Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  “That,” said Mrs. Kendal, turning to me, “is what I call life-like. And yet not vulgar.”

  I was still pondering on the exact significance of the “And yet” when Mrs. Harter came on to the platform.

  It was a small platform, with an upright piano set across one corner of it, a pair of worn plush curtains drawn across it, and a painted back-ground of pallid sky and consumptive-looking marble pillars, well-known to Cross Loman during many years. Pot plants and ferns, and oil lamps, and little flags, were ranged above and below the three red baize steps that led up to the stage. At the conclusion of an item, the performer may openly descend these steps and return to the body of the hall, but in order to mount the stage from the auditorium it is customary to edge round to a side erection of red-baize covered boxes, placed one upon another, and just too high to admit of either comfort or elegance in mounting. No Cross Loman audience ever applauds, or even perceives, any performer until this acrobatic feat has been accomplished, and the singer, or player, or reciter, stands safely facing the room, panting slightly from the achievement, but bowing pleasantly in acknowledgment of greeting claps.

  It was left to Mrs. Harter, perfectly well-known in the town before her marriage, to astonish Cross Loman by departing from precedent. She walked up the steps at the front of the platform, her back to the audience, and then turned round and faced them, not panting in the least, and bowing, if at all, without urbanity.

  “Nodding, I should call that,” Mrs. Kendal remarked sharply, in a critical manner.

  “How absolutely right I was, when I said ‘personality,’” I heard Claire murmur to herself.

  I looked at Mrs. Harter, remembering the day when I had heard her discussed at the Manor House.

  She was a tall young woman, in a black net evening dress cut square at the neck. She was standing very erect and gazing straight in front of her with no slightest appearance of nervousness.

  “What a curiously defiant face,” whispered Sallie Ambrey to her brother.

  Martyn nodded.

  “Rather attractive.”

  Sallie looked dubious, and certainly Mrs. Harter’s expression was rather more than slightly disagreeable-looking. Her squarish jaw was slightly underhung, her sombre face almost colourless, and her heavy-lidded eyes, set beneath thick, straight black brows, expressed nothing so much as resentment.

  Her hair was dark, and in exaggeration of the prevailing fashion was taken straight back from her forehead and brought low over her ears; accentuating the Slavonic suggestion of the high cheek-bones and broad, flat modelling of the features. Her skin, although very white, was coarse, rather than fine, in texture.

  “No,” said Sallie. “No. I can’t agree with you, Martyn. Not attractive.”

  “Unusual, anyhow. Arresting.”

  “She doesn’t look like Cross Loman, I grant you that.”

  “Mrs. Harter — Song—” said Mrs. Kendal, for — I should think — the fourteenth time. “I suppose that means she’s going to sing.”

  It did.

  Mrs. Harter’s singing was calculated to please the unsophisticated rather than the critical amongst her audience. As in most audiences, however, the number of the former predominated over the latter.

  She had a good voice, a very strong and very true mezzo-soprano. She had also a number of cheap tricks, whereby to produce cheap effects, and she made full use of them.

  “Third-rate teaching of the worst kind,” whispered Claire. Behind me I heard Captain Patch say to Mrs. Fazackerly, “I like her voice,” and Mrs. Fazackerly, who happens to be the most musical person in Cross Loman, replied eagerly, “Oh, so do I,” for once enabled to combine responsiveness and truth in a fashion that all too often eludes her.

  The Kendal family applauded with a detached, deprecating air, at the end of the song. “I may not know a great deal about music, but I know what I like,” Mumma remarked, as she has very frequently remarked on other occasions, and Puppa hummed something to himself, which I think he honestly believed to be a true and faithful repetition of the last line of Mrs. Harter’s song, and waved his head about from side to side in a musical sort of way.

  The applause in the room was prolonged.

  The song had been a very popular one, a modern sentimental ballad, with all the sham values of its kind, and set to a tune that frankly was a tune, and could be trusted to “run in the heads” of those who heard it for hours after the concert was over. Mrs. Harter received an enthusiastic “Encore.”

