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

read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Harriett said, “We

should have enjoyed Rome more if we had read Gibbon,” and her mother

replied that they would not have enjoyed Gibbon so much if they had not

seen Rome. Harriett did not really enjoy him; but she enjoyed the sound of

her own voice reading out the great sentences and the rolling Latin names.

She had brought back photographs of the Colosseum and the Forum and of

Botticelli’s Spring, and a della Robbia Madonna in a shrine of

fruit and flowers, and hung them in the drawing-room. And when she saw the

blue egg in its gilt frame standing on the marble-topped table, she

wondered how she had ever loved it, and wished it were not there. It had

been one of Mamma’s wedding presents. Mrs. Hancock had given it her; but

Mr. Hancock must have bought it.

Harriett’s face had taken on again its arrogant lift. She esteemed herself

justly. She knew she was superior to the Hancocks and the Penne fathers

and to Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby; even to Priscilla. When she thought

of Robin and how she had given him up she felt a thrill of pleasure in her

beautiful behavior, and a thrill of pride in remembering that he had loved

her more than Priscilla. Her mind refused to think of Robin married.

Two, three, five years passed, with a perceptible acceleration, and

Harriett was now thirty.

She had not seen them since the wedding day. Robin had gone back to his

own town; he was cashier in a big bank there. For four years Prissie’s

letters came regularly every month or so, then ceased abruptly.

Then Robin wrote and told her of Prissie’s illness. A mysterious

paralysis. It had begun with fits of giddiness in the street; Prissie

would turn round and round on the pavement; then falling fits; and now

both legs were paralyzed, but Robin thought she was gradually recovering

the use of her hands.

Harriett did not cry. The shock of it stopped her tears. She tried to see

it and couldn’t. Poor little Prissie. How terrible. She kept on saying to

herself she couldn’t bear to think of Prissie paralyzed. Poor little

Prissie.

And poor Robin–-

Paralysis. She saw the paralysis coming between them, separating them, and

inside her the secret pain was soothed. She need not think of Robin

married any more.

She was going to stay with them. Robin had written the letter. He said

Prissie wanted her. When she met him on the platform she had a little

shock at seeing him changed. Changed. His face was fuller, and a dark

mustache hid the sensitive, uneven, pulsing lip. His mouth was dragged

down further at the corners. But he was the same Robin. In the cab, going

to the house, he sat silent, breathing hard; she felt the tremor of his

consciousness and knew that he still loved her; more than he loved

Priscilla. Poor little Prissie. How terrible!

Priscilla sat by the fireplace in a wheel chair. She became agitated when

she saw Harriett; her arms shook as she lifted them for the embrace.

“Hatty—you’ve hardly changed a bit.” Her voice shook.

Poor little Prissie. She was thin, thinner than ever, and stiff as if she

had withered. Her face was sallow and dry, and the luster had gone from

her black hair. Her wide mouth twitched and wavered, wavered and twitched.

Though it was warm summer she sat by a blazing fire with the windows

behind her shut.

Through dinner Harriett and Robin were silent and constrained. She tried

not to see Prissie shaking and jerking and spilling soup down the front of

her gown. Robin’s face was smooth and blank; he pretended to be absorbed

in his food, so as not to look at Prissie. It was as if Prissie’s old

restlessness had grown into that ceaseless jerking and twitching. And her

eyes fastened on Robin; they clung to him and wouldn’t let him go. She

kept on asking him to do things for her. “Robin, you might get me my

shawl;” and Robin would go and get the shawl and put it round her.

Whenever he did anything for her Prissie’s face would settle down into a

quivering, deep content.

At nine o’clock he lifted her out of her wheel chair. Harriett saw his

stoop, and the taut, braced power of his back as he lifted. Prissie lay in

his arms with rigid limbs hanging from loose attachments, inert, like a

doll. As he carried her upstairs to bed her face had a queer, exalted look

of pleasure and of triumph.

Harriett and Robin sat alone together in his study.

“How long is it since we’ve seen each other?”

“Five years, Robin.”

“It isn’t. It can’t be.”

“It is.”

“I suppose it is. But I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m married. I

can’t believe Prissie’s ill. It doesn’t seem real with you sitting there.”

“Nothing’s changed, Robin, except that you’re more serious.”

“Nothing’s changed, except that I’m more serious than ever…. Do you

still do the same things? Do you still sit in the curly chair, holding

your work up to your chin with your little pointed hands like a squirrel?

Do you still see the same people?”

“I don’t make new friends, Robin.”

He seemed to settle down after that, smiling at his own thoughts,

appeased….

Lying in her bed in the spare room, Harriett heard the opening and

shutting of Robin’s door. She still thought of Prissie’s paralysis as

separating them, still felt inside her a secret, unacknowledged

satisfaction. Poor little Prissie. How terrible. Her pity for Priscilla

went through and through her in wave after wave. Her pity was sad and

beautiful and at the same time it appeased her pain.

