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

When the last midsummer holidays came she spent them with Harriett.

“Oh-h-h!” Prissie drew in her breath when she heard they were to sleep

together in the big bed in the spare room. She went about looking at

things, curious, touching them softly as if they were sacred. She loved

the two rough-coated china lambs on the chimney-piece, and “Oh—the dear

little china boxes with the flowers sitting up on them.”

But when the bell rang she stood quivering in the doorway.

“I’m afraid of your father and mother, Hatty. They won’t like me. I

know they won’t like me.”

“They will. They’ll love you,” Hatty said.

And they did. They were sorry for the little white-faced, palpitating

thing.

It was their last night. Priscilla wasn’t going back to school again. Her

aunt, she said, was only paying for a year. They lay together in the big

bed, dim, face to face, talking.

“Hatty—if you wanted to do something most awfully, more than anything

else in the world, and it was wrong, would you be able not to do it?”

“I hope so. I think I would, because I’d know if I did it would

make Papa and Mamma unhappy.”

“Yes, but suppose it was giving up something you wanted, something you

loved more than them—could you?”

“Yes. If it was wrong for me to have it. And I couldn’t love anything more

than them.”

“But if you did, you’d give it up.”

“I’d have to.”

“Hatty—I couldn’t.”

“Oh, yes, you could if I could.”

“No. No….”

“How do you know you couldn’t?”

“Because I haven’t. I—I oughtn’t to have gone on staying here. My

father’s ill. They wanted me to go to them and I wouldn’t go.”

“Oh, Prissie–-”

“There, you see. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was so happy here with you.

I couldn’t give it up.”

“If your father had been like Papa you would have.”

“Yes. I’d do anything for him, because he’s your father. It’s you I

couldn’t give up.”

“You’ll have to some day.”

“When—when?”

“When somebody else comes. When you’re married.”

“I shall never marry. Never. I shall never want anybody but you. If we

could always be together…. I can’t think why people marry,

Hatty.”

“Still,” Hatty said, “they do.”

“It’s because they haven’t ever cared as you and me care…. Hatty, if I

don’t marry anybody, you won’t, will you?”

“I’m not thinking of marrying anybody.”

“No. But promise, promise on your honor you won’t ever.”

“I’d rather not promise. You see, I might. I shall love you all the

same, Priscilla, all my life.”

“No, you won’t. It’ll all be different. I love you more than you love me.

But I shall love you all my life and it won’t be different. I shall never

marry.”

“Perhaps I shan’t, either,” Harriett said.

They exchanged gifts. Harriett gave Priscilla a rosewood writing desk

inlaid with mother-o’-pearl, and Priscilla gave Harriett a pocket-handkerchief case she had made herself of fine gray canvas embroidered

with blue flowers like a sampler and lined with blue and white plaid silk.

On the top part you read “Pocket handkerchiefs” in blue lettering, and on

the bottom “Harriett Frean,” and, tucked away in one corner, “Priscilla

Heaven: September, 1861.”

She remembered the conversation. Her father sitting, straight and slender,

in his chair, talking in that quiet voice of his that never went sharp or

deep or quavering, that paused now and then on an amused inflection, his

long lips straightening between the perpendicular grooves of his smile.

She loved his straight, slender face, clean-shaven, the straight, slightly

jutting jaw, the dark-blue flattish eyes under the black eyebrows, the

silver-grizzled hair that fitted close like a cap, curling in a silver

brim above his ears.

He was talking about his business as if more than anything it amused him.

“There’s nothing gross and material about stock-broking. It’s like pure

mathematics. You’re dealing in abstractions, ideal values, all the time.

You calculate—in curves.” His hand, holding the unlit cigar, drew a

curve, a long graceful one, in mid-air. “You know what’s going to happen

all the time.

“… The excitement begins when you don’t quite know and you risk it; when

it’s getting dangerous.

“… The higher mathematics of the game. If you can afford them; if you

haven’t a wife and family—I can see the fascination….”

He sat holding his cigar in one hand, looking at it without seeing it,

seeing the fascination and smiling at it, amused and secure.

And her mother, bending over her bead-work, smiled too, out of their

happiness, their security.

He would lean back, smoking his cigar and looking at them out of

contented, half-shut eyes, as they stitched, one at each end of the long

canvas fender stool. He was waiting, he said, for the moment when their

heads would come bumping together in the middle.

Sometimes they would sit like that, not exchanging ideas, exchanging only

the sense of each other’s presence, a secure, profound satisfaction that

belonged as much to their bodies as their minds; it rippled on their faces

with their quiet smiling, it breathed with their breath. Sometimes she or

her mother read aloud, Mrs. Browning or Charles Dickens; or the biography

of some Great Man, sitting there in the velvet-curtained room or out on

the lawn under the cedar tree. A motionless communion broken by walks in

the sweet-smelling fields and deep, elm-screened lanes. And there were

short journeys into London to a lecture or a concert, and now and then the

surprise and excitement of the play.

