Life and Death of Harriett Frean
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May Sinclair >> Life and Death of Harriett Frean
Poor little Prissie. She couldn't bear to think she would never see her
again.
Six months later Robin wrote again, from Sidmouth.
"Dear Harriett: Priscilla left you this locket in her will as a
remembrance. I would have sent it before but that I couldn't bear to part
with her things all at once.
"I take this opportunity of telling you that I am going to be married
again----"
Her heart heaved and closed. She could never have believed she could have
felt such a pang.
"The lady is Miss Beatrice Walker, the devoted nurse who was with my dear
wife all through her last illness. This step may seem strange and
precipitate, coming so soon after her death; but I am urged to do it by
the precarious state of my own health and by the knowledge that we are
fulfilling poor Prissie's dying wish...."
Poor Prissie's dying wish. After what she had done for Prissie, if she
_had_ a dying wish--But neither of them had thought of her. Robin had
forgotten her.... Forgotten.... Forgotten.
But no. Priscilla had remembered. She had left her the locket with his
hair in it. She had remembered and she had been afraid; jealous of her.
She couldn't bear to think that Robin might marry her, even after she was
dead. She had made him marry this Walker woman so that he shouldn't----
Oh, but he wouldn't. Not after twenty years.
"I didn't really think he would."
She was forty-five, her face was lined and pitted and her hair was dust
color, streaked with gray: and she could only think of Robin as she had
last seen him, young: a young face; a young body; young, shining eyes. He
would want to marry a young woman. He had been in love with this Walker
woman, and Prissie had known it. She could see Prissie lying in her bed,
helpless, looking at them over the edge of the white sheet. She had known
that as soon as she was dead, before the sods closed over her grave, they
would marry. Nothing could stop them. And she had tried to make herself
believe it was her wish, her doing, not theirs. Poor little Prissie.
She understood that Robin had been staying in Sidmouth for his health.
A year later, Harriett, run down, was ordered to the seaside. She went to
Sidmouth. She told herself that she wanted to see the place where she had
been so happy with her mother, where poor Aunt Harriett had died.
Looking through the local paper she found in the list of residents:
Sidcote--Mr. and Mrs. Robert Lethbridge and Miss Walker. She wrote to
Robin and asked if she might call on his wife.
A mile of hot road through the town and inland brought her to a door in a
lane and a thatched cottage with a little lawn behind it. From the
doorstep she could see two figures, a man and a woman, lying back in
garden chairs. Inside the house she heard the persistent, energetic sound
of hammering. The woman got up and came to her. She was young, pink-faced
and golden-haired, and she said she was Miss Walker, Mrs. Lethbridge's
sister.
A tall, lean, gray man rose from the garden chair, slowly, dragging
himself with an invalid air. His eyes stared, groping, blurred films that
trembled between the pouch and droop of the lids; long cheeks, deep
grooved, dropped to the infirm mouth that sagged under the limp mustache.
That was Robin.
He became agitated when he saw her. "Poor Robin," she thought. "All these
years, and it's too much for him, seeing me." Presently he dragged himself
from the lawn to the house and disappeared through the French window where
the hammering came from.
"Have I frightened him away?" she said.
"Oh, no, he's always like that when he sees strange faces."
"My face isn't exactly strange."
"Well, he must have thought it was."
A sudden chill crept through her.
"He'll be all right when he gets used to you," Miss Walker said.
The strange face of Miss Walker chilled her. A strange young woman, living
close to Robin, protecting him, explaining Robin's ways.
The sound of hammering ceased. Through the long, open window she saw a
woman rise up from the floor and shed a white apron. She came down the
lawn to them, with raised arms, patting disordered hair; large, a full,
firm figure clipped in blue linen. A full-blown face, bluish pink; thick
gray eyes slightly protruding; a thick mouth, solid and firm and kind.
That was Robin's wife. Her sister was slighter, fresher, a good ten years
younger, Harriett thought.
"Excuse me, we're only just settling in. I was nailing down the carpet in
Robin's study."
Her lips were so thick that they moved stiffly when she spoke or smiled.
She panted a little as if from extreme exertion.
When they were all seated Mrs. Lethbridge addressed her sister. "Robin was
quite right. It looks _much_ better turned the other way."
"Do you mean to say he made you take it all up and put it down again?
Well----"
"What's the use?... Miss Frean, you don't know what it is to have a
husband who _will_ have things just so."
"She had to mow the lawn this morning because Robin can't bear to see one
blade of grass higher than another."
"Is he as particular as all that?"
"I assure you, Miss Frean, he is," Miss Walker informed her.
