Mrs. Harter

Mrs. Harter

By
E. M. Delafield
Author of “The Heel of Achilles,”
“The Optimist,” Etc.

Publishers
Harper & Brothers
New York and London

Mrs. Harter

First Edition
c-z

To Phyllida

Mrs. Harter

Chapter One

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

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

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

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

Claire lives upon the edge of a volcano.

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

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

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

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

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

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

She generally speaks in capital letters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few of our discussions ever survive this stage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martyn is twenty-one and at Oxford.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s try it,” said Claire, eagerly.

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

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

It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen.

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

No Kendals are ever dashing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Would it?” Sallie remarked, dryly.

She caught her mother’s eye and relented.

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

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

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

“Here goes,” said Dolly Kendal, recklessly.

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

The first slip read aloud by Martyn was my own.

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

“Nancy Fazackerly,” said Mary, instantly.

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

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

“Elusive is very good,” said Sallie.

“You’ve got it?” her brother asked.

“Of course.”

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

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

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

Martyn considered her gravely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I saw the Kendals exchange glances with one another.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a short, deathly silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do me,” said Sallie, shamelessly.

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

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

“Only very slightly.”

“All the more interesting.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

She can afford to accept them.

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

“One minute.”

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

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

That was Martyn’s version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t agree.”

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

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

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

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

Sallie looked intelligently inquiring.

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

Claire shook her head.

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

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

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

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

“She’s musical, is she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Has she got one?”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lighting?”

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

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

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

“You seem to have thought of everything—”

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

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

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

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

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

“How is your father?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It ought to be a great help.”

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

“Second helpings?”

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

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

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

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

“On the first of June.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which afternoon, mumma?”

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

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

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

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

“I suppose it is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That would make her thirty-three.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded.

“Very.”

Claire did not look delighted.

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

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

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

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

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

Her gloom deepened.

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

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

Chapter Three

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

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

“Never heard of her in my life.”

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

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

I explained Mrs. Harter to her.