Life and Death of Harriett Frean, May Sinclair [different ereaders .TXT] 📗

was just that. Doing ugly things. Being good was being

beautiful like Mamma. She wanted to be like her mother. Sitting up there

and being good felt delicious. And the smooth cream with the milk running

under it, thin and cold, was delicious too.

 

Suddenly a thought came rushing at her. There was God and there was Jesus.

But even God and Jesus were not more beautiful than Mamma. They couldn’t

be.

 

“You mustn’t say things like that, Hatty; you mustn’t, really. It might

make something happen.”

 

“Oh, no, it won’t. You don’t suppose they’re listening all the time.”

 

Saying things like that made you feel good and at the same time naughty,

which was more exciting than only being one or the other. But Mamma’s

frightened face spoiled it. What did she think—what did she think God

would do?

 

Red campion–-

 

At the bottom of the orchard a door in the wall opened into Black’s Lane,

below the three tall elms.

 

She couldn’t believe she was really walking there by herself. It had come

all of a sudden, the thought that she must do it, that she

must go out into the lane; and when she found the door unlatched,

something seemed to take hold of her and push her out. She was forbidden

to go into Black’s Lane; she was not even allowed to walk there with

Annie.

 

She kept on saying to herself: “I’m in the lane. I’m in the lane. I’m

disobeying Mamma.”

 

Nothing could undo that. She had disobeyed by just standing outside the

orchard door. Disobedience was such a big and awful thing that it was

waste not to do something big and awful with it. So she went on, up and

up, past the three tall elms. She was a big girl, wearing black silk

aprons and learning French. Walking by herself. When she arched her back

and stuck her stomach out she felt like a tall lady in a crinoline and

shawl. She swung her hips and made her skirts fly out. That was her

grown-up crinoline, swing-swinging as she went.

 

At the turn the cow’s parsley and rose campion began; on each side a long

trail of white froth with the red tops of the campion pricking through.

She made herself a nosegay.

 

Past the second turn you came to the waste ground covered with old boots

and rusted, crumpled tins. The little dirty brown house stood there behind

the rickety blue palings; narrow, like the piece of a house that has been

cut in two. It hid, stooping under the ivy bush on its roof. It was not

like the houses people live in; there was something queer, some secret,

frightening thing about it.

 

The man came out and went to the gate and stood there. He was the

frightening thing. When he saw her he stepped back and crouched behind the

palings, ready to jump out.

 

She turned slowly, as if she had thought of something. She mustn’t run.

She must not run. If she ran he would come after her.

 

Her mother was coming down the garden walk, tall and beautiful in her

silver-gray gown with the bands of black velvet on the flounces and the

sleeves; her wide, hooped skirts swung, brushing the flower borders.

 

She ran up to her, crying, “Mamma, I went up the lane where you told me

not to.”

 

“No, Hatty, no; you didn’t.”

 

You could see she wasn’t angry. She was frightened.

 

“I did. I did.”

 

Her mother took the bunch of flowers out of her hand and looked at it.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s where the dark-red campion grows.”

 

She was holding the flowers up to her face. It was awful, for you could

see her mouth thicken and redden over its edges and shake. She hid it

behind the flowers. And somehow you knew it wasn’t your naughtiness that

made her cry. There was something more.

 

She was saying in a thick, soft voice, “It was wrong of you, my darling.”

 

Suddenly she bent her tall straightness. “Rose campion,” she said, parting

the stems with her long, thin fingers. “Look, Hatty, how beautiful

they are. Run away and put the poor things in water.”

 

She was so quiet, so quiet, and her quietness hurt far more than if she

had been angry.

 

She must have gone straight back into the house to Papa. Harriett knew,

because he sent for her. He was quiet, too…. That was the little, hiding

voice he told you secrets in…. She stood close up to him, between his

knees, and his arm went loosely round her to keep her there while he

looked into her eyes. You could smell tobacco, and the queer, clean man’s

smell that came up out of him from his collar. He wasn’t smiling; but

somehow his eyes looked kinder than if they had smiled.

 

“Why did you do it, Hatty?”

 

“Because—I wanted to see what it would feel like.”

 

“You mustn’t do it again. Do you hear?—you mustn’t do it.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Why? Because it makes your mother unhappy. That’s enough why.”

 

But there was something more. Mamma had been frightened. Something to do

with the frightening man in the lane.

 

“Why does it make her?”

 

She knew; she knew; but she wanted to see what he would say.

 

“I said that was enough…. Do you know what you’ve been guilty of?”

 

“Disobedience.”

 

“More than that. Breaking trust. Meanness. It was mean and dishonorable of

you when you knew you wouldn’t be punished.”

 

“Isn’t there to be a punishment?”

 

“No. People are punished to make them remember. We want you to forget.”

His arm tightened, drawing her closer. And the kind, secret voice went on.

