She was aware of her drowsy, supine dependence on Maggie. At first her
perishing self asserted itself in an increased reserve and arrogance.
Thus she protected herself from her own censure. She had still a feeling
of satisfaction in her exclusiveness, her power not to call on new
people.
“I think,” Lizzie Pierce said, “you might have called on the
Brailsfords.”
“Why should I? I should have nothing in common with such people.”
“Well, considering that Mr. Brailsford writes in _The Spectator_----”
Harriett called. She put on her gray silk and her soft white mohair
shawl, and her wide black hat tied under her chin, and called. It was on
a Saturday. The Brailsfords’ room was full of visitors, men and women,
talking excitedly. Dorothy was not there--Dorothy was married. Mimi was
not there--Mimi was dead.
Harriett made her way between the chairs, dim-eyed, upright, and stiff
in her white shawl. She apologized for having waited seven years before
calling.... “Never go anywhere.... Quite a recluse since my father’s
death. He was Hilton Frean.”
“Yes?” Mrs. Brailsford’s eyes were sweetly interrogative.
“But as we are such near neighbors I felt that I must break my rule.”
Mrs. Brailsford smiled in vague benevolence; yet as if she thought that
Miss Frean’s feeling and her action were unnecessary. After seven years.
And presently Harriett found herself alone in her corner.
She tried to talk to Mr. Brailsford when he handed her the tea and bread
and butter. “My father,” she said, “was connected with _The Spectator_
for many years. He was Hilton Frean.”
“Indeed? I’m afraid I--don’t remember.”
She could get nothing out of him, out of his lean, ironical face, his
eyes screwed up behind his glasses, benevolent, amused at her. She was
nobody in that roomful of keen, intellectual people; nobody; nothing but
an unnecessary little old lady who had come there uninvited.
Her second call was not returned. She heard that the Brailsfords were
exclusive; they wouldn’t know anybody out of their own set. Harriett
explained her position thus: “No. I didn’t keep it up. We have nothing
in common.”
She was old--old. She had nothing in common with youth, nothing in
common with middle age, with intellectual, exclusive people connected
with _The Spectator_. She said, “_The Spectator_ is not what it used to
be in my father’s time.”
Harriett Frean was not what she used to be. She was aware of the
creeping fret, the poisons and obstructions of decay. It was as if she
had parted with her own light, elastic body, and succeeded to somebody
else’s that was all bone, heavy, stiff, irresponsive to her will. Her
brain felt swollen and brittle, she had a feeling of tiredness in her
face, of infirmity about her mouth. Her looking-glass showed her the
fallen yellow skin, the furrowed lines of age.
Her head dropped, drowsy, giddy over the week’s accounts. She gave up
even the semblance of her housekeeping, and became permanently dependent
on Maggie. She was happy in the surrender of her responsibility, of
the grown-up self she had maintained with so much effort, clinging to
Maggie, submitting to Maggie, as she had clung and submitted to her
mother.
Her affection concentrated on two objects, the house and Maggie, Maggie
and the house. The house had become a part of herself, an extension
of her body, a protective shell. She was uneasy when away from it.
The thought of it drew her with passion: the low brown wall with the
railing, the flagged path from the little green gate to the front
door. The square brown front; the two oblong, white-framed windows,
the dark-green trellis porch between; the three windows above. And the
clipped privet bush by the trellis and the may tree by the gate.
She no longer enjoyed visiting her friends. She set out in peevish
resignation, leaving her house, and when she had sat half an hour with
Lizzie or Sarah or Connie she would begin to fidget, miserable till she
got back to it again; to the house and Maggie.
She was glad enough when Lizzie came to her; she still liked Lizzie
best. They would sit together, one on each side of the fireplace,
talking. Harriett’s voice came thinly through her thin lips, precise yet
plaintive, Lizzie’s finished with a snap of the bent-in jaws.
“Do you remember those little round hats we used to wear? You had one
exactly like mine. Connie couldn’t wear them.”
“We were wild young things,” said Lizzie. “I was wilder than you.... A
little audacious thing.”
“And look at us now--we couldn’t say ‘Bo’ to a goose.... Well, we may be
thankful we haven’t gone stout like Connie Pennefather.”
“Or poor Sarah. That stoop.”
They drew themselves up. Their straight, slender shoulders rebuked
Connie’s obesity, and Sarah’s bent back, her bodice stretched hump-wise
from the stuck-out ridges of her stays.
Harriett was glad when Lizzie went and left her to Maggie and the house.
She always hoped she wouldn’t stay for tea, so that Maggie might not
have an extra cup and plate to wash.
The years passed: the sixty-third, sixty-fourth, sixty-fifth; their
monotony mitigated by long spells of torpor and the sheer rapidity of
time. Her mind was carried on, empty, in empty, flying time. She had
a feeling of dryness and distension in all her being, and a sort of
crepitation in her brain, irritating her to yawning fits. After meals,
sitting in her armchair, her book would drop from her hands and her mind
would slip from drowsiness into stupor. There was something voluptuous
about the beginning of this state; she would give herself up to it with
an animal pleasure and content.
Sometimes, for long periods, her mind would go backwards, returning,
always returning, to the house in Black’s Lane. She would see the row of
elms and the white wall at the end with the green balcony hung out like
a birdcage above the green door. She would see herself, a girl wearing
a big chignon and a little round hat; or sitting in the curly chair with
her feet on the white rug; and her father, slender and straight, smiling
half-amused, while her mother read aloud to them. Or she was a child in
a black silk apron going up Black’s Lane. Little audacious thing. She
had a fondness and admiration for this child and her audacity. And
always she saw her mother, with her sweet face between the long, hanging
curls, coming down the garden path, in a wide silver-gray gown trimmed
with narrow bands of black velvet. And she would wake up, surprised to
find herself sitting in a strange room, dressed in a gown with strange
sleeves that ended in old wrinkled hands; for the book that lay in her
lap was Longfellow, open at _Evangeline_.
One day she made Maggie pull off the old, washed-out cretonne covers,
exposing the faded blue rep. She was back in the drawing-room of her
youth. Only one thing was missing. She went upstairs and took the blue
egg out of the spare room and set it in its place on the marble-topped
table. She sat gazing at it a long time in happy, child-like
satisfaction. The blue egg gave reality to her return.
When she saw Maggie coming in with the tea and buttered scones she
thought of her mother.
Three more years. Harriett was sixty-eight. She had a faint recollection
of having given Maggie notice, long ago, there, in the dining room.
Maggie had stood on the hearthrug, in her large white apron, crying. She
was crying now.
She said she must leave and go and take care of her mother. “Mother’s
getting very feeble now.”
“I’m getting very feeble, too, Maggie. It’s cruel and unkind of you to
leave me.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I can’t help it.”
She moved about the room, sniffing and sobbing as she dusted. Harriett
couldn’t bear it any more. “If you can’t control yourself,” she said,
“go into the kitchen.” Maggie went.
Harriett sat before the fire in her chair, straight and stiff, making no
sound. Now and then her eyelids shook, fluttered red rims; slow, scanty
tears oozed and fell, their trail glistening in the long furrows of her
cheeks.