Dark Hester/Chapter 14

I was almost dinner-time. Miriam received her back calmly and told her that no one had called. ‘But you've been too far, Ma’am,’ she observed, and Monica agreed to go to bed again and have hot milk and brandy. Already she was in a half dream when Miriam brought it and very soon, after drinking it, she fell asleep, her mind empty of every image.

When she woke it was late. Her room was dark and all was still. She lighted her candle and saw that her clock stood at half-past ten. The maids had gone to bed. Across the green, on its hill side, Clive and Hester, up at The Crofts, were, she hoped, sleeping peacefully. Hester would never tell Clive the truth about the afternoon; that would be to grieve him too terribly; but she would have told him that his mother could never again hurt him as she had done. All would be well with the young lives. And, suddenly, in the apathy of release, of reconstruction, a memory, an image, shot into her mind. She saw Ingpen’s head, dark against the sky, looking in at her through the window.

With the memory, a dreadful distress filled her; a ​new, a strange distress. The globe had turned again; the daylight world of youth where Clive and Hester lived and struggled, moved slowly round to darkness. She was again in the sorrowful world of the Old Manor Farm and remembered the scarred heart of her friend. He was going early to-morrow morning. He had promised Hester that they should never see him again, and he would keep his promise.

Monica rose and put her feet to the ground. She felt feeble yet restored. It could not be. ‘No, it can’t be,’ she said aloud, her own childlike voice startling her as she heard it. She dressed quickly, as she had dressed that afternoon; carefully—but that she did not pause for flowers and lavender-water and forgot her gloves. She crept downstairs. The house was still. An old dark cloak hung in the hall cupboard and she wrapped it round her. The night was cloudy, moonless, the way solitary; but even if she were seen she would not be recognized. And even if she were recognized;—she felt herself smile slightly at her own indifference. All the scruples and inhibitions of the daylight world had fallen from her.

Not by the wood, she thought, as she stole out, down the path, through the gate; it was shorter by the wood but in the dark she would not find her ​way across the planks and she must run no danger of not reaching her friend. The road lay, the colour of the sky, between the darker hedges, and it seemed to unroll itself before her and to lead her on into the obscurity, and it was restful to walk like this, swiftly, unhesitatingly, in the darkness, as if led on. She could not remember that she had ever walked, late at night, in the country, alone, before. It was an adventure, and as she had smiled slightly on thinking of doffed scruples, so she smiled now, contrasting the adventures of her life with those of Ingpen’s life; adventures to which his personal involvements had, perhaps, been only a background; and again vaguely remembered names and images moved before her mind as she went along the drowsy English road:—dark, menacing faces; fertile valleys, unknown perhaps, to European eyes till his had seen them; and she saw pallid stretches of plain, bleached by the sun; and rocks with inky shadows rising against a torrid sky; and peril everywhere. How far away; how remote, how unreal to her; yet upon such images the web of his consciousness was stretched.

Now the Manor Farm woods stole gently towards her, so tame, so diminished by the darkness that they made her think of a tabby-cat reconnoi​tring along the roadside, and there, beyond them, was the oblong bulk of the Manor Farm just visible, with chinks of light along its lower windows and a dim orange fan of light laid above its door. He was still up; of course; he was leaving early to-morrow and would have much to do; but it struck her, as she opened the gate so softly, that with all her intrepidity she would have been disconcerted had the house been unlighted. Softly she opened the gate and softly stole across the lawn, her hands out-stretched till they touched the window-sill. Then she stood still for a moment and, for that one moment, a dart of wonder at herself went through her, almost as if she woke from a somnambulist dream to find herself strangely astray. But no, this was herself; she had meant to come and her friend would not misunderstand her.

She lifted her hand and tapped softly three times. There was no sound, no movement. The chink of light close there before her remained unaltered. She tapped again, three times, lightly, insistently. Then a heavy muffled sound answered her, a sound of incredulous haste, a thrust-back chair, a table toppling, tottering.—The curtains were flung aside, he was there, before her, against the lighted room. Her face looked in at him through the pane, and for one ​moment they gazed at each other as they had gazed the other day. But now the story was to take life and substance. They were to remain ghosts no longer. He threw open the sash.