  There was a whispered consultation between her and the accompanist, a youth who always plays at all Cross Loman concerts, and whom we look upon as being almost part of the piano.

  To the surprise of everybody, and to the delight of a few, he struck up the air of the “Bluebells of Scotland.”

  “Oh where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?

  Oh where, tell me where, is your Highland laddie gone?

  He’s gone with streaming banners where noble deeds are done And it’s Oh, in my heart, I wish him safe at home.”

  The simplicity of the air was suited to Mrs.Harter’s clear voice, and she sang it without affectation.

  “That’s more like,” Mrs. Fazackerly murmured to Captain Patch, who nodded emphatically. The accompanist was introducing an immense number of runs, variations and repetitions of the well-known theme, between each of the verses. But while she was singing, he subdued his accompaniment to the merest murmur —

  “Oh what, tell me what, if your Highland lad be slain?

  Oh what, tell me what, if your Highland lad be slain?

  Oh no! True love will be his guard and bring him safe again For it’s Oh! my heart would break, if my Highland lad were slain.”

  The accompaniment ended in a torrent of notes, out of which the gallant, plaintive air emerged for the last time.

  “I liked that,” said Claire softly. Her eyes were tearful. Almost any tune that she knows very well indeed will bring tears to her eyes, by rousing associations with a past that she always rates higher than she does the present.

  “She doesn’t look like the sort of person to sing that soft of song,” analysed Sallie Ambrey. “She looks hard.”

  “She looks unhappy,” said Mary.

  Christopher leaned forward.

  “Who is Mrs. Harter?”

  “A girl called Diamond Ellison — old Ellison’s daughter. She married and went out to the East a few years ago.”

  “It’s a pity she looked so bad-tempered all the time she was singing,” observed Dolly Kendal.

  “Good-looking woman,” General Kendal muttered, and Mrs. Kendal, Claire, Sallie, and Aileen Kendal, all said— “Oh, do you think so?” in tones implying surprise, or disagreement, or both. But Mrs. Fazackerly agreeably said “Yes, isn’t she?” after her fashion.

  But when Mumma in the interval, remarked weightily: “That Mrs. Harter may be a good singer, but she’s a very plain woman,” I distinctly heard Mrs. Fazackerly, ever obliging, say “Yes, isn’t she?” all over again.

  Captain Patch, like Christopher Ambrey, asked who Mrs. Harter was, and said that he should like to hear her sing again.

  “If we can persuade Father — who is sometimes a wee bit inclined to be conservative, as you may have noticed — we will have a musical evening, and ask Diamond Harter to come,” said Nancy Fazackerly, who has learnt nothing from life and the late Mr. Fazackerly if not complaisance. “I’m sure Sallie and Martyn would come — and Major Ambrey?”

  She looked at Christopher.

  “I’d like it very much,” he said.

  “I can play accompaniments and we could have some songs, and it would be so nice,” said Mrs. Fazackerly eagerly.

  Her obvious capacity for enjoyment, taken in conjunction with the very few and poor opportunities of gratifying it that have ever fallen to her lot, struck me as rather pathetic.

  I heard her give her invitation to Mrs. Harter at the end of the concert, as we were all leaving the hall together.

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sp; Mrs. Harter, who did not appear to be an enthusiastic person, accepted curtly. Her voice was low, and had not the intonation of good-breeding, and when she passed under the flaring lights at the end of the room, I saw that the sulky lines of her face had hardly relaxed at all.

  “Thank you, I don’t mind if I do,” was all that she said before walking away.

  “What an ungracious manner — and how typical of her class. I said she was common,” Claire observed, when Mrs. Harter had disappeared.

  “I think she’s shy.”

  Nancy Fazackerly is always ready to sacrifice truth to kindliness, as we all know. Perhaps it is the effect of having successively known a father and a husband both of whom appear to have lived in a chronic state of annoyance with everybody.

  “It was a nice concert, wasn’t it?” she added, with her child-like appreciation of any form of pleasuring.

