looking down the street, waiting. When he reached the three steps, she got up and opened the front door and said to him, “Let’s get out of this!” jerking her head backwards at the linoleum floor and tiled walls of the tiny entrance.

She was wearing her outdoor things, all ready.

As they walked down Queen Street together Mary Ambrey passed them. She stopped, with some question for Bill about the play. Mrs. Harter stood by, and after one look at her Mary suddenly remembered Martyn’s words:

“That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about!”

Captain Patch, in a way, was always joyous, and that morning he only looked younger than ever, but, to Mary’s perceptions, there was something about them both that almost made her catch her breath.

They looked, she said, somehow dazed. Mary never told me or anyone else about this brief meeting until some time afterwards, but then she said that, whenever anyone condemned either or both of those two people who caused so much talk in our small community, she remembered that morning and the strange impression she received of sheer, dazzling happiness. Captain Patch told Mary that they were going up to the moors—some twelve miles away. He never, either then or afterwards, attempted the slightest concealment of the fact that they went everywhere together. Neither did Mrs. Harter, but then she was not by any means on friendly terms with the whole of Cross Loman, as Bill Patch was, and her manner towards the people whom she did know always held the same semi-contemptuous reticence.

It was only a very few days later that people began to talk about them.

It began, I have not the slightest doubt, at Dheera Dhoon. The Kendals, like so many other people who are temperamentally good, take an impassioned interest in those things and people which they consider bad. But, as a matter of fact, it was Lady Annabel Bending from whom I first heard about it.

“That is a nice youth who is staying at the Cottage with old Mr. Carey. But they tell me that he is running after that very common-looking woman who sings.”

Lady Annabel never sees things from her bedroom window or hears them over the counter from Miss Applebee, like the rest of us. She obtains all her information from a mysterious and unspecified source. “They” tell her, or she “is informed.”

No doubt this is another relic of the Government House days.

“Mrs. Harter must be a great deal older than he is, surely, and what can they possibly have in common?”

“Music,” said I feebly.

Not for one instant did I suppose that Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter walked twelve miles on a hot day in order to talk about music.

Lady Annabel showed me at once that neither did she believe anything so improbable.

“From what I have heard of Mrs. Harter, Sir Miles, I should think that music is the last thing to occupy her mind. I think I told you that a good deal is known about her, though it reached me only through entirely unofficial channels. But Captain Patch is a very nice young fellow indeed, and one can’t help feeling it’s a pity that he should be victimized.”

“Perhaps he isn’t victimized. He may admire her.”

“So much the worse,” said Lady Annabel in her lowest, gentlest and most inexorable voice. “Surely there are plenty of nice, innocent girls to choose from without running after a married woman. The Rector’s position makes it difficult for me to speak about these things, as you know. But, if you remember, I said some time ago that it was a most unwise proceeding to invite a person like Mrs. Harter to take part in your theatricals.”

“She has, up to the present, come to no rehearsals, so the theatricals can hardly be held responsible for bringing them together.”

Lady Annabel bent her head. I knew, however, and she meant me to know, that this was mere courtesy on her part—not acquiescence.

She was not the only person to talk about Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch, of course. It is never only one person who talks; these things get into the air, no one knows how.

Mrs. Kendal spoke to Claire, and Claire reported what she had said to me.

“I have seen them myself, walking about the town,” said Mumma impressively. “They actually went into the butcher’s together. Of course, I suppose she does her own marketing, living in rooms. And I distinctly saw them go into the butcher’s together.”

Claire said that it seemed an unromantic sort of trysting place.

“It shows how intimate they are, their going like that to the butcher’s together. None of my girls would ever dream of taking a gentleman to do their household shopping,” said Mrs. Kendal with absolute truth. “I should think less of it, in a way, if Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter went to the theater, or even to the cinematograph, together. But when it comes to their going together to the butcher’s, I ask myself what it all means.”

Mrs. Kendal had not been content only to ask herself what it all meant. She had asked several other people as well, including her four daughters and her son.

“It means,” said Dolly, with her most uncompromisingly sensible expression, “that Mrs. Harter is trying to get up a flirtation with Captain Patch.”

“She’s old enough to be his mother, I should think,” said Aileen.

When the twins had made these scathing statements, I think they felt that the situation had been exhaustively analyzed. At any rate, although they thereafter talked round and round the subject with tireless persistency, the sum total of their observations never amounted to more than that Mrs. Harter was trying to get up a flirtation with Captain Patch and that she was old enough to be his mother.

I did not think it worth while to point out that twenty-eight cannot be the mother of twenty-six.

It was odd, and to me profoundly interesting, to compare the comments which the situation evoked.

Mary Ambrey, of course, made none, and was, I should imagine, almost the only person in Cross Loman of whom that could be said.

Sallie and Martyn, with their strange, passionless habits of dissection, were coldly and impersonally interested.

I remember one exposition of their views. The spirit of it impressed itself upon my consciousness so clearly that I can almost remember the letter.

“There’ll be a scandal over Patch and the fascinating Mrs. Harter one of these days,” said Martyn.

“She’s not fascinating,” Sallie asserted.

Her brother raised his eyebrows slightly, and she understood and laughed.

“Flat contradiction is rather uncivilized, I admit. And besides, she probably is fascinating, to some people.”

“She certainly is to Bill Patch.”

“I know. As a matter of fact, there’s more to it than that, I believe. I mean, he’s more than just attracted by her.”

“Really? You once said he was a temperamental romantic, I know. Are you trying to justify that now by building up a mountain out of a molehill?”

“I am not. Events are simply confirming my previous psychological deductions, that’s all,” said Sallie with bland dignity.

I was glad that Claire was not in the room. Like all egotists, she is driven nearly to frenzy by a display of egotism in anybody else.

“In all this,” said I, “there is one person who is never mentioned. What about Mr. Harter?”

There was a pause. Then Martyn remarked: “Negligible, I should think.”

“Possibly, as a personality. But as a man and a husband, he exists. It is even conceivable that he has feelings.”

“Oh, feelings!” said Sallie and Martyn, more or less together.

The tone of each expressed the utmost contempt.

“Some people might even go so far as to say that he has rights.”

“To a certain extent, so he has,” said Sallie, evidently determined to be broad-minded.

“Presumably she made the usual undertakings when she married him. But from all accounts, they’ve each gone their own way ever since they married. From a sentimental point of view, it can hardly matter what she does now. Perhaps she’s working up for a divorce.”

“If so, it’s bad luck on Patch. He can’t want to marry her.”

But to that Sallie replied thoughtfully, “I’m not so sure.”

“Are they together a great deal?” Martyn queried. “Mrs. Kendal speaks as though they were never to be seen apart, but she bases that upon their having gone into the butcher’s shop at the same time, which she appears to regard as peculiarly incriminating.”

“He takes her for a walk every day and sees her home whenever they’re at the same parties, but I can’t personally see why he shouldn’t do that,” Sallie declared. “All this gossip and tittle-tattle makes me sick. Whatever they do it’s their own business and nobody else’s.”

Again I mentioned Mr. Harter’s name, and it met with as little acclamation as before.

“He’d better come to England if he doesn’t like his wife to have friendships.”

“Do you suppose she writes and tells him about them?” asked Sallie ironically.

“One has links, as Lady Annabel would say. He’s probably heard all about it, and rather more than all, from some officious soul who thinks he ought to know. After all, Mrs. Harter was Diamond Ellison, the plumber’s daughter, and pretty well-known, at least by name, to everybody here, let alone that she’s the sort that always does get talked about.”

“She interests me a good deal, as a psychological study,” said Sallie. “But as a matter of fact, I don’t consider that she’s behaving well.”

“You mean that what she’s doing—getting herself talked about with Patch, while her husband is abroad—is anti-social?” Martyn suggested.

“Yes, exactly. I’ve no feelings, personally, as to the rights or wrongs of anything, from an ethical point of view, but I do bar the sort of thing that can only be called anti-social.”

They are both perfectly satisfied once they have found a label, and affixed it, to any situation.

I should like to see Martyn or Sallie—but especially Sallie—in love. There are times when I believe that she is quite incapable of it. She would pin down and analyze every symptom of her condition and then discuss it exhaustively, and very likely write a book about it. Perhaps passion could survive all this. I am not prepared to say that it could not, for I am conscious that the understanding of one generation cannot project itself into that of another, whatever Claire may say about the experience of a lifetime, which in reality has nothing whatever to do with it.

Once upon a time, Martyn Ambrey did bring a very young girl, with shingled hair and most beautiful slim ankles, to stay with his mother for a week-end. They went out on his motor bicycle all Sunday, and that evening—when the girl was out of the room—Martyn said casually to Mary and Sallie:

“Lois has plenty of brains, but I didn’t realize how conventional her upbringing has made her. She’d insist upon having her children baptized.”

On Monday morning he took her away again on the carrier of his motor bicycle, and that—so far as I know—was the end of it.

Mary said that Lois, from start to finish, remained as demure as a Victorian school girl. They have their own standards, no doubt. Mary says so, and leaves it at that. But Claire says, in one and the same breath, that the Lois and Martyn type do not know the meaning of reality, and are incapable of recognizing it when they meet it, and that their attitude of detachment is all a pose.

Perhaps she envies them their undoubted immunity from the perpetual emotional turmoil in which her own life has been spent.

But, on the other hand, there was bitter and passionate envy in her condemnation of Mrs. Harter.

I could understand that, in a way. Claire, like many another woman who is more or less incapable of self-command, holds the theory that this lack of discipline constitutes a special and peculiar claim upon Providence. Only a supreme call, they hold, can bring forth the supreme response of which they feel themselves to be capable. Failing that, it is impossible that they should fulfil themselves. They go through life with a sense of frustration.

Claire has far too much perception not to appraise an atmospheric value very quickly. She knew quite well that Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter were not engaged upon the odious pastime, so odiously described by Dolly Kendal, of “getting up a flirtation.”

Bill Patch himself, quite unconsciously, made one see that. He did not very often speak Mrs. Harter’s name, but when he did, it was like an electric spark in the room.

“What will happen?” Nancy Fazackerly murmured to me once, so vaguely that I half wondered if she knew that she was speaking aloud.

“You think something will happen? Sometimes these things die of themselves, you know.”

“Sometimes. But this won’t. I can’t bear to think of it. You know, one gets very fond of Bill.”

I knew.

But I doubt if anyone else would have added, as Nancy did, “And I’m so sorry for her.”

“Why?” said Christopher, who was beside her as usual. He was one of the people who did not admire Mrs. Harter.

“Well, she is married, isn’t she?” Mrs. Fazackerly suggested. “I suppose things may be rather difficult, perhaps, when Mr. Harter comes to England.”

One could not help remembering that Mrs. Fazackerly had the best of reasons for understanding how difficult things could be made by the return of a husband, even although the late Mr. Fazackerly had had no serious grievances to provoke his habits of violence.

“I know nothing about Mr. Harter,” said Christopher, “but if he’s coming here, mark my words, there’ll be trouble.”

Mrs. Fazackerly may or may not have marked Christopher’s words—probably she did—but it was quite evident enough without them that the arrival of Harter in Cross Loman would precipitate a crisis.

“Is he coming here?” I asked.

Mrs. Fazackerly nodded.

“When?” I said, and Christopher Ambrey at the same moment said, “Why?”

“Very soon. And he’s coming because—” Nancy paused and then said in a slightly awe-stricken way: “She’s written and asked him to come.”

“Did she tell you so?”

“Captain Patch did.”

“And did he tell you why she did anything so astonishing?”

“Not exactly. I got an impression, though.” She hesitated.

“I think I’ll tell you. I think, in a way, he rather wanted me to tell people—especially if anyone is talking about them.”

“Everyone is talking about them,” I assured her. “Please add to the number.”

All the same, I knew that what she wanted to say was, by comparison with the tittle-tattle that was going on, something serious.

“Diamond Harter has written to her husband and asked him to come here. She is very unhappily married—everyone knows that—and I think she is going to try and put an end to it.”

“Put an end to it?”

“A separation, I suppose, or—or a divorce, perhaps.”

“And where, exactly, does Bill Patch come in?”

“I should have thought that was obvious,” muttered Christopher.

“That’s exactly where you’re mistaken, my dear fellow. There’s nothing obvious about any of it. Neither of them are obvious people, and I distrust profoundly the combination of an obvious situation and two such unobvious protagonists. It is quite impossible to predict what their reactions may be.”

I felt rather like Sallie as I spoke, and I also knew that Christopher, by instinct, dislikes and distrusts the use of polysyllabic words.

He looked at me rather disgustedly, but did not say anything.

Nancy Fazackerly went on.

“Of course, it’s impossible not to see that she and Captain Patch are—are always together. But really and truly I believe she’s written—or they both have—to Mr. Harter.”

“To tell him that they’re making themselves the talk of Cross Loman? How considerate!”

“It seems rather a brave sort of thing to have done,” Nancy said wistfully.

Her own strong point is not moral courage.

“Of course, she’s older than he is, and besides, she’s married already, and—and there are other things as well. But I can’t help being very sorry for her. And I am fond of him.”

I thought Christopher Ambrey looked rather anxious, at that, and that I had better give him the opportunity of going into the question of the exact degree of fondness that Captain Patch had inspired in Mrs. Fazackerly. So I left them together.

Their love affair was progressing very, very slowly, and I did not even then feel sure that it was destined to a successful fulfilment.

Claire, I knew, would use all her influence to prevent it, which seemed to render it rather more likely to happen, but old Carey was capable of working seriously upon his daughter’s feelings to the extent of making her think it her duty to remain with him.

There was no doubt that Christopher, hitherto singularly unsusceptible, was attracted by her. He always turned over the pages of her music for her at rehearsals, and once he had given her a bunch of lilies of the valley.

There were pauses in his courtship, during which he evidently thought over the next stage before embarking upon it, but on the whole the affair was going forward.

Nancy Fazackerly was looking prettier than I had ever seen her. She had one or two new frocks that summer, too, as though she thought it was worth while to look her best.

“Nancy Fazackerly doesn’t look like a widow,” Mrs. Kendal said, about this time. Her tone was not exactly disparaging, although neither was it enthusiastic. But her wide, opaque gaze rested quite blandly upon Nancy as she spoke.

“What does a widow look like?”

Mumma is not apt at definitions, and she only replied that a widow generally looked like a widow, and that Nancy Fazackerly didn’t.

“So much the better,” said I.

“She is very young,” Mumma said tolerantly. “And I believe it is a positive fact that her first husband was in the habit of throwing plates at her head.”

She paused for a moment, and then, as far as Mumma’s large face can express anything, it expressed confusion.

“When I say her first husband,” she incredibly remarked, “I mean to say her late husband.”

I really thought that I had better not hear this at all, and so I turned the conversation abruptly to “The Bulbul Ameer.”

It was very easy to do this, since everyone who knew anything at all about the play, and many who did not, appeared to hold very strong views about the manner of its production and to be eager to advocate them.

Mumma was no exception.

Bill Patch and Nancy, however, were the joint authors of the piece, and so the conversation gradually veered round to personalities again.

Mrs. Kendal said that it was a great pity about Captain Patch and that she had always thought him a nice young fellow, before.

I declined, tacitly, to unravel these implications, and on the whole I was relieved when she worked her way back to the Nancy Fazackerly theme once more.

Everybody’s inflections, if not their words, were friendly and hopeful when they talked about Nancy Fazackerly and Christopher Ambrey. Almost equally universal were the characteristics of the words and inflections applied to Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

These were either condemnatory or regretful—and sometimes both.

Chapter Nine

IT WAS an unusually eventful summer in Cross Loman.

The only large house in the neighborhood which is ever let, Grainges, was taken for three months by a wealthy fellow of the name of Leeds and his wife. Lady Annabel Bending was quite excited and said that they had “known H. E. in his Zanzibar days.” It was one of those links of which we had so often heard her speak, and she naturally called upon them at once. Then there was a tea party in their honor at the rectory, and Lady Annabel stood on the steps smiling and said a few appropriate words to each guest as she shook hands and at intervals raised her voice and said very clearly and distinctly:

“To your right as you go in. The door is open....”

Most of Cross Loman knows the inside of the rectory pretty well, and it is not a very large house, so that Lady Annabel’s directions were not really exactly necessary, but it was all very masterly and well organized, and we went into the drawing-room and avoided the dining room, which was the only other room opening out of the hall.

After that, Leeds and Mrs. Leeds were invited to various small social functions, and then, in return, they gave a monster picnic. It was, as entertainments not infrequently are, the occasion for one or two contretemps. Mrs. Leeds, a kindly, noisy, unperceiving creature, at the last moment extended an invitation to Mrs. Harter, whom it seemed that they had met in Cairo, when their yacht was coaling at Port Said. I was present at Grainges when Mrs. Leeds announced this to Lady Annabel.

