"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.

She read more and more novels from the circulating libraries, of a kind demanding less and less effort of attention. And always her inability to concentrate appeared to her as a just demand for clarity: "The man has no business to write so that I can't understand him."

She laid in a weekly stock of opinions from The Spectator, and by this means contrived a semblance of intellectual life.

She was appeased more and more by the rhythm of the seasons, of the weeks, of day and night, by the first coming up of the pink and wine-brown velvet primulas, by the pungent, burnt smell of her morning coffee, the smell of a midday stew, of hot cakes baking for tea time; by the lighting of the lamp, the lighting of autumn fires, the round of her visits. She waited with a strained, expectant desire for the moment when it would be time to see Lizzie or Sarah or Connie Pennefather again.

Seeing them was a habit she couldn't get over. But it no longer gave her keen pleasure. She told herself that her three friends were deteriorating in their middle age. Lizzie's sharp face darted malice; her tongue was whipcord; she knew where to flick; the small gleam of her eyes, the snap of her nutcracker jaws irritated Harriett. Sarah was slow; slow. She took no care of her face and figure. As Lizzie put it, Sarah's appearance was an outrage on her contemporaries. "She makes us feel so old."

And Connie—the very rucking of Connie's coat about her broad hips irritated Harriett. She had a way of staring over her fat cheeks at Harriett's old suits, mistaking them for new ones, and saying the same exasperating thing. "You're lucky to be able to afford it. I can't."

Harriett's irritation mounted up and up.

And one day she quarreled with Connie.

Connie had been telling one of her stories; leaning a little sideways, her skirt stretched tight between her fat, parted knees, the broad roll of her smile sliding greasily. She had "grown out of it" in her young womanhood, and now in her middle age she had come back to it again. She was just like her father.

"Connie, how can you be so coarse?"

"I beg pardon. I forgot you were always better than everybody else."

"I'm not better than everybody else. I've only been brought up better than some people. My father would have died rather than have told a story like that."

"I suppose that's a dig at my parents."

"I never said anything about your parents."

"I know the things you think about my father."

"Well—I daresay he thinks things about me."

"He thinks you were always an incurable old maid, my dear."

"Did he think my father was an old maid?"

"I never heard him say one unkind word about your father."

"I should hope not, indeed."

"Unkind things were said. Not by him. Though he might have been forgiven——"

"I don't know what you mean. But all my father's creditors were paid in full. You know that."

"I didn't know it."

"You know it now. Was your father one of them?"

"No. It was as bad for him as if he had been, though."

"How do you make that out?"

"Well, my dear, if he hadn't taken your father's advice he might have been a rich man now instead of a poor one.... He invested all his money as he told him."

"In my father's things?"

"In things he was interested in. And he lost it."

"It shows how he must have trusted him."

"He wasn't the only one who was ruined by his trust."

Harriett blinked. Her mind swerved from the blow. "I think you must be mistaken," she said.

"I'm less likely to be mistaken than you, my dear, though he was your father."

Harriett sat up, straight and stiff. "Well, your father's alive, and he's dead."

"I don't see what that has to do with it."

"Don't you? If it had happened the other way about, your father wouldn't have died."

Connie stared stupidly at Harriett, not taking it in. Presently she got up and left her. She moved clumsily, her broad hips shaking.

Harriett put on her hat and went round to Lizzie and Sarah in turn. They would know whether it were true or not. They would know whether Mr. Hancock had been ruined by his own fault or Papa's.

Sarah was sorry. She picked up a fold of her skirt and crumpled it in her fingers, and said over and over again, "She oughtn't to have told you." But she didn't say it wasn't true. Neither did Lizzie, though her tongue was a whip for Connie.

"Because you can't stand her dirty stories she goes and tells you this. It shows what Connie is."

It showed her father as he was, too. Not wise. Not wise all the time. Courageous, always, loving danger, intolerant of security, wild under all his quietness and gentleness, taking madder and madder risks, playing his game with an awful, cool recklessness. Then letting other people in; ruining Mr. Hancock, the little man he used to laugh at. And it had killed him. He hadn't been sorry for Mamma, because he knew she was glad the mad game was over; but he had thought and thought about him, the little dirty man, until he had died of thinking.



