Chapter Two
Mrs. Fazackerly, whom we all call Nancy, lived with a very old father at Loman Cottage, just on the outskirts of Cross Loman.
No one, in speaking of her behind her back to anybody unaware of her history, is ever strong-minded enough to refrain from adding, “Her husband threw plates at her head.” The first time that this was said to Bill Patch, I remember, he inquired with interest if the late Mr. Fazackerly had been a juggler. It was explained to him then that the late Mr. Fazackerly had only been of a violent temper.
No one, however, has ever heard Nancy Fazackerly allude to the conjugal missiles that tradition has associated with her dinner table. She is, indeed, wholly silent about her short married life. She was twenty-seven years old, or thereabouts, when she married and went to live in London, and it was five years later when she came home, widowed and childless, to Cross Loman again.
About everything else Mrs. Fazackerly talked freely.We all knew that she and her father were entirely dependent upon his tiny pension, and it was common talk in Cross Loman that Mrs. Fazackerly would sell anything in the world if she could get cash payment for it.
Her astuteness over a bargain is only to be equalled by the astonishing unscrupulousness with which she recommends her own wares to possible or impossible purchasers.
Many people disapprove of her, but everyone is fond of her, perhaps because it is a sort of constitutional inability in her to say anything except the thing which her fatally reliable intuition tells her will be most acceptable to her hearer.
When she came up to tell Claire about her paying guest, she pretended that it was because she wanted to consult Claire upon the business side of the question. Claire, being naturally unpractical, and with far less business experience than Mrs. Fazackerly, was, of course, susceptible to the compliment.
“I hope I have come to a satisfactory arrangement with him,” Nancy said. “I think so. Of course, I couldn’t bargain with him, and I’m afraid, being entirely new to this sort of thing, that I shan’t be up to any of the tricks of the trade and may find myself making very little, if anything at all, out of it. Heis to have the little spare room, of course. It’s delightfully warm, now that we’ve got the radiators, though I don’t suppose anyone would want a radiator on in the summer, but still, there it is, and so I thought I’d simply make an inclusive charge for heating and lighting.”
“Lighting?”
“We only have the humblest little oil lamps all over the house, as you know, but I thought I’d move the blue china standard lamp into the spare room, and then it will always be there, although, with daylight saving, he will hardly use it, I imagine.”
“I see.” Something in Claire’s tone indicated that she was wondering upon exactly what grounds Mrs. Fazackerly had contrived to base her claims to payment for a radiator and a lamp that would be required to perform no other functions than that of a diurnalacte de présence.
“I believe it’s professional etiquette to have a few items that are called ‘extras’,” pursued the prospective hostess. “So I explained that the use of the bathroom—unlimited use—would be an extra, and then little things like bootblacking, or soap, I believe one ought to make a charge for. Laundry, of course, I wouldn’t undertake at all, with my tiny establishment, but it can go into Cross Loman with ours, and I can take all thetrouble off his hands, and separate the items, and go through his things when they come back. A very small additional sum would cover all that, as I told him.”
“You seem to have thought of everything—”
“Well, one must, when one has no one to think for one,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with her pretty apologetic smile. “And I’m not very practical and have had no previous experience, so that I do want to be on the safe side.”
“I’ve very often wondered if I shouldn’t have done well as a business woman, personally. I am really, in some ways, extraordinarily practical,” mused Claire, following her usual methods.
“Yes, I’m sure you are.” Mrs. Fazackerly’s voice denoted admiration and agreement. “I’ve always felt that about you. I shall come to you for advice, if I may, once I’ve fairly started.”
Mrs. Fazackerly seldom goes to anyone for advice, but she has an unequaled capacity for making her friends and acquaintances feel as though she had done so.
