Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  She told him that she’d never been in love. Men had stirred her senses, and one or two of them had excited her half-resentful admiration. She had a most acute power of distinguishing nuances of breeding, and in the East she came into contact with a class of man of very different calibre to that of Harter.

  Not once, in all her twenty-eight years, had she even wished to establish a permanent link between herself and a fellow-creature.

  And Bill Patch, who liked everybody, and who was everybody’s friend, listened to her.

  I suppose it was just that element in Bill Patch, that made a writer of him, which enabled him to understand. Something rather beyond the apprehension of most of us, to whom he was simply a good-tempered, red-headed boy, with an unexpected brain-power. Only Sallie, justifying her determination to specialise in psychology, had seen rather farther than other people when she said that Captain Patch was a temperamental romantic, capable of a grande passion.

  He listened to Diamond Harter, and came, I suppose, as near to perfect comprehension of her as one soul can ever come to perfect comprehension of another. That is to say, that he not only understood what her words told him, but that he saw far beyond them, to the Diamond Harter that she might have been, and that — almost unknown to herself — she must, sometimes, have dimly felt a wish to be.

  Whatever else there is to say about Mrs. Harter, it is indisputable that she possessed a character of unusual strength, and that there were in her latent possibilities almost frightful in their intensity.

  Bill Patch saw straight past everything, accepted everything, and somehow made her see that he understood, and that he accepted. He was passionately in love with her — but that day on Loman Hill he did not speak a word of love to her. There were no preliminary explanations, or tentative confidences between them. The whole thing was too vital for that.

  At the top of Loman Hill, at the cross roads, is a beech tree, on which lovers have carved their initials for generations. It stands beside a low hedge, in which is set a rickety five-barred gate. It was at that gate that they must have stood, as everyone stands, gazing at the blue haze that lies over the hills beyond, and at the square, red sandstone tower of Cross Loman church below them.

  I have stood at the cross roads on Loman Hill many and many a time, and looked over the five-barred gate at the tower of St. Andrew’s, and when I went there last, I thought of those two who must have stood there together — Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.

  She was a tall woman, and her shoulders and his were nearly on a level; and his red head topped hers only by a matter of quarter-of-an-inch. I never saw Bill Patch wear a cap or a hat.

  Her clothes were rather distinctive, and she wore them well. She had a figure for tailor-made suits, and they were nearly always dark in colour, and she wore with them a white silk shirt, open at the throat. Her hats were always severe — dark velours, of the plainest possible contour. Mary says that she knew her style, and stuck to it.

  It was characteristic of her to keep her hands thrust into her coat pockets, and I always fancy that it was so that she leant against the rickety gate, her shoulders as erect as Bill’s were slouched.

  He was so short-sighted that he never took off his glasses, and through those queer, thick lenses he must have looked at her, as he listened. His eyes always had that friendly smile in them, and that odd, pathetic look that had reminded me of a Clumber spaniel. It was his mouth that betrayed him, with the sensitive line of lip that was only visible when he was not laughing. That gave one Bill Patch, the writer and dreamer — Sallie’s potential romantic.

  They stood at the cross-ways for a very long while, and, after a time, in silence. Bill Patch knew, absolutely for certain, that he loved her, and that they belonged to one another. The supreme importance of it, in his eyes, made everything else of so little account that he did not even wonder what would happen.

  Mrs. Harter was different. She had never waited as Bill, quite unconsciously, had waited. The thing had come upon her unawares, and part of her — the part that had made her marry Harter, and then flirt with other men — had absolutely denied the existence of the one supreme reality.

  But the capacity for recognising it had been there all the time, smothered under her cheap cynicism, her ruthless ambition, and the streak in her of sheer, iron hardness.

  She had to recognise it, when it came, and to surrender to it.

  And so she was frightened, or at least overwhelmed, at first. Bill’s intuition told him that, and he gave her time.

