Alfred Kendal said “Hullo, Patch!” rather feebly, and Mrs. Harter stood by the door, waiting.
I looked at Claire. She had flushed a little, and was obviously undecided what line to take. And then Mary Ambrey got up and walked down the length of the room and shook hands with her, and said very clearly —
“How do you do, Mrs. Harter. Mrs. Leeds has just gone out to see about the car, I believe. She’ll be back in a second or two. How brave of you to walk, in this heat!”
It was very like Mary, and more like her still to do it with perfect calm, and the most absolute naturalness.
I doubt if she even knew that we all drew a breath of intense relief, as she stood there, talking quietly, till Mrs. Leeds came dashing in at one of the French windows.
“That was rather finely done,” I heard Martyn murmuring in my ear, with his insufferable accent of patronising approval. Claire heard him, too, and I saw that she was vexed.
She had missed an opportunity of making what, from her, would have been a very beautiful gesture.
The last guests to arrive were General and Mrs. Kendal, with two of the girls. Puppa is the most punctual of men, but he admits that he cannot always estimate the time that it will take to drive anywhere in the new car. I suppose that it depends upon the number and promptitude of Mumma’s warning outbursts on the road.
As they entered, our host made his appearance. Leeds, what with his wealth, and a fine presence, and one of the loudest voices that I have ever heard in my life, is only to be described as an overwhelming man.
He was very hearty and enthusiastic, and welcomed us all, especially Mrs. Harter, to whom he immediately shouted —
“Last time we met, someone bet you wouldn’t drink six cocktails in succession, and you did it. By Jove, I’ve never forgotten it! Lounge of Shepherd’s Hotel, wasn’t it? Never saw a more sporting collection in my life, than we had that evening. You ought to have been there.”
I think that he uttered the last clause in an indiscriminate sort of way to all of us, perhaps conscious that his audience was not, so to speak, altogether with him. But it was a little unfortunate that the people immediately facing him happened to be Lady Annabel and Mrs. Kendal. It was so extraordinarily evident to the rest of us that they did not at all feel that they ought to have been there on the occasion of Mrs. Harter’s rather singular achievement.
Leeds, however, alternates between a childlike touchiness and an egotistical obtuseness, and this time he was obtuse.
He went on talking to Mrs. Harter about Cairo and the people there whom he had known, and whom he took it for granted that she had known also. Later on I learnt that the weakness of Mr. Leeds was to have known everybody. He is a young-looking man for his years, and people are always astonished, in a gratifying way, when he claims acquaintance with the celebrities of forty years ago.
He is exactly the kind of man to whom one would expect Mrs. Harter’s type to make a strong appeal, and he addressed his conversation almost exclusively to her.
When Mrs. Leeds said, “How are we all goin’?” there was the usual pause, followed by the usual demonstrations.
“Will you come in the Mercedes with me, Lady Annabel, and Sir Miles? Hector,” said Mrs. Leeds to her husband, “will you take Lady Flower in the two-seater?”
She did not make her suggestions with any assurance, and Lady Annabel, while acquiescing graciously as to the place allotted to her, seemed faintly amused. She said afterwards that these things require a great deal of practice — which indeed is quite true — and that personally she had always instructed the A.D.C.s beforehand, and left nothing to chance.
“I can seat three people,” said General Kendal. “Not more. The springs, you know — and the hill up to Berry Down is a stiff pull.”
“You’d better let me sit in front with you,
Puppa,” Mrs. Kendal said firmly. “Then I can keep my eyes open. If one hasn’t been driving very long,” she explained to the rest of us, “one is liable to get fussed. I always say to my husband, at critical moments, ‘Don’t get fussed, dear.’ Whatever you do, keep your head, and don’t allow yourself to get fussed.”
“But this won’t do at all — we must separate relations!” cried Leeds. “We can’t all go about in family groups, like the Ark, or whatever it was. Might as well stay at home, as do that.”