XIII

New people had come to the house next door. Harriett saw a pretty girl going in and out. She had not called; she was not going to call. Their cat came over the garden wall and bit off the blades of the irises. When he sat down on the mignonette Harriett sent a note round by Maggie: "Miss Frean presents her compliments to the lady next door and would be glad if she would restrain her cat."

Five minutes later the pretty girl appeared with the cat in her arms.

"I've brought Mimi," she said. "I want you to see what a darling he is."

Mimi, a Persian, all orange on the top and snow white underneath, climbed her breast to hang flattened out against her shoulder, long, the great plume of his tail fanning her. She swung round to show the innocence of his amber eyes and the pink arch of his mouth supporting his pink nose.

"I want you to see my mignonette," said Harriett. They stood together by the crushed ring where Mimi had made his bed.

The pretty girl said she was sorry. "But, you see, we can't restrain him. I don't know what's to be done.... Unless you kept a cat yourself; then you won't mind."

"But," Harriett said, "I don't like cats."

"Oh, why not?"

Harriett knew why. A cat was a compromise, a substitute, a subterfuge. Her pride couldn't stoop. She was afraid of Mimi, of his enchanting play, and the soft white fur of his stomach. Maggie's baby. So she said, "Because they destroy the beds. And they kill birds."

The pretty girl's chin burrowed in Mimi's neck. "You won't throw stones at him?" she said.

"No, I wouldn't hurt him.... What did you say his name was?"

"Mimi."

Harriett softened. She remembered. "When I was a little girl I had a cat called Mimi. White Angora. Very handsome. And your name is——"

"Brailsford. I'm Dorothy."

Next time, when Mimi jumped on the lupins and broke them down, Dorothy came again and said she was sorry. And she stayed to tea. Harriett revealed herself.

"My father was Hilton Frean." She had noticed for the last fifteen years that people showed no interest when she told them that. They even stared as though she had said something that had no sense in it. Dorothy said, "How nice."

"Nice?"

"I mean it must have been nice to have him for your father.... You don't mind my coming into your garden last thing to catch Mimi?"

Harriett felt a sudden yearning for Dorothy. She saw a pleasure, a happiness, in her coming. She wasn't going to call, but she sent little notes in to Dorothy asking her to come to tea.

Dorothy declined.

But every evening, towards bedtime, she came into the garden to catch Mimi. Through the window Harriett could hear her calling: "Mimi! Mimi!" She could see her in her white frock, moving about, hovering, ready to pounce as Mimi dashed from the bushes. She thought: "She walks into my garden as if it was her own. But she won't make a friend of me. She's young, and I'm old."

She had a piece of wire netting put up along the wall to keep Mimi out.

"That's the end of it," she said. She could never think of the young girl without a pang of sadness and resentment.

Fifty-five. Sixty.

In her sixty-second year Harriett had her first bad illness.

It was so like Sarah Barmby. Sarah got influenza and regarded it as a common cold and gave it to Harriett who regarded it as a common cold and got pleurisy.

When the pain was over she enjoyed her illness, the peace and rest of lying there, supported by the bed, holding out her lean arms to be washed by Maggie; closing her eyes in bliss while Maggie combed and brushed and plaited her fine gray hair. She liked having the same food at the same hours. She would look up, smiling weakly, when Maggie came at bedtime with the little tray. "What have you brought me now, Maggie?"

"Benger's Food, ma'am."

She wanted it to be always Benger's Food at bedtime. She lived by habit, by the punctual fulfillment of her expectation. She loved the doctor's visits at twelve o'clock, his air of brooding absorption in her case, his consultations with Maggie, the seriousness and sanctity he attached to the humblest details of her existence.

Above all she loved the comfort and protection of Maggie, the sight of Maggie's broad, tender face as it bent over her, the feeling of Maggie's strong arms as they supported her, the hovering pressure of the firm, broad body in the clean white apron and the cap. Her eyes rested on it with affection; she found shelter in Maggie as she had found it in her mother.

One day she said, "Why did you come to me, Maggie? Couldn't you have found a better place?"

"There was many wanted me. But I came to you, ma'am, because you seemed to sort of need me most. I dearly love looking after people. Old ladies and children. And gentlemen, if they're ill enough," Maggie said.

"You're a good girl, Maggie."

She had forgotten. The image of Maggie's baby was dead, hidden, buried deep down in her mind. She closed her eyes. Her head was thrown back, motionless, ecstatic under Maggie's flickering fingers as they plaited her thin wisps of hair.

