Chapter Seven
Mostof 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 rathermacabregallery of celebrities, and he gardened with Mrs. Fazackerly, and they worked at the “Bulbul 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 veryfar 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, “Thatwoman hard?”
The “Bulbul 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 rehearsalen bloc, although only Alfred and Amy were to takeparts, 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 cast 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 enquired, looking alertly round him.
“We haven’t quite got to that yet.”
“I say, why not have one of the verses of thereal‘Bulbul 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 “Bulbul 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 quiteseePuss-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 recognize them.
“Why not little Bo-Peep, while 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 arealEastern 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.
Claire 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 while 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 waswise 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 Ishouldlike to know, if possible, whether you can undertake Abdul the Bulbul 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 veryslowly, 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. Ican’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.
The tune of “Abdul the Bulbul Ameer” rattled through the room again and again, and Martyn and Sallie and Alfred and Amy all sang it, and General Kendal boomed his usual accompaniment of some rather indeterminate monosyllable repeated over and over again. All the rehearsals seem to me now to have been very much alike.
Bill Patch was always gay and light-hearted and more or less distracted, and Mrs. Fazackerly was always good-tempered and obliging—and almost always untruthful, when appealed to on any question of conflicting opinions.
Sallie Ambrey was always competent, and her acting was very clever. So was Martyn’s. Eventually, theymade Bill Patch play the villain’s part himself, after Christopher Ambrey had declined it.
“I’d rather turn over the pages for the orchestra,” said Christopher, and the orchestra smiled at him gratefully in the person of Mrs. Fazackerly.
The Kendals almost always came to the rehearsals. I think Puppa had some idea that his presence inspired the whole thing with a spirit of military discipline. At any rate, he said, “Come, come, come,” every now and then when Bill or I had stopped the rehearsal in order to confer with one another.
And Mumma, I feel sure, enjoyed watching Amy and Alfred on the stage and Blanche and Dolly and Aileen among the audience.
Claire was there, of course. From time to time she interrupted everything, in order to show somebody how to do something. Most of them were very patient with her, and Patch, in all simplicity, always thanked her. I daresay that the others didn’t see it as I did. I find it difficult to be fair to Claire. Mary Ambrey, I noticed, used to find a seat near her and used to listen while Claire explained in an undertone that, funnily enough, she had a great deal of the actress in her and other things like that. So long as one person was exclusively occupied with her, Claire was fairly safe not to make one of her general appeals.
Mary Ambrey was to prompt, and during the first few rehearsals she had nothing to do and could attend to Claire.
“Why not do without prompting altogether?” said Alfred Kendal. “We can always gag a bit, if necessary. Topical allusions—that sort of thing.”
“Icouldn’t,” said his sister Amy firmly. “I’m sure you’d better have a prompter.”
Mumma supported Amy. “Some of you are sure to get stage fright and to break down on the night, and that’s when the prompter is useful. When someone gets stage fright, you know, and breaks down.”
Captain Patch asked me afterwards if it was absolutely necessary for General and Mrs. Kendal to attend every rehearsal. He said that Mrs. Kendal was breaking his nerve. And the General thought, and spoke, of nothing but his Hessian boots. Bill put in a song about them on purpose to please him and Martyn—Ivan Petruski Skivah—sang it.
Mrs. Harter did not attend any of the early rehearsals. She had nothing to do with the play, really, and was only to sing “The Bulbul Ameer” before the curtain went up and again at the end of the play. I think Nancy Fazackerly had made Bill understand that Claire would not welcome Mrs. Harter to the rehearsals.
One day old Mr. Carey came. He made us all rather nervous, and his daughter, at the piano, lost her head completely.
“Father is such a personality,” I heard her murmuring to Christopher—a phrase which she generally reserved for those who had no personal experience of her father’s peculiarities.
That was after old Carey had criticized a bit of dialogue which he attributed to his daughter’s authorship and which afterwards turned out to have been written by Bill Patch quite independently.