‘I have come to say good-bye,’ said Monica.

His collar was unfastened; his tie loosened; and oddly,automatically, his fingers went up to them, angrily wrenching them into place. ‘May I come in?’ she faintly smiled. How absurd, with all its beauty, life was! That at a moment like this she should feel herself wish to say: ‘Let it alone: it makes no difference. ’ And the sense of pathos brought by the untoward little mischance deepened in her as, while she waited on the doorstep, she realized that he had said not a word of welcome or surprise.

The door opened and she went before him into the drawing-room. A chair at the table had been pushed back in haste and a heavy pile of documents lay sprawling on the floor beside a battered leather box with brass corners. She glanced down at it as she went in; it seemed to have been in a dream that she had seen it before; it had come from so far away; it was going so far away again. Those strange names and visions floated for a moment through her mind. ‘Hindu Kush,’ she thought ​as she moved into the middle of the room and looked about her for the second and the last time. The bright landscapes still hung on the wall; on the mantelpiece stood the uncouth stone animals, like those on Hester’s mantelpiece. The clock still ticked with security; yet all wore a dismantled air, and the old square leather box, yawning there on the floor, expressed its owner as the room had never done. He was on the march again;—no, not on the march; that was too disciplined a simile:—on the prowl. The wilderness was again to receive him. He pulled a chair for her before the fire and she sank down in it and leant back her head, closing her eyes. Absurd, beautiful; yes; but she knew that as she thought of all it meant of loss her heart was almost breaking.

‘Hester told me you are going early in the morning, so I felt I had to see you.—I hopeI have not seemed too horrible to you,” she said, keeping her eyes closed.

He stood across the room by the table. ‘Horrible? No. Why?’ She heard that he stooped and began gathering up the fallen papers. He gathered them up in crackling layers and dumped them down on the table.

‘I have seemed horrible to myself’ said Monica. ​‘But I had to think of my son. I misjudged you and Hester. I thought he was betrayed.’

Ingpen went on dumping down the papers and for a moment made no reply. ‘I saw what you must think,’ he said then. ‘No; — you didn’t misjudge me—though in the present instance your judgment went astray. What you thought me capable of is exactly what I am capable of;—had you not been involved; and had I still wanted Hester.’ He sat down on the chair beside the table and his hands still moved among the papers. ‘That’s quite all right,’ he said. ‘But I don’t understand;—how this is possible, I mean — how you can be to me like this. I saw you knew everything, yesterday;—no, the day before was it? I told Hester you knew everything. And that everything was over.’

She had opened her eyes while he spoke; he was not looking at her; his head was on his hand and he rubbed his hand over his brow and across his eyes, repeating: ‘I can’t quite understand.’

‘It’s because of Hester, I think.” Monica had not known till now that but for Hester it would not have been possible. ‘I had a long talk with Hester this afternoon. She found me when I was very desperate. I thought I had killed my son’s love for me. And she was extraordinarily kind. ​Everything is changed. And, after I had slept, when I woke just now and remembered you, I knew that I must see you.’

He had dropped his hand and was looking over at her, his dark brows brooding, still in perplexity, above his hot pale eyes; and, looking her assurance at him, she went on: ‘We were meant to meet like this, with nothing before us, and everything between us. We have nothing to hide now. We know each other for ever.’

He said nothing, but presently he got up and walked to and fro, his hands behind him. ‘Are you friends with Hester?’ he asked at length.

‘Friends? I don’t know. But I understand why you and Clive loved her.’

‘I am glad of that,’ said Ingpen. He continued to walk to and fro. ‘Then I can tell you everything. I would like to give you the history of everything, if that’s what you mean I may do. You are being so beautiful to me;—but I don’t want to take advantage—and force things on you. Only I would like to do Hester one good turn, for all the ill ones.’

‘I want to hear everything that you care to tell me.’

