E. M. Delafield

“ It is said that antiquarians can reconstruct an entire monster from a single bone. Perhaps, as an amateur psychologist, I can reconstruct a singularly enigmatic personality from—well, more than a single fact, perhaps, but not much more. Impressions, especially other people’s impressions, are not facts. Besides, the most curious thing of all, to my mind, is that they all saw her quite differently. The aspect that she wore to Mary Ambrey, for instance, was not that in which Claire, my wife, saw her. ”

“ I hated Cross Loman.”
“Did you like Egypt?”
“Yes,” said Diamond Harter slowly. “I liked Egypt. I got all the dancing and the riding and the parties out there that I’d wanted and hadn’t been able to get down here. Have you ever been to the East?”
“No.”
“It’s all quite different, of course. Everyone knows everyone, in a way. There aren’t ‘county’ people and other cliques, like there are here. One got the chance of knowing people whom one wouldn’t even have met at home.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was Nancy Fazackerly herself who subsequently told me all about her musical evening. She very often comes to see me, and, unlike the Kendals, never causes me to see myself in the unpleasant light of something accomplished, something done, for the good of somebody else’s soul. ”

“ Harter at all, and apparently some unwonted scruple prevented her from saying that she did.
“Oh, Bill, don’t do anything to mess up your life,” she besought him. “You’re so young. It’s so awful to make a mistake right at the beginning.”
She was thinking of her own mistake, no doubt.
“What sort of mistake do you mean, exactly?” said Bill in his literal way. “Do you mean taking her away from Harter? You see, he says that he wouldn’t divorce her even if we did.”
“A great many people, even nowadays, don’t approve of divorced people remarrying. Wouldn’t your own family mind?” ”

“ Martyn has always been her favorite because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn-God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up and has ceased to be chubby—which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Fazackerly looked at his young, unhappy face and pitied him profoundly.
“All the same,” she said bravely, “it isn’t fair, really and truly it isn’t, to shirk one’s obligations. I know it’s dreadful to be with a man one doesn’t like, oh, Bill, I do know it, but she did promise when she married him.”
Bill didn’t exactly acquiesce, but he looked at her with understanding, sorrowful eyes, and Nancy felt that he, too, knew perplexity. ”

“ Fazackerly gently, “that I knew what to do.”
“When a woman says that, it generally means that her mind is made up.”
Nancy laughed, but she said, “Mine isn’t.”
I suppose that if one of the Kendals had been there she would immediately have inquired, “Has he asked you yet?” I have not, however, been brought up by Mumma, and so these unflinching methods are beyond me. Moreover, I did not imagine for a minute that Nancy really wanted advice, any more than anybody else ever wants it. She only needed someone to whom she could talk more or less freely. ”

“ Of course the play was a great success. Amateur theatricals always are a great success. Sallie’s performance was quite brilliant and the others were good enough.
The chief success of the evening was achieved by Alfred, who overacted his part, uttered impromptu soliloquies, cut into other people’s speeches and played the clown in dumb show throughout a pathetic duet between Sallie and Martyn.
The audience, as a whole, adored him. He was applauded at every impossible moment, and the servants, at the back of the hall, screamed with laughter whenever he spoke. Mumma was beaming. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What do you mean by calling me ‘unbalanced?’ I suppose there isn’t a woman of my age anywhere to whom that word is less applicable.”
“Hadn’t we better play at something else?” said Dolly Kendal. “I knew before we began that if anyone put in real people it wouldn’t be a success. That sort of thing always ends in somebody being offended.”
“There’s no question of being offended,” said Claire, more offended than ever.
“Mumma always made the rule, when we were children and used to play games like Consequences: present company always excepted.” ”

“ I thought my life was quite over, as far as that sort of thing went, and that I was just one of those unlucky people who’d made a bad mistake. And then to find him—so good and dear and nice, and actually caring for me!”
“I fail to see anything so astounding in that last item.”
Nancy Fazackerly shook her head.
“I know what I’m like—what circumstances have made me,” she said simply. “Father is a very dominant personality, as you know, and I’ve never been very brave. Sometimes I wonder that I’ve got any individuality left at all. ”

