Monica went up to London on Saturday, making the cheerless railway
journey that plunged one so soon from the menaced countryside into the
sordid suburbs. One might pass all one’s life snugly ensconced in the
heart of London and remain almost unaware of this encompassing
wilderness. She returned to the heart, now, as an outsider, and there
was almost a sense of adventure in taking a taxi at the underground
station, after the added journey from Liverpool Street. She looked at
London and was aware of London, now, as an outsider is aware; just as
she looked at and was aware of Clive. A large luncheon-party in Hyde
Park Gardens restored to her some of the old sense of adequacy. She saw
herself there as a still significant woman to whom black was always
becoming, and a friend said over coffee: ‘My dear, you are a marvel.—You
look ten years younger than any of us.’
‘Living in the country puts one into cold storage,’ Monica answered. And
keeping one’s face set to a ready brightness was preserving,
doubtlessly.
After lunch she bought some salted almonds—of which both Clive and
Hester were fond—and fruit for her dinner, had tea with Margaret Orde,
whose father was now dead and who had come to live in Bloomsbury, and on
the Liverpool Street Station platform met Norah, also returning from a
day in town.
‘It’s such a dismal extension of one’s life—this station—isn’t it,
Norah?’ she said, greeting her young friend.
‘I always rather like it. I always think it’s rather exciting,’ said
Norah. ‘It makes the country all the nicer.’
‘But it becomes part of the country in one’s thoughts.’
‘But that’s a very wrong way of looking at it,’ said Norah laughing; and
she was right of course.
When they were established in their third-class carriage, their parcels
disposed in the rack above them, Monica said: ‘Your uncle is coming to
dine to-night with Clive and Hester. I didn’t know that he was settled
in until the other day. I met him and saw his house. You have done it
all charmingly, Norah, but it looks rather desolate all the same.’
‘It _is_ a desolate place,’ said Norah, ‘and I can’t quite see him
there; but it seems to suit him all right, and he’s got an awfully nice
oldish couple to take care of him.—His servants are fond of him. He is
that sort of person. I begin to see what mother used to mean when she
said he was endearing, in spite of everything.’
‘In spite of what?’ Monica asked.
‘Well, I’m afraid Uncle Godfrey has been rather a bad lot. It’s just as
well you should know it if you are going to be kind to him,’ said Norah.
‘And anyway you are almost sure to hear about it—since he had to leave
the army because of it.’
‘Because of it! Oh, poor man!—In what sense a bad lot?’ She could not
associate Captain Ingpen with anything disgraceful; only with things
dangerous and difficult. Norah’s words inflicted an odd blow on her
heart.
‘Oh—just in the usual sense; about women. He started his career by a
love affair with his Colonel’s wife in India, years ago; and it all came
out and there was an awful row and he was permitted to retire;—that’s
the proper expression I think. Of course I was too young to hear
anything about it; it’s only from what mother has said; because Mrs.
Ingpen was a friend of hers. They got married after her husband divorced
her. I remember great family wrangles because father wouldn’t let mother
ask her to stay. You know what a darling mother would be about things
like that. She used to brave father and go to stay with Mrs. Ingpen, in
Sussex, and once when I was in London at a concert with mother I saw
her. Very pretty; too pretty; very much made up and very peevish; but,
as mother said, one couldn’t wonder at that; Uncle Godfrey led her such
a life.’
‘Oh, dear!—He was not faithful to her—after all that she had braved for
him?’
‘Anything but faithful. I will say, from my glimpse of her, that she
struck me as the sort of woman a man might make love to but not at all
the sort he would care to marry. The wistful siren type, you know; I
can’t stand them. I don’t think mother was really very fond of her:—only
very sorry. Anyway he made her miserable and she wouldn’t divorce him.’
‘Swept away: broken: everything fades,’ thought Monica. ‘Did she go on
caring for him, then?’ she asked.
‘I suppose she did. Mother said she always believed he would come back
if she held on. But he never did come back and she died a year or two
ago, still holding.’
‘Poor woman,’ said Monica.