‘I met her in Paris,’ said Ingpen, ‘at the end of the ​war, and I had never seen anything like her. I had lived so much out of England and I hadn’t followed the changes that were taking place among the young, and all the women I had known could be put into simple categories:—the chaste and the unchaste: the attainable and the unattainable;—and I hadn’t much faith in the latter unless they happened to be in love with somebody else. I had never conceived of a woman—a young woman—unprotected, without position or fortune or worldly asset of any kind, who could at once set the very highest value on herself and yet unhesitatingly give herself away. I had never conceived of a woman in love who had not a trace of the siren about her—and not a trace of the virtuous victim who bargains with her virtue for permanence and fidelity. Hester never allured and never bargained. She came to me because she loved me and thought no less well of herself for giving than of me for taking. The old hallmarks did not exist for her. I was a married man.—Did you know that I’d been married?—That’s a story that I won’t inflict on you. She’s dead, poor creature, and we pretty well hated each other before the end, though we began with a Tristram and Isolde romance.—I was perfectly frank with Hester and she took what I had to offer ​with her eyes open, with perfect courage and perfect integrity. At the same time I don’t think she quite realized what kind of man I was. I didn’t mean to deceive her; but she was deceived. She was very young and very ignorant and took her first love affair with a terrible whole-heartedness. I didn’t believe in whole hearts where love affairs were concerned and she never understood that. She was very ingenuous. She still is. And she is faithful to the core.’ Ingpen looked at Monica from the end of the room which he had, in his pacing, reached.

‘And, since she was faithful, why did you part? Were you faithless?’ Monica asked.

‘Yes; I was faithless, after a fashion,’ said Ingpen, still standing to look at her; seeking, not arranging, the truth. ‘But I don’t think that I am by nature disloyal, if you can accept the difference. And I can even conceive that I might have remained faithful to one woman in spite of my polygamous tendencies; because I can love very deeply. It’s only that things get broken. They break more easily in love affairs than in marriages, perhaps. A quarrel isn’t as perilous a thing in a marriage as it is in a love affair. There’s nothing to keep people together in a love affair—except love; and that may seem extinguished.—Well. Yes. I was faithless,’ he re​sumed his pacing, ‘from her point of view. She is a modern girl; but only in the way of freedom; not of licence, and she felt contemporaneity in love affairs an unforgivable affront and injury. All the same I should have kept straight, for I loved her very deeply, if another woman hadn’t turned up, a woman I had loved in India, years before. It was only a month after Hester gave me this ring.’ He glanced over at her with a twist of his grim smile.—‘Poor old Aunt Harriet! To what uses I tried to put her! When I saw your face that morning I felt sure you had seen the initials; but you spoke of great-grandmothers and that gave me the clue and I forgot about the date.—Well, the other woman came to Paris with her husband, for the Peace Conference. I was there, too, and Hester was secretary to another bigwig;—that was how we met. It was a shock to see the other woman again. I am very susceptible, you know, and she was still quite extraordinarily lovely; not happy with her husband and her boy killed in the war. She had never relinquished her sense of a special claim on me because I was her only affair, and she made the most of her griefs and memories. But it was my fault. I was faithless, and Hester found it out. She already suspected that something was amiss when, by some mischance, they met ​at a function, my friend a very brilliant personage and Hester a little outsider. They found they both knew me—and knew me well, and my friend was exquisitely rude; so rude that she gave herself away. Hester confronted me with my infidelity and I didn’t lie to her. I couldn’t lie to Hester. We had gone down to Chartres for the week-end and we had a terrible scene there and she left me and I never heard of her again until the other night. By Heaven, you know—I was pretty well knocked out when I saw her appear there in the door between you and your son!’

Poor little Hester! So young! She flitted across Monica’s memory, a sombre slender figure in the black cloak lined with red, suspicious of all softness; the obscure girl who had endured exquisite rudeness at the hands of a brilliant rival. How clearly she could retrace the flaming of that passionate young heart. She sat and thought in silence, looking into the fire, while Ingpen, restlessly, walked up and down, and at last she questioned him again: ‘You must have known that it might come out at any moment, when you saw her here, married, happy, safe, with her husband and her child. Why didn’t you go at once? You knew we were the type of people who couldn’t accept it. How do you forgive ​yourself for not going? Didn’t you feel it was to use her cruelly?’