“So very amusin’ to meet a well-known face unexpectedly,” she said jovially. “And Mrs. Harter was almost too well-known, in Cairo—ha-ha! Any amount of scandal was talked about her, I believe—so interestin’, scandal, I always think.”

Lady Annabel looked pale and said in a very low voice that Mrs. Harter was the daughter of the local plumber, she believed.

“Really?” said Mrs. Leeds. “I wish I’d asked her to bring her father—he could have had a look at the range.”

We all met at Grainges, from whence a fleet of cars was to carry us to Berry Down. Leeds had two cars and his wife one, and the servants, besides a mountain of hampers, preceded us in a Ford lorry.

“It is almost like the East again to see this sort of thing. Native labor, you know....” Lady Annabel murmured to me rather wistfully.

However, she ceased to be wistful, and became austere instead, when she heard about Mrs. Harter.

Captain Patch brought her and they arrived on foot. Mrs. Leeds happened to be out of the room, giving final orders to one of the chauffeurs, and there was a moment’s awkwardness.

We were all assembled in the big drawing-room and Lady Annabel, for whom we waited instinctively, made no move at all.

Alfred Kendal said, “Hullo, Patch!” rather feebly and Mrs. Harter stood by the door, waiting.

I looked at Claire. She had flushed a little and was obviously undecided what line to take. And then Mary Ambrey got up and walked down the length of the room and shook hands with her and said very clearly:

“How do you do, Mrs. Harter? Mrs. Leeds has just gone out to see about the car, I believe. She’ll be back in a second or two. How brave of you to walk, in this heat!”

It was very like Mary, and more like her still to do it with perfect calm, and the most absolute naturalness.

I doubt if she even knew that we all drew a breath of intense relief, as she stood there, talking quietly, till Mrs. Leeds came dashing in at one of the French windows.

“That was rather finely done,” I heard Martyn murmuring in my ear, with his insufferable accent of patronizing approval. Claire heard him, too, and I saw that she was vexed.

She had missed an opportunity of making what, from her, would have been a very beautiful gesture.

The last guests to arrive were General and Mrs. Kendal with two of the girls. Puppa is the most punctual of men, but he admits that he cannot always estimate the time that it will take to drive anywhere in the new car. I suppose that it depends upon the number and promptitude of Mumma’s warning outbursts on the road.

As they entered, our host made his appearance. Leeds, what with his wealth, and a fine presence, and one of the loudest voices that I have ever heard in my life, is only to be described as an overwhelming man.

He was very hearty and enthusiastic, and welcomed us all, especially Mrs. Harter, to whom he immediately shouted:

“Last time we met, someone bet you wouldn’t drink six cocktails in succession, and you did it. By Jove, I’ve never forgotten it! Lounge of Shepherd’s Hotel, wasn’t it? Never saw a more sporting collection in my life, than we had that evening. You ought to have been there.”

I think that he uttered the last clause in an indiscriminate sort of way to all of us, perhaps conscious that his audience was not, so to speak, altogether with him. But it was a little unfortunate that the people immediately facing him happened to be Lady Annabel and Mrs. Kendal. It was so extraordinarily evident to the rest of us that they did not at all feel that they ought to have been there, on the occasion of Mrs. Harter’s rather singular achievement.

Leeds, however, alternates between a childlike touchiness and an egotistical obtuseness, and this time he was obtuse.

He went on talking to Mrs. Harter about Cairo, and the people there whom he had known, and whom he took it for granted that she had known also. Later on, I learned that the weakness of Mr. Leeds was to have known everybody. He is a young-looking man for his years, and people are always astonished, in a gratifying way, when he claims acquaintance with the celebrities of forty years ago.

He is exactly the kind of man to whom one would expect Mrs. Harter’s type to make a strong appeal, and he addressed his conversation almost exclusively to her.

When Mrs. Leeds said, “How are we all goin’?” there was the usual pause, followed by the usual demonstrations.

“Will you come in the Mercedes with me, Lady Annabel, and Sir Miles? Hector,” said Mrs. Leeds to her husband, “will you take Lady Flower in the two-seater?”

She did not make her suggestions with any assurance, and Lady Annabel, while acquiescing graciously as to the place allotted to her, seemed faintly amused. She said afterward that these things require a great deal of experience—which indeed is quite true—and that personally she had always instructed the A. D. C.s beforehand, and left nothing to chance.

“I can seat three people,” said General Kendal. “Not more. The springs, you know—and the hill up to Berry Down is a stiff pull.”

“You’d better let me sit in front with you, Puppa,” Mrs. Kendal said firmly. “Then I can keep my eyes open. If one hasn’t been driving very long,” she explained to the rest of us, “one is liable to get fussed. I always say to my husband, at critical moments, ‘Don’t get fussed, dear. Whatever you do, keep your head, and don’t allow yourself to get fussed.’”

“But this won’t do at all—we must separate relations!” cried Leeds. “We can’t all go about in family groups, like the Ark, or whatever it was. Might as well stay at home as do that.”

“I certainly think there’s more sense in staying at home and eating one’s food in comfort, than dragging it out of doors and eating it under the most miserable conditions imaginable, for no conceivable reason—” said General Kendal suddenly and strongly.

Everyone looked a little disconcerted, and Dolly Kendal said in a determined tone that picnics were great fun, if one took the rough with the smooth and didn’t mind things.

“Why not let’s walk—some of us?” Bill Patch suggested. “It’s not more than a mile or so, through the woods.”

“No need to walk. There are plenty of conveyances,” said Leeds, in rather an offended way.

“Well, who’ll go in the second car?” cried Mrs. Leeds. “Let me see—Miss Kendal, Captain Patch, Major Ambrey—and what about you, Mrs. Fazackerly?”

“I should love to,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.

“That leaves the other Miss Kendal, and Mrs. Harter and Mrs. Kendal, oh, and Mrs. Ambrey—”

She began to look rather helpless again.

“My two-seater is here,” suggested Christopher.

“Oh, but do let some of us walk. It would be so nice to walk,” Sallie declared.

Nearly everybody in the room then began to explain how very much he, or she, would prefer to walk to Berry Down. It was a voluble contest in unselfish determination. Then, just as it seemed that Mrs. Leeds was reconciled to the idea of letting some of her guests start on foot, Leeds reduced the whole thing to chaos again by suddenly announcing that he would take Mrs. Harter in his small runabout.

“You are taking Lady Flower, dear,” said poor Mrs. Leeds. “We’ve got muddled.”

We had indeed.

In the end, things were settled contrary to the wishes of almost everybody. Bill Patch and Sallie and Alfred Kendal went off on foot, Christopher, with a face of thunder, declared himself delighted to take Aileen Kendal in his two-seater, and the rest of us were somehow packed into the big cars, all except Martyn, who insisted upon going off on his own motor bicycle and taking Mrs. Harter on the carrier.

Mr. Leeds and Claire, mutually dissatisfied, went in our host’s runabout.

I do not know exactly what they said to one another, of course, but I do know that Claire is not in the least interested in the celebrities that other people have met. Even the ones that she has met herself appeal to her from only one point of view, which is what she thinks that they thought about her. At all events, when they arrived at the particular clump of Scotch firs indicated, Claire looked utterly exhausted, and Leeds made straight for Mrs. Harter and threw himself down on the dry, heathery turf at her feet and asked for a drink.

It was, actually, only the second time that I had seen Mrs. Harter. She looked better than she had looked in evening dress, wearing a thin dark tweed and a purple felt hat properly rammed down over her black hair. (The Kendals had large straw hats, the backs of which almost touched their shoulder blades.)

Our host’s voice boomed on without ceasing and I caught the words “cocktails,” “Cairo” and “moonlight” a good many times, but from Mrs. Harter I hardly heard a syllable. She sat and smoked cigarettes, and every now and then she looked across the gorse and heather and bracken to the path along which the walkers would come.

The interval during which we waited for them was mostly passed in discussion as to whether we should wait or not. I remember that Mrs. Kendal kept on saying, “I should have thought they would have been here by this time. I should have thought so,” and that each time she said it, one or other of us replied, intelligently, that we should have thought so, too.

Then Mrs. Leeds wanted us to begin lunch, and we said, “Oh no, we’d better wait,” and then one by one capitulated, and said, “Well, perhaps we’d better not wait.” And by that time the habit of uncertainty that I had already discerned in Mrs. Leeds had got the better of her again and she said, “Oh well, perhaps we’d better give them a few minutes’ law.”

At last we saw approaching the emerald-green handkerchief that Sallie wore knotted round her head, and they came up to us.

Captain Patch went and sat beside Diamond Harter without pause or hesitation, and I very much doubt if he even saw the look of astonished resentment turned upon him by Mr. Leeds.

The rest of us saw it, however, including Mrs. Leeds, who had not been among us long enough to realize fully the inner subtleties of the affaire Harter, and remarked with a loud laugh that Hector would be simply furious with that red-headed young man. Hector had, as she put it, made all the running with Mrs. Harter last time they met, on board the yacht.

Nobody made very much response, and it was a relief on every account when we at last began luncheon.

But luncheon was not without its perilous moments, either.

Mr. and Mrs. Leeds are the sort of people who provide cocktails at a picnic, and these of course revived the reminiscences of Mrs. Harter’s feats in Cairo. Even Leeds, however, must have seen that he was not being a success. Mrs. Harter’s face showed that plainly enough, and even more expressive was the way in which she presently turned her back on him and left him to Sallie, who was sitting on his other side. With Sallie, Leeds had only too much scope.

There is a colloquialism made use of in the servants’ hall which has always seemed to me a wonderfully expressive one. Somebody is described as “playing up” somebody else. It occurred to me very forcibly, while watching and listening to Sallie and Leeds.

Sallie was shamelessly “playing him up.” She encouraged him with artless questions, and listened to his loud and generally boastful replies with innocent and unwavering interest, and all the time I knew, and Mary Ambrey did, that the horrid little clever thing was storing up every word of it, and mentally labeling, filing, and indexing him for future reference.

Sallie will certainly write a novel some day, and all of us will recognize one another in it.

Leeds told several stories, not very funny ones, but in such stentorian tones that we were all more or less obliged to listen, and twice Claire said, “That reminds me of how I once” but Leeds didn’t hear.

Nancy Fazackerly took off her hat, and the sun shone on her beautiful blonde hair, and she looked very happy and young.

Christopher Ambrey sat next her and looked at her a great deal.

“I wonder if old Chris has asked her, yet,” I heard Martyn say quietly to one of the Kendals. And she replied in an interested way:

“I should think he’d do it to-day, anyhow. Wouldn’t you?”

“Too many people about.”

“They can go for a walk or something, after lunch.”

“We’ll have a bet on it, if you like,” Martyn suggested, and they arranged the terms of a very mild wager, with some suppressed giggling from Aileen.

I thought to myself that if I had been a young man, people like Martyn and the Kendals would not have been given the opportunity of exercising their wit upon my love affairs. But as a matter of fact I knew well enough that if Chris and Nancy really did become engaged, they would probably be told all about the bet, and would find it quite amusing.

The servants from Grainges had solemnly laid an enormous tablecloth over the heather, and weighted the corners of it—not with stones, nothing so rural—but with plated ice buckets, full of broken ice. We had lobster, and salmon-mayonnaise, and chicken salad, and galantine, and an immense variety of cold sweets and pastries, and our plates were changed by the servants after each course, and our glasses filled with Moselle, or whisky or lemonade.

One felt ungrateful for feeling that it would have been a relief if only the salt had been forgotten, or there hadn’t been enough rolls to go round.

Christopher did, in an honest attempt to make the thing less magnificent, suggest sharing a salad plate with his neighbor, but Leeds overheard him, and roared to one of the men servants. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Kendal was sitting on the missing salad plate, which was afterwards found embedded deeply into quite hard ground, but of course the servants produced an extra one without a moment’s hesitation.

However, iced Moselle, whether suitable or not to a picnic on the moors, was bound to have its effect, and, anyway, Leeds and Mrs. Leeds undeniably came into the category known to modern slang as “cheery souls.” So that by the time we were all eating cherries and strawberries, the picnic had become a very animated and successful affair.

Claire, while Leeds was telling Sallie that he had been through parts of China where no other white man had ever been allowed to set foot, got her opportunity, and gave Alfred Kendal and Mrs. Leeds, and one or two others, an amusing account of an impromptu charade party of the previous summer. The point of the story was her own success in a tragic impersonation, but she brought it in very skilfully. The contrast between her methods, and those of Leeds, was rather amusing.

Lady Annabel talked to the Kendals. Puppa and Mumma have lived sufficiently long in the East to understand her point of view.

Most of the younger people present were playing bob-cherry, but Christopher, with his hat tipped right over his eyes, was talking to Nancy Fazackerly, and Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter were silent.

He was industriously scraping together a small pile of fir needles and dry twigs—one of those mechanical occupations that are generally the sign of complete mental absorption in something else—and she was lighting and smoking one after another of her interminable cigarettes.

Mary Ambrey had been sitting next to me, but she gave me a little nod presently, and changed her place, and went to talk to Mrs. Leeds. She has out-of-date ideas of the courtesy due to a hostess from a guest, which are not shared by her children. Then Mrs. Leeds added the final touch to her lavish entertainment, and produced, with the air of a benevolent conjuror, a couple of tooled-leather boxes containing cards and bridge markers.

“I thought it’d be a shame to waste the afternoon,” she said simply, clearing a space for a thin carriage rug to cover the purple heather, and setting her back against a small, shimmering silver birch.

“Upon my word, that’s a great idea,” said General Kendal, brightening for the first time since the expedition had started.

“Hector!”

“Hello!” said Leeds, turning half round. “Oh, I see—you want to build card-houses, do you? Well, Miss Sallie, the end of it was that these perishers, never having seen anyone like me before, absolutely knuckled under. Most ridiculous thing you ever saw. Why, they’d have made me crowned king over them if I’d allowed it. You must let me tell you the end of the yarn another day—that is, if I haven’t been boring you stiff.”

As he did not wait to hear Sallie’s answer, one supposes that Leeds was happily confident as to its nature.

Of course, everybody began to be unselfish again about the bridge, and those who most obviously wanted to play unanimously offered to resign their places to those who did not care about it in the least.

But the present new generation, like every other generation, has the qualities of its defects, and if it is graceless, it is also fearlessly candid.

Martyn said that he would rather be shot than play bridge, any day of the week, and Sallie said that she thought cards out of doors would be a loathsome idea, and Bill Patch thanked Mrs. Leeds very much but he’d a good deal rather not. Mrs. Fazackerly, however, said that she would love to play, when she thought herself needed to make up a rubber, and when she saw that she wasn’t, said that she didn’t really care for bridge at all, and would honestly prefer not to play.

“You’ll play, Mrs. Harter,” said Leeds in his affirmative way. “I know you’re a gambler, right enough. D’you remember that night at the Club when old Patterson’s crew played whisky poker till the small hours, and by Jove, d’you remember the cards you picked up? I’ve never forgotten them. Never saw such cards in my life.”

“I always hold good cards,” said Mrs. Harter indifferently.

And of course one of the Kendals rushed in where ordinarily intelligent human beings, let alone angels, would have thought twice about treading.

“Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” said Aileen, in the self-satisfied tone of one who is making a consciously apt observation.

The way in which some among us then looked straight at Bill and Mrs. Harter was only less indecently obvious than the way in which others among us at once looked away from them.

And Bill and Mrs. Harter just looked at one another, and if we hadn’t, all of us, known about them before, that look must have told us. Leeds was the only person who presumably saw nothing, for he went on to remind Mrs. Harter how badly screwed poor old Patterson had been that night in Egypt, and didn’t she remember his falling down the steps backwards?

“Good gracious!” said Dolly Kendal with all the fearful directness of the Kendals, “you must have known some funny people out there, Mrs. Harter.”

“Shall we cut for partners?” said Lady Annabel Bending very gently.

Mrs. Kendal does not play bridge, and she came and sat beside me, no doubt with the kindest intentions of enlivening me, but after observing three or four times that the picnic had been very well done, she gradually closed her eyes and ceased to say it. Mumma’s bulk was partly between me and the rest of the world, and I saw, as from the shadow of a great rock, what they were all doing, and it interested me. The people who were playing cards were almost altogether silent, as good players always are. Claire looked tense and eager, as she does over everything. It is nothing to her whether she wins at bridge or not, but it is everything whether she is thought to excel or not. As a matter of fact, she plays very well. General Kendal was her partner, and he is a good player, too.

Lady Annabel was playing with Leeds, and every now and then, at the end of a hand, his voice bellowed out encouragement or explanation, or even remonstrance.

“I can’t imagine why you didn’t back me up,” he said once. “A hand that positively screamed for a redouble—positively screamed for it.”