“Forget ugly things. Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden. We don’t

forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave beautifully….

There, there.”

 

She hid her face on his breast against his tickly coat, and cried.

 

She would always have to do what they wanted; the unhappiness of not doing

it was more than she could bear. All very well to say there would be no

punishment; their unhappiness was the punishment.

 

It hurt more than anything. It kept on hurting when she thought about it.

 

The first minute of to-morrow she would begin behaving beautifully; as

beautifully as she could. They wanted you to; they wanted it more than

anything because they were so beautiful. So good. So wise.

 

But three years went before Harriett understood how wise they had been,

and why her mother took her again and again into Black’s Lane to pick red

campion, so that it was always the red campion she remembered. They must

have known all the time about Black’s Lane; Annie, the housemaid, used to

say it was a bad place; something had happened to a little girl there.

Annie hushed and reddened and wouldn’t tell you what it was. Then one day,

when she was thirteen, standing by the apple tree, Connie Hancock told

her. A secret… Behind the dirty blue palings… She shut her eyes,

squeezing the lids down, frightened. But when she thought of the lane she

could see nothing but the green banks, the three tall elms, and the red

campion pricking through the white froth of the cow’s parsley; her mother

stood on the garden walk in her wide, swinging gown; she was holding the

red and white flowers up to her face and saying, “Look, how

beautiful they are.”

 

She saw her all the time while Connie was telling her the secret. She

wanted to get up and go to her. Connie knew what it meant when you

stiffened suddenly and made yourself tall and cold and silent. The cold

silence would frighten her and she would go away. Then, Harriett thought,

she could get back to her mother and Longfellow.

 

Every afternoon, through the hours before her father came home, she sat in

the cool, green-lighted drawing-room reading Evangeline aloud to

her mother. When they came to the beautiful places they looked at each

other and smiled.

 

She passed through her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of

Evangeline. Her upright body, her lifted, delicately obstinate,

rather wistful face expressed her small, conscious determination to be

good. She was silent with emotion when Mrs. Hancock told her she was

growing like her mother.

III

Connie Hancock was her friend.

 

She had once been a slender, wide-mouthed child, top-heavy with her damp

clumps of hair. Now she was squaring and thickening and looking horrid,

like Mr. Hancock. Beside her Harriett felt tall and elegant and slender.

 

Mamma didn’t know what Connie was really like; it was one of those things

you couldn’t tell her. She said Connie would grow out of it. Meanwhile you

could see he wouldn’t. Mr. Hancock had red whiskers, and his face

squatted down in his collar, instead of rising nobly up out of it like

Papa’s. It looked as if it was thinking things that made its eyes bulge

and its mouth curl over and slide like a drawn loop. When you talked about

Mr. Hancock, Papa gave a funny laugh as if he was something improper. He

said Connie ought to have red whiskers.

 

Mrs. Hancock, Connie’s mother, was Mamma’s dearest friend. That was why

there had always been Connie. She could remember her, squirming and

spluttering in her high nursery chair. And there had always been Mrs.

Hancock, refined and mournful, looking at you with gentle, disappointed

eyes.

 

She was glad that Connie hadn’t been sent to her boarding-school, so that

nothing could come between her and Priscilla Heaven.

 

Priscilla was her real friend.

 

It had begun in her third term, when Priscilla first came to the school,

unhappy and shy, afraid of the new faces. Harriett took her to her room.

 

She was thin, thin, in her shabby black velvet jacket. She stood looking

at herself in the greenish glass over the yellow-painted chest of drawers.

Her heavy black hair had dragged the net and broken it. She put up her

thin arms, helpless.

 

“They’ll never keep me,” she said. “I’m so untidy.”

 

“It wants more pins,” said Harriett. “Ever so many more pins. If you put

them in head downwards they’ll fall out. I’ll show you.”

 

Priscilla trembled with joy when Harriett asked her to walk with her; she

had been afraid of her at first because she behaved so beautifully.

 

Soon they were always together. They sat side by side at the dinner table

and in school, black head and golden brown leaning to each other over the

same book; they walked side by side in the packed procession, going two by

two. They slept in the same room, the two white beds drawn close together;

a white dimity curtain hung between; they drew it back so that they could

see each other lying there in the summer dusk and in the clear mornings

when they waked.

 

Harriett loved Priscilla’s odd, dusk-white face; her long hound’s nose,

seeking; her wide mouth, restless between her shallow, fragile jaws; her

eyes, black, cleared with spots of jade gray, prominent, showing white

rims when she was startled. She started at sudden noises; she quivered and

stared when you caught her dreaming; she cried when the organ burst out

triumphantly in church. You had to take care every minute that you didn’t

hurt her.

 

She cried when term ended and she had to go home. Priscilla’s home was

horrible. Her father drank, her mother fretted; they were poor; a rich

aunt paid for her schooling.