“ Claire was not enjoying the theatricals. Bill Patch had diffidently offered her a part and she had, wisely enough, refused it. But I think she regretted all the time not holding the center of the stage, especially when she found that it was Sallie who quite naturally took that place. Nancy Fazackerly might be one of the authors of the piece and get all the credit of the musical part of it, but she was neither as pretty, as young, as clever, nor as self-assertive as Sallie. Nancy is always ready to let somebody else take the lead, and moreover, in those days, she seemed to be living in a dream. ”

“ I don’t think the marriage is a very happy one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, looking down.
I fancy that to all of us there then came a momentary vision of crockery, propelled violently through space, after the reckless habit that report had imputed to Mrs. Fazackerly’s excitable partner.
“It would be so very kind of you, Lady Flower, to say that we may ask her to help with the show,” said Nancy, raising her pretty eyes to Claire’s face, and speaking with her habitual flattering deference. “You see, if once you gave a lead, Mrs. Harter wouldn’t feel out of things any more.” ”

“ Her hats were always [109] 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 leaned 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. ”

“ On Monday morning he took her away again on the carrier of his motor bicycle, and that—so far as I know—was the end of it.
Mary said that Lois, from start to finish, remained [144] as demure as a Victorian school girl. They have their own standards, no doubt. Mary says so, and leaves it at that. But Claire says, in one and the same breath, that the Lois and Martyn type do not know the meaning of reality, and are incapable of recognizing it when they meet it, and that their attitude of detachment is all a pose. ”

“ Harter, Sir Miles, I should think that music is the last thing to occupy her mind. I think I told you that a good deal is known about her, though it reached me only through entirely unofficial channels. But Captain Patch is a very nice young fellow indeed, and one can’t help feeling it’s a pity that he should be victimized.”
“Perhaps he isn’t victimized. He may admire her.”
“So much the worse,” said Lady Annabel in her lowest, gentlest and most inexorable voice. “Surely there are plenty of nice, innocent girls to choose from without running after a married woman. ”

“ We all meet one another pretty frequently, but I seldom care to take my wheel chair and my unsightly crutch outside the park gates, and so my intercourse is mostly with the people who come to the house.
Mary Ambrey and her children come oftenest. Claire’s feelings, on the whole, are less often hurt by Mary than by most other people. Claire neither likes, admires, nor approves of Sallie and Martyn Ambrey, but she is at the same time genuinely and pathetically fond of them—a contradiction as painful to herself as it is probably irksome to Martyn and Sallie. ”

“ Claire, theoretically, is a democrat. She is also the champion of individual freedom, and she believes in the right of every man or woman to marry for love.
Neither Mary nor I was tactless enough to remind her of all this. In fact, we said very little. The Claire type of mind cannot be approached by arguments, being almost as wholly devoid of sustained reasoning powers as is a young child. It was inevitable that Claire should be jealous of the woman with whom her brother fell in love, and the obviousness of poor Mrs. Fazackerly’s shortcomings made things simpler, in a way. ”

“ Harter had for some years been devoid of qualms. Mrs. Fazackerly says that she remembered then Leeds and his story about the cocktails, and several other stories of his, too, and she felt that Bill was probably right. But after all, qualms were not altogether to be relegated to nothingness.
Captain Patch, with his strange air of a wistful candor that sought her sympathy even while accepting her condemnation, told Mrs. Fazackerly that he fully realized something which he described, in the idiom of his generation, as the “unsportingness” of taking away another man’s wife. ”

“ The rectory possesses only a small governess cart and pony, and Lady Annabel is driven out by the gardener’s boy. But she always, by means of smiles and bows, and small waves of the hand, makes a kind of royal progress for herself. It is her boast that she never forgets a face, and in consequence a great number of the tradespeople in Cross Loman are gratified by the marks of recognition lavishly showered upon them from the rectory pony carriage. ”

“ 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 appeal to her from only 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. ”

