Dark Hester/Chapter 5

Anyone looking at Clive—anyone with a discerning eye—would have said that unless he were a soldier he might well be a poet. So his mother thought, as she had often thought, on that Saturday afternoon when, drawing her hand within his arm, he led her away from The Crofts, where Hester and her friends still computed and measured. He carried himself like a soldier—that was his inheritance from Charlie, and the little twist that his injured thigh had given to his gait lent it a jauntiness that added to rather than detracted from the resolute blitheness of his bearing. Objectivity was a soldierly quality and Clive’s expression—so much more aware of you than of himself—was objective. And with these disciplined and valiant characteristics went the almost unearthly beauty; eyes bright as clear grey water; hair swept to silver-gilt ripples, like a young archangel’s; a head with its fragile, forcible structure, to be bound by the laurels of a Greek fillet or bend from a background of swift, beneficent pinions. Yes; a beneficent archangel; but an archangel bearing a sword. There was something about Clive that frightened her a little at moments. ​He never yielded to inner, or to outer, pressure. He could break; but he would not yield.

‘I must see you alone, Mummy darling,’ he had said. They had had no word alone as yet. She had been called for and borne off to The Crofts and so elated had he been with the success of their exploit, so glad in her imagined gladness, that no shadow of her anxiety must be allowed to reach his consciousness. There had been, for her, too, a certain exhilaration in thus taking possession of the new home and looking out from the comfortable windows at the views which were now to frame his existence; and even Hester’s friends she had found less annoying than usual. Never, indeed, had she heard anyone talk so swiftly and so vehemently as Mr. Gales. He was like a stout weathercock in a summer storm, veering, glittering, challenging the elements, with never a suspicion that anyone could find him anything but bewitching. But he had altered much in his demeanour towards Clive since that far-away evening of the party. Without pressure, without consciousness, she felt that Clive had mastered all the elements of Hester’s world. He did not withdraw and he did not mingle, but they were all aware of him; and to her they were very kind, even when they bustled her aside and ​forgot her presence. A young woman whom they called Oriana, who had come, unannounced, with Mr. Gales, offered her chocolates with the greatest affability.

‘Let’s go round by the hill, Mummy,’ said Clive. ‘It’s so jolly up there; the hill is the best part of The Crofts.—You’re not too tired with all the chatter?’ Drawing her hand within his arm he bent his head to smile at her.

‘Not a bit too tired. Rather stimulating, I found it. It does one good to be made aware of all this new life.’

‘Yes; I suppose it does. There’s no harm in them,’ said Clive, still looking at her and smiling a little absently while, from the gate of The Crofts, they turned up the smooth, turfed hill where a flock of sheep raised tranquil heads to see them pass.

It was a hot August day, but the wind blew freshly and the blue distances fell below them, spreading and receding into the ample, happy view. They paused to look down at it and as they turned again to the ascent, Clive said suddenly: ‘You are pleased, aren’t you, Mummy?’

She knew then that this had been the question underlying all his gladness and that he had been longing to ask it; that it was in order to ask it that ​he had led her away, and in feeling him thus dependent on her happiness her fears and darknesses seemed to melt away into the encompassing sunlight. ‘Pleased! How should I not be pleased?’ she said. She clasped her hands on his arm and offered him a radiant countenance.

Clive walked beside her, looking down at her, sounding her radiance as it were; and for the first time to-day she was aware of an uncertainty in his. But there had always, since the war, been uncertainty in any radiance of Clive’s and even as she looked at him she saw anew all that Hester had done for him; all the things that a mother could never do. There was still the cold, attentive gravity at the bottom of his gaze, as though he watched for something; but the strain and lassitude were gone. He was deeply rooted in life, in the life that Hester had made for him; and she felt, in seeing it, for all the pain of her own abdication, a pang of deep, impersonal joy. Hester had given him back his manhood.

‘Well, that is what we thought; that is what we wanted;—more than anything;—to please you,’ Clive said. ‘I was never satisfied about your being here, all alone. From the first I hated your going off to live by yourself in the country.’

‘Did you, dearest? I never guessed that.’

​Clive was still smiling but now she saw that he lifted his eyebrows and opened his eyes widely. ‘Did you really think that I felt it natural—our being separated—after having spent all our lives together?’ he asked.

