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....”

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

moustache. 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.