“I acted to the best of my judgment,” said Lady Annabel. “I thought at the time, and I still think, that I should not have been justified in redoubling.”

“But it would have given us the game! Listen to me,” commanded Leeds, most unnecessarily. “I led the spade....”

He proceeded to play the whole hand all over again, card by card. And at the end of it all Lady Annabel, drooping in a dignified way over the scattered packs, said that she did not really think she would have been justified in redoubling.

I suppose it was that spirit which made her the success that she undoubtedly was, in the days of H. E. Sir Hannabuss Tallboys.

While that was happening, most of the others had disappeared. Christopher Ambrey and Mrs. Fazackerly were with Sallie and some of the Kendals, but already the groups were breaking up into twos and threes.

Only Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter sat quite still, not very far from where I was, but a good deal removed from the others.

I could just hear the sound of his voice, and hers, as they spoke together.

Chapter Ten

OF COURSE I thought about Mrs. Harter. She compelled one to think about her, even then. And I liked young Patch, too, and it seemed to me that he was heading straight for the rocks.

It was a very hot, still afternoon. Even the shadows of the beech trees were motionless and unflickering.

The servants had taken away the remains of the feast and the motor cars had been discreetly manœuvered to some invisible point on the horizon. By far the most sophisticated things within sight were the bridge players.

Nancy Fazackerly, coming toward me by herself, blended quite agreeably into the surrounding green, in her pale green linen frock with her ash-blonde hair uncovered.

I have known her nearly all her life, and, as one of the very few young women on earth whose society Claire could tolerate, she had spent quite a lot of time with us since her return to Cross Loman.

Doubts, however, had for some time been assailing me as to the security of that state of affairs, and something in her face as she sat down beside me brought all my misgivings into active life.

“I wish,” said Mrs. Fazackerly gently, “that I knew what to do.”

“When a woman says that, it generally means that her mind is made up.”

Nancy laughed, but she said, “Mine isn’t.”

I suppose that if one of the Kendals had been there she would immediately have inquired, “Has he asked you yet?” I have not, however, been brought up by Mumma, and so these unflinching methods are beyond me. Moreover, I did not imagine for a minute that Nancy really wanted advice, any more than anybody else ever wants it. She only needed someone to whom she could talk more or less freely.

“You know that my dear father is sometimes a little—peculiar,” she began in a hesitating way.

“I know—and you know—” said I, “that he treats you disgracefully. Yes. Let’s come to the point, my dear.”

“Can you imagine that he would ever tolerate the idea of my leaving him again?”

“If you mean, do I think that he would take it lying down, no, I don’t. But in your place, I shouldn’t allow him a word in the matter.”

“You are always so brave,” she said wistfully.

“And you are always so cowardly.”

Then I felt rather ashamed of having said that, remembering that, after all, she had stuck to Fazackerly, from whom most women would probably have fled at the end of six weeks.

But Nancy only said sadly, “I know I am.”

“Is it Christopher?” I asked, well knowing that it was.

She nodded.

“I know you can’t say you’re glad,” she added hastily.

“But I should be glad, to see you happy.”

“It’s very nice of you.”

We were both thinking of Claire, but our conversation, as is the way of most conversations, made no mention of that of which we were thinking.

“I cannot imagine what Father would do, all by himself, although he does say that I am such a bad housekeeper. And it would be quite impossible to have anything like a joint establishment.”

I nearly said, “God forbid!” as I thought of old Carey, and his incessant grumbling, and his stinginess, and his criminology.

“Is your father the only reason why you’re hesitating?”

She gave me a most expressive look.

“Except that it seems far, far too good to be true. I thought my life was quite over, as far as that sort of thing went, and that I was just one of those unlucky people who’d made a bad mistake. And then to find him—so good and dear and nice, and actually caring for me!”

“I fail to see anything so astounding in that last item.”

Nancy Fazackerly shook her head.

“I know what I’m like—what circumstances have made me,” she said simply. “Father is a very dominant personality, as you know, and I’ve never been very brave. Sometimes I wonder that I’ve got any individuality left at all. And then, being so badly off has made me calculating, and even mean, in tiny little ways that you probably wouldn’t even understand if I told you about them. You see, I always knew that the bills would make Father angry, and the thing I’m most afraid of in the world is that people should be angry with me. Often and often I’ve said what isn’t true so as not to disagree with other people. I daresay you won’t believe me....”

I believed her, on the contrary, without any difficulty at all, and I was touched by her naïveté, and by the pathos of her confession.

“That would be all over if you married Christopher.”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course I suppose everyone, more or less, feels that if they could be happy they could be good, but if—if anything so wonderful as that happened to me, it would be the first great chance that I’d ever had in my life.”

I knew it was true.

“I believe it has come and that you’re going to take it and make the very most of it. And I’ll back you for all I’m worth, Nancy my dear.”

She thanked me with a gratitude that was disproportionate, and then asked if I thought that anybody had guessed.

“Because, of course, nothing whatever is settled yet, and in any case, his sister comes first.”

Nancy looked terribly apprehensive, and I could think of nothing whatever that would be at once convincing and reassuring, as to Claire’s reception of the tidings. So, on the principle of the counterirritant, I asked when she was going to tell her father.

Mrs. Fazackerly’s small face actually and literally became quite pale.

“Chris is going to tell him for me,” she murmured, in a conscience-stricken whisper. “He says he doesn’t mind. He and Captain Patch are the only two people I know who are not a little bit overwhelmed by dear Father’s personality.”

At her mention of Captain Patch, we both glanced round at the little knoll, at the foot of which he and Mrs. Harter had been sitting, but the two figures had disappeared. At the same moment the bridge players rose and came towards us, and the servants apparently sprang out of the earth and began to collect the cards and markers and pencils and put them away.

Mrs. Leeds said, “What’s that young man, Patch, done to Mrs. Harter? I asked her on purpose to keep Hector amused, and she’s behavin’ like a flapper havin’ her first flirtation. It’s indecent, considerin’ all we know about the woman.”

“Do tell us what you know about her,” Claire suggested. “I think her manners are atrocious, myself, and she is victimizing unfortunate Captain Patch, who used to be quite a nice boy.”

Claire spoke very lightly indeed, and yet one could sense the bitterness that prompted the words. It was not only personal dislike of Mrs. Harter—although that certainly existed—it was also resentment at the central place that Mrs. Harter occupied in an emotional adventure. On a certain plane, Claire’s perceptions and intuitions are exceptionally acute, and I think she knew very well that greater forces were at work than she herself could have coped with, and the knowledge made her angry. No one likes to feel inadequate, and, after all, Claire’s speciality was the emotions.

“Do tell us what you know about Mrs. Harter,” she repeated.

“Oh, it doesn’t amount to anythin’ desperate,” said good-natured Mrs. Leeds. “She was pretty hot stuff out there and her husband carried on in rather an alarmin’ way, that’s all, when she went a bit too far. Ghastly little man, Harter—the men all barred him, absolutely.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t supposed to be straight, or something—I don’t know,” said Mrs. Leeds casually. “Never could imagine why the woman didn’t do a bunk, myself. One or two of the men were mad about her—God knows why. But nobody had a good word for Harter. He did some very dirty trick over a deal in polo ponies, I believe, but it was kept pretty dark, and anyway, we weren’t there very long. The men all said that Mrs. Harter was straight, whatever they meant by that, but I never heard of anyone havin’ a good word to say for Harter. I must say he was an objectionable-lookin’ little bounder, if ever there was one. No one could imagine why on earth she’d ever married him.”

“Perhaps she wanted to get away from the plumber’s shop, and thought that the only opportunity,” Claire suggested. “I suppose, from what you say, that she must be attractive to men—of a certain sort—but she isn’t in the least good-looking.”

Mrs. Leeds laughed loudly. I think it crossed her mind vaguely, with no sort of understanding, that Claire was in some way jealous of Mrs. Harter, and it amused her.

“It isn’t what I say,” she remarked. “It’s what we could see for ourselves. That red-headed youth is perfectly besotted. I quite agree with you that she’s no beauty, but she’s got him on a string all right.”

“It’s a great pity,” said Claire emphatically. “Captain Patch is a nice young man, really.”

Quite suddenly Mrs. Kendal woke up. She looked round upon us with rather a blank eye for a moment, but instinct, or her subconscious self, must have prompted her as to what we had been talking about, for she joined in almost automatically.

“Captain Patch—yes, indeed. That woman ought to know better. Why, she must be old enough to be his mother.”

“No.”

That was Mary Ambrey, who is always reasonable, and seldom emphatic.

“Really, Mrs. Kendal, she isn’t. Not by about eighteen years. Captain Patch looks very young, I quite agree, but as a matter of fact, he’s quite old enough to take care of himself.”

“More shame for him,” declared Mumma, not at all viciously, but with that effortless, relentless implacability of hers that always makes one think of a tank in action.

“I don’t expect they realize that the way they go about together isn’t very good form,” said Blanchie Kendal brightly and kindly. She is the one whom Mumma often speaks of as “our family peacemaker,” but I doubt if Mrs. Kendal thought it quite fitting that she should peacemake on the subject of Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

“That will do, dear,” she said, and Blanchie desisted from her charitable attempts at once.

The Kendals are all of them rather large young women, but when Mumma says, “That will do,” like that, they seem to shrink into a temporary invisibility.

“I think,” said Mrs. Kendal further, “that we shall have to make a move. Will you see if you can find Puppa and the others, Blanchie? I am afraid we ought to make a move.”

“So ought we,” said Claire, and in spite of hospitable protests from Leeds and Mrs. Leeds, people began to prepare for departure.

Claire, perhaps with a recollection of her tête-à-tête journey with Leeds in his runabout, at once offered to take Mary and her children back to the Manor House if they would spend the evening with us, and Mary agreed.

Christopher had already put Mrs. Fazackerly into his two-seater, and Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch were nowhere to be seen.

I really felt sorry for Leeds, as I saw the blank expression with which he offered to drive Lady Annabel Bending home.

“What a bounder that fellow is!” young Martyn observed pleasantly as the car moved away.

“You’ve eaten his salt,” Claire said gravely. She looked very austere and high-minded as she said it, but that was probably for the benefit of Martyn—who seemed in no way impressed—and I saw every reason to fear that another volcano was claiming Claire’s inward attention. I knew she would say nothing in front of Sallie and Martyn, but as soon as we got home they dashed upstairs in search of some property connected with the play, and Claire and Mary and I remained together.

Then poor Claire’s features relaxed into an expression of desperation. These histrionic transformations in her are largely instinctive, I believe. She herself is never, for an instant, out of her own line of vision.

“It has come.”

It was useless to ask what had come. I knew and Mary knew.

“Has Christopher said anything to you?” I asked.

“No. Has he to you?”

Claire’s question came like a rapier point, and I was thankful to be able to say no in reply to it.

“He is going to marry that little third-rate creature.” Claire spoke with concentrated bitterness.

Claire, theoretically, is a democrat. She is also the champion of individual freedom, and she believes in the right of every man or woman to marry for love.

Neither Mary nor I was tactless enough to remind her of all this. In fact, we said very little. The Claire type of mind cannot be approached by arguments, being almost as wholly devoid of sustained reasoning powers as is a young child. It was inevitable that Claire should be jealous of the woman with whom her brother fell in love, and the obviousness of poor Mrs. Fazackerly’s shortcomings made things simpler, in a way. It provided Claire with a more or less legitimate outlet for her irrational sense of grievance.

“I should never utter one word—I should thank God upon my knees—if Christopher had found somebody with whom he could go through life in utter and absolute sympathy—the perfect companion—” said Claire emotionally, and quite genuinely unaware that her aspirations on Christopher’s behalf were far beyond any that he would ever entertain for himself.

I remember, word for word, a curious little interlude that came in, there, the outcome of that outburst of poor Claire’s.

“The perfect companion of whom you speak has no existence, at least on this plane,” I said, foolishly enough.

Mary Ambrey looked at me and smiled. “Miles!” She said my name almost exactly in the half-affectionate, half-amused way in which a mother admonishes a child when the child is trying to “show off” before strangers. She wasn’t in the least taken in by my cheap cynicism, and she wouldn’t allow me to be taken in by it, either.

Dear, beautiful Mary Ambrey! I never, like people in a novel, wonder whether she has ever guessed. With her fine, clear intelligence, of course she has guessed—long, long ago.

We had a bad quarter of an hour with Claire. Mary, of course, was far more successful with her than I was, because she did not exhaust herself and infuriate Claire by reasoning with her. She just let her talk—and talk—and talk.

By the time that Sallie came in Claire had got to the stage of knowing that she was repeating herself and of being secretly glad of an interruption.

“We were going to have the dress rehearsal next week,” Sallie said. “Which day, Cousin Miles?”

So we were once more absorbed into the atmosphere of the theatricals.

“The Bulbul Ameer,” one could not help feeling, was taking shape as a play in spite of most of the people who were acting in it. Sallie and Martyn both had talent and a certain amount of amateur experience, but Alfred Kendal’s sole qualification appeared to be an unlimited confidence in something which he spoke of, in a very professional way, as “gag.”

This had a disastrous effect upon Bill Patch, and both of them took to appealing to Nancy Fazackerly, as part author of the piece.

Her ingenuity was hard put to it, once or twice, and I was touched when I noticed that she seemed to be making some endeavors in the direction of truthfulness.

Claire noticed it, too, I feel certain, and the atmosphere that she managed to diffuse at rehearsal became less violently hostile than it had been at first.

Everybody else was frankly interested in Christopher and Nancy, and waited hopefully for them to announce their engagement.

“Is it official, yet?” Lady Annabel asked me one day, and when I said, “No,” she assured me that she understood perfectly and that I could rely upon her absolute discretion. The years that she had spent in the Colonial Service, Lady Annabel said, had trained her.

Several people came to the dress rehearsal. Mrs. Fazackerly’s father invited himself, to the unspeakable dismay of almost everybody, and General and Mrs. Kendal, of course, were not to be denied.

“I think that Amy will be far less nervous if she sees me there,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her kindest smile. “Ahlfred, now, is not nervous—but Amy is. I think she may be less nervous if she sees me there. Call it a mother’s fancy if you like, Sir Miles, but I can’t help thinking that Amy will be far less nervous if she sees me in the front row. So there I shall be.”

And there, in fact, she was.

Puppa was there, too, although less preoccupied with Amy and Alfred than with the pair of Hessian boots that he had lent for the performance. So long as they were on the stage, he never took his eyes off them.

“Is everyone here?” I asked Nancy.

“Mrs. Harter is coming. Bill went to fetch her.”

She sighed.

“It is all very queer, don’t you think—I mean the way in which they go about together. Of course, I’m dreadfully sorry for Bill. I think he’s terribly in love with her.”

I was inclined to think so, too, and I found it quite impossible not to watch them both when they arrived together.

It was not the first time that Mrs. Harter had come to a rehearsal—it might have been the second, or at most the third.

Bill took her straight up to Mary Ambrey after she had received Claire’s very brief greeting and had bowed stiffly in reply to mine.

“Will you come into the green room, Mrs. Harter? They’re all getting ready.”

“I’m sorry we’re so late,” said Bill. “It was my fault; I started late to fetch her. I’ll just see the curtain go up and then cut off and get into my things. I don’t come on till the middle of the scene.”

He marched off to the piano, where Nancy sat already.

I heard her say, “Shall I begin the overture?” and Patch answer, “Give her ten minutes to get changed. She says it won’t take her longer than that.”

Mrs. Harter, of course, had to be on the stage before anybody else, in order to sing “The Bulbul Ameer.”

Bill and Christopher fussed about with the lights, and tested the curtain and found that it had stuck, as curtains invariably do stick at all amateur theatricals, and Alfred Kendal said, “Why not have put it up properly in the first place?” and finally a step ladder was produced and Patch went up it and dealt adequately with the curtain. It all took time and created the right atmosphere of dramatic crisis and masterly presence of mind, and I hope that nobody except myself heard my neighbor, old Carey, asking what the devil they were all mucking about like that for.

When the curtain did go up, officially, as Lady Annabel Bending might have said, the small stage showed a painted background of palm trees and blue sea, and Mrs. Harter standing in front of it in her Eastern dress.

The straight lines of the long veil over her head and the circlet of coins across her forehead suited her very well, although the swarthiness of her coloring became almost startlingly evident. Her bare arms were hung with bracelets and she wore long drop earrings and a girdle of colored stones. The dress, Claire was at pains to assure us quietly, was entirely incorrect from the point of view of any known nationality—but it was very effective, all the same.

Sallie, in almost similar clothes, and Amy Kendal, had had their faces stained with some brown pigment or other and their brows darkened, but Mary told me that Mrs. Harter had needed scarcely any make-up at all.

She made no attempt at acting, but simply sang the ridiculous, mock-pathetic song on which Bill and Nancy had based their play, right through from beginning to end.

