A blaring atrocity, known as a sensational foxtrot, opened the dance. Claire had engaged a jazz-band, and at intervals, to a sound of clattering fire-irons, they suddenly yelled in brassy staccato —
“Why — did — I kiss — that girl —
Why, Oh why, Oh why?”
It was ugly, discordant, essentially vulgar, and when all that was admitted, it had its value. It was entrainant.
The brazen yelp of it had not torn the air more than three times before people were dancing.
Mrs. Kendal planted herself firmly beside me, with her kindest air, and began.
“Dancing has changed so much in the last four years. These modern dances don’t look to me like dancing at all.”
“Give me a real old-fashioned waltz,” said General Kendal.
And, before I could say it for them — and it was on the tip of my tongue, too — they both exclaimed together: “Now, the old ‘Blue Danube’—”
“Look at that,” said Mrs. Kendal, and she shook her head, and made a sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth that quite adequately conveyed regret and disapproval.
“That” was of course Mrs. Harter, dancing with Bill Patch. They were in their pseudo-Oriental dresses, but Bill’s red head was unmistakable and so was Mrs. Harter’s dancing.
They were together the whole evening. So were Chris and Nancy, Martyn and some un-identified young woman in mauve bead shoulder-straps and a fragment of crimson chiffon, and Leeds and a very pretty widow who had come with their party. But nobody made distressed sounds about them.
“She dances quite beautifully,” I pointed out firmly to Mrs. Kendal, who replied in a tone of concession —
“If you call it dancing. I must say, I don’t think that either Puppa or I would very much care to see one of our girlies dancing like that.”
The suggested test of Puppa and Mumma’s sensibilities appeared to me to be a very remote contingency indeed.
At rather infrequent intervals one or other of the Miss Kendals lolloped cheerfully round the room with a stray partner, but as Mrs. Kendal said— “This modern way of dancing with one man the whole evening seems to me very odd. I shouldn’t care about it for any of my own flock.”
“But you know, Mumma, we don’t know any men who are in the least likely to ask us to dance with them for the whole evening,” observed Dolly Kendal very honestly.
“And one never does go to any dance, except perhaps at Christmas — struggling along down here,” added Aileen.
I thought Mumma looked rather disconcerted at so much candour, but she only said —
“Well, well,” and put up her glasses to scrutinise Bill and Mrs. Harter more effectively.
Their performance was well worth watching, artistically speaking, although it was undoubtedly not that aspect of the case which presented itself to those people who appeared unable to take their eyes off them.
Harter himself was amongst these. He stood near one of the windows and never stirred. Claire asked if he cared to dance, and he said “No, thanks, Lady Flower. I am not a dancing man.”
Later on I saw Sallie go up to him. I think that she actually asked him to dance, probably out of pure curiosity, but if so, he declined the privilege.
Sallie, looking very pretty, stayed beside him, talking and laughing, for a few moments, but I did not once see Harter smile, nor make any response except of the shortest and most formal kind.
He had a peculiar way of not looking at the person to whom he was — presumably — listening, and all the while that Sallie was with him, he looked at Bill Patch and at his wife.
“Well, if you ask me, that little worm Harter will be filing his petition within a month,” said Mrs. Leeds cheerfully.
“If I were in his shoes, I’d take that woman home and thrash her,” charitably remarked old Carey, to whom she had spoken.
“She was pretty hot stuff, even in Egypt.”
“She! I’m not thinking about her. I’m thinking about a decent young fellow like Patch. She’s out to make a fool of that lad, and by Jove, she’s succeeding. He’s bewitched.”
“Men always run after that sort of woman. They were all after her, in Cairo. Hector would have been as bad as any of them, if I hadn’t put my foot down.”
Mrs. Leeds looked up at her husband and laughed most good-naturedly.
It was quite evident that to her the whole thing was a joke, and a joke of the type that most appealed to her.
Where Lady Annabel saw sin, she saw only vulgarity, and vulgarity amused her.
I am reminded that Lady Annabel was particularly gracious that evening. It was quite characteristic of her that once she had given us her advice, and we had tacitly refused to take it, she should avoid any slightest hint of the “I told-you-so” attitude that really was open to her.
She certainly looked at those two — but then so did everybody. She never said a word.
Lady Annabel has a wonderfully good memory both for names and for faces.
(“I have heard it called a royal attribute,” she sometimes says smilingly.) She remembers to inquire after sick relatives, and she can always make some happily-turned little reference to “the last time that I met you, on that very hot day at the station” — which makes one feel that the meeting in question left an indelible impression on her mind and was of real importance to her. It is all very pleasant and gratifying.
On the night of the party she told me that she thought it was all going most successfully, and that the theatricals had been delightful. “Such a charming way of meeting one’s neighbours all together,” she said, looking round the room through her tortoiseshell lorgnette.
She was wearing a green gown that was all over sequins, and shimmered as she moved, and although Lady Annabel is a small woman, and very thin and spare, she looked majestic, and altogether reminded me of Queen Elizabeth.
