Chapter Twelve
Afterthe rehearsal, Captain Patch went to Queen Street. And although I can, again, only reconstruct, at the same time it isn’t exactly that and that only. For Bill, strangely enough, told Nancy Fazackerly about it.
I can understand his having done so, in a way. He knew very well that she was in love with another man and also that she knew him to be in love with another woman, and that there could be no question of sex values or sex consciousness between them.
Moreover, Patch was naturally open-hearted and Nancy sympathetic.
He came back to Loman Cottage at about six o’clock that evening and Mrs. Fazackerly overtook him just as he pushed open the garden gate.
She had begun a reference to the all-pervading theatricals when she caught sight of his face. The curiously boyish aspect that always belonged to it seemed intensified, but she has told me that, although she felt he was suffering, it wasn’t the fierce, unreasoningsuffering of youth that he suggested to her, but rather a certain perplexity, a foreseeing of conflict.
“What is it?” she cried, almost involuntarily.
“Can’t you tell me? Can’t I do anything?”
“How kind you are,” Bill said gratefully. He looked at her for a minute or two in silence. “We needn’t go indoors yet. Let’s sit out here for a minute.”
They sat under the pink may tree on Nancy’s circular seat.
“Have you been down to Queen Street?” at last said Mrs. Fazackerly.
“Yes. You know he’s come. Harter’s come.”
“Has he?”
“Do you remember that I told you a little time ago she—Diamond—had written to him and asked him to come?”
“Yes.”
“In her letter she told him.”
“Told him?”
Nancy understood really what he meant, but it still seemed to her so extraordinary that she could almost have persuaded herself that she didn’t understand.
“Told him?” she repeated.
“About us,” said Bill, simply. “That she and I love one another.”
When Nancy Fazackerly told me this, which she did long afterwards, I said it was impossible. Men—at any rate Englishmen—don’t say these things.
But Nancy only repeated that Billhadsaid them, and had said them in a way that was absolutely natural, so that she had not been surprised at the time—only afterwards.
“You do understand, don’t you?” Bill said. “Her marriage to Harter was a mistake. He hasn’t been happy either. And, of course, one can imagine how rotten it is for two people to remain together when they’ve come to dislike one another and when, anyway, they never had a great deal in common to begin with.”
“Why did they marry then?” murmured Nancy; not censoriously, as Lady Annabel might have said it, but as one sorrowfully propounding for the hundredth time an insoluble problem.
“Well, you know, if you think of the way most people are brought up, it isn’t surprising there are so many unhappy marriages,” Bill remarked. “Until quite lately, women weren’t told more than half the truth about marriage, were they? And anyway—it isn’t talked about as a serious thing now, is it? People make a sort of furtive joke of it ...le mariage n’est pas l’amour, and that sort of thing.... And it oughtto be quite different. It ought to have a different place in the scale of relative values. As it is, of course, most people don’t even know what they’re missing, because they haven’t been educated up to wanting it. But Diamond does know, you see.”
“Did she always, do you suppose?”
“More or less. She knew underneath, I think, but she wouldn’t let herself face it.”
“And if she hadn’t met you?”
“I don’t know,” said Bill gently.
Then Mrs. Fazackerly, very much in earnest and hating to say it, made one of the moral efforts of her life and asked him if he really thought that his—his attraction—hisstrongattraction, if he liked—to this woman older than himself, was anything more than the accident of falling in love, to which every normal man or woman is liable. She was frightened when she said it, because she thought that he would repent of his confidence to her and think her unworthy of it.
Bill looked at her through the glasses, and smiled a little, and took both her hands, which were shaking, into his, comforting her.
“It’s awfully good of you to say that, because I know you mind saying it, and I think—I think you only said it because you thought you ought to. (I hope that doesn’t sound like the most frightful cheek.It isn’t meant to.) In a way, I know it must look like that, of course—I mean, like my being just in love with her, and nothing else. And of course Iamin love with her, too.”
Suddenly he was blinking, behind his glasses, and looking very young and very shy.
Nancy said that his utter sincerity and his earnestness brought a lump into her throat.
Her judgments of other people are always gentle ones, but I think she felt that Diamond Harter wasn’t worth it, just then.