“I certainly think there’s more sense in staying at home and eating one’s food in comfort, than dragging it out of doors and eating it under the most miserable conditions imaginable, for no conceivable reason,” said General Kendal suddenly and strongly.
Everyone looked a little disconcerted, and Dolly Kendal said in a determined tone that picnics were great fun, if one took the rough with the smooth and didn’t mind things.
“Why not let’s walk — some of us?” Bill Patch suggested. “It’s not more than a mile or so, through the woods.”
“No need to walk. There are plenty of conveyances,” said Leeds, in rather an offended way.
“Well, who’ll go in the second car?” cried Mrs. Leeds. “Let me see — Miss Kendal, Captain Patch, Major Ambrey — and what about you, Mrs. Fazackerly?”
“I should love to,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.
“That leaves the other Miss Kendal, and Mrs. Harter, and Mrs. Kendal, oh, and Mrs. Ambrey—”
She began to look rather helpless again.
“My two-seater is here,” suggested Christopher.
“Oh, but do let some of us walk. It would be so nice to walk,” Sallie declared.
Nearly everybody in the room then began to explain how very much he, or she, would prefer to walk to Berry Down. It was a voluble contest in unselfish determination. Then, just as it seemed that Mrs. Leeds was reconciled to the idea of letting some of her guests start on foot, Leeds reduced the whole thing to chaos again by suddenly announcing that he would take Mrs. Harter in his small runabout.
“You are taking Lady Flower, dear,” said poor Mrs. Leeds. “We’ve got muddled!”
We had indeed.
In the end things were settled contrary to the wishes of almost everybody. Bill Patch and Sallie and Alfred Kendal went off on foot, Christopher, with a face of thunder, declared himself delighted to take Aileen Kendal in his two-seater, and the rest of us were somehow packed into the big cars, all except Martyn, who insisted upon going off on his own motor-bicycle and taking Mrs. Harter on the carrier.
Mr. Leeds and Claire, mutually dissatisfied, went in our host’s runabout.
I do not know exactly what they said to one another, of course, but I do know that Claire is not in the least interested in the celebrities that other people have met. Even the ones that she has met herself only appeal to her from one point of view: which is what she thinks that they thought about her. At all events, when they arrived at the particular clump of Scotch firs indicated, Claire looked utterly exhausted, and Leeds made straight for Mrs. Harter and threw himself down on the dry, heathery turf at her feet and asked for a drink.
It was, actually, only the second time that I had seen Mrs. Harter. She looked better than she had looked in evening dress, wearing a thin dark tweed and a purple felt hat properly rammed down over her black hair. (The Kendals had large straw hats, of which the backs almost touched their shoulder-blades.)
Our host’s voice boomed on without ceasing and I caught the words “cocktails,”
“Cairo,” and “moonlight” a good many times, but from Mrs. Harter I hardly heard a syllable. She sat and smoked cigarettes, and every now and then she looked across the gorse and heather and bracken to the path along which the walkers would come.
The interval during which we waited for them was mostly passed in discussion as to whether we should wait or not. I remember that Mrs. Kendal kept on saying “I should have thought they would have been here by this time. I should have thought so,” and that each time she said it one or other of us replied, intelligently, that we should have thought so, too.
Then Mrs. Leeds wanted us to begi
n lunch, and we said “Oh, no, we’d better wait,” and then one by one capitulated, and said, “Well, perhaps we’d better not wait.” And by that time the habit of uncertainty that I had already discerned in Mrs. Leeds, had got the better of her again and she said: “Oh, well, perhaps we’d better give them a few minutes’ law.”
At last we saw approaching the emerald green handkerchief that Sallie wore knotted round her head, and they came up to us.
Captain Patch went and sat beside Diamond Harter without pause or hesitation, and I very much doubt if he even saw the look of astonished resentment turned upon him by Mr. Leeds.
The rest of us saw it, however, including Mrs. Leeds, who had not been amongst us long enough to realise fully the inner subtleties of the affaire Harter, and who remarked with a loud laugh that Harter would be simply furious with that red-headed young man. Hector had, as she put it, made all the running with Mrs. Harter last time they met, on board the yacht.