“I think I see a face that is strange to me,” she murmured, drawing her brows together in a rather puzzled way, and one knew that this was one of Lady Annabel’s very harmless little affectations, since there are of necessity a good many faces that are strange to her, even in Cross Loman.
I followed the direction of the lorgnette, and saw, as I had somehow expected, that she was looking at Harter.
“That is Mr. Harter.”
“Oh,” said Lady Annabel.
She looked hard at him, and then she said “Oh” again — but that was all.
Leeds was less forbearing.
“Sour-faced devil, isn’t he? Not that it’s much wonder. If he’d had any sense he’d have stayed where he was. What the eyes don’t see, the heart won’t grieve for.”
“I should have thought he’d got used to it by this time,” said Mrs. Leeds simply. “Do you remember Captain Tompkins and that unfortunate engineer — what was his name — who threw up his job and went home?”
Evidently the Leeds couple, who had, after all, seen something of Mrs. Harter in Egypt, looked upon Bill Patch as being one of a series.
I reflected that perhaps they knew more about it than we did. Provincials take these things so seriously.
“I’m going to take that wretched chap to have a drink,” Leeds declared. “Utter little outsider though he is, I’m sorry for him.”
Mrs. Leeds, laughing loudly, called out “Fellow-feeling, I suppose?” after him, as he went off. I thought it to Lady Annabel’s credit that not a muscle of her face had moved during the whole of this rather crude conversation.
It was one of the few hot nights of the year, and sooner or later everybody drifted into the garden. I went there with Mary Ambrey, and we found our way to the farthest summer-house, one that has fallen into disuse. The summer-house proper, a strangely obvious little trysting place, was being monopolised by Christopher and Mrs. Fazackerly.
I suppose that every single couple who went into the garden that night must have passed the summerhouse, glanced inside it, smiled sympathetically, and gone on.
Christopher and Nancy sat in t
wo deck chairs, her frock and shoes and hair all looking equally silvery in the moonlight, and they were talking in low, happy voices.
“That’s all right,” I said, and Mary agreed. Perhaps she was conscious, as I certainly was, of something rather perfunctory in the tone of her assent. She added after a moment —
“It really is quite plain sailing for them, isn’t it?”
“Unless you call Nancy’s father a rock in the way.”
“Nancy isn’t a Victorian schoolgirl. I don’t think they have much to contend with.”
“So much the better.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mary, her tone rather enigmatical.
Then she suddenly burst out —
“It’s all so upside down! Christopher and Nancy are dears, both of them, but you know as well as I do that they are neither of them people of tremendous significance. Yet one wishes them well, and wants to see it all happily settled. But those other two people — and they are real people, both of them — are outside the law, and there’s no possible happy ending in sight, anywhere, for them. And — one doesn’t know what to wish.”
It was unlike Mary to be vehement. Although she had not raised her voice at all, she had spoken with great intensity.
I put my hand on her arm.
“Look!”
Two people were coming down the path, where no Japanese lanterns had found their way, but which was crossed by a clear patch of white moonlight.
“Not Sallie, is it?”
The dress was almost Sallie’s, and the coins on it clinked together slightly, and the long gauze veil hung in motionless folds in the unusual stillness of the night air — but it wasn’t Sallie, of course.
Sallie is less tall than Mrs. Harter, and her movements have the lightness and abruptness of extreme youth.
Mrs. Harter’s way of walking was unmistakable, and even in the moonlight Bill’s red hair was easily recognisable.
They were walking very slowly, not speaking. He was looking at her, whose head was bent.
Just as I realised that they could not see us, in the dark little summer-house, Mrs. Harter stopped dead, and looked up at him. Mary sprang to her feet with a decided movement, and at the same moment we both heard Diamond Harter’s voice very distinctly, that voice that Bill Patch had called a “carrying” voice.
“To-morrow, when we go up Loman Hill to the cross roads,” she said.
Almost, before she had finished speaking — but not quite — she heard us move; and she and Bill walked on, out of the patch of white light, into the darkness of the overhanging syringa bushes.
Was it a tryst, or a promise, or a decision? I have never known, and neither Mary nor I spoke about what we had heard as we went back to the house again.
I have my theory, of course. Almost all my knowledge of Mrs. Harter is theoretical. I think that Bill had asked her for a decision, and that she was deferring it until the next day, until they went “up Loman Hill to the cross roads” once more. I always imagine that, in spite of Harter, and certainly in spite of the people who looked at them so often, and with so much disapproval, they deliberately forgot about the future, for that one evening.
Both of them must have realised that a turning-point had been reached. Harter had come home, he had made it perfectly clear that in no circumstances would he give his wife her freedom, and she had, I afterwards learnt, made it equally clear that, whether she went away with Bill or not, she had no intention of returning to her husband again.
It was Bill Patch, with his strange mixture of a belief in God, and a strong sense of the “unsportingness” of adultery, who saw the necessity for a decision. To Mrs. Harter, I am quite certain that the issue would have been a simple one. All her life she had gone for what she wanted, with a singular and unusual freedom of aim, in so far as the opinion of other people was always a matter of complete and genuine indifference to her. Neither by education nor by temperament was she a woman of ideals, and it seems to me the measure of her regard for Bill Patch that she was prepared to let his be a determining factor in their future.
