Dark Hester/Chapter 6

Monica saw Captain Ingpen once again before the summer was over. He came down seldom, it seemed, leaving most of the ordering of his new home to Norah’s efficient hands, but on going one afternoon to have a practice with Celia she found him at the cottage, seated in the window behind Norah and the tea-table, stretching out one hand to stir the cup of tea that stood on the window-sill beside him and turning the pages of a book with the other. He was an inconsiderate person; she had said that of him, on sufficient evidence, she thought, and his desultory manner as he sat there now, reading his book and drinking his tea, reinforced the opinion. He was not surly or discourteous in his withdrawal; but he was certainly not assiduous, and it vexed Monica a little to see that he treated her dear Celia with as little ceremony as he did his niece. As she greeted them all she felt that her smile, though including, passed him over intentionally, and hoped that he would feel the edge of its aloofness. He remained standing, dark against the window, for a moment after she had taken her place, his head bent forward, ​as though the ceiling were too low for him, and she saw that he was looking across at her as he had looked the first time they had met; and recalling her impression then, a slight feeling of discomfort grew in her as she became aware that even after resuming his seat he continued to look at her and not at his book. Perhaps he did not know, sitting against the light as he was, that she observed this, but she suspected suddenly, as his silence and his scrutiny persisted, that he did know, and perhaps expected acquiescence on her part. Again old memories were revived in her, of pursuing suitors. She remembered even, while she chattered on to Celia and Norah, all unaware, the man in India, Charlie’s friend and brother-officer, who had dared one day to make mad love to her in his absence. She remembered her rage and his folly of despair, and as she sat there before Captain Ingpen a little flame of angry colour rose up to her cheek, anger with herself that this stranger should have the power of awakening such memories in her. He sat crouched a little forward, a finger between the pages of his book, raising his cup to his lips now and then, and reaching it out once over Norah’s shoulder, to ask in the coolest tone for a fresh one, and, as the flame of the old memory sank, Monica was able to ​ask herself, whether it was that he admired her and was willing that she should know it, or whether it was that he was sorry for her. The one was almost as absurd and incensing as the other, yet, as she talked and laughed, making Celia and Norah laugh with her, she grew more and more aware of her unhappiness. It was as if something passed between her and the silent stranger; as if she could not keep something from him. He heard, as well as she, that her laughter rang false; he as well as she knew that grief burned in her heart. There was a complicity of consciousness between them, for he, too, was un-happy and he, too, knew that she knew it.

She would have liked to escape, to evade the practice, when tea was over, but Celia had brought out her violin and when Norah said: ‘I must be about my work;—will you stay and listen, Uncle Godfrey?—Do you mind his listening?’ it was settled, with no word said, that he was to stay and she not to mind playing the Brahms sonata to him. He changed his seat as she and Celia took their places. He moved into Celia’s vacated corner of the sofa, where it was true that he could listen more comfortably but where, also, he could continue to look at her as she sat in profile to him at the piano. But, when they began to play, she saw that he was ​no longer looking. He clasped his hands behind his head and stretched out his long legs, and sat, absorbed, brooding, his heart enfranchised and appeased, she knew, as was her own heart, by the splendour and magnanimity of the music. She played her part well. And Celia played well. Captain Ingpen did not look up at them when they had finished. He remained sitting in his corner, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes fixed before him. Only when she was definitely moving towards the door, did he rise to go to open it for her and Celia to pass through, and as she gave him her hand in farewell, she could no longer interpret the cold dark glance that floated, from far away it seemed, to rest as if with a bitter physical pressure upon her. ‘He cares for music, that speechless person,’ she said to Celia at the door. And Celia said: ‘It’s difficult to be sure of anything he cares for; but I feel that, too. He always sits and listens when I play.’

