Dark Hester/Chapter 2

It was not Hester’s face that she was seeing now, as she stood, looking down into the flames; it was her son’s; when he had told her; a face of fear. It had been because of fear that he had, till now, told her nothing and she had known that she must hide from him at once, lest he should guess at hers—and see his own too plainly; and responding to their peril with an automatic swiftness she had said: ‘My darling! I’m so glad! Tell me all about it.’

Not a word of reproach, but Clive, holding her, his face against her shoulder, had said: ‘Forgive me, Mummy;—but I cared so desperately; I was so afraid she wouldn’t have me; I couldn’t bear to speak of it—even to you—till I was sure.’

‘Of course—of course. Of course I understand,’ she said. And she had understood; but most of all that had he been sure of her liking the woman he loved he must have confided in her. He was not sure. He was afraid. But she sustained and reassured him. The lover’s radiance flowered from him as he told her all about his wonderful Hester. She was a modern girl, very modern, a product of Girton ​and post-war London. She had had a miserable girlhood; her mother was dead and her father a parson in the Midlands. Hester had made her own living ever since leaving college. She had done really remarkable work. The Jessups thought it remarkable. She had travelled through Bolshevik Russia, risking her life, and written a series of articles for ‘The Protest,’ and she was tremendously interested in psycho-analysis and social reform.

‘A socialist, I suppose?’ Monica had blithely enquired.—And why not? Her youngest brother had been a provocative socialist, thirty years ago at Oxford, and had come home to call them all ‘pleasant thieves’—a phrase that made their father—jovial and caustic— with his rough tawny head—loudly laugh. But Clive said that Hester followed no isms of any sort; was completely detached and sane—‘The sanest person I have ever known, except you, Mummy.’

‘I must love her. I cannot keep him unless I can love her,’ Monica had thought. She remembered that she had knelt down and prayed for strength and wisdom and selflessness. And when he brought her was it not true that she had gone to meet her with unhostile, with hopeful eyes?

And now again she saw her, sitting in the open ​window on the hot July day, extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily assured. Her face was vehement; childlike yet haggard; with, already, the indication of a line running along the cheek to the corner of the mouth, and a deeper line engraved across her forehead, which she showed when she doffed her hat, unceremoniously, for tea. She showed then, too, a beautifully shaped head, the dark hair, thick and dense and straight, brushed back from a meditative arch of brow; and the indignant composure of her large eyes made Monica think of a Byzantine Madonna. ‘A repellent little face!’ That had been the involuntary, the irrepressible verdict that had surged up in Monica’s mind on seeing her fully. In her considering gaze she read already the relegation of her own standards and significances. Hester would never trouble to controvert them; she would merely look away from them, and over them; they were not so much out of date as irrelevant; and a woman of the Hester type had no time for irrelevancies. Monica saw her placing her and deciding how to deal with her as they sat face to face, she herself, as she too well knew, wearing the smile that her own panic forced from her. Hester did not smile; she answered questions and asked none, looking now and then ​about the room, while Clive sitting a little behind her, radiant perhaps, but still haggard, watched them with an intentness under which his mother still seemed to hear that heavy beating of his heart. Meretricious, frivolous, trivial—that was what Hester was thinking her; the smug, sheltered, upholstered, late-Victorian woman; reared on obsolete traditions, sustained by a doomed social system, buttressed by old china and mezzotints of simpering ancestresses. She could not remember anything that Hester had said at this first interview; she could only remember her assessing silence; but never, never to her dying day, would she forget the minute yet portentous incident that she had witnessed after they left her. She had gone to the window to watch them as they walked away in the little slip of garden beneath the flats, and she saw Clive bend his head to speak to the girl, as though in pleading or reassurance and that, for all response, not looking at him, she had laid hold of the hem of his coat, staying herself on him, or staying him on her, as she walked beside him. Their unity could not have been made more piercingly apparent to the mother’s fierce eyes watching from above. Hester’s possessorship of her son was rivetted upon her mind by the unemotional little gesture. Not ​only Clive’s subjection was made clear to her, but Hester’s still, impassive strength.

And then Celia. Celia who loved Clive; who should have married him. She had had to tell her that very evening when she came in for a practice. Standing there in the twilit room, still, gentle, unprotesting, her violin hanging by her side, she had received the blow.—‘Clive is engaged to be married, Celia;—to a girl none of us know.’ So she had phrased it, controlling the trembling of her voice. ‘Her name is Hester Blakeston. She’s a journalist.—You must come and meet her next Monday, for they are to be married very soon.’ And then, seeing the girl’s brave smile, bitterness had broken from her: ‘I’m afraid I shall never forgive her for taking him from you,’ she had said.