“About meals, of course, he’ll have them with us—except when he’s out, as I told him. I hope he’ll make simply heaps of friends here, and be out as much as ever he pleases. There won’t be any nonsense aboutpeople having to ask our leave before they invite him to lunch or tea or dine out. We shall,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, I feel sure with truth, “be only too delighted. And when he is in, I shall try and have everything as nice as possible for him. Of course we live very simply indeed, but I told him that. I felt it was much better to be perfectly candid. And of course I know nothing about wine, so I thought I’d simply make that an extra and have up what we’ve got in the cellar. It’s doing nothing there, but I’m sure Father would take some if it were actually on the table, and I expect it would do him good.”
“How is your father?”
“He’s wonderful,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with determined enthusiasm.
Her parent was then nearer eighty than seventy, and quite famous locally for the strength and the irrationality of his violent prejudices, but Mrs. Fazackerly gayly made the best of him.
It was her way to prepare strangers for an introduction to him by declaring, brightly, “Dear Father is rather a personality, you know.”
“Is he quite ready to fall in with your scheme—as to the paying guest, I mean?” Claire inquired, delicately.
“Oh, quite, I think,” Mrs. Fazackerly replied, in aslightly uncertain tone that conveyed to anyone conversant with her methods that she was adding yet another item to the long list of her deviations from perfect straightforwardness.
“Of course, Father is not a young person, exactly, and one didn’t put the whole thing before him quite as one might have done, say, a few years earlier. But he took it all very well indeed, and Captain Patch is so nice and such a thorough gentleman that I’m sure we shall have no friction at all. And really, it’s impossible not to think what a relief it will be to have anything—however little—coming in regularly once a week toward the household books.”
“It ought to be a great help.”
“After all, it needn’t really cost more to feed five people than to feed four. A joint is a joint, and we always have one a week—and sometimes two. The amount of meat that even one maid can get through is inconceivable, simply. I don’t grudge it to her for a moment, of course,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, wistfully. She looked thoughtful for a few minutes, and then said: “That does remind me of one thing that I rather wondered about. What about second helpings?”
“Second helpings?”
“I know that in boarding houses and places like that it’s an understood thing that there are no secondhelpings. Especially meat. But in the case of a paying guest, it seems to me that one really couldn’t think of anything like that,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, evidently thinking of it very earnestly indeed.
Claire, who is lavish alike by temperament and from a life-long environment of plenty, was eloquent in her protestations, and Nancy Fazackerly thanked her very gratefully indeed, and said what a help it was to have someone to consult who always knew things.
Although, theoretically, Claire, in common with the whole neighborhood, perceives and regrets certain by no means obscure failings in the character of Mrs. Fazackerly, she finds it impossible not to like her very much indeed when they are together.
“Let me know how it turns out, my dear. When does Captain Patch arrive?”
“On the first of June.”
“We’ll arrange some tennis next month, I hope.”
“He ought to get quite a lot of invitations,” remarked Captain Patch’s prospective hostess, thoughtfully. “I do want it to be pleasant and amusing for him, and he’s so nice I’m sure everybody will like him and want to ask him to tea and tennis. Or lunch. I want him to feel perfectly free to accept all invitations, and I shall make that quite clear from the start.”
One is always somehow exhilarated by a visit fromNancy Fazackerly. Claire was able to retail an amusing and exaggerated account of the conversation to Mary, a few days later. She is an excellentraconteuse, and always makes a success of her stories, except in the case of the literal-minded Kendals. To them, araconteuseis simply a person who does not speak the truth.
The Kendals were candidly self-congratulatory at the prospect of having a strange man in the neighborhood of Cross Loman during the coming summer.
“It isn’t as if we ever saw a man down here,” they said, “especially since the war. There’s only Martyn Ambrey, who’s hardly grown-up, even.”
“If only Alfred had friends!” groaned Dolly. “I’m sure Mumma has told him often enough to bring any of his friends down, whenever he likes, but he never does.”
“Poor old thing, struggling along in an office all the time! I don’t believe hehasany friends,” said Amy, pessimistically.