It was the first time he had asked such a question; he asked it now when five years had passed. Did he not know that they had been separated for more than five years? Time collapsed suddenly; Clive was suddenly near her again, so near that it was as though she held him against her heart. Had he really suffered too? The weight upon her heart seemed his suffering as well as her own.

‘But, darling child,’ she said, carefully, seeking her words;—‘it was the most natural thing in the world. It is what must happen, when a man marries and makes his home;—it is what must happen—to mothers.’

‘Not to a mother like you. Not when people have been as much to each other as you and I. For a time I hardly took it in; you seemed so sure of its being the right thing, and so contented. And then, little by little, it became more of a grief, a mystery.—And when Jeremy died ———’ Clive stopped.

‘When Jeremy died?’ she repeated. ‘Yes? What had that to do with it, Clive?’

​‘Why—to see that you were quite alone; not a bit of the old life left to you.—Have you been contented;—living without me, like this?’

She steadied her thoughts and voice. ‘Well—hardly contented, Clive; except as mothers must learn to be; in your happiness.’

‘But how could I be happy if you weren’t!’ said Clive. He had turned his eyes away from her.

Strange paradox of the human heart, showing its frailty! A moment before she had felt the pang of joy in the thought of his happiness; but was it not now a deeper joy to know that he, too, had suffered? She could find no word to say to him; no word that might not flaw the beautiful, the precarious moment. She felt herself cherishing it, and the assurance it brought her, as though it were a gift of something warm, living and fragile that Clive had put into her hands. It was their life; their own shared life; known by nobody else; that she had thought dead. It lived; and he had given it back to her. She heard herself saying to herself, deep down under everything: ‘This is one of those moments when it would be good to die’: and then, suddenly, as they reached the summit of the hill and stood there, looking away in the sunlight, everything was shattered; for Clive was saying, with a breathlessness that, she now ​recognized, had underlain all his urgency: ‘And it was just what Hester did see, Mummy.—That you must be missing me and that I couldn’t be really happy with you buried down here. It was all Hester’s idea, every bit of it. I’d never have thought it possible to sell the house and uproot ourselves like this and put it through so that you shouldn’t find out and stop us. It was Hester who did it all. She is like that when she makes up her mind to a thing. Nothing stops her. That was why I wanted her to be the one to tell you;—so that you should understand.’

Hester. It was Hester’s idea; or rather—for she did indeed understand—Hester had made him believe it hers. He loved her, no doubt; he had, no doubt, suffered in the thought of her loneliness—with even Jeremy gone; but it was not of her, it was of Hester, he was thinking; and what he was really longing for was that she should see and acknowledge and love Hester. He had sent Hester so that she might gain the full credit for her insight and generosity. Dust. Dust and ashes. The bright afternoon shrank to a shrivelled snake-skin before Monica’s eyes.

‘How dear of Hester!’ she said. Instinct upheld her. She found the fitting words. She kept her ​clasp steady on his arm and smiled, looking before her.

‘I do hope,’ she said presently, for Clive said nothing and the pause that fell between them became perceptible, ‘that it is not a real sacrifice to you both; I hope you are not doing it only on my account.’

Clive already felt the change in her. How should he not? What availed the sweetest words if the voice that spoke them went to a different tune? And how banish the stiffened rhythm when the night thoughts that had come to her after Hester’s visit pressed in upon her and she saw them all—all fulfilled? She had run away from Hester, and Hester followed her, with generous hands outstretched. Hester accepted her and it remained for her now to accept Hester. That was what it all came to. It was a contest between her and Hester in which she was worsted beforehand; since it was Hester who possessed Clive and was in no peril of losing him. She remembered now the long glance that she had cast upon them as he led her away. It had all been rehearsed between them; all arranged, so that Hester should have the full credit of her magnanimity.

‘Sacrifice?’ Clive repeated the word a long time after she had spoken it, as though he had been ​weighing it and found it heavy. ‘Sacrifice, Mummy? There’s no question of that. I must have blundered badly to lead you to think that. Who wants a sacrifice made for them?’

Who indeed? ‘I only meant that it is so much to accept from your young lives.—I must be very worthy of it.’ Monica spoke as carefully as though picking her way amidst hot ploughshares.

‘Worthy! Don’t, Mummy!’

They had begun to walk, rapidly, down the hill.

‘But that really is the word, Clive. You show me how much it is the word. You show me how wonderful Hester has been in it all. I must be worthy of her; that is what I mean.’

