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 anæsthetic
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----"