“Tell me what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think I understand altogether. You said you were in love with her, ‘too?’”
“Well,” Bill explained in a reasonable voice, “you know what falling in love is—a thing nobody can control, or explain, or produce if it isn’t there of itself. That’s the part that might, as you said, overtake anybody. It did overtake me, as a matter of fact, the night that we heard her sing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ at the concert. Do you remember? I didn’t begin to know about the other part of it till later—well, notmuchlater—but the night we met at this house and sang and that I saw her home afterwards.”
“Butwhatother part of it?” wailed Nancy, in despair.“Do you mean that you think you met in a—a former life—something like that?”
No, Bill didn’t mean anything a bit like that. If people had former lives at all, perhaps he and Mrs. Harter might have met in them, but he’d never thought about it, and anyway, he didn’t think he believed in reincarnation.
“More like finding your affinity?” Nancy then suggested.
More like that, Bill agreed, but he didn’t seem to think that it was exactly that, either.
“The only word that seems at all right,” he said at last, “isunderstanding. Like seeing quite clearly, after being in a dusky room for a long time. That’s not at all a good illustration either. But you know the muddled sort of way in which one sees most people—wondering about them, if they’re interesting, or just accepting them, if they aren’t? With her, it’s been completely and absolutely different from the very start. I seemed able to see her quite clearly—her realest self—and to understand things about her that I’d never dreamed of before.”
He made this explanation very haltingly, and although Mrs. Fazackerly’s perceptions instantly recognized his sincerity, she could not feel that his ratherincoherent words had brought much enlightenment to her.
“I wish I could say it better,” Bill observed wistfully. “I’d like to make you understand.”
“I do,” Nancy began instinctively, and then she honestly added, “at least, I don’t. And I’m so afraid—please, please forgive me, Bill—I’m so dreadfully afraid that you’re going to be unhappy.”
And Bill said, “I shouldn’t wonder.”
Then they left the region of speculation, and Mrs. Fazackerly asked him what the exact position was.
“Well, we thought that Harter would let her have a divorce. At least I thought so. Diamond was never sure that he would.”
“And he won’t?”
“No, he won’t. He said to-day that he never would. Although he knows that she’s unhappy with him—and he with her, for the matter of that—he says he won’t let her have a divorce. And I shouldn’t think that he was the sort of fellow who’d change his mind.”
“Perhaps he thinks that divorce is wrong.”
“He didn’t say so. Of course, it might be that. But he only said that she was his wife, and belonged to him, and that he didn’t mean to give her up.”
Bill drew very hard at his pipe. “Which is true enough,” he added thoughtfully.
“I don’t think I altogether see—exactly—why you ever felt so sure that he would let her have a divorce.”
“Don’t you? Well, it seemed to me that, as he doesn’t care for her nor she for him, and as there are no children to complicate things, it would have been fairly obvious to let her have her freedom and give them both the chance of beginning again. But he’s—he’s hanging on to a formula, so to speak, the formula that she belongs to him—and so he won’t let her go.”
“But what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Captain Patch.
Nancy Fazackerly felt very unhappy, and her face generally shows what she is feeling.
“It’s very good of you to care,” said Bill Patch affectionately. “But I wish it didn’t make you unhappy. In spite of everything, I’m so awfully, awfully happy myself.”
The boyish slang expression, Nancy said, somehow touched her almost more than anything.
She asked if there was anything that she could do for him and he said no.
“But you’ve already done a great deal—more than anybody. You’ve done a lot for her,” said Captain Patch.
Nancy wished that she could have said she liked Mrs. Harter. But, at the moment, she did not feelthat she liked Mrs. 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?”
“I’m afraid so. My dear old father would be very sorry, I’m afraid.”
“Wouldn’t that stop you from doing it?”
“Well, no, I can’t honestly say that it would. He’s had his life and run it his own way, and now I must manage mine for myself. It’s a thing about which one has a right to judge for oneself, really and truly.”
It seemed to Mrs. Fazackerly—I think quite correctly—that she could do nothing. It was so obvious that Bill Patch saw his own gleam, and that he meant to follow it, whatever his inability to make anybody else share his vision.
