No one cared if old hearts broke. Monica lay, on her awaking next
morning, and almost smiled as the girlish self-pity of the thought
returned to her. Until last night she had, perhaps, still been a girl
and she lay now knowing that age brought acquiescence. He was not to die
with his head in her hand, like Jeremy:—but he was not a lost dog; not
stoned. He was lonely, yet loved and cherished; and as long as he lived
the thought of her would keep alive the hope that had brushed them with
its wing, as the thought of him would keep it alive in her. He was dear
to her; very dear; but the sacrament of which they had partaken meant
more, perhaps, than any personal relation could have done, and united
them more really.
When, a little later, a note was brought to her she lay for a moment
looking in a sort of bewilderment at her name written in Hester’s small,
scholarly hand. Last night seemed far away; but how much farther the
afternoon and her own suicidal self. She had almost forgotten the world
of youth; almost forgotten Clive. Yet, as she opened Hester’s letter she
knew that he was not less dear for having been forgotten. Her heart was
no longer shut in on its solitary love, and a shared heart is a heart
enfranchised. It would be happier for Clive to be loved by an
enfranchised heart.
She opened the letter. Hester’s firm dark script closely filled the
sheets.
‘DEAR MONICA, Frank Jessup has for some time been suggesting that I
should go to Russia again and write a series of articles for the
“Enquirer” on developments there, and it seems the moment to close
with the offer. So I am going up to London by the 12.40 and shall
stay with Frank and Marcia for a day or two and then be off. If I
could have foreseen this on Thursday, I wouldn’t have asked Godfrey
to go and perhaps you know where he is and could tell him to come
back. But perhaps you and Clive will like to stay on at Oddley, and
in that case it is necessary that Godfrey should be kept away; Clive
could never stand seeing him. My going off on the same day as he
does will make some gossip, I imagine; but I like to be quite frank
with you and hope you will go on understanding—as you did
yesterday—if I say that gossip about me will be all to the good,
where Clive is concerned. You see, I found him and Celia up here, on
the hill, the other evening, when I came back from London, and saw
then what I had never realized before—purblind fool that I have
been—how deeply Clive cared for her; how he depended on her—or could
depend on her again. And I know, though the less said about it the
better, that if they could come together it would be far the
happiest thing for everyone concerned. At the same time I would like
you to know that I should never go back to Godfrey—even if he wanted
me to, which he doesn’t—though he and I might agree to fix up
appearances so that Clive and Celia can marry. Clive is opposed to
my decision, and I couldn’t leave him in the state he is in unless
you were here; so this is really to ask you to come over and see
after him as soon as I am gone. The sooner I go the better. I merely
tear him to pieces by staying on, now that the decision is really
taken. He thinks me incredibly cruel and hard; but I believe you
will understand. You won’t forget what I said to you about him
yesterday. Wives can get to feel about their husbands what mothers
feel, after a time, though at the first it would have seemed
impossible;—I mean being really able to think of their happiness
apart from one’s own. I have sent Robin up to London for the day
with Nurse so that he shall be well out of the way. He will be very
happy, I feel sure, with you and Celia. He has taken a great fancy
to her already, and she to him, and you know that he has always
really liked being with you rather than with me. You can tell him
all the fairy-tales you like now, Monica! I was a beast that
night.—Though it’s quite true that I don’t think they are good for
him. As to the future, I shall never make any conditions about being
allowed to see him and all that sort of sentimentality because I
think it really dislocates a child’s life—having to adjust itself to
two centres and care for two mothers.’ Here came a sentence that had
been scratched out; but it could still be deciphered: ‘All the same
I hope I shall see him sometimes,’ but, after this repented lapse
into maternal weakness the letter resumed its steady course. ‘I
don’t really think I am a maternal woman. I don’t understand
children instinctively. It made me frightfully angry when I saw that
you thought my book great rot, but I’m inclined now to believe that
you were right; at least, that one needs more than a knowledge of
psychology—and even more than being a mother—to write a book like
that. Of course Robin doesn’t know that I am going; and it’s best
that he should only realize, little by little, like the rest of the
world, that I’m not coming back. I think I said yesterday the things
that most needed saying and I am glad you know me better and that I
know you. It is really—if you will forgive my saying so—because I
begin to know you at last, and Celia, that I feel I can go away and
leave Clive to you. I should have been conceited enough to have
thought that no one else could do for him what I could. But I was
mistaken about that—as about so many things. So, wishing you the
best of luck, dear Monica,
‘Yours ever
‘HESTER’
Monica laid down the letter on the sheet. Here it was in her hand. What
had been the dearest wish of her heart for years was accomplished.
