Dark Hester/Chapter 1

I SUPPOSE I have hated her from the first moment I saw her,’ Monica Wilmott heard herself saying, and she saw Hester as she had first seen her, sitting in the open window of the Chelsea drawing-room against the background of the river; extraordinarily quiet, extraordinarily assured, with black eyebrows and a thin black cloak lined with red.

She had thought of Hester almost constantly since Clive had married her, but this habit of thinking aloud had crept upon her only since she had come to live alone in Essex, and it frightened her a little when she caught herself at it; it was dangerous, as anything automatic in life might be dangerous; a thing like that, said aloud, became much more real; more real than it was; one might shut oneself up in the cell of a self-suggestion if one listened to it. So now, on this solitary afternoon, darkened by cold summer rain, she rose from the window-seat where she had been looking out at the village-green, and ​walked with a swift step down the oddly shaped room that turned an angle at the chimney-piece and fell to a lower level reached by three shallow steps. The casement windows in the upper portion opened under a thatch, and the ceiling there was low and crossed by ancient beams; the little house had been contrived from two old cottages, and the second, loftier room was modern.

Monica Wilmott descended to it and looked out on the altered view, as uneventful as the first had been. There was a touch of romance in the silhouettes of the hedgerow elms; but it was a tame romance and her own house made part of it, so comfortably, so consciously picturesque with its beams and plaster, its eddying thatch and climbing roses. Never would she have chosen to live in such a house, nor to live in Essex at all, were it not that Clive lived in London and that here, though parted from him, she was near him. Oddley Green was almost suburban and the railway station lay but a mile away; she could hear the whistle of the trains as they passed all day and night, and she was glad to hear them; they seemed a link with London and with Clive.

Turning from the window she glanced at her husband’s Indian water-colours, hanging in a row round ​the walls as they had hung in all her makeshift homes all the thirty years since his death, and then at the goldfish in their bowl. Clive, from babyhood, had loved goldfish and she had always had them, too, in her drawing-rooms. Her eyes gathered an intentness as she watched the glancing fish, seeing herself suddenly like them, like them bright, rapid, frustrated, and the bitter flicker of a smile crossed her face as she took ants’ eggs from a little porcelain box and scattered them on the water. She went back, then, to the upper room,—‘I am restless,’ she thought. ‘Like the goldfish,’—and, beside the fire-place, she came to a standstill, putting her foot on the stone curbing, her hand on the high stone shelf and looking round her—at the walnut bureau where her mother had sat every day in the spacious London home of her girlhood; at the French clock that she and her father, the clever London judge, had bought in Paris; at the portrait of her Scotch great-grandmother, a girl with bare shoulders above white satin, pearls in her tawny hair, and blue eyes like her own; not soft, not gentle blue; intrepid, rather, and ardent with their smile. The faded chintzes on the chairs and sofas she and Clive had chosen together seven years ago, for the flat in Chelsea; every rose and pheasant and carnation ​brought memories of that one epoch of her life when she had been aware of a garnered, a conscious happiness. And, as she remembered it, her eyes fell and in her stillness she might have been standing there to have her picture painted, a touch of something gracefully obsolete, for all the modernity of her straight lines and shortened skirts, in the falling sleeves of her black dress, the loose short jacket, the bow of velvet at her throat. Resolutely drawn against the dark background, the lines of her downcast profile were at once gay, impatient and imperative; the lifted upper lip sweet, the lower lip stubborn, the nose a little thick, a little clumsy, like a child’s nose, but with a nostril all delicacy and decision. Her golden hair, twisted round her head, made a brightness in the room. Clive had said that she had the hair of Helen of Troy. He had also said, playing at their game of analogies, that she was like a falcon, a jar of honey, a spray of rosemary; and there was, indeed, an almost vestal fierceness in Monica Wilmott; something high, hovering, and perhaps a little ruthless. Her tresses might be the tresses of Helen, her fair glancing face might allure like the face of a siren over the sea, but her two distant years of marriage had left intact something of girlhood that survived into her middle years, and ​her maternity had expressed itself not only in passionate comradeship with her child, but in swift repudiation of all matrimonial approaches. She was impatient of sentimental predicaments; averse, even hostile to any display of amorous emotion. She was remembering those years after the war as she stood there, that time of halcyon sweetness when, like two tempest-tossed sea-gulls, she and Clive had floated side by side in a sunlit harbour; the happiest time of her life. She had never been inclined to pathos or self-pity. She had, for all the years of his boyhood, eaten her cold mutton in the West Kensington lodgings, run the hat shop, written the articles on the French countryside, since only so could she send him to Winchester and Oxford; and the road she trod was never dusty to her, since Clive’s future was its goal. But when, her goal attained, the tidal wave of the war broke over the world, she had, for a suffocating and swooning moment, seen herself as a collapsed and falling form with bubbles rising from its mouth. She remembered now the turmoil of horrifying darkness, the sensation, while it lasted, of holding her breath and swimming under water, and then the emergence, tragic, since Clive was brought back to her almost dying of his wounds, yet ecstatic, for he was in her ​arms again and death now was an antagonist that they could face together. His slow return to life and to her had recalled the trembling sweetness of her pregnancy, and when he was safe at last it was as if he had been born again. All the good things had come to her at once; Clive’s recovery and Aunt Janet’s legacy and the post in the staunch old City shipping-office to make them in their own eyes opulent. It was true that she had never thought of a shipping-office as the end of all her efforts; she had thought of Clive as a soldier, like his father, or a lawyer, like his grandfather, or the poet that his verses had seemed to promise; but the shipping-office, when it came, was indeed a harbour and what wonder, with all the sudden security, that she had been blind to the change in Clive, the change, she saw so clearly now, that had made him Hester’s prey. His child face rose before her as she tried to define to herself in what it had consisted; one day, when very tiny, he had had little friends to tea and been horribly shy and afraid of them. Fear, with Clive, never took the form of subterfuge or awkwardness. He had sat there, very upright in his white suit, at the end of the nursery table, a pale, golden little boy; and though he could not assume a smile he could muster a perfect courtesy. The ​only signs by which his mother had read his deep distress were the stiffening of his small upper lip and the way in which he repeatedly raised his eye-brows, opening his eyes very wide the while. And only to-day did this distant memory supply its link of association; for Clive, when he came back to life, was constantly raising his eyebrows and opening his eyes very wide; and if he as constantly contrived to smile, she saw now that that had been because of her and because, for love of her, he could dissemble. A mother might give life; but even a mother could not give the zest for life. The war had left him a frightened bird huddled under a hedge with its wing broken. That was the truth of it. That was what Hester must have felt in him; helplessness; helplessness and beauty. Even her prosaic eye had been charmed by the bird’s beauty; commonplace young huntress as she had been, striding through the woods in search of prey.

