Anyone looking at Clive—anyone with a discerning eye—would have said
that unless he were a soldier he might well be a poet. So his mother
thought, as she had often thought, on that Saturday afternoon when,
drawing her hand within his arm, he led her away from The Crofts, where
Hester and her friends still computed and measured. He carried himself
like a soldier—that was his inheritance from Charlie, and the little
twist that his injured thigh had given to his gait lent it a jauntiness
that added to rather than detracted from the resolute blitheness of his
bearing. Objectivity was a soldierly quality and Clive’s expression—so
much more aware of you than of himself—was objective. And with these
disciplined and valiant characteristics went the almost unearthly
beauty; eyes bright as clear grey water; hair swept to silver-gilt
ripples, like a young archangel’s; a head with its fragile, forcible
structure, to be bound by the laurels of a Greek fillet or bend from a
background of swift, beneficent pinions. Yes; a beneficent archangel;
but an archangel bearing a sword. There was something about Clive that
frightened her a little at moments. He never yielded to inner, or to
outer, pressure. He could break; but he would not yield.
‘I must see you alone, Mummy darling,’ he had said. They had had no word
alone as yet. She had been called for and borne off to The Crofts and so
elated had he been with the success of their exploit, so glad in her
imagined gladness, that no shadow of her anxiety must be allowed to
reach his consciousness. There had been, for her, too, a certain
exhilaration in thus taking possession of the new home and looking out
from the comfortable windows at the views which were now to frame his
existence; and even Hester’s friends she had found less annoying than
usual. Never, indeed, had she heard anyone talk so swiftly and so
vehemently as Mr. Gales. He was like a stout weathercock in a summer
storm, veering, glittering, challenging the elements, with never a
suspicion that anyone could find him anything but bewitching. But he had
altered much in his demeanour towards Clive since that far-away evening
of the party. Without pressure, without consciousness, she felt that
Clive had mastered all the elements of Hester’s world. He did not
withdraw and he did not mingle, but they were all aware of him; and to
her they were very kind, even when they bustled her aside and forgot her
presence. A young woman whom they called Oriana, who had come,
unannounced, with Mr. Gales, offered her chocolates with the greatest
affability.
‘Let’s go round by the hill, Mummy,’ said Clive. ‘It’s so jolly up
there; the hill is the best part of The Crofts.—You’re not too tired
with all the chatter?’ Drawing her hand within his arm he bent his head
to smile at her.
‘Not a bit too tired. Rather stimulating, I found it. It does one good
to be made aware of all this new life.’
‘Yes; I suppose it does. There’s no harm in them,’ said Clive, still
looking at her and smiling a little absently while, from the gate of The
Crofts, they turned up the smooth, turfed hill where a flock of sheep
raised tranquil heads to see them pass.
It was a hot August day, but the wind blew freshly and the blue
distances fell below them, spreading and receding into the ample, happy
view. They paused to look down at it and as they turned again to the
ascent, Clive said suddenly: ‘You are pleased, aren’t you, Mummy?’
She knew then that this had been the question underlying all his
gladness and that he had been longing to ask it; that it was in order to
ask it that he had led her away, and in feeling him thus dependent on
her happiness her fears and darknesses seemed to melt away into the
encompassing sunlight. ‘Pleased! How should I not be pleased?’ she said.
She clasped her hands on his arm and offered him a radiant countenance.
Clive walked beside her, looking down at her, sounding her radiance as
it were; and for the first time to-day she was aware of an uncertainty
in his. But there had always, since the war, been uncertainty in any
radiance of Clive’s and even as she looked at him she saw anew all that
Hester had done for him; all the things that a mother could never do.
There was still the cold, attentive gravity at the bottom of his gaze,
as though he watched for something; but the strain and lassitude were
gone. He was deeply rooted in life, in the life that Hester had made for
him; and she felt, in seeing it, for all the pain of her own abdication,
a pang of deep, impersonal joy. Hester had given him back his manhood.