Out of the peace of illness she entered on the misery and long labor of convalescence. The first time Maggie left her to dress herself she wept. She didn't want to get well. She could see nothing in recovery but the end of privilege and prestige, the obligation to return to a task she was tired of, a difficult and terrifying task.

By summer she was up and (tremulously) about again.



XIV

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.



XV

The door of the specialist's house had shut behind them with a soft, respectful click.

Lizzie Pierce and Harriett sat in the taxicab, holding each other's hands. Harriett spoke.

"He says I've got what Mamma had."

Lizzie blinked away her tears; her hand loosened and tightened on Harriett's with a nervous clutch.

Harriett felt nothing but a strange, solemn excitement and exaltation. She was raised to her mother's eminence in pain. With every stab she would live again in her mother. She had what her mother had.

Only she would have an operation. This different thing was what she dreaded, the thing her mother hadn't had, and the going away into the hospital, to live exposed in the free ward among other people. That was what she minded most. That and leaving her house, and Maggie's leaving.

She cried when she saw Maggie standing at the gate in her white apron as the taxicab took her away. She thought, "When I come back again she won't be there." Yet somehow she felt that it wouldn't happen; it was impossible that she should come back and not find Maggie there.

She lay in her white bed in the white-curtained cubicle. Lizzie was paying for the cubicle. Kind Lizzie. Kind. Kind.

She wasn't afraid of the operation. It would happen in the morning. Only one thing worried her. Something Connie had told her. Under the anaesthetic you said things. Shocking, indecent things. But there wasn't anything she could say. She didn't know anything.... Yes. She did. There were Connie's stories. And Black's Lane. Behind the dirty blue palings in Black's Lane.

The nurses comforted her. They said if you kept your mouth tight shut, up to the last minute before the operation, if you didn't say one word you were all right.

She thought about it after she woke in the morning. For a whole hour before the operation she refused to speak, nodding and shaking her head, communicating by gestures. She walked down the wide corridor of the ward on her way to the theatre, very upright in her white flannel dressing gown, with her chin held high and a look of exaltation on her face. There were convalescents in the corridor. They saw her. The curtains before some of the cubicles were parted; the patients saw her; they knew what she was going to. Her exaltation mounted.

She came into the theatre. It was all white. White. White tiles. Rows of little slender knives on a glass shelf, under glass, shining. A white sink in the corner. A mixed smell of iodine and ether. The surgeon wore a white coat. Harriett made her tight lips tighter.

She climbed on to the white enamel table, and lay down, drawing her dressing gown straight about her knees. She had not said one word.

* * * * *

She had behaved beautifully.

The pain in her body came up, wave after wave, burning. It swelled, tightening, stretching out her wounded flesh.

She knew that the little man they called the doctor was really Mr. Hancock. They oughtn't to have let him in. She cried out. "Take him away. Don't let him touch me;" but nobody took any notice.

"It isn't right," she said. "He oughtn't to do it. Not to any woman. If it was known he would be punished."

And there was Maggie by the curtain, crying.

"That's Maggie. She's crying because she thinks I killed her baby."

The ice bag laid across her body stirred like a live thing as the ice melted, then it settled and was still. She put her hand down and felt the smooth, cold oilskin distended with water.

"There's a dead baby in the bed. Red hair. They ought to have taken it away," she said. "Maggie had a baby once. She took it up the lane to the place where the man is; and they put it behind the palings. Dirty blue palings.

"...Pussycat. Pussycat, what did you there? Pussy. Prissie. Prissiecat. Poor Prissie. She never goes to bed. She can't get up out of the chair."

A figure in white, with a stiff white cap, stood by the bed. She named it, fixed it in her mind. Nurse. Nurse—that was what it was. She spoke to it. "It's sad—sad to go through so much pain and then to have a dead baby."

The white curtain walls of the cubicle contracted, closed in on her. She was lying at the bottom of her white-curtained nursery cot. She felt weak and diminished, small, like a very little child.

The front curtains parted, showing the blond light of the corridor beyond. She saw the nursery door open and the light from the candle moved across the ceiling. The gap was filled by the heavy form, the obscene yet sorrowful face of Connie Pennefather.

Harriett looked at it. She smiled with a sudden ecstatic wonder and recognition.

"Mamma——"

THE END