‘Yes, poor woman; but it’s rather mean all the same, don’t you think?’
said Norah, ‘to hold a man if he wants to be free?’
‘Does a man like that want any further freedom than he takes?’
‘Well—if there was someone whom he couldn’t get unless he married them,
he would want it, wouldn’t he? And it’s rather revengeful to keep a man
against his will I think.’
‘But it must be rather difficult not to be revengeful under her
particular circumstances,’ said Monica. She seemed to feel the rusty cut
in the heart of Captain Ingpen’s peevish wife.
It was late when she reached home and she had only time to arrange her
fruit and flowers before dressing for dinner. The parlour-maid announced
Captain Ingpen as she tied the last knot of her tea-gown and she stood
for a moment feeling a sudden reluctance that recalled to her, not so
much Captain Ingpen and his ambiguities, as her own girlhood when, all
dressed before a dance, she had used to stand at the head of the
staircase in her father’s house and feel afraid, but rather deliciously
afraid, of all that might befall below. The old waltz tune of the
nineties surged into her mind again and she remembered that Charlie had
befallen her at a dance. She had worn a tight pink satin bodice and a
full tulle skirt and her great-grandmother’s pearls—pearls sold long ago
during the hard years. How Charlie would have grieved could he have
known of all her struggles. She was glad he had never known, and as she
went down the stairs she kept her heart fixed in pity and tenderness on
Clive, so full of hope and anxious happiness; on Charlie, lying far away
in his Indian grave.
Captain Ingpen was in the lower room, bending his massive head to one of
Charlie’s water-colours, and as he turned and looked up at her standing
on the steps above him, she saw that he found her beautiful. She
preferred not to think of Captain Ingpen’s capacity for appreciation. If
it had been fear she had felt just now, it had not been the delicious
fear of girlhood and there was almost a sense of anger in her as she
asked: ‘Do you know my India?’
‘Yes, slightly. I know most of India I imagine.’ He was looking at her
with a faintly provocative touch of amusement, rather as he had looked
when she hurt her ankle.—‘Beautiful; that is what you are; and I don’t
care how many grandchildren you have,’ was what his eyes were saying,
though he asked, with a sort of indulgent acquiescence, as though he
accepted her terms: ‘Did you care about India?—what you saw of it? Were
you there for long?’
‘Only two years. No, I didn’t care for it at all;—but my India was only
an extension of South Kensington, with all the defects of that type of
society and none of its virtues. I didn’t like Indian architecture—those
nasty teeming temples;—and I didn’t like the Indian landscape, or the
climate; it oppressed me.—And all those mysterious dark servants; the
impossibility of personal relations with the herds of people who took
care of one.—No; I hated it.’ She felt that she chattered a little.
‘Are these your work?’
‘No; they are my husband’s.’
‘I didn’t think them yours somehow.’
It was wonderful indeed to see how much of South Kensington and its
standards dear Charlie had put into his water-colours. They were very
guileless, very conscientious and disastrously picturesque. It had made
him very happy—thank goodness—to paint them and give them to her. Yet
glancing at them for a moment she saw, as she had never paused to do
before, that the pictures that Hester’s friends painted had indeed
performed a useful function. They, like Captain Ingpen, had swept away
rubbish.
‘I hear my young people,’ she said.
He did not follow her to the upper room. He paused to glance at the
books on a shelf and the goldfish in their bowl.
‘Well, darling.’ Clive had come in first and taking each other’s hands
they kissed each other.
‘Well, Mummy,’ he returned, and he held her off and surveyed her. ‘How
lovely!’
‘You remember this dress?’
‘Rather! It’s my favourite.—Hester has a lovely dress to-night, too; put
on for the first time, specially for you.—Lovely!’ he repeated looking
her up and down. And gently lifting her hands, so that the long, black,
transparent sleeves slid back, he said: ‘The arms of Helen as well as
the tresses, Mummy.’
‘Don’t be absurd, Clive!’ Captain Ingpen was behind them. She had heard
his step and Clive, startled, evidently saw him over her shoulder.
‘This is my son, Captain Ingpen. Clive, this is Norah Unwin’s
uncle.—Where is Hester?’