Hester was eliminated. And the thought brought her no joy. On the
contrary, she knew, as she lay there, that dismay was closing in upon
her. The face of Celia, summoned by an act of will and at Hester’s
bidding, only rose to share in her consternation. Arctic, moonlike, it
floated over the plains. Some possibilities, once extinguished, could
only shine with a reflected radiance for ever after. Clive and Celia
might once have married; but Hester was his wife. Hester was here, close
by; she was nearer, strange as it was to realize it, than Celia. A
person hated for five years was a person brought near. Hatred carved its
dark conceptions, its dark interpretations, and then the hollowed form
turned round and revealed itself in relief; the same, yet almost
unrecognizable. _Elle est ben trop noire_; the Madonna eyes of
reprobation; against what a background did she now see her old
distastes! The strength of Hester’s arm was round her shoulders,
snatching her from death; its warmth was beneath her hand, sustaining
her. Hester might still be strange to her; but she was near.
It was a grey, fresh day. Yesterday had still been almost summer; to-day
was almost winter and as Monica approached The Crofts she saw that the
hedgerow trees, in the climbing lane behind it, were nearly leafless.
But a savour of sweetness was in the air and on the cherry-tree at the
gate a robin was singing its silvery song, symbolic to her ear of all
she had come to rescue; childhood under a secure heaven; old age hand in
hand beside the hearth; the promise of spring and winter’s harvesting of
unity; all the sacred platitudes.
She went quietly up the path, so quietly that the robin did not cease
its singing, and opened the door and went in. Everything was still in
the little house though, in the distance, she could just hear the murmur
of voices in the kitchen where the maids no doubt were in surmising
conference. Her eye was drawn, as she stood there, to a suitcase
standing near the door, a strong leather suitcase marked ‘H. W.’ Hester
was packed and ready for the Bolsheviks. The drawing-room door was ajar
and she looked in. In the further end, at the window that gave on the
garden behind the house, Hester sat writing with her back to her. Her
slight figure was framed from on high by the opulent folds of Mrs.
