Dark Hester by Anne Douglas Sedgwick — Read

In the night she woke after long, swooning sleep, clear-minded. She had been dreaming of her mother, who had, in the dream, come laughing to the breakfast-table and said, as she stood behind the coffee-urn: ‘I am going to become a Catholic to-day, and you must all come and see me take the veil at Brompton Oratory. ' It was a very characteristic announcement. They had always, all of them, been a family for sudden resolutions, and later in the dream she saw her mother, dressed like a bride, before an altar blazing with candles, and she herself and Alison, her younger sister, were bridesmaids and smiled at each other over the shower bouquets of the period. Then they were both crying and everything was dark and they were standing on either side of a black catafalque and their mother lay beneath; dead: ‘Of course we all knew that she killed herself,' said Alison. Not until this dream had the truth been spoken-that her mother had indeed taken the overdose purposely; but she knew now that she had always known it. The dreadful grief drifted above her like a pall of smoke and when she woke she lay beneath it, thinking of all those she had loved, who were dead. -Her father, her mother, Charlie, her brothers Christopher and Martin, and the young sister Alison who had died in girlhood, nearly breaking her mother's heart-though that had not finally broken until her father went. And it was strange to think of them all ending so sadly when they had been such a happy family. And all were dead: for ever and ever and ever. She felt herself repeating the words ‘For ever. ' Such strange words. In form they seemed to possess something; but it was only the dust of oblivion. They were all gone; irretrievably submerged in the salt, dissolving ocean of time, and even the few sparkling memories that lingered on in the minds of the living would soon be extinguished.

Now, detached, emotionless, yet stricken to the heart as if by a deadly drug, she lay and saw a vast cliff rising as far as the eye could reach; as vast and dark and towering as a tidal wave, reared eternally against an abyss of empty space. And it plunged beneath further than thought could fathom into a sea of death. The cliff was the world, and line upon line, like the minutely fretted ledges of a coral reef, the human generations emerged, just above the last sea-level, like a desperate striving crepitation of insects. The cliff was immutable. The sea, but for its imperceptible upward movement, motionless; only the line of life pulsed with a fierce, miniature rhythm as the insects struggled up, always up, always away from the engulfing sea, and fought with each other, and tore each other down, and mounted upon each other in their effort to escape and rise above the creeping tide; all with a hallucinated ardour of faith, their little eyes fixed on the cliff that all sought unavailingly to scale. Then silence; stillness. The tide of death had mounted and they sank, generation after generation, line after line; and the ledge of stilled consciousness that lay just below the surface was as distant in reality, as inaccessible and perished, as the ledges on which the Pharaohs slept, or ape-like men lay curled in profundities of oblivion. ‘Yes; that's life,' Monica heard herself say in the darkness.