‘She’s just coming.’
Captain Ingpen, though not taller than Clive, seemed to tower above him
in bulk and darkness and maturity. He bent his head to him rather as he
had bent it to Charlie’s water-colours. ‘I’m afraid it’s a hopelessly
dismal place; woods and house,’ he said, as Clive made some comment on
the Manor Farm.—‘You found the woods specially dismal, didn’t you, Mrs.
Wilmott?’
‘But you could do a great deal with them,’ said Monica.
‘What, for instance?’ asked Ingpen.
‘Well, you could have those ditches dug out and drained. And you could
plant blue anemones—and primroses—in the clearings. I think primroses
would grow there. I only wish I had a wood to play with.’
‘That little wood behind us is full of primroses in the spring, you
know,’ said Clive. ‘And that _is_ yours now, Mummy.’
Hester appeared in the doorway as he spoke and Monica saw at once from
her aspect, as she paused there, her eyes turning to her husband, that
the evening, to her, had some special significance. If Clive was hoping
that Hester would please his mother, Hester was hoping—was not that
it?—to please him. Or rather was it not that, sure of pleasing him, she
displayed for him her equipped readiness to do all that was requested of
her. The new dress, Monica recognized it at once, had been requested,
and as a tribute to her own taste for pretty clothes. Hester had never,
in Monica’s sense, dressed at all; and this dress was fashionable;
almost, to her fastidious eye, absurdly so; yet it strangely became the
young woman; Monica had never seen her look so nearly beautiful. Her
throat was set in a thick circle of red coral beads; her figure wrapped
in fringed red and silver; and so naked was she in her modishness that
she made Monica think, with her high dark head and gleaming liquid
surfaces, of an Indian princess, standing beside some pool from whose
waters she had just arisen. Her eyes were turned on Clive and Clive was
smiling at her with the tender reticent radiance of some secret code.
‘Yes; they are happy: yes—they understand each other,’ thought Monica,
and for a moment her heart was glad, seeing that unity.
And now Hester’s eyes rested on the stranger who stood behind her
husband.
‘Captain Ingpen, Hester; our neighbour; Norah’s uncle you know.’ Monica
took her hands in hers murmuring as she kissed her: ‘It’s lovely, the
dress; quite lovely, my dear.’
Hester was still standing on the threshold and Captain Ingpen had
advanced into the light. ‘We have met before, I think,’ he said smiling.
‘Isn’t it—wasn’t it—Hester Blakeston?’
‘How do you do,’ said Hester. She was not smiling.
‘I heard you were married, but I never heard to whom. This is
delightful,’ said Captain Ingpen, and, though he did not look delighted,
he continued to smile at the young woman.
‘How amusing that you should know each other,’ said Monica, while Hester
moved slowly forward and came to stand beside her husband. ‘And that you
should be neighbours without yet having found each other out.—When was
it that you met?’
‘In London; after the war.—Whom did not one meet in those days?—eh, Mrs.
Wilmott?’ smiled Ingpen. ‘You have every right to forget me if you
choose.’
‘Oh—I don’t forget you at all,’ said Hester. ‘Where is my shawl, Clive?’
‘Have you left it upstairs—or in the hall?’—Clive was going to look but
Hester checked him; ‘It’s in the car. I remember. How tiresome of me.
Will you get it?’ She walked away to the fireplace at the other end of
the room.
‘Wasn’t she interested in Russia? Didn’t she perform great feats for
such a young creature—just fresh from Girton if I remember—and write
some very remarkable articles about Dostoievsky and the Bolsheviks?’
Captain Ingpen at their distance enquired, politely and with lowered
voice, casting a glance upon the silvery form of the Indian princess,
her slender limbs outlined against the flames. Strange, thought Monica,
that Hester should first have been presented to her awareness as boyish
and in rubber boots. She could imagine nothing more feminine or more
alluring than the translucent figure drooping before the fire. Captain
Ingpen did not look allured, however; he looked rather ironic, as though
the memory of the young creature and the Bolsheviks made him smile
inwardly.