"He wasn't when I knew him," Harriett said.
"Ah--my sister spoils him."
Mrs. Lethbridge wondered why he hadn't come out again.
"I think," Harriett said, "perhaps he'll come if I go."
"Oh, you mustn't go. It's good for him to see people. Takes him out of
himself."
"He'll turn up all right," Miss Walker said, "when he hears the teacups."
And at four o'clock when the teacups came, Robin turned up, dragging
himself slowly from the house to the lawn. He blinked and quivered with
agitation; Harriett saw he was annoyed, not with her, and not with Miss
Walker, but with his wife.
"Beatrice, what have you done with my new bottle of medicine?"
"Nothing, dear."
"You've done nothing, when you know you poured out my last dose at
twelve?"
"Why, hasn't it come?"
"No. It hasn't."
"But Cissy ordered it this morning."
"I didn't," Cissy said. "I forgot."
"Oh, Cissy----"
"You needn't blame Cissy. You ought to have seen to it yourself.... She
was a good nurse, Harriett, before she was my wife."
"My dear, your nurse had nothing else to do. Your wife has to clean and
mend for you, and cook your dinner and mow the lawn and nail the carpets
down." While she said it she looked at Robin as if she adored him.
All through tea time he talked about his health and about the sanitary
dustbin they hadn't got. Something had happened to him. It wasn't like him
to be wrapped up in himself and to talk about dustbins. He spoke to his
wife as if she had been his valet. He didn't see that she was perspiring,
worn out by her struggle with the carpet.
"Just go and fetch me another cushion, Beatrice."
She rose with tired patience.
"You might let her have her tea in peace," Miss Walker said, but she was
gone before they could stop her.
When Harriett left she went with her to the garden gate, panting as she
walked. Harriett noticed pale, blurred lines on the edges of her lips. She
thought: She isn't a bit strong. She praised the garden.
Mrs. Lethbridge smiled. "Robin loves it.... But you should have seen it at
five o'clock this morning."
"Five o'clock?"
"Yes. I always get up at five to make Robin a cup of tea."
Harriett's last evening. She was dining at Sidcote. On her way there she
had overtaken Robin's wife wheeling Robin in a bath chair. Beatrice had
panted and perspired and had made mute signs to Harriett not to take any
notice. She had had to go and lie down till Robin sent for her to find his
cigarette case. Now she was in the kitchen cooking Robin's part of the
dinner while he lay down in his study. Harriett talked to Miss Walker in
the garden.
"It's been very kind of you to have us so much."
"Oh, but we've loved having you. It's so good for Beatie. Gives her a rest
from Robin.... I don't mean that she wants a rest. But, you see, she's not
well. She looks a big, strong, bouncing thing, but she isn't. Her heart's
weak. She oughtn't to be doing what she does."
"Doesn't Robin see it?"
"He doesn't see anything. He never knows when she's tired or got a
headache. She'll drop dead before he'll see it. He's utterly selfish, Miss
Frean. Wrapt up in himself and his horrid little ailments. Whatever
happens to Beatie he must have his sweetbread, and his soup at eleven and
his tea at five in the morning..
"... I suppose you think I might help more?"
"Well----" Harriett did think it.
"Well, I just won't. I won't encourage Robin. He ought to get her a proper
servant and a man for the garden and the bath chair. I wish you'd give him
a hint. Tell him she isn't strong. I can't. She'd snap my head off. Would
you mind?"
Harriett didn't mind. She didn't mind what she said. She wouldn't be
saying it to Robin, but to the contemptible thing that had taken Robin's
place. She still saw Robin as a young man, with young, shining eyes, who
came rushing to give himself up at once, to make himself known. She had no
affection for this selfish invalid, this weak, peevish bully.
Poor Beatrice. She was sorry for Beatrice. She resented his behavior to
Beatrice. She told herself she wouldn't be Beatrice, she wouldn't be
Robin's wife for the world. Her pity for Beatrice gave her a secret
pleasure and satisfaction.
After dinner she sat out in the garden talking to Robin's wife, while
Cissy Walker played draughts with Robin in his study, giving Beatrice a
rest from him. They talked about Robin.
"You knew him when he was young, didn't you? What was he like?"
She didn't want to tell her. She wanted to keep the young, shining Robin
to herself. She also wanted to show that she had known him, that she had
known a Robin that Beatrice would never know. Therefore she told her.
"My poor Robin." Beatrice gazed wistfully, trying to see this Robin that
Priscilla had taken from her, that Harriett had known. Then she turned her
back.
"It doesn't matter. I've married the man I wanted." She let herself go.
