Chapter Eleven
Whenthe day preceding that of the show arrived, we had all reached the stage of believing, with entire conviction, that nothing else in the world mattered but a successful performance. It is this temporary but complete absence of sense of proportion that puts life into almost any undertaking, but more especially into one about which a number of people are engaged.
On the morning of that day Bill tried to hold a final rehearsal, at which half of the performers failed to appear, because they were frantically and irrationally mislaying vital pieces of property in different parts of the house or dashing off in search of substitutes for other equally vital pieces of property, alleged by them to have been mislaid by other members of the cast.
“If Alfred Kendal isn’t taken through his bit of dialogue at least half a dozen times more, he’ll ruin the whole thing,” said Patch, looking perfectly distraught. “In fact, he’ll probably do that anyhow. For Heaven’s sake, someone hear him his words.”
“I will,” said Nancy. “Where is Alfred?”
She snatched up a housemaid’s tray that had been loaded with empty vases for which Claire, her hands full of flowers, had been vainly inquiring a few moments earlier. “I’ll take this. Where is Alfred?”
“Always remember, when you’re carrying a loaded tray,” said General Kendal, “to put the heavy articles in the middle of the tray and not at the sides.”
“Oh yes, thank you.”
“Let me show you—”
“I’ll leave Alfred to you,” said Bill Patch earnestly, “and if you can get him to sayheightand notheighthin the last scene, it’ll make all the difference.”
“I’ll try, but you know—Oh, General Kendal, thank you very much—yes, I do quite see. Only I think Lady Flower is in a hurry—”
“Are you looking for Alfred?” said Sallie, dashing past. “He’s trying on his beard in the dining room. Cousin Claire is looking everywhere for those drawing-room vases.”
“I know. Thank you so much, Sallie.”
“Thisfellow is the heaviest, I should say—put him in the middle. Then these little light bits of glass—”
“Oh thank you, thank you!”
“Wait a minute—that isn’t quite right yet. It always saves time in the long run,” said the General impressively, “to do things in therightway.”
“Yes, indeed. Shall I take it now? I know Lady Flower is in a hurry.”
“Did someone say Ahlfred was wanted?” Dolly inquired, also hurrying and also with her arms full. “Because I heard him say something about going off on his bicycle to fetch ...” she vanished through the door, and we only heard faintly the words ... “seems to have forgotten.”
“Oh, stop him!” cried Nancy. “Do go and stop Alfred, somebody. Wait! I’ll go myself.”
“Do you want Ahlfred?” said Mrs. Kendal. “Because, if so, he is on the stage. If you want Ahlfred for anything, I can go and find him for you.”
“I thought you wanted to take these vase affairs to Lady Flower,” the General said rather reproachfully to Mrs. Fazackerly. “If you want Alfred, I can fetch him for you.”
“Oh, thank you,” said Nancy, quite wildly, and she rushed away with the tray of vases, and Mrs. Kendal went away, too, and presently reappeared with Alfred, and then, as Nancy was no longer to be seen, let him go again, whereupon Nancy came in again by another door and immediately said:
“But where’s Alfred?”
That sort of thing went on all day long, and running all through my recollection of the whole, chaotic businessis a sort of intermittent duet between Nancy Fazackerly and Alfred Kendal, when at last they found themselves on the same spot, at the same moment, and she was hearing him his part.
“Your cue is—‘color of the sea.’”
“Yes, yes. Just give me my cue, will you?”
“—‘color of the sea.’”
“Yes. Color of the sea. Now, what do I say? Funny thing, it’s on the very tip of my tongue.Don’t tell me—”
“Color of—”
“Don’ttell me.”
“I was only going to give you your cue again ‘Color of the sea’—”
“‘What man can measure the heighth of the mountains? They are—’”
“Didn’t Captain Patch suggest that it really makes the lines run better to sayheight?”
“Isaidheight.”
“Oh, did you? I’m so sorry. How stupid of me. Let’s start again ... ‘color of the sea.’”
“‘What man can measure the heighth of the mountains?...’”
Bill passed them once or twice, and each time he heard Alfred he groaned. By and by Martyn Ambrey,as though he had been the first person to think of it, came up to me and said:
“You know, this sort of thing really won’t do. If this show is to be any good at all, we ought to pull ourselves together and have a proper rehearsal.”
“‘The heighth of the mountains,’” came faintly from the far corner of the hall.
“If you will collect everyone and bring them here, I’ll keep them together and send for Patch, and we’ll go through the whole thing,” I said.
“Right you are. I’ll ring the gong and they’ll think it’s lunch. That’ll bring them.”
“The young are so cynical nowadays,” I heard Sallie murmur.
