Life and Death of Harriett Frean
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May Sinclair >> Life and Death of Harriett Frean
"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.
VII
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, Harriett. He must be ill." She always thought of seventy-nine as
one continuous November.
Her father and mother were alone in the study for a long time; she
remembered Annie going in with the lamp and coming out and whispering that
they wanted her. She found them sitting in the lamplight alone, close
together, holding each other's hands; their faces had a strange, exalted
look.
"Harriett, my dear, I've lost every shilling I possessed, and here's your
mother saying she doesn't mind."
He began to explain in his quiet voice. "When all the creditors are paid
in full there'll be nothing but your mother's two hundred a year. And the
insurance money when I'm gone."
"Oh, Papa, how terrible----"
"Yes, Hatty."
"I mean the insurance. It's gambling with your life."
"My dear, if that was all I'd gambled with----"
It seemed that half his capital had gone in what he called "the higher
mathematics of the game." The creditors would get the rest.
"We shall be no worse off," her mother said, "than we were when we began.
We were very happy then."
"We. How about Harriett?"
"Harriett isn't going to mind."
"You're not--going--to mind.... We shall have to sell this house and live
in a smaller one. And I can't take my business up again."
"My dear, I'm glad and thankful you've done with that dreadful, dangerous
game."
"I'd no business to play it.... But, after holding myself in all those
years, there was a sort of fascination."
One of the creditors, Mr. Hichens, gave him work in his office. He was now
Mr. Hichens's clerk. He went to Mr. Hichens as he had gone to his own
great business, upright and alert, handsome in his dark-gray overcoat with
the black velvet collar, faintly amused at himself. You would never have
known that anything had happened.
Strange that at the same time Mr. Hancock should have lost money, a great
deal of money, more money than Papa. He seemed determined that everybody
should know it; you couldn't pass him in the road without knowing. He met
you with his swollen, red face hanging; ashamed and miserable, and angry
as if it had been your fault.
One day Harriett came in to her father and mother with the news. "Did you
know that Mr. Hancock's sold his horses? And he's going to give up the
house."
Her mother signed to her to be silent, frowning and shaking her head and
glancing at her father. He got up suddenly and left the room.
"He's worrying himself to death about Mr. Hancock," she said.
"I didn't know he cared for him like that, Mamma."
"Oh, well, he's known him thirty years, and it's a very dreadful thing he
should have to give up his house."
"It's not worse for him than it is for Papa."
"It's ever so much worse. He isn't like your father. He can't be happy
without his big house and his carriages and horses. He'll feel so small
and unimportant."
"Well, then, it serves him right."
"Don't say that. It _is_ what he cares for and he's lost it."
"He's no business to behave as if it was Papa's fault," said Harriett. She
had no patience with the odious little man. She thought of her father's
face, her father's body, straight and calm, and his soul so far above that
mean trouble of Mr. Hancock's, that vulgar shame.
Yet inside him he fretted. And, suddenly, he began to sink. He turned
faint after the least exertion and had to leave off going to Mr. Hichens.
And by the spring of eighteen eighty he was upstairs in his room, too ill
to be moved. That was just after Mr. Hichens had bought the house and
wanted to come into it. He lay, patient, in the big white bed, smiling his
faint, amused smile when he thought of Mr. Hichens.
It was awful to Harriett that her father should be ill, lying there at
their mercy. She couldn't get over her sense of his parenthood, his
authority. When he was obstinate, and insisted on exerting himself, she
gave in. She was a bad nurse, because she couldn't set herself against his
will. And when she had him under her hands to strip and wash him, she felt
that she was doing something outrageous and impious; she set about it with
a flaming face and fumbling hands. "Your mother does it better," he said
gently. But she could not get her mother's feeling of him as a helpless,
dependent thing.
Mr. Hichens called every week to inquire. "Poor man, he wants to know when
he can have his house. Why _will_ he always come on my good days? He
isn't giving himself a chance."
He still had good days, days when he could be helped out of bed to sit in
his chair. "This sort of game may go on for ever," he said. He began to
worry seriously about keeping Mr. Hichens out of his house. "It isn't
decent of me. It isn't decent."
Harriett was ill with the strain of it. She had to go away for a fortnight
with Lizzie Pierce, and Sarah Barmby stayed with her mother. Mrs. Barmby
had died the year before. When Harriett got back her father was making
plans for his removal.
"Why have you all made up your minds that it'll kill me to remove me? It
won't. The men can take everything out but me and my bed and that chair.
And when they've got all the things into the other house they can come
back for the chair and me. And I can sit in the chair while they're
bringing the bed. It's quite simple. It only wants a little system."
Then, while they wondered whether they might risk it, he got worse. He lay
propped up, rigid, his arms stretched out by his side, afraid to lift a
hand because of the violent movements of his heart. His face had a
patient, expectant look, as if he waited for them to do something.
They couldn't do anything. There would be no more rallies. He might die
any day now, the doctor said.
"He may die any minute. I certainly don't expect him to live through the
night."
Harriett followed her mother back into the room. He was sitting up in his
attitude of rigid expectancy; no movement but the quivering of his night-
shirt above his heart.
"The doctor's been gone a long time, hasn't he?" he said.
Harriett was silent. She didn't understand. Her mother was looking at her
with a serene comprehension and compassion.
"Poor Hatty," he said, "she can't tell a lie to save my life."
"Oh--Papa----"
He smiled as if he was thinking of something that amused him.
"You should consider other people, my dear. Not just your own selfish
feelings.... You ought to write and tell Mr. Hichens."