And after this meeting six weeks passed; Clive and Hester had been settled in The Crofts for ten days, the summer was over, before she saw Captain Ingpen again. On the October afternoon she had turned her steps in the direction of the woods that lay, across the fields, behind her cottage; not that ​the woods were a favourite walk of hers; her favourite walk took her in the opposite direction, up past The Crofts to the hilltop; but she knew that Mr. Gales was at work in the dining-room and did not care to risk encounters. She foresaw, indeed, that she would now seldom walk past The Crofts. Clive would be in town, Robin at his little local Montessori school; if Hester saw her from the house or garden, she would feel constrained to greet her, and one of the conversations that Hester seemed to find easy but that Monica felt laborious, would ensue; so the dull woods would be her frequent portion.

They were singularly dull woods, she thought, as she approached them this afternoon, drawn in duns and russets on a linen-grey sky. It was a windless, heavy day, and when she stepped in among the closely serried ashes and alders—all untended and unthinned so that they grew poorly, the dense under-brush rising about them—she was aware of a slight feeling of stupefaction, as if she entered a dream. The woods were crossed by sluggish streams—or, rather, ditches—choked with the fallen leaves of a rainy summer, and in passing over each one, on its narrow plank, she felt as if she sank still further into the dream and left each time more of the ​past behind her. Everything was still, except when once, from a high branch, a jay screamed loudly. Suddenly, at a little distance, she saw the figure of a man approaching her.

She had come to one of the streams to find the plank which lay across it half eaten away by the damp, and she had paused, about to turn back when she recognized Captain Ingpen. She remembered then that the woods belonged to the Old Manor Farm and that he must be in possession. He had seen her, that was evident; and since she wore her grey dress and black hat he probably recognized her, too. It would seem uncivil to turn away, and she did not want to stand and wait for him; so, summoning resolution, she crossed the plank with wary footsteps and went forward, noting, as she approached him, Captain Ingpen’s heavy shoulders and narrow hips; so heavy above and so spare below was he, that, with the something prowling in his gait now perceptible, he made her think of a gaunt strong forest animal.

Curious; lonely creature, wandering as solitary as herself. He went with the damp tawny woods and with the harsh cry of the jay and she was glad to see him, so she told herself. He offered surmise, significance to her cramped and troubled mind.

​‘How do you do?’ she said, smiling upon him with a smile consciously kept unconscious. ‘Do you remember me? We’ve never spoken, I think, though we have met.—These are your woods, aren’t they? I must be trespassing.’

He did not reply for a moment, standing still in the narrow path and resting his curious gaze upon her; hard, empty, yet assessing. And if she were starved for people and events, what was he? So she asked herself, to escape the feeling of discomfort and uncertainty the pause evoked. They had never spoken; and to speak like this, with the light dismissal of all that had, indubitably, passed between them, had in it, she knew, something of a definite rebuff. But a rebuff was necessary in dealing with a man like Captain Ingpen. One must either rebuff him, or seem to accept what he might mean. So she spoke lightly, while thinking of his loneliness and of how inadequate for his needs would be the delicate viands her hunger craved. Distant memories crossed her mind; strange, perilous names; of tribes and mountains: Hindu Kush: the Durénis; the Ghilzáis; adventure, danger glimmered behind them. Meat; freshly killed meat, was what those tiger eyes were asking. Why was he here in these dank English woods? So she kept her discomfort at ​bay, scanning him with her well-equipped gaze, and he answered her at last. ‘Yes; I remember you. Very well. You played Brahms. Yes; these are my woods, I believe. I have hardly found my way about the place yet.’

He turned, and as, after a moment’s hesitation, she went forward, he walked beside her in the narrow path. After all, Monica said to herself, she had intended to go to the end of the woods.

‘Do you really think of settling here?’ she asked, pursuing her own train of thought, for he said nothing and she knew that he was still looking at her. ‘Have you given up India?’

‘India has given me up,’ said Captain Ingpen. ‘I can’t go on there. I have been too ill and I am getting too old for the sort of life I like. I can’t stand being scorched or frozen any longer.’ His voice was as curious as his gaze; so low that one would expect it to be soft; yet so harsh that it startled one.

‘And you think that you will be able to stand being rained on? England’s a very damp place, a very sodden place, after India.’