‘Well, that is what we thought; that is what we wanted;—more than
anything;—to please you,’ Clive said. ‘I was never satisfied about your
being here, all alone. From the first I hated your going off to live by
yourself in the country.’
‘Did you, dearest? I never guessed that.’
Clive was still smiling but now she saw that he lifted his eyebrows and
opened his eyes widely. ‘Did you really think that I felt it natural—our
being separated—after having spent all our lives together?’ he asked.
It was the first time he had asked such a question; he asked it now when
five years had passed. Did he not know that they had been separated for
more than five years? Time collapsed suddenly; Clive was suddenly near
her again, so near that it was as though she held him against her heart.
Had he really suffered too? The weight upon her heart seemed his
suffering as well as her own.
‘But, darling child,’ she said, carefully, seeking her words;—‘it was
the most natural thing in the world. It is what must happen, when a man
marries and makes his home;—it is what must happen—to mothers.’
‘Not to a mother like you. Not when people have been as much to each
other as you and I. For a time I hardly took it in; you seemed so sure
of its being the right thing, and so contented. And then, little by
little, it became more of a grief, a mystery.—And when Jeremy died——’
Clive stopped.
‘When Jeremy died?’ she repeated. ‘Yes? What had that to do with it,
Clive?’
‘Why—to see that you were quite alone; not a bit of the old life left to
you.—_Have_ you been contented;—living without me, like this?’
She steadied her thoughts and voice. ‘Well—hardly contented, Clive;
except as mothers must learn to be; in your happiness.’
‘But how could I be happy if you weren’t!’ said Clive. He had turned his
eyes away from her.
Strange paradox of the human heart, showing its frailty! A moment before
she had felt the pang of joy in the thought of his happiness; but was it
not now a deeper joy to know that he, too, had suffered? She could find
no word to say to him; no word that might not flaw the beautiful, the
precarious moment. She felt herself cherishing it, and the assurance it
brought her, as though it were a gift of something warm, living and
fragile that Clive had put into her hands. It was their life; their own
shared life; known by nobody else; that she had thought dead. It lived;
and he had given it back to her. She heard herself saying to herself,
deep down under everything: ‘This is one of those moments when it would
be good to die’: and then, suddenly, as they reached the summit of the
hill and stood there, looking away in the sunlight, everything was
shattered; for Clive was saying, with a breathlessness that, she now
recognized, had underlain all his urgency: ‘And it was just what Hester
did see, Mummy.—That you must be missing me and that I couldn’t be
really happy with you buried down here. It was all Hester’s idea, every
bit of it. I’d never have thought it possible to sell the house and
uproot ourselves like this and put it through so that you shouldn’t find
out and stop us. It was Hester who did it all. She is like that when she
makes up her mind to a thing. Nothing stops her. That was why I wanted
her to be the one to tell you;—so that you should understand.’
Hester. It was Hester’s idea; or rather—for she did indeed
understand—Hester had made him believe it hers. He loved her, no doubt;
he had, no doubt, suffered in the thought of her loneliness—with even
Jeremy gone; but it was not of her, it was of Hester, he was thinking;
and what he was really longing for was that she should see and
acknowledge and love Hester. He had sent Hester so that she might gain
the full credit for her insight and generosity. Dust. Dust and ashes.
The bright afternoon shrank to a shrivelled snake-skin before Monica’s
eyes.
‘How dear of Hester!’ she said. Instinct upheld her. She found the
fitting words. She kept her clasp steady on his arm and smiled, looking
before her.
‘I do hope,’ she said presently, for Clive said nothing and the pause
that fell between them became perceptible, ‘that it is not a real
sacrifice to you both; I hope you are not doing it only on my account.’
Clive already felt the change in her. How should he not? What availed
the sweetest words if the voice that spoke them went to a different
tune? And how banish the stiffened rhythm when the night thoughts that
had come to her after Hester’s visit pressed in upon her and she saw
them all—all fulfilled? She had run away from Hester, and Hester
followed her, with generous hands outstretched. Hester accepted her and
it remained for her now to accept Hester. That was what it all came to.