  He told her that he’d been very happy all his life, even during the war. His mother had died when he was too little to remember her, and his father had married again. He was friends with his stepmother. She and his father had two jolly little kids.

  He had heaps of friends. A good many of them had gone west in the war.

  His writing, Bill Patch said, was a frightfully real thing in its way, but it actually only took a bit of him to do it — he looked on it as a sort of trick. He thought perhaps his sub-conscious self did most of it, and that was why he could write so easily, and didn’t mind old Carey chatting about poisoners all the time, or people talking in the room, or anything. He knew it was a form of self-expression for some people, but it wasn’t for him. He didn’t, in fact, think he needed a form of self-expression. He had always, he said again, been very happy.

  And all the time he had known that he was waiting for something, and that it was something very great. But he hadn’t known at all what it would be.

  Sometimes I have wondered what Mrs. Harter made of it all, as she listened to him. He was so much younger than she, in experience, and in knowledge, and most of all in spirit. Mrs. Harter was, one might say, temperamentally sophisticated, and Bill Patch, who was two years her junior, was most essentially child-like. It is the only adjective I can think of that comes anywhere near to describing that quality in him that had made him, all his life, always happy.

  There had never been any woman at all, “to count,” he said. He had gone straight from school into the Army, and he hadn’t thought about girls much, although he greatly admired the pretty ones.

  Always — he came back to it again — he’d had that queer feeling of waiting for something. He didn’t mean someone — a person — no, it was more like a job, something that only he could do. It sounded odd, Bill admitted, but there it was. Some-shing to do, in a way, with God. Yes, he believed in God.

  And Mrs. Harter, who didn’t, and who never had, didn’t say a word.

  It was Bill Patch who said at last that they ought to go. One supposes that no single one of all the men whom Mrs. Harter had known, would have been sufficiently lacking in the technique of that sort of situation, to propose putting an end to it. She wouldn’t have given them the chance, probably saying it herself, with her most disconcerting air of suddenly finding their company not at all worth her while.

  But when Bill Patch said that it was late, and that he ought to take her home again, Mrs. Harter acquiesced, simply. They must have taken a last look over the five-barred gate at the evening sky against which the red church tower always stands out with peculiar, clear-cut precision of outline, before they turned away and went down the long slope of Loman Hill, which lies between high banks where the green almost meets overhead.

  Bill asked her about her singing, and she said that she’d learnt at school, and taken a few lessons just before she married. She used to sing a good deal, in Cairo, because the men she knew liked it. Did he understand, she asked him, that she was the sort of person who only sang for that sort of reason? Once, at a party in a man’s rooms, they’d put her right up on the top of the piano, and she’d sung there, and the’yd said it was worth a double brandy-and-soda. Men were always wanting to stand her drinks, and she took them, partly out of devilment, and partly because her husband hated it. She’d got a strong enough head for anything.

  I can quite imagine her facing Bill, as she told him that, her mouth hard and rather mocking, and perhaps in he
r eyes the dawn of a hope that she strove to believe was an incredulous one.

  And Bill said that had nothing at all to do with it. He didn’t specify what it was that it had nothing to do with — but that was the last time Diamond Harter ever thought it necessary to point out to him the things about herself, by which the rest of the world judged her.

  VII

  MOST of us, no doubt — except, I must once more add, the Kendals — hover between two planes of consciousness: the inner life and the outer existence. The predominant values of either remain fairly well defined, and vary very little.

  But for Captain Patch, that summer, the inner life and the outer one must have mingled strangely.

  In the mornings he listened to old Carey’s chatter of Crippen and Mrs. Maybrick, and all the other figures in his rather macabre gallery of celebrities, and he gardened with Mrs. Fazackerly, and they worked at the “Bul-bul Ameer” show together. Very often, in the afternoons, there were rehearsals, sometimes there were tennis parties. Very often, though not always, he and Mrs. Harter met at the latter. She was invited to quite a lot of places, partly thanks to Nancy Fazackerly’s efforts and partly because she played a hard game of tennis quite extraordinarily well. Bill Patch always saw her home afterwards, quite openly. And every evening they were out together, often going very far afield, for she was a good walker. Once Martyn Ambrey met them, and it was after that, when someone spoke of “that Mrs. Harter,” that he said to Mary —

  “Do you remember our saying she had such a defiant face, and you said she looked unhappy?”

