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BEGINNING
RUST PROGRAMMING

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix

CHAPTER 1 Game of Life: The Basics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

CHAPTER 2 Extended Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
CHAPTER 3 Building a Library. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
CHAPTER 4 Hangman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
CHAPTER 5 In Concurrence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
CHAPTER 6 Clients and Servers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
CHAPTER 7 Client-Side Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
CHAPTER 8 Going Relational. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
CHAPTER 9 No(SQL) Going. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191
CHAPTER 10 Web Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
CHAPTER 11 Web Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
CHAPTER 12 Getting to the System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
CHAPTER 13 Device Programming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
CHAPTER 14 Collecting Stuff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
CHAPTER 15 Odds and Sods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 375
 BEGINNING

Rust® Programming
 BEGINNING

Rust® Programming

Ric Messier
Beginning Rust® Programming

Copyright © 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RIC MESSIER is an author, consultant, and educator who holds CCSP, GCIH, GSEC, CEH, and CISSP
certifications and has published several books on information security and digital forensics. With dec-
ades of experience in information technology and information security, Ric has held the varied roles
of programmer, system administrator, network engineer, security engineering manager, VoIP engineer,
consultant, and professor. He is currently a Principal Consultant with FireEye Mandiant.
ABOUT THE TECHNICAL EDITOR

JESSICA ROCCHIO has been in the information technology industry for over a decade and is currently
an incident response consultant at Mandiant. Over the last few years, she has worked with various
programming languages. She has spent most of her career in incident response, forensics, intelligence,
insider threats, and vulnerability management. Jessica has worked on a wide range of incidents,
including espionage, cybercrime, fraud, data theft, and insider threats.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Without my tech editor, Jessica, and my project editor, Kim, I might not have made it through this
book, so many thanks to them!
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION xix

CHAPTER 1: GAME OF LIFE: THE BASICS 1

Game of Life: The Program 2

Starting with Cargo 4
Putting the Pieces Together 5
Bringing In External Functionality 5
Namespaces 6
Generating the Game Grid 7
Dissecting Main 8
Defining Functions 8
Defining Variables 9
Datatypes 11
Arrays 12
Control Structures 14
Looking at More Function Functions 16
Returning Values 16
Passing Parameters 18
Scope 21
Compiling Programs 22
Summary 24
Exercises 25
Additional Resources 25
CHAPTER 2: EXTENDED LIFE 27

Understanding Ownership 28
Extending Life 30
Adding Modules 32
Working with Command-Line Arguments 34
Option Types 36
Reading from Files 39
Extracting Values 41
Populating from the Vector 42
Outputting to the Terminal 43
Using Colors 44
Printing Generations 44
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
admiration. She had a most acute power of distinguishing nuances
of 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 between herself 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 a grande 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 understood and 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 always
severe—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. That gave 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 with other 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 it wasn’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 mean someone—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 up on 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
what it was, 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.
Chapter Seven
Most of 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 rather macabre gallery
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 very far 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, “That woman
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 rehearsal en bloc, although
only Alfred and Amy were to take parts, 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 the real ‘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 quite see Puss-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 a real Eastern 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 was wise 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 I should like 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 very slowly, 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. I can’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, they made 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.”
“I couldn’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 him triumphantly, 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 the Times every 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 I found 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 ought to 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 we can 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 Fazackerly
had 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 make him happy.
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 expense that 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 at dressmaking 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.
Chapter Eight
After that, the two affairs in one sense ran concurrently, so far as
the outer world was concerned. In that other world, of course, that I
have called the inner life, they were on altogether different planes.
As far as I know, Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter knew no hesitations at
all. The day after that evening when they had gone up Loman Hill he
said to Mrs. Fazackerly that he could not come to the rehearsal and
that he wanted to be out all day. At nine o’clock in the morning he
was at the house in Queen Street, where she was waiting for him.
He saw her, as he crossed the road, sitting at the execrable little bow
window of the dining room, her hands clasped in her lap, quite
obviously looking down the street, waiting. When he reached the
three steps, she got up and opened the front door and said to him,
“Let’s get out of this!” jerking her head backwards at the linoleum
floor and tiled walls of the tiny entrance.
She was wearing her outdoor things, all ready.
As they walked down Queen Street together Mary Ambrey passed
them. She stopped, with some question for Bill about the play. Mrs.
Harter stood by, and after one look at her Mary suddenly
remembered Martyn’s words:
“That woman hard? I wonder what we were all thinking about!”
Captain Patch, in a way, was always joyous, and that morning he
only looked younger than ever, but, to Mary’s perceptions, there was
something about them both that almost made her catch her breath.
They looked, she said, somehow dazed. Mary never told me or
anyone else about this brief meeting until some time afterwards, but
then she said that, whenever anyone condemned either or both of
those two people who caused so much talk in our small community,
she remembered that morning and the strange impression she
received of sheer, dazzling happiness. Captain Patch told Mary that
they were going up to the moors—some twelve miles away. He
never, either then or afterwards, attempted the slightest concealment
of the fact that they went everywhere together. Neither did Mrs.
Harter, but then she was not by any means on friendly terms with the
whole of Cross Loman, as Bill Patch was, and her manner towards
the people whom she did know always held the same semi-
contemptuous reticence.
It was only a very few days later that people began to talk about
them.
It began, I have not the slightest doubt, at Dheera Dhoon. The
Kendals, like so many other people who are temperamentally good,
take an impassioned interest in those things and people which they
consider bad. But, as a matter of fact, it was Lady Annabel Bending
from whom I first heard about it.
“That is a nice youth who is staying at the Cottage with old Mr.
Carey. But they tell me that he is running after that very common-
looking woman who sings.”
Lady Annabel never sees things from her bedroom window or hears
them over the counter from Miss Applebee, like the rest of us. She
obtains all her information from a mysterious and unspecified source.
“They” tell her, or she “is informed.”
No doubt this is another relic of the Government House days.
“Mrs. Harter must be a great deal older than he is, surely, and what
can they possibly have in common?”
“Music,” said I feebly.
Not for one instant did I suppose that Bill Patch and Mrs. Harter
walked twelve miles on a hot day in order to talk about music.
Lady Annabel showed me at once that neither did she believe
anything so improbable.
“From what I have heard of Mrs. Harter, Sir Miles, I should think that
music is the last thing to occupy her mind. I think I told you that a
good deal is known about her, though it reached me only through