Dark Hester/Chapter 15

No one cared if old hearts broke. Monica lay, on her awaking next morning, and almost smiled as the girlish self-pity of the thought returned to her. Until last night she had, perhaps, still been a girl and she lay now knowing that age brought acquiescence. He was not to die with his head in her hand, like Jeremy:—but he was not a lost dog; not stoned. He was lonely, yet loved and cherished; and as long as he lived the thought of her would keep alive the hope that had brushed them with its wing, as the thought of him would keep it alive in her. He was dear to her; very dear; but the sacrament of which they had partaken meant more, perhaps, than any personal relation could have done, and united them more really.

When, a little later, a note was brought to her she lay for a moment looking in a sort of bewilderment at her name written in Hester’s small, scholarly hand. Last night seemed far away; but how much farther the afternoon and her own suicidal self. She had almost forgotten the world of youth; almost forgotten Clive. Yet, as she opened Hester’s letter she knew that he was not less dear for having been ​forgotten. Her heart was no longer shut in on its solitary love, and a shared heart is a heart enfranchised. It would be happier for Clive to be loved by an enfranchised heart.

She opened the letter. Hester’s firm dark script closely filled the sheets.

‘Dear Monica, Frank Jessup has for some time been suggesting that I should go to Russia again and write a series of articles for the “Enquirer” on developments there, and it seems the moment to close with the offer. So I am going up to London by the r2.40 and shall stay with Frank and Marcia for a day or two and then be off. If I could have foreseen this on Thursday, I wouldn’t have asked Godfrey to go and perhaps you know where he is and could tell him to come back. But perhaps you and Clive will like to stay on at Oddley, and in that case it is necessary that Godfrey should be kept away; Clive could never stand seeing him. My going off on the same day as he does will make some gossip, I imagine; but I like to be quite frank with you and hope you will go on understanding—as you did yesterday—if I say that gossip about me will be all to the good, where Clive is concerned. You see, I found him and Celia up here, on the hill, the ​other evening, when I came back from London, and saw then what I had never realized before—pur-blind fool that I have been—how deeply Clive cared for her; how he depended on her—or could depend on her again. And I know, though the less said about it the better, that if they could come together it would be far the happiest thing for everyone concerned. At the same time I would like you to know that I should never go back to Godfrey—even if he wanted me to, which he doesn’t—though he and I might agree to fix up appearances so that Clive and Celia can marry. Clive is opposed to my decision, and I couldn’t leave him in the state he is in unless you were here; so this is really to ask you to come over and see after him as soon as I am gone. The sooner I go the better. I merely tear him to pieces by staying on, now that the decision is really taken. He thinks me incredibly cruel and hard; but I believe you will understand. You won’t forget what I said to you about him yesterday. Wives can get to feel about their husbands what mothers feel, after a time, though at the first it would have seemed impossible;—I mean being really able to think of their happiness apart from one’s own. I have sent Robin up to London for the day with Nurse so that he shall be well out of the way. He will be very ​happy, I feel sure, with you and Celia. He has taken a great fancy to her already, and she to him, and you know that he has always really liked being with you rather than with me. You can tell him all the fairy-tales you like now, Monica! I was a beast that night.—Though it’s quite true that I don’t think they are good for him. As to the future, I shall never make any conditions about being allowed to see him and all that sort of sentimentality because I think it really dislocates a child’s life—having to adjust itself to two centres and care for two mothers.’ Here came a sentence that had been scratched out; but it could still be deciphered: ‘All the same I hope I shall see him sometimes,’ but, after this repented lapse into maternal weakness the letter resumed its steady course. ‘I don’t really think I am a maternal woman. I don’t understand children instinctively. It made me frightfully angry when I saw that you thought my book great rot, but I’m inclined now to believe that you were right; at least, that one needs more than a knowledge of psychology—and even more than being a mother—to write a book like that. Of course Robin doesn’t know that I am going; and it’s best that he should only realize, little by little, like the rest of the world, that I’m not coming back. I think I said yesterday the things ​that most needed saying and I am glad you know me better and that I know you. It is really—if you will forgive my saying so—because I begin to know you at last, and Celia, that I feel I can go away and leave Clive to you. I should have been conceited enough to have thought that no one else could do for him what I could. But I was mistaken about that—as about so many things. So, wishing you the best of luck, dear Monica,

Monica laid down the letter on the sheet. Here it was in her hand. What had been the dearest wish of her heart for years was accomplished. Hester was eliminated. And the thought brought her no joy. On the contrary, she knew, as she lay there, that dismay was closing in upon her. The face of Celia, summoned by an act of will and at Hester’s bidding, only rose to share in her consternation. Arctic, moonlike, it floated over the plains. Some possibilities, once extinguished, could only shine with a reflected radiance for ever after. Clive and Celia might once have married; but Hester was his wife. Hester was here, close by; she was nearer, strange as it was to realize it, than Celia. A person hated ​for five years was a person brought near. Hatred carved its dark conceptions, its dark interpretations, and then the hollowed form turned round and revealed itself in relief; the same, yet almost unrecognizable. Elle est ben trop noire; the Madonna eyes of reprobation; against what a background did she now see her old distastes! The strength of Hester’s arm was round her shoulders, snatching her from death; its warmth was beneath her hand, sustaining her. Hester might still be strange to her; but she was near.