It was a contest between her and Hester in which she was worsted
beforehand; since it was Hester who possessed Clive and was in no peril
of losing him. She remembered now the long glance that she had cast upon
them as he led her away. It had all been rehearsed between them; all
arranged, so that Hester should have the full credit of her magnanimity.
‘Sacrifice?’ Clive repeated the word a long time after she had spoken
it, as though he had been weighing it and found it heavy. ‘Sacrifice,
Mummy? There’s no question of that. I must have blundered badly to lead
you to think that. Who wants a sacrifice made for them?’
Who indeed? ‘I only meant that it is so much to accept from your young
lives.—I must be very worthy of it.’ Monica spoke as carefully as though
picking her way amidst hot ploughshares.
‘Worthy! Don’t, Mummy!’
They had begun to walk, rapidly, down the hill.
‘But that really is the word, Clive. You show me how much it is the
word. You show me how wonderful Hester has been in it all. I must be
worthy of her; that is what I mean.’
Yes; she must heap Hester with garlands, lest he should guess at her
ingratitude. But she saw as she walked so swiftly beside him and heard
the heavy beating of her heart that her bitterness had betrayed her. She
had shown Clive to himself as asking something of her instead of giving
her something. She had spoiled everything for him, as he had for her:
but it was a mother’s part to hide from him what he had done and she had
failed to hide it. Everything was spoiled, unless she could find at once
an issue, and summoning all her resource, all her strength and strategy,
she went on: ‘You know, London means a great deal more to Hester than it
does to you, Clive. You care for all sorts of things that you will get
here in the country; tennis and birds and gardening; while Hester is a
typical London girl—as typical as I used to be; only I have drained my
London cup and she is in the middle of hers. It _is_ wonderful of her,
Clive, and perhaps I realize how wonderful more than you do; and I own,
darling, that it troubles me lest you have not counted the cost of it to
her.’
Had she succeeded? She listened to the specious, the perfidious note of
her own voice after it had ceased and wondered if Clive had not heard it
too. She gagged and pinioned and laid herself at Hester’s feet, as he
had forced her to do; and could she really make him believe that she
relished the position?
‘But she isn’t giving up London, Mummy,’ he said. Gravely, his eyes
turned from her, he accepted her words at their face value. ‘Not in any
way that would mean such cost to her. I did count it all, I promise you,
and I wouldn’t have accepted it from her if it had meant the loss of her
London life. But that’s the good fortune of your being so near. She can
go up to town every day if she likes, and have her friends with her
constantly. Gales will be coming twice a week, you see, to paint the
dining-room;—it’s as easy for him as if we were living in Chelsea. And
Hester is arranging to give a course of lectures this autumn.’
‘Splendid. That is splendid. If it’s really so. If Hester hasn’t
deceived you about it in her wish to make us happy.—But I will take your
word for it, dearest. What are the lectures to be about? Excellent, that
Hester should be taking up her own work again.’
She must indeed go carefully. Clive knew that she had not cared for the
small book on infant psychology that Hester had published in the second
year of their marriage. It had been easier, when one saw such theories
connected in all their abstract brutality with the dawning life of
little Robin, to smile at them than to resent them; and in order that
she should not show resentment, she had smiled. Clive must have seen her
smile. They had never spoken of the book.
‘Oh, her special line, you know.—The modern emancipation of women;
psycho-analysis; all that sort of thing.’ His voice was guarded.
‘Does she feel the emancipation accomplished?—or is there even more to
do?’
‘A very great deal more to do; the acceptance of equal standards, all
along the line, is only tacit as yet, isn’t it?’