“Why not be content with thespiritof the thing, supposing the actual letter fails me?” Alfred Kendal suggested in the distance. “As a matter of fact, there’s always a certain amount of gag expected at a show of this kind.”
“I’m sure you’ll get it in a minute,” said Nancy, with her usual kindly, if unfounded, optimism. “Let’s just run through it again ... ‘color of the sea.’”
They crawled through it again.
Martyn’s performance on the gong actually did bring most people into the hall and I then announced that a final rehearsal was to take place at once, andeverybody said that it was utterly impossible and adduced important reasons why they should be somewhere else doing something quite different.
“Very well, then we’ll call a general rehearsal immediately after lunch. Three o’clock sharp. Does that suit everybody?”
Almost everybody assented, presumably because they were relieved at having the thing postponed for an hour or two.
“What about Mrs. Harter?” Martyn suddenly inquired.
She was not present.
“If it’s to be the last rehearsal we ought to do the thing properly and have her song at the beginning and at the end.”
“I can send her down a note,” said Claire.
“I’ll fetch her on my motor bike,” young Martyn volunteered.
He is not always so ready to put himself out on behalf of other people.
“Does Martyn admire Mrs. Harter?” I had the curiosity to ask his sister later.
“It’s mostly that he’s so frightfully interested. The whole psychological situation, you know,” Sallie explained. “I think it’s interesting, too, but I don’t agree with him altogether that it’s her personality thatmakes it so. Bill, in his own way, is quite as well worth watching as she is.”
“You talk as though it were a cinematograph film being shown for your express benefit.”
“That’s rather a good simile,” said Sallie condescendingly.
“My dear child, bar joking, I wish you’d tell me something. These two people, I quite agree with you, are out of the ordinary. Are you wholly and solely curious, and analytical, and interested—or do you ever feel sorry for them?”
I really wanted to know, and Sallie saw that.
“Honestly, I don’t think I really feel sorry for them, because if the whole thing came to an end to-morrow—say, she went back to her husband and he started an affair with somebody else—I should be disappointed, in a way. I don’t want it all to peter out in some trivial way. I want to have something worth watching.”
“Quite impersonally?”
“Of course,” said Sallie.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” suddenly said Claire behind me. Neither of us had seen her. “A child of your age has neither the experience nor the understanding to discuss that sort of problem.”
From being natural, if patronizing, Sallie instantly became stiffly arrogant.
“I’ve already been training for some time with a view to making that or any other sort of problem affecting human beings my work in life.”
“Even a little medical student of two years’ standing doesn’t know everything, darling.”
Claire saw herself as being gently and subtly satirical as she said this, and I saw her as being more or less unconsciously jealous of Sallie’s youth and her cleverness and her opportunities—and above all resentful of her self-confidence. But Sallie, I suppose, only saw her as being stupidly “superior” and aggressive.
“I’ll explain the difference between the medical side and the psycho-analytical side some other time, cousin Claire,” she said, smiling. “I’m afraid I haven’t time now.”
Of course she knew as well as I did that nothing is less endurable to Claire than the suggestion that she stands in need of having any subject under the sun explained to her.
Sallie walked off, cool and triumphant, and Claire turned white with anger.
She has often said—and it is perfectly true—that she would share her last penny with Mary’s childrendid they stand in need of it. But she cannot allow them to assert themselves.
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.
Christopher was very devoted to her, and they looked happy. It was understood that their engagement would not be announced until Mrs. Fazackerly judged her father’s mood to be a propitious one. Knowing Nancy’s weakness, and her parent’s force of character, one was inclined to look upon the case as being adjournedsine die, or at least until old Carey should be translated into another sphere from this.
The strain on Claire was a considerable one, and of course she did nothing whatever to lessen it, but, rather, lay awake at nights and wept, and by day forced upon the unwilling and inadequate Christopheremotional appeals and impulsive generosities. Nancy had been so much absorbed by the theatricals that she had, with her usual tact, avoided Claire altogether, without blatantly appearing to do so.
Now, of course, we were every one of us utterly obsessed by the theatricals. They seemed to have become the one supreme reality in life.
Before three o’clock the performers were assembled round the stage and most of them were saying:
“Where’s Mrs. Harter?”
“She isn’t here yet, is she?” said Mrs. Kendal, looking round with an inquiring expression. And presently she added, as though struck by an afterthought, “Mrs. Harter is late, isn’t she?”
“Martyn went for her on his motor bike.”
“They’ll probably be brought in on two stretchers directly,” Sallie said cheerfully. “Meanwhile, couldn’t we get on without them?”
