Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Asked whether he had been drinking during the evening, Harter replied in the affirmative, but denied that he had been anything but sober.

  He gave a very unemphatic account of the accident, and “supposed that the car had skidded.” It was not a very tenable theory, and it broke down under the examination of the A.A. men.

  Harter listened to it all with his unwholesome little face quite unmoved. He must have expected the verdict, for when at last it came, he did not move a muscle.

  He was formally committed for trial at the next Assizes, on a charge of manslaughter.

  XV

  THE thing, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there. The climax had come. It was — it should have been — all over. But the drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to anti-climax. Things go on... one can’t pause, as at the end of a chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval.

  The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights, that had to be lived through. Harter’s trial came on in a very short while, and he was found guilty of manslaughter.

  He got five years for it.

  They said that he smiled at the verdict.

  Sallie and Martyn Ambrey both went away from home on the day following that of the inquest. One could feel, in both of these young and yet highly-evolved people, the strong, instinctive resistance with which they opposed the possible effect of tragedy upon themselves. They were afraid of being made to feel emotion, and yet they were afraid, too, of finding themselves out to be incapable of emotion. They hurried away from Cross Loman.

  In a little while I imagine that the whole thing will have become purely objective to both of them, a story to be told, something entirely outside themselves.

  Claire, with her powers of imagination, suffered vicariously, but, as usual, she mixed it all up with her own private and peculiar grievances. Several times she asked why Bill, who was young and had all his life before him, should have been taken, whilst she herself, for whom life held nothing, and who was infinitely weary, should have been left?

  There is, of course, no answer to these kind of questions. I never quite understand why people ask them.

  Lady Annabel Bending, who would certainly get out of her pony-cart and walk up the mildest slope, in order to spare her fat pony, made, on the whole, the most brutal comment of any that I heard made, in her gentle, relentless voice. She said —

  “I suppose that woman is satisfied, now that she’s succeeded in causing the death of a young and talented man, after mixing him up in a vulgar scandal, and doing her best to ruin him, body and soul, and bringing her husband to disgrace. I suppose she’s satisfied.”

  She said this to me, but Mary Ambrey was in the room. She looked at Lady Annabel with her straight-gazing dark eyes.

  “However much Mrs. Harter may be responsible for, and after all she wasn’t the only person concerned in the affair — it’s she who’s been left to face the music,” said Mary. “As for being satisfied, Lady Annabel, it’s a figure of speech in any case, I suppose, but it doesn’t apply to Mrs. Harter. If she’d broken every commandment there is, she’d be paying for it now — over and over again.”

  Lady Annabel did not look pleased. No doubt there was an obscure connection in her mind between the ten commandments and the Rector’s official position.

  “My words were, of course, not meant to be taken literally,” she said. “Probably Mrs. Harter is shocked at what has happened, now, as we are all apt to be shocked by consequences, when they are sufficiently serious and unexpected. But I must say I have very little pity for a woman who deliberately sets out to wreck the life of a man younger than herself.”

  Mary turned rather white, but she had the courage to say —

  “Bill Patch was a free agent. Apart from everything else, we ought to remember that he was a free agent. It’s she who’s left to pay the penalty, but it isn’t fair that she should bear the blame for both.”

  And then Claire said: “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.”

  So far as surface values went, it was a rebuke to Mary. But Mary’s values are not surface ones, and she is quite clear-headed about them. And I believe that Claire herself, in a way, understood better than she would let herself appear to understand. She had far too much intuition not to know that Bill and Mrs. Harter had been involved, together, in an adventure of real spiritual and emotional significance, and that it was Bill who had been allowed the easy way out, and Mrs. Harter who, as Mary said, had been left to face the music alone.

  Claire understood, to a certain extent. But she had always disliked Mrs. Harter, and it was not in her to accord to a woman she disliked the recognition of spiritual and emotional significance.

  Lady Annabel, who bent her head in acquiescence to the de mortuis clause, was on another plane of vision altogether. She really couldn’t see any but the surface values.

  Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter had sinned; and she was quite prepared to judge and condemn them both. But Captain Patch was dead, and so he could no more be spoken of, except with pity and regret. Mrs. Harter, who was still alive, retained full responsibility for everything.

  “It is a frightful affair, altogether,” said Lady Annabel, “to have caused the death of a young man like that, in the very midst of the errors into which she had led him, without any time for preparation.. Well, I suppose she is satisfied now.”

  Even Mary did not again attempt to move her from that.

  The Kendals, who will undoubtedly parler pour ne rien dire round the whole subject at frequent intervals for the rest of their lives, nevertheless showed a great deal of warm feeling, so that one felt their narrow-mindedness to be oddly neutralised by their kind-heartedness.

  They had been fond of Bill Patch, and the girls, at least, in their strangely prolonged youthfulness of outlook, had never seen beyond the “flirtation-with-a-married-woman” indictment. Mumma herself, in all sincerity, cried heartily and said that in the grave all things were forgotten.

