VINTAGE BOOKS. Mrs. Harter. 1925

Chapter One

Most of us, at Cross Loman, have begun to forget about Mrs. Harter and Captain Patch, and those of us who still remember—and after all, it was only last summer—hardly ever speak their names.

I know that Mary Ambrey remembers, just as I do. Sometimes we talk about it to each other, and exchange impressions and conjectures. Conjectures more than anything, because neither of us has the inside knowledge that alone could help one to a real understanding of what happened. Mary goes by intuition a good deal, and after all she did see something of Mrs. Harter. Personally, I know less than anybody. Bill Patch was my junior by many years and, though I saw him very often, we were never anything more than acquaintances. And Diamond Harter, oddly enough, I scarcely spoke to at all. And yet I have so vivid an impression of her strange personality that I

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 feel as though I understood her better than anyone now living can ever do.

It is partly to rid myself of the obsession that she is to me that I have set myself to reconstruct the affair of last summer. It is said that antiquarians can reconstruct an entire monster from a single bone. Perhaps, as an amateur psychologist, I can reconstruct a singularly enigmatic personality from—well, more than a single fact, perhaps, but not much more. Impressions, especially other people’s impressions, are not facts. Besides, the most curious thing of all, to my mind, is that they all saw her quite differently. The aspect that she wore to Mary Ambrey, for instance, was not that in which Claire, my wife, saw her.

And yet Claire—about whom I intend to write with perfect frankness—is not devoid of insight, although she exaggerates everything.

Claire lives upon the edge of a volcano.

This is her own metaphor, and certainly represents quite accurately the state of emotional jeopardy in which her days are passed—indeed, it would be truer still to say that she lives upon the edge of a hundred volcanoes, so that there can never be a complete absence of eruptions.

She has really undergone a certain amount of suffering

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 in her life, and is, I think, all but entirely unaware that most of it was avoidable.

Her powers of imagination, although in the old days they helped to constitute her charm, are, and always were, in excess of her self-control, her reason, and her education. There are few combinations less calculated to promote contentment in the possessors of them.

She is really incapable now of concentrating upon any but a personal issue. Yet she expresses her opinion, with passionate emphasis, upon a number of points.

“An atheist,” says Claire, frequently, “is a fool. Now an agnostic is not a fool. An agnostic says, humbly, ‘I don’t know.’ But an atheist, who denies the existence of a God, is a fool.”

It is perhaps needless to add that Claire considers herself an agnostic.

She generally speaks in capital letters.

When she dislikes the course of action, as reported in the Times, taken by any politician—and she has a virulent and mutually inconsistent set of dislikes—Claire is apt to remark vivaciously:

“All I can say is that So-and-so ought to be taken out and hung. Then he wouldn’t talk so much nonsense.”

Claire is, of course, an anti-prohibitionist because

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 “just look at America—it’s a perfect farce”—and an anti-feminist because “women can exercise all the influence they want to at home. I should like to see the woman who can’t make her husband vote as she wants him to vote!”

Socialism, in which Claire includes the whole of the Labor Party, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and a large number of entirely non-political organizations, she condemns upon the grounds that “it is nonsense to pretend that things could ever be equal. Place everyone upon the same footing in every respect, and in a week some people would have everything and others nothing.”

Upon the question of birth control, so freely discussed by our younger relatives, her views might be epitomized (though not by herself, since Claire never epitomizes anything, least of all views of her own).

The whole subject is disgusting. All those who write or speak of it are actuated by motives of indecency, and all those who read their writings or listen to their speeches do so from unhealthy curiosity. God Himself has definitely pronounced against any and every form of birth control.

Of this last, Claire seems to be especially positive, but I have never been able to find out from her exactly

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 where this revelation of the Almighty’s attitude of mind is to be found.

It need scarcely be added that, to Claire, all pacifists are unpatriotic and cowardly, all vegetarians cranks, and all spiritualists either humbugs or hysterical women.

Sometimes, but not often, she and I discuss these things. But when I object to sweeping generalities, Claire, unfortunately, feels that I am being something which she labels as “always against” her, and she then not infrequently bursts into tears.

Few of our discussions ever survive this stage.

It is very curious now to think that fifteen years ago I was madly in love with Claire Ambrey. She refused to marry me until I was smashed up in a flying experiment in America.

Then she wrote and said that she loved me and had always loved me and would marry me at once. I suppose I believed this because at the moment I so wanted to believe it, and because also, at the moment she so intensely believed it herself.

The generosity and the self-deception were both so like Claire. Her emotional impulses are so violent and her capacity for sustained effort so small.

It would be ungracious, to say the least of it, to dwell upon the failure that we both know our married

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 life to be. It is sufficient to say that, in tying herself to a semi-cripple, with a too highly developed critical faculty and a preference for facing facts stark and undecorated, Claire, in a word—and a vulgar word at that—bit off more than she could chew.

We have lived at Cross Loman Manor House ever since my father’s death. The Ambreys, Claire’s cousins, are our nearest neighbors, but they have been at the Mill House only for the last seven years, and Cross Loman looks upon them as newcomers. The Kendals have been eighteen years at Dheera Dhoon, which is the name unerringly bestowed by General Kendal on their big stucco villa at the outskirts of the town. Nancy Fazackerly was born at Loman Cottage, lived there until she married, and came back there, a few years afterward, widowed—and so on. It is just the same with the tradespeople and the farmers. Applebee was always the baker, and when he died, Emma Applebee, his daughter, remained on in the business. A boy, whom Emma Applebee has always strenuously impressed upon us all as “my little nephew,” will succeed Emma.

Halfway up Cross Loman Hill is the church, with the rectory just below it. Bending has been there for thirty years. Lady Annabel Bending, who was the widow of a colonial governor when the Rector married

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 her, has been among us only for the last two years.

We all meet one another pretty frequently, but I seldom care to take my wheel chair and my unsightly crutch outside the park gates, and so my intercourse is mostly with the people who come to the house.

Mary Ambrey and her children come oftenest. Claire’s feelings, on the whole, are less often hurt by Mary than by most other people. Claire neither likes, admires, nor approves of Sallie and Martyn Ambrey, but she is at the same time genuinely and pathetically fond of them—a contradiction as painful to herself as it is probably irksome to Martyn and Sallie.

Martyn has always been her favorite because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn-God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up and has ceased to be chubby—which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all……….