  We said that we had enjoyed it very much and Mrs. Kendal added that the only thing she regretted was that the Kendal family had not been able to get seats all together. It being impossible to remove this blot on the evening, her complaint was received in silence by us all.

  Then Lady Annabel came out, bowing in an indiscriminate sort of way, and saying “Thank you — thank you so much,” to anyone who accidentally stood in her way.

  “Quite a success, wasn’t it?” she asked us, and we all said at once that it had been a great success, and Mrs. Fazackerly congratulated her.

  “It entails a good deal of work, getting up this sort of thing and it is all so different, when one cannot delegate part of the work to the A.D.C.s,” said Lady Annabel.

  If the Rector of Cross Loman kept a curate, I feel convinced that Lady Annabel would speak of him as “the A.D.C.” or perhaps the “P.S.”

  “I hope you will have made a good deal of money,” said Mrs. Fazackerly. “I always think it’s wonderful the way in which people here are always ready to spend money.”

  “We must try and get up something else one of these days,” said Lady Annabel with vague graciousness. “Perhaps for the King’s birthday — Goodnight — good-night. Thank you so much — so glad you were able to come — —”

  Until Lady Annabel came to the Rectory, Cross Loman, although entirely loyal, had never been in the habit of concerning itself with the King’s birthday. But we know better now.

  “Do you have a birthday ball at the Rectory?” asked Christopher, grinning.

  “I wish we did,” said Sallie. “Couldn’t we have a dance? Oh, cousin Miles, the Manor House would be the place for it.”

  I looked at Claire.

  “I should like to arrange something of that sort,” she said thoughtfully, and I knew that it was in her mind to show Lady Annabel Bending that Government Houses are not the only places where these things can be done.

  “Come up to tea on Sunday, and let’s talk about it,” I suggested, and Claire extended the invitation to Mrs. Fazackerly and to Captain Patch.

  We took Mary and Sallie back to the Mill House in the car, and I remember that Christopher Ambrey began to ask about Mrs. Fazackerly.

  Of course Sallie told him instantly that her husband used to throw plates at her head.

  “What a hound the fellow must have been!”

  “She shouldn’t have married him,” said Sallie. “Though I believe she only did it to get away from her father. If people are mad enough to bind themselves by those preposterous vows, what can you expect?”

  “Preposterous vows?” said Christopher, surprised.

  “Don’t you call the marriage service preposterous?” returned Sallie, equally surprised.

  “No,” said Christopher stoutly. “I don’t. I suppose I am old-fashioned. I like the Prayer Book, and songs with tunes to them, and pictures that tell a story you can understand, and and Christmas carols.”

  “Well done!” said I.

  “Talking about songs with tunes,” Mary asked: “What did you think of Mrs. Harter, Miles?”

  “I agree with you, that, as an unusual type of person, she’s interesting.”

  “Her choice of songs was interesting, too that atrocity about cabbage roses — I beg your pardon, Christopher! — and then the ‘Bluebells of Scotland. The first one was so exactly what one would have expected, and the second one so exactly what one wouldn’t have expected,” said Sallie.

  “I like the good old ‘Bluebells of Scotland, Christopher said. “We must make her sing it again, when we go to Mrs. Fazackerly’s house.”

  I was glad that he seemed to be looking forward to that pleasantly.

  Claire and I are not lively people, but we both wanted to make Christopher enjoy himself, although I think Claire resented his Philistine forms of enjoyment a good deal.

  Both he and Captain Patch went often to play tennis with the Kendals at Dheera Dhoon.

  “He couldn’t, surely,” Claire said to me desperately, upon this subject.

  I knew what she meant. Christopher’s possible — or, more probably impossible — marriage, was always one of Claire’s deepest pre-occupations. And she has always been victim to an intensive system under which her hopes and her fears alike leap to gigantic proportions within a few seconds of their conception.

  I had no doubt that she had already endowed Christopher and one of the Kendals — probably Dolly, the one she dislikes the most — with a family of which all the members would have inherited the Kendal temperament, which Claire finds a singularly unattractive one.

  “I don’t think he could,” I assured her.