The Kendals are not given to illusions. They know well that Alfred is stolidly unattractive, unenterprising, and quite unlikely to provide himself or his sisters with interesting friends. And yet, in their matter-of-fact way, Blanche and Amy and Dolly and Aileen all vehemently desire that “something should happen” atDheera Dhoon, and the only happenings to which they have ever been taught to look are matrimonial ones of the most orthodox kind.
“Girls,” I can imagine Mrs. Kendal saying to them in her direct way, “I think two of you might very well walk down to Nancy Fazackerly’s and find out something about this paying guest who’s coming to stay with her. We must have some tennis, later on. Ask her if she’d care to bring him up one afternoon.”
“Which afternoon, mumma?”
“Whichever afternoon she likes. Find out when he’s coming. I think it’s next week. I was thinking of having a tennis party one day before the end of the month.”
I am sure that Dolly and Aileen forthwith put on their hats—on the backs of their heads—slung woolen sports coats of dingy gray, and sickly green, respectively, across their shoulders, and walked to Loman Cottage; and that they did not talk to each other on the way. Unlike the Ambreys, the Kendals seldom have anything to talk to one another about. Abstract discussion does not interest them in the least, and they confine their remarks to small and obvious comments upon things that they can see.
“Two cart horses,” Aileen might say when they were exactly abreast with the gate over which the two carthorses could plainly be seen. And a quarter of a mile farther on Dolly might perhaps remark:
“The stream’s pretty full. That’s all the rain we had last week, I suppose.”
“I suppose it is.”
After a pause Dolly might say, thoughtfully, “I suppose so,” and after that they would walk on in silence, both slightly swinging their arms as they went.
Their conversation with Mrs. Fazackerly was afterward repeated to Claire by Aileen Kendal.
They found her with her head tied up in a becoming purple-and-white-check handkerchief and wearing a purple-and-white-check cotton frock with short sleeves, turning out her spare room.
She does a great deal of her own housework, and always does it very well.
“You’ve got on a very smart frock,” said Aileen, whose tone is always disparaging, not from any ill will, but because it is the Kendal habit to make personal remarks and to give them a disparaging inflection.
Mrs. Fazackerly, who is used to this, said that she had made the frock herself, and it washed well, and wouldn’t they sit down.
“Thanks. Mumma wanted to know when your payingguest is coming and if you’d like to bring him up to play tennis one afternoon, and if so, when?”
Thus, untroubled by subtleties of diplomacy, did Miss Kendal accomplish her mission.
Nancy, with equal straightforwardness, selected a date about a week after Captain Patch’s expected arrival, and at once wrote the engagement down in a little book.
“I am delighted with him, you know,” she said. “You’ll all like him—such a nice fellow.”
“What sort of age is he?” asked Dolly Kendal, suddenly.
“Twenty-six,” said Mrs. Fazackerly, with precision.
The Kendal twins, on their way home again, dispassionately remarked one to another that they thought Captain Patch would have been older.
“It’s perfectly proper, of course, because of her old father.”
“Good gracious, yes! Besides, what is Nancy Fazackerly? At least as old as Amy.”
“That would make her thirty-three.”
“She looks younger than that, doesn’t she? It’s funny to think of her having been married, and out in India and lost her husband, all inside five years, and come back again to this dead-alive place after all.”
“Oh, well,” said Aileen, with the philosophy due toother people’s troubles, “I daresay she’ll manage to struggle along somehow, like the rest of us.”
The Kendals, who seldom know cheerful anticipations, were more surprised than anybody when their own predictions as to the gain of an additional man to Cross Loman were realized.
Captain Patch was a tall, copper-headed young man, who gazed with a certain beaming friendliness at everybody, out of very short-sighted brown eyes from behind a powerful pair of thick lenses. He had something of the happiness, and the engaging ugliness, of a young Clumber spaniel.
As Mrs. Fazackerly had told us he would, he got on well with everybody.
It was at the Dheera Dhoon tennis party that he was first introduced to the neighborhood. The Kendals were evidently rather glad of that, when they saw how very popular Mrs. Fazackerly’s paying guest seemed likely to become.