Ingpen stopped in his walk and looked over at her. ‘I wanted to stay near you,’ he said.

Monica pondered, not lifting her eyes from the fire. ‘Near her too, don’t you think, perhaps?’

‘No. I still wear her ring. I always shall. Because of something she meant to me that no one else will ever mean: something of youth and faith. But I was horribly sorry to find her here. All I wanted of her was to ask if we couldn’t be friends; if she couldn’t accept my going on among you all. Judged by her old standards she would have felt it absurd that I should have to clear out now just because she and I had once been lovers; absurd, antiquated, irrational. And you know, in a way, I feel it that myself.—No: I am going: I see I must go. I see you all push me out. But the odd thing is that you—the older generation—could bear it, could live over it and keep me here.—Isn’t it so?’—He confronted her and then went on, not waiting for an answer, his voice recovering its heavy calm; ‘But when I saw her yesterday I saw how she had changed. You have changed her; he has changed her. She has grown into all the standards she once rejected so fiercely. ​She is a wife, with the standards of a wife. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of hiding my identity from her husband if I stayed, and he couldn’t tolerate seeing his wife’s former lover.—Does he know now who I am?’ Again Ingpen confronted her. ‘Is that why you thought you had killed his love for you?’ And he waited now for her reply.

‘Yes,’ said Monica, ‘that was why.’

‘I see. Yes, I see.’ Ingpen gazed at her, his hands clasped behind him. ‘And he hates me like slow poison.—And will you understand if I say that I felt a stir of hate for him the other evening when I saw him there; her possessor. What are we made of do you think? I don’t want her in the least. What I want is to stay. Near you.’

She was wondering, as she looked at him, whether she must conceal from him how deeply he moved her; wondering whether, at a glance, a gesture, the thread of flame might creep between them; knowing that she could trust him only if she could trust herself. Spoiled.’ The word came back to her. ‘Horribly spoiled.’ It must not be. This was perfection that she held within her hand. She owed it to him, to herself, to life, not to jeopardise it by a faltering or a tear. ‘We could not have made anything of it, you know,’ she said, and her voice was as steady as ​her gaze. ‘It became impossible— from the moment that she saw you again.’

He looked at her, hard, for a moment longer and then he turned away. He went to the window, pushed aside the curtain and looked out into the night. ‘Of course you know what happened—at the beginning,’ he said. ‘At the beginning, when I first saw you —at Norah’s, in the wood—you were one of the sirens. You attracted me, at once; exceedingly; in spite of your age. I had never met a woman who attracted me more. Your type:—frost and sunlight; gaiety and hardness.—Your eyes, that darkest blue; the way your lip lifts when you smile; the arms of Helen of Troy.—I saw it all; at once. I see these things at once in women. And then, I don’t know why or how—perhaps merely because we are both over fifty—I became sober and reasonable. — No; better than that; far better.—You made me feel safe; healed; or, at all events, sheltered. I became quite sentimental over it; saw us growing old together; standing by the fountain with the little boy; looking at the blue anemones in spring; watching the yellow rose grow on the front of the house;—it’s there already, you know; and the anemones are planted. I would never have asked anything but the shelter. You may be sure ​of that. I’d have had too much sense, once I had found it, to risk spoiling it. And now it’s spoiled. All spoiled.’

It was as if the word, in its different context, had passed from her mind to his. He stood there at the window, his back turned to her, leaning his face close to the pane as if to gaze out at the darkness that was all he had before him, and he gave a great sigh, like a tired child. Her heart rose up—to her lips—as she heard him. But it was full of thankfulness as well as of grief. ‘Not quite spoiled, dear Godfrey,’ she said, ‘or I should not be here.’ And he did not turn to her. He understood. ‘Do you remember,’ he said presently—the embers had fallen, an owl had hooted, the clock had struck, sadly, reluctantly; it was twelve o’clock—‘that talk we had—it’s only the other day, really, but it seems years ago—when you came here through the wood? I felt that I had reached the end of everything that day. It was like mildew creeping over me; and when I saw you sitting there, where you are now, I felt that you had too.’