It was a grey, fresh day. Yesterday had still been almost summer; to-day was almost winter and as Monica approached The Crofts she saw that the hedgerow trees, in the climbing lane behind it, were nearly leafless. But a savour of sweetness was in the air and on the cherry-tree at the gate a robin was singing its silvery song, symbolic to her ear of all she had come to rescue; childhood under a secure heaven; old age hand in hand beside the hearth; the promise of spring and winter’s harvesting of unity; all the sacred platitudes.

She went quietly up the path, so quietly that the robin did not cease its singing, and opened the door and went in. Everything was still in the little house though, in the distance, she could just hear the ​murmur of voices in the kitchen where the maids no doubt were in surmising conference. Her eye was drawn, as she stood there, to a suitcase standing near the door, a strong leather suitcase marked ‘H. W.’ Hester was packed and ready for the Bolsheviks. The drawing-room door was ajar and she looked in. In the further end, at the window that gave on the garden behind the house, Hester sat writing with her back to her. Her slight figure was framed from on high by the opulent folds of Mrs. Jessup’s batik curtains with which it was in strange contrast. Monica saw now, clearly, that Hester had never harmonized with Mrs. Jessup’s curtains; as little as with her own chintz and china. She was a creature of either the open heath or the underground railway. She belonged to no æsthetic background. She wore, this morning, her dark blue skirt and her red jumper and her hair was neatly brushed to a point on the nape of her neck. Beside her on the ground stood an open attaché case and as she dropped a folded paper into it and drew a fresh sheet towards her she looked extremely composed and efficient. Monica, however, now saw the statue in the round and knew what lay on the other side of Hester’s composure. She was occupied in cutting away her roots; but it would not ​be without emotion. She did not believe in roots; yet they ran as deeply in hers as in any human heart and bled as bitterly when severed. They did not believe in roots, Hester and her generation; they believed in the swift, unflinching adaptibility that roots menaced, or made impossible. And perhaps they were not altogether wrong, thought Monica, still pausing, still gazing at the resolute young figure, the future, was it not?—as she herself was the past. Roots meant sweetness, security, sameness; the old found again in the new; continuity and bondage. They gave you as reward a flower, and Hester’s world moved too quickly for such slow rewards. It was a world of machinery, rather; of things you made and used and cast aside; things of which you remained master and that never mastered you. Roots mastered you; and perhaps the world of the future was a world of change, of swift improvisation, where ruthlessness and decision were the price of survival. It was difficult for her eyes to foresee what beauty there might be in such a world, yet Hester, sitting there in her ruthlessness, was not alien to her. It was better to cut through and escape if withering were the doom of persistency, and not only one’s own withering, but that of those one loved. They refused the discipline of tradition, ​Hester and her generation; they would be self-disciplined; and she saw their valour, their integrity, and their peril. A new age was always perilous. It was as though the fostering epoch of the plant-consciousness were over and the human flower, its product, walked away on its feet, nourished by no sap from below and sustained only by some new element in the surrounding atmosphere of which newly evolved faculties were for the first time aware. ‘It may work; it may work;—in ways we can’t conceive of,’ Monica thought, standing there, her heart strangely held by pity and understanding. ‘There may be enough to grow on—since they feel it. It will be a world of walking flowers. Dangerous; but they accept danger.’

She turned away and went softly up the stairs. Robin’s day-nursery was in front, facing south; Hester had chosen the best bedroom for her child. She passed that, glancing in at its sunny order, and went down the little passage that led, at the other side of the house, to Clive and Hester’s room. She stood for a moment before the door and listened hearing no sound; then she tapped, very softly, and Clive’s weary voice said: ‘Come in.’