In the morning Priscilla told her about her illness. The doctors didn’t

understand it. She ought to have had a stroke and she hadn’t had one.

There was no reason why she shouldn’t walk except that she couldn’t. It

seemed to give her pleasure to go over it, from her first turning round

and round in the street (with helpless, shaking laughter at the queerness

of it), to the moment when Robin bought her the wheel chair…. Robin …

Robin …

“I minded most because of Robin. It’s such an awful illness, Hatty.

I can’t move when I’m in bed. Robin has to get up and turn me a dozen

times in one night…. Robin’s a perfect saint. He does everything for

me.” Prissie’s voice and her face softened and thickened with voluptuous

content.

“… Do you know, Hatty, I had a little baby. It died the day it was

born…. Perhaps some day I shall have another.”

Harriett was aware of a sudden tightening of her heart, of a creeping

depression that weighed on her brain and worried it. She thought this was

her pity for Priscilla.

Her third night. All evening Robin had been moody and morose. He would

hardly speak to either Harriett or Priscilla. When Priscilla asked him to

do anything for her he got up heavily, pulling himself together with a

sigh, with a look of weary, irritated patience.

Prissie wheeled herself out of the study into the drawing-room, beckoning

Harriett to follow. She had the air of saving Robin from Harriett, of

intimating that his grumpiness was Harriett’s fault. “He doesn’t want to

be bothered,” she said.

She sat up till eleven, so that Robin shouldn’t be thrown with Harriett in

the last hours.

Half the night Harriett’s thoughts ran on, now in a darkness, now in thin

flashes of light. “Supposing, after all, Robin wasn’t happy? Supposing he

can’t stand it? Supposing…. But why is he angry with me?” Then a

clear thought: “He’s angry with me because he can’t be angry with

Priscilla.” And clearer. “He’s angry with me because I made him marry

her.”

She stopped the running and meditated with a steady, hard deliberation.

She thought of her deep, spiritual love for Robin; of Robin’s deep

spiritual love for her; of his strength in shouldering his burden. It was

through her renunciation that he had grown so strong, so pure, so good.

Something had gone wrong with Prissie. Robin, coming home early on

Saturday afternoon, had taken Harriett for a walk. All evening and all

through Sunday it was Priscilla who sulked and snapped when Harriett spoke

to her.

On Monday morning she was ill, and Robin ordered her to stay in bed.

Monday was Harriett’s last night. Priscilla stayed in bed till six

o’clock, when she heard Robin come in; then she insisted on being dressed

and carried downstairs. Harriett heard her calling to Robin, and Robin

saying, “I told you you weren’t to get up till to-morrow,” and a

sound like Prissie crying.

At dinner she shook and jerked and spilt things worse than ever. Robin

gloomed at her. “You know you ought to be in bed. You’ll go at nine.”

“If I go, you’ll go. You’ve got a headache.”

“I should think I had, sitting in this furnace.”

The heat of the dining room oppressed him, but they sat on there after

dinner because Prissie loved the heat. Robin’s pale, blank face had a sick

look, a deadly smoothness. He had to lie down on the sofa in the window.

When the clock struck nine he sighed and got up, dragging himself as if

the weight of his body was more than he could bear. He stooped over

Prissie, and lifted her.

“Robin—you can’t. You’re dropping to pieces.”

“I’m all right.” He heaved her up with one tremendous, irritated effort,

and carried her upstairs, fast, as if he wanted to be done with it.

Through the open doors Harriett could hear Prissie’s pleading whine, and

Robin’s voice, hard and controlled. Presently he came back to her and they

went into his study. They could breathe there, he said.

They sat without speaking for a little time. The silence of Prissie’s room

overhead came between them.

Robin spoke first. “I’m afraid it hasn’t been very gay for you with poor

Prissie in this state.”

“Poor Prissie? She’s very happy, Robin.”

He stared at her. His eyes, round and full and steady, taxed her with

falsehood, with hypocrisy.

“You don’t suppose I’m not, do you?”

“No.” There was a movement in her throat as though she swallowed something

hard. “No. I want you to be happy.”

“You don’t. You want me to be rather miserable.”

“Robin!” She contrived a sound like laughter. But Robin didn’t

laugh; his eyes, morose and cynical, held her there.

“That’s what you want…. At least I hope you do. If you didn’t–-”

She fenced off the danger. “Do you want me to be miserable,

then?”

At that he laughed out. “No. I don’t. I don’t care how happy you are.”

She took the pain of it: the pain he meant to give her.

That evening he hung over Priscilla with a deliberate, exaggerated

tenderness.

“Dear…. Dearest….” He spoke the words to Priscilla, but he sent out

his voice to Harriett. She could feel its false precision, its intention,

its repulse of her.

She was glad to be gone.

Eighteen seventy-nine: it was the year her father lost his money. Harriett

was nearly thirty-five.

She remembered the day, late in November, when they heard him coming home

from the office early. Her mother raised her head and said, “That’s your

father,