‘I think it’s getting old that’s sodden—everywhere,’ said Captain Ingpen.

​‘You can hardly speak of getting old yet in that sense.’

‘You are always old when you are past your work,’ he said.

She did not intend to enter upon personal expostulations or encouragements, yet since, as Norah’s uncle and as country neighbour, Captain Ingpen could not remain a stranger, she was willing to listen to whatever confidences he might feel impelled to impart. And indeed after a moment he went on:

‘The only reason I am here is because it is near London and the India Office, and I have some writing to occupy me. One of those atrocious books that one spends the evening of one’s days perpetrating and that no one ever reads—except a few jealous contemporaries. Maps and statistics, you know, and photographs of oneself standing among one’s native friends. Norah being here was something of a reason too; her mother is the only one of my relatives I could ever endure; I can’t be near her as she lives in Shropshire and is married to a poisonous parson; but Norah is a good girl and would see after one if one were ill.’

‘How do you like your house?’ asked Monica. He was making no definite appeal for sympathy ​yet how clearly she recognized the vanity in him and the something pathetic that went with a manly man’s vanity; something boyish and endearing. Still, she would not gratify it. She asked no question about the relations he could not endure, and made no protest about the atrocious book. ‘How do you like your house?’ was all that she vouchsafed him.

‘Well, here it is. — How do you like it? Come and look at it,’ said Captain Ingpen.

They had reached the end of the wood and there indeed, beyond a hedge, stood the low, ochre-coloured Old Manor Farm, a very plain and not unpleasing dwelling, long lapsed —or risen—from its original utilitarian purposes, with a trellised arch over the doorway and three plots of dilapidated snapdragons on the lawn before it. Monica had only seen it from the road, and, standing still to survey it, found herself placing it with some surprise in its new aspect.

‘I had no idea one came upon it like this,’ she said. ‘It’s not so bad, is it?—I should take down that trellis if I were you, and do away with those flower beds.’

‘Would you? I know nothing about gardening. I am a perfect savage about all that sort of thing. ​Norah intends a border under the wall, I believe. Come and look at it,’ he repeated, opening a small wicket-gate in the hedge.

Monica hesitated, a strange apprehension seizing her mind as she stood beside Captain Ingpen in the sombre wood and looked at the ochre-coloured house. Those sluggish streams had been Lethes; to pass through the hedge would be to forget the past; and though Clive was taken from her irretrievably, memory was precious; she had come to the end of everything except memory—was not that always the fate of the old? And if she passed through the wicket with Captain Ingpen, would she not jeopardize her one possession? It would be like entering a new life. And she had nothing to do with new lives.

His eyes were on her, and as she raised her own she thought that she detected in their narrow scrutiny a mocking challenge: ‘Are you afraid?’ did they not say? ‘of me? and of the difference that I may make?’ It was childish to harbour such fancies. Her courage, her sense of humour rose to answer him. ‘Yes, I must look at it,’ she said, and she went through the hedge and walked beside him up the gravel path.

The side of the house that gave on the wood was ​patched with damp stains. A jug stood inside a grated larder window. She wondered if his servants took care of him. He was the sort of man who would make his own coffee, with a machine, on the breakfast-table. Yes, he would have good coffee, thought Monica, her competence reassuringly asserting itself as he ushered her into a bare, flagged passage and then into a brightly furnished drawing-room.

‘The dining-room is opposite,’ he said, there are six bedrooms upstairs. I am going to turn two into a big study and get a view. It’s too God-forsaken to sit here with nothing to look out at except that grass-plot.—Here is a comfortable chair. My man will bring us some tea.’

‘Tea? Oh, no, thanks, it’s far too early;—I must get back for tea.’—He did take things for granted.—‘If you look at the room, and not out of the window, it’s rather nice in here, all the and same.’

‘It’s not bad, is it? Norah helped me with it. Big chairs and cheerful colours, and the latest things in art.’

On the walls indeed there hung some very vigorous landscapes, and on the mantelpiece were two or three carved animals that reminded Monica of those that Hester domiciled.