Monica had not seen the room since her first visit to the completed Crofts, and, as she glanced at it, ​her eye passing over Clive who lay turned from her on his pillows, it looked almost as denuded as then, like a bright modern room in a shop-window. Hester’s bed of painted wood might never have been occupied, so accurately drawn above so flat a surface was its cover of putty and flame and black; her dressing-table was empty of all appurtenances; the cupboards in the walls were neatly closed; the chairs stood in their appointed places; even the bright little fire, lighted for the invalid, might have been an imitation fire; it carried out the colouring scheme as accurately as the flame and putty and purple of the pictures on the walls in their broad black frames. Yet though it was denuded Clive did not look abandoned in it. A glass of water, a vase of late roses, his letters unopened, and the folded morning paper lay on the table beside him. He had only to get up, to make a gesture, to take up the new life to which Hester was leaving him, in order to break through the bright magic that seemed to surround him.

His mother scrutinized him and noted that though he seemed almost sleeping, the hand lying out on the sheet was tightly clenched. ‘What is it?’ he said. He thought it was the maid.

‘Clive dear ———’ She advanced from the door, ​but she did not meet his eyes. She could not look at Clive yet. She walked to the window and stood there with her back to him. From the window one saw the hill behind the house. The turf was misted with spider’s webs and the sheep were all the colour of mushrooms. Above the hill was a little space of blue. ‘I’ve come to see you, Clive,’ she said.

There was silence for a moment behind her; then, in a careful voice, Clive said: ‘It’s very kind of you, Mother. More than kind. But Hester doesn’t leave me till the afternoon.’

‘I know. I won’t take Hester’s time. I only want to talk to you a little.—Hester has told you that we met yesterday?’

‘Yes. Of course.—She said you’d been wonderful. You and I’ll talk later, Mother. When she’s gone. There’s nothing to be done now; really.’ She turned at that and looked at him. He lay back on his pillows, a spot of hard colour on each cheek. ‘I’m all right, I promise you,’ he muttered as he met her eyes. ‘You needn’t treat me as if I were spun glass. I lie here because she’s left me nothing else to do. I can’t go down and wrestle with her at the door before the taxi-driver and the maids.’

‘No; of course you can’t,’ Monica murmured. ‘But you do know, don’t you, that she is as un​happy as you are. You do know that it’s not from lack of love that she is leaving you.’

‘Mummy,’ Clive muttered, gazing at her and after a moment’s silence: ‘I don’t know where you stand; I don’t know what you’re trying to do for me;—but I do know that it’s no good.—She won’t stay. Not even if it were you as well as I who asked her to.’

‘Why not, Clive?’ She advanced and sat down on the chair at the foot of the bed and Clive’s eyes were sounding her. He did not know where she stood; but he must see that she was changed; he must see that it was no longer Hester’s enemy he confronted; and as he kept silence she said again: ‘Why not? I traduced Hester the other night, and you trusted her. You left me full of love and trust. You said that every drop of your blood was hers. What was it that happened when you got back to her? Why did she feel that she must leave you? Tell me, Clive? You must tell me. You must trust me.—You can trust me now,’ said Monica.

He turned away his face and shut his eyes and she saw that he was thinking hard. The thin, beautiful hand, the archangel hand, clenched itself again as he lay there thinking and when at last he spoke Clive was nearer than he had ever been, for ​he trusted her, completely; with his own and with Hester’s life. ‘I was horribly upset,’ he said.

‘Yes. Of course. But you trusted her.’

‘It wasn’t my trust I was thinking of,’ Clive muttered. ‘It was something very different.—All the way up here, after I’d left you—it was something very different I was thinking of.—It was of him.’ A scarlet flush mounted to his face as he spoke. ‘I understand what’s happened, Mother; and you understand. Hester understands too; though she won’t accept it. How could you have believed anything but what you did—of a man like that?’

As she heard his broken phrases; as she saw the dark, bright colour rise to her son’s face, Monica, for a moment, knew such a turning of the heart that she feared her own blood would echo his. But it was, she felt, a drained pallor that met Clive’s eyes as he opened them to look, heavily, at her, and as she heard her own voice saying: ‘A man like that?’

‘Why, Mummy, don’t let’s pretend,’ said Clive. He felt her emotion, though it was so stilled, and he moved his eyes from her face and looked out of the window beyond her head. ‘You may have liked him; but that was because you knew nothing, really, about him. I know, unfortunately, a great deal. I ​know what sort of reputation he has, where women are concerned. It has been discreditable to him. He had to leave the army because of it. He is the last sort of man I could have associated with Hester.’ The hot colour burned on Clive’s cheek while a cold fire burned in his eyes. ‘I had thought of an artist; a writer;—an idealist of some sort; not a ruthless, battered libertine.—A man whose love is an insult.—Mummy,’ he glanced at her, and as he had looked away from her emotion so she now looked away from his, dropping her eyes—‘I told you that I didn’t writhe with male jealousy; do you remember? And it was true when I said it. But I had it all the other night; on the way up here; after I’d left you.—I had it all; every bit of it,‘ said Clive, and had he been lying on her heart, in his bitter abasement, her son could not have been nearer. ‘I came up here,’ he said, ‘and I was as primitive as he is—damn him! And first it was Robin, sitting in the dusk, in the garden.—I saw he’d been frightened.—And then it was Hester, crouched on the sofa, crying.—That’s how I found her. And when I asked her if it were true that Captain Ingpen had been her lover, and whether she loved him still, she said that it was true. She said she loved him still. She said she’d always love ​him. I was horrible to Hester, Mummy. But she gave me too much to bear.’