Yet how far she had been on that distant day from having reached the end of things. Sitting quietly in her chair Monica saw again the bee-face of the engine coming round the curve. ‘And we ​talked,’ said Ingpen, ‘about love and suffering; and we agreed that life is a delusion, and we agreed, all the same, that we preferred it to Nirvana. And you said then—do you remember?—that perhaps our preference had a meaning.’ He closed the curtains and turned to her and leant back against the window-frame, folding his arms. ‘I often think of it.’

‘Yes. I remember. I think I remember our talk;—though not clearly.’ She rested her forehead on her hand, trying to remember; not only for him but for herself. There was something that they must try to see together. ‘I don’t think that we meant quite the same sort of love, did we? Or the same sort of suffering.’

‘Yes, we did. Exactly the same sort. There is only one sort of both; and of happiness. You said we kept the love we gave; you tried to make it safer so; and I said that that sort was as much of a delusion as the other. I said there was no safety anywhere—for saint or sinner;—granting if you like, that you are the one and I am the other.’

‘You must not get angry with me if we are to think together’ Monica gently smiled in the shadow of her hand. ‘You know I don’t grant it, though you seem to have gone more astray than I ​have ever been in danger of doing. I have not led a dangerous life—that’s all the difference, perhaps. I have had shelter.’

‘If I pretend to get angry with you, it’s only because you are so dear to me,’ said Ingpen. ‘And I want if possible to get some comfort out of you before we part. It’s a little comfort to know that you mind parting, almost as much as I do.—But I’m really not being personal. I wasn’t that day—in spite of the other side of it;—that was the difference, with you; one reached something else.—And we did agree that the only real thing was suffering; that all the rest was youth and froth and illusion; that all the rest fades. We did agree, I am sure of it, that the sort of happiness that Hester and her friends believed in is a sheer will-o’-the-wisp. Happiness for the race, you know, when we have got rid of our greed and cruelty and become hygienic and rational and orderly.’

‘Yes; but it’s worth while to get rid of greed and cruelty if we can. I know what they mean. I admire it.’

‘You never will get rid of them; they are life; part of life. You will get them in more surreptitious forms; that’s all. We shall go on devouring each other—because life can only maintain itself so; ​but we shall hire butchers to do the killing first. And even if there were something in it—in the idea of a better race—it could only be for a time; until the earth begins to cool and we degenerate into forms of life too low for such aspirations. For a time humanity may rise; it may reach a more decent level than any it has yet attained to; but even then, the craving for love, the craving for power, will never lessen till life itself begins to fade. Hester and her friends believed that those cravings could be better managed.—Poor child! I can hear her talk!—They believed that they may be harnessed to useful machinery;—be made to plough and reap and irrigate. But it’s not so; you will never rationalize craving; you can only deviate it; and it may corrode us the more for being deviated. People who were loved once, will long to be loved again, and consume away with grief; people who have power without opportunity will canker with rage and envy; it may all stumble on, better than in the past; but for imagining that it will ever mean happiness or offer an ideal;—no; that’s not possible;—when one has felt he facts in one’s flesh and blood;—when one has seen in oneself everything one most hates in life. We do agree, you and I; we do see the truth; that beautiful things come to an end and are ​broken; and that we shall go on suffering until we are put to sleep for ever.’

Monica, while she listened, leaning forward on her hand, trying to think, to follow the arraignment—his bitter sincerity shot through, as always, with the glint of his bitter parade—felt exhaustion overwhelming her and almost feared that she might faint. But, lifting her eyes, she saw that he was still standing at the other side of the room, leaning against the window, and waiting; waiting for her to give him some comfort before they parted. He believed that she might have some comfort for him; and she pressed her hand against her eyes and thought of herself; of Clive and Hester; of Ingpen and of the little dog lost and stoned to death; of all the cruelty and horror;—in oneself; in life. And at last she said: ‘We shall go on suffering until we go to sleep; but we can go on loving too.’

‘Suffering because we love,’ said Ingpen.

