Life and Death of Harriett Frean, May Sinclair [different ereaders .TXT] 📗
- Author: May Sinclair
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When the last midsummer holidays came she spent them with Harriett.
“Oh-h-h!” Prissie drew in her breath when she heard they were to sleep
together in the big bed in the spare room. She went about looking at
things, curious, touching them softly as if they were sacred. She loved
the two rough-coated china lambs on the chimney-piece, and “Oh—the dear
little china boxes with the flowers sitting up on them.”
But when the bell rang she stood quivering in the doorway.
“I’m afraid of your father and mother, Hatty. They won’t like me. I
know they won’t like me.”
“They will. They’ll love you,” Hatty said.
And they did. They were sorry for the little white-faced, palpitating
thing.
It was their last night. Priscilla wasn’t going back to school again. Her
aunt, she said, was only paying for a year. They lay together in the big
bed, dim, face to face, talking.
“Hatty—if you wanted to do something most awfully, more than anything
else in the world, and it was wrong, would you be able not to do it?”
“I hope so. I think I would, because I’d know if I did it would
make Papa and Mamma unhappy.”
“Yes, but suppose it was giving up something you wanted, something you
loved more than them—could you?”
“Yes. If it was wrong for me to have it. And I couldn’t love anything more
than them.”
“But if you did, you’d give it up.”
“I’d have to.”
“Hatty—I couldn’t.”
“Oh, yes, you could if I could.”
“No. No….”
“How do you know you couldn’t?”
“Because I haven’t. I—I oughtn’t to have gone on staying here. My
father’s ill. They wanted me to go to them and I wouldn’t go.”
“Oh, Prissie–-”
“There, you see. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I was so happy here with you.
I couldn’t give it up.”
“If your father had been like Papa you would have.”
“Yes. I’d do anything for him, because he’s your father. It’s you I
couldn’t give up.”
“You’ll have to some day.”
“When—when?”
“When somebody else comes. When you’re married.”
“I shall never marry. Never. I shall never want anybody but you. If we
could always be together…. I can’t think why people marry,
Hatty.”
“Still,” Hatty said, “they do.”
“It’s because they haven’t ever cared as you and me care…. Hatty, if I
don’t marry anybody, you won’t, will you?”
“I’m not thinking of marrying anybody.”
“No. But promise, promise on your honor you won’t ever.”
“I’d rather not promise. You see, I might. I shall love you all the
same, Priscilla, all my life.”
“No, you won’t. It’ll all be different. I love you more than you love me.
But I shall love you all my life and it won’t be different. I shall never
marry.”
“Perhaps I shan’t, either,” Harriett said.
They exchanged gifts. Harriett gave Priscilla a rosewood writing desk
inlaid with mother-o’-pearl, and Priscilla gave Harriett a pocket-handkerchief case she had made herself of fine gray canvas embroidered
with blue flowers like a sampler and lined with blue and white plaid silk.
On the top part you read “Pocket handkerchiefs” in blue lettering, and on
the bottom “Harriett Frean,” and, tucked away in one corner, “Priscilla
Heaven: September, 1861.”
IVShe remembered the conversation. Her father sitting, straight and slender,
in his chair, talking in that quiet voice of his that never went sharp or
deep or quavering, that paused now and then on an amused inflection, his
long lips straightening between the perpendicular grooves of his smile.
She loved his straight, slender face, clean-shaven, the straight, slightly
jutting jaw, the dark-blue flattish eyes under the black eyebrows, the
silver-grizzled hair that fitted close like a cap, curling in a silver
brim above his ears.
He was talking about his business as if more than anything it amused him.
“There’s nothing gross and material about stock-broking. It’s like pure
mathematics. You’re dealing in abstractions, ideal values, all the time.
You calculate—in curves.” His hand, holding the unlit cigar, drew a
curve, a long graceful one, in mid-air. “You know what’s going to happen
all the time.
“… The excitement begins when you don’t quite know and you risk it; when
it’s getting dangerous.
“… The higher mathematics of the game. If you can afford them; if you
haven’t a wife and family—I can see the fascination….”
He sat holding his cigar in one hand, looking at it without seeing it,
seeing the fascination and smiling at it, amused and secure.
And her mother, bending over her bead-work, smiled too, out of their
happiness, their security.
He would lean back, smoking his cigar and looking at them out of
contented, half-shut eyes, as they stitched, one at each end of the long
canvas fender stool. He was waiting, he said, for the moment when their
heads would come bumping together in the middle.
Sometimes they would sit like that, not exchanging ideas, exchanging only
the sense of each other’s presence, a secure, profound satisfaction that
belonged as much to their bodies as their minds; it rippled on their faces
with their quiet smiling, it breathed with their breath. Sometimes she or
her mother read aloud, Mrs. Browning or Charles Dickens; or the biography
of some Great Man, sitting there in the velvet-curtained room or out on
the lawn under the cedar tree. A motionless communion broken by walks in
the sweet-smelling fields and deep, elm-screened lanes. And there were
short journeys into London to a lecture or a concert, and now and then the
surprise and excitement of the play.