‘Can we hope for more than a tacit acceptance, I wonder?’ She tried to
attain the tone of blithe detachment with which she and Clive, in the
old days, would have discussed such themes. ‘Women are so handicapped by
nature that it’s difficult to imagine a time when equal standards
wouldn’t be really an injury to them.—Where is she to give the lectures?
I might be able to go up for them?’ She must go on talking; but Clive
would know as well as she did that she had no intention of attending
Hester’s lectures.
‘At Oriana’s;—Mrs. Travers’s—you know,’ said Clive.
They had reached the bottom of the hill and were now following the
little path that led out to the Green. How terse was Clive’s voice.
Hester was there between them. Monica seemed to see her eyes following
them, and now with reprobation.
‘Oh, is that little creature married? She looks such a child—with her
bright doll face. I imagined that she and Mr. Gales were engaged.’
Clive paused for a moment and then with a resolution not hidden from his
mother’s ear, answered: ‘She’s left her husband and she and Gales live
together. They are modern, artistic people, you know, and don’t believe
in marriage. I hope you don’t mind their coming. Hester was rather upset
when she saw them both, knowing we were to have tea with you.’
‘Why, my dear—do you, too, think of me as the prim Victorian dame? Of
course I’ll give them tea. Why should I mind? I don’t mind
irregularities in the least. All I mind is people having theories to
justify their irregularity.—I don’t mind what people do so long as they
don’t talk about it!’ And Monica’s laugh, as she found the aphorism, was
dry. She was sure that Hester had not been in the least upset and she
did mind irregularity.
‘They don’t talk about it,’ said Clive. He never retorted; he only
withdrew. She felt now that he withdrew. She had failed. He saw that she
was miserable. When one was miserable one could not hide.
In silence they crossed the Green. Looking out with hot eyes from under
the brim of her summer hat, Monica felt that she hated the Green; she
had never known how much till then. She hated her garden, too, all
opened and exposed to view except at the back where the hedge had grown
high enough to hide it. She hated the beam and plaster and the
clambering roses. Only when they were inside and the dark coolness of
the drawing-room enveloped them, did the flame of hatred die. Here, at
all events, was the past. Here she could remember Clive, as he had been,
before Hester came. He pulled a chair near the window for her. ‘Sit
down, Mummy,’ he said gently. ‘How delicious it is in here.’
‘No; you sit down, my dear. We’ll have a little more light for our
tea-party.’ She went to the blinds. She must give herself time to see
where she stood. A horrible dread, cold after the fierceness, crept over
her. Had she not alienated Clive by her perversity? He must see it as
perversity.
‘Clive,’ she said—a woman when she has shown herself as perverse must
not supplicate, yet she knew that under her light tone there was
supplication:—‘you and Hester will have to come and spend a great many
evenings with me.—Give me an inch, and I’ll take an ell, I’m afraid
you’ll feel! They have been rather lonely;—more lonely than I could have
realized. And even when you can’t come, it will be everything to know
that you are hardly a mile away.—I believe that you could almost hear me
if I called you from my bedroom window.’
‘It will be everything to me, too,’ said Clive, still with his
gentleness. ‘I’ve often thought I heard you calling me—since you’ve been
down here.—I’ve waked up suddenly and answered you.—Yes;—isn’t it queer?
Perhaps you were thinking of me, Mummy.’
He sat there in his chair, sunken together a little, as though his
gallant pose had failed him, and as she saw his smile and how jaded was
his face, tears almost mastered her. How she had hurt, how disappointed
him! She could have thrown herself in his arms and wept, but that Hester
and her friends would soon be upon them.
‘Perhaps I was,’ she said, moving to the last blind. ‘That’s very
likely, darling.’
Voices were approaching over the Green, Mr. Gales’s voice; Mrs.
Jessup’s. It was fortunate that she had mastered her emotion. Hester and
Mr. Gales walked in front. She carried her hat in her hand and the
breeze blew back her hair. In her blue linen dress and with something
sulky in her demeanour, she had a curiously childlike aspect. Mrs.
