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

She climbed on to the white enamel table, and lay down, drawing her

dressing gown straight about her knees. She had not said one word.

*

She had behaved beautifully.

The pain in her body came up, wave after wave, burning. It swelled,

tightening, stretching out her wounded flesh.

She knew that the little man they called the doctor was really Mr.

Hancock. They oughtn’t to have let him in. She cried out. “Take him away.

Don’t let him touch me;” but nobody took any notice.

“It isn’t right,” she said. “He oughtn’t to do it. Not to any

woman. If it was known he would be punished.”

And there was Maggie by the curtain, crying.

“That’s Maggie. She’s crying because she thinks I killed her baby.”

The ice bag laid across her body stirred like a live thing as the ice

melted, then it settled and was still. She put her hand down and felt the

smooth, cold oilskin distended with water.

“There’s a dead baby in the bed. Red hair. They ought to have taken it

away,” she said. “Maggie had a baby once. She took it up the lane to the

place where the man is; and they put it behind the palings. Dirty blue

palings.

“…Pussycat. Pussycat, what did you there? Pussy. Prissie. Prissiecat.

Poor Prissie. She never goes to bed. She can’t get up out of the chair.”

A figure in white, with a stiff white cap, stood by the bed. She named it,

fixed it in her mind. Nurse. Nurse—that was what it was. She spoke to it.

“It’s sad—sad to go through so much pain and then to have a dead baby.”

The white curtain walls of the cubicle contracted, closed in on her. She

was lying at the bottom of her white-curtained nursery cot. She felt weak

and diminished, small, like a very little child.

The front curtains parted, showing the blond light of the corridor beyond.

She saw the nursery door open and the light from the candle moved across

the ceiling. The gap was filled by the heavy form, the obscene yet

sorrowful face of Connie Pennefather.

Harriett looked at it. She smiled with a sudden ecstatic wonder and

recognition.

“Mamma–-”

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