“I think you met him at our house, didn’t you?” they said, firmly, when Sallie Ambrey, in her casual way, spoke as though she and Martyn had known the newcomer for years.
After a time it became known that Captain Patch was writing a novel.
“He writes, I believe,” people told one another withtremendous and mysterious emphasis, quite as though nobody in Cross Loman had ever got beyond pothooks and hangers.
“Of course, he’ll put us all into his book,” said Mrs. Kendal, with her large, tolerant smile. “We expect that. Novelists are always on the look-out for what they call copy, we know.”
Mrs. Fazackerly, closely interrogated, admitted that she knew Captain Patch was writing, but that he did not seem to require quiet, or solitude, or even a writing table. Quite often he sat under the pink May tree on the circular bench in the garden, with a pencil and a small notebook. At intervals he wrote in the notebook, and at intervals he talked to Father. He did not seem to mind interruptions.
“Come, come!” said the Kendals, rather severely at this. They knew better than that, even though authors had been hitherto unknown in Cross Loman. But then Nancy Fazackerly’s statements were never to be relied upon.
“She likes to put herself forward,” was the trenchant verdict of the Kendals. “I don’t believe she knows anything at all about his writing. She only wants to sound as though she did.”
They did not say this at all unkindly. It is the natural instinct of them all, from Puppa and Mummadownward, to adopt, and voice, a disparaging view of humanity.
They did not, however, disparage Captain Patch. They liked him.
Everyone liked him, even old Carey. To those who did not employ the filial euphemisms always made use of by his daughter, Nancy’s father appeared as an aged, unreasonable bully, known to have driven his daughter into an improvident marriage.
It being supposed that Mrs. Fazackerly elected to return to her parents’ house after her widowhood for reasons of finance, quite a number of people, that summer, frequently informed other people that she would certainly marry again at the earliest opportunity. An impression gradually began to prevail that the opportunity might be at hand. The Kendals steadfastly reiterated; “He’s years younger than she is,” but they said it without very much conviction.
Only Sallie Ambrey declared that Captain Patch was not, and never could be, attracted by Mrs. Fazackerly.
“But why not, Sallie? Do you know anything about it, or is it just that you like putting yourself forward?”
“It’s a case of using my powers of observation,” said Sallie, perfectly indifferent to the uncomplimentary form of the Kendals’ characteristic inquiry. “He is niceto everyone, but he’s a hopeless and temperamental romantic, and I believe he’s one of the few men I’ve ever met who is capable of agrande passion.”
“What can you know about it?” murmured Dolly, almost automatically.
“As for Nancy Fazackerly, I don’t believe she’d inspire anyone with agrande passion, and I’m certain she’d have no use for one herself. She’s essentially practical, and he is essentially an idealist.”
“I agree with you about her, of course,” Martyn said to his sister, “but I admit that you’ve gone further than I should be prepared to go about him. You may be right, of course. To me, he’s simply a curiously straightforward, rather primitive person, with limited powers of self-expression. Take his writing, for instance—”
“Oh, if you’re going to talk about books, we’ll be off,” said Aileen Kendal, hastily.
The disappearance of the Kendals, however, was scarcely noticed by Sallie and Martyn, who are always perfectly content to talk vigorously to one another.
Early in June, Christopher Ambrey, Claire’s soldier brother, came home from China. Mary, Sallie, Martyn and I all endeavored by various means, direct in my own case, and indirect in that of the others, to persuade Claire not to go to the docks to meet his ship.
“Why not?” said Christopher’s only sister, her voice trembling.
She knew very well why not, and so did we, but nobody had the courage to say brutally that it was because she could not be trusted not to make a scene.
In the end she remained at home, excited and restless, while the car was sent to the station. Before it returned one felt fairly certain that Claire, walking aimlessly all over the house, had mentally received and opened several telegrams respectively announcing Christopher’s death, a fatal accident to the train, his arrest and imprisonment in London, and the immediate cancellation of his leave. Also that she had held several imaginary conversations with her brother of so dramatic a character that she found herself bewildered and trembling when Christopher actually arrived and said nothing more sensational than—
“Well, Claire—this is splendid”—one of the noncommittalclichésof which he so frequently makes use, and which always fall like cold water upon poor Claire’s emotionalism.