Jessup, golden hoops swinging against her ochre-coloured cheeks,
followed with Mrs. Travers. She was a succulent young woman with glossy
black eyes. Mrs. Travers, round-faced and coloured to an apple-blossom
pink and white, tripped beside her on the highest heels, listening with
docility to her authoritative contralto.
‘Here they come,’ said Monica cheerfully. ‘I feel specially pleased,
Clive, when I see her friends, that Hester doesn’t paint her face.’
‘But it suits some women, don’t you think?’ said Clive. He got up with a
little stumble of eagerness and came to look beside her. He could be
grateful even for a negative tribute to Hester. ‘It’s rather too hot a
day for Marcia’s make-up, isn’t it? Her mouth seems rather shifted. But
Mrs. Travers is very crisp and neat.’
‘Yes; and it’s an amusing little face, with the straight fringe; like a
Chinese baby, rather. Poor little creature. I’m afraid this venture of
hers will be an uneasy one. Mr. Gales looks to me very unstable.’
Clive smiled. ‘They don’t expect stability, I imagine.’ He was loyal to
them, but he did not identify himself with Hester’s friends.
Now they were all in the room, Mr. Gales still talking.
‘What a divine room!’ he cried, twirling about to look at
it.—‘Grandmothers;—great-grandmothers;—Hymns Ancient and Modern;—Mudie’s
Circulating Library and bridal wreaths—all the things we’ve raised such
a dust to run away from! here they sit and smile at us!’
‘Isn’t it cosy,’ said Hester. She drew her blue linen sleeve across her
forehead.
‘Cosy, my dear child!—that’s not the word for it! It’s balm!—not down! I
revel in it! Simply revel!’ and snuffing his nostrils, as if assailed by
sweet odours, Mr. Gales plunged himself into the deepest chair and then
plunged out again as Mrs. Travers, perched at the top of the steps,
looked down into the lower room calling out: ‘O Beppo—come and
see!—Goldfish and black-lacquer and—oh the priceless little
water-colours!’
‘We shall never look upon their like again,’ said Mr. Gales solemnly,
gazing down, while Hester, at a little distance, surveyed him with
a persistent gloom. ‘Hester, my darling, they give me an
inspiration:—about that rather degraded little dining-hutch of yours at
The Crofts.—I’ll paint you a row of Indian jokes; palanquins; elephants;
ladies in bustles flirting—_pour le bon motif_—with cavalry officers
under the deodars! Kipling, Empire and the Nineties! A wink for every
meal! _Cela vous sourit?_’
‘Not at all,’ said Hester, sitting down at Monica’s tea-table. ‘I don’t
like being winked at. Keep to _La Boutique Fantasque_ idea. Robin would
love that.’ She had not liked the reproof of her ‘cosy,’ for which
Monica could not but feel grateful, though Mr. Gales’s encomiums struck
her as singularly impudent.
Hester sat opposite her, on a straight chair and was evidently bent on
doing her duty by her. ‘I’m rather worried about Robin, Monica. He calls
out in his sleep. There’s some repression, I think, and he cries when I
try to get at it. He says he sees Jeremy in a cage.—I suppose that’s the
goldfish.—You had the same sort of trouble with Vivian, hadn’t you,
Marcia?’
‘There was a definite complex in Vivian’s case,’ Mrs. Jessup, from the
easy chair where she already sat smoking, a magazine on her lap,
answered. ‘He’s always tended to Narcissism; moral scruples and general
priggishness when he was little and trying to get religion now at
school. He wants to be like Saint Francis, it seems, and say his
prayers. He may outgrow it, but it’s rather disturbing I own.’ Mrs.
Jessup did not lift her eyes from her magazine as she thus diagnosed her
child. ‘Have you seen these pictures of Malcolm’s, Beppo? Putrid the way
he panders to the public nowadays.’
Mr. Gales sat on the arm of her chair to look while Mrs. Travers,
exclaiming that she was _éreintée_, extended herself on the sofa,
lighting a cigarette.