One day her mother smoothed out her long, hanging curls and tucked them
away under a net. Harriett had a little shock of dismay and resentment,
hating change.
And the long, long Sundays spaced the weeks and the months, hushed and
sweet and rather enervating, yet with a sort of thrill in them as if
somewhere the music of the church organ went on vibrating. Her mother had
some secret: some happy sense of God that she gave to you and you took
from her as you took food and clothing, but not quite knowing what it was,
feeling that there was something more in it, some hidden gladness, some
perfection that you missed.
Her father had his secret too. She felt that it was harder, somehow,
darker and dangerous. He read dangerous books: Darwin and Huxley and
Herbert Spencer. Sometimes he talked about them.
“There’s a sort of fascination in seeing how far you can go…. The
fascination of truth might be just that—the risk that, after all, it
mayn’t be true, that you may have to go farther and farther, perhaps never
come back.”
Her mother looked up with her bright, still eyes.
“I trust the truth. I know that, however far you go, you’ll come back some
day.”
“I believe you see all of them—Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer—
coming back,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
His eyes smiled, loving her. But you could see it amused him, too, to
think of them, all those reckless, courageous thinkers, coming back, to
share her secret. His thinking was just a dangerous game he played.
She looked at her father with a kind of awe as he sat there, reading his
book, in danger and yet safe.
She wanted to know what that fascination was. She took down Herbert
Spencer and tried to read him. She made a point of finishing every book
she had begun, for her pride couldn’t bear being beaten. Her head grew hot
and heavy: she read the same sentences over and over again; they had no
meaning; she couldn’t understand a single word of Herbert Spencer. He had
beaten her. As she put the book back in its place she said to herself: “I
mustn’t. If I go on, if I get to the interesting part I may lose my
faith.” And soon she made herself believe that this was really the reason
why she had given it up.
Besides Connie Hancock there were Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby.
Exquisite pleasure to walk with Lizzie Pierce. Lizzie’s walk was a
sliding, swooping dance of little pointed feet, always as if she were
going out to meet somebody, her sharp, black-eyed face darting and
turning.
“My dear, he kept on doing this” (Lizzie did it) “as if he
was trying to sit on himself to keep him from flying off into space like a
cork. Fancy proposing on three tumblers of soda water! I might have been
Mrs. Pennefather but for that.”
Lizzie went about laughing, laughing at everybody, looking for something
to laugh at everywhere. Now and then she would stop suddenly to
contemplate the vision she had created.
“If Connie didn’t wear a bustle—or, oh my dear, if Mr. Hancock did–-”
“Mr. Hancock!” Clear, firm laughter, chiming and tinkling.
“Goodness! To think how many ridiculous people there are in the world!”
“I believe you see something ridiculous in me.”
“Only when—only when–-”
She swung her parasol in time to her sing-song. She wouldn’t say when.
“Lizzie—not—not when I’m in my black lace fichu and the little
round hat?”
“Oh, dear me—no. Not then.”
The little round hat, Lizzie wore one like it herself, tilted forward,
perched on her chignon.
“Well, then–-” she pleaded.
Lizzie’s face darted its teasing, mysterious smile.
She loved Lizzie best of her friends after Priscilla. She loved her
mockery and her teasing wit.
And there was Lizzie’s friend, Sarah Barmby, who lived in one of those
little shabby villas on the London road and looked after her father. She
moved about the villa in an unseeing, shambling way, hitting herself
against the furniture. Her face was heavy with a gentle, brooding
goodness, and she had little eyes that blinked and twinkled in the
heaviness, as if something amused her. At first you kept on wondering what
the joke was, till you saw it was only a habit Sarah had. She came when
she could spare time from her father.
Next to Lizzie, Harriett loved Sarah. She loved her goodness.
And Connie Hancock, bouncing about hospitably in the large, rich house.
Tea-parties and dances at the Hancocks’.
She wasn’t sure that she liked dancing. There was something obscurely
dangerous about it. She was afraid of being lifted off her feet and swung
on and on, away from her safe, happy life. She was stiff and abrupt with
her partners, convinced that none of those men who liked Connie Hancock
could like her, and anxious to show them that she didn’t expect them to.
She was afraid of what they were thinking. And she would slip away early,
running down the garden to the gate at the bottom of the lane where her
father waited for her. She loved the still coldness of the night under the
elms, and the strong, tight feel of her father’s arm when she hung on it
leaning towards him, and his “There we are” as he drew her closer. Her
mother would look up from the sofa and ask always the same question,
“Well, did anything nice happen?”
Till at last she answered, “No. Did you think it would, Mamma?”
“You never know,” said her mother.
“I know everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything that could happen at the Hancocks’ dances.”
Her mother shook her head at her. She knew that in secret Mamma was glad;
but she answered
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