Yes; she must heap Hester with garlands, lest he should guess at her ingratitude. But she saw as she walked so swiftly beside him and heard the heavy beating of her heart that her bitterness had betrayed her. She had shown Clive to himself as asking something of her instead of giving her something. She had spoiled everything for him, as he had for her: but it was a mother’s part to hide from him what he had done and she had failed to hide it. Everything was spoiled, unless she could find at once an issue, and summoning all her resource, all her strength and strategy, she went on: ‘You know, London means a ​great deal more to Hester than it does to you, Clive. You care for all sorts of things that you will get here in the country; tennis and birds and gardening; while Hester is a typical London girl—as typical as I used to be; only I have drained my London cup and she is in the middle of hers. It is wonderful of her, Clive, and perhaps I realize how wonderful more than you do; and I own, darling, that it troubles me lest you have not counted the cost of it to her.’

Had she succeeded? She listened to the specious, the perfidious note of her own voice after it had ceased and wondered if Clive had not heard it too. She gagged and pinioned and laid herself at Hester’s feet, as he had forced her to do; and could she really make him believe that she relished the position?

‘But she isn’t giving up London, Mummy,’ he said. Gravely, his eyes turned from her, he accepted her words at their face value. ‘Not in any way that would mean such cost to her. I did count it all, I promise you, and I wouldn’t have accepted it from her if it had meant the loss of her London life. But that’s the good fortune of your being so near. She can go up to town every day if she likes, and have her friends with her constantly. Gales will be com​ing twice a week, you see, to paint the dining-room;—it’s as easy for him as if we were living in Chelsea. And Hester is arranging to give a course of lectures this autumn.’

‘Splendid. That is splendid. If it’s really so. If Hester hasn’t deceived you about it in her wish to make us happy. — But I will take your word for it, dearest. What are the lectures to be about? Excellent, that Hester should be taking up her own work again.’

She must indeed go carefully. Clive knew that she had not cared for the small book on infant psychology that Hester had published in the second year of their marriage. It had been easier, when one saw such theories connected in all their abstract brutality with the dawning life of little Robin, to smile at them than to resent them; and in order that she should not show resentment, she had smiled. Clive must have seen her smile. They had never spoken of the book.

‘Oh, her special line, you know.—The modern emancipation of women; psycho-analysis; all that sort of thing.’ His voice was guarded.

‘Does she feel the emancipation accomplished?—or is there even more to do?’

‘A very great deal more to do; the acceptance of ​equal standards, all along the line, is only tacit as yet, isn’t it?’

‘Can we hope for more than a tacit acceptance, I wonder?’ She tried to attain the tone of blithe detachment with which she and Clive, in the old days, would have discussed such themes. ‘Women are so handicapped by nature that it’s difficult to imagine a time when equal standards wouldn’t be really an injury to them.—Where is she to give the lectures? I might be able to go up for them?’ She must go on talking; but Clive would know as well as she did that she had no intention of attending Hester’s lectures.

‘At Oriana’s;—Mrs. Travers’s—you know,’ said Clive.

They had reached the bottom of the hill and were now following the little path that led out to the Green. How terse was Clive’s voice. Hester was there between them. Monica seemed to see her eyes following them, and now with reprobation.

‘Oh, is that little creature married? She looks such a child—with her bright doll face. I imagined that she and Mr. Gales were engaged.’

Clive paused for a moment and then with a resolution not hidden from his mother’s ear, answered: ‘She’s left her husband and she and Gales live to​gether. They are modern, artistic people, you know, and don’t believe in marriage. I hope you don’t mind their coming. Hester was rather upset when she saw them both, knowing we were to have tea with you.’

‘Why, my dear—do you, too, think of me as the prim Victorian dame? Of course I’ll give them tea. Why should I mind? I don’t mind irregularities in the least. All I mind is people having theories to justify their irregularity.—I don’t mind what people do so long as they don’t talk about it!’ And Monica’s laugh, as she found the aphorism, was dry. She was sure that Hester had not been in the least upset and she did mind irregularity.

‘They don’t talk about it,’ said Clive. He never retorted; he only withdrew. She felt now that he withdrew. She had failed. He saw that she was miserable. When one was miserable one could not hide.