Nobody made very much response, and it was a relief on every account when we at last began luncheon.
But luncheon was not without its perilous moments, either.
Mr and Mrs. Leeds are the sort of people who provide cocktails at a picnic, and these of course revived the reminiscences of Mrs. Harter’s feats in Cairo. Even Leeds, however, must have seen that he was not being a success. Mrs. Harter’s face showed that plainly enough, and even more expressive was the way in which she presently turned her back on him and left him to Sallie, who was sitting on his other side.
With Sallie, Leeds had only too much scope. There is a colloquialism made use of in the servants’ hall which has always seemed to me a wonderfully expressive one. Somebody is described as “playing up” somebody else. It recurred to me very forcibly, whilst listening to Sallie and Mr. Leeds.
Sallie was shamelessly “playing him up.” She encouraged him with artless questions, and listened to his loud and generally boastful replies with innocent and unwavering interest, and all the time I knew, and Mary Ambrey did, that the horrid little clever thing was storing up every word of it, and mentally labelling, filing, and indexing him for future reference.
Sallie will certainly write a novel some day, and all of us will recognise one another in it.
Leeds told several stories, not very funny ones, but in such stentorian tones that we were all more or less obliged to listen, and twice Claire said —
“That reminds me of how I once —— —” but Leeds didn’t hear.
Nancy Fazackerly took off her hat, and the sun shone on her beautiful blonde hair, and she looked very happy and young.
Christopher Ambrey sat next her and looked at her a great deal.
“I wonder if old Chris has asked her, yet,” I heard Martyn say quietly to one of the Kendals. And she replied in an interested way —
“I should think he’d do it to-day, anyhow. Wouldn’t you?”
“Too many people about.”
“They can go for a walk or something, after lunch.”
“We’ll have a bet on it, if you like,” Martyn suggested, and they arranged the terms of a very mild wager, with some suppressed giggling from Aileen.
I thought to myself that if I had been a young man, people like Martyn and the Kendals would not have been given the opportunity of exercising their wit upon my love affairs. But as a matter of fact I knew well enough that if Chris and Nancy really did become engaged, they would probably be told all about the bet, and would find it quite amusing.
The servants from Grainges had solemnly laid an enormous tablecloth over the heather, and weighted the corners of it — not with stones, nothing so rural — but with plated ice-buckets, full of broken ice. We had lobster, and salmon-mayonnaise, and chicken-salad, and galantine, and an immense variety of cold sweets and pastries, and our plates were changed by the servants after each course, and our glasses filled with Moselle, or whisky, or lemonade.
One felt ungrateful for feeling that it would have been a relief if only the salt had been forgotten, or there hadn’t been enough rolls to go round.
Christopher did, in an honest attempt to make the thing less magnificent, suggest sharing a salad-plate with his neighbour, but Leeds overheard him, and roared to one of the men-servants. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Kendal was sitting on the missing salad-plate, which was afterwards found embedded deeply into quite hard ground, but of course the servants produced an extra one without a moment’s hesitation.
However, iced Moselle, whether suitable or not to a picnic on the moors, was bound to have its effect, and anyway, Leeds and Mrs. Leeds undeniably came into the category known to modern slang as “cheery souls.” So that by the time we were all eating cherries and raspberries, the picnic had become a very animated and successful affair.
Claire, while Leeds was telling Sallie that he had been through parts of China where no other white man had ever been allowed to set foot, got her opportunity, and gave Alfred Kendal and Mrs. Leeds, and one or two others, an amusing account of an impromptu charade-party of the previous summer. The point of the story was her own success in a tragic impersonation, but she brought it in very skilfully.
The contrast between her methods, and those of Leeds, was rather amusing.
Lady Annabel talked to the Kendals. Puppa and Mumma have lived sufficiently long in the East to understand her point of view.
Most of the younger people present were playing bob-cherry, but Christopher, with his hat tipped right over his eyes, was talking to Nancy Fazackerly, and Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter were silent.
