Chapter III: Part 3

“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.