“The cat has just swallowed the last piece of lip-stick 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 that she wanted to be able to visualise 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 mantel-piece, 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 to 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 today 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.’ We 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 know
n 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.
XII
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 manage 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 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 much.
“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 recognised 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 — oh 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.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 250