‘That was in the past before I knew Hester. She still performs feats, or
is quite ready to do so: she is wonderfully equipped; wonderfully
secure.’
‘Almost frighteningly so, eh? She always frightened me, I remember, so
very young and so very fierce she was, and believed that every problem
was just about to be solved—by the Girton young—here and now, in
England’s green and pleasant land.’
‘I never thought of Hester as harbouring illusions.’ Monica smiled a
little dryly, for she could admit no confidences with regard to Hester.
‘And they have solved a good many problems, the believing young—haven’t
they?—Are you cold, Hester?’ she went forward and joined her
daughter-in-law at the fireplace.
‘I haven’t enough clothes on,’ said Hester, still leaning her hands on
the mantelshelf above her head and still looking down at the flames.
‘That is the bother of these smart dresses;—one can wear only one layer
under them and that a thin one. I do feel a little chilly. Thanks,
Clive.—Yes; I will put it on.’
Clive had returned with the folds of a coral shawl dripping from his arm
and as he put it round her he said: ‘You haven’t caught cold, have you?’
‘Not in the least. It’s only this silly dress of yours,’ said Hester,
holding the shawl against her breast as she moved to a table, took a
cigarette and leant to light it at the lamp chimney, her small,
illumined face cold and concentrated.
‘You have only time for three whiffs,’ said Monica. ‘Dinner will be
ready in half a minute.’ And Clive said, smiling at his wife: ‘Hester is
horribly wasteful of her cigarettes; it’s her only extravagance.’
Monica had always loved to look at her son across the dinner-table,
their own little table for four in the Chelsea flat, when he had been
the most dependable of hosts, and she had not so seen him for years. The
contrast between his face and Captain Ingpen’s struck her anew as they
sat round the candles and crystal and white napery, and it was not so
much now between youth and maturity as between two different kinds of
life. Clive’s face was like a high taper burning upward; Captain
Ingpen’s like a half-consumed log, charred, jagged, a sullen red
smouldering along its edge. How could she, even for a nightmare moment,
have thought of Clive as weak, she wondered, looking across at him and
noting the pure, meditative hollow cast by the reflected candlelight
above the bow of his upper lip.
He and Ingpen were talking about the new book on India. ‘Things quite as
grim and equally true could be written about us, couldn’t they?’ Ingpen
was saying, eating his soup and glancing sideways at Clive, a hard,
appraising glance. ‘I know all those festering Hindus too well, though
my time has been mainly spent among the people who were destined by
nature to be their destroyers—the people we prevent from preying on
them.’
He was very affable, very suave, and Clive was very courteous, but
already, as she listened to them, Monica felt that they were not going
to like each other. Neither was Hester going to like Captain Ingpen.
Wrapped in a stubborn silence, she had refused soup and was crunching
salted almonds, her elbows on the table.
‘It’s very perverse to say that things as grim and as true could be
written about us; I don’t accept that for a moment,’ she said, since
Clive did not seem inclined to take up the challenge.
‘Don’t you?’ Ingpen turned his eyes on her and she felt a new edge in
their raillery. ‘And what do you know about it? What does any woman know
about our civilization? All you see is the tidied-up world we men
present to you.’
‘Good Heavens! Where have you been living during the last twenty years!
Do you really imagine that we don’t do as much tidying up as you
do!—You’ve been a Rip van Winkle among the warrior-tribes!’ laughed
Monica. ‘And indeed, even before we gained all our modern freedoms, our
function has always been to tidy up after you!—Hasn’t it, Hester?’ and
she appealed for support to the avowed feminist. But, closely enveloped
in her rosy shawl, Hester crunched her almonds and made no reply.
‘But exactly;—exactly,’ Ingpen was softly and rather disagreeably
laughing. ‘You tidy up after us. It’s what you’ve always done, what you
always will do—and very creditable it is to you. After we’ve finished
with all the dirty, discreditable, necessary work that underlies every
civilization, you’ll bring your mops and pails and tidy up! You do, I
grant you, keep us much cleaner on the surface, here in Europe; but just
as much foulness and iniquity seethes underneath as in India; and
there’s no hope of a warrior-tribe to wipe us out.’