But it was unjust; she knew it was unjust. Hatred made one unjust and horrible. She looked a moment longer at the dark fireplace and then, taking the matches, stooped and lighted the logs. Let us have more light, was the instinct within her. Let us face things.——— Own up and see yourself as you are; perhaps the merely jealous mother, unable to ​endure that another woman should make your son happy. Did it really come to that? Or had it been because of Celia that she had seen Hester from the first with hostile eyes?

‘How did it all begin?’ said Monica, watching the flames leap up.

‘Who is Clive’s new friend?’ Margaret Orde had asked. ‘The queer dark girl who dresses like a boy?’ It was so it had begun, the first hint brushing lightly yet sharply, like a branch of briar drawn across one’s face on a woodland ramble. Clive had seemed to share his life to every jot and tittle with her; and he had told her nothing of a new friend who was dark and queer. From the very first there had been a sharpness, a surmise.

‘Where did you see them? He has so many friends and all girls dress like boys nowadays,’ she had said.

Good old Margaret who lived out at Chiswick with her ancient father, loved these tea-table talks and to hear every detail of Monica and Clive’s London life. She insisted now, all interest and all innocence, on her topic.

‘Boys don’t curl their hair over their ears, or wear pink silk stockings, and neither did this girl. Her hair was brushed back and she wore what looked ​like riding boots; but I expect they were rubber; very sensible, for it was raining.’

‘Could it have been Agatha Milford?—but Agatha would hardly come to London in riding clothes.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t Miss Milford—I remember her perfectly; I met her here at tea one day, you know. She’s lovely. This girl had very big eyes and looked rather ill-tempered; but perhaps she was only very intellectual or artistic. It was at that show of queer pictures in Grafton Street.—Clive didn’t see me, so I didn’t interrupt them.’

