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

daughter. “After our wonderful life with him,” they said, “you’ll

understand, Sarah, that we don’t want people.” And if Harriett was

introduced to any stranger she accounted for herself arrogantly: “My

father was Hilton Frean.”

They were collecting his Remains for publication.

Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker than the

last. And Harriett was thirty-nine.

One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted. That was the

beginning of her illness, February, eighteen eighty-three. First came the

long months of weakness; then the months and months of sickness; then the

pain; the pain she had been hiding, that she couldn’t hide any more.

They knew what it was now: that horrible thing that even the doctors were

afraid to name. They called it “something malignant.” When the friends—

Mrs. Hancock, Connie Pennefather, Lizzie, and Sarah—called to inquire,

Harriett wouldn’t tell them what it was; she pretended that she didn’t

know, that the doctors weren’t sure; she covered it up from them as if it

had been a secret shame. And they pretended that they didn’t know. But

they knew.

They were talking now about an operation. There was one chance for her in

a hundred if they had Sir James Pargeter: one chance. She might die of it;

she might die under the an�sthetic; she might die of shock; she was so old

and weak. Still, there was that one chance, if only she would take it.

But her mother wouldn’t listen. “My dear, it would cost a hundred pounds.”

“How do you know what it would cost?”

“Oh,” she said, “I know.” She was smiling above the sheet that was tucked

close up, tight under her chin, shutting it all down.

Sir James Pargeter would cost a hundred pounds. Harriett couldn’t lay her

hands on the money or on half of it or a quarter. “That doesn’t matter if

they think it’ll save you.”

“They think; they think. But I know. I know better than all

the doctors.”

“But Mamma, darling–-”

She urged the operation. Just because it would be so difficult to raise

the hundred pounds she urged it. She wanted to feel that she had done

everything that could be done, that she had let nothing stand in the way,

that she had shrunk from no sacrifice. One chance in a hundred. What was a

hundred pounds weighed against that one chance? If it had been one in a

thousand she would have said the same.

“It would be no good, Hatty. I know it wouldn’t. They just love to try

experiments, those doctors. They’re dying to get their knives into me.

Don’t let them.”

Gradually, day by day, Harriett weakened. Her mother’s frightened voice

tore at her, broke her down. Supposing she really died under the

operation? Supposing–- It was cruel to excite and upset her just for

that; it made the pain worse.

Either the operation or the pain, going on and on, stabbing with sharper

and sharper knives; cutting in deeper; all their care, the antiseptics,

the restoratives, dragging it out, giving it more time to torture her.

When the three friends came, Harriett said, “I shall be glad and thankful

when it’s all over. I couldn’t want to keep her with me, just for this.”

Yet she did want it. She was thankful every morning that she came to her

mother’s bed and found her alive, lying there, looking at her with her

wonderful smile. She was glad because she still had her.

And now they were giving her morphia. Under the torpor of the drug her

face changed; the muscles loosened, the flesh sagged, the widened, swollen

mouth hung open; only the broad beautiful forehead, the beautiful calm

eyebrows were the same; the face, sallow white, half imbecile, was a mask

flung aside. She couldn’t bear to look at it; it wasn’t her mother’s face;

her mother had died already under the morphia. She had a shock every time

she came in and found it still there.

On the day her mother died she told herself she was glad and thankful. She

met her friends with a little quiet, composed face, saying, “I’m glad and

thankful she’s at peace.” But she wasn’t thankful; she wasn’t glad. She

wanted her back again. And she reproached herself, one minute for having

been glad, and the next for wanting her.

She consoled herself by thinking of the sacrifices she had made, how she

had given up Sidmouth, and how willingly she would have paid the hundred

pounds.

“I sometimes think, Hatty,” said Mrs. Hancock, melancholy and condoling,

“that it would have been very different if your poor mother could have had

her wish.”

“What—what wish?”

“Her wish to live in Sidmouth, near your Aunt Harriett.”

And Sarah Barmby, sympathizing heavily, stopping short and brooding,

trying to think of something to say: “If the operation had only been done

three years ago when they knew it would save her–-”

“Three years ago? But we didn’t know anything about it then.”

“She did…. Don’t you remember? It was when I stayed with her….

Oh, Hatty, didn’t she tell you?”

“She never said a word.”

“Oh, well, she wouldn’t hear of it, even then when they didn’t give her

two years to live.”

Three years? She had had it three years ago. She had known about it all

that time. Three years ago the operation would have saved her; she would

have been here now. Why had she refused it when she knew it would save

her?

She had been thinking of the hundred pounds.