“I know nothing whatever about writing,” said Carey, who, like many other people, appeared to think this in itself a reason for offering an opinion on the subject. “In fact, I’m willing to admit that it seems to me a damned waste of time for any full-grown person to sit and scribble a lot of nonsense about something that never happened, and never could have happened, for other full-grown persons to learn by heart and gabble off like a lot of board-school children. However, that’s as it may be. What you young people don’t realize is that there are things going on all around you every day that would beat the plot of any story, or any play, hollow.”
When old Carey had said this, he looked round himtriumphantly, as though he had just made a new and valuable contribution to the subject of literature.
He also said that anyone could write, if only they had the time, and that reading novels was only fit for women, and that generally he had enough to do reading theTimesevery day, with an occasional detective story if he had nothing better to do.
Mrs. Fazackerly looked unhappy, but Bill Patch was impervious to it all.
He sat down beside the old man and listened to him quite earnestly, and presently I heard old Carey, evidently intending a concession, inquire whether authors thought of their plots first and their characters afterwards or their characters first and their plots afterwards.
I have often wondered whether there is any writer in the world who has escaped that inquiry.
“I have often thought that I should like to write a book,” said Mrs. Kendal in a tolerant way. “I’m sure if I put down some of the things that have happened to me in my life, they would make a most extraordinary tale, and probably no one would believe that they had really happened.”
I fancied that Amy and Alfred Kendal cast rather a nervous glance at their parent at these implications, but the General remained entirely unmoved, and Ifound that, instead of listening, he was offering, in a rather uncertain manner, to drive Mrs. Fazackerly and Sallie into the town to choose material for the costumes that were to be worn in the play.
“What is the use of having a car if we cannot help our friends out of a difficulty?” said Mumma, with her large, kind smile. “Let us all go in this afternoon—you and I, Puppa, and Nancy and Sallie. The girls can keep Ahlfred company at home.”
If Mrs. Kendal is obliged to go out anywhere without her family, she always arranges some occupation for the absent members of it. I think it gives her a sense of security.
“The car holds four very comfortably, but more than four are bad for the springs, I believe. One has to think about the springs, especially in a new car. Springs are so important,” said Mumma.
“If my tin Lizzie can be of any use, I’ll drive anyone anywhere,” said Christopher Ambrey eagerly. “And in Lizzie’s case there’s no need to consider the springs, as there aren’t any to speak of. Look here, I suggest that if you and General Kendal can really find room for Sallie, I should drive Mrs. Fazackerly in, and—and then you can take, say, Patch. I’m sure Patch ought to be there to settle about the clothes and things—or Martyn. I should think Martyn oughtto go, if anyone does, to make sure you get the right things for those boots.”
“We’re only going to buy materials—not clothes,” said Sallie. “But, still, I daresay that Martyn could be quite useful.”
“I think Bill had better go,” Martyn firmly declared.
“I can’t. It’s awfully good of you, Mrs. Kendal, but my partner will do all that far better than I could.”
He smiled at Mrs. Fazackerly, who was smiling back at him happily, when the unexpected sound of old Carey’s voice suddenly and completely extinguished the brightness in her face.
“Nancy can go with you, Mrs. Kendal, as you’re kind enough to propose it, and there are one or two things I want done in the town. Nancy can see to them.”
Sallie’s clear, intelligent gaze went from one to the other of them. She sees a great deal, but she has not yet learned how to look as though she didn’t see it.
“If Martyn and I may go with you, Mrs. Kendal, we’ll sit in the back of the car and rehearse to one another. (Yes, Martyn, we must—time is frightfully short, and you know how woolly you are about your words.) And then Chris can take Nancy, and wecan all meet somewhere for tea. What time, Mrs. Kendal?”
Sallie is always so confident, and decisive, and resolute, that she can carry things off with a high hand. Old Carey subsided again and Mrs. Kendal said, some seven or eight times, that as they always had tiffin early at Dheera Dhoon—“a reminiscence of our Indian days, I’m afraid—” she thought that they had better start at two o’clock.
“Besides,” said Captain Patch to me, aside, “I believe it takes the General nearly an hour to do the ten miles.”
At the last minute, the whole thing was nearly wrecked by General Kendal, who suddenly observed: “Then I am to have the pleasure of driving you, Mrs. Fazackerly? I hope that you will not feel nervous. I am something of a tyro still, but I believe I am a careful driver.”