"Cissy says I've spoiled him. That isn't true. It was his first wife who
spoiled him. She made a nervous wreck of him."
"He was devoted to her."
"Yes. And he's paying for his devotion now. She wore him out.... Cissy
says he's selfish. If he is, it's because he's used up all his
unselfishness. He was living on his moral capital.... I feel as if I
couldn't do too much for him after what he did. Cissy doesn't know how
awful his life was with Priscilla. She was the most exacting----"
"She was my friend."
"Wasn't Robin your friend, too?"
"Yes. But poor Prissie, she was paralyzed."
"It wasn't paralysis."
"What was it then?"
"Pure hysteria. Robin wasn't in love with her, and she knew it. She
developed that illness so that she might have a hold on him, get his
attention fastened on her somehow. I don't say she could help it. She
couldn't. But that's what it was."
"Well, she died of it."
"No. She died of pneumonia after influenza. I'm not blaming Prissie. She
was pitiable. But he ought never to have married her."
"I don't think you ought to say that."
"You know what he was," said Robin's wife. "And look at him now."
But Harriett's mind refused, obstinately, to connect the two Robins and
Priscilla.
She remembered that she had to speak to Robin. They went together into his
study. Cissy sent her a look, a signal, and rose; she stood by the
doorway.
"Beatie, you might come here a minute."
Harriett was alone with Robin.
"Well, Harriett, we haven't been able to do much for you. In my beastly
state----"
"You'll get better."
"Never. I'm done for, Harriett. I don't complain."
"You've got a devoted wife, Robin."
"Yes. Poor girl, she does what she can."
"She does too much."
"My dear woman, she wouldn't be happy if she didn't."
"It isn't good for her. Does it never strike you that she's not strong?"
"Not strong? She's--she's almost indecently robust. What wouldn't I give
to have her strength!"
She looked at him, at the lean figure sunk in the armchair, at the
dragged, infirm face, the blurred, owlish eyes, the expression of abject
self-pity, of self-absorption. That was Robin.
The awful thing was that she couldn't love him, couldn't go on being
faithful. This injured her self-esteem.
XI
Her old servant, Hannah, had gone, and her new servant, Maggie, had had a
baby.
After the first shock and three months' loss of Maggie, it occurred to
Harriett that the beautiful thing would be to take Maggie back and let her
have the baby with her, since she couldn't leave it.
The baby lay in his cradle in the kitchen, black-eyed and rosy, doubling
up his fat, naked knees, smiling his crooked smile, and saying things to
himself. Harriett had to see him every time she came into the kitchen.
Sometimes she heard him cry, an intolerable cry, tearing the nerves and
heart. And sometimes she saw Maggie unbutton her black gown in a hurry and
put out her white, rose-pointed breast to still his cry.
Harriett couldn't bear it. She could not bear it.
She decided that Maggie must go. Maggie was not doing her work properly.
Harriett found flue under the bed.
"I'm sure," Maggie said, "I'm doing no worse than I did, ma'am, and you
usedn't to complain."
"No worse isn't good enough, Maggie. I think you might have tried to
please me. It isn't every one who would have taken you in the
circumstances."
"If you think that, ma'am, it's very cruel and unkind of you to send me
away."
"You've only yourself to thank. There's no more to be said."
"No, ma'am. I understand why I'm leaving. It's because of Baby. You don't
want to 'ave 'im, and I think you might have said so before."
That day month Maggie packed her brown-painted wooden box and the cradle
and the perambulator. The greengrocer took them away on a handcart.
Through the drawing-room window Harriett saw Maggie going away, carrying
the baby, pink and round in his white-knitted cap, his fat hips bulging
over her arm under his white shawl. The gate fell to behind them. The
click struck at Harriett's heart.
Three months later Maggie turned up again in a black hat and gown for
best, red-eyed and humble.
"I came to see, ma'am, whether you'd take me back, as I 'aven't got Baby
now."
"You haven't got him?"
"'E died, ma'am, last month. I'd put him with a woman in the country. She
was highly recommended to me. Very highly recommended she was, and I paid
her six shillings a week. But I think she must 'ave done something she
shouldn't."
"Oh, Maggie, you don't mean she was cruel to him?"
"No, ma'am. She was very fond of him. Everybody was fond of Baby. But
whether it was the food she gave him or what, 'e was that wasted you
wouldn't have known him. You remember what he was like when he was here."
"I remember."
She remembered. She remembered. Fat and round in his white shawl and
knitted cap when Maggie carried him down the garden path.
"I should think she'd a done something, shouldn't you, ma'am?"
She thought: No. No. It was I who did it when I sent him away.