They did not return to the ballroom again until the last dance of the evening was being played.
It is part of the incongruity that was so marked a feature of the whole affair that for that last dance, the players chose to repeat the “sensational foxtrot” with which the evening had begun — that loud, swaggering, jerky abomination, that yet held its third-rate appeal —
“Why — did — I kiss — that girl —
Why, Oh why, Oh why?”
And Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter danced it together.
I watched them all the while, this time, almost as Mrs. Kendal herself might have done, and Mrs. Harter’s eyes were shining like a girl’s, and I remembered Martyn Ambrey and his— “That woman hard?”
Bill’s young face was that of a boy in love, until one looked at it very closely, and then it was that of a man who has found serenity.
I have always had a fancy that Bill knew, that evening, which way Diamond Harter would eventually decide; but that he had consciously put the knowledge away from him, and was simply, as he had once said to Nancy Fazackerly, “so extraordinarily happy, in spite of it all.”
It was after three o’clock when the Kendals, who are generally the last to leave any entertainment, prepared to go home.
They were walking.
“I shall enjoy a drive in the moonlight,” said Mumma, pleasantly sentimental. “Don’t you think, Puppa dear, that a drive in the moonlight will be too delightful? It will remind us of our honeymoon days,” said Mumma, smiling delightfully.
Then a contretemps arose.
The car that had been hired to take old Carey and his daughter home had not appeared at the door, and Christopher, returning from the stable-yard, reported the driver to be lying helplessly intoxicated in a corner of the old cow-house.
Christopher said that the lad deserved dismissal and that he would make a point of seeing that he got it, but he had seized the opportunity of bringing round his own two-seater, and was eager to take Nancy home in it.
“Oh, but father—”
“I could easily come back for him.”
Old Carey, however, had flown into a passion.
He used fearful language, and said that he should walk every step of the way home, which threat he evidently supposed to constitute a terrible revenge upon the drunken driver, Nancy, Christopher, and everybody who had helped to enrage him.
“He’s in one of his rather difficult moods, I’m afraid,” said Nancy aside.
It was Harter, of all unlikely people, who suddenly suggested a solution.
“The car is only a Ford, isn’t it? I’ll drive it back to the garage — it’s next door to our rooms in Queen Street — and I will drop Mr.—”
“Carey—”
“Mr. Carey, and this lady, on the way.”
“No room,” growled Carey, determined not to be appeased.
“Plenty of room,” everybody assured him.
“There at the back, and one beside the driver,” said Harter, who appeared to have become suddenly articulate.
I remember that it flashed across my mind just then, casually, that he had been drinking a good deal during the evening, and that this had evidently had the effect of rendering him sociable.
“Mr. Carey and his daughter, and Mrs. Harter, in the back, and myself and Captain Patch in front,” said Harter calmly.
There was an electric silence.
Then Mrs. Kendal, tactfully filling up the significant pause, inquired brightly —
“Then you can drive a car, Mr. Harter?”
They settled it at last, but Christopher held firm to his intention of taking Nancy home in the two-seater, and they went off, overtaking and passing General Kendal in his tightly-packed Standard before the lodge gates were reached.
Harter brought the hired Ford round to the front door, old Carey, still grumbling, was helped in, and Mrs. Harter got in beside him.
Captain Patch
hesitated for a moment.
“Get in,” said little Harter coldly.
He was himself already at the wheel, and he made a slight gesture which unmistakably invited Bill to the place beside him.
It crossed my mind then that he was determined to speak to Bill, and I think Mrs. Harter thought so too.
She said, “Come on, then,” and Bill came, and they all drove off together.
XIV
IT was less than ten minutes later that we all heard the frantic hooting of a motor horn again and again.
Claire was already in her room, Mary Ambrey half-way upstairs, and the indefatigable Sallie and Martyn still talking in the hall.
“What’s that?”
Martyn threw open the hall doors and we listened, but the hooting had ceased and for a moment there was no sound. Then, from far away we heard that indescribable medley of noises, broken and piercing, that unmistakably denotes calamity.
“An accident?” said Sallie, in a doubtful way.
Martyn, who had stepped outside, suddenly dashed off down the moonlit drive.
“I’ll just see — I’ll come back—” promised Sallie, and she too was off.
Mary Ambrey had come downstairs again, and was standing beside me. She never says, to a crippled man, as other people do: “I’ll come back” — that promise which no one ever keeps.
“It’s a clear night — no one could have come to grief, surely,” she said.
“I hope to God that Harter was fit to drive a car,” said I, remembering that sudden loosening of Harter’s tongue.
“Did you think—”
“Not, not really. But he did drink, during the evening. Fellows who’ve been in the East—”
“There’s a car coming up here.”
There was no need to comment to one another upon the speed with which that car could be heard tearing up the avenue.
Mary gave me her arm to the door and we saw the Standard, brought to a standstill so violently and so abruptly that her brakes jarred with a grinding noise. It was General and Mrs. Kendal.
“They want help — just down by the bridge,” said the General hoarsely. “Harter has had a smash with the hired car — it’s very bad.”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 252