In silence they crossed the Green. Looking out with hot eyes from under the brim of her summer hat, Monica felt that she hated the Green; she had never known how much till then. She hated her garden, too, all opened and exposed to view except at the back where the hedge had grown high enough to hide it. She hated the beam and plaster and the ​clambering roses. Only when they were inside and the dark coolness of the drawing-room enveloped them, did the flame of hatred die. Here, at all events, was the past. Here she could remember Clive, as he had been, before Hester came. He pulled a chair near the window for her. ‘Sit down, Mummy,’ he said gently. ‘How delicious it is in here.’

‘No; you sit down, my dear. We’ll have a little more light for our tea-party.’ She went to the blinds. She must give herself time to see where she stood. A horrible dread, cold after the fierceness, crept over her. Had she not alienated Clive by her perversity? He must see it as perversity.

‘Clive,’ she said—a woman when she has shown herself as perverse must not supplicate, yet she knew that under her light tone there was supplication:—‘you and Hester will have to come and spend a great many evenings with me.—Give me an inch, and I’ll take an ell, I’m afraid you’ll feel! They have been rather lonely;—more lonely than I could have realized. And even when you can’t come, it will be everything to know that you are hardly a mile away. — I believe that you could almost hear me if I called you from my bedroom window.’

‘It will be everything to me, too,’ said Clive, still ​with his gentleness. ‘I’ve often thought I heard you calling me—since you’ve been down here. —I’ve waked up suddenly and answered you. —Yes; —isn’t it queer? Perhaps you were thinking of me, Mummy.’

He sat there in his chair, sunken together a little, as though his gallant pose had failed him, and as she saw his smile and how jaded was his face, tears almost mastered her. How she had hurt, how disappointed him! She could have thrown herself in his arms and wept, but that Hester and her friends would soon be upon them.

‘Perhaps I was,’ she said, moving to the last blind. ‘That’s very likely, darling.’

Voices were approaching over the Green, Mr. Gales’s voice; Mrs. Jessup’s. It was fortunate that she had mastered her emotion. Hester and Mr. Gales walked in front. She carried her hat in her hand and the breeze blew back her hair. In her blue linen dress and with something sulky in her demeanour, she had a curiously childlike aspect. Mrs. Jessup, golden hoops swinging against her ochre-coloured cheeks, followed with Mrs. Travers. She was a succulent young woman with glossy black eyes. Mrs. Travers, round-faced and coloured to an apple-blossom pink and white, tripped beside her ​on the highest heels, listening with docility to her authoritative contralto.

‘Here they come,’ said Monica cheerfully. ‘I feel specially pleased, Clive, when I see her friends, that Hester doesn’t paint her face.’

‘But it suits some women, don’t you think?’ said Clive. He got up with a little stumble of eagerness and came to look beside her. He could be grateful even for a negative tribute to Hester. ‘It’s rather too hot a day for Marcia’s make-up, isn’t it? Her mouth seems rather shifted. But Mrs. Travers is very crisp and neat.’

‘Yes; and it’s an amusing little face, with the straight fringe; like a Chinese baby, rather. Poor little creature. I’m afraid this venture of hers will be an uneasy one. Mr. Gales looks to me very unstable.’

Clive smiled. ‘They don’t expect stability, I imagine.’ He was loyal to them, but he did not identify himself with Hester’s friends.

Now they were all in the room, Mr. Gales still talking.

‘What a divine room!’ he cried, twirling about to look at it.—‘Grandmothers;—great-grand-mothers;—Hymns Ancient and Modern;—Mudie’s Circulating Library and bridal wreaths—all ​the things we’ve raised such a dust to run away from! here they sit and smile at us!’

‘Isn’t it cosy,’ said Hester. She drew her blue linen sleeve across her forehead.

‘Cosy, my dear child!—that’s not the word for it! It’s balm!—not down! I revel in it! Simply revel!’ and snuffing his nostrils, as if assailed by sweet odours, Mr. Gales plunged himself into the deepest chair and then plunged out again as Mrs. Travers, perched at the top of the steps, looked down into the lower room calling out: ‘O Beppo—come and see!—Goldfish and black-lacquer and—oh the priceless little water-colours!’

‘We shall never look upon their like again,’ said Mr. Gales solemnly, gazing down, while Hester, at a little distance, surveyed him with a persistent gloom. ‘Hester, my darling, they give me an inspiration:—about that rather degraded little dining-hutch of yours at The Crofts.—I’ll paint you a row of Indian jokes; palanquins; elephants; ladies in bustles flirting—pour le bon motif—with cavalry officers under the deodars! Kipling, Empire and the Nineties! A wink for every meal! Cela vous sourit?’

