Chapter Six
Mrs. Harterdid not come to discuss the play with the others that afternoon, but Captain Patch went straight from the meeting to the house in Queen Street and told her about it, and made her promise to sing the “Bulbul Ameer” song.
Again I shall have to fall back upon what, in reality, can only be guess-work, based upon what was afterward told me by Mary Ambrey.
It was their second meeting, and it clinched matters, so far as Bill Patch was concerned. Mrs. Harter may have known, too—probably she did—but she held complexities in her nature that would make her surrender a less simple and less instantaneous affair than his.
I can imagine that, realizing as she certainly did, the strength of the extraordinary thing that was coming, inevitably, to overwhelm them both, she may have hesitated for a moment—not from doubt or fear, but simply in order to gauge, in one breathless instant, the smashing force of the storm before it should break.
He went to see her, and they walked out of the narrow Queen Street house and up Loman Hill to the crossroads there. She told him about her life.
I have put together what I heard in the time, later on, when we were all talking about her, and the little that she said to Mary in their one interview, and the facts that afterward Nancy Fazackerly gave me. And, knowing her turns of phraseology, which remained characteristic of her class and of the defiant streak that ran all through her, I have made out my own version of what she said.
She had been an ambitious girl. Cross Loman had not liked her and she had not liked Cross Loman. Although she was not beautiful, she possessed very powerful sex magnetism and had love affairs from her schooldays onward. But the hard, practical vein that had come to her direct from Ellison, the successful tradesman, never failed her. She never lost her head. She despised her country-town lovers, even while she flaunted their admiration in the face of all Cross Loman.
But she knew very well that only marriage could give her her chance. Mr. Harter (I am sure that she spoke of him as “Mr. Harter” throughout) was the uncle of one of her school friends. Diamond Ellison went to stay with this girl at her home in one of theLondon suburbs, and the solicitor—twenty years her senior—came to the house and fell under one of the brief, incomprehensible spells that young women of a certain type sometimes exercise over men no longer in their first youth.
He misjudged her from first to last, probably misled by the boldness of her mere physical outlines and the mixture of contempt and familiarity in her manner towards men. His first proposals were received by her with no sense of shock—she was both too experienced in men and too ruthlessly cynical for that—but with utter disdain.
“You can ask me to marry you—or you can clear out,” said Diamond Ellison.
He married her.
In the East, she had all the success that she had expected and intended to have. The women never liked her, but she knew herself to be essentially a man’s woman, and she was indifferent then and always to the opinions of her surroundings. The men fell in love with her, and Harter was furiously jealous.
On her own showing, Harter had everything to complain of in his wife. She did not pretend to care for him, she flirted with other men, she was notorious, even judged by the lax standards of the East, and she replied to his incessant, nagging remonstrances withsulky, curt indifference. The only thing that he could never charge her with was extravagance, for she was far too practical a woman to squander money, and perhaps also too proud, since she had not a penny of her own. (Mrs. Ellison was dead, and she had long ago quarreled with old Ellison, who gave her nothing at all.)
Harter threatened to send her home, and she replied that she would not go. Nor did she.
A far stronger man than Harter would have found it impossible to get the better of her. A combination of recklessness and absolute determination made her very nearly impervious.
She even took her pleasures sulkily and without enthusiasm, although she never missed an entertainment or an expedition.
They had no child, of course.
Harter got her back to England at last, after nearly five years of it, by pretending to book his passage as well, and then backing out of it at the last minute.
She despised him all the more for the subterfuge. She herself was never anything but absolutely direct.
She told Patch that she would not have come home even then, but that she was ill, and it is very certain that only a woman of iron physique and resolute willcould have stood the climate, and the racket of her days and nights, for that length of time.
As it was, she’d been a month in a London nursing home before she came to Cross Loman. It was in the nursing home, I imagine, that Diamond Harter took stock of life. She’d been in that home for weeks and not a soul had been to see her. There was no one to come. Her father had retired from business and lived by himself at Torquay. They hadn’t even corresponded for years.
I have heard Mrs. Harter’s speaking voice—a voice stronger and more abrupt than that of most women—and her tones ring in my ears now, sometimes, so that I think I can distinguish the very words that she may have used on the day that she and Bill Patch went up Loman Hill together. But there must have been an intonation in her voice then that neither I, nor anyone else, ever heard there.
She told him that she’d never been in love. Men had stirred her senses, and one or two of them had excited her half-resentful admiration. She had a most acute power of distinguishingnuancesof breeding, and in the East she came into contact with a class of man of very different caliber from that of Harter.
Not once, in all her twenty-eight years, had she even wished to establish a permanent link betweenherself and a fellow creature. And Bill Patch, who liked everybody and who was everybody’s friend, listened to her.
I suppose it was just that element in Bill Patch that made a writer of him, which enabled him to understand. Something rather beyond the apprehension of most of us, to whom he was simply a good-tempered, red-headed boy with an unexpected brain power. Only Sallie, justifying her determination to specialize in psychology, had seen rather further than other people when she said that Captain Patch was a temperamental romantic, capable of agrande passion.
