Alyse Gregory An extract from Hester Craddock from The Sundial Press
HOME TITLES FAQs HOW TO ORDER FORTHCOMING NEWS Still Blue Beauty Durdle Door to Dartmoor Unclay Kindness in a Corner The Blackthorn Winter Hester Craddock
An extract from Hester Craddock
From HESTER CRADDOCK
:(1884 - 1967)
Novelist, Essayist, Editor, Feminist, Literary critic.
Chapter Seventeen
Since the morning that Hester had received Halmath her attitude towards her sister had become more and more strange. Nelly’s silence and pallor seemed only to increase her anger. A thousand suspicions swarmed into her mind. Perhaps she was pregnant with Hal’s baby and did not dare tell of it, perhaps she was pining away to see Hal and he was afraid to come because he did not want to encounter her – Hester. Perhaps Nelly crept out in the night and met him behind the haystack or in the shed. She would now leave her door ajar when she went to bed at night and for hours she would lie listening for footsteps or the slightest creaking of a board, but the only rumour that reached her was the violent beating in her own temples. Dark tempestuous thoughts shot across her mind: ‘Where is the key, where is the key to it all?’ she would mutter to herself; ‘Flesh and blood can’t stand it, there is no escape, no escape. I might be happy now, she has ruined my life, she has shattered my faith,’ and a swooning horror of her sister would surge up like a hot corrosive current through all her being, and the sight of the flesh so susceptive, so exquisite of the girl who sat handfast with sorrow so near her would make her want to scream. Her very presence beat her down, obliterated her. When she came so softly in in the morning looking like a tortured saint suddenly robbed of faith and without a word set the tea on the table, Hester would shrivel back into herself and at the same time her whole body would tingle with hate. When the rain came beating down on the slate roof of the forlorn house the two girls would move from room to room with soundless invisible chains dragging behind them, driven far apart by some inward spectre which precluded speech. Sometimes a kind of prostration of soul would fasten itself upon Hester and press her down, down, down below the level of speech or thought where only her own sick conscience lived, and then Nelly would seem to be like the jailer who was master of the lock and would not let her out, and at the same time far, far off as in a vague dissolving dream a fair and loving sister smiled a piteous smile and extended a rejected hand.
And Nelly, as she languished by the open window where the cold air that made her shiver was not as cold as was her heavy heart, or sat down at a table where no morsel of food however dainty could coax her reluctant appetite, felt an increasing sense of transgression. It was as if she had failed in the most essential obligation of her life, for she had known since Hester was a little girl that her nature was prone to morbid preoccupations and unreasonable suspicions and she should have foreseen the effect upon her of such a disclosure. She ought to have warned Edwin or she ought to have told Hetty at once. Now there was nothing to do. Sometimes she would make up her mind to try to break down Hester’s resistance. She would rehearse sentences over to herself, but when it came to the point of actually enunciating the words something merciless in Hester’s face would make her fall back in discouragement. She would merely say some little passing thing about the food or the weather and Hester would either remain silent or answer in a tone that led only back into silence.
It was now but the whiplash of her suspicions that while it scourged her kept Hester both quiescent and animated. Perhaps he hid somewhere near the house and waited until he had seen her go out and knew that Nelly was by herself, and then they flew famished to each other’s arms, lay prone in each other’s arms slaking their pent up immoral thirst. She began looking covertly about whenever she opened the outside door. Sometimes in the dark shadows at nightfall she thought she saw someone lurking. Then she would grow too restless to stay in the house and would start off on long gloom-wrapped walks over the downs. But so sure was she that Nelly and Hal were in some way circumventing her that she never returned without stealing cautiously through the door and listening with heightened nerves for the sound of whispering voices.