  She gazed at me out of her enormous, tragical eyes.

  “I am living upon the edge of a volcano, Miles.” And as, I suppose, my silence appeared to her to be an inadequate rejoinder — as indeed it was — she added, with violent emphasis, the word “Literally.”

  Poor Claire!

  The Kendals, than whom no young women in this world have ever been more devoid of a dangerous fascination, continued to exercise their harmless hospitality, and in return, Christopher begged us to let him ask them to the Manor House.

  They played tennis moderately well, but I found that all of them looked upon it as a matter of course that they should take it in turns to sit by my wheeled chair for five or ten minutes and talk to me very brightly and conscientiously.

  I think they looked upon this exercise as something which cheered up that poor Sir Miles Flower, and no doubt, had they been Boy Scouts, it would have been counted as the One Good Deed, or Kind Act, or whatever it is that Boy Scouts are presumed to perform daily.

  The Kendals, in reality, are a pre-war survival.

  “Nothing ever happens to us,” might be taken as their motto.

  They frequently proclaim this negative state of affairs in the tones of aggressive resignation peculiar to themselves, rather as though they resented this absence of drama in their lives, and yet regard it as a mark of superiority.

  During the war, Blanche Kendal, the eldest daughter, stayed at home “To help Mumma,” and Amy, whom Mumma has decreed to be delicate, was not allowed to do anything except what her mother called “cheering up poor Puppa in the evenings — that must be your war-work, darling.”

  Dolly and Aileen, after an inordinate number of family conclaves — the Kendals are nothing if not tribal — had, in 1915, been permitted to go daily to the County Hospital, where they had zealously washed dishes and listened enviously to the talk of girls much younger than themselves who worked in the wards as nurses or masseuses.

  Alfred, whom neither parent would have dreamed of trying to coerce, did not succeed in passing as fit for foreign service, and had to content himself with Salisbury Plain.

  It follows that the Kendals, although they would no doubt repudiate the suggestion indignantly, have, for all practical purposes, completely forgotten all about the war.

  Where Puppa previously condemned and denounced the Radicals, he now condemns and denounces the Labour Party; and when, as sometimes happens, he loses his temper for no appreciable reason, Mumma explains the l
apse by saying: “Poor Puppa is so worried about this wicked Income Tax,” instead of, as in former days: “Poor Puppa is so worried about this nonsensical Servants’ Insurance Act.”

  Mumma herself never loses her temper, but, even as she, once upon a time, allowed herself to speak of the Suffragettes as unsexed, hysterical idiots, so she now condemns as wicked, irreligious, and immoral, the increased scope of the Divorce Laws and the new independence of domestic servants. Since the thirtieth birthday of the twins, Mrs. Kendal has allowed herself more latitude in mentioning such subjects in their presence. She quite believes, and often proclaims, that she has the complete confidence of all her children.

  Dolly and Aileen are affectionately regarded by the whole family as being the emancipated members of it.

  “No one ever allowed us to read the books they read” Blanche told me, after Mumma had actually left ‘a library copy of Women Napoleon Loved lying about the drawing-room, without troubling to shroud it in a brown paper cover.

  And Amy pointed out, quite unresentfully, that she and Blanche had always been made to dress alike, at the twins’ age. This was when Dolly bold y appeared in a tailor-made shirt with pink stripes, although Aileen had not yet discarded her winter “every-day” cream-coloured flannel.

  Variegated sweaters and low-necked silk jumpers, such as Sallie Ambrey wears, Mumma has pronounced to be in bad style.

  Dolly, who was my informant upon this point, seemed to think that I might get a false impression of Mumma and her ideals from it, for she added at once ——

  “Not that Mumma is in the least narrow-minded about things of that sort, or indeed of any sort. Long before the days of Women’s Suffrage — although, of course, she disapproved utterly of the militant ones — Mumma always said that she saw no harm whatever in a woman having a vote, so long as she could find a good, wise man to tell her how to use it.”

  I could only feel thankful that neither Sallie nor Martyn were present to hear this remarkable testimony to Mumma’s catholicity of outlook.