  “Yes. The night she sang ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert.”

  “And cousin Claire said she was hard.”

  “Did she?”

  “Of course, cousin Claire is almost always wrong.”

  “You only mean that you and she generally hold different opinions.

  Martyn laughed, but after a minute he said reflectively: “That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about.”

  It is not Mary Ambrey’s way to ask questions, and Martyn did not elucidate. He only looked as though he were seeing again something that might have struck him that afternoon, and repeated, with a rather derisive inflection in his cocksure young voice:— “That woman hard?”

  The Bul-bul Ameer play was gradually being built up, under the usual frightful difficulties, by a number of people who were all determined to help.

  The Kendals faithfully attended every rehearsal en bloc, although only Alfred and Amy were to take parts, Amy being alleged by Mumma to be possessed of a voice.

  “Not a great deal of ear perhaps — not one of them has an ear, I’m afraid — but Amy certainly has a voice. I’ve said from the days when they were all little tots together that Amy certainly had a voice.

  Don’t you remember, girls, my telling you long ago that Amy was the only one with a voice?”

  The Kendals, of course, remembered quite well. They never fail Mumma.

  Amy and the Voice were admitted into the caste and that, as Bill Patch said, was all right. But it didn’t entitle Alfred Kendal to come out in the new and insufferable guise in which he presently appeared.

  (“I do think that amateur theatricals bring out all that is worst in human nature,” Sallie thoughtfully remarked to me once.)

  Ahlfred, as his family persist in calling him, was at home for a few weeks. During the hours of rehearsal, from regarding him as a pleasant, if unexciting, fellow-creature, we all came to look upon him as something that could only have been sent to try us.

  It was disappointing when Amy read the words of the opening chorus for the first time that her only comment should be —

  “Well, I suppose if we’ve got to make fools of ourselves it can’t be helped, and once we’re worked up to it, I daresay it won’t be so bad” — but it was positively infuriating when Alfred, in an instructive voice, began to make a number of suggestions all beginning with “Why not.”

  “Why not alter this a bit, here, Patch — you see what I mean? You say ‘The Muscovite maiden comes on from the O.P. side.’ Now, why not have her come on from the other side?”

  “Why?”

  “Well, wouldn’t it be effective? And why not bring in an allusion to the moon, in that final song? Always a success, the moon, in a show like this. Why not arrange an effect of some sort with a moderator-lamp behind the scene? I’ve seen wonders-done with a moderator-lamp.”

  “Fancy, a moderator-lamp!” said Mrs. Kendal.

  “I think, as it’s supposed to be early morning in the first scene, that perhaps the moon would be out of place,” Nancy Fazackerly suggested apologetically.

  And Alfred, with something of his mother’s singular powers of reiteration, said: “Why not make it the evening instead?”

  “I think we ought to get on a bit. We’ll take the Muscovite maiden’s song. Sallie!” I called.

  She sang it well, and the lyric was rather a pretty one.

  “What about encores?” Alfred Kendal inquired, looking alertly round him.

  “We haven’t quite got to that yet.”

  “I say, why not have one of the verses of the real ‘Bul-bul Ameer’ song brought in each time as an encore? I call that a piece of sheer inspiration, don’t you?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bill Patch grinning; and was further, and unnecessarily, supported by Christopher Ambrey, who said that personally, and speaking quite dispassionately, he called it a piece of sheer senselessness. The Bul-bul Ameer song was already being given at the beginning and at the end, and played at all sorts of critical moments throughout the piece, and surely there was no need to hear it more than forty-eight times in one evening.