That Nancy did not share it was superabundantly evident.
She said something feebly about the cost to Mrs. Harter of a cap thrown over the windmill and Bill implied, without actually saying so, that the question of reputation was one upon which Mrs. 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.
“What will you do, then?” again asked Mrs. Fazackerly. “You’re quite right, of course, Bill, it is unsporting, as you call it, and I don’t believe, really, in all the things you see in books about one’s highest duty being to oneself, and it’s wicked to live with people when you’ve stopped loving them, and all that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know what books you’re thinking of,” saidBill, presumably speaking as an author. “They can’t be worth much, if that’s the sort of advice they give you.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Nancy meekly. “And I knew you didn’t really hold those views yourself, and that’s why I—I can’t understand what’s going to happen next.”
“Well, I don’t know that myself,” said Captain Patch. “You see, I’d been pretty sure that Harter would agree to the divorce. And now it seems that he won’t.”
“I cannot imagine why you ever thought that he would.”
“If he has no objection to the thing on principle—and he hasn’t—and he knows it would make two people happy, and leave him, except for legal freedom, very much where he was before, I can’t see why he won’t,” said Bill obstinately.
“You’ve seen him?”
“Oh yes. I’ve been talking to him for more than an hour.”
“And she was there, too?”
“Some of the time she was. They are very unhappy together, and have been all the time. I think, anyway, that Diamond will leave him now.”
Mrs. 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, Idoknow 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.
Their conversation was not in the least conclusive. They talked round the subject, at least Mrs. Fazackerly did, and Bill Patch thanked her several times for caring and for letting him tell her about it. He repeated again that in spite of everything he was extraordinarily happy. Nancy Fazackerly assured me afterwards that she had no difficulty in believing him when he said that.
Christopher Ambrey came to supper at Loman Cottage that evening. I suppose it was partly that which helped to fix it all so definitely in Mrs. Fazackerly’s mind. Anyhow, she apparently remembered it all very clearly.
Dear Father, again I quote Nancy, was passing through rather a difficult phase that evening. This was her euphemism for the utterly impracticablemoods that at intervals caused old Carey to embark upon interminable arguments, that led nowhere at all, with anybody whom he could find to argue with him.
He had never succeeded very well in this amiable enterprise with Captain Patch because Patch had a facility, which very often goes with the power of writing, for seeing a great many sides to every question. Sooner or later, and it was generally sooner, he was certain to concede the tenability of his antagonist’s position, however much he might disagree, personally, with his views.
But Christopher Ambrey could quite safely be counted upon to do nothing so baffling. He had not yet reached the stage of perceiving that nobody has ever yet been convinced of anything by argument, neither did he realize that he was doing poor Nancy a considerable disservice by taking part in one of the long, battledore-and-shuttlecock dialogues started by old Carey in pure contradictoriness.
The old man had been talking crime, as he usually did, and some reference was made to a point of international law.
Nancy said, “Father, how interesting”—not being in the least interested, but, as usual, only anxious to please.
“You’re a little bit out there, sir, if I may say so,”Christopher began. “I think the way they work it is like this:—”
After that they were at it hammer and tongs, Christopher very polite and deferential to begin with, prefacing his reiteration of facts with a small, civil laugh, but gradually adopting the low, stubborn monotone of an unimaginative man who knows that he is right.
Carey, who was wrong, and also knew it, became very angry and said, “Look here, d’you mean to tell me—” and then put forward long, involved and hypothetical cases and interrupted violently when Christopher tried to deal with them in reply.
Bill Patch caught Nancy’s eye and did everything he could, but when an argument has once got beyond a certain stage it sometimes seems as though nothing short of those unspecified catastrophes known as “an act of God” could ever bring it to an end.
All through the evening they went on, and Nancy’s efforts to change the conversation were utterly ignored, and Bill’s gallant attempts at funniness were met with a glare of contempt from Christopher and a disgusted ejaculation or two from his host.
Nancy Fazackerly, however, never forgot that Bill had tried. Like so many people who have been very badly treated by fate, she was touchingly grateful when she met with kindness.