I had forgotten how very good her voice was. At least, I supposed that I had. Since the day of the dress rehearsal I have sometimes wondered whether something new had come into it that had not been there when she sang “The Bluebells of Scotland” at the concert.

Mrs. Harter looked straight in front of her while she was singing, her hands behind her back. The silence in the room had a very peculiar character; it was strangely intent.

Even old Carey, who, after all, was by no means a fool, was perfectly motionless, and he, like everybody else, was looking at the woman on the stage.

It was with a perfectly conscious effort that I turned my eyes away from Mrs. Harter and looked across to where Captain Patch stood.

Bill was leaning against the wall, his back half turned to the stage, both hands thrust into his pockets. He seemed to be looking fixedly down at the floor, and he never once raised his eyes or turned round while the strong sound of Mrs. Harter’s singing vibrated in the room.

There are six verses to the absurd song, and the air is repeated again and again. For days afterwards we all of us hummed it and sang it at intervals and execrated it for the persistent way in which it haunted us.

I can remember every note of it, and no doubt everybody else can, too, for everybody, now, avoids humming or singing it. Even the least impressionable people are susceptible to the powers of association that lie in sound, and the Bulbul Ameer song belongs eternally, so far as Cross Loman is concerned, to the affair of Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

Mrs. Fazackerly played the final verse slowly and then rattled off the refrain for the last time with a swing:

“But, of all, the most reckless of life or of limb,

Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer—

Was Abdul, the Bulbul Ameer.”

Nancy’s small strong hands crashed out a couple of chords with astonishing sureness and emphasis.

It was a dress rehearsal, and Bill Patch and I were the only people in the room who were entitled to speak, just then. I waited for him, but he only gave me a quick glance and a nod. So I said: “That’s splendid, Mrs. Harter, thank you very much. Will you go off left, please? Now then, for the first scene.”

She left the stage and came round to the front. Then Captain Patch left the wall and walked across the room and went and sat down beside her.

Chapter Eleven

WHEN the day preceding that of the show arrived, we had all reached the stage of believing, with entire conviction, that nothing else in the world mattered but a successful performance. It is this temporary but complete absence of sense of proportion that puts life into almost any undertaking, but more especially into one about which a number of people are engaged.

On the morning of that day Bill tried to hold a final rehearsal, at which half of the performers failed to appear, because they were frantically and irrationally mislaying vital pieces of property in different parts of the house or dashing off in search of substitutes for other equally vital pieces of property, alleged by them to have been mislaid by other members of the cast.

“If Alfred Kendal isn’t taken through his bit of dialogue at least half a dozen times more, he’ll ruin the whole thing,” said Patch, looking perfectly distraught. “In fact, he’ll probably do that anyhow. For Heaven’s sake, someone hear him his words.”

“I will,” said Nancy. “Where is Alfred?”

She snatched up a housemaid’s tray that had been loaded with empty vases for which Claire, her hands full of flowers, had been vainly inquiring a few moments earlier. “I’ll take this. Where is Alfred?”

“Always remember, when you’re carrying a loaded tray,” said General Kendal, “to put the heavy articles in the middle of the tray and not at the sides.”

“Oh yes, thank you.”

“Let me show you—”

“I’ll leave Alfred to you,” said Bill Patch earnestly, “and if you can get him to say height and not heighth in the last scene, it’ll make all the difference.”

“I’ll try, but you know—Oh, General Kendal, thank you very much—yes, I do quite see. Only I think Lady Flower is in a hurry—”

“Are you looking for Alfred?” said Sallie, dashing past. “He’s trying on his beard in the dining room. Cousin Claire is looking everywhere for those drawing-room vases.”

“I know. Thank you so much, Sallie.”

“This fellow is the heaviest, I should say—put him in the middle. Then these little light bits of glass—”

“Oh thank you, thank you!”

“Wait a minute—that isn’t quite right yet. It always saves time in the long run,” said the General impressively, “to do things in the right way.”

“Yes, indeed. Shall I take it now? I know Lady Flower is in a hurry.”

“Did someone say Ahlfred was wanted?” Dolly inquired, also hurrying and also with her arms full. “Because I heard him say something about going off on his bicycle to fetch ...” she vanished through the door, and we only heard faintly the words ... “seems to have forgotten.”

“Oh, stop him!” cried Nancy. “Do go and stop Alfred, somebody. Wait! I’ll go myself.”

“Do you want Ahlfred?” said Mrs. Kendal. “Because, if so, he is on the stage. If you want Ahlfred for anything, I can go and find him for you.”

“I thought you wanted to take these vase affairs to Lady Flower,” the General said rather reproachfully to Mrs. Fazackerly. “If you want Alfred, I can fetch him for you.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Nancy, quite wildly, and she rushed away with the tray of vases, and Mrs. Kendal went away, too, and presently reappeared with Alfred, and then, as Nancy was no longer to be seen, let him go again, whereupon Nancy came in again by another door and immediately said:

“But where’s Alfred?”

That sort of thing went on all day long, and running all through my recollection of the whole, chaotic business is a sort of intermittent duet between Nancy Fazackerly and Alfred Kendal, when at last they found themselves on the same spot, at the same moment, and she was hearing him his part.

“Your cue is—‘color of the sea.’”

“Yes, yes. Just give me my cue, will you?”

“—‘color of the sea.’”

“Yes. Color of the sea. Now, what do I say? Funny thing, it’s on the very tip of my tongue. Don’t tell me—”

“Color of—”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I was only going to give you your cue again ‘Color of the sea’—”

“‘What man can measure the heighth of the mountains? They are—’”

“Didn’t Captain Patch suggest that it really makes the lines run better to say height?”

“I said height.”

“Oh, did you? I’m so sorry. How stupid of me. Let’s start again ... ‘color of the sea.’”

“‘What man can measure the heighth of the mountains?...’”

Bill passed them once or twice, and each time he heard Alfred he groaned. By and by Martyn Ambrey, as though he had been the first person to think of it, came up to me and said:

“You know, this sort of thing really won’t do. If this show is to be any good at all, we ought to pull ourselves together and have a proper rehearsal.”

“‘The heighth of the mountains,’” came faintly from the far corner of the hall.

“If you will collect everyone and bring them here, I’ll keep them together and send for Patch, and we’ll go through the whole thing,” I said.

“Right you are. I’ll ring the gong and they’ll think it’s lunch. That’ll bring them.”

“The young are so cynical nowadays,” I heard Sallie murmur.

“Why not be content with the spirit of the thing, supposing the actual letter fails me?” Alfred Kendal suggested in the distance. “As a matter of fact, there’s always a certain amount of gag expected at a show of this kind.”

“I’m sure you’ll get it in a minute,” said Nancy, with her usual kindly, if unfounded, optimism. “Let’s just run through it again ... ‘color of the sea.’”

They crawled through it again.

Martyn’s performance on the gong actually did bring most people into the hall and I then announced that a final rehearsal was to take place at once, and everybody said that it was utterly impossible and adduced important reasons why they should be somewhere else doing something quite different.

“Very well, then we’ll call a general rehearsal immediately after lunch. Three o’clock sharp. Does that suit everybody?”

Almost everybody assented, presumably because they were relieved at having the thing postponed for an hour or two.

“What about Mrs. Harter?” Martyn suddenly inquired.

She was not present.

“If it’s to be the last rehearsal we ought to do the thing properly and have her song at the beginning and at the end.”

“I can send her down a note,” said Claire.

“I’ll fetch her on my motor bike,” young Martyn volunteered.

He is not always so ready to put himself out on behalf of other people.

“Does Martyn admire Mrs. Harter?” I had the curiosity to ask his sister later.

“It’s mostly that he’s so frightfully interested. The whole psychological situation, you know,” Sallie explained. “I think it’s interesting, too, but I don’t agree with him altogether that it’s her personality that makes it so. Bill, in his own way, is quite as well worth watching as she is.”

“You talk as though it were a cinematograph film being shown for your express benefit.”

“That’s rather a good simile,” said Sallie condescendingly.

“My dear child, bar joking, I wish you’d tell me something. These two people, I quite agree with you, are out of the ordinary. Are you wholly and solely curious, and analytical, and interested—or do you ever feel sorry for them?”

I really wanted to know, and Sallie saw that.

“Honestly, I don’t think I really feel sorry for them, because if the whole thing came to an end to-morrow—say, she went back to her husband and he started an affair with somebody else—I should be disappointed, in a way. I don’t want it all to peter out in some trivial way. I want to have something worth watching.”

“Quite impersonally?”

“Of course,” said Sallie.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” suddenly said Claire behind me. Neither of us had seen her. “A child of your age has neither the experience nor the understanding to discuss that sort of problem.”

From being natural, if patronizing, Sallie instantly became stiffly arrogant.

“I’ve already been training for some time with a view to making that or any other sort of problem affecting human beings my work in life.”

“Even a little medical student of two years’ standing doesn’t know everything, darling.”

Claire saw herself as being gently and subtly satirical as she said this, and I saw her as being more or less unconsciously jealous of Sallie’s youth and her cleverness and her opportunities—and above all resentful of her self-confidence. But Sallie, I suppose, only saw her as being stupidly “superior” and aggressive.

“I’ll explain the difference between the medical side and the psycho-analytical side some other time, cousin Claire,” she said, smiling. “I’m afraid I haven’t time now.”

Of course she knew as well as I did that nothing is less endurable to Claire than the suggestion that she stands in need of having any subject under the sun explained to her.

Sallie walked off, cool and triumphant, and Claire turned white with anger.

She has often said—and it is perfectly true—that she would share her last penny with Mary’s children did they stand in need of it. But she cannot allow them to assert themselves.

Claire was not enjoying the theatricals. Bill Patch had diffidently offered her a part and she had, wisely enough, refused it. But I think she regretted all the time not holding the center of the stage, especially when she found that it was Sallie who quite naturally took that place. Nancy Fazackerly might be one of the authors of the piece and get all the credit of the musical part of it, but she was neither as pretty, as young, as clever, nor as self-assertive as Sallie. Nancy is always ready to let somebody else take the lead, and moreover, in those days, she seemed to be living in a dream.

Christopher was very devoted to her, and they looked happy. It was understood that their engagement would not be announced until Mrs. Fazackerly judged her father’s mood to be a propitious one. Knowing Nancy’s weakness, and her parent’s force of character, one was inclined to look upon the case as being adjourned sine die, or at least until old Carey should be translated into another sphere from this.

The strain on Claire was a considerable one, and of course she did nothing whatever to lessen it, but, rather, lay awake at nights and wept, and by day forced upon the unwilling and inadequate Christopher emotional appeals and impulsive generosities. Nancy had been so much absorbed by the theatricals that she had, with her usual tact, avoided Claire altogether, without blatantly appearing to do so.

Now, of course, we were every one of us utterly obsessed by the theatricals. They seemed to have become the one supreme reality in life.

Before three o’clock the performers were assembled round the stage and most of them were saying:

“Where’s Mrs. Harter?”

“She isn’t here yet, is she?” said Mrs. Kendal, looking round with an inquiring expression. And presently she added, as though struck by an afterthought, “Mrs. Harter is late, isn’t she?”

“Martyn went for her on his motor bike.”

“They’ll probably be brought in on two stretchers directly,” Sallie said cheerfully. “Meanwhile, couldn’t we get on without them?”

Of course they could, and did. Bill Patch stuck to his post and never took his eyes off his company, until the cue was spoken for Martyn’s first entrance. Then there was a pause and Mrs. Fazackerly said:

“Oh dear, haven’t they come yet?”

Bill shook his head. Evidently, although he hadn’t turned round, he would have known it if they had come.

Mary, who was prompting, began to read her son’s part, but before she had spoken two sentences he came in.

He was by himself.

It was one of the Kendals, needless to say, although I cannot remember which one, who asked, “Hasn’t Mrs. Harter come?”

“She can’t get here this afternoon. Apologies, and all that. Look here, Patch, can I carry on without changing?”

“Of course,” said Bill. “Fire away.”

They got through it fairly well. Alfred forgot his words several times and said, “Don’t tell me,” with great emphasis when Nancy tried to prompt him, and Mumma called out from her place amongst the spectators: “Now, Ahlfred, don’t get fussed. Don’t let yourself get fussed, dear.” The only sentence that he seemed to have no difficulty at all in remembering was the one in which he referred to “the heighth of the mountains.” The others acquitted themselves reasonably well, and Sallie, who has never known the meaning of nervousness, was brilliant as the Muscovite maiden.

“Those boots of mine look uncommonly well on the stage,” said General Kendal at the end of it all.

And the only comment that I heard from either of his daughters was that we must try and remember it would be all the same a hundred years hence.

Whether or not Bill Patch was encouraged by these observations, he made no reply to them, but gave his attention to Mrs. Fazackerly and a doubtful point in the music.

Martyn Ambrey came up to me.

“Do you know what’s happened?”

“The cat has just swallowed the last piece of lipstick in the country, and the whole thing will be ruined,” I suggested somewhat wearily. The last few days had been over-full of such critical situations.

“Much more cataclysmic than that. Do you know why that woman didn’t turn up this afternoon?”

The question being purely rhetorical, I allowed Martyn to supply his own answer to it.

“The husband has come.”

“Good Lord! The Harter husband?” said Sallie. I could have sworn that she was quite delighted at this new dramatic factor in the case.

So was Martyn.

“It was the most extraordinary bit of luck, coming in for it. You know I went down on the machine to fetch her, to those awful rooms in Queen Street. She opened the door to me herself. She’d no hat on, and evidently hadn’t meant to come. So I told her about the rehearsal and suggested taking her along.”

“Did she see you in the hall or in the sitting room?” Sallie inquired. One could see she wanted to be able to visualize the whole thing.

“There wouldn’t have been room for both of us in the wretched little entrance passage. She asked me into the dining room, or, rather, she said, ‘You can go in if you want to,’ and I did go in. The room smelt of mutton chop and down draughts. There was a tray on the table with greasy plates and things and two ghastly affairs in frames, on the walls—some kids feeding swans and a nun trailing along past an open door and looking at a woman in her petticoat bodice undressing a small child on a table. It was all frightfully characteristic.”

Sallie nodded vehemently.

“I know. A sort of arrangement of brackets and shelves and a looking-glass over the mantelpiece, I suppose, and pink paper in the grate.”

“More or less that. And Mrs. Harter stood in the middle of it looking rather like Cassandra. She simply asked if I’d wait while she finished a bit of ironing. I said I would, and she carried on at the other end of the table from the tin tray and the greasy plates. I think she was ironing a blouse—something white, anyhow.”

“Did you talk?”

“I tried to make her talk,” said Martyn frankly, “but, by Jove, she’s a baffling woman. D’you remember how she turned down Leeds on the day of the picnic? I can quite understand it, of course, but I’m sorry for him, especially as she’d apparently been on quite the opposite tack when they met before. Well, she was just about as forthcoming with me to-day as she was with old Leeds when he would keep on with variations of that story about the cocktails.

“I asked her if she thought the play was shaping all right, and she said, ‘I really couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ and all the time one felt that she was so tremendously on the defensive.”

“I’ve had that feeling about her myself,” Sallie remarked, “as though life had used her pretty hard, which I daresay it has—through her own fault, too. Go on.”

“Well, not having made any headway at all, I was just going to start on Cairo and the East generally when there was a ring at the door, and Mrs. Harter jumped as though she’d been shot. It’s my belief she thought it was Bill Patch, come to fetch her, but she went on with her ironing and I heard someone else go to the door—the woman of the house, I suppose. And almost directly the dining room door opened and a man walked in, and Mrs. Harter looked up and saw him.”

Martyn paused like an actor who wants to enhance a coming effect.

“How did he strike you?” said Sallie breathlessly.

It was characteristic of her that even in her excitement she should put it like that instead of saying, as almost everybody else would have said, “What’s he like?”

“Reptilian—distinctly reptilian. His eyes were too close together and his nostrils flat and too small. But it wasn’t only that. I should say that in a quiet way he was ruthless—very ruthless. I didn’t like the look of him—and neither did Mrs. Harter for the matter of that. When she saw him she stared at him, and something in the way she did it made me guess who it was—just like that. She never said a word, but after a bit he said: ‘Hallo, Diamond! I thought I’d take you by surprise. We got in to Plymouth this morning.’”

“I got up to go, of course, from sheer decency, although I wanted frightfully to sit it out, and I was morally certain that neither of them had given me a thought. But I was wrong. Harter said to her, ‘Who’s your friend, Di? Aren’t you going to introduce me?’”

“He thought you were Bill Patch,” said Sallie instantly, and I had a sudden feeling that she was right.

“Did she introduce you?”

“She said, ‘Mr. Ambrey—my husband, Mr. Harter.’ He didn’t shake hands. And then I had to go.”

“Does Bill know?”