To have known about it three years and said nothing—to have gone

believing she hadn’t two years to live–-

That was her secret. That was why she had been so calm when Papa

died. She had known she would have him again so soon. Not two years–-

“If I’d been them,” Lizzie was saying, “I’d have bitten my tongue out

before I told you. It’s no use worrying, Hatty. You did everything that

could be done.”

“I know. I know.”

She held up her face against them; but to herself she said that everything

had not been done. Her mother had never had her wish. And she had died in

agony, so that she, Harriett, might keep her hundred pounds.

In all her previsions of the event she had seen herself surviving as the

same Harriett Frean with the addition of an overwhelming grief. She was

horrified at this image of herself persisting beside her mother’s place

empty in space and time.

But she was not there. Through her absorption in her mother, some large,

essential part of herself had gone. It had not been so when her father

died; what he had absorbed was given back to her, transferred to her

mother. All her memories of her mother were joined to the memory of this

now irrecoverable self.

She tried to reinstate herself through grief; she sheltered behind her

bereavement, affecting a more profound seclusion, abhorring strangers; she

was more than ever the reserved, fastidious daughter of Hilton Frean. She

had always thought of herself as different from Connie and Sarah, living

with a superior, intellectual life. She turned to the books she had read

with her mother, Dante, Browning, Carlyle, and Ruskin, the biographies of

Great Men, trying to retrace the footsteps of her lost self, to revive the

forgotten thrill. But it was no use. One day she found herself reading the

Dedication of The Ring and the Book over and over again, without

taking in its meaning, without any remembrance of its poignant secret.

“‘And all a wonder and a wild desire’—Mamma loved that.” She thought she

loved it too; but what she loved was the dark-green book she had seen in

her mother’s long, white hands, and the sound of her mother’s voice

reading. She had followed her mother’s mind with strained attention and

anxiety, smiling when she smiled, but with no delight and no admiration of

her own.

If only she could have remembered. It was only through memory that she

could reinstate herself.

She had a horror of the empty house. Her friends advised her to leave it,

but she had a horror of removal, of change. She loved the rooms that had

held her mother, the chair she had sat on, the white, fluted cup she had

drunk from in her illness. She clung to the image of her mother; and

always beside it, shadowy and pathetic, she discerned the image of her

lost self.

When the horror of emptiness came over her, she dressed herself in her

black, with delicate care and precision, and visited her friends. Even in

moments of no intention she would find herself knocking at Lizzie’s door

or Sarah’s or Connie Pennefather’s. If they were not in she would call

again and again, till she found them. She would sit for hours, talking,

spinning out the time.

She began to look forward to these visits.

Wonderful. The sweet peas she had planted had come up.

Hitherto Harriett had looked on the house and garden as parts of the space

that contained her without belonging to her. She had had no sense of

possession. This morning she was arrested by the thought that the plot she

had planted was hers. The house and garden were hers. She began to take an

interest in them. She found that by a system of punctual movements she

could give to her existence the reasonable appearance of an aim.

Next spring, a year after her mother’s death, she felt the vague stirring

of her individual soul. She was free to choose her own vicar; she left her

mother’s Dr. Braithwaite, who was broad and twice married, and went to

Canon Wrench, who was unmarried and high. There was something stimulating

in the short, happy service, the rich music, the incense, and the

processions. She made new covers for the drawing-room, in cretonne, a gay

pattern of pomegranate and blue-green leaves. And as she had always had

the cutlets broiled plain because her mother liked them that way, now she

had them breaded.

And Mrs. Hancock wanted to know why Harriett had forsaken her dear

mother’s church; and when Connie Pennefather saw the covers she told

Harriett she was lucky to be able to afford new cretonne. It was more than

she could; she seemed to think Harriett had no business to afford

it. As for the breaded cutlets, Hannah opened her eyes and said, “That was

how the mistress always had them, ma’am, when you was away.”

One day she took the blue egg out of the drawing-room and stuck it on the

chimney-piece in the spare room. When she remembered how she used to love

it she felt that she had done something cruel and iniquitous, but

necessary to the soul.

She was taking out novels from the circulating library now. Not, she

explained, for her serious reading. Her serious reading, her Dante, her

Browning, her Great Man, lay always on the table ready to her hand (beside

a copy of The Social Order and the Remains of Hilton Frean)

while secretly and half-ashamed she played with some frivolous tale. She

was satisfied with anything that ended happily and had nothing in it that

was unpleasant, or difficult, demanding thought. She exalted her

preferences into high canons. A novel ought to conform to her

requirements. A novelist (she thought of him with some asperity) had no

right to be obscure, or depressing, or to add needless unpleasantness to

the unpleasantness that