“ Claire wailed.
But Mary could believe it. She told me afterward that, from the instant in which she had heard that Bill Patch was dead, it seemed to her that there was something inevitable in that arbitrary solution to the affair.
When General Kendal brought me back to the Manor House—and, after all, we were at the bridge less than an hour—Sallie was with me. She had helped most pluckily and sensibly, with a silent efficiency that spoke admirably for her training.
Martyn had remained with the A. A. men who were beside the wrecked car. ”

“ 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 [110] other men—had absolutely denied the existence of the one supreme reality.
But the capacity for recognizing it had been there all the time, smothered under her cheap cynicism, her ruthless ambition, and the streak in her of sheer, iron hardness. ”

“ I have heard him sing in church.
“You’ll have to do it yourself, Captain Patch,” said Claire. “How about the Hessian boots?”
“We thought of Martyn. And someone will be wanted to sing the song itself, as a kind of prologue, before the curtain goes up,” said Mrs. Fazackerly.
I remember that she looked as much pleased and excited over their plans as a child over a party.
“You see, that song is meant to be a sort of recurring motif throughout the whole show,” Bill said. “When we’re at rather a loose end, someone can play the refrain or sing it, and it will buck things up at once. ”

“ The Kendal reaction to life is a mixture of self-depreciation, self-assertion, and a thorough-going, entirely unvenomous pessimism in regard to past, present, and future. There are four sisters, and one brother, who is always spoken of by his family as “poor old Ahlfred.”
Inquiries after Alfred, who is in business and comes home only for week-ends, always elicit the assurance that he is “struggling along somehow.”
General Kendal, known as Puppa, and Mrs. Kendal—Mumma—also “struggle along somehow.”
When they were told about Sallie’s new game, Dolly and Aileen Kendal looked horribly distrustful. ”

“ Claire said that it seemed an unromantic sort of trysting place.
“It shows how intimate they are, their going like that to the butcher’s together. None of my girls would ever dream of taking a gentleman to do their household shopping,” said Mrs. Kendal with absolute truth. “I should think less of it, in a way, if Captain Patch and Mrs. Harter went to the theater, or even to the cinematograph, together. But when it comes to their going together to the butcher’s, I ask myself what it all means.” ”

“ We translate life in terms of our own inner values ... and Bill and Mrs. Harter were capable of tragedy, and it came to them, and most of us condemned them, and some of us only pitied.
It is over, and yet it will never be over. It continues to live, in the personality of Diamond Harter, and, indeed, in the personalities of us all. ”

“ 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 [268] 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.” ”

“ Sallie and Martyn are both crude in many ways.”
“But is Sallie really going to be a lady doctor?”
“So she thinks at present,” replied Claire, with a tolerant smile that I think relieved her feelings. “Girls have these wonderful opportunities nowadays. I’ve sometimes thought that if it had been possible, I ought to have gone in for that kind of career myself. I believe I’ve got a natural turn for that sort of thing.”
Claire almost always believes herself to possess a “natural turn,” whatever that phrase may denote, for any form of achievement in which she hears of someone else’s success. ”

“ I said that I thought we ought to do [78] the thing properly and invite the whole neighborhood, not merely dancers. “Can’t we have bridge or something to amuse the older people?” said I, not without a thought to my own entertainment.
“I know!” cried Martyn. “Let’s have theatricals—ask everybody to come and see them, and then have a dance afterwards for those who like it.”
Christopher, Mrs. Fazackerly, Sallie, and Captain Patch received the suggestion with such clamorous enthusiasm that Claire and I exchanged a glance and a word under cover of it. ”

“ Just as Martyn had finished distributing pencils and strips of paper the Misses Kendal were announced.
It was the twins, Dolly and Aileen.
They wear their hats on the backs of their heads, and their skirts a little longer behind than in front, [10] as do all the Kendals, but they are nice-looking girls in a bovine way. It is hard on them to compare them with Sallie, who is ten years their junior, as slim and as straight as a wand, and whose clothes invariably produce a peculiarly dashing effect.
No Kendals are ever dashing. ”