“Not unless she’s conveyed it to him by telepathy. She said when I was going, ‘Please make my excuses and say I can’t come to the rehearsal, but I’ll turn up to-morrow night all right.’ I bet she will!”

“I hope the husband will come, too,” said Sallie, in what I can only call a bloodthirsty way.

“Well, there they are, the three of them. I suppose,” Martyn said, “that Patch will rush off, as usual, and go down to Queen Street this evening and there he’ll find Mr. Harter.”

“He won’t be as much surprised as you might suppose. Didn’t someone say that Bill and Mrs. Harter had written to him, and asked him to come and see what he thought about it all—something of that sort?”

“You’re flippant, Sallie. Mark my words, something or other is going to get smashed.”

I listened to these two young people. They certainly seemed to me graceless in their hard, detached appraisement of the affair, but at least their interest was on a higher level than that of Lady Annabel’s low-voiced censoriousness or the frank scandal-mongering of the Kendals.

In a very few hours, of course, the Kendals, and Lady Annabel, and everybody else would know that Mrs. Harter’s husband had come to Cross Loman. Bill Patch, in all probability, would know it even sooner.

“Martyn, are you going to tell him?” said Sallie.

“I suppose so. She told me to make her excuses, as she called it, and that’s a perfectly good excuse, if ever there was one.”

Sallie nodded her head, looking very thoughtful. I felt perfectly certain—and the certainty partly amused and partly disgusted me—that whenever Martyn made his announcement Sallie fully intended to be within earshot of it. While they were still talking, Patch himself came up, looking very earnest and very, very young.

“I think it’s going to be all right, you know,” said he, without preamble. “That last act really went uncommonly well this time. If only Kendal remembers his words, and above all doesn’t try any impromptu funniness, we ought to be all right.”

He turned and looked at Martyn through those queer thick lenses of his.

“What about trying over that stage fight of ours once more? I still have to learn to die, as the hymn book says.”

“Come on then.”

He and Martyn went off together, and I thought Sallie looked disappointed.

“Go and help them, my dear,” I said ironically. “You’ve still a chance of being in at the death.”

“Thanks,” said Sallie coolly. “I think I will.”

I did not see them again after that, but I suppose the communication was made, for presently everybody seemed to know that Mr. Harter had returned to England and had unexpectedly appeared in Queen Street, and everybody seemed to want to talk about it.

Claire was evidently determined to see Harter as a figure of pathos. I guessed that she had not heard Martyn’s “reptilian” description of him.

“So he’s back! Poor fellow. It makes me sick to think of him, toiling there in the heat, probably stinting himself of all but necessities so as to send home money to his wife, while all the time she’s betraying his trust like that.”

I said that, from all accounts, trust was about the last sentiment that Mrs. Harter had ever inspired in her husband, and in any case he’d known for years that she didn’t care for him.

“God help him!” said Claire sombrely. “An unhappy marriage....”

The subject of unhappy marriages is one that, personally, I much prefer to avoid. Claire, however, I think, experiences a certain strange satisfaction in oblique references of which she can make personal application to our own case. But Mary and Mrs. Kendal joined us, and so Claire let the question of unhappy marriages sink into abeyance and asked them if they knew that Mrs. Harter’s husband had just arrived from Egypt.

“Has he come?” said Mary. “I heard he was arriving this summer, but I didn’t know he was actually due yet. He’ll be just in time for the play.”

I didn’t believe in that nonchalance of Mary’s. It was like a cold, strong wind blowing across the atmosphere of gossip and surmise in which we had all been moving. Her matter-of-factness, for the moment, killed the dramatic possibilities in the arrival of Mr. Harter.

We talked of other things.

Chapter Twelve

AFTER the rehearsal, Captain Patch went to Queen Street. And although I can, again, only reconstruct, at the same time it isn’t exactly that and that only. For Bill, strangely enough, told Nancy Fazackerly about it.

I can understand his having done so, in a way. He knew very well that she was in love with another man and also that she knew him to be in love with another woman, and that there could be no question of sex values or sex consciousness between them.

Moreover, Patch was naturally open-hearted and Nancy sympathetic.

He came back to Loman Cottage at about six o’clock that evening and Mrs. Fazackerly overtook him just as he pushed open the garden gate.

She had begun a reference to the all-pervading theatricals when she caught sight of his face. The curiously boyish aspect that always belonged to it seemed intensified, but she has told me that, although she felt he was suffering, it wasn’t the fierce, unreasoning suffering of youth that he suggested to her, but rather a certain perplexity, a foreseeing of conflict.

“What is it?” she cried, almost involuntarily.

“Can’t you tell me? Can’t I do anything?”

“How kind you are,” Bill said gratefully. He looked at her for a minute or two in silence. “We needn’t go indoors yet. Let’s sit out here for a minute.”

They sat under the pink may tree on Nancy’s circular seat.

“Have you been down to Queen Street?” at last said Mrs. Fazackerly.

“Yes. You know he’s come. Harter’s come.”

“Has he?”

“Do you remember that I told you a little time ago she—Diamond—had written to him and asked him to come?”

“Yes.”

“In her letter she told him.”

“Told him?”

Nancy understood really what he meant, but it still seemed to her so extraordinary that she could almost have persuaded herself that she didn’t understand.

“Told him?” she repeated.

“About us,” said Bill, simply. “That she and I love one another.”

When Nancy Fazackerly told me this, which she did long afterwards, I said it was impossible. Men—at any rate Englishmen—don’t say these things.

But Nancy only repeated that Bill had said them, and had said them in a way that was absolutely natural, so that she had not been surprised at the time—only afterwards.

“You do understand, don’t you?” Bill said. “Her marriage to Harter was a mistake. He hasn’t been happy either. And, of course, one can imagine how rotten it is for two people to remain together when they’ve come to dislike one another and when, anyway, they never had a great deal in common to begin with.”

“Why did they marry then?” murmured Nancy; not censoriously, as Lady Annabel might have said it, but as one sorrowfully propounding for the hundredth time an insoluble problem.

“Well, you know, if you think of the way most people are brought up, it isn’t surprising there are so many unhappy marriages,” Bill remarked. “Until quite lately, women weren’t told more than half the truth about marriage, were they? And anyway—it isn’t talked about as a serious thing now, is it? People make a sort of furtive joke of it ... le mariage n’est pas l’amour, and that sort of thing.... And it ought to be quite different. It ought to have a different place in the scale of relative values. As it is, of course, most people don’t even know what they’re missing, because they haven’t been educated up to wanting it. But Diamond does know, you see.”

“Did she always, do you suppose?”

“More or less. She knew underneath, I think, but she wouldn’t let herself face it.”

“And if she hadn’t met you?”

“I don’t know,” said Bill gently.

Then Mrs. Fazackerly, very much in earnest and hating to say it, made one of the moral efforts of her life and asked him if he really thought that his—his attraction—his strong attraction, if he liked—to this woman older than himself, was anything more than the accident of falling in love, to which every normal man or woman is liable. She was frightened when she said it, because she thought that he would repent of his confidence to her and think her unworthy of it.

Bill looked at her through the glasses, and smiled a little, and took both her hands, which were shaking, into his, comforting her.

“It’s awfully good of you to say that, because I know you mind saying it, and I think—I think you only said it because you thought you ought to. (I hope that doesn’t sound like the most frightful cheek. It isn’t meant to.) In a way, I know it must look like that, of course—I mean, like my being just in love with her, and nothing else. And of course I am in love with her, too.”

Suddenly he was blinking, behind his glasses, and looking very young and very shy.

Nancy said that his utter sincerity and his earnestness brought a lump into her throat.

Her judgments of other people are always gentle ones, but I think she felt that Diamond Harter wasn’t worth it, just then.

“Tell me what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think I understand altogether. You said you were in love with her, ‘too?’”

“Well,” Bill explained in a reasonable voice, “you know what falling in love is—a thing nobody can control, or explain, or produce if it isn’t there of itself. That’s the part that might, as you said, overtake anybody. It did overtake me, as a matter of fact, the night that we heard her sing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert. Do you remember? I didn’t begin to know about the other part of it till later—well, not much later—but the night we met at this house and sang and that I saw her home afterwards.”

“But what other part of it?” wailed Nancy, in despair. “Do you mean that you think you met in a—a former life—something like that?”

No, Bill didn’t mean anything a bit like that. If people had former lives at all, perhaps he and Mrs. Harter might have met in them, but he’d never thought about it, and anyway, he didn’t think he believed in reincarnation.

“More like finding your affinity?” Nancy then suggested.

More like that, Bill agreed, but he didn’t seem to think that it was exactly that, either.

“The only word that seems at all right,” he said at last, “is understanding. Like seeing quite clearly, after being in a dusky room for a long time. That’s not at all a good illustration either. But you know the muddled sort of way in which one sees most people—wondering about them, if they’re interesting, or just accepting them, if they aren’t? With her, it’s been completely and absolutely different from the very start. I seemed able to see her quite clearly—her realest self—and to understand things about her that I’d never dreamed of before.”

He made this explanation very haltingly, and although Mrs. Fazackerly’s perceptions instantly recognized his sincerity, she could not feel that his rather incoherent words had brought much enlightenment to her.

“I wish I could say it better,” Bill observed wistfully. “I’d like to make you understand.”

“I do,” Nancy began instinctively, and then she honestly added, “at least, I don’t. And I’m so afraid—please, please forgive me, Bill—I’m so dreadfully afraid that you’re going to be unhappy.”

And Bill said, “I shouldn’t wonder.”

Then they left the region of speculation, and Mrs. Fazackerly asked him what the exact position was.

“Well, we thought that Harter would let her have a divorce. At least I thought so. Diamond was never sure that he would.”

“And he won’t?”

“No, he won’t. He said to-day that he never would. Although he knows that she’s unhappy with him—and he with her, for the matter of that—he says he won’t let her have a divorce. And I shouldn’t think that he was the sort of fellow who’d change his mind.”

“Perhaps he thinks that divorce is wrong.”

“He didn’t say so. Of course, it might be that. But he only said that she was his wife, and belonged to him, and that he didn’t mean to give her up.”

Bill drew very hard at his pipe. “Which is true enough,” he added thoughtfully.

“I don’t think I altogether see—exactly—why you ever felt so sure that he would let her have a divorce.”

“Don’t you? Well, it seemed to me that, as he doesn’t care for her nor she for him, and as there are no children to complicate things, it would have been fairly obvious to let her have her freedom and give them both the chance of beginning again. But he’s—he’s hanging on to a formula, so to speak, the formula that she belongs to him—and so he won’t let her go.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Captain Patch.

Nancy Fazackerly felt very unhappy, and her face generally shows what she is feeling.

“It’s very good of you to care,” said Bill Patch affectionately. “But I wish it didn’t make you unhappy. In spite of everything, I’m so awfully, awfully happy myself.”

The boyish slang expression, Nancy said, somehow touched her almost more than anything.

She asked if there was anything that she could do for him and he said no.

“But you’ve already done a great deal—more than anybody. You’ve done a lot for her,” said Captain Patch.

Nancy wished that she could have said she liked Mrs. Harter. But, at the moment, she did not feel that she liked Mrs. Harter at all, and apparently some unwonted scruple prevented her from saying that she did.

“Oh, Bill, don’t do anything to mess up your life,” she besought him. “You’re so young. It’s so awful to make a mistake right at the beginning.”

She was thinking of her own mistake, no doubt.

“What sort of mistake do you mean, exactly?” said Bill in his literal way. “Do you mean taking her away from Harter? You see, he says that he wouldn’t divorce her even if we did.”

“A great many people, even nowadays, don’t approve of divorced people remarrying. Wouldn’t your own family mind?”

“I’m afraid so. My dear old father would be very sorry, I’m afraid.”

“Wouldn’t that stop you from doing it?”

“Well, no, I can’t honestly say that it would. He’s had his life and run it his own way, and now I must manage mine for myself. It’s a thing about which one has a right to judge for oneself, really and truly.”

It seemed to Mrs. Fazackerly—I think quite correctly—that she could do nothing. It was so obvious that Bill Patch saw his own gleam, and that he meant to follow it, whatever his inability to make anybody else share his vision.

That Nancy did not share it was superabundantly evident.

She said something feebly about the cost to Mrs. Harter of a cap thrown over the windmill and Bill implied, without actually saying so, that the question of reputation was one upon which Mrs. Harter had for some years been devoid of qualms. Mrs. Fazackerly says that she remembered then Leeds and his story about the cocktails, and several other stories of his, too, and she felt that Bill was probably right. But after all, qualms were not altogether to be relegated to nothingness.

Captain Patch, with his strange air of a wistful candor that sought her sympathy even while accepting her condemnation, told Mrs. Fazackerly that he fully realized something which he described, in the idiom of his generation, as the “unsportingness” of taking away another man’s wife.

“What will you do, then?” again asked Mrs. Fazackerly. “You’re quite right, of course, Bill, it is unsporting, as you call it, and I don’t believe, really, in all the things you see in books about one’s highest duty being to oneself, and it’s wicked to live with people when you’ve stopped loving them, and all that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know what books you’re thinking of,” said Bill, presumably speaking as an author. “They can’t be worth much, if that’s the sort of advice they give you.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Nancy meekly. “And I knew you didn’t really hold those views yourself, and that’s why I—I can’t understand what’s going to happen next.”

“Well, I don’t know that myself,” said Captain Patch. “You see, I’d been pretty sure that Harter would agree to the divorce. And now it seems that he won’t.”

“I cannot imagine why you ever thought that he would.”

“If he has no objection to the thing on principle—and he hasn’t—and he knows it would make two people happy, and leave him, except for legal freedom, very much where he was before, I can’t see why he won’t,” said Bill obstinately.

“You’ve seen him?”

“Oh yes. I’ve been talking to him for more than an hour.”

“And she was there, too?”

“Some of the time she was. They are very unhappy together, and have been all the time. I think, anyway, that Diamond will leave him now.”

Mrs. Fazackerly looked at his young, unhappy face and pitied him profoundly.

“All the same,” she said bravely, “it isn’t fair, really and truly it isn’t, to shirk one’s obligations. I know it’s dreadful to be with a man one doesn’t like, oh, Bill, I do know it, but she did promise when she married him.”

Bill didn’t exactly acquiesce, but he looked at her with understanding, sorrowful eyes, and Nancy felt that he, too, knew perplexity.

Their conversation was not in the least conclusive. They talked round the subject, at least Mrs. Fazackerly did, and Bill Patch thanked her several times for caring and for letting him tell her about it. He repeated again that in spite of everything he was extraordinarily happy. Nancy Fazackerly assured me afterwards that she had no difficulty in believing him when he said that.

Christopher Ambrey came to supper at Loman Cottage that evening. I suppose it was partly that which helped to fix it all so definitely in Mrs. Fazackerly’s mind. Anyhow, she apparently remembered it all very clearly.

Dear Father, again I quote Nancy, was passing through rather a difficult phase that evening. This was her euphemism for the utterly impracticable moods that at intervals caused old Carey to embark upon interminable arguments, that led nowhere at all, with anybody whom he could find to argue with him.

He had never succeeded very well in this amiable enterprise with Captain Patch because Patch had a facility, which very often goes with the power of writing, for seeing a great many sides to every question. Sooner or later, and it was generally sooner, he was certain to concede the tenability of his antagonist’s position, however much he might disagree, personally, with his views.

But Christopher Ambrey could quite safely be counted upon to do nothing so baffling. He had not yet reached the stage of perceiving that nobody has ever yet been convinced of anything by argument, neither did he realize that he was doing poor Nancy a considerable disservice by taking part in one of the long, battledore-and-shuttlecock dialogues started by old Carey in pure contradictoriness.

The old man had been talking crime, as he usually did, and some reference was made to a point of international law.

Nancy said, “Father, how interesting”—not being in the least interested, but, as usual, only anxious to please.

“You’re a little bit out there, sir, if I may say so,” Christopher began. “I think the way they work it is like this:—”

After that they were at it hammer and tongs, Christopher very polite and deferential to begin with, prefacing his reiteration of facts with a small, civil laugh, but gradually adopting the low, stubborn monotone of an unimaginative man who knows that he is right.

Carey, who was wrong, and also knew it, became very angry and said, “Look here, d’you mean to tell me—” and then put forward long, involved and hypothetical cases and interrupted violently when Christopher tried to deal with them in reply.

Bill Patch caught Nancy’s eye and did everything he could, but when an argument has once got beyond a certain stage it sometimes seems as though nothing short of those unspecified catastrophes known as “an act of God” could ever bring it to an end.

All through the evening they went on, and Nancy’s efforts to change the conversation were utterly ignored, and Bill’s gallant attempts at funniness were met with a glare of contempt from Christopher and a disgusted ejaculation or two from his host.

