Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair (reading women TXT) 📕

“You’re a good girl, Maggie.”

She had forgotten. The image of Maggie’s baby was dead, hidden, buried

deep down in her mind. She closed her eyes. Her head was thrown back,

motionless, ecstatic under Maggie’s flickering fingers as they plaited her

thin wisps of hair.

Out of the peace of illness she entered on the misery and long labor of

convalescence. The first time Maggie left her to dress herself she wept.

She didn’t want to get well. She could see nothing in recovery but the end

of privilege and prestige, the obligation to return to a task she was

tired of, a difficult and terrifying task.

By summer she was up and (tremulously) about again.

She was aware of her drowsy, supine dependence on Maggie. At first her

perishing self asserted itself in an increased reserve and arrogance. Thus

she protected herself from her own censure. She had still a feeling of

satisfaction in her exclusiveness, her power not to call on new people.

“I think,” Lizzie Pierce said, “you might have called on the Brailsfords.”

“Why should I? I should have nothing in common with such people.”

“Well, considering that Mr. Brailsford writes in The Spectator–-”

Harriett called. She put on her gray silk and her soft white mohair shawl,

and her wide black hat tied under her chin, and called. It was on a

Saturday. The Brailsfords’ room was full of visitors, men and women,

talking excitedly. Dorothy was not there—Dorothy was married. Mimi was

not there—Mimi was dead.

Harriett made her way between the chairs, dim-eyed, upright, and stiff in

her white shawl. She apologized for having waited seven years before

calling…. “Never go anywhere…. Quite a recluse since my father’s

death. He was Hilton Frean.”

“Yes?” Mrs. Brailsford’s eyes were sweetly interrogative.

“But as we are such near neighbors I felt that I must break my rule.”

Mrs. Brailsford smiled in vague benevolence; yet as if she thought that

Miss Frean’s feeling and her action were unnecessary. After seven years.

And presently Harriett found herself alone in her corner.

She tried to talk to Mr. Brailsford when he handed her the tea and bread

and butter. “My father,” she said, “was connected with _The

Spectator_ for many years. He was Hilton Frean.”

“Indeed? I’m afraid I—don’t remember.”

She could get nothing out of him, out of his lean, ironical face, his eyes

screwed up behind his glasses, benevolent, amused at her. She was nobody

in that roomful of keen, intellectual people; nobody; nothing but an

unnecessary little old lady who had come there uninvited.

Her second call was not returned. She heard that the Brailsfords were

exclusive; they wouldn’t know anybody out of their own set. Harriett

explained her position thus: “No. I didn’t keep it up. We have nothing in

common.”

She was old—old. She had nothing in common with youth, nothing in common

with middle age, with intellectual, exclusive people connected with _The

Spectator_. She said, “The Spectator is not what it used to be

in my father’s time.”

Harriett Frean was not what she used to be. She was aware of the creeping

fret, the poisons and obstructions of decay. It was as if she had parted

with her own light, elastic body, and succeeded to somebody else’s that

was all bone, heavy, stiff, irresponsive to her will. Her brain felt

swollen and brittle, she had a feeling of tiredness in her face, of

infirmity about her mouth. Her looking-glass showed her the fallen yellow

skin, the furrowed lines of age.

Her head dropped, drowsy, giddy over the week’s accounts. She gave up even

the semblance of her housekeeping, and became permanently dependent on

Maggie. She was happy in the surrender of her responsibility, of the

grown-up self she had maintained with so much effort, clinging to Maggie,

submitting to Maggie, as she had clung and submitted to her mother.

Her affection concentrated on two objects, the house and Maggie, Maggie

and the house. The house had become a part of herself, an extension of her

body, a protective shell. She was uneasy when away from it. The thought of

it drew her with passion: the low brown wall with the railing, the flagged

path from the little green gate to the front door. The square brown front;

the two oblong, white-framed windows, the dark-green trellis porch

between; the three windows above. And the clipped privet bush by the

trellis and the may tree by the gate.

She no longer enjoyed visiting her friends. She set out in peevish

resignation, leaving her house, and when she had sat half an hour with

Lizzie or Sarah or Connie she would begin to fidget, miserable till she

got back to it again; to the house and Maggie.

She was glad enough when Lizzie came to her; she still liked Lizzie best.

They would sit together, one on each side of the fireplace, talking.

Harriett’s voice came thinly through her thin lips, precise yet plaintive,

Lizzie’s finished with a snap of the bent-in jaws.

“Do you remember those little round hats we used to wear? You had one

exactly like mine. Connie couldn’t wear them.”

“We were wild young things,” said Lizzie. “I was wilder than you…. A

little audacious thing.”

“And look at us now—we couldn’t say ‘Bo’ to a goose…. Well, we may be

thankful we haven’t gone stout like Connie Pennefather.”

“Or poor Sarah. That stoop.”

They drew themselves up. Their straight, slender shoulders rebuked

Connie’s obesity, and Sarah’s bent back, her bodice stretched hump-wise

from the stuck-out ridges of her stays.