“Thank you—not a bit—but—”
“I think Sallie goes with you, General,” said Christopher.
And I saw Claire look round at the tone in which he said it.
Then the rehearsal broke up. Sallie and Martyn disappeared, but Mary Ambrey stayed and had lunch with us.
As soon as the servants had left the dining room, Claire wrung her hands together and looked despairing.
“Did you notice Christopher?” she asked in husky misery. “Surely, surely he couldn’t?”
Of course, both Mary and I knew what she meant. We had heard her say the same thing so often.
“He only offered to take her in the two-seater. There really need not be any very great significance in that,” I pointed out, although I knew very well that, to Claire’s type of mind, events are of two kinds only: the intensely significant and the completely non-existent.
“I thought you wanted Christopher to get married,” said Mary calmly.
Claire nearly screamed.
“Why shouldn’t he marry Nancy Fazackerly? Not that I think he wants to marry her just because he offers to take her for a drive—but supposing he did, Claire—I can’t see why you shouldn’t be pleased.”
“A woman whose husband used to throw plates at her head!” said Claire. “Have you forgotten that?”
“Mary cannot very well have forgotten it,” said I, “as no one ever allows it to rest in peace. If I’ve heard that story once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. And I fail to see, Claire, why the fact that Fazackerlyhad an unbridled temper should be supposed to detract from the desirability of his widow.”
I really did believe that Christopher was attracted by Nancy Fazackerly, and although I did not—as I believe women do—immediately begin to think about choosing them a wedding present, it had certainly crossed my mind that it would be a pleasant thing to see little Nancy happy. As for Christopher, I knew perfectly well that any nice woman, especially if she liked gardening and children, would makehimhappy.
Claire, however, credited him with all her own exigencies.
“Nancy Fazackerly is all very well in her own way, perhaps, but she isn’t the sort of woman I expect my brother to marry, Miles. It may not be her fault—I daresay it isn’t—but she has some very odd ideas. I shall never forget how she talked about taking in a paying guest, and whether he was to have second helpings or not.”
“I imagine that Christopher could regulate the number of helpings that he required, at his own dinner table, for himself.”
“You know, Claire,” said Mary Ambrey, “if Nancy was away from her father, she would be quite different. It’s only his endless naggings about expensethat has infected her. You know how adaptable she is.”
“I know that she is the most untruthful woman of my acquaintance,” returned Claire vehemently.
“That must have been the plates,” I affirmed positively. “I am convinced that Nancy would not tell so many fibs as she undoubtedly does tell if she could be brought to forget the outrageous Fazackerly and his plate-throwing. Don’t you agree with me, Mary?”
“Yes, I do. And in any case, Claire, you know we really are taking a good deal for granted. At one time you were afraid it might be Aileen Kendal.”
“Never,” said Claire, with a total disregard for accuracy that would have done ample credit to Mrs. Fazackerly herself.
Christopher brought Nancy back to the Manor that afternoon for a very late tea.
He was in excellent spirits, and they told us about their afternoon’s shopping.
“We got in long before the others. The General positively crawls in that Standard of his. And Patch did turn up, after all. We met him with Mrs. Harter.”
“That Mrs. Harter?” said Claire.
“We all of us got the things together, and we decided that Mrs. Harter ought to wear an Eastern dress, too, for singing ‘The Bulbul Ameer.’ She’s very clever atdressmaking and she and I can easily make the things ourselves. That’ll save expense,” babbled Nancy.
“Why didn’t you bring Captain Patch back with you? I like Captain Patch. He and I have so much in common.”
“He and Mrs. Harter were going to have tea together somewhere in the town.”
Claire drew her brows together for an instant and then raised them, as though puzzled.
“But how nice of him, to be kind to Mrs. Harter!”
“I think he admires her, if you ask me,” said Christopher easily. “They came in together by ’bus to-day from Cross Loman.”
Then they began to talk about the play again.
It was then, on that same day, that Mary Ambrey and Claire and I had begun to ask ourselves if Christopher was falling in love with Nancy Fazackerly, that the first suggestion was made of anybody’s having noticed the friendship between Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.