Nancy Fazackerly, however, never forgot that Bill had tried. Like so many people who have been very badly treated by fate, she was touchingly grateful when she met with kindness.

She knew that Bill Patch was preoccupied, as well he might be, with his own affairs, and that it was on her account that he had produced those intrinsically feeble, and entirely unsuccessful, jests and flippancies. And although Bill failed conspicuously in his object, Nancy’s gratitude went out to him.

It was, no doubt, an unpleasant evening. Bill did not go out, as he usually did, and Mrs. Fazackerly could only presume that the Harter ménage was being left to the further discussion of their infelicitous relations.

Her father and Christopher Ambrey continued to try and talk one another down, having long since forgotten the original point at issue, and at eleven o’clock Mrs. Fazackerly, in despair, went to bed.

All this I heard from Nancy, and she certainly made me visualize it clearly enough—the conversation with Bill Patch on the circular bench under the pink may tree, and the pity and affection that he inspired in her so strongly, despite the fact that, in her gentle judgment, he was altogether wrong.

She saw him, theoretically, as a person who was undecided between right and wrong, but when he was actually there, talking to her, I believe that Nancy felt vaguely that his perplexity was not exactly of that sort. It was at once more subtle and less acute. She did not believe that he was either selfish, or sensual, or irreligious.

“Even if he ran away with Mrs. Harter, I shouldn’t think him any of those things,” Mrs. Fazackerly told herself, but it rather amazed her to realize that, all the same.

For all her superficial glibness in the art of fibbing, Nancy Fazackerly, as I have said before, is fundamentally sincere, and her view of Bill Patch has always interested me.

Almost everybody else saw him as the victim of an unscrupulous woman.

That was the view held by Mrs. Leeds, who knew nothing whatever about it; by Leeds, who may well have been biased owing to his non-success with Mrs. Harter at the picnic; and by the Kendals.

Lady Annabel was more impartial, and spoke severely and regretfully about them both. But even she said, “Such a pity—a nice young fellow like that.” Whereas when she referred to Mrs. Harter, she simply said, “Disgraceful—a woman of her age!”

Claire’s attitude was rather a curious one. She liked Bill Patch and she had always been prejudiced against Mrs. Harter, but she was one of the few people who said hardly anything, after all, about what was going on, and she snubbed Sallie even more severely than usual when Sallie dissected the situation in her habitual cold-blooded, clear-sighted way.

Martyn Ambrey, who took the line of having discovered from the very first that the personality of Mrs. Harter was one that presaged disaster, was, if possible, more intensely interested than his sister.

He exploited the whole thing, conversationally, letting off verbal fireworks in display of his own powers of analysis, and evidently hoping for nothing so much as a grand dramatic climax, such as the murder of Harter by Captain Patch or the suicide of Mrs. Harter.

“Which, of everything in the world, are about the most unlikely things to happen,” said Sallie scornfully. “Life is nothing but a series of anticlimaxes, one after another.”

“Anticlimax implies climax,” said Martyn, scoring.

Their clever flippancies were rather revealing. They would have seen Tragedy itself in terms of revue—clever, noisy, flippant, essentially unemotional, everything that, in 1924, was meant by “modern.”

“Harter will have to come to the show to-morrow night,” Martyn affirmed. “It’ll be frightfully interesting to see them all three together.”

“I should imagine that he will take his wife away to-morrow morning, if he has any sense of decency,” Claire replied coldly.

Martyn returned gravely that Harter, he was perfectly certain, had no sense of decency whatever.

“Besides,” said I, “the word ‘take’ is not one that I should apply to Mrs. Harter, least of all, perhaps, where her husband is concerned.”

“In any case, she’s bound to sing for us,” Christopher pointed out.

He was taking the play with intense seriousness, whereas the triangle of Bill, and Mrs. Harter, and Mrs. Harter’s husband scarcely interested him at all.

He saw it—when he did see it, that is to say—merely as something rather commonplace and faintly shocking.

“Well, I suppose I must give them the opportunity of behaving properly,” said Claire, referring to Mrs. Harter, and she wrote a note and sent it to Queen Street by hand, expressing a perfunctory hope that Mrs. Harter would “bring” her husband to the theatricals and the dance. None of us were exactly surprised, but all of us were perhaps more or less conscious of obscure excitement, when Mrs. Harter, in a laconic note, accepted Claire’s invitation on behalf of herself and Mr. Harter.

Chapter Thirteen

MARTYN AMBREY, evidently desirous of showing me what a strongly individual viewpoint he possessed, told me that evening that he felt “Mr. Harter,” as we all called him, in faint mimicry of his wife’s invariable phrase, to be very much more worth seeing than the theatricals themselves.

I did not tell him that I felt exactly the same. He would probably not have believed me.

By seven o’clock the house was full of people, most of them in a state of great disorder and agitation.

People were dressing, or even undressing, in almost every room.

At last Claire appeared in the hall in a very beautiful black velvet gown.

“They’ll be ready by nine o’clock,” she said confidently.

The curtain was to go up at nine. The performers, all except Mrs. Harter, had dined early at the Manor.

She and her husband arrived after dinner.

“Mr. and Mrs. Harter.”

Whatever her gaucheries, Mrs. Harter knew how to enter a room—an art that is not a common one nor—generally—an acquired one. She moved remarkably well.

Harter followed her.

The word “nondescript” is the one that first occurs to me, in attempting to describe him, and the next one is “unwholesome.”

He was a small man, sandy-haired, with a sallow, fretful face and narrow shoulders. He seemed to walk like a cat—almost, but never quite, on the tips of his toes. When his wife, in her abrupt, graceless fashion, said, by way of introduction, “This is Mr. Harter,” he bowed stiffly. Almost at once Mrs. Harter, obviously constrained, suggested that she ought to go and change her dress, and Claire took her away.

I gave Harter a drink.

He was a difficult man to talk with, noncommittal and without humor. It was a relief to him, without a doubt, when Mr. and Mrs. Leeds were announced.

I performed the usual introductions, but Leeds listens only to his own voice, never to that of anybody else.

He said, “How d’ye do,” and in the same breath went on to talk of the play, and ended his sentence with a hearty laugh and the pleasing observation:

“Amateur theatricals almost always lead to a scandal of some sort, that’s the beauty of them. Somebody runs off with somebody else’s wife—that sort of thing. I’ve seen it happen time and time again—”

“Mr. Harter, have another drink,” said I, with all the distinctness of utterance at my command. I saw—and no doubt Harter did, too—that Leeds jumped at the sound of his name. Then he looked at Mrs. Leeds, then again, hard, at Harter, and finally at me, with comically raised eyebrows. Harter remained entirely impervious.

“Let me see, you and I met once in Cairo, I believe,” said Mr. Leeds, “when our yacht was at Alexandria.”

“Yes,” said the little man, with a sort of neutral civility. “I believe that was so.”

“And your wife—”

“Oh, yes.”

There was a pause.

I had an unreasonable, and quite unfounded, premonition that the next thing would be the cocktail story.

It was a relief when Lady Annabel and the Rector arrived, and then the Kendals and other people.

The atmosphere was somehow jerky, almost apprehensive. No conversation seemed to have any continuity, and no movement any very definite purpose.

The third, and greatest, relief of the evening was when we all adjourned to our places in front of the stage and waited for the curtain to go up.

There were a good many people present. Some of the men, among them Harter, stood up at the end of the room.

Mrs. Harter’s song went very well. There was an instant in which I thought, with surprise, that she was nervous. Her eyes searched the audience intently for a moment, seeking to identify someone or something in the fashion that so unmistakably differentiates the amateur from the professional. Lady Annabel, beside me, said not a word, but I saw her eyebrows go up.

However, it wasn’t Bill Patch that Mrs. Harter was looking for—he was behind the scenes, and of course she must have known that. In less than a minute I saw by her face that she had discovered what she wanted, and she began her song and sang it very well.

I had curiosity enough to turn around and follow the direction that her glance had taken, and I saw that it must have been her husband, whose situation she had wanted to ascertain.

His little, sallow face was inexpressive, and I suddenly saw some justification for Martyn’s adjective—reptilian. There was something oddly and inexplicably baleful about the singularly unattractive Mr. Harter as he leaned against the wall and watched his wife on the stage.

After her song was over and had been vigorously applauded she went off the stage and I did not see her again during the play, but Dolly Kendal, who had a seat at the far end of a row, assured me afterward that Mrs. Harter sat in the wings, and that Bill Patch came and stood beside her in every interval when he was not on the stage.

There are always observant people to note these things and to retail them in conversation.

Of course the play was a great success. Amateur theatricals always are a great success. Sallie’s performance was quite brilliant and the others were good enough.

The chief success of the evening was achieved by Alfred, who overacted his part, uttered impromptu soliloquies, cut into other people’s speeches and played the clown in dumb show throughout a pathetic duet between Sallie and Martyn.

The audience, as a whole, adored him. He was applauded at every impossible moment, and the servants, at the back of the hall, screamed with laughter whenever he spoke. Mumma was beaming.

“I must say, Ahlfred has a great sense of the ridiculous,” she said appreciatively. “I hope we all have, it’s such a help, to see the funny side—but Ahlfred especially, from the time he was quite a little fellow, has always been able to keep us in a perfect roar.”

Finally the performers all sang “The Bulbul Ameer,” and Bill and Nancy took a call for “Author,” and then everybody said to everybody else how good it had all been, and the actors came off the stage still in costume and received compliments and congratulations.

A blaring atrocity, known as a “sensational fox-trot,” opened the dance. Claire had engaged a jazz band, and at intervals, to a sound of clattering fire-irons, they suddenly yelled in brassy staccato:

“Why—did—I kiss—that girl—

Why, oh! why, oh! why?”

It was ugly, discordant, essentially vulgar, and when all that was admitted it had its value. It was entrainant.

The brazen yelp of it had not torn the air more than three times before people were dancing.

Mrs. Kendal planted herself firmly beside me with her kindest air and began:

“Dancing has changed so much in the last four years. These modern dances don’t look to me like dancing at all.”

“Give me a real old-fashioned waltz,” said General Kendal.

And before I could say it for them—and it was on the tip of my tongue, too—they exclaimed together, “Now, the old Blue Danube—”

“Look at that,” said Mrs. Kendal, and she shook her head and made a sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth that quite adequately conveyed regret and disapproval.

“That” was of course Mrs. Harter, dancing with Bill Patch. They were in their pseudo-oriental dresses, but Bill’s red head was unmistakable and so was Mrs. Harter’s dancing.

They were together the whole evening. So were Chris and Nancy, Martyn and some unidentified young woman in mauve bead shoulder straps and a fragment of crimson chiffon, and Leeds and a very pretty widow who had come with their party. But nobody made distressed sounds about them.

“She dances quite beautifully,” I pointed out firmly to Mrs. Kendal, who replied in a tone of concession:

“If you call it dancing. I must say, I don’t think that either Puppa or I would very much care to see one of our girlies dancing like that.”

The suggested test of Puppa and Mumma’s sensibilities appeared to me to be a very remote contingency indeed.

At rather infrequent intervals one or other of the Miss Kendals lolloped cheerfully round the room with a stray partner, but, as Mrs. Kendal said:

“This modern way of dancing with one man the whole evening seems to me very odd. I shouldn’t care about it for any of my own flock.”

“But you know, Mumma, we don’t know any men who are in the least likely to ask us to dance with them for the whole evening,” observed Dolly Kendal very honestly.

“And one never does go to any dance, except perhaps at Christmas—struggling along down here,” added Aileen.

I thought Mumma looked rather disconcerted at so much candor, but she only said, “Well, well,” and put up her glasses to scrutinize Bill and Mrs. Harter more effectively.

Their performance was well worth watching, artistically speaking, although it was undoubtedly not that aspect of the case which presented itself to those people who appeared unable to take their eyes off them.

Harter himself was among these. He stood near one of the windows and never stirred. Claire asked if he cared to dance and he said, “No thanks, Lady Flower. I am not a dancing man.”

Later on I saw Sallie go up to him. I think that she actually asked him to dance, probably out of pure curiosity, but if so, he declined the privilege.

Sallie, looking very pretty, stayed beside him, talking and laughing, for a few moments, but I did not once see Harter smile or make any response except of the shortest and most formal kind.

He had a peculiar way of not looking at the person to whom he was—presumably—listening, and all the while that Sallie was with him he looked at Bill Patch and at his wife.

“Well, if you ask me, that little worm Harter will be filing his petition within a month,” said Mrs. Leeds cheerfully.

“If I were in his shoes, I’d take that woman home and thrash her,” charitably remarked old Carey, to whom she had spoken.

“She was pretty hot stuff, even in Egypt.”

“She! I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking about a decent young fellow like Patch. She’s out to make a fool of that lad and, by Jove, she’s succeeding. He’s bewitched.”

“Men always run after that sort of woman. They were all after her in Cairo. Hector would have been as bad as any of them if I hadn’t put my foot down.”

Mrs. Leeds looked up at her husband and laughed most good-naturedly.

It was quite evident that to her the whole thing was a joke, and a joke of the type that most appealed to her.

Where Lady Annabel saw sin she saw only vulgarity, and vulgarity amused her.

I am reminded that Lady Annabel was particularly gracious that evening. It was quite characteristic of her that once she had given us her advice and we had tacitly refused to take it, she should avoid any slightest hint of the “I-told-you-so” attitude that really was open to her.

She certainly looked at those two—but then so did everybody. She never said a word.

Lady Annabel has a wonderfully good memory both for names and for faces. (“I have heard it called a royal attribute,” she sometimes says smilingly.)

She remembers to inquire after sick relatives and she can always make some happily turned little reference to “the last time that I met you, on that very hot day at the station”—which makes one feel that the meeting in question left an indelible impression on her mind and was of real importance to her. It is all very pleasant and gratifying.

On the night of the party she told me that she thought it was all going most successfully and that the theatricals had been delightful. “Such a charming way of meeting one’s neighbors all together,” she said, looking around the room through her tortoise-shell lorgnette.

She was wearing a blue gown that was all over sequins and shimmered as she moved, and although Lady Annabel is a small woman, and very thin and spare, she looked majestic and altogether reminded me of Queen Elizabeth.

“I think I see a face that is strange to me,” she murmured, drawing her brows together in a rather puzzled way, and one knew that this was one of Lady Annabel’s very harmless little affectations, since there are of necessity a good many faces that are strange to her, even in Cross Loman.

I followed the direction of the lorgnette and saw, as I had somehow expected, that she was looking at Harter.

“That is Mr. Harter.”

“Oh,” said Lady Annabel.

She looked hard at him and then she said, “Oh,” again—but that was all.

Leeds was less forbearing.

“Sour-faced devil, isn’t he? Not that it’s much wonder. If he’d had any sense, he’d have stayed where he was. What the eyes don’t see the heart won’t grieve for.”

“I should have thought he’d got used to it by this time,” said Mrs. Leeds simply. “Do you remember Captain Tompkins and that unfortunate engineer—what was his name—who threw up his job and went home?”

Evidently the Leeds couple, who had, after all, seen something of Mrs. Harter in Egypt, looked upon Bill Patch as being one of a series.

I reflected that perhaps they knew more about it than we did. Provincials take these things so seriously.

“I’m going to take that wretched chap to have a drink,” Leeds declared. “Utter little outsider though he is, I’m sorry for him.”

Mrs. Leeds, laughing loudly, called out, “Fellow-feeling, I suppose?” after him as he went off. I thought it to Lady Annabel’s credit that not a muscle of her face had moved during the whole of this rather crude conversation.

It was one of the few hot nights of the year, and sooner or later everybody drifted into the garden. I went there with Mary Ambrey, and we found our way to the furthest summerhouse, one that has fallen into disuse. The summerhouse proper, a strangely obvious little trysting place, was being monopolized by Christopher and Mrs. Fazackerly.

I suppose that every single couple who went into the garden that night must have passed the summerhouse, glanced inside it, smiled sympathetically and gone on.

Christopher and Nancy sat in two deck chairs, her frock and shoes and hair all looking equally silvery in the moonlight, and they were talking in low, happy voices.

“That’s all right,” I said, and Mary agreed. Perhaps she was conscious, as I certainly was, of something rather perfunctory in the tone of her assent. She added after a moment:

“It really is quite plain sailing for them, isn’t it?”

“Unless you call Nancy’s father a rock in the way.”

“Nancy isn’t a Victorian schoolgirl. I don’t think they have much to contend with.”

“So much the better.”

“Oh yes,” said Mary, her tone rather enigmatical.

Then she suddenly burst out:

“It’s all so upside down! Christopher and Nancy are dears, both of them, but you know as well as I do that they are neither of them people of tremendous significance. Yet one wishes them well and wants to see it all happily settled. But those other two people—and they are real people, both of them—are outside the law, and there’s no possible happy ending in sight, anywhere, for them. And—one doesn’t know what to wish.”