Of course they could, and did. Bill Patch stuck to his post and never took his eyes off his company, until the cue was spoken for Martyn’s first entrance. Then there was a pause and Mrs. Fazackerly said:
“Oh dear, haven’t they come yet?”
Bill shook his head. Evidently, although he hadn’t turned round, he would have known it if they had come.
Mary, who was prompting, began to read her son’s part, but before she had spoken two sentences he came in.
He was by himself.
It was one of the Kendals, needless to say, although I cannot remember which one, who asked, “Hasn’t Mrs. Harter come?”
“She can’t get here this afternoon. Apologies, and all that. Look here, Patch, can I carry on without changing?”
“Of course,” said Bill. “Fire away.”
They got through it fairly well. Alfred forgot his words several times and said, “Don’t tell me,” with great emphasis when Nancy tried to prompt him, and Mumma called out from her place amongst the spectators: “Now, Ahlfred, don’t get fussed. Don’tletyourself get fussed, dear.” The only sentence that he seemed to have no difficulty at all in remembering was the one in which he referred to “the heighth of the mountains.” The others acquitted themselves reasonably well, and Sallie, who has never known the meaning of nervousness, was brilliant as the Muscovite maiden.
“Those boots of mine look uncommonly well on the stage,” said General Kendal at the end of it all.
And the only comment that I heard from either ofhis daughters was that we must try and remember it would be all the same a hundred years hence.
Whether or not Bill Patch was encouraged by these observations, he made no reply to them, but gave his attention to Mrs. Fazackerly and a doubtful point in the music.
Martyn Ambrey came up to me.
“Do you know what’s happened?”
“The cat has just swallowed the last piece of lipstick in the country, and the whole thing will be ruined,” I suggested somewhat wearily. The last few days had been over-full of such critical situations.
“Much more cataclysmic than that. Do you know why that woman didn’t turn up this afternoon?”
The question being purely rhetorical, I allowed Martyn to supply his own answer to it.
“The husband has come.”
“Good Lord! The Harter husband?” said Sallie. I could have sworn that she was quite delighted at this new dramatic factor in the case.
So was Martyn.
“It was the most extraordinary bit of luck, coming in for it. You know I went down on the machine to fetch her, to those awful rooms in Queen Street. She opened the door to me herself. She’d no hat on, andevidently hadn’t meant to come. So I told her about the rehearsal and suggested taking her along.”
“Did she see you in the hall or in the sitting room?” Sallie inquired. One could see she wanted to be able to visualize the whole thing.
“There wouldn’t have been room for both of us in the wretched little entrance passage. She asked me into the dining room, or, rather, she said, ‘You can go in if you want to,’ and I did go in. The room smelt of mutton chop and down draughts. There was a tray on the table with greasy plates and things and two ghastly affairs in frames, on the walls—some kids feeding swans and a nun trailing along past an open door and looking at a woman in her petticoat bodice undressing a small child on a table. It was all frightfully characteristic.”
Sallie nodded vehemently.
“I know. A sort of arrangement of brackets and shelves and a looking-glass over the mantelpiece, I suppose, and pink paper in the grate.”
“More or less that. And Mrs. Harter stood in the middle of it looking rather like Cassandra. She simply asked if I’d wait while she finished a bit of ironing. I said I would, and she carried on at the other end of the table from the tin tray and the greasy plates.I think she was ironing a blouse—something white, anyhow.”
“Did you talk?”
“I tried to makehertalk,” said Martyn frankly, “but, by Jove, she’s a baffling woman. D’you remember how she turned down Leeds on the day of the picnic? I can quite understand it, of course, but I’m sorry for him, especially as she’d apparently been on quite the opposite tack when they met before. Well, she was just about as forthcoming with me to-day as she was with old Leeds when he would keep on with variations of that story about the cocktails.
“I asked her if she thought the play was shaping all right, and she said, ‘I really couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ and all the time one felt that she was so tremendously on the defensive.”
“I’ve had that feeling about her myself,” Sallie remarked, “as though life had used her pretty hard, which I daresay it has—through her own fault, too. Go on.”
“Well, not having made any headway at all, I was just going to start on Cairo and the East generally when there was a ring at the door, and Mrs. Harter jumped as though she’d been shot. It’s my belief she thought it was Bill Patch, come to fetch her, but she went on with her ironing and I heard someone else goto the door—the woman of the house, I suppose. And almost directly the dining room door opened and a man walked in, and Mrs. Harter looked up and saw him.”
Martyn paused like an actor who wants to enhance a coming effect.
“How did he strike you?” said Sallie breathlessly.
It was characteristic of her that even in her excitement she should put it like that instead of saying, as almost everybody else would have said, “What’s he like?”
