Chapter V: Part 5

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!”