It was unlike Mary to be vehement. Although she had not raised her voice at all, she had spoken with great intensity.

I put my hand on her arm.

“Look!”

Two people were coming down the path, where no Japanese lanterns had found their way, but which was crossed by a clear patch of white moonlight.

“Not Sallie, is it?”

The dress was almost Sallie’s, and the coins on it clinked together slightly, and the long gauze veil hung in motionless folds in the unusual stillness of the night air—but it wasn’t Sallie—of course.

Sallie is less tall than Mrs. Harter and her movements have the lightness and abruptness of extreme youth.

Mrs. Harter’s way of walking was unmistakable, and even in the moonlight Bill’s red hair was easily recognizable.

They were walking very slowly, not speaking. He was looking at her, whose head was bent.

Just as I realized that they could not see us, in the dark little summerhouse, Mrs. Harter stopped dead and looked up at him. Mary sprang to her feet with a decided movement and at the same moment we both heard Diamond Harter’s voice very distinctly, that voice that Bill Patch had called a “carrying” voice.

“To-morrow, when we go up Loman Hill to the crossroads,” she said.

Almost before she had finished speaking—but not quite—she heard us move; and she and Bill walked on, out of the patch of white light into the darkness of the overhanging syringa bushes.

Was it a tryst, or a promise, or a decision? I have never known, and neither Mary nor I spoke about what we had heard as we went back to the house again.

I have my theory, of course. Almost all my knowledge of Mrs. Harter is theoretical. I think that Bill had asked her for a decision and that she was deferring it until the next day, until they went “up Loman Hill to the crossroads” once more. I always imagine that, in spite of Harter, and certainly in spite of the people who looked at them so often, and with so much disapproval, they deliberately forgot about the future for that one evening.

Both of them must have realized that a turning point had been reached. Harter had come home, he had made it perfectly clear that in no circumstances would he give his wife her freedom, and she had, I afterwards learned, made it equally clear that, whether she went away with Bill or not, she had no intention of returning to her husband again.

It was Bill Patch, with his strange mixture of a belief in God and a strong sense of the “unsportingness” of adultery, who saw the necessity for a decision. To Mrs. Harter I am quite certain that the issue would have been a simple one. All her life she had gone for what she wanted with a singular and unusual freedom of aim, in so far as the opinion of other people was always a matter of complete and genuine indifference to her. Neither by education nor by temperament was she a woman of ideals, and it seems to me the measure of her regard for Bill Patch that she was prepared to let his be a determining factor in their future.

They did not return to the ballroom again until the last dance of the evening was being played.

It is part of the incongruity that was so marked a feature of the whole affair that for that last dance the players chose to repeat the “sensational fox-trot” with which the evening had begun—that loud, swaggering, jerky abomination that yet held its third-rate appeal:

“Why—did—I kiss that girl—

Why, oh! why, oh! why?”

And Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter danced it together.

I watched them all the while this time almost as Mrs. Kendal herself might have done, and Mrs. Harter’s eyes were shining like a girl’s, and I remembered Martyn Ambrey and his—“That woman hard?”

Bill’s young face was that of a boy in love until one looked at it very closely, and then it was that of a man who has found security.

I have always had a fancy that Bill knew that evening which way Diamond Harter would eventually decide, but that he had consciously put the knowledge away from him, and was simply, as he had once said to Nancy Fazackerly, “so extraordinarily happy, in spite of it all.”

It was after three o’clock when the Kendals, who are generally the last to leave any entertainment, prepared to go home.

“I shall enjoy a drive in the moonlight,” said Mumma, pleasantly sentimental. “Don’t you think, Puppa dear, that a drive in the moonlight will be too delightful? It will remind us of our honeymoon days,” said Mumma, smiling delightfully.

Then a contretemps arose.

The car that had been hired to take old Carey and his daughter home had not appeared at the door, and Christopher, returning from the stable yard, reported the driver to be lying helplessly intoxicated in a corner of the old cowhouse.

Christopher said that the lad deserved instant dismissal and that he would make a point of seeing that he got it, but he had seized the opportunity of bringing round his own two-seater and was eager to take Nancy home in it.

“Oh, but Father—”

“I could easily come back for him.”

Old Carey, however, had flown into a passion.

He used fearful language and said that he should walk every step of the way home, which threat he evidently supposed to constitute a terrible revenge upon the drunken driver, Nancy, Christopher, and everybody who had helped to enrage him.

“He’s in one of his rather difficult moods, I’m afraid,” said Nancy aside.

It was Harter, of all unlikely people, who suddenly suggested a solution.

“The car is only a Ford, isn’t it? I’ll drive it back to the garage—it’s next door to our rooms in Queen Street—and I will drop Mr. —”

“Carey—”

“Mr. Carey and this lady on the way.”

“No room,” growled Carey, determined not to be appeased.

“Plenty of room,” everybody assured him.

“Three at the back and one beside the driver,” said Harter, who appeared to have become suddenly articulate.

I remember that it flashed across my mind just then, casually, that he had been drinking a good deal during the evening and that this had evidently had the effect of rendering him sociable.

“Mr. Carey and his daughter and Mrs. Harter in the back and myself and Captain Patch in front,” said Harter calmly.

There was an electric silence.

Then Mrs. Kendal, tactfully filling up the significant pause, inquired brightly:

“Then can you drive a car, Mr. Harter?”

They settled it at last, but Christopher held firm to his intention of taking Nancy home in the two-seater, and they went off, overtaking and passing General Kendal, in his tightly packed Standard, before the lodge gates were reached.

Harter brought the hired Ford round to the front door, old Carey, still grumbling, was helped in, and Mrs. Harter got in beside him.

Captain Patch hesitated for a moment.

“Get in,” said little Harter coldly.

He was himself already at the wheel and he sketched a slight gesture which unmistakably invited Bill to the place beside him.

It crossed my mind then that he was determined to speak to Bill, and I think Mrs. Harter thought so, too.

She said, “Come on, then,” and Bill came, and they all drove off together.

Chapter Fourteen

IT WAS less than ten minutes later that we all heard the frantic hooting of a motor horn again and again.

Claire was already in her room, Mary Ambrey halfway upstairs, and the indefatigable Sallie and Martyn still talking in the hall.

“What’s that?”

Martyn threw open the hall doors and we listened, but the hooting had ceased and for a moment there was no sound. Then from far away we heard that indescribable medley of noises, broken and piercing, that unmistakably denotes calamity.

“An accident?” said Sallie in a doubtful way.

Martyn, who had stepped outside, suddenly dashed off down the moonlit drive.

“I’ll just see—I’ll come back—” promised Sallie, and she, too, was off.

Mary Ambrey had come downstairs again and was standing beside me. She never says to a crippled man, as other people do, “I’ll come back”—that promise which no one ever keeps.

“It’s a clear night—no one could have come to grief, surely,” she said.

“I hope to God that Harter was fit to drive a car,” said I, remembering that sudden loosening of Harter’s tongue.

“Did you think—”

“No, not really. But he did drink, during the evening. Fellows who’ve been in the East—”

“There’s a car coming up here.”

There was no need to comment to one another upon the speed with which that car could be heard tearing up the avenue.

Mary gave me her arm to the door and we saw the Standard, brought to a standstill so violently and so abruptly that her brakes jarred with a grinding noise.

It was General and Mrs. Kendal.

“They want help—just down by the bridge,” said the General hoarsely. “Harter has had a smash with a hired car—it’s very bad.”

“Who?” said Mary.

“Carey and—and poor young Patch. And Mrs. Harter is hurt, too, but she’s conscious.”

Claire came down and Mary turned to her.

The General leaned forward out of his seat.

“Don’t let the women come. It’s ghastly. Patch was killed on the spot. The spare wheel came down on his head—broke his neck. They’re taking them to the cottage hospital—all but Harter. He’s down there—he somehow escaped. Old Carey is jammed between the car and the parapet—dead, they think, but they can’t get him out. Can you send down one or two of the men?”

Claire had already rung the bell violently, and we heard the servants coming hurriedly. General Kendal helped his wife out of the car. She was white-faced and shaking. We knew afterwards that the girls had been told to walk home from the scene of the accident, but that poor Mrs. Kendal had valiantly refused to let her husband come back to us by himself.

“Let me leave her here. I’ll take the men back with me,” said the General.

The two men who were ready first sprang into the car, and when I got in myself I found Claire already there.

“Get out, Claire,” I said abruptly. “It’s not fit for you, and you couldn’t help them.”

“I am coming,” said Claire tensely.

“I tell you, there’s nothing you can do.”

“I can do as much as you can,” she retorted.

She was quite obviously on the verge of becoming hysterical.

I looked at Mary in despair. There was no time to lose, but to have Claire creating a panic among the terrible wreckage at the bridge was unthinkable.

General Kendal took her by the shoulders and half pushed, half lifted her, on to the steps.

Mary Ambrey, quite resolutely, did the rest.

Claire was screaming and struggling in her grasp as we turned and drove away.

Mrs. Kendal, a woman of great determination, was able to command herself in a very few moments and to give Mary a fairly lucid account of what had happened. Her story, and later on, of course, the evidence at the inquest, made the facts clear enough.

At the bottom of the avenue is a very sharp turn into the high road, which was negotiated by General Kendal with his usual excessive caution. Immediately beyond it, a small bridge spans the river running beneath the road, protected only by white wooden railings and a low stone parapet.

“We heard the Ford behind us, and Puppa said to me, ‘I hope they won’t try and pass us on the bridge.’ Those were his very words,” said Mrs. Kendal to Mary. “I looked round, as I always do, so as to tell him if anything was coming, and I saw the Ford car, as plainly as possible in the moonlight, take the corner of your drive going much too fast. Oh, much too fast. I immediately said to my husband, ‘Oh, what a dangerous thing to do. I don’t believe that Mr. Harter knows how to drive,’ I said. Of course, Puppa couldn’t look round himself, but I did, and I saw the accident happen.” Her face whitened again dreadfully, but she went on, although she sobbed now and then. “I suppose he tried to right the car after taking the corner so sharply, for it seemed to swerve across the road to the left and then suddenly to the right. That was just as they reached the bridge. It seemed to happen in a flash, and yet one saw it coming.... The car crashed straight into the railings. I saw something spin up into the air—large and dark—and come down again, and the car turned over sideways and hung over the water half on the road, half in the air, somehow caught in the railings.”

Poor Mrs. Kendal was shuddering violently. Her account of the tragedy was afterwards proved to be substantially correct. The wheel tracks in the dust of the high road accurately followed the lines that she had described. The large, dark thing that had flown up and come down again was the spare wheel, somehow ripped clean off the car. It was that which had killed Bill Patch.

Harter had been flung clear and had landed in the mud of the river bed, nearly dry at that time of year. He was not hurt. The two on the back seat—old Carey and Mrs. Harter—were flung against the stone parapet. They picked up the woman on the road, screaming. Carey, who was probably killed on the spot, had somehow been caught in the wreckage. (When I got down there, Mrs. Harter had been taken away, into the cottage hospital, which mercifully was not far off.)

“They got her out almost at once,” said Mrs. Kendal. “We had stopped the car and Puppa ran back, but I wouldn’t let the girls come. Ahlfred came, of course, but I said to the girls, ‘No, girls.’ And they stayed by the car. There seemed to be people there in a moment—I saw Major Ambrey, but, thank Heaven, Nancy was safe at home. Oh, poor little thing—who is to go to her?”

“I will,” said Claire wildly.

Loman Cottage is three miles from the Manor House and the chauffeur had gone down to the scene of the accident.

“They will have sent for her from the cottage hospital,” Mary said gently. “Is old Mr. Carey—?”

Mrs. Kendal nodded, the tears running down her face.

“They said he must be. They—they couldn’t move the car so as to free him.”

“They’ll have moved it now, with the men. I’m going down there,” said Claire suddenly.

“No, don’t!”

“I must help.”

“Claire, you can’t help.”

“I can help Nancy Fazackerly.”

“Sallie is there, I think. I wouldn’t let my girls come—I have always shielded them most tenderly from dreadful sights and sounds—but I saw Sallie, I think.”

“Yes,” said Mary. “She went with her brother.”

Perhaps Mary, too, would have liked the selfish satisfaction of shielding her children from reality; but she does not indulge in it.

“Sallie!” exclaimed Claire. “What can a child like Sallie do? She has no business to be there at all. I shall go myself.”

They had a trying time with her. She kept on saying that she must go and starting up wildly to ring for her maid and order her hat and cloak to be brought, and then she broke into tears again and said, “The only thing is, am I fit for it?”

At least it afforded Mary the relief of occupation. In the end she telephoned down to the cottage hospital for news and to ask whether Mrs. Fazackerly were there.

Yes, she was there. Major Ambrey had fetched her. Old Carey was actually breathing when they brought him in, but had died without regaining consciousness within five minutes of his admission.

Mrs. Harter?

She was badly bruised, but by some miracle had escaped serious injury. She would be detained for the night, but the doctor could find nothing the matter with her beyond severe shock.

Harter himself had not appeared at the hospital at all.

“Then,” said Mary, “has anyone—is anyone—with Mrs. Harter?”

There was a momentary silence at the other end of the wire. Then:

“The nurse is within call, of course. But, naturally, there’s a great deal to be done. She seems more or less stunned.”

“I see,” said Mary.

She hung up the receiver without mentioning the name of the dead boy.

Claire upbraided her for that.

“But what could I have asked?” said Mary sadly.

“It may be a ghastly mistake—I can’t believe it’s true—why he was laughing and talking in this very hall less than two hours ago. I can’t believe it,” Claire wailed.

But Mary could believe it. She told me afterward that, from the instant in which she had heard that Bill Patch was dead, it seemed to her that there was something inevitable in that arbitrary solution to the affair.

When General Kendal brought me back to the Manor House—and, after all, we were at the bridge less than an hour—Sallie was with me. She had helped most pluckily and sensibly, with a silent efficiency that spoke admirably for her training.

Martyn had remained with the A. A. men who were beside the wrecked car.

The early morning light was flooding the windows and there was in the air the curious chill that is sometimes the preliminary, in England, to a very fine summer day.

The faces of those three women, waiting there, were ghastly, and Claire every now and then had a paroxysm of sobbing and low, muffled screaming.

General Kendal took his wife away. He had already told me, what was indeed sufficiently obvious, that she would inevitably be obliged to give evidence at the inquest, and the poor old fellow was already dreading the ordeal for her and hoping vehemently that the fear of it would not occur to her until the last possible moment.

The Ambreys were staying in the house, and Sallie said, after one look at Mary:

“Mother, won’t you come upstairs?”

Mary’s face was gray. She only asked me two questions:

“Who is with Nancy?”

“Dolly Kendal—good girl! Alfred went and fetched one of them, and she is going to spend the night with her.”

“Mrs. Harter? Does she know?”

“She hasn’t spoken, but they say she’s been conscious the whole time.”

“Mother, come,” said Sallie, and they went upstairs together, Sallie holding her mother’s hand as I had never seen her do since she was a tiny child.

Poor Claire cried and asked incessant questions, to which she herself supplied most of the answers, and walked up and down, and threw herself backward and forward in a deep armchair, and finally turned absolutely faint from sheer nervous exhaustion.

Her maid got her upstairs and into bed at last.

There was nothing left of the night, but a ghastly interval of waiting, and silence, and realization, followed.

I had seen Bill Patch—unrecognizable—for one instant only....

And I had seen old Carey, my neighbor for years, crushed and broken, to all intents and purposes dead....

I had seen Harter, the stranger whom we none of us knew except as the husband of Diamond Ellison, after the accident.

And it was his face which was to haunt me longest.

The theatrical litter had all been cleared away out of sight. The servants, white-faced, went about their duties as usual.

Claire remained in her room.

Quite early in the forenoon, Sallie and Mary Ambrey went down to the hospital. They saw Nancy, who was pathetically courageous, and heard that she had telegraphed to Bill’s father.

They asked for Mrs. Harter.

“She is coming round in the most extraordinary way,” said the little nurse, full of importance. “Doctor says she must have an iron constitution. But she won’t let anybody go near her—not her husband or anyone. Strange, isn’t it? She’ll be going out in a day or two; there’s nothing to keep her in for.”

The woman dropped her voice.

“She’ll be wanted to give evidence at the inquest. Dreadful, isn’t it? Doctor says they’re holding it over till to-morrow on her account.”

I had already been notified as to the time and place of the inquest and enjoined to attend it. That Harter’s condition at the time of the smash would be strictly inquired into was already a matter of certainty.

All that day people came up to the house, insisting upon talking about it all. I saw only Lady Annabel, who walked in through a French window, without going to the hall door at all.

Even she did not touch upon the side of things that had so lately absorbed all her attention. The nearest that she came to it was to say that if ever anything seemed like the judgment of Heaven—and there she broke off, with the tears pouring down her face.