She knew that Bill Patch was preoccupied, as well he might be, with his own affairs, and that it was on her account that he had produced those intrinsically feeble, and entirely unsuccessful, jests and flippancies. And although Bill failed conspicuously in his object, Nancy’s gratitude went out to him.
It was, no doubt, an unpleasant evening. Bill did not go out, as he usually did, and Mrs. Fazackerly could only presume that the Harter ménage was being left to the further discussion of their infelicitous relations.
Her father and Christopher Ambrey continued to try and talk one another down, having long since forgotten the original point at issue, and at eleven o’clock Mrs. Fazackerly, in despair, went to bed.
All this I heard from Nancy, and she certainly made me visualize it clearly enough—the conversation with Bill Patch on the circular bench under the pink may tree, and the pity and affection that he inspired in her so strongly, despite the fact that, in her gentle judgment, he was altogether wrong.
She saw him, theoretically, as a person who was undecided between right and wrong, but when he was actually there, talking to her, I believe that Nancy felt vaguely that his perplexity was not exactly ofthat sort. It was at once more subtle and less acute. She did not believe that he was either selfish, or sensual, or irreligious.
“Even if he ran away with Mrs. Harter, I shouldn’t think him any of those things,” Mrs. Fazackerly told herself, but it rather amazed her to realize that, all the same.
For all her superficial glibness in the art of fibbing, Nancy Fazackerly, as I have said before, is fundamentally sincere, and her view of Bill Patch has always interested me.
Almost everybody else saw him as the victim of an unscrupulous woman.
That was the view held by Mrs. Leeds, who knew nothing whatever about it; by Leeds, who may well have been biased owing to his non-success with Mrs. Harter at the picnic; and by the Kendals.
Lady Annabel was more impartial, and spoke severely and regretfully about them both. But even she said, “Such a pity—a nice young fellow like that.” Whereas when she referred to Mrs. Harter, she simply said, “Disgraceful—a woman of her age!”
Claire’s attitude was rather a curious one. She liked Bill Patch and she had always been prejudiced against Mrs. Harter, but she was one of the few people who said hardly anything, after all, about what was goingon, and she snubbed Sallie even more severely than usual when Sallie dissected the situation in her habitual cold-blooded, clear-sighted way.
Martyn Ambrey, who took the line of having discovered from the very first that the personality of Mrs. Harter was one that presaged disaster, was, if possible, more intensely interested than his sister.
He exploited the whole thing, conversationally, letting off verbal fireworks in display of his own powers of analysis, and evidently hoping for nothing so much as a grand dramatic climax, such as the murder of Harter by Captain Patch or the suicide of Mrs. Harter.
“Which, of everything in the world, are about the most unlikely things to happen,” said Sallie scornfully. “Life is nothing but a series of anticlimaxes, one after another.”
“Anticlimax implies climax,” said Martyn, scoring.
Their clever flippancies were rather revealing. They would have seen Tragedy itself in terms ofrevue—clever, noisy, flippant, essentially unemotional, everything that, in 1924, was meant by “modern.”
“Harter will have to come to the show to-morrow night,” Martyn affirmed. “It’ll be frightfully interesting to see them all three together.”
“I should imagine that he will take his wife away to-morrowmorning, if he has any sense of decency,” Claire replied coldly.
Martyn returned gravely that Harter, he was perfectly certain, had no sense of decency whatever.
“Besides,” said I, “the word ‘take’ is not one that I should apply to Mrs. Harter, least of all, perhaps, where her husband is concerned.”
“In any case, she’s bound to sing for us,” Christopher pointed out.
He was taking the play with intense seriousness, whereas the triangle of Bill, and Mrs. Harter, and Mrs. Harter’s husband scarcely interested him at all.
He saw it—when he did see it, that is to say—merely as something rather commonplace and faintly shocking.
“Well, I suppose I must give them the opportunity of behaving properly,” said Claire, referring to Mrs. Harter, and she wrote a note and sent it to Queen Street by hand, expressing a perfunctory hope that Mrs. Harter would “bring” her husband to the theatricals and the dance. None of us were exactly surprised, but all of us were perhaps more or less conscious of obscure excitement, when Mrs. Harter, in a laconic note, accepted Claire’s invitation on behalf of herself and Mr. Harter.