  It will be no thanks to her if they are, however. She will always see the whole thing in terms of a sensational scandal, and it is thus that she will always show it to others. And in the end, it is quite probable that the four Kendal girls will dismiss the subject, in their rather solemn way, by the formula: “Mumma says she would rather that we did not talk about it.”

  The lowest level of all was that upon which Mr and Mrs. Leeds took — it could scarcely be called their stand — but their very fleeting and transitory foothold.

  When they had accorded to death the conventional tributes of an instant of seriousness, a hastily-made-up face of shocked dismay, and a meaningless ejaculation or two, they were inclined to facetiousness.

  They enjoyed the scandal of it all, with that instinctive vulgarity of outlook that characterises a certain type of unimaginative mind.

  Leeds told the cocktail story over and over again, and Mrs. Leeds chaffed him publicly about having admired “that woman” in Egypt. Away from Cross Loman, probably they magnified their acquaintance with Mrs. Harter, wherever the notoriety of her name had penetrated, into an intimacy. Leeds, in particular, was like that.

  Mrs. Fazackerly, to whom, after all, the shock of the accident had been a double one, behaved very gallantly. She attended the inquest, and she actually saw the father of Bill Patch, and talked with him about his son. Neither of them referred to Mrs. Harter at all. Then Mrs. Fazackerly put Loman Cottage into the hands of the house agents, stored all her belongings, and came to us. Claire, who is at her best in a crisis, went herself to fetch her. The last of her opposition to Christopher’s marriage went by the board when poor Nancy, her final responsibilities over, had a bad nervous breakdown.

  Claire nursed her.

  “Poor little thing,” said Claire. “Women who have never really suffered are very apt to go to pieces when the first contact with reality comes. I could never do that, myself. One is as one’s made, of course. I suppose that very few women of my years have been called
upon to go through all that I have gone through in my life. But I’ve never broken down yet. If I had, I suppose that I should have gone mad by this time.”

  She did not make that speech in front of Christopher, and her care of Nancy was rewarded by Christopher’s rather inarticulate, but quite evident, gratitude and admiration.

  As soon as possible, Christopher Ambrey and Mrs. Fazackerly were married very quietly indeed, in London, and he took her away to the South of France.

  He was to rejoin his regiment abroad early in the following year, and she, of course, was going with him.

  The last thing that she said to me — and her childlike eyes regained their radiance as she said it — was —

  “It’s the most wonderful chance of beginning life all over again that anyone was ever given. The things that used to worry me need never worry me again, and I shan’t ever be frightened any more.”

  And with that — the last reference that I ever heard her make to the past — one felt that the old ghosts of those oft-quoted rages of Fazackerly, thrower of plates, and the tyrannies of old Carey, and his eternal criminological discussions, were laid for ever. Even the rather strenuous economies that had for so long been part and parcel of life at Loman Cottage, melted away of themselves in Nancy’s determination that Christopher should be as happy as she was herself.

  And as far as I know, both of them continue to be happy, in their own way, and according to their own capacity for happiness.

  They will be a great deal abroad, for some years to come, and Claire is gradually turning the battery of her correspondence on to Nancy instead of Christopher. Nancy’s replies are far more adequate than Christopher’s ever were.

  “In the end,” says Sallie, “she’ll get on better with cousin Claire than anybody. Far better than any really, thoroughly truthful person could ever do.”

  It is all, in a way, very like the old literary convention of the good people getting married and living happily ever after, and the bad ones coming to smash.

  And yet there is another way of looking at it — Mary Ambrey’s way.

  It was after Martyn and Sallie had gone away, after Christopher’s marriage, and after I had been abroad with Claire for nearly nine weeks. Mary had remained in Cross Loman. It was a very warm spring day, and I had driven her up Loman Hill to the cross roads. The pony stopped of his own accord and turned round, and we looked at the distant hills and the red church tower. It was then that Mary told me she could never come there any more, without thinking with a vividness of thought that amounted to pain of Mrs. Harter and of Captain Patch. “Neither can I,” said I.

  “The first — no, it was the second — walk that they took together, was to this place.”

  “Yes. How do you know?”

  “She told me.”

  “Diamond Harter?”

  “Yes,” said Mary.

  “I didn’t know that she had ever told anybody anything.”

  “It was the only time that she ever did, I think, and nobody else knows that — I went down to Queen Street, the day of the inquest.”

  “Did you, Mary?”

  “I wasn’t the only one,” she said quickly. “After the accident, do you remember that they’d taken her to the Cottage Hospital, and she was detained there till the very day of the inquest. Two or three people asked for her then, I know — the Rector, and Nancy Fazackerly and, I think, Mrs. Leeds.”

  I ejaculated, at the last name.

  “Yes, I know,” said Mary. “Of course that was horrible — but she refused to see the Rector, too, and Nancy.”

  “So I should have expected.”

  “I don’t know. The Rector is very gentle, and she’s known him for years — and he was very fond of Bill Patch. But anyhow, she didn’t see either of them. As far as I know she saw nobody, except the doctor and one nurse, until she gave her evidence. And after that, Miles, she had to go back to Queen Street.”

  “And you went to find her there?”