​‘It’s a very unexpected sort of room to find in a house like this,’ she said.

‘Is it? Is anything unexpected nowadays?’

‘Well— I should not have expected Norah or Celia Bowen to have chosen those pictures:—they are very modern girls in some ways, no doubt; but their taste has never developed further than Sickert or Wilson Steer.’

‘Oh, they didn’t choose those.—I picked those up, just after the war, in London and Paris.—Will you have a cigarette?—They are not what I call modern girls, those two; they seem to me survivals.’ He held a match to light her cigarette.

‘Of the fittest? I hope you think so.’

‘I don’t know that I think so,’ Captain Ingpen was no longer being vain and boyish; his massive maturity glanced at her dispassionately: ‘They will take what is given to them; they won’t take what they want.—I like the modern girl for doing that;—or trying to.’

‘Perhaps my two are wise enough to know that you can rarely keep what you take. It is what is given that we really keep, I think.’

Captain Ingpen’s eye rested on her; his odd, light, hot eye. ‘That sounds rather religious, you know, he observed after a moment, and Monica, who had ​not thought of it in this light, who had only thought,instinctively, of defending her two against the other sort of modern girl (Hester, of course, was the other sort) said: ‘Perhaps it is. Most things come to religion in the end.’

‘Well, I’m not religious,’ Captain Ingpen remarked. He certainly was not. He had no need to tell her that, Monica reflected, feeling a stir of pity for him, the ageing, stiffening creature, prowling about the bright cage with its easy chairs and irrelevant modernities. She liked feeling a stir of pity. It was pleasanter to feel pity than fear; though, now that she came to look at him in his cage, she could tell herself that the fear amounted only to a sense of wariness. One kept one’s eye on him, that was all; one was wary; as one might be with even a caged lion.

‘I’ve seen too many religions to be religious,’ he went on after a moment. ‘If I’m anything I’m a Buddhist;—an admirable solvent of all religions. But though I accept the metaphysics of Buddhism I prefer life to Nirvana. The only bother about life is that it doesn’t prefer us.—It leaves us in the lurch!’ And Captain Ingpen gave a laugh that was like the jay’s discordant cry.

Yes: it did indeed. He was at the other end of ​the room, smoking, walking up and down, his hands behind his back, and in her chair by the fire Monica forgot him, utterly forgot him for a moment, as she sat and pondered this echo of her thoughts. Was that not exactly what life had done to her—after all the hopes and strivings? It had done worse than merely leave her; it had left her in the lurch. She saw the posture;— bent; arrested; passive and painful.—The lurch, in which one was fixed and tormented. Yet she, too, perhaps, like Captain Ingpen, preferred even the lurch to Nirvana. ‘I suppose because one goes on hoping,’ she heard herself say.

It was the insidious, dangerous habit, and she had not known till now that it would carry her so far. She rose, disconcerted, as she heard that she had spoken the words aloud. ‘I really must be going,’ she said. ‘You must let me come for tea some day.—I shall have some plants for your border if you care for them.—I like your house, inside; better inside than out. It is rather dreary out, I think. But that can be helped, too.’ She had picked up her gloves and stood buttoning her coat at throat and hip, and, making no comment on the suddenness of her decision, Captain Ingpen led her out into the hall, only saying: ‘I will walk back with ​you, then. I’ve not begun the book yet. I’ve all my time.—Wait a moment.’ He left her on the threshold.

She stood in the doorway looking at the snap-dragons and wondering anew at the things he took for granted. She had not expected to have him beside her on the way back. She had, perhaps, been intending to escape him. Then she heard his footstep sounding along the stone passages and as he appeared before her she saw with surprise that he carried a hatchet in his hand. ‘I follow Norah’s counsels with regard to chairs and borders,’ he remarked, stepping out before her, ‘and I will now follow yours about the trellis. Stand a little inside;—it might fall on you.—It’s a farmer’s house with the trellis, isn’t it? Now we will transform it into a gentlemanly residence,’ and, the surprise warming to amazement, Monica saw him lay the hatchet with fell strokes about the base of the harmless structure.