‘Here’s Celia, Mummy. Did you know she was coming? How delightful!’
Clive, from his place at the window, had stood looking over them all
with his cool, aerial gaze, very much to his mother’s eye the hovering
archangel, uncertain of where, on an ambiguous planet, to place his
foot, and as he now left the room she suspected that it was with relief.
‘Celia who?’ Mrs. Jessup raised her eyes to enquire. ‘Will you have any
neighbours you can talk to here?’
‘Why shouldn’t we? If we come here to live, why shouldn’t other
intelligent people?’ Hester rejoined. ‘It’s Celia Bowen, a very old
friend of Clive’s. She came to that party when Lionel played—don’t you
remember?—and he evidently found her more worth talking to than any of
us. She plays the violin.’ Hester spoke tersely.
‘The thin fair girl—who looked like Clive?—But I thought she’d died in
Switzerland long ago! How dreadful of me!’ exclaimed Mrs. Jessup taking
out her lip-stick and equipping her mouth for the new encounter.
‘Help my mother-in-law with the tea, Beppo,’ said Hester, and Mr. Gales
sprang from the arm of the chair to pass the cups. He was full of
goodwill and though she found him impudent Monica did not dislike him.
Celia, facing them all with her gentleness, rather as Clive faced them,
made Monica think of Milton’s lady confronted with the Comus rout. She
belonged with Clive, not with the rout, and did not Hester, whose eyes
were on her, feel it? ‘But I _have_ been here all the time, you know!’
she was saying as she entered. Clive had been asking why he so seldom
saw her. She was cool and gentle, but surprised, and she said, as she
came to kiss her friend and be introduced to the circle: ‘I didn’t know
you had a party, Monica.’
‘Do lie down,’ said Hester, indicating the sofa from which Mrs. Travers
had arisen. ‘You must be tired; it’s so hot, isn’t it?’
It was evident that Hester intended to be kind, thoughtful and
efficient, but Celia, who would as soon have thought of taking off her
shoes and stockings when she came out to tea as of lying down, laughed a
little nervously as she said: ‘Thanks so much!—But I’m not a bit tired.’
‘Well, Oriana is, at all events,’ said Hester, who still stood, rather
gauntly, in the middle of the room in her straight blue dress. ‘We’ve
had a very tiring afternoon, up at The Crofts.—What sort of people owned
it? Their ideas of decoration were absolutely grisly.—We shall have to
scrape it—inside and out—beginning with the rockery!’
‘Oh—the rockery! Poor dears!—It was the pride of their lives! They said
to me, when they were going: “At all events we are leaving the new
people a lovely rockery!”’ Celia laughed again, taking the chair that
Clive placed for her. ‘It is bad, of course; but it has some nice things
on it—don’t scrape too ruthlessly:—and they were rather dears, and had a
darling cat!’ Celia was talking with a touch of her headlong girlish
manner. Hester confused her a little, and Mr. Gales’s cheerfully
admiring gaze. ‘A yellow Tom, you know,’ she said, ‘with blue eyes.’
Mrs. Jessup was also surveying her, but not admiringly, seeing in her,
Monica imagined, a trivial example of the capitalistic drone. ‘A cat?
And what have they done with it?’ she demanded. ‘People who have a
stained-glass Romeo and Juliet in their lavatory window might have been
capable of turning their cat out to starve, I feel!—I don’t need to be
told what sort of people they were, Hester!’
‘Try some of these cakes, Celia.’ Clive placed himself before her and
smiled down upon her as she murmured, disconcerted: ‘Turned it out! Why,
it was their treasure! They carried it away in a hamper.’
‘What do these cakes remind you of, Mummy?’ Clive went on, keeping
himself between Celia and Mrs. Jessup. ‘Do you remember that hot day at
Chartres when we stopped at the pastrycook’s and bought wonderful cakes
for tea—cakes like these—on our way back to the hotel?—Do you remember
the ill-tempered _gardien_—and the black kitten we found wandering in
the cathedral?’