‘But she hasn’t taken him from me,’ Celia answered quickly. ‘I shall always care for him more than for anybody;—but he never cared for me in that way.’ And as Monica stood silent, she added, looking intently at her:—‘Oh, Monica, don’t start wrong!’

Celia had seen her as starting wrong from the very beginning; even after her own meeting with Hester she had seen her friend as wrong. And, of ​course, it had been wrong to have been so aware, on that second hot July afternoon, of the contrast between Clive’s elect and his bride rejected. There sat Celia—his affinity in type and tradition, whatever Hester might be by the dark forces of the blood—with her unflawed gentleness, her unflawed dignity, ethereal in pearly greys and whites; while Hester in her black and red, with dust upon her shoulders, was, she knew, conscious of the contrast, and only just escaped sulkiness by being surly. And, as they moved to the tea-table, she had asked her—prompted, perhaps, by malicious subconscious forces of which she was only now aware: ‘What are you going to wear, Hester?’

Hester, after her wont, had taken off her hat and, dropping into the seat that Clive placed for her, passing her hand over her hair, she looked across the table at her mother-in-law-to-be, her chin a little dropped, as though not understanding, or not wishing to understand, the question.

‘For your wedding?’ Monica had smiled, perhaps too radiantly. ‘There is nothing so lovely as white satin, is there?—And I have an old lace veil of my great-grandmother’s that has been waiting since my wedding for a bride in the family.’ She had perhaps meant it kindly; really kindly; she had certainly ​meant to show Clive her willingness to adorn his beloved with her most cherished possessions; but even as she spoke she saw Celia’s flower-like head bent beneath the veil and thought, swiftly:—‘But we are all so fair!’

Hester, after considering what was placed before her conversationally—Monica had already noticed this—and finding that she could not agree with it, was capable of making no reply, and for a moment now Monica feared— or hoped (only it was too late to hope for any estrangement)—that she would vouchsafe none. But, after a pause, looking steadily at the tea-pot, she said:

‘I don’t think a lace veil would look particularly well in a Registrar’s office.’

‘A Registrar’s office!’ Monica still heard the metallic note of her own voice as she said it. Clive in a Registrar’s office! She stood there, the caddie in her hand, and she could not pretend to smile.

‘Clive and I are going to get married in a Registrar’s office,’ said Hester. ‘I have no religious beliefs and I don’t like being stared at by a crowd of strangers.’

‘But,’ said Monica, carefully, after a moment; ‘there will be no strangers.’

​‘Not to you; but they would be strangers to me,’ said Hester, not provocatively, stating, merely, the fact that concerned her.

‘There would be your friends as well as ours—and ours will all be yours.’

‘A Registrar’s office is rather small for such a crowd; ask anybody you please, of course. I shall have one or two only.’

‘But a church has nothing to do with religious beliefs.’

‘Hasn’t it?’ Hester slightly smiled. ‘It’s that way of looking at a church—as though it were a wedding cake—that I don’t like. Perhaps I take churches more seriously than you do. I am the daughter of a parson,’ and Hester laughed, unmirthfully.

‘I only mean’—Monica knew that she had put herself in the wrong—‘that a church stands for a past and a future; what our ancestors believed, what our children may believe; it transcends completely any question of individual feeling. And many of us there would be believing;—quite enough to justify the occasion.’

She, too, smiled; but hers was the forced smile that seemed to reach down within her and wring her heart-strings as she felt its falsity. There was ​nothing forced or false about Hester; helping herself to bread and butter she replied:

‘I don’t ask to be justified. Other people’s beliefs don’t concern me. If it would offend you to come, you know, Clive and I could slip out quietly some morning and have it done without troubling anybody.’

‘Oh—no; no,’ Monica had muttered, feeling her pale cheeks burn suddenly. ‘I must come to my son’s wedding.’

She had not dared look at Clive or Celia. She knew that she was worsted. She knew that they were unhappy and that only Hester preserved the guise of imperturbability. She and Hester had met and their rapiers had clashed, in the presence of terribly interested witnesses; but it was she who had fallen back; her rapier that was splintered.

Afterwards, when she and Celia were left alone, desperate tears had risen and she could not conceal them. Celia came to her and put her arms around her.

‘But, you know—I do see what she means,’ she had said gently.

‘So do I!’ Monica rejoined with intense bitterness.

‘It is to make a wedding-cake out of a church—if you don’t believe anything,’ Celia said.