‘Oh! — Wait! — Do wait and think it over first!’ She did not know what to say. The flimsy supports came crashing down; the poor old tattered crimson-rambler drooped on its fastenings. ‘Really this is reckless!’ she cried, half amused, half indignant.

‘Not the least reckless,’ said Captain Ingpen, ​wielding his weapon with a sort of indolent enjoyment. ‘I accept your judgment. Nothing could be less reckless.—Now there is a mess! Can you step through it?’

‘You are reckless. You enjoy destruction,’ Monica said, still with her startled laugh.

‘Well, that’s true enough; when it’s of rubbish.’ He held out his hand. She steadied herself on it and sprang; but her ankle struck against a spar of splintered wood and she found herself precipitated into Captain Ingpen’s arms. For a moment of confusion and anger, anger against him—and against herself for suspecting him—she did suspect that they closed about her. ‘My fault,’ she heard him say, calmly:—or was it calmly? ‘You are not hurt?’—He placed her on the path.

‘My ankle is a little hurt, I think.’ She hoped that she, too, spoke calmly, or seemed to: and her tumble would explain her hurried breath, her heightened colour. He was observing her colour, and then he looked down at her ankle. ‘Yes; your stocking is torn. Are you angry with me?’ he asked, and his ambiguous smile rested on her; ‘I only meant to satisfy your taste about the trellis; I didn’t mean you to hurt your ankle.’

‘Of course I’m not angry. It’s not really hurt.’ ​Monica moved along the path. But she was angry, and the more for his having asked it; and she suspected him now of knowing what she felt and of enjoying her predicament and of inwardly jibing at the embraced Victorian lady.

‘Now, do look at the house before you go,’ he said. He had moved beside her. ‘And tell me that you think it improved.’ He was completely master of the situation.

She looked up at the bare facade. ‘Yes; it is much better. You might have a rose there, trained over the door. Not a crimson-rambler. I am glad that’s gone. Some nice old-fashioned yellowish rose to go with the colour of the house. Yes; it’s really very nice like that. Recklessness has its uses.’ The breeze had risen and the wood rustled at hand, darker now and more melancholy. ‘I will go back by the road,’ said Monica. ‘There are too many insecure planks to cross in the wood.’

‘I was just thinking when I met you,’ said Captain Ingpen, ‘how easy it would be—if one managed to break one’s neck in a tumble—to disappear in the mud of one of those ditches and never be heard of again.’

‘They are rather grisly streams,’ Monica admitted.

​They walked in silence then between the hedgerows. A sense of excitement remained from her anger with Monica. Her thoughts were no longer occupied with Captain Ingpen and his daring; they had turned to Clive; not dreamlike now, not far away or forgotten. On the contrary, he stood out sharply in her mind; sharp, small and near, and, for the first time in her life, it felt to her as if she looked at her son coldly. Was he not weak? even a little fatuous? Was it not fatuous to thrust his wife on her as he had now done, imagining that the enforced intimacy would compel affection? The pain of the summer day when he had shattered all her joy returned to her, deepened by this strange sense of alienation. He had said that it was Hester’s idea, not his; he had said that Hester made him see her loneliness; he had understood her joy so little as to tell her that, and look for response and gratitude.

Captain Ingpen’s voice broke in strangely on her thoughts. ‘But what do you suppose one goes on hoping for?’

So far had she drifted on the dark current of her mood that she looked up at him almost with astonishment.

‘You said one went on hoping. You were thinking about preferring life to Nirvana.—What does ​one go on hoping for?—At our age? Do you know?’

Was this dark tumult life? And the sluggish dream of the wood Nirvana? She felt herself struggle, with herself, and, it seemed, against Captain Ingpen. But she would not attempt to evade him. That might involve her in some undignified mishap. She armed herself with what she could secure of cool sincerity. ‘One hopes to feel again the things one has felt; the things that have given life its value.’ She heard the words and they were lifeless; yet she had believed in them.