One day her mother smoothed out her long, hanging curls and tucked them

away under a net. Harriett had a little shock of dismay and resentment,

hating change.

And the long, long Sundays spaced the weeks and the months, hushed and

sweet and rather enervating, yet with a sort of thrill in them as if

somewhere the music of the church organ went on vibrating. Her mother had

some secret: some happy sense of God that she gave to you and you took

from her as you took food and clothing, but not quite knowing what it was,

feeling that there was something more in it, some hidden gladness, some

perfection that you missed.

Her father had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow,

darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and

Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he talked about them.

“There’s a sort of fascination in seeing how far you can go…. The

fascination of truth might be just that—the risk that, after all, it

mayn’t be true, that you may have to go farther and farther, perhaps never

come back.”

Her mother looked up with her bright, still eyes.

“I trust the truth. I know that, however far you go, you’ll come back some

day.”

“I believe you see all of them—Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer—

coming back,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

His eyes smiled, loving her. But you could see it amused him, too, to

think of them, all those reckless, courageous thinkers, coming back, to

share her secret. His thinking was just a dangerous game he played.

She looked at her father with a kind of awe as he sat there, reading his

book, in danger and yet safe.

She wanted to know what that fascination was. She took down Herbert

Spencer and tried to read him. She made a point of finishing every book

she had begun, for her pride couldn’t bear being beaten. Her head grew hot

and heavy: she read the same sentences over and over again; they had no

meaning; she couldn’t understand a single word of Herbert Spencer. He had

beaten her. As she put the book back in its place she said to herself: “I

mustn’t. If I go on, if I get to the interesting part I may lose my

faith.” And soon she made herself believe that this was really the reason

why she had given it up.

Besides Connie Hancock there were Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby.

Exquisite pleasure to walk with Lizzie Pierce. Lizzie’s walk was a

sliding, swooping dance of little pointed feet, always as if she were

going out to meet somebody, her sharp, black-eyed face darting and

turning.

“My dear, he kept on doing this” (Lizzie did it) “as if he

was trying to sit on himself to keep him from flying off into space like a

cork. Fancy proposing on three tumblers of soda water! I might have been

Mrs. Pennefather but for that.”

Lizzie went about laughing, laughing at everybody, looking for something

to laugh at everywhere. Now and then she would stop suddenly to

contemplate the vision she had created.

“If Connie didn’t wear a bustle—or, oh my dear, if Mr. Hancock did–-”

“Mr. Hancock!” Clear, firm laughter, chiming and tinkling.

“Goodness! To think how many ridiculous people there are in the world!”

“I believe you see something ridiculous in me.”

“Only when—only when–-”

She swung her parasol in time to her sing-song. She wouldn’t say when.

“Lizzie—not—not when I’m in my black lace fichu and the little

round hat?”

“Oh, dear me—no. Not then.”

The little round hat, Lizzie wore one like it herself, tilted forward,

perched on her chignon.

“Well, then–-” she pleaded.

Lizzie’s face darted its teasing, mysterious smile.

She loved Lizzie best of her friends after Priscilla. She loved her

mockery and her teasing wit.

And there was Lizzie’s friend, Sarah Barmby, who lived in one of those

little shabby villas on the London road and looked after her father. She

moved about the villa in an unseeing, shambling way, hitting herself

against the furniture. Her face was heavy with a gentle, brooding

goodness, and she had little eyes that blinked and twinkled in the

heaviness, as if something amused her. At first you kept on wondering what

the joke was, till you saw it was only a habit Sarah had. She came when

she could spare time from her father.

Next to Lizzie, Harriett loved Sarah. She loved her goodness.

And Connie Hancock, bouncing about hospitably in the large, rich house.

Tea-parties and dances at the Hancocks’.

She wasn’t sure that she liked dancing. There was something obscurely

dangerous about it. She was afraid of being lifted off her feet and swung

on and on, away from her safe, happy life. She was stiff and abrupt with

her partners, convinced that none of those men who liked Connie Hancock

could like her, and anxious to show them that she didn’t expect them to.

She was afraid of what they were thinking. And she would slip away early,

running down the garden to the gate at the bottom of the lane where her

father waited for her. She loved the still coldness of the night under the

elms, and the strong, tight feel of her father’s arm when she hung on it

leaning towards him, and his “There we are” as he drew her closer. Her

mother would look up from the sofa and ask always the same question,

“Well, did anything nice happen?”

Till at last she answered, “No. Did you think it would, Mamma?”

“You never know,” said her mother.

“I know everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything that could happen at the Hancocks’ dances.”

Her mother shook her head at her. She knew that in secret Mamma was glad;

but she answered