‘Not at all,’ said Hester, sitting down at Monica’s tea-table. ‘I don’t like being winked at. Keep to La Boutique Fantasque idea. Robin would love that.’ ​She had not liked the reproof of her ‘cosy,’ for which Monica could not but feel grateful, though Mr. Gales’s encomiums struck her as singularly impudent.

Hester sat opposite her, on a straight chair and was evidently bent on doing her duty by her. ‘I’m rather worried about Robin, Monica. He calls out in his sleep. There’s some repression, I think, and he cries when I try to get at it. He says he sees Jeremy in a cage.—I suppose that’s the goldfish.—You had the same sort of trouble with Vivian, hadn’t you, Marcia?’

‘There was a definite complex in Vivian’s case,’ Mrs. Jessup, from the easy chair where she already sat smoking, a magazine on her lap, answered. ‘He’s always tended to Narcissism; moral scruples and general priggishness when he was little and trying to get religion now at school. He wants to be like Saint Francis, it seems, and say his prayers. He may outgrow it, but it’s rather disturbing I own.’ Mrs. Jessup did not lift her eyes from her magazine as she thus diagnosed her child. ‘Have you seen these pictures of Malcolm’s, Beppo? Putrid the way he panders to the public nowadays.’

Mr. Gales sat on the arm of her chair to look while Mrs. Travers, exclaiming that she was ​éreintée, extended herself on the sofa, lighting a cigarette.

‘Here’s Celia, Mummy. Did you know she was coming? How delightful!’ Clive, from his place at the window, had stood looking over them all with his cool, aerial gaze, very much to his mother’s eye the hovering archangel, uncertain of where, on an ambiguous planet, to place his foot, and as he now left the room she suspected that it was with relief.

‘Celia who?’ Mrs. Jessup raised her eyes to enquire. ‘Will you have any neighbours you can talk to here?’

‘Why shouldn’t we? If we come here to live, why shouldn’t other intelligent people?’ Hester rejoined. ‘It’s Celia Bowen, a very old friend of Clive’s. She came to that party when Lionel played—don’t you remember?—and he evidently found her more worth talking to than any of us. She plays the violin.’ Hester spoke tersely.

‘The thin fair girl—who looked like Clive?—But I thought she’d died in Switzerland long ago! How dreadful of me!’ exclaimed Mrs. Jessup taking out her lip-stick and equipping her mouth for the new encounter.

‘Help my mother-in-law with the tea, Beppo,’ said Hester, and Mr. Gales sprang from the arm of ​the chair to pass the cups. He was full of goodwill and though she found him impudent Monica did not dislike him.

Celia, facing them all with her gentleness, rather as Clive faced them, made Monica think of Milton’s lady confronted with the Comus rout. She belonged with Clive, not with the rout, and did not Hester, whose eyes were on her, feel it? ‘But I have been here all the time, you know!’ she was saying as she entered. Clive had been asking why he so seldom saw her. She was cool and gentle, but surprised, and she said, as she came to kiss her friend and be introduced to the circle: ‘I didn’t know you had a party, Monica.’

‘Do lie down,’ said Hester, indicating the sofa from which Mrs. Travers had arisen. ‘You must be tired; it’s so hot, isn’t it?’

It was evident that Hester intended to be kind, thoughtful and efficient, but Celia, who would as soon have thought of taking off her shoes and stockings when she came out to tea as of lying down, laughed a little nervously as she said: ‘Thanks so much!—But I’m not a bit tired.’

‘Well, Oriana is, at all events,’ said Hester, who still stood, rather gauntly, in the middle of the room in her straight blue dress. ‘We’ve had a very tiring ​afternoon, up at The Crofts.—What sort of people owned it? Their ideas of decoration were absolutely grisly.—We shall have to scrape it—inside and out—beginning with the rockery!’

‘Oh—the rockery! Poor dears!—It was the pride of their lives! They said to me, when they were going: “At all events we are leaving the new people a lovely rockery!”’ Celia laughed again, taking the chair that Clive placed for her. ‘It is bad, of course; but it has some nice things on it—don’t scrape too ruthlessly:—and they were rather dears, and had a darling cat!’ Celia was talking with a touch of her headlong girlish manner. Hester confused her a little, and Mr. Gales’s cheerfully admiring gaze. ‘A yellow Tom, you know,” she said, ‘with blue eyes.’