Then one morning an idea came to her. She too could play a little game of hide and seek. She too could fight with cunning weapons. With more than a usual show of activity she put on her hat and coat and went noisily out of the door. ‘I don't know when I shall be back,’ she called after her. But no sooner was she hidden from sight of the house by the shed than she stopped, turned about, and entered the low thatched building. The floor was strewn with damp straw. Looking around in the dim light she discovered a wooden box. She carried it over to where there was a small window all dusty and covered with cobwebs. She placed it carefully underneath and stepping up on it found that her eyes could just reach high enough to get a view of the house and part of the field at the side. She rubbed some of the dust away. Breathless with expectation she remained motionless waiting. The minutes passed and nothing happened. She could see Nelly up at her window. Once she looked out and then drew back again. An hour and then two hours had gone by. Her neck was stiff, her joints cold and cramped, but still she did not move. At last she was forced to come down, but always she would return there. Indeed it was through this glazed aperture that she viewed her world darkly; it was her lookout, and the dusty woodwork and individual living spiders and dead fly corpses became intimate familiar objects to those glowering eyes with their almost maniacal concentration, lunatic’s eyes from in a cell, with one livid fixed deranged idea that nothing could dislodge.
A day passed, then two days. It had become an unremitting obsession with her. It gave her an objective, some active employment in pursuance of her ends. She persisted with a grim burning obduracy, and while Nelly worried in nervous despondency thinking of her walking near dangerous parts of the cliffs, perhaps contemplating suicide, certainly in a convulsion of resentments, there she was with pounding heart and staring tireless vision within only a few yards of her.
On the afternoon of the third day she took her usual position. She was like a hunter with whom patience and ferocity had gone into partnership – ferocity sleeping while patience assumed the watch. Everything she viewed through that dim sinister square stood out with a kind of torrid light upon it – the house crouching in the cup of the valley, the hedge of thorn, the railing, the silent windows, but above all Nelly’s window, sometimes pushed wide open, sometimes fastened halfway back, the neglected garden now so rich with early autumn colours, the two gorse bushes on the upward slope of the downs, the gate leading into Farmer Bottle’s field, and part of the cornstack which seemed to her a particularly appropriate decoy. She was able to encompass everything with a sure predatory gaze. It was a cold cheerless day and a certain sickness of heart touched now and then the ugly fervour of her intention, pulling at it lightly yet leaving every sinew still quivering with sentient awareness. Suddenly she saw a figure emerge furtively from behind the cornstack, hesitate a moment, then rapidly approach the house, a figure that brought the blood rushing through her arteries and bursting in a torrent in her brain. It was Hal, there could be no mistake. She watched the whole telltale scene until he disappeared finally behind the closed door. For a moment she thought of stalking in and striking them both dead, but this impulse vanished and in its place she felt a kind of nauseated shuddering abhorrence of life.
With uneven steps she found her way out of the low door, walked sightlessly past the chickens so bent on their irrelevant occupations, and continued up over the downs toward the sea. A cold mist was settling over everything, obscuring the heavens and making the path ahead of her seem like a dim tunnel. Two jackdaws unaware of her approach flew away in startled affright as she loomed suddenly up above them. On down the familiar winding path to the sea she went. At last she dropped over the final descent and following for some time along the wet stony shore fell prone under a rock. There she lay as if dead.
Now that her suspicions had been finally proved to be true she felt severed from all ties, cast out into a dark abyss with no one to see, no one to care, no one to watch the final overthrow of her heart – the drip, drip of the living blood. She had no god, she had no lover, she had no sister, she had no friend. Hal had been fond of her and he might have been her lover, might have kept her from this sense of devouring emptiness, might have kept her in the circle of the living. But now she lay outside. Where was the truth? Oh, where was the truth? There was no truth – there were only the happy and the unhappy, the blest and the damned, those whom fortune favoured and those whom fortune spurned. What had she done to deserve this death? She had done nothing really wicked. It was Nelly, Nelly who had deserted her and brought her heart to ashes. It was proved, all proved. What God concurred in this? Nothing was as it appeared. On the surface all was plausible and alight with hope, but underneath was only horror, horror within horror and beyond horror emptiness!
The moments passed and still she lay there, the wide deserted beach unheeding of her presence, the white cliffs rising up in harsh immobile aloofness. The moments grew to hours. Only the sea as it approached and receded, approached and receded, spoke gradually some assuagement – always that recurring murmur, laden with a thousand uncontrite memories, that steady impenitent rhythm – without remorse, without accusation – lapping up against the rocks, ebbing and advancing, ebbing and advancing, cradling her in its cadence, washing over her wounds, cooling her brow, healing her heart – Oh, hope stand back, begone!
Copyright © The Estate of Alyse Gregory Powys 2007
Still Blue Beauty Durdle Door to Dartmoor Unclay Kindness in a Corner The Blackthorn Winter Hester Craddock
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