Jessup’s batik curtains with which it was in strange contrast. Monica
saw now, clearly, that Hester had never harmonized with Mrs. Jessup’s
curtains; as little as with her own chintz and china. She was a creature
of either the open heath or the underground railway. She belonged to no
æsthetic background. She wore, this morning, her dark blue skirt and her
red jumper and her hair was neatly brushed to a point on the nape of her
neck. Beside her on the ground stood an open attaché case and as she
dropped a folded paper into it and drew a fresh sheet towards her she
looked extremely composed and efficient. Monica, however, now saw the
statue in the round and knew what lay on the other side of Hester’s
composure. She was occupied in cutting away her roots; but it would not
be without emotion. She did not believe in roots; yet they ran as deeply
in hers as in any human heart and bled as bitterly when severed. They
did not believe in roots, Hester and her generation; they believed in
the swift, unflinching adaptibility that roots menaced, or made
impossible. And perhaps they were not altogether wrong, thought Monica,
still pausing, still gazing at the resolute young figure, the future,
was it not?—as she herself was the past. Roots meant sweetness,
security, sameness; the old found again in the new; continuity and
bondage. They gave you as reward a flower, and Hester’s world moved too
quickly for such slow rewards. It was a world of machinery, rather; of
things you made and used and cast aside; things of which you remained
master and that never mastered you. Roots mastered you; and perhaps the
world of the future was a world of change, of swift improvisation, where
ruthlessness and decision were the price of survival. It was difficult
for her eyes to foresee what beauty there might be in such a world, yet
Hester, sitting there in her ruthlessness, was not alien to her. It was
better to cut through and escape if withering were the doom of
persistency, and not only one’s own withering, but that of those one
loved. They refused the discipline of tradition, Hester and her
generation; they would be self-disciplined; and she saw their valour,
their integrity, and their peril. A new age was always perilous. It was
as though the fostering epoch of the plant-consciousness were over and
the human flower, its product, walked away on its feet, nourished by no
sap from below and sustained only by some new element in the surrounding
atmosphere of which newly evolved faculties were for the first time
aware. ‘It may work; it may work;—in ways we can’t conceive of,’ Monica
thought, standing there, her heart strangely held by pity and
understanding. ‘There may be enough to grow on—since they feel it. It
will be a world of walking flowers. Dangerous; but they accept danger.’
She turned away and went softly up the stairs. Robin’s day-nursery was
in front, facing south; Hester had chosen the best bedroom for her
child. She passed that, glancing in at its sunny order, and went down
the little passage that led, at the other side of the house, to Clive
and Hester’s room. She stood for a moment before the door and listened
hearing no sound; then she tapped, very softly, and Clive’s weary voice
said: ‘Come in.’
Monica had not seen the room since her first visit to the completed
Crofts, and, as she glanced at it, her eye passing over Clive who lay
turned from her on his pillows, it looked almost as denuded as then,
like a bright modern room in a shop-window. Hester’s bed of painted wood
might never have been occupied, so accurately drawn above so flat a
surface was its cover of putty and flame and black; her dressing-table
was empty of all appurtenances; the cupboards in the walls were neatly
closed; the chairs stood in their appointed places; even the bright
little fire, lighted for the invalid, might have been an imitation fire;
it carried out the colouring scheme as accurately as the flame and putty
and purple of the pictures on the walls in their broad black frames. Yet
though it was denuded Clive did not look abandoned in it. A glass of
water, a vase of late roses, his letters unopened, and the folded
morning paper lay on the table beside him. He had only to get up, to
make a gesture, to take up the new life to which Hester was leaving him,
in order to break through the bright magic that seemed to surround him.
His mother scrutinized him and noted that though he seemed almost
sleeping, the hand lying out on the sheet was tightly clenched. ‘What is
it?’ he said. He thought it was the maid.
‘Clive dear——’ She advanced from the door, but she did not meet his
eyes. She could not look at Clive yet. She walked to the window and
stood there with her back to him. From the window one saw the hill
behind the house. The turf was misted with spider’s webs and the sheep
were all the colour of mushrooms. Above the hill was a little space of
blue. ‘I’ve come to see you, Clive,’ she said.
There was silence for a moment behind her; then, in a careful voice,
Clive said: ‘It’s very kind of you, Mother. More than kind. But Hester
doesn’t leave me till the afternoon.’
‘I know. I won’t take Hester’s time. I only want to talk to you a
little.—Hester has told you that we met yesterday?’
‘Yes. Of course.—She said you’d been wonderful. You and I’ll talk later,
Mother. When she’s gone. There’s nothing to be done now; really.’
She turned at that and looked at him. He lay back on his pillows, a spot
of hard colour on each cheek. ‘I’m all right, I promise you,’ he
muttered as he met her eyes. ‘You needn’t treat me as if I were spun
glass. I lie here because she’s left me nothing else to do. I can’t go
down and wrestle with her at the door before the taxi-driver and the
maids.’
‘No; of course you can’t,’ Monica murmured. ‘But you do know, don’t you,
that she is as unhappy as you are. You do know that it’s not from lack
of love that she is leaving you.’
