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 unhappy
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 underbrush 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
Duránis; 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, ‘and 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 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 snapdragons 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 façade. ‘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.’