She herself has a keen, if exaggerated, feeling forle mot justein any situation, but this is shared by none of her family except Mary, and Mary’s words, at any time at all, are very few and Claire does not attach to them the importance that she does to her brother’s.
Christopher and Claire, the only children of their parents, are both victims of Christopher’s reaction from Claire’s temperamental excessiveness. He once told me that even as a little boy he had known himself unable to live up to his worshiping sister’s demands upon a degree of sensitiveness and intelligence that he did not possess.
She tried passionately to shield him from spiritual hurts that he would never have felt, and to exercise nursery influence over him long after he had outgrown the nursery. Her vicarious sufferings when Christopher first went to school must have been of dimensions that never came within the range either of Christopher’s limited imagination or of his experience.
He is uneasily, gratefully, and resentfully fond of his sister when he is away from her, and it is, I think, always on his conscience that he never quite manages to read the whole of the immensely long and rather illegible letters that she writes him—but when they are together Claire makes Christopher feel self-conscious and inadequate.
I am sorry for Claire. She spends her life and her strength in making the wrong demands on the wrong people. In middle life she still retains all the passionate desire of youth to be wholly understood. It hasnever yet occurred to her that, in the majority of human relationships, it is still more desirable not to be wholly understood.
When Christopher comes home on leave, she is as frightfully and pathetically excited as though he were not one of the most real and poignant disappointments of her life.
And yet, her bitter resentment of Christopher’s emotional inadequacy occupies her mind for hours and hours, and days and nights, and fills pages of her diaries, and reams of her notepaper, besides forming a sort of standing item in the list of miseries with which it is her nightly habit to keep herself awake.
(Like all neurasthenics, Claire is always complaining of sleepless nights).
Christopher, having spent part of each of his previous furloughs with us, is always looked upon as belonging to Cross Loman, and the welcome accorded to Captain Patch was of course extended also to him by the whole neighborhood.
It was I who suggested, tactlessly enough, that Mary and her children should come up to dinner on the evening after Christopher’s arrival.
Claire’s enormous dark eyes were turned upon me with tragic reproachfulness.
“His second evening with me? They can come next week, if they like.”
Unfortunately, before the close of his first evening with us Christopher said: “Why didn’t you have Mary and the two kids here? Let’s walk down and see them after dinner.”
“Certainly,” said Claire, her lips compressed, her spirit descended into fathomless depths of depression. But Christopher, the sturdy and, to be honest, rather stupid Christopher, has no clue to Claire’s mercurial sensitiveness. When she is most profoundly wounded by his matter-of-factness, Christopher regards her pregnant silence and her tragic eyes as an all too common phenomenon which he describes as “Old Claire being a bit put out about something or other.”
“Mary’s children have grown up, you know,” I said to Christopher. “Martyn is twenty-one, and Sallie is now a medical student. She wants to specialize, eventually, as a psycho-analyst.”
“Is she clever?” said Christopher, astounded.
“Very.”
Claire did not look delighted.
“I’m not so sure, Miles, that Sallie is really very clever. She’s sharp, in a way, and of course she thinks herself tremendously clever, but all that talk, and the opinionative way in which she lays down the law,doesn’t impress me very much. 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 am prepared to agree with her, within limits, but when it comes to science, I can only preserve an indiscreet silence.
Claire, pathetically dependent on the appreciation of other people, fathomed its meaning all too easily.
Her gloom deepened.
“Youth, to-day, has opportunities such as we never dreamed of,” she said, and then looked still more dissatisfied. And indeed she detests a truism, and is not often guilty of uttering one.
“Opportunities? I’m sure I can’t think why a pretty girl like Sallie should want opportunities of cutting up dead rabbits and things,” said Christopher, simply. “Morbid rot, I call it.”