"I don't know, Maggie. I'm afraid it's been very terrible for you."
"Yes, ma'am.... I wondered whether you'd give me another trial, ma'am."
"Are you quite sure you want to come to me, Maggie?"
"Yes'm.... I'm sure you'd a kept him if you could have borne to see him
about."
"You know, Maggie, that was _not_ the reason why you left. If I take
you back you must try not to be careless and forgetful."
"I shan't 'ave nothing to make me. Before, it was first Baby's father and
then 'im."
She could see that Maggie didn't hold her responsible. After all, why
should she? If Maggie had made bad arrangements for her baby, Maggie was
responsible.
She went round to Lizzie and Sarah to see what they thought. Sarah
thought: Well--it was rather a difficult question, and Harriett resented
her hesitation.
"Not at all. It rested with Maggie to go or stay. If she was incompetent I
wasn't bound to keep her just because she'd had a baby. At that rate I
should have been completely in her power."
Lizzie said she thought Maggie's baby would have died in any case, and
they both hoped that Harriett wasn't going to be morbid about it.
Harriett felt sustained. She wasn't going to be morbid. All the same, the
episode left her with a feeling of insecurity.
XII
The young girl, Robin's niece, had come again, bright-eyed, eager, and
hungry, grateful for Sunday supper.
Harriett was getting used to these appearances, spread over three years,
since Robin's wife had asked her to be kind to Mona Floyd. Mona had come
this time to tell her of her engagement to Geoffrey Carter. The news
shocked Harriett intensely.
"But, my dear, you told me he was going to marry your little friend, Amy--
Amy Lambert. What does Amy say to it?"
"What _can_ she say? I know it's a bit rough on her----"
"You know, and yet you'll take your happiness at the poor child's
expense."
"We've got to. We can't do anything else."
"Oh, my dear----" If she could stop it.... An inspiration came. "I knew a
girl once who might have done what you're doing, only she wouldn't. She
gave the man up rather than hurt her friend. She _couldn't do anything
else_."
"How much was he in love with her?"
"I don't know _how much_. He was never in love with any other woman."
"Then she was a fool. A silly fool. Didn't she think of _him?_"
"Didn't she think!"
"No. She didn't. She thought of herself. Of her own moral beauty. She was
a selfish fool."
"She asked the best and wisest man she knew, and he told her she couldn't
do anything else."
"The best and wisest man--oh, Lord!"
"That was my own father, Mona, Hilton Frean."
"Then it was you. You and Uncle Robin and Aunt Prissie."
Harriett's face smiled its straight, thin-lipped smile, the worn, grooved
chin arrogantly lifted.
"How could you?"
"I could because I was brought up not to think of myself before other
people."
"Then it wasn't even your own idea. You sacrificed him to somebody else's.
You made three people miserable just for that. Four, if you count Aunt
Beatie."
"There was Prissie. I did it for her."
"What did you do for her? You insulted Aunt Prissie."
"Insulted her? My dear Mona!"
"It was an insult, handing her over to a man who couldn't love her even
with his body. Aunt Prissie was the miserablest of the lot. Do you suppose
he didn't take it out of her?"
"He never let her know."
"Oh, didn't he! She knew all right. That's how she got her illness. And
it's how he got his. And he'll kill Aunt Beatie. He's taking it out of
_her_ now. Look at the awful suffering. And you can go on
sentimentalizing about it."
The young girl rose, flinging her scarf over her shoulders with a violent
gesture.
"There's no common sense in it."
"No _common_ sense, perhaps."
"It's a jolly sight better than sentiment when it comes to marrying."
They kissed. Mona turned at the doorway.
"I say--did he go on caring for you?"
"Sometimes I think he did. Sometimes I think he hated me."
"Of course he hated you, after what you'd let him in for." She paused.
"You don't _mind_ my telling you the truth, do you?"
... Harriett sat a long time, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes
staring into the room, trying to see the truth. She saw the girl, Robin's
niece, in her young indignation, her tender brilliance suddenly hard,
suddenly cruel, flashing out the truth. Was it true that she had
sacrificed Robin and Priscilla and Beatrice to her parents' idea of moral
beauty? Was it true that this idea had been all wrong? That she might have
married Robin and been happy and been right?
"I don't care. If it was to be done again to-morrow I'd do it."
But the beauty of that unique act no longer appeared to her as it once
was, uplifting, consoling, incorruptible.
The years passed. They went with an incredible rapidity, and Harriett was
now fifty.