‘Are the warrior-tribes so just and upright?’ Monica was a little
disconcerted. There was a snarl perceptible beneath the supple surfaces
of her tiger’s good manners and she wondered if he might become, in his
hostility towards life, a little unmanageable.
‘They are clean in comparison with us; there’s that to be said for
them,’ said Ingpen, while Clive, helping himself to fish, glanced at him
coldly. ‘They have evolved no sewers and no sewer-rats. The moment you
get civilization—or, in other words, sewers—you get sewer-rats. What
happens to our civilization, I suppose, is not the warrior-tribes, but
the sewer-rat;—as we see in Russia.’
‘Our rats will find us a more difficult mouthful,’ Clive commented,
frostily smiling, and at that Hester spoke, raising her head and fixing
her eyes upon her husband: ‘And who do you mean by rat?’ she enquired.
‘Oppressed people? Exploited people? The English working classes? I can
assure you that there is quite as much civilization to be found among
them as among their so-called betters, and very much more hope for the
future. I think it is they who are going to do most of the tidying
up;—and I agree that there’s a great deal to be done.—But they won’t
devour anybody, as the wretched Russians had to do; it is uneducated to
draw any comparison between the Russian despotism and our
democracy;—they will be perfectly decent and kind through all the
reorganization, you may be sure of it; as they always have been.’
Clive remained, looking quietly at his wife while she delivered herself
of this homily, which was not, it was evident, directed against him.
When she had finished he said, smiling with just a touch of quizzical
reassurance; as though he calmed and sustained her: ‘Quite right, dear.’
‘Yes; quite right, Mrs. Wilmott!’ Ingpen echoed, bowing across the table
towards her. Had she touched him in her youth and ardour? He, too,
smiled, and his smile was not sardonic. ‘We all agree that the British
working man is the best of good fellows—if also one of the stupidest. No
doubt he will evolve a very tidy world for us; all garden-cities,
greyhound-racing, cinemas and cheap beer. Fortunately I shall be in my
grave before it arrives.’
‘Don’t be too sure of that!’ said Hester, flashing a fiery glance upon
him.
When Monica was alone with her daughter-in-law in the drawing-room, she
prepared herself for trenchant comment on the reactionary guest, but,
saying not a word of Captain Ingpen, Hester extended herself on the
sofa, remarking, as she stretched out a nonchalant hand for a cigarette:
‘Monica, I’d rather you told Robin no more fairy-tales when he is with
you. He came home the other day very much over-excited, with his head
full of captive princesses and dragons. He’s a nervous child; I’m
anxious about him already; and it doesn’t make my task the easier.’
Monica had been but too well aware during the meal from which they had
just come that her dinner was far from a success, but not till she heard
this request did she know how much ill-temper had seethed beneath
Hester’s composure. So unexpected, so unprovoked were her words, that
she felt herself struck suddenly upon the cheek and tears almost rose to
her eyes with the sense of tingling aggression.
‘My dear Hester, what nonsense!’ she exclaimed.
‘I was quite aware that you would think it so,’ said Hester, drawing at
her cigarette and watching a ring of smoke float above her head. ‘But I
must insist upon my own point of view nevertheless.’
‘A child who has heard no fairy-tales is illiterate,’ said Monica,
standing across the room near a table and resting her finger-tips on it
as she surveyed the languid form of her daughter-in-law. She kept
herself from trembling. ‘Fairy-tales are as much a part of a child’s
heritage as Shakespeare and the Gospel of Saint John!’
‘Our modern ideas of a child’s heritage are very different from those of
your generation,’ Hester returned. ‘We understand children’s minds in a
way you had no opportunity of doing. You were as ignorant of psychology
as your grandparents were of evolution.’
‘A great deal of your modern psychology will prove as obsolete in a
generation as a great deal of Darwinian evolution has already proved, my
dear Hester.’