He was industriously scraping together a small pile of fir needles and dry twigs — one of those mechanical occupations that are generally the sign of complete mental absorption in something else — and she was lighting and smoking one after another of her interminable cigarettes.
Mary Ambrey had been sitting next to me, but she gave me a little nod presently, and changed her place, and went to talk to Mrs. Leeds. She has out-of-date ideas of the courtesy due to a hostess from a guest, which are not shared by her children.
Then Mrs. Leeds added the final touch to her lavish entertainment, and produced, with the air of a benevolent conjuror, a couple of tooled-leather boxes containing cards and bridge markers.
“I thought it’d be a shame to waste the afternoon,” she said simply, clearing a space for a thin carriage rug to cover the purple heather, and setting her back against a small, shimmering silver birch.
“Upon my word, that’s a great idea,” said General Kendal, brightening for the first time since the expedition had started.
“Hector!”
“Hallo!” said Leeds, turning half round. “Oh, I see — you want to build card-houses, do you? Well, Miss Sallie, the end of it was that these perishers, never having seen anyone like me before, absolutely knuckled under. Most ridiculous thing you ever saw. Why, they’d have made me crowned king over them if I’d allowed it. You must let me tell you the end of the yarn another day — that is, if I haven’t been boring you stiff.”
As he did not wait to hear Sallie’s answer, one supposes that Leeds was happily confident as to its nature.
Of course, everybody began to be unselfish again, about the bridge, and those who most obviously wanted to play unanimously offered to resign their places to those who did not care about it in the least.
But the present new generation, like every other generation, had the qualities of its defects, and if it is graceless, it is also fearlessly candid.
Martyn said that he would rather be shot than play bridge, any day of the week, and Sallie said that she thought cards out of doors would be a loathsome idea, and Bill Patch thanked Mrs. Leeds very much but he’d a good deal rather not. Mrs. Fazackerly, however, said that she would love to play, when she thought herself needed to make up a rubber, and when she saw that she wasn’t, said that she didn’t really care for bridge at all, and would honestly prefer not to play.
“You’ll play, Mrs. Harter,” said Leeds in his affirmative way. “I know you’re a d
emon gambler. D’you remember that night at the Club when old Patterson’s crew played whisky-poker till the small hours, and by Jove, d’you remember the cards you picked up? I’ve never forgotten them. Never saw such cards in my life.”
“I always hold good cards,” said Mrs. Harter indifferently.
And of course one of the Kendals rushed in, where ordinarily intelligent human beings, let alone angels, would have thought twice about treading.
“Lucky at cards, unlucky in love,” said Aileen, in the self-satisfied tone of one who is making a consciously apt observation.
The way in which some amongst us then looked straight at Bill and Mrs. Harter was only less indecently obvious than the way in which others amongst us at once looked away from them.
And Bill and Mrs. Harter just looked at one another, and if we hadn’t all of us known about them before, that look must have told us. Leeds was the only person who presumably saw nothing, for he went on to remind Mrs. Harter how badly screwed poor old Patterson had been that night in Egypt, and didn’t she remember his falling down the steps backwards?
“Good gracious!” said Dolly Kendal, with all the fearful directness of the Kendals, “you must have known some funny people out there, Mrs. Harter.”
“Shall we cut for partners?” said Lady Annabel Bending very gently.
Mrs. Kendal does not play bridge, and she came and sat beside me, no doubt with the kindest intentions of enlivening me, but after observing three or four times that the picnic had been very well done, she gradually closed her eyes and ceased to say it. Mumma’s bulk was partly between me and the rest of the world, and I saw, as from the shadow of a great rock, what they were all doing, and it interested me. The people who were playing cards were almost altogether silent, as good players always are. Claire looked tense and eager, as she does over everything. It is nothing to her whether she wins at bridge or not, but it is everything whether she is thought to excel or not. As a matter of fact, she plays very well. General Kendal was her partner and he is a good player, too.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 247