Monica asked no further question but she had, already, a sense of something surreptitious that faintly menaced her. She telephoned to Celia that evening and asked her to come and dine with them and bring her violin. Since they had first played together, since Celia’s childhood, Clive had been their audience, so much at one with them in his part of listener that they made a trio rather than a duet. But he had seemed tired that night when he came in and she had felt, all through the lovely Schubert Sonatina, that he was not really listening, that he was not thinking of her or Celia or Schubert but of the queer dark girl. And after that, as the days passed and he said nothing of the new friend, ​he suddenly became much older in her eyes; a man as he had never been before; never again to be her child only.

‘Wouldn’t it be nice if Celia could come with us to Paris this Easter?’ It must have been a fortnight later that she had asked him this question, one evening when he and she had returned together from the play and were drinking hot bouillon in the drawing-room. He was standing opposite her, his cup in his hand, and as he looked at her she saw that his sweet, attentive face was jaded, almost haggard.

‘Paris? Were we thinking of Paris, Mummy?’ he asked.

‘Well, wouldn’t it be rather nice for Easter? We have not been there since before the war, nor has Celia. We could show her everything.’ France had been one of the family traditions in Monica’s youth and she had seen to it that Clive inherited it. She was always scraping and saving in the West Kensington days to give him his holidays in France, to see cathedrals and follow the course of the great French rivers with knapsacks on their backs.

‘That would be delightful,’ said Clive, ‘but what about summer? Isn’t Easter rather early for Paris?’

​‘Oh, I always think it a heavenly time then, the horse-chestnuts just beginning to bud, and violets in the streets.——— Had you thought of anything else?’

He was still looking at her, and now he lifted his eyebrows and opened his eyes very widely; then said: ‘I have been asked to go to Cornwall for Easter———some new friends of mine.———But of course I could give that up if you have fixed your heart on Paris, Mummy.’

A violent struggle took place within her, but she mastered it. ‘Of course you mustn’t give it up. Who are the new friends?’ It was inevitable that she should ask that now; he could feel no pressure in that.

‘Rather a nice couple,’ said Clive. ‘He is the editor of “The Protest”———you know that clever weekly———and she is artistic and does batik scarves and curtains. Jessup is their name and they have three nice little children. I am not sure you would care for them though, Mummy. I shall find out, in Cornwall.’

He was now smiling at her quite clearly. He was grateful to her for not holding him back from Cornwall.

‘Only those two?’

​‘And some friends of theirs, two or three friends, who have cottages near by. It’s on the cliffs near the Lizard; it’s lovely there in early spring they say.’

‘Are the friends artistic too?’ She felt as if she were creeping after a tiger in the jungle.

‘Yes, they are all artistic I think,’ said Clive, moving to the fireplace. ‘Write or paint or act, you know;—all very busy and modern.’

‘What form does their modernness take?’

‘What form does it take? Well, I don’t quite know. Talk in the main, I think; they are great talkers; very unshackled,’ and Clive tried to smile, looking over at her, but his smile was no longer clear. He knew now that he had something to hide and that she was trying to find it, and, while bitterness surged in her against the dark girl who made Clive hide from her, who made them both, suddenly, fear each other—she contrived to ask, lightly: ‘Is anybody shackled nowadays, my dear?’

‘Oh, we all are!’ said Clive, and he laughed. ‘People who dress for dinner, I mean, and are presented at Court and take in the “Quarterly Review”———’ He glanced at it lying on his mother’s table.

Her bitterness found an outlet. ‘I haven’t painted, it’s true, or acted, or made batik scarves, ​but I have written, and run an antique shop, and trimmed hats! It seems to me that I know the dusty arena as well as any modern woman—that I am as modern in that as any of them;—even though I was presented at Court in the dark ages!’

Clive crossed over to her. She had done what she intended; made herself real and near to him; bound him to her—but, when he came to her like that and put his arms around her, she had known that the heavy beating of his heart was for the secret he hid from her as much as for his love and retrospective pity. And she had known, with a cruel pain, that she had asked her son for gratitude. She hardly kept herself from weeping as she heard him say: ‘Oh, darling Mummy—don’t I know it! Do you think that you need ever remind me? Do you think that I shall ever forget all that you have done for me!’

So they had clung together—their embrace effacing nothing, and he had gone to Cornwall for Easter and when he came back was engaged to Hester Blakeston.