‘I don’t imagine that anything essential in either will become
obsolete,’ said Hester. ‘Jibes at psycho-analysis will be forgotten as
completely as jibes at our monkey ancestry.—Of course people try to make
fun of what belittles and frightens them.’ And, waiving the general
question, she went on. ‘Shakespeare comes at his own time to a maturing
child; I shall begin to read the historical plays to Robin as soon as he
starts English history; and the Gospel of Saint John, no doubt, when he
is old enough to take an interest in religious myths. But for a nervous,
imaginative boy like him, fairy-tales are definitely harmful. I’ve no
theory against them; that would be silly and pedantic; but from my study
of Robin’s reactions I’ve come to suspect that they put a child’s mind
into the attitude of panic and credulity that is at the root of all
human superstitions. It’s only a step, after all, from Beauty and the
Beast to the Three Wise Men and the Star.—We have a great deal of
useless and harmful lumber to rid ourselves of, my dear Monica.’
Never had Hester so displayed her arrogant assurance. Never, Monica
realized it in the midst of her anger, had she heard her make so long a
speech. Anger was flaming up, though she tried to stifle it, and it was
shot through by all sorts of fiery memories:—The black eyebrows and the
dusty black cloak lined with red; the Registrar’s office; the jibing
friend sitting with Mr. Gales on the stair—flashed and crackled on the
upward flame.
‘We differ in our definition of lumber. It’s a step from Beauty and the
Beast, if you will, to the Three Wise Men and the Star, but a step a
child’s mind distinguishes quite as quickly as ours;—superstition
doesn’t come into the question at all.—What a bleak, ungarnished world
you seem to inhabit, Hester.’
‘I’m not justifying my world to you,’ said Hester. ‘I’m only asking you
not to take my child into the world of fairy-tales.’ She rose as she
spoke. Clive and Ingpen were entering and Clive was saying, with a
somewhat tightened utterance: ‘What about fairy-tales, Hester?’ He was
glad to be done with Captain Ingpen.
Hester made no reply. She walked away to the fireplace and, again
leaning her hands on the mantelshelf, smoked on, her back turned to
them.
‘It’s only that Hester has been forbidding me to tell them to Robin,’
said Monica. She could not help it. It was the untamed girlhood in her
and the impulse of vengeance flamed up as her anger had done. She smiled
as she spoke, moving forward to the card-table and seeing reflected from
Clive’s face how white and flashing was her own aspect. ‘They aren’t
allowed to modern children, it seems.—Are you sorry you used to hear
about Saint George and the Dragon and Puss in Boots, Clive? Do you think
they did you harm?’ She glanced again at her son as she placed the packs
of cards.
His face had taken on the stiffened, watchful look that it broke her
heart to see. And Hester said no word. Hester the aggressor was wise and
crafty; she said no word in accusation or self-exculpation. She stood
there smoking in her coral-red shawl.
‘I adored fairy-tales,’ said Clive, looking from her to Hester and back
again. He spoke carefully and his mother felt his care as a sword in her
heart. Oh, no, he would never take her part against Hester, however
Hester misused her! ‘Only;—Hester thinks Robin rather unusually nervous,
you see.’
‘Yes; I do see. I think there may be other reasons for his nervousness.
He is never nervous when he is with me.—But I’m not dreaming of
rebellion.—It would be useless to do that, I know.—Shall we cut for
partners?—Will you come, Hester?—It’s a dreadful privation for a
grandmother, Captain Ingpen. Fairy-tales are the only function left to a
grandmother really.’
‘Everything is changed since our young days, isn’t it?’ said Ingpen. He
had joined her at the table and as she met his eyes she had a strange
sense that he and she were united against Clive and Hester. He
understood and sustained her as Clive understood and sustained Hester.
His massive strength upheld and quieted her. ‘You gave your child
sweetmeats and the modern mother gives hers antiseptics,’ he smiled.
‘You were very naughty and self-indulgent, no doubt; but we have still
to see which method produces the best results.’
Hester had now come forward. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll play with Clive,’
she said. ‘I’m not good at bridge and he understands my game.’ She spoke
with perfect self-possession. In contrast to Hester’s composure Monica
was aware that her own outburst appeared as undignified. She had behaved
like a fool. She had put Hester in the wrong before a stranger. Clive
could not feel any sympathy for her, seeing her do that. She had been a
fool and her heart burned with the consciousness of folly as they sat
down and shuffled and dealt.