‘Ah. Yes; just so. But at our age—for you are as old as I am, I suppose—it’s rather idiotic, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps not. Perhaps not idiotic. There are always the grandchildren,’ her bitterness found. How much good, indeed, was Robin going to do her;—since Hester would never believe that she could do him any?’

‘Grandchildren? Have you grandchildren?’

‘Yes. I have a grandson; four years old.’

‘Really. That surprises me. You are not grandmotherly. But one forgets how obsolete the grandmother type has become. Grandchildren?’ he repeated. ‘Are they really worth hoping about?’

‘I think so.’

​‘No you don’t. I can’t believe it.’ He did not look at her. He walked beside her, his cigarette hanging at the edge of his lower lip, giving it a disdainful projection. ‘Why not face it? Why not own that life is an illusion? We get nothing that we hope to get. Or if we get it, we never keep it.’

‘Never?’ She, too, looked before her. Was this what he had seen in her face that afternoon at Norah’s?

‘Never. You know it as well as I do, since you are a brave woman. You often say it to yourself. No love lasts. That is what we want, of course. Not only to get it, but to keep it. It doesn’t last.’

‘No love?’

‘Not one. Haven’t you watched it in your own life? In other people’s? There may be a perfect time, a perfect relation; but hardly is it grasped and realized before it begins to change. It is swept away; or broken. Everything fades, Mrs. Wilmott. Everything.’

It was horrible to hear him riveting her chains upon her. His words seemed to knock great iron nails into her heart and, as she heard them, Charlie’s face flickered, remote, unsubstantial, to the tune of an old waltz of the nineties. And there went Clive, looking down at Hester, who held him ​by the hem of his coat. Something cried out in her then and rose up and wrenched itself free of the manacles. Of course she loved Clive. Even if he forgot her. Even if she could do nothing for him. It was only in a nightmare that she could hold him off and watch him.

‘One goes on loving,’ she said. ‘It is the love we give we keep.’ She was speaking more to herself than to Captain Ingpen. But he too needed help, and she was sorry for him.

‘So one flatters oneself. One goes on as long as one has hopes of receiving something back. I don’t count myself more stable than the rest of the phantasmagoria. Perhaps what we go on hoping for is God;—the thread the beads are strung on. I suspect that the thread is even more of an illusion than the beads.’

‘All the same, we do prefer life to Nirvana. Our preference may have a meaning.’

‘Don’t look for the thread,’ he jibed. ‘It’s not there.’

‘It’s as much there as the beads. There is something we care for, call it beads or thread.—Are you trying to frighten me?’ she asked, and her glance, with its kindness, had recovered its integrity.

​‘I am trying to make you own you are a companion in misfortune. One likes to have a companion. One likes to feel one isn’t alone, you know.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Monica. And the strange fact was that she and Captain Ingpen were together and not alone. Let it rest at that for the moment. ‘And now, what do you think of my house?’ she said. Oddley Green was reached and they were approaching her cottage. ‘It’s very cheerful, isn’t it?

‘Damnably cheerful,’ said Ingpen, with a laugh almost boyish. ‘I think I like mine better. It keeps up no pretences at all events.’

‘But I live up to my pretences,’ said Monica, also laughing. ‘I am cheerful, you know.’

‘Yes. I know about your cheerfulness.’ His eye rested on her with the glint of its challenge. ‘You’re not going to ask me into it, I suppose, lonely as I am? You’ve had enough of me.’

‘For the moment I have: but I am going to ask you if you care to dine on Saturday night—and play bridge afterwards. My son and his wife are coming.’

‘The father and mother of the grandchild?’

‘Yes; my only son.’

‘Very dear, then, I suppose? And are you fond ​of your daughter-in-law? Mothers never are, are they?’ He was not impudent, but she did not know why not. She must accept him, if she accepted him at all, on his own terms. She felt that she accepted him yet kept him at the distance she intended as she said: ‘Very fond. She is a charming young woman: very clever and interesting.’

‘Does she take what she wants, or what she is given?’ Captain Ingpen enquired, and Monica said: ‘Oh—she’s quite modern; you will approve of her.’