‘Mummy,’ Clive muttered, gazing at her and after a moment’s silence: ‘I
don’t know where you stand; I don’t know what you’re trying to do for
me;—but I do know that it’s no good.—She won’t stay. Not even if it were
you as well as I who asked her to.’
‘Why not, Clive?’ She advanced and sat down on the chair at the foot of
the bed and Clive’s eyes were sounding her. He did not know where she
stood; but he must see that she was changed; he must see that it was no
longer Hester’s enemy he confronted; and as he kept silence she said
again: ‘Why not? I traduced Hester the other night, and you trusted her.
You left me full of love and trust. You said that every drop of your
blood was hers. What was it that happened when you got back to her? Why
did she feel that she must leave you? Tell me, Clive? You must tell me.
You must trust me.—You can trust me now,’ said Monica.
He turned away his face and shut his eyes and she saw that he was
thinking hard. The thin, beautiful hand, the archangel hand, clenched
itself again as he lay there thinking and when at last he spoke Clive
was nearer than he had ever been, for he trusted her, completely; with
his own and with Hester’s life. ‘I was horribly upset,’ he said.
‘Yes. Of course. But you trusted her.’
‘It wasn’t my trust I was thinking of,’ Clive muttered. ‘It was
something very different.—All the way up here, after I’d left you—it was
something very different I was thinking of.—It was of him.’ A scarlet
flush mounted to his face as he spoke. ‘I understand what’s happened,
Mother; and you understand. Hester understands too; though she won’t
accept it. How could you have believed anything but what you did—of a
man like that?’
As she heard his broken phrases; as she saw the dark, bright colour rise
to her son’s face, Monica, for a moment, knew such a turning of the
heart that she feared her own blood would echo his. But it was, she
felt, a drained pallor that met Clive’s eyes as he opened them to look,
heavily, at her, and as she heard her own voice saying: ‘A man like
that?’
‘Why, Mummy, don’t let’s pretend,’ said Clive. He felt her emotion,
though it was so stilled, and he moved his eyes from her face and looked
out of the window beyond her head. ‘You may have liked him; but that was
because you knew nothing, really, about him. I know, unfortunately, a
great deal. I know what sort of reputation he has, where women are
concerned. It has been discreditable to him. He had to leave the army
because of it. He is the last sort of man I could have associated with
Hester.’ The hot colour burned on Clive’s cheek while a cold fire burned
in his eyes. ‘I had thought of an artist; a writer;—an idealist of some
sort; not a ruthless, battered libertine.—A man whose love is an
insult.—Mummy,’ he glanced at her, and as he had looked away from her
emotion so she now looked away from his, dropping her eyes—‘I told you
that I didn’t writhe with male jealousy; do you remember? And it was
true when I said it. But I had it all the other night; on the way up
here; after I’d left you.—I had it all; every bit of it,’ said Clive,
and had he been lying on her heart, in his bitter abasement, her son
could not have been nearer. ‘I came up here,’ he said, ‘and I was as
primitive as he is—damn him! And first it was Robin, sitting in the
dusk, in the garden.—I saw he’d been frightened.—And then it was Hester,
crouched on the sofa, crying.—That’s how I found her. And when I asked
her if it were true that Captain Ingpen had been her lover, and whether
she loved him still, she said that it was true. She said she loved him
still. She said she’d always love him. I was horrible to Hester, Mummy.
But she gave me too much to bear.’
A silence fell. Under the sound of her son’s deep breaths Monica heard
laughter in the kitchen and the robin’s song in the garden. A
tradesman’s cart drove up and stopped at the back door. She glanced at
her wrist. It was half-past eleven. Clive’s eyes were closed. He was
shut into his dark world of shame and passion. He had never till now
inhabited such a world and strange it was to know that she accepted his
initiation. His flame had been too white. It had burned down now into a
hidden core of consciousness and she seemed to see the smoke and fire
that tainted its limpidity.