It was true that Hester was not good at bridge. At all events she was
not good to-night. She was perhaps not as composed as she pretended to
be. ‘Our trick, I think,’ said Ingpen when, at the end of the first
round, she put out her hand; and, drawing it back quickly, she muttered:
‘Sorry.’ But she held her head high and kept her eyes on her cards and
if at last she and Clive were beaten, it was not a shameful defeat.
Clive indeed was playing very well. ‘He is sustaining her,’ thought
Monica.
‘We are well matched,’ Ingpen commented at the end of the next round.
‘He understands her game and I already understand yours.’ He glanced at
her, slightly smiling, and Monica saw that Clive observed the glance.
Now they were bidding for the next lead. Clive had dealt and went one
spade. Imperturbably Ingpen said: ‘Three hearts.’
‘Three spades,’ said Hester instantly, and Clive smiled across at her,
thanking her for her promptitude and courage. But Monica, astonished out
of her anger, looked round at the girl. She herself held an excellent
hand of spades. Clive had the lead and Hester laid down her hand, black
with disastrous clubs. There was a moment’s silence; then Monica said:
‘It was a mistake, Hester. Take it back.’ She was even sorry for Hester,
seeing the look of wild fury that swept across her face as she stared
down at the cards. ‘What did I say?’ she asked.
‘You said three spades. Take it back, my dear.’
‘If course I won’t take it back.’ She rose to her feet, leaving the hand
lying and pushing back her chair. ‘I’m sorry, Clive. I’ve been an ass
and you must pay the penalty.’ Walking away to the steps, she descended
to the lower room.
‘Shall we really go on, Clive?’ said Monica. ‘It was a mere slip of the
tongue.’
He had been looking after his wife and as his eyes came back to his
mother she saw that they were hardly aware of her. ‘Of course we’ll go
on.’ So they went on and Monica and Ingpen swept up twelve tricks.
When the slaughter was accomplished, Clive jumped up and went to the
steps. ‘It’s all over! Come back!’ He stood smiling down at his wife,
again almost quizzically. So united were they that he could venture to
tease Hester out of her bad temper.
And indeed, from where she sat, Monica saw that, as she appeared from
below, she lifted her face to her husband, as if with a murmur of
compunction.
‘Better luck this time,’ said Ingpen. He was shuffling now, with lean,
skilful hands. He wore an odd ring, a little too large for him; it
slipped forward when he dealt and Monica fastened her eyes upon it so
that she need not look at Hester and Clive; a flat gold ring circled by
two broad bands of black enamel.
‘You mean, I think, better play,’ said Hester.
‘No, no,’ smiled Ingpen. ‘You were wool-gathering. That’s bad luck.’
‘I beg your pardon. I was not wool-gathering,’ Hester retorted, her head
high, her eyes on her traducer, while a deep colour rose to her cheek.
‘It was a slip of the tongue.’
‘Come, I can’t believe that,’ said Ingpen, tossing the cards to their
places; ‘because you would hardly have meant to say three clubs, eh?
That wouldn’t have done you any good, would it?’ He spoke benignly,
almost paternally, as if to a forward child who must not be left in
possession of an illusory triumph. Hester bit her lip, drew hard at her
breath, and fixed her eyes upon her cards while Clive cast a glance of
cold repudiation upon his mother’s guest.
They played in almost unbroken silence after that. Monica and Ingpen
exchanged a word once or twice but neither Hester nor Clive spoke, and
she understood too well their withdrawal.
‘And now I think we must go, Mummy,’ Clive said when the rubber was
played and he and Hester beaten. ‘Hester has a rather full day before
her to-morrow and oughtn’t to be late.’
‘Oh—don’t go on my account, I beg,’ said Hester, tossing the end of her
shawl over her shoulder. ‘I’m not in the least tired.’
‘I am, then,’ said Clive, and Monica wondered, hearing the note of
dryness in his voice, if even his patience had worn thin.