Harriett was glad when Lizzie went and left her to Maggie and the house.

She always hoped she wouldn’t stay for tea, so that Maggie might not have

an extra cup and plate to wash.

The years passed: the sixty-third, sixty-fourth, sixty-fifth; their

monotony mitigated by long spells of torpor and the sheer rapidity of

time. Her mind was carried on, empty, in empty, flying time. She had a

feeling of dryness and distension in all her being, and a sort of

crepitation in her brain, irritating her to yawning fits. After meals,

sitting in her armchair, her book would drop from her hands and her mind

would slip from drowsiness into stupor. There was something voluptuous

about the beginning of this state; she would give herself up to it with an

animal pleasure and content.

Sometimes, for long periods, her mind would go backwards, returning,

always returning, to the house in Black’s Lane. She would see the row of

elms and the white wall at the end with the green balcony hung out like a

birdcage above the green door. She would see herself, a girl wearing a big

chignon and a little round hat; or sitting in the curly chair with her

feet on the white rug; and her father, slender and straight, smiling half-amused, while her mother read aloud to them. Or she was a child in a black

silk apron going up Black’s Lane. Little audacious thing. She had a

fondness and admiration for this child and her audacity. And always she

saw her mother, with her sweet face between the long, hanging curls,

coming down the garden path, in a wide silver-gray gown trimmed with

narrow bands of black velvet. And she would wake up, surprised to find

herself sitting in a strange room, dressed in a gown with strange sleeves

that ended in old wrinkled hands; for the book that lay in her lap was

Longfellow, open at Evangeline.

One day she made Maggie pull off the old, washed-out cretonne covers,

exposing the faded blue rep. She was back in the drawing-room of her

youth. Only one thing was missing. She went upstairs and took the blue egg

out of the spare room and set it in its place on the marble-topped table.

She sat gazing at it a long time in happy, child-like satisfaction. The

blue egg gave reality to her return.

When she saw Maggie coming in with the tea and buttered scones she thought

of her mother.

Three more years. Harriett was sixty-eight. She had a faint recollection

of having given Maggie notice, long ago, there, in the dining room. Maggie

had stood on the hearthrug, in her large white apron, crying. She was

crying now.

She said she must leave and go and take care of her mother. “Mother’s

getting very feeble now.”

“I’m getting very feeble, too, Maggie. It’s cruel and unkind of you to

leave me.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help it.”

She moved about the room, sniffing and sobbing as she dusted. Harriett

couldn’t bear it any more. “If you can’t control yourself,” she said, “go

into the kitchen.” Maggie went.

Harriett sat before the fire in her chair, straight and stiff, making no

sound. Now and then her eyelids shook, fluttered red rims; slow, scanty

tears oozed and fell, their trail glistening in the long furrows of her

cheeks.

The door of the specialist’s house had shut behind them with a soft,

respectful click.

Lizzie Pierce and Harriett sat in the taxicab, holding each other’s hands.

Harriett spoke.

“He says I’ve got what Mamma had.”

Lizzie blinked away her tears; her hand loosened and tightened on

Harriett’s with a nervous clutch.

Harriett felt nothing but a strange, solemn excitement and exaltation. She

was raised to her mother’s eminence in pain. With every stab she would

live again in her mother. She had what her mother had.

Only she would have an operation. This different thing was what she

dreaded, the thing her mother hadn’t had, and the going away into the

hospital, to live exposed in the free ward among other people. That was

what she minded most. That and leaving her house, and Maggie’s leaving.

She cried when she saw Maggie standing at the gate in her white apron as

the taxicab took her away. She thought, “When I come back again she won’t

be there.” Yet somehow she felt that it wouldn’t happen; it was impossible

that she should come back and not find Maggie there.

She lay in her white bed in the white-curtained cubicle. Lizzie was paying

for the cubicle. Kind Lizzie. Kind. Kind.

She wasn’t afraid of the operation. It would happen in the morning. Only

one thing worried her. Something Connie had told her. Under the an�sthetic

you said things. Shocking, indecent things. But there wasn’t anything she

could say. She didn’t know anything…. Yes. She did. There were Connie’s

stories. And Black’s Lane. Behind the dirty blue palings in Black’s Lane.

The nurses comforted her. They said if you kept your mouth tight shut, up

to the last minute before the operation, if you didn’t say one word you

were all right.

She thought about it after she woke in the morning. For a whole hour

before the operation she refused to speak, nodding and shaking her head,

communicating by gestures. She walked down the wide corridor of the ward

on her way to the theatre, very upright in her white flannel dressing

gown, with her chin held high and a look of exaltation on her face. There

were convalescents in the corridor. They saw her. The curtains before some

of the cubicles were parted; the patients saw her; they knew what she was

going to. Her exaltation mounted.

She came into the theatre. It was all white. White. White tiles. Rows of

little slender knives on a glass shelf, under glass, shining. A white sink

in the corner. A mixed smell of iodine and ether. The surgeon wore a white

coat. Harriett made her tight lips