The feeling of insecurity had grown on her. It had something to do with
Mona, with Maggie and Maggie's baby. She had no clear illumination, only a
mournful acquiescence in her own futility, an almost physical sense of
shrinkage, the crumbling away, bit by bit, of her beautiful and honorable
self, dying with the objects of its three profound affections: her father,
her mother, Robin. Gradually the image of the middle-aged Robin had
effaced his youth.
She read more and more novels from the circulating libraries, of a kind
demanding less and less effort of attention. And always her inability to
concentrate appeared to her as a just demand for clarity: "The man has no
_business_ to write so that I can't understand him."
She laid in a weekly stock of opinions from _The Spectator_, and by
this means contrived a semblance of intellectual life.
She was appeased more and more by the rhythm of the seasons, of the weeks,
of day and night, by the first coming up of the pink and wine-brown velvet
primulas, by the pungent, burnt smell of her morning coffee, the smell of
a midday stew, of hot cakes baking for tea time; by the lighting of the
lamp, the lighting of autumn fires, the round of her visits. She waited
with a strained, expectant desire for the moment when it would be time to
see Lizzie or Sarah or Connie Pennefather again.
Seeing them was a habit she couldn't get over. But it no longer gave her
keen pleasure. She told herself that her three friends were deteriorating
in their middle age. Lizzie's sharp face darted malice; her tongue was
whipcord; she knew where to flick; the small gleam of her eyes, the snap
of her nutcracker jaws irritated Harriett. Sarah was slow; slow. She took
no care of her face and figure. As Lizzie put it, Sarah's appearance was
an outrage on her contemporaries. "She makes us feel so old."
And Connie--the very rucking of Connie's coat about her broad hips
irritated Harriett. She had a way of staring over her fat cheeks at
Harriett's old suits, mistaking them for new ones, and saying the same
exasperating thing. "You're lucky to be able to afford it. _I_
can't."
Harriett's irritation mounted up and up.
And one day she quarreled with Connie.
Connie had been telling one of her stories; leaning a little sideways, her
skirt stretched tight between her fat, parted knees, the broad roll of her
smile sliding greasily. She had "grown out of it" in her young womanhood,
and now in her middle age she had come back to it again. She was just like
her father.
"Connie, how can you be so coarse?"
"I beg pardon. I forgot you were always better than everybody else."
"I'm not better than everybody else. I've only been brought up better than
some people. My father would have died rather than have told a story like
that."
"I suppose that's a dig at my parents."
"I never said anything about your parents."
"I know the things you think about my father."
"Well--I daresay he thinks things about me."
"He thinks you were always an incurable old maid, my dear."
"Did he think my father was an old maid?"
"I never heard him say one unkind word about your father."
"I should hope not, indeed."
"Unkind things were said. Not by him. Though he might have been
forgiven----"
"I don't know what you mean. But all my father's creditors were paid in
full. You know that."
"I didn't know it."
"You know it now. Was your father one of them?"
"No. It was as bad for him as if he had been, though."
"How do you make that out?"
"Well, my dear, if he hadn't taken your father's advice he might have been
a rich man now instead of a poor one.... He invested all his money as he
told him."
"In my father's things?"
"In things he was interested in. And he lost it."
"It shows how he must have trusted him."
"He wasn't the only one who was ruined by his trust."
Harriett blinked. Her mind swerved from the blow. "I think you must be
mistaken," she said.
"I'm less likely to be mistaken than you, my dear, though he _was_
your father."
Harriett sat up, straight and stiff. "Well, _your_ father's alive,
and _he's_ dead."
"I don't see what that has to do with it."
"Don't you? If it had happened the other way about, your father wouldn't
have died."
Connie stared stupidly at Harriett, not taking it in. Presently she got up
and left her. She moved clumsily, her broad hips shaking.
Harriett put on her hat and went round to Lizzie and Sarah in turn. They
would know whether it were true or not. They would know whether Mr.
Hancock had been ruined by his own fault or Papa's.
Sarah was sorry. She picked up a fold of her skirt and crumpled it in her
fingers, and said over and over again, "She oughtn't to have told you."
But she didn't say it wasn't true. Neither did Lizzie, though her tongue
was a whip for Connie.
"Because you can't stand her dirty stories she goes and tells you this. It
shows what Connie is."
It showed her father as he was, too. Not wise. Not wise all the time.
Courageous, always, loving danger, intolerant of security, wild under all
his quietness and gentleness, taking madder and madder risks, playing his
game with an awful, cool recklessness. Then letting other people in;
ruining Mr. Hancock, the little man he used to laugh at. And it had killed
him. He hadn't been sorry for Mamma, because he knew she was glad the mad
game was over; but he had thought and thought about him, the little dirty
man, until he had died of thinking.