‘Yes: that’s perhaps the best we can hope for; but often because we don’t love; because we don’t give love. To give is life and not to give, death; and the love that is life redeems us from death. It is given to us. We find it.’ She was remembering how it had come to her to-day and how it was with her now. ‘We can only give it if it is first given.’— ​That was the paradox, and she felt herself pause to look at it as she saw it for the first time.—‘If we never found it, if we felt life only as loss and change, we could not love life as we do. We love it because we find love. In spite of everything.’

He did not move. He did not speak. She knew that he was standing there looking at her and she dropped her hand and raised her eyes to his.

From the first she had seen something endearing and ingenuous in his ravaged face, and it was now that his innocent gaze brought her her deepest vision of him. She saw him as a little boy, as young, nearly, as Robin, who had been frightened, and who had come to his mother with a question. It was all there in his face as he said slowly: ‘But in that case, if it is given, there would be a Giver. There would be a Giver—who cared to give. I wonder if you are right. I often wonder about it all. Do you really think there may be a meaning in it for us?—“And God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.”—Do you really think that possible?’

It was the question of the little boy longing for comfort; it was the question of myth and legend. But it was only in the terms of myth and legend that the deepest questions could be asked or answered.—‘We are all nothing more than children,’ thought ​Monica—while the question fell, like a plummet, down, far down, into her heart.—‘And we discover, as we grow old, that we never grow up;’—and she seemed to listen to its fall and to watch it. It fell beyond thought, towards the unfathomable foundations of the cliff. She watched it disappear. Her mind could give her nothing. But he was asking nothing of her mind.

The memory of the wide golden sunset that she had watched with Hester rose within her now as, leaning her head on her hand, she kept silence. Had he asked that question this morning she could have answered him only in the terms of the nightmare vision; of hallucinated life and obliterating death. What had happened to her since then? It had been as if she had left life and death behind her and as if—she watched the sunset broadening salvation had been made manifest. Not the saving from death; it was deeper than that withdrawal back into existence; the saving from darkness and alienation. It had been given. She could have done nothing by herself. It had come to her and widened before her like the sunset. And could salvation, manifested here and now to the darkened selves, fail to express its essential being for ever and to include all grief in its atoning beatitude?

​She remembered afterwards, as it came back to her in its preciousness, the sacramental significance of their last moments together, but she could remember no words. Her assurance, if assurance it was, her faith, rather, had been conveyed in the look that she had at last lifted towards him, the silence in which their eyes had communed with one another’s. Peace passed from her to him and together they partook of its meaning.

It had been like the symbol of this communion, when, seeing her deadly weariness, he had gone away and found milk and heated it and made her drink before her homeward walk, drinking with her. At the time everything had been so blurred by her exhaustion that she had known only the primitive comfort of silence, warmth and nourishment, that, and a faint amusement at the monotony of her repasts; for she seemed to have spent the intervals of the day in drinking milk, with just this flavour added of the brandy that he, like Hester, found suitable to her case. All was done calmly and concisely, with no flurry of search or overturning of saucepans such as she associated with improvised meals. He brought the jug and glasses on a tray; there were biscuits on a plate and a spoon. It re​minded her of the way he had cut down the trellis. And afterwards she leaned on his arm for the dark walk home.

They met nobody. The night was still and cloudy; but a few faint stars showed here and there in the darker spaces above them. A sheep bleated behind a hedge, and, as they approached Oddley Green, they heard the owls hoot from the elms. They paused before the road reached the first cottage. Till then they had not spoken. ‘You can go alone now?’ said Ingpen.

‘Perfectly. Thanks so much,’ said Monica. They might have met that day for the first time. ‘You will always let me know where you are.’

‘Shall I?’

‘Yes. Always please. I will come to you if you send.’

‘You mean if I am dying?’ She felt his grim smile in the question.

‘Yes. If you are dying.’

‘And if you are dying—will you send for me?’

‘I am afraid not.—No; I can’t promise that. I shouldn’t be alone.’

‘Well.’ He took her hand. ‘So it is good-bye.’

‘It is good-bye.’

​All was over. As Monica sank asleep the only thought in her mind was: ‘Nothing is spoiled.’ But, afterwards, it all came back to her; never to be forgotten.