Mrs. Jessup was also surveying her, but not admiringly, seeing in her, Monica imagined, a trivial example of the capitalistic drone. ‘A cat? And what have they done with it?’ she demanded. ‘People who have a stained-glass Romeo and Juliet in their lavatory window might have been capable of turning their cat out to starve, I feel!—I don’t need to be told what sort of people they were, Hester!’

‘Try some of these cakes, Celia.’ Clive placed ​himself before her and smiled down upon her as she murmured, disconcerted: ‘Turned it out! Why, it was their treasure! They carried it away in a hamper.’

‘What do these cakes remind you of, Mummy?’ Clive went on, keeping himself between Celia and Mrs. Jessup. ‘Do you remember that hot day at Chartres when we stopped at the pastrycook’s and bought wonderful cakes for tea—cakes like these—on our way back to the hotel?—Do you remember the ill-tempered gardien—and the black kitten we found wandering in the cathedral?’

‘What a tribute to my cakes!—Of course I remember.’

‘When did you eat the cakes of Chartres, Hester?’ Mr. Gales inquired, reclining now above Oriana on the back of the sofa as he fanned her with a newspaper.

‘I didn’t eat them. It was Clive; long ago.—Some more tea, please, Monica.’

‘You and Clive must go some day,’ said Monica, filling the cup. ‘It’s the most beautiful cathedral in the world.’

‘We must all four go,’ said Clive. ‘You and I and Mummy and Celia, Hester.—To think of your never having seen Chartres!’

​‘But I have seen it.’ Hester drank off her tea and rose as she spoke, pushing back her chair. ‘During the war. The windows were all muffled up.’

She showed rather flagrantly that Clive’s suggestion of a quartette had ruffled her and glancing first at her and then at her son, Monica protested: ‘If you’ve not seen the glass, you’ve only seen it asleep; with its eyes shut. Clive must take you. You must go again.’

‘But I don’t want to go again,’ said Hester. ‘It’s the most beautiful cathedral in the world, no doubt, but it’s dead and done with; that’s what I feel about it. It’s like a terrible, beautiful skull, looking away over those endless plains.’ She walked to the window and pulled up the blind. ‘When is the taxi coming, Clive? Isn’t it late already?’

Clive was scanning his wife’s averted countenance. Was it really his suggestion about Celia that had so perturbed her? Yet she did not seem angry with Clive; she smiled round and up at him as he joined her at the window and said, laying his hand on her shoulder: ‘Not quite time yet. It’s hot, isn’t it?—I think I could open this a little further—may I, Mummy?—Yes; that’s better. Sit in the draught, darling. You’re tired.’

‘Not a skull, Hester,’ Monica sent the arrested ​ball rolling again. Mr. Gales, Oriana, and Mrs. Jessup were now bending their heads with wild laughter over some further atrocity discovered in the pages of the magazine and she and Clive and Hester and Celia seemed alone together. ‘More like the moon, as one sees it sometimes in daylight, in a blue sky.—Do you remember that we saw Chartres once like that, Clive, coming by train up from Bordeaux? It floated over the plains; from miles away we saw it; it looked transparent, impalpable; it was heavenly rather than terrible.’

Hester seemed to listen absently. She had not taken the chair Clive put for her and still stood looking out of the window. ‘Well, the moon is a skull,’ she said. ‘Here is the taxi, Clive.’

For some moments after they were gone Monica and Celia sat in silence. One might have thought that a much larger party had been there, Monica thought, looking slowly about her oddly disordered room, where a pile of magazines sprawled on the floor, the cushions of the sofa lay tossed and cigarette-ends and ash were scattered freely.

‘Well, what are you thinking of them?’ she enquired, looking across at Celia with an ironic lift of the lip.

Celia was watching her, quietly. ‘Of them? ​Hester’s friends? They seem very good-tempered.—But I was thinking about Clive and Hester, and how happy they are. I was thinking that it’s the greatest success.’

‘You mean their marriage? Yes. I suppose it is. Yes. They are very devoted.’