Her mother gave a short sobbing laugh. "Oh, you darling," she said.
He lay still. Then suddenly he began pressing hard on the mattress with
both hands, bracing himself up in the bed. Her mother leaned closer
towards him. He threw himself over slantways, and with his head bent as if
it was broken, dropped into her arms.
Harriett wondered why he was making that queer grating and coughing noise.
Three times.
Her mother called softly to her--"Harriett."
She began to tremble.
VIII
Her mother had some secret that she couldn't share. She was wonderful in
her pure, high serenity. Surely she had some secret. She said he was
closer to her now than he had ever been. And in her correct, precise
answers to the letters of condolence Harriett wrote: "I feel that he is
closer to us now than he ever was." But she didn't really feel it. She
only felt that to feel it was the beautiful and proper thing. She looked
for her mother's secret and couldn't find it.
Meanwhile Mr. Hichens had given them six weeks. They had to decide where
they would go: into Devonshire or into a cottage at Hampstead where Sarah
Barmby lived now.
Her mother said, "Do you think you'd like to live in Sidmouth, near Aunt
Harriett?"
They had stayed one summer at Sidmouth with Aunt Harriett. She remembered
the red cliffs, the sea, and Aunt Harriett's garden stuffed with flowers.
They had been happy there. She thought she would love that: the sea and
the red cliffs and a garden like Aunt Harriett's.
But she was not sure whether it was what her mother really wanted. Mamma
would never say. She would have to find out somehow.
"Well--what do you think?"
"It would be leaving all your friends, Hatty."
"My friends--yes. But----"
Lizzie and Sarah and Connie Pennefather. She could live without them. "Oh,
there's Mrs. Hancock."
"Well----" Her mother's voice suggested that if she were put to it she
could live without Mrs. Hancock.
And Harriett thought: She does want to go to Sidmouth then.
"It would be very nice to be near Aunt Harriett."
She was afraid to say more than that lest she should show her own wish
before she knew her mother's.
"Aunt Harriett. Yes.... But it's very far away, Hatty. We should be cut
off from everything. Lectures and concerts. We couldn't afford to come up
and down."
"No. We couldn't."
She could see that Mamma did not really want to live in Sidmouth; she
didn't want to be near Aunt Harriett; she wanted the cottage at Hampstead
and all the things of their familiar, intellectual life going on and on.
After all, that was the way to keep near to Papa, to go on doing the
things they had done together.
Her mother agreed that it was the way.
"I can't help feeling," Harriett said, "it's what he would have wished."
Her mother's face was quiet and content. She hadn't guessed.
They left the white house with the green balcony hung out like a
birdcage at the side, and turned into the cottage at Hampstead. The
rooms were small and rather dark, and the furniture they had brought had
a squeezed-up, unhappy look. The blue egg on the marble-topped table was
conspicuous and hateful as it had never been in the Black's Lane
drawing-room. Harriett and her mother looked at it.
"Must it stay there?"
"I think so. Fanny Hancock gave it me."
"Mamma--you know you don't like it."
"No. But after all these years I couldn't turn the poor thing away."
Her mother was an old woman, clinging with an old, stubborn fidelity to
the little things of her past. But Harriett denied it. "She's not old,"
she said to herself. "Not really old."
"Harriett," her mother said one day. "I think you ought to do the
housekeeping."
"Oh, Mamma, why?" She hated the idea of this change.
"Because you'll have to do it some day."
She obeyed. But as she went her rounds and gave her orders she felt that
she was doing something not quite real, playing at being her mother as she
had played when she was a child. Then her mother had another thought.
"Harriett, I think you ought to see more of your friends, dear."
"Why?"
"Because you'll want them after I'm gone."
"I shall never _want_ anybody but you."
And their time went as it had gone before: in sewing together, reading
together, listening to lectures and concerts together. They had told Sarah
that they didn't want anybody to call. They were Hilton Frean's wife and
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 anaesthetic; 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.
IX
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 had to be. The Great Men didn't _do_ it.
She spoke of George Eliot and Dickens and Mr. Thackeray.
Lizzie Pierce had a provoking way of smiling at Harriett, as if she found
her ridiculous. And Harriett had no patience with Lizzie's affectation in
wanting to be modern, her vanity in trying to be young, her middle-aged
raptures over the work--often unpleasant--of writers too young to be worth
serious consideration. They had long arguments in which Harriett, beaten,
retired behind _The Social Order_ and the _Remains_.
"It's silly," Lizzie said, "not to be able to look at a new thing because
it's new. That's the way you grow old."
"It's sillier," Harriett said, "to be always running after new things
because you think that's the way to look young. I've no wish to appear
younger than I am."
"I've no wish to appear suffering from senile decay."
"There _is_ a standard." Harriett lifted her obstinate and arrogant
chin. "You forget that I'm Hilton Frean's daughter."
"I'm William Pierce's, but that hasn't prevented my being myself."
Lizzie's mind had grown keener in her sharp middle age. As it played about
her, Harriett cowered; it was like being exposed, naked, to a cutting
wind. Her mind ran back to her father and mother, longing, like a child,
for their shelter and support, for the blessed assurance of herself.
At her worst she could still think with pleasure of the beauty of the act
which had given Robin to Priscilla.
X
"My dear Harriett: Thank you for your kind letter of sympathy. Although we
had expected the end for many weeks poor Prissie's death came to us as a
great shock. But for her it was a blessed release, and we can only be
thankful. You who knew her will realize the depth and extent of my
bereavement. I have lost the dearest and most loving wife man ever
had...."