‘What a tribute to my cakes!—Of course I remember.’
‘When did you eat the cakes of Chartres, Hester?’ Mr. Gales inquired,
reclining now above Oriana on the back of the sofa as he fanned her with
a newspaper.
‘I didn’t eat them. It was Clive; long ago.—Some more tea, please,
Monica.’
‘You and Clive must go some day,’ said Monica, filling the cup. ‘It’s
the most beautiful cathedral in the world.’
‘We must all four go,’ said Clive. ‘You and I and Mummy and Celia,
Hester.—To think of your never having seen Chartres!’
‘But I have seen it.’ Hester drank off her tea and rose as she spoke,
pushing back her chair. ‘During the war. The windows were all muffled
up.’
She showed rather flagrantly that Clive’s suggestion of a quartette had
ruffled her and glancing first at her and then at her son, Monica
protested: ‘If you’ve not seen the glass, you’ve only seen it asleep;
with its eyes shut. Clive must take you. You must go again.’
‘But I don’t want to go again,’ said Hester. ‘It’s the most beautiful
cathedral in the world, no doubt, but it’s dead and done with; that’s
what I feel about it. It’s like a terrible, beautiful skull, looking
away over those endless plains.’ She walked to the window and pulled up
the blind. ‘When is the taxi coming, Clive? Isn’t it late already?’
Clive was scanning his wife’s averted countenance. Was it really his
suggestion about Celia that had so perturbed her? Yet she did not seem
angry with Clive; she smiled round and up at him as he joined her at the
window and said, laying his hand on her shoulder: ‘Not quite time yet.
It’s hot, isn’t it?—I think I could open this a little further—may I,
Mummy?—Yes; that’s better. Sit in the draught, darling. You’re tired.’
‘Not a skull, Hester,’ Monica sent the arrested ball rolling again. Mr.
Gales, Oriana, and Mrs. Jessup were now bending their heads with wild
laughter over some further atrocity discovered in the pages of the
magazine and she and Clive and Hester and Celia seemed alone together.
‘More like the moon, as one sees it sometimes in daylight, in a blue
sky.—Do you remember that we saw Chartres once like that, Clive, coming
by train up from Bordeaux? It floated over the plains; from miles away
we saw it; it looked transparent, impalpable; it was heavenly rather
than terrible.’
Hester seemed to listen absently. She had not taken the chair Clive put
for her and still stood looking out of the window. ‘Well, the moon _is_
a skull,’ she said. ‘Here is the taxi, Clive.’
For some moments after they were gone Monica and Celia sat in silence.
One might have thought that a much larger party had been there, Monica
thought, looking slowly about her oddly disordered room, where a pile of
magazines sprawled on the floor, the cushions of the sofa lay tossed and
cigarette-ends and ash were scattered freely.
‘Well, what are you thinking of them?’ she enquired, looking across at
Celia with an ironic lift of the lip.
Celia was watching her, quietly. ‘Of them? Hester’s friends? They seem
very good-tempered.—But I was thinking about Clive and Hester, and how
happy they are. I was thinking that it’s the greatest success.’
‘You mean their marriage? Yes. I suppose it is. Yes. They are very
devoted.’
‘One sees it in the way they look—or don’t look—at each other.’ Celia
slightly smiled. ‘They are always aware of each other—and understanding
each other. It’s the greatest success;—and you mustn’t suppose, you must
be sure, Monica.’
‘Perhaps I am sure. Perhaps that’s the trouble with me,’ said Monica,
after a moment. ‘It’s a success which shuts me out; because I can’t
understand it.’
‘Why not?’ Celia still smiled.
‘I know you always thought me wrong,’ said Monica. ‘I know you always
thought I didn’t appreciate Hester’s qualities.’
‘Wrong? Did I? Anyway—she is different now. Don’t you feel that?’