‘One sees it in the way they look—or don’t look—at each other.’ Celia slightly smiled. ‘They are always aware of each other—and understanding each other. It’s the greatest success;—and you mustn’t suppose, you must be sure, Monica.’

‘Perhaps I am sure. Perhaps that’s the trouble with me,’ said Monica, after a moment. ‘It’s a success which shuts me out; because I can’t understand it.’

‘Why not?’ Celia still smiled.

‘I know you always thought me wrong,’ said Monica. ‘I know you always thought I didn’t appreciate Hester’s qualities.’

‘Wrong? Did I? Anyway—she is different now. Don’t you feel that?’

‘She’s happier. She is completely happy; completely satisfied. She has everything she wants, if that is what you mean.’

‘Well, perhaps it does come down to being happy,’ said Celia. ‘And perhaps nobody who isn’t ​happy and satisfied, is himself. Being unhappy and dissatisfied twists people so, doesn’t it? Not that Hester was twisted, exactly; she was always straight.—But I have a feeling now, remembering how she was when I first saw her, that she had her back against a wall. There is no wall now.’

‘I don’t think that she had her back against a wall in the very least, my darling child; I think she was straight—as a ramrod—because she had spent her life in hitting out against the world— with complete success. I think she saw me with my back against the wall; and so I was. If there seems no wall now, it is only because I manage to act as though I could step away if I wanted to. As a matter of fact, I can’t move an inch. She is there, close to me—whichever way I stir.’ Tears now came to Monica’s eyes, the checked tears of her wretched afternoon, and she put her handkerchief, angrily, to her eyes. ‘I don’t mean that she forces herself on me; I mean that Clive puts her there, between us, and that she dares me to forget her for a moment.’

‘She can’t help it if he puts her there. It’s his loyalty, don’t you see?—because he is so afraid that you want to put her out.’

‘If he was afraid—of anything connected with ​my happiness—could he have brought her down here, set her here, at my door, her and her friends?—I’m bound and gagged and pinioned, Celia, and laid at Hester’s feet.’—The scorching simile returned to her.—‘He doesn’t know it, poor darling;—no man ever knows these things;—but she does; she knows that I have to swallow anything she presents me with, without a grimace;—like Mr. Gales and his twittering little mistress!—If Clive had the least bit of fear for me, for our relationship, his and mine, he would know that I ran away to hide from him!’ And the hot tears rose and she pressed her handkerchief angrily against them.

‘But, then—why did they come? What made them come at all?—if it wasn’t simply because they thought it would give you pleasure?’ said Celia after a moment, finding her way, and Monica’s tears were checked as she, too, tried to think why they had come.

‘Because Hester wished to display her generosity to Clive; because she wished to please Clive,’ she found.—‘I don’t know why, unless it’s that.—Forgive me, Celia; you see me as the tigress mother; the hateful tigress mother. Perhaps I am.’ She dried her eyes and sat gazing out at the green.

‘No; it’s only that you are so different, you and ​Hester.’ Celia’s downcast eyes seemed studying a difficult move in chess. ‘He must see it; Clive must have seen it from the first, and from the first it must have made him miserable. Only he loves her so much that he feels sure you would, too, if you could really get to know her.—Perhaps you will, Monica,’ and Celia raised her eyes showing her friend the only possible move out of her predicament. ‘Perhaps you will, after all. His love can’t be so mistaken. There must be so much to love in Hester—if she makes Clive happy.—Can’t you trust that, Monica, and try?’

Monica’s eyes dwelt on the girl’s delicate face. ‘What does it mean to you, their coming here?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been wondering about that.—I’m afraid they weren’t thinking of me —or of you either, when they came.’

Celia leaned back in her chair and looked across at her. ‘I’m not a wounded doe, Monica,’ she said, and she smiled.

‘Not a wounded doe?’

‘No.’ Celia returned her gaze with a defiance almost gay; ‘though I am sure you feel me that, you and Norah! I was awfully miserable when it all happened, of course; so miserable that I got ill; that couldn’t be pretended about and I didn’t try to pre​tend, with you, did I? But I’m not pretending now. It’s over.’

‘You have, really, cut him out of your life?—What queer creatures we are, Celia.—It almost hurts me to hear you say it.’

‘But I don’t mean that. I’ve not cut him out. But it’s over—in the way of hurting. It’s all become rather like the cathedral floating over the plains, you know, something rather terrible; but beautiful, and very far away,’ said Celia.