​‘Then why refuse to have mere wedding-cake—if it pleases your foolish mother-in-law?’

‘Because she wants to be straight. I do see that about her, Monica.—She wants to be straight, more than anything.—Please don’t start wrong; it will make Clive so miserable;—already he’s afraid,’ Celia murmured while Monica now wept openly.

She turned now from the fire and went back to the window-seat and again looked out at the driving rain. Her mind travelled over the past five years and saw Hester always the same, imperturbably pursuing her own way and making it Clive’s; but there was no injury to recall, no fault to record. If Clive’s friends had not cared for his wife and had tended to fall away, that was not Hester’s fault. If Clive looked a little dimmed and dumb and out of the picture that Hester put him in, he never looked unhappy. He never looked unhappy when he was with Hester; it was only with her, his mother, that Clive was, gently, silently, ill at ease. It was her relationship with her son that was ruined, or almost ruined; because she could not like his wife. She had tried to; faithfully, if desperately. She recalled the parties she had gone to, in the little Chelsea house that had been her wedding-​gift to Clive. Hester and her friends had furnished it; her own taste and help had not been requested and she soon observed that the lovely bits of glass, of china, the one or two really good engravings that she bestowed upon the young ménage were exiled, in order that they might not disturb a unity of design with which they jarred. How she disliked Hester’s drawing-room!—so gaunt, so glaring, so unadjusted to human needs and frailties, so cut off from all complicity with the past. It seemed to challenge you to disagree with it as you entered, to nudge you maliciously on its angular chairs, to suffocate you surreptitiously with the many cushions of its enormous divan. On the walls, the perspective of the few pictures slanted dizzily towards you; you wanted to push the knife, the mug, the herring and the apple back to equilibrium. On the mantelpiece stood three small sculptured animals, menacing in their solid, misshapen vitality. The batik curtains of a dramatic purple shade seemed inappropriate as a background to afternoon tea and London gossip. In Hester’s drawing-room she had felt herself an anachronism, a half-absurd survival. But Hester’s friends went well with it. They were often drab and dusty and often picturesque and brightly coloured, but whether they lounged on the ​divan or sat bolt upright on the chairs they were terribly intelligent. Their laughter ripped up ancient faiths; their gravity undermined stalwart policies. They seemed to believe in none of the creeds one had ever heard of, but they held creeds of their own with a fierce intolerance and could become very angry with each other. Monica enjoyed seeing them quarrel. She disliked them all intensely and when she saw that they took Clive lightly she hated them. ‘Hester’s amber cigarette-holder’ she had heard him called one evening by a jibing young couple who did not see her on the stairs above them. And indeed Clive moved among them all, against Mrs. Jessup’s batik curtains, a background figure. He did not look in the least oppressed———or impressed; neither did he look ironic. He talked to anyone who seemed to be neglected and passed the claret-cup and sandwiches.

It was after this party that Monica decided to leave London and live in the country. Her gifts to the young couple had depleted her resources and her London, the London shared with Clive, had ceased to exist; but to her own consciousness the withdrawal was less of a retreat than a flight. She could not risk living on near Clive. She had not the strength to go on hiding from him, at such close ​quarters, how much she disliked his wife. There had been every sort of good reason to allege and Celia had been the chief of them, for Celia’s lungs had been threatened, and after a winter in Switzerland she had gone to live with a devoted woman-friend who ran a little chicken-farm in Essex. Every aspect of recoil was removed by Celia’s presence. ‘I can never be lonely with you at hand and Celia so near and Jeremy with me day and night———can I?’ she had said. Clive, perhaps, had been convinced. Even when Jeremy, the dear West Highland terrier who had grown up with him, died, he had remained, she felt sure, unaware of her deadly loneliness, though he had begged her to let him give her another dog. But she could not replace Jeremy. Another dog would have been a mere effigy. She often felt that she herself had become an effigy, bearing on its face the waxen smile of the past, and she often felt that it would be better to be dead. But that, she suspected, smiling ironically as she leaned her head against the window-frame and closed her eyes, was only when she was angry. She still longed too much for Clive to wish to leave a world where he lived. It was mere sentimentality to say that everything was over when one could suffer like this and tear one’s heart. Why could she ​not acquiesce and be at peace? Why could she not rest in the conviction of his happiness?———for that he was mended, that Hester made him happy, she felt sure. Should it not be enough for a mother to know that her son was happy?———‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.’ The words rose in her mind. That was what a mother must be able to say.

The wicket-gate clicked as she thought it, and opening her eyes she saw Hester coming up the path holding Robin by the hand.