‘She’s happier. She is completely happy; completely satisfied. She has
everything she wants, if that is what you mean.’
‘Well, perhaps it does come down to being happy,’ said Celia. ‘And
perhaps nobody who isn’t happy and satisfied, _is_ himself. Being
unhappy and dissatisfied twists people so, doesn’t it? Not that Hester
was twisted, exactly; she was always straight.—But I have a feeling now,
remembering how she was when I first saw her, that she had her back
against a wall. There is no wall now.’
‘I don’t think that she had her back against a wall in the very least,
my darling child; I think she was straight—as a ramrod—because she had
spent her life in hitting out against the world—with complete success. I
think she saw me with _my_ back against the wall; and so I was. If there
seems no wall now, it is only because I manage to act as though I could
step away if I wanted to. As a matter of fact, I can’t move an inch. She
is there, close to me—whichever way I stir.’ Tears now came to Monica’s
eyes, the checked tears of her wretched afternoon, and she put her
handkerchief, angrily, to her eyes. ‘I don’t mean that she forces
herself on me; I mean that Clive puts her there, between us, and that
she dares me to forget her for a moment.’
‘She can’t help it if he puts her there. It’s his loyalty, don’t you
see?—because he is so afraid that you want to put her out.’
‘If he was afraid—of anything connected with my happiness—could he have
brought her down here, set her here, at my door, her and her
friends?—I’m bound and gagged and pinioned, Celia, and laid at Hester’s
feet.’—The scorching simile returned to her.—‘He doesn’t know it, poor
darling;—no man ever knows these things;—but she does; she knows that I
have to swallow anything she presents me with, without a grimace;—like
Mr. Gales and his twittering little mistress!—If Clive had the least bit
of fear for me, for our relationship, his and mine, he would know that I
ran away to hide from him!’ And the hot tears rose and she pressed her
handkerchief angrily against them.
‘But, then—why did they come? What made them come at all?—if it wasn’t
simply because they thought it would give you pleasure?’ said Celia
after a moment, finding her way, and Monica’s tears were checked as she,
too, tried to think why they had come.
‘Because Hester wished to display her generosity to Clive; because she
wished to please Clive,’ she found.—‘I don’t know why, unless it’s
that.—Forgive me, Celia; you see me as the tigress mother; the hateful
tigress mother. Perhaps I am.’ She dried her eyes and sat gazing out at
the green.
‘No; it’s only that you are so different, you and Hester.’ Celia’s
downcast eyes seemed studying a difficult move in chess. ‘He must see
it; Clive must have seen it from the first, and from the first it must
have made him miserable. Only he loves her so much that he feels sure
you would, too, if you could really get to know her.—Perhaps you will,
Monica,’ and Celia raised her eyes showing her friend the only possible
move out of her predicament. ‘Perhaps you will, after all. His love
can’t be so mistaken. There must be so much to love in Hester—if she
makes Clive happy.—Can’t you trust that, Monica, and try?’
Monica’s eyes dwelt on the girl’s delicate face. ‘What does it mean to
you, their coming here?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been wondering about that.—I’m
afraid they weren’t thinking of me—or of you either, when they came.’
Celia leaned back in her chair and looked across at her. ‘I’m not a
wounded doe, Monica,’ she said, and she smiled.
‘Not a wounded doe?’
‘No.’ Celia returned her gaze with a defiance almost gay; ‘though I am
sure you feel me that, you and Norah! I was awfully miserable when it
all happened, of course; so miserable that I got ill; that couldn’t be
pretended about and I didn’t try to pretend, with you, did I? But I’m
not pretending now. It’s over.’
‘You have, really, cut him out of your life?—What queer creatures we
are, Celia.—It almost hurts me to hear you say it.’
‘But I don’t mean that. I’ve not cut him out. But it’s over—in the way
of hurting. It’s all become rather like the cathedral floating over the
plains, you know, something rather terrible; but beautiful, and very far
away,’ said Celia.