He listened to Diamond Harter and came, I suppose, as near to perfect comprehension of her as one soul can ever come to perfect comprehension of another. That is to say that he not only understood what her words told him, but that he saw far beyond them to the Diamond Harter that she might have been, and that—almost unknown to herself—she must, sometimes, have dimly felt a wish to be.
Whatever else there is to say about Mrs. Harter, it is indisputable that she possessed a character of unusual strength and that there were in her latent possibilities almost frightful in their intensity.
Bill Patch saw straight past everything, accepted everything, and somehow made her see that he understoodand that he accepted. He was passionately in love with her—but that day on Loman Hill he did not speak a word of love to her. There were no preliminary explanations or tentative confidences between them. The whole thing was too vital for that.
At the top of Loman Hill, at the crossroads, is a beech tree, on which lovers have carved their initials for generations. It stands beside a low hedge in which is set a rickety five-barred gate. It was at that gate that they must have stood, as everyone stands, gazing at the blue haze that lies over the hills beyond and at the square, red sandstone tower of Cross Loman church below them.
I have stood at the crossroads on Loman Hill many and many a time and looked over the five-barred gate, at the tower of St. Andrew’s, and when I went there last, I thought of those two who must have stood there together—Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch.
She was a tall woman, and her shoulders and his were nearly on a level; and his red head topped hers only by a matter of a quarter of an inch. I never saw Bill Patch wear a cap or a hat. Her clothes were rather distinctive, and she wore them well. She had a figure for tailor-made suits, and they were nearly always dark in color, and she wore with them a white silk shirt, open at the throat. Her hats were alwayssevere—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. It was his mouth that betrayed him, with the sensitive line of lip that was visible only when he was not laughing.Thatgave one Bill Patch, the writer and dreamer—Sallie’s potential romantic.
They stood at the crossways for a very long while, and, after a time, in silence. Bill Patch knew, absolutely for certain, that he loved her, and that they belonged to one another. The supreme importance of it, in his eyes, made everything else of so little account that he did not even wonder what would happen.
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 withother 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.
She had to recognize it, when it came, and to surrender to it.
And so she was frightened, or at least overwhelmed, at first. Bill’s intuition told him that, and he gave her time.
He told her that he’d been very happy all his life, even during the war. His mother had died when he was too little to remember her, and his father had married again. He was friends with his stepmother. She and his father had two jolly little kids.
He had heaps of friends. A good many of them had gone west in the war.
His writing, Bill Patch said, was a frightfully real thing in its way, but it actually only took a bit of him to do it—he looked on it as a sort of trick. He thought perhaps his subconscious self did most of it, and that was why he could write so easily, and didn’t mind old Carey chatting about poisoners all the time, or people talking in the room, or anything. He knew it was a form of self-expression, for some people, but itwasn’t for him. He didn’t, in fact, think he needed a form of self-expression. He had always, he said again, been very happy.
And all the time he had known that he was waiting for something, and that it was something very great. But he hadn’t known at all what it would be.
Sometimes I have wondered what Mrs. Harter made of it all, as she listened to him. He was so much younger than she, in experience, and in knowledge, and most of all in spirit. Mrs. Harter was, one might say, temperamentally sophisticated, and Bill Patch, who was two years her junior, was most essentially childlike. It is the only adjective I can think of that comes anywhere near to describing that quality in him that had made him, all his life, always happy.
There had never been any woman at all, “to count” he said. He had gone straight from school into the Army, and he hadn’t thought about girls much, although he greatly admired the pretty ones.
Always he came back to it again—he’d had that queer feeling of waiting for something. He didn’t meansomeone—a person—no, it was more like a job, something that only he could do. It sounded odd, Bill admitted, but there it was. Something to do, in a way, with God. Yes, he believed in God.
And Mrs. Harter, who didn’t, and who never had, didn’t say a word.
It was Bill Patch who said at last that they ought to go. One supposes that no single one of all the men whom Mrs. Harter had known would have been sufficiently lacking in the technique of that sort of situation, to propose putting an end to it. She wouldn’t have given them the chance, probably saying it herself, with her most disconcerting air of suddenly finding their company not at all worth her while.
But when Bill Patch said that it was late, and that he ought to take her home again, Mrs. Harter acquiesced, simply. They must have taken a last look over the five-barred gate at the evening sky, against which the red church tower always stands out with peculiar, clear-cut precision of outline, before they turned away, and went down the long slope of Loman Hill, which lies between high banks where the green almost meets overhead.
Bill asked her about her singing, and she said that she’d learned at school, and taken a few lessons just before she married. She used to sing a good deal, in Cairo, because the men she knew liked it. Did he understand, she asked him, that she was the sort of person who sang only for that sort of reason? Once, at a party in a man’s rooms, they’d put her right upon the top of the piano, and she’d sung there, and they’d said it was worth a double brandy-and-soda. Men were always wanting to stand her drinks, and she took them, partly out of devilment, and partly because her husband hated it. She’d got a strong enough head for anything.
I can quite imagine her facing Bill, as she told him that, her mouth hard and rather mocking, and perhaps in her eyes the dawn of a hope that she strove to believe was an incredulous one.
And Bill said that had nothing at all to do with it. He didn’t specify whatitwas, that it had nothing to do with—but that was the last time Diamond Harter ever thought it necessary to point out to him the things about herself, by which the rest of the world judged her.