Afterward she went up to see Claire. They do not like one another very much, but it is always an unconscious relief to Claire to pour out the story of her own reactions, to anybody at all.

She was better after Lady Annabel’s visit and came downstairs.

Late in the evening, Christopher took the car to the station to meet Bill’s father. He bore many offers of hospitality, but the old man, perhaps not unnaturally, preferred to stay alone at the inn. He had not brought his young wife.

“He is to see Nancy to-morrow, after the inquest,” Christopher told me.

He hesitated a little, and I could guess what was in his mind.

“She thinks that he knows nothing at all, about poor Bill and that woman. I suppose there’s no chance of anything cropping up, at this inquest?”

“Surely not. Of course, the jury will be composed of local men and they’re bound to know that there’s been talk. But I don’t see how it affects the manner of the accident, which is what they have to find a verdict about.”

“Death by misadventure,” said Christopher slowly, and without much conviction.

“H’m! There’s the question of contributory negligence, or worse. Did you see anything of Harter that evening?”

“Not much. Do you mean that he was the worse for drink?”

“Between ourselves, Chris, the fellow had undoubtedly been drinking, but as far as I could tell he was all right when he left the house.”

“Then I can’t for the life of me understand how it happened. The ground was dry, there was no possibility of a skid, and nothing coming towards them in the road, to give any possible reason for a swerve.”

“The steering gear?”

“Nothing the matter with it. I was there when the men righted the car. They looked to see.”

“The chief evidence, beside that of Mrs. Kendal, who actually witnessed the whole thing, will be Mrs. Harter’s, then?”

“Good Lord, are they going to make her give evidence?”

“How can they help it? She, and Harter himself, are the survivors of the accident.”

Christopher groaned.

“That little reptile, and a worthless woman! And a good fellow like that,” said Christopher simply. “It would wring tears from a stone to hear the poor old father talking about him, saying what a good boy he was, and how fond the little stepbrothers were of him. It seems he was clever, too, although you’d never have guessed it—a nice fellow like that,” said Christopher simply.

“Well,” I said, “it’s the cutting of the Gordian knot, for Bill, all right.”

The day and the night that preceded the inquest seemed endless. There was no possibility of restoring any sort of balance to everyday life, until that was over.

Mary asked again if Mrs. Harter would see her, and was again refused.

“She still hasn’t seen her husband,” said the nurse, very much shocked.

She was quite newly arrived in the district.

“What is she doing?” asked Sallie, her eyes wide.

“Nothing. She’s up, you know—she’s got to get up her strength for this afternoon, poor thing. It’ll be an ordeal for her, like. She’s just sitting by the window, with her hands crossed on her lap, so.”

Just as she had sat at her window in the Queen Street lodgings, Mary remembered.

Then Sallie surprised even her mother by suddenly inquiring of the nurse, “How is Mr. Harter?”

One rather wonders if it wasn’t the first time that anyone had thought of asking that, since the accident.

Even the nurse, Mary said, seemed a little bit startled.

“Oh, he wasn’t hurt, you know,” she began.

“I know,” said Sallie—“but I suppose it’s been a shock for him, too—worse, in fact, for him.”

“Of course, of course,” the little nurse agreed. “He’s—he’s a very quiet man, isn’t he? Kept his nerve well, and all that—which makes it all the more strange he should have had such an accident. But there’s no accounting. He’s been up here a good deal, of course—hoping his wife would come to reason, I dare say. I told him that in his place, I’d simply go up, and walk in on her. It’s all nerves, that makes her say she won’t see him. ‘If I were you,’ I told him straight—”

She began the typical hospital nurse’s monologue. Sallie, the medical student, quite ruthlessly interrupted her by saying good morning, and walking out of the room.

“I had to ask about Harter,” she explained afterwards to Mary. “Can you imagine what it must be like, to feel responsible for the death of two people? Especially if one hated one of them.”

“Do you suppose that he hated Bill?”

“I know he did. I saw him watching Bill and Mrs. Harter, on the night of ‘The Bulbul Ameer’—Oh, doesn’t all that seem ages ago?—And, honestly, they did try him pretty high.”

Mary could not deny it.

“It strikes me,” said Sallie, quite quietly, “that it’s on the cards that friend Harter may actually find himself committed for trial, on a charge of manslaughter.”

Nobody else had dared to say it.

And Sallie was right, as she almost always is.

It was, of course, a local jury, and the coroner was a local man. The state of affairs was perfectly well-known to them.

The coroner was a decent little fellow—and the dead boy’s father was in court. There was not a word spoken to connect his name with that of Mrs. Harter.

With her, he dealt very briefly and mercifully, and she looked ill enough to justify it. Her answers were given almost inaudibly, but always straight to the point. When the coroner thanked her, and said that would do, she walked straight out of the room, and went away.

She passed quite close to me, and I saw her face before she had pulled down her veil. It looked as though she had not slept for a long, long while.

Then Mrs. Kendal was called.

Her account of what she had seen was, of course, emphatic, detailed, and circumstantially accurate. She made it perfectly clear that the accident was due entirely to Harter’s driving. The question of his sobriety was pressed very hard, and the medical evidence from the cottage hospital was damaging, on that point. I was asked if he had been drinking during the evening, and so were one or two others. None of the evidence was absolutely damning, but none of it could create a favorable impression.

Harter’s own manner was utterly against him, too. One could see the jury disliking him more and more.

His impassivity was absolute—after all, he was a solicitor himself—but it struck one very disagreeably, as the coroner dwelt on the frightful results of the smash, as he had not done with any of the other witnesses.

Asked whether he had been drinking during the evening, Harter replied in the affirmative, but denied that he had been anything but sober.

He gave a very unemphatic account of the accident and “supposed that the car had skidded.” It was not a very tenable theory and it broke down under the examination of the A. A. men.

Harter listened to it all with his unwholesome little face quite unmoved. He must have expected the verdict, for when at last it came he did not move a muscle.

He was formally committed for trial at the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter.

Chapter Fifteen

THE thing, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there. The climax had come. It was—it should have been—all over. But the drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to anticlimax. Things go on ... one can’t pause, as at the end of a chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval.

The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights that had to be lived through.

Harter’s trial came on in a very short while and he was found guilty of manslaughter.

He got five years for it.

They said that he smiled at the verdict.

Sallie and Martyn Ambrey both went away from home on the day following that of the inquest. One could feel in both of these young and yet highly evolved people the strong, instinctive resistance with which they opposed the possible effect of tragedy upon themselves. They were afraid of being made to feel emotion, and yet they were afraid, too, of finding themselves out to be incapable of emotion. They hurried away from Cross Loman.

In a little while, I imagine that the whole thing will have become purely objective to both of them, a story to be told, something entirely outside themselves.

Claire, with her powers of imagination, suffered vicariously, but as usual she mixed it all up with her own private and peculiar grievances. Several times she asked why Bill, who was young and had all life before him should have been taken, while she herself, for whom life held nothing, and who was infinitely weary, should have been left?

There is, of course, no answer to that kind of questions. I never quite understand why people ask them.

Lady Annabel Bending, who would certainly get out of her pony cart and walk up the mildest slope in order to spare her fat pony, made, on the whole, the most brutal comment of any that I heard made, in her gentle, relentless voice. She said:

“I suppose that woman is satisfied, now that she’s succeeded in causing the death of a young and talented man, after mixing him up in a vulgar scandal and doing her best to ruin him, body and soul, and bringing her husband to disgrace. I suppose she’s satisfied.”

She said this to me, but Mary Ambrey was in the room. She looked at Lady Annabel with her straight-gazing dark eyes.

“However much Mrs. Harter may be responsible for—and, after all, she wasn’t the only person concerned in the affair—it’s she who’s been left to face the music,” said Mary. “As for being satisfied, Lady Annabel, it’s a figure of speech in any case, I suppose, but it doesn’t apply to Mrs. Harter. If she’d broken every Commandment there is, she’d be paying for it now—over and over again.”

Lady Annabel did not look pleased. No doubt there was an obscure connection in her mind between the Ten Commandments and the Rector’s official position.

“My words were, of course, not meant to be taken literally,” she said. “Probably Mrs. Harter is shocked at what has happened, now, as we are all apt to be shocked by consequences when they are sufficiently serious and unexpected. But I must say I have very little pity for a woman who deliberately sets out to wreck the life of a man younger than herself.”

Mary turned rather white, but she had the courage to say:

“Bill Patch was a free agent. Apart from everything else, we ought to remember that he was a free agent. It’s she who’s left to pay the penalty, but it isn’t fair that she should bear the blame for both.”

And then Claire said, “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

So far as surface values went, it was a rebuke to Mary. But Mary’s values are not surface ones, and she is quite clear-headed about them. And I believe that Claire herself, in a way, understood better than she would let herself appear to understand. She has far too much intuition not to know that Bill and Mrs. Harter had been involved, together, in an adventure of real spiritual and emotional significance, and that it was Bill who had been allowed the easy way out and Mrs. Harter who, as Mary said, had been left to face the music alone.

Claire understood, to a certain extent. But she had always disliked Mrs. Harter, and it was not in her to accord to a woman she disliked the recognition of spiritual and emotional significance.

Lady Annabel, who bent her head in acquiescence to the “de mortuis” clause, was on another plane of vision altogether. She really couldn’t see any but the surface values.

Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter had sinned; and she was quite prepared to judge and condemn them both. But Captain Patch was dead, and so he could no more be spoken of except with pity and regret. Mrs. Harter, who was still alive, retained full responsibility for everything.

“It is a frightful affair altogether,” said Lady Annabel, “to have caused the death of a young man like that, in the very midst of the errors into which she had led him, without any time for preparation.... Well, I suppose she is satisfied now.”

Even Mary did not again attempt to move her from that.

The Kendals, who will undoubtedly parler pour ne rien dire round the whole subject at frequent intervals for the rest of their lives, nevertheless showed a great deal of warm feeling, so that one felt their narrow-mindedness to be oddly neutralized by their kindheartedness.

They had been fond of Bill Patch, and the girls, at least, in their strangely prolonged youthfulness of outlook, had never seen beyond the “flirtation-with-a-married-woman” indictment. Mumma herself, in all sincerity, cried heartily and said that in the grave all things were forgotten.

It will be no thanks to her if they are, however. She will always see the whole thing in terms of a sensational scandal, and it is thus that she will always show it to others. And in the end it is quite probable that the four Kendal girls will dismiss the subject, in their rather solemn way, by the formula: “Mumma says she would rather that we did not talk about it.”

The lowest level of all was that upon which Mr. and Mrs. Leeds took—it could scarcely be called their stand, but their very fleeting and transitory foothold.

When they had accorded to death the conventional tributes of an instant of seriousness, a hastily-made-up face of shocked dismay, and a meaningless ejaculation or two, they were inclined to facetiousness.

They enjoyed the scandal of it all with that instinctive vulgarity of outlook that characterizes a certain type of unimaginative mind.

Leeds told the cocktail story over and over again and Mrs. Leeds chaffed him publicly about having admired “that woman” in Egypt. Away from Cross Loman probably they magnified their acquaintance with Mrs. Harter, wherever the notoriety of her name had penetrated, into an intimacy. Leeds, in particular, was like that.

Mrs. Fazackerly, to whom, after all, the shock of the accident had been a double one, behaved very gallantly. She attended the inquest, and she actually saw the father of Bill Patch and talked with him about his son. Neither of them referred to Mrs. Harter at all. Then Mrs. Fazackerly put Loman Cottage into the hands of the house agents, stored all her belongings and came to us. Claire, who is at her best in a crisis, went herself to fetch her. The last of her opposition to Christopher’s marriage went by the board when poor Nancy, her final responsibilities over, had a bad nervous breakdown.

Claire nursed her.

“Poor little thing,” said Claire. “Women who have never really suffered are very apt to go to pieces when the first contact with reality comes. I could never do that myself. One is as one’s made, of course. I suppose that very few women of my years have been called upon to go through all that I have gone through in my life. But I’ve never broken down yet. If I had, I suppose that I should have gone mad by this time.”

She did not make that speech in front of Christopher, and her care of Nancy was rewarded by Christopher’s rather inarticulate, but quite evident, gratitude and admiration.

As soon as possible, Christopher Ambrey and Mrs. Fazackerly were married, very quietly indeed, in London, and he took her away to the South of France.

He was to rejoin his regiment abroad early in the following year, and she, of course, was going with him.

The last thing she said to me—and her childlike eyes regained their radiance as she said it—was:

“It’s the most wonderful chance of beginning life all over again that anyone was ever given. The things that used to worry me need never worry me again, and I shan’t ever be frightened any more.”

And with that—the last reference that I ever heard her make to the past—one felt that the old ghosts of those oft-quoted rages of Fazackerly, thrower of plates, and the tyrannies of old Carey, and his eternal criminological discussions, were laid for ever. Even the rather strenuous economies that had for so long been part and parcel of life at Loman Cottage melted away of themselves in Nancy’s determination that Christopher should be as happy as she was herself.

As far as I know, both of them continue to be happy, in their own way, and according to their own capacity for happiness.

They will be a great deal abroad, for some years to come, and Claire is gradually turning the battery of her correspondence on to Nancy instead of Christopher. Nancy’s replies are far more adequate than Christopher’s ever were.

“In the end,” says Sallie, “she’ll get on better with cousin Claire than anybody. Far better than any really thoroughly truthful person could ever do.”

It is all, in a way, very like the old literary convention of the good people getting married and living happily ever after and the bad ones coming to smash.

And yet there is another way of looking at it—Mary Ambrey’s way.

It was after Martyn and Sallie had gone away, after Christopher’s marriage, and after I had been abroad with Claire for nearly nine weeks. Mary had remained in Cross Loman. It was a very warm spring day, and I had driven her up Loman Hill to the crossroads. The pony stopped of his own accord and turned round, and we looked at the distant hills and the red church tower. It was then that Mary told me she could never come there any more without thinking, with a vividness of thought that amounted to pain, of Mrs. Harter and of Captain Patch.

“Neither can I,” said I.

“The first—no, it was the second—walk that they took together was to this place.”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“Diamond Harter?”

“Yes,” said Mary.

“I didn’t know that she had ever told anybody anything.”

“It was the only time that she ever did, I think, and nobody else knows that—I went down to Queen Street the day of the inquest.”

“Did you, Mary?”

“I wasn’t the only one,” she said quickly. “After the accident, do you remember that they’d taken her to the cottage hospital and she was detained there till the very day of the inquest? Two or three other people asked for her then, I know—the Rector, and Nancy Fazackerly, and, I think, Mrs. Leeds.”

I ejaculated at the last name.

“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.

I know of no dignified equivalent that can convey that implication.

We translate life in terms of our own inner values ... and Bill and Mrs. Harter were capable of tragedy, and it came to them, and most of us condemned them, and some of us only pitied.

It is over, and yet it will never be over. It continues to live, in the personality of Diamond Harter, and, indeed, in the personalities of us all.

THE END

Novels of Adventure

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MOUNTAINS OF MYSTERY

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Craig Kennedy, classic and phenomenally popular figure of detective fiction, here appears in a series of stories the scheme of which includes an ingenious and absolutely new twist, which invests them with all the lure of cross-word puzzles as well as that of first-class mysteries.

CLOTHES MAKE THE PIRATE

BY HOLMAN DAY

A rollicking sea yarn of Colonial times in Boston, in which a timorous but romantically minded tailor masquerades as Dixy Bull, pirate and terror of the Maine coast. The results of his escapades are as unexpected as they are crammed with hilarity and misadventure.

HARPER & BROTHERS

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Harper Fiction

DESTINY

BY RUPERT HUGHES

A startling and unusual plot—even for Rupert Hughes. Two angels accept the challenge to descend to earth and live our life, putting behind them all their divine wisdom. They meet, but do not recognise each other, and their lives become tempestuously entangled.

THE LION TAMER

BY CARROLL E. ROBB

In spite of his name, “Lion Tamer” was oppressed by fear—a fear that nearly wrecked his happiness. How he learned at last to face life and to beat it is a profound and dramatic story of fundamental human emotions.

MIRACLE

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This is the story of how Donovan Steele, turned by the betrayal of the woman he loved into a modern Timon of Athens without love or pity, regained both his physical and his spiritual vision through a miracle at the wonder-working shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré in old Quebec.

MRS. HARTER

BY E. M. DELAFIELD

In this story of Diamond Harter, her disastrous attempt at marriage, and her subsequent life in the small English village which half resentfully received her, Mrs. Delafield adds a new and perhaps the finest novel to her already distinguished list.

HARPER & BROTHERS, Publishers

Established 1817

See HARPER’S MAGAZINE for Announcements of the better Schools and Colleges

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

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Table of Contents

Mrs. Harter

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

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