A silence fell. Under the sound of her son’s deep breaths Monica heard laughter in the kitchen and the robin’s song in the garden. A tradesman’s cart drove up and stopped at the back door. She glanced at her wrist. It was half-past eleven. Clive’s eyes were closed. He was shut into his dark world of shame and passion. He had never till now inhabited such a world and strange it was to know that she accepted his initiation. His flame had been too white. It had burned down now into a hidden core of consciousness and she seemed to see the smoke and fire that tainted its limpidity.

‘Clive,’ she said, and as he heard her voice he opened his eyes and looked at her, ‘would you have found it easier if it had been a man you could have understood her loving?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked after a moment. They were, again, sounding each other.

‘Would it have been easier for you to accept, if Hester’s lover had been somebody you could understand her loving?’

‘Why should you ask me that? You mean that I deceive myself; that I don’t know myself; that I was as primitive as anyone and would have writhed, ​whoever it was?—There may be truth in that.—Some truth.—But no!’ — He clenched his hand and laid his arm across his eyes. ‘No! If it had been anybody but that man! If I could only understand that it could be that man! And even that—for the past—I could have swallowed. She was so young. He was so—practised,’ Clive groaned. ‘But that she should tell me, throw it in my teeth at last, that she loves him still and will always love him!—No. Even to keep Hester I can’t pretend that I accept it.’

Monica now felt herself gazing at a necessity that lay before her. She had seen it in an ominous glimpse before, when she had paled and recoiled from it; but it lay there, clearly visible now, in the path of her approach to Clive and Hester’s lives, and over the heavy throbbing of her heart she steadied her voice to speak, understanding, at last, what it had all meant as she had not done till this moment came upon her. One did not understand, ever, till afterwards.

‘I wonder if it will help you to accept what Hester gives you to bear if I tell you something about myself, Clive,’ she said. He lay still, rigidly still, his arm before his eyes. ‘You think that Captain Ingpen would not have been my friend if I had ​known about him. But that isn’t true. I did know about him; all that you know; and I was his friend. But it’s more than that.’ She had begun to speak with dropped eyes but now she raised them and fixed them on her son, who, his arm fallen, gazed at her. ‘It’s much more than that, Clive,’ she said, and as she spoke she seemed to herself to be drawing Hester near, to be holding her within her arm, to be at one with Hester; ‘Because I understand why Hester loved him, and still loves him, in a way I never could have done if he had remained only my friend.’

Clive spoke then. She heard the voice that Hester had heard; almost the voice of a stranger. ‘What do you mean?’

What did she mean? She stopped to think, looking at her son, feeling no wish for veils. All that she wished was the truth. ‘Not that he was my lover,’ she said. ‘That would have been impossible; but not because I did not love him enough. Impossible because of my age; my situation;—my codes and symbols, Clive. He is not my lover, but I love him and he loves me. We parted last night; and I don’t think we shall ever see each other again; and after you, no one has come so near my heart.’

Had the presage of the October woods been for ​this, she wondered, as, looking into her son’s eyes, she saw his father struck down and remembered the slow brooks, the prowling figure and the fear in which the strange affinity had masked itself. But this was not disloyalty; not forgetfulness. All the loves, the lesser and the greater, the old and new, were there within her heart; swords crossing; notes clashing; though she saw, she heard, the attainable harmony. If she could stand firm and bear the pain, the harmony could be attained.

‘Does it make it more, or less endurable, Clive?’ she asked.

‘It puts me out,’ was what Clive said to her. He lay and looked at her.

‘No, darling. It only puts me out;—if you can’t forgive my loving him.’

‘It puts me out,’ Clive repeated, ‘with you both. I’m only second-best; with you both.—Somehow—that doesn’t seem enough to go on living for.’

She sat and thought.

‘It’s for your sake that we both put him out; because we love you most.’

‘You put him out because I’m your son; and Hester puts him out because I’m her husband. But you both love him best,’ said Clive, and he closed his eyes and turned his face away from her.

​Was it the truth? They must face the truth, thought Monica, as, pale and trembling, she rose to her feet and moved towards Clive, and then paused, hearing a footstep outside, a hand laid on the door.