She did not press them to stay. Beset by bitter fears and bitterer
self-reproaches, she only prayed that they would go before Ingpen so
that she might not be left alone with them. Clive in that case might
attempt some strained reconciliation and she knew that she could bear no
more.
They all went to the table where whiskey and soda and barley-water were
set out and now, as they drank, it was Clive who contrived a few
utterances. ‘How’s Robin’s fountain getting on, Mummy?’ he asked, and he
politely enquired of Ingpen if there was a good garage at the Old Manor
Farm. Dear Clive; he would always try, at least, to help her out. Then
they were gone, both kissing her good-night, and for a moment, as she
stood by the table looking after them, her mind was filled with the
imagination of what they would be saying as they sped away from the
evening she had offered them: ‘Rather grisly, wasn’t it?’ That might
well be Hester’s sober comment. And Clive might reply: ‘And what an
odious man Mummy has picked up. I hope he didn’t utterly enrage you.’
She gazed for a moment at these visions with a bitter heart and then,
looking round, saw that Captain Ingpen was gazing at her. But, whatever
his ambiguities the other day, there was to-night no failure in his
understanding. He did not conceal from her that he saw and pondered on
her plight; but he made no comment on it, only saying, kindly and
gravely, as he looked about him—rather as Robin had done: ‘I like this
room. I like it much better than mine.’
‘Well;—it’s a growth; it’s all my life.’
‘Yes. I know. That’s just it.—I like your life,’ he said, moving to the
door, and bending his head to a picture here, a book there, as he
went:—it reminded her again of something feline; but endearingly feline;
the kindly interest a cat may take in a new environment. ‘How peaceful
you’ve been,’ he said.
‘Well; I don’t know about that.’ Monica went beside him. ‘I haven’t had
an easy life in some ways. I worked very hard for a great many years,
and had anxieties.’
‘Yes. I know. Norah told me. All the same you’ve been peaceful.’ They
were in the hall now, and again he paused, to look at a row of
engravings that hung there:—French cathedrals; Amiens, Rheims, Beauvais,
Chartres, Bourges and Vézelay;—all the cathedrals she and Clive had
visited together.
‘Isn’t that lovely of the interior of Amiens,’ she said. ‘It’s like a
white foxglove, I always think; all rising lightness and grace.—You’ve
seen them?’
‘Only Chartres.’
‘There’s nothing to compare to Chartres, of course.—You remember this
view from below?—And this of the West front?’
‘Pretty well. Unfortunately I didn’t see the windows. It was during the
war and they were covered up.’
‘I should rather like to see it quite dark like that. It would be
another sort of sublimity.—You ought to go to all the French cathedrals
one day.’
‘I must,’ said Ingpen; ‘I must take Norah and your fragile young friend
and see them all.’ He looked round at her from the pictures. ‘Will you
come, too? Why not all four of us go and live in France and see
cathedrals?’
Was it a covert recognition of her plight? She smiled it away. ‘One
might find a worse way of spending the evening of one’s days.’
‘I mean it, you know.’ He scrutinized her. ‘You were right about this
climate. It’s sodden. Why,—after one’s done one’s work, married off
one’s children, kept the warrior-tribes from devouring the Indians—why
not loaf and enjoy oneself in a country where there are good beds and
good cooking?—and these for an object? The four of us would find plenty
of occupation. We would constitute a perambulatory colony in ourselves
and the young people would take care of us if we fell ill,’ and Ingpen
smiled upon her. ‘Let’s run away,’ he said.
‘That’s just what one can’t do,’ said Monica. Whether he were serious or
not she could not tell.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t quite know why not;—but it can’t be done;—because of this, I
suppose.’ She indicated the room behind them. ‘The growth; the life. It
has its roots; it holds one down;—one would soon wither if one left it.’
‘Well—I have no roots; nowhere in all the world have I any roots,’ said
Ingpen, ‘and I’m withered already.’
‘So that you can run whenever it becomes too sodden.’ She gave him her
hand, smiling.
‘Yes; I can run. It remains to be seen whether I shall,’ said Ingpen.