  “Oh no, I didn’t. She found me there. I can’t exactly explain what made me do it, Miles. I think — stupidly enough — it was the thought of her packing. I couldn’t get it out of my head — that after the whole appalling business was over, she’d have to come and see all the clothes she’d been wearing — and the little, inanimate things — and the sitting-room with the bow-window, where she’d waited for Bill. And I thought that it would be less frightful if she found someone there — and the packing done — and even if it made her very angry, it would be better than seeing it all again; just exactly as it had been before. But she wasn’t angry. She came much sooner than I’d expected, and walked straight into the sitting-room, and I don’t think she remembered who I was or anything. She sat down by the table, I remember, and folded her hands in her lap and never said a word. And I finished the packing.”

  “Without speaking?”

  Mary nodded.

  “I was crying, Miles. I didn’t know that one could cry like that, any more — at my age. But if you’d seen her face—”

  She broke off, and then after a minute or two spoke again.

  “If the people, like Lady Annabel, or General Kendal, who talked about her having done so much harm, and wrecked Bill’s life, and so on, could have seen her then, surely they’d have realised that she was paying for everything — over and over again. There’s nothing anyone can say of her that she can’t have said to herself — you see, she’s intelligent, isn’t she? She knew what she’d done far better than any of them could ever tell her. That’s the point of the whole thing, really, isn’t it? Mrs. Harter was capable of things, good as well as bad, that the rest of us didn’t even begin to apprehend. If the Kendals — I’m using them as a symbol, you understand — if the Kendals think that she was ‘unhappy’ and it served her right, it’s only because they attach such a trivial meaning to the word. I saw her once when she was happy, out with him one morning, long before we realty knew anything about her and Bill — and I can’t forget it, Her emotions were on a different plane to those of the rest of us. Her capacity for feeling was different — I suppose it was really that which we all felt about her in the very beginning, when we discussed her. Life must always have been much more difficult for her than for most people — and yet all the time, one knows, it might have been so much more beautiful.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  I was remembering Mrs. Harter’s sullen, contemptuous expression, her ungracious manner, even that characteristic middle-class phraseology, those intonations and inflexions that placed her, so unmistakably, in the aristocratic judgments of Cross Loman —

  After all, I had never seen her, as Mary had, illuminated.

  “Do you really think that Mrs. Harter’s life might have been something — beautiful?”

  “Might have been?” said Mary. “It ought to have been. Sometimes I’m not even sure, Miles, that it won’t yet be, in spite of everything. She’s got it in her.”

  Mary stopped — not hesitating, but giving additional weight to her low, earnest speech.

  “Mrs. Harter is capable of tragedy — that’s why it came to her, I suppose. The majority of people aren’t.”

  I found that I rather resented that remark of Mary’s. It was so true — the last half of it, I mean. Inevitably, I made the personal application that Mary had certainly not intended.

  No, my warped, fretful, sometimes rather spiteful, outlook on life does not constitute tragedy, any more than does the flat, jarring inharmony of the relations between Claire and myself. My futile repinings, all of them translated into terms of mental values, are not tragedy.

  For a moment, I wondered about Mary Ambrey herself. I looked at her, and she smiled.

  “Oh no, Miles. One may be conscious of having missed actual, positive happiness, perhaps, even, of having lost the power of feeling anything very vehemently, but that’s disappointment, not tragedy. All I’m capable of is of recognising it when I see it.”

  “And you saw it in Mrs. Harter?” />
  “Yes.”

  “Mary, where is she now? What happened, when you had packed for her, in the lodgings in Queen Street?”

  “She went to London, but I don’t know where she is now. I asked her where she was going, and she said ‘London first, to get a job. Abroad, I expect.’ There wasn’t anything I could do to help her, she said. She went away that night. I went to the station with her. And on the way there she talked a little, though I don’t think she had much idea of whom she was talking to, at the time. She spoke about Bill, and she said quite calmly: ‘One reason why I’m telling you about it, is that it will help me to remember it longer. One day all this will fade away — I know that very well. One’s made like that. What it’s done to me will stay, but the memory of this — even of him — will grow dim, like everything else. This torture will stop, in time, and I shall remember less and less.’ Then she told me about her second meeting with Bill. They went up Loman Hill and came here. She knew he’d fallen in love with her, of course — I imagine that quite a lot of men have been in love with her — and she half thought it was different to anything else that had ever happened to her before, but she wasn’t absolutely certain. You know, Miles, personally, I think it was rather wonderful that she should have recognised that — that quality, when it did come. I don’t think anything in her life had helped to make her able to recognise it.

  “So she told him about herself — the truth, not the subtle dramatisation of it that one mostly offers to other people — I don’t mean that she had any special revelation to make, you know. But she just let him see her as she honestly saw herself — and she’s an extraordinarily honest woman. And she said Bill understood. She said that he asked ‘What difference that made?’ at the end of it all. Can’t you hear Bill saying that, very literal, and serious and gentle, and looking at her through those queer, thick glasses?”

  For a minute, as Mary spoke, something caught hold of me, and I passed through one of those vivid moments of almost intolerable intuition, in which one lives imaginatively through the profound emotional experience of another.