Chapter 4

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.

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.