“Reptilian—distinctly reptilian. His eyes were too close together and his nostrils flat and too small. But it wasn’t only that. I should say that in a quiet way he was ruthless—very ruthless. I didn’t like the look of him—and neither did Mrs. Harter for the matter of that. When she saw him she stared at him, and something in the way she did it made me guess who it was—just like that. She never said a word, but after a bit he said: ‘Hallo, Diamond! I thought I’d take you by surprise. We got in to Plymouth this morning.’”
“I got up to go, of course, from sheer decency, although I wanted frightfully to sit it out, and I was morally certain that neither of them had given me athought. But I was wrong. Harter said to her, ‘Who’s your friend, Di? Aren’t you going to introduce me?’”
“He thought you were Bill Patch,” said Sallie instantly, and I had a sudden feeling that she was right.
“Did she introduce you?”
“She said, ‘Mr. Ambrey—my husband, Mr. Harter.’ He didn’t shake hands. And then Ihadto go.”
“Does Bill know?”
“Not unless she’s conveyed it to him by telepathy. She said when I was going, ‘Please make my excuses and say I can’t come to the rehearsal, but I’ll turn up to-morrow night all right.’ I bet she will!”
“I hope the husband will come, too,” said Sallie, in what I can only call a bloodthirsty way.
“Well, there they are, the three of them. I suppose,” Martyn said, “that Patch will rush off, as usual, and go down to Queen Street this evening and there he’ll find Mr. Harter.”
“He won’t be as much surprised as you might suppose. Didn’t someone say that Bill and Mrs. Harter had written to him, and asked him to come and see what he thought about it all—something of that sort?”
“You’re flippant, Sallie. Mark my words, something or other is going to get smashed.”
I listened to these two young people. They certainly seemed to me graceless in their hard, detachedappraisement of the affair, but at least their interest was on a higher level than that of Lady Annabel’s low-voiced censoriousness or the frank scandal-mongering of the Kendals.
In a very few hours, of course, the Kendals, and Lady Annabel, and everybody else would know that Mrs. Harter’s husband had come to Cross Loman. Bill Patch, in all probability, would know it even sooner.
“Martyn, are you going to tell him?” said Sallie.
“I suppose so. She told me to make her excuses, as she called it, and that’s a perfectly good excuse, if ever there was one.”
Sallie nodded her head, looking very thoughtful. I felt perfectly certain—and the certainty partly amused and partly disgusted me—that whenever Martyn made his announcement Sallie fully intended to be within earshot of it. While they were still talking, Patch himself came up, looking very earnest and very, very young.
“I think it’s going to be all right, you know,” said he, without preamble. “That last act really went uncommonly well this time. If only Kendal remembers his words, and above all doesn’t try any impromptu funniness, we ought to be all right.”
He turned and looked at Martyn through those queer thick lenses of his.
“What about trying over that stage fight of ours once more? I still have to learn to die, as the hymn book says.”
“Come on then.”
He and Martyn went off together, and I thought Sallie looked disappointed.
“Go and help them, my dear,” I said ironically. “You’ve still a chance of being in at the death.”
“Thanks,” said Sallie coolly. “I think I will.”
I did not see them again after that, but I suppose the communication was made, for presently everybody seemed to know that Mr. Harter had returned to England and had unexpectedly appeared in Queen Street, and everybody seemed to want to talk about it.
Claire was evidently determined to see Harter as a figure of pathos. I guessed that she had not heard Martyn’s “reptilian” description of him.
“So he’s back! Poor fellow. It makes me sick to think of him, toiling there in the heat, probably stinting himself of all but necessities so as to send home money to his wife, while all the time she’s betraying his trust like that.”
I said that, from all accounts, trust was about the last sentiment that Mrs. Harter had ever inspired in her husband, and in any case he’d known for years that she didn’t care for him.
“God help him!” said Claire sombrely. “An unhappy marriage....”
The subject of unhappy marriages is one that, personally, I much prefer to avoid. Claire, however, I think, experiences a certain strange satisfaction in oblique references of which she can make personal application to our own case. But Mary and Mrs. Kendal joined us, and so Claire let the question of unhappy marriages sink into abeyance and asked them if they knew that Mrs. Harter’s husband had just arrived from Egypt.
“Has he come?” said Mary. “I heard he was arriving this summer, but I didn’t know he was actually due yet. He’ll be just in time for the play.”
I didn’t believe in that nonchalance of Mary’s. It was like a cold, strong wind blowing across the atmosphere of gossip and surmise in which we had all been moving. Her matter-of-factness, for the moment, killed the dramatic possibilities in the arrival of Mr. Harter.
We talked of other things.