  “Do you really mean that one song is to be played forty-eight times?” said Mumma. “Fancy! Forty-eight times! Do you hear that, Puppa? Why, we shall all know it quite well.”

  General Kendal gave no assent to this proposition, reasonable though it was. He had been fidgeting for some time.

  “I say, Patch, do you remember a pair of boots of mine?”

  “Hessian boots,” put in Mumma, helpfully.

  “That’s right, Hessian boots. It’s not of the slightest consequence, of course, but you don’t often see those Hessian boots about, nowadays. How would it be to give them some sort of prominence? Just draw the attention of the audience to them, in some way, if you know what I mean. I should think it could be worked in, somehow.”

  “Why not make an allusion to Puss-in-Boots — something of that kind? All those old stories come more or less out of the Arabian Nights, don’t they, and this is supposed to take place in the East.”

  “If you’re going to have Puss-in-Boots, you may as well have Dick Whittington,” said Dolly Kendal brightly, and quite as though she was making a relevant and reasonable observation.

  “I don’t somehow quite see Puss-in-Boots, or even Dick Whittington, in the piece,” said Nancy Fazackerly — but she said it with so much hesitation, in her fear of hurting anybody’s feelings, that one quite felt they might very well have been there all the time, without our having been clever enough to recognise them.

  “Why not little Bo-Peep, whilst we’re about it?” Sallie asked sardonically. “Do let’s get on, instead of wasting time like this.”

  I saw Mrs. Fazackerly gaze at her with fearful admiration. Perhaps Claire saw it too — and she does not ever think that admiration, of any kind, is good for Sallie.

  “I don’t want to interrupt,” she began smoothly, and I got ready to be interrupted at once. “But you do the whole thing so well, Sallie darling, that it’s a shame it shouldn’t be absolutely perfect.”

  Claire has not yet discovered that, to Sallie’s generation, tact is as objectionable as plain-speaking is to her own.

  “I want you to see how a real Eastern maiden, which is what you’re supposed to be, would move. You walk like a European. Now look at me.”

  Of course, that was all she wanted. We looked at her.

  Clair
e has a beautiful figure, and she moves very well. But I do not know that she has any particular claim to expert knowledge about Eastern women. However, there she was, in her own house, and of course everybody looked at her whilst she gravely walked up and down — everybody, that is to say, except Sallie, who was ostentatiously lighting a cigarette.

  “You see what I mean?” said Claire, but she was wise enough not to say it to Sallie, who quite obviously neither wished nor intended to see.

  Of course it was Mrs. Fazackerly who murmured: “Oh yes — how well you do it!” and then Claire sat down again, her insistent egoism satisfied for the moment.

  “I should like to go through the whole of the first scene again,” said Bill Patch, looking harassed.

  “We haven’t settled anything yet about Puppa’s Hessian boots,” one of the Kendals reproachfully observed.

  “They come in later. Ivan Petruski Skivah will wear them. That’s Martyn. And I should like to know, if possible, whether you can undertake Abdul the Bul-bul Ameer, Major Ambrey?”

  “Dear me, haven’t you settled that yet?” Mrs. Kendal asked, in amicable surprise. “I should have thought the parts would have been settled long ago. We seem to be getting on very slowly, don’t we?”

  I agreed with her, and called upon Christopher to make up his mind. To my surprise, he did not utter the uncompromising refusal that I had expected. He only said that if Patch would take his oath not to ask him to sing anything by himself, or speak a single line, or do anything of that sort, he’d think about it.

  “But Abdul is the chief character in the piece. I can’t very well make him deaf and dumb,” expostulated the author.

  “Well then, some other chap had better take it on. I should only make a mull of it.”

  I heard Nancy Fazackerly softly protesting at this, and Christopher crossed over to the piano, where she had been patiently sitting all the afternoon.

  “I’ll turn over the pages for you,” he suggested, and he remained standing behind her head, looking down at the pale-gold knot of her hair, and saying “Now?” anxiously, at short intervals.