‘Clive,’ she said, and as he heard her voice he opened his eyes and
looked at her, ‘would you have found it easier if it had been a man you
could have understood her loving?’
‘What do you mean?’ he asked after a moment. They were, again, sounding
each other.
‘Would it have been easier for you to accept, if Hester’s lover had been
somebody you could understand her loving?’
‘Why should you ask me that? You mean that I deceive myself; that I
don’t know myself; that I was as primitive as anyone and would have
writhed, whoever it was?—There may be truth in that.—Some truth.—But
no!’—He clenched his hand and laid his arm across his eyes. ‘No! If it
had been anybody but that man! If I could only understand that it could
be that man! And even that—for the past—I could have swallowed. She was
so young. He was so—practised,’ Clive groaned. ‘But that she should tell
me, throw it in my teeth at last, that she loves him still and will
always love him!—No. Even to keep Hester I can’t pretend that I accept
it.’
Monica now felt herself gazing at a necessity that lay before her. She
had seen it in an ominous glimpse before, when she had paled and
recoiled from it; but it lay there, clearly visible now, in the path of
her approach to Clive and Hester’s lives, and over the heavy throbbing
of her heart she steadied her voice to speak, understanding, at last,
what it had all meant as she had not done till this moment came upon
her. One did not understand, ever, till afterwards.
‘I wonder if it will help you to accept what Hester gives you to bear if
I tell you something about myself, Clive,’ she said. He lay still,
rigidly still, his arm before his eyes. ‘You think that Captain Ingpen
would not have been my friend if I had known about him. But that isn’t
true. I did know about him; all that you know; and I was his friend. But
it’s more than that.’ She had begun to speak with dropped eyes but now
she raised them and fixed them on her son, who, his arm fallen, gazed at
her. ‘It’s much more than that, Clive,’ she said, and as she spoke she
seemed to herself to be drawing Hester near, to be holding her within
her arm, to be at one with Hester; ‘Because I understand why Hester
loved him, and still loves him, in a way I never could have done if he
had remained only my friend.’
Clive spoke then. She heard the voice that Hester had heard; almost the
voice of a stranger. ‘What do you mean?’
What did she mean? She stopped to think, looking at her son, feeling no
wish for veils. All that she wished was the truth. ‘Not that he was my
lover,’ she said. ‘That would have been impossible; but not because I
did not love him enough. Impossible because of my age; my situation;—my
codes and symbols, Clive. He is not my lover, but I love him and he
loves me. We parted last night; and I don’t think we shall ever see each
other again; and after you, no one has come so near my heart.’
Had the presage of the October woods been for this, she wondered, as,
looking into her son’s eyes, she saw his father struck down and
remembered the slow brooks, the prowling figure and the fear in which
the strange affinity had masked itself. But this was not disloyalty; not
forgetfulness. All the loves, the lesser and the greater, the old and
new, were there within her heart; swords crossing; notes clashing;
though she saw, she heard, the attainable harmony. If she could stand
firm and bear the pain, the harmony could be attained.
‘Does it make it more, or less endurable, Clive?’ she asked.
‘It puts me out,’ was what Clive said to her. He lay and looked at her.
‘No, darling. It only puts _me_ out;—if you can’t forgive my loving
him.’
‘It puts me out,’ Clive repeated, ‘with you both. I’m only second-best;
with you both.—Somehow—that doesn’t seem enough to go on living for.’
She sat and thought.
‘It’s for your sake that we both put him out; because we love you most.’
‘You put him out because I’m your son; and Hester puts him out because
I’m her husband. But you both love him best,’ said Clive, and he closed
his eyes and turned his face away from her.
Was it the truth? They must face the truth, thought Monica, as, pale and
trembling, she rose to her feet and moved towards Clive, and then
paused, hearing a footstep outside, a hand laid on the door.