Hetty Dorval (12 page)

“Mouse,” she said at last, “that’s not true!”

“Hester, I am your mother,” repeated Mrs. Broom sombrely. “Many’s the time I’ve near told you and now I’ve done it.”

“Why …” said Hetty, and then she stopped. “Who …” And she stopped again. “Mouse, you can’t prove it!”

“Prove it!” said Mrs. Broom scornfully, “I’ve no call to prove it. I don’t have to prove it. You’re my daughter, Hester, and you’ve brought me nothing but trouble from the minute you could speak and you’ve never given me any real love.”

Hetty’s mind was set on something. She didn’t seem to listen. She looked through the room, through the walls, and concentrated on something.

“Then who is my father?” she said at last, looking up at Mrs. Broom, and I found myself sorry for Hetty. If there was a side, I was on Hetty’s side.

“You’d like to know!”
said Mrs. Broom with gathered anger and scorn, and the words un-dammed and began to flow. “You’d like to know who your father is and you’ll never know! I’ll never tell you! He done all right by you and it was his money you lived by till you was twenty-one and after, and it was his money edjcated you well, and if I loosed you on him now, he and his would never know another happy minute from you … he’s pretty near forgotten about me and about you too by now. And you’ve led me to trouble and hard work and shame of you, and me always your servant. I pretty near left you in Hongkong, and pretty near left you in Shanghai, and Lytton, and Vancouver, and Montreal. You near drove me to it but I stayed by you and by you and now you’d marry this man and bring the same to these decent people as you done to me. I’ll tell him first that you’re rotten bad and selfish and see how he likes it.
You done all right without a mother.”
The bitterness that Mrs. Broom put into those words was ferocious.

Hetty had shrunk back on the couch as though she had been struck and I was sorry for her. Like a fool I was so sorry for her that I spoke to Mrs. Broom. Like a fool indeed.

“Oh, Mrs. Broom,” I said, “why did you do this to Hetty now? Why did you let Hetty grow up like this, all in the dark …? If you’d brought her up like mother and daughter maybe she’d …”

She flashed round at me. “A lot you know, you comfortable safe ones. Wait till you’ve had your baby in secret, my fine girl, in a dirty foreign place, and found a way to keep her sweet and clean and a lady like her father’s people was, before you talk so loud. Shut your mouth!”

Hetty put her hands to her head. She smoothed her hands over her eyes and forehead, over and over, mechanically. And then a bell rang in the house. Again … again … the bell rang again. I do not think that Mrs. Broom or Hetty even heard this loud jangling bell, and I did not stir. Mrs. Broom looked with great intensity at Hetty, whose eyes were closed. “Oh, do what you like,” she said in an anguish, “marry who you like and where you want to. I’ve done. I’m tired. I’m going. I’m not going to follow your damned dance any more. You’re not sorry for
me
, Hester. You’re not giving me a thought. You never have and you never will, not to nobody.” And she stood there, still leaning upon the table, looking at Hetty with grief and need.

And Hetty did exactly what Hetty would do. She did not speak to her mother. Without a word or a look she rose and slowly went out of the room, closing the door behind her, and left her mother standing there, looking after her with a ravaged face.

Mrs. Broom had forgotten me. She now looked down at her hands, and so did I. Her hands, with the pressure upon
the table, were red and looked swollen and congested. She held up her hands and regarded them strangely, turning their roughness this way and that to the light. What she thought as she regarded her worn hands so strangely I could only guess.

As Mrs. Broom seemed oblivious of me, and I am sure that she was, I found myself no longer necessary to this situation. I went into the hall and put on my mackintosh, very much astonished. She, lost in her own dreadful moment, neither saw nor heard me go.

While Mrs. Broom and I had stood there in silence, I had heard a telephone bell ring in what seemed to be Hetty’s room. Perhaps she had answered it. I did not know. I heard no voice. When I opened the front door to go out again into the rain, I almost ran into Rick, who saw me in the light of the street lamp and stopped suddenly. I closed the door behind me and the lock clicked.

“What are
you
doing here?” Rick said to me angrily.

“Oh hello, Rick,” I said, “Was that you ringing? I heard someone ringing.”

“Yes, and no one came. I saw the lights on up there and I knew there was someone in and I went and telephoned and Hetty told me not to come … So I came. What are you doing here, Frankie? Why aren’t you in Paris? Why did you write me that letter? By the way, I tore it up. Please don’t meddle in my business.”

“Rick,” I said, “when I wrote you that letter Hetty wasn’t your business. She was my business. Let me go. It’s raining. I’m going home.”

Rick stood square in front of me. “You’ve got to tell me what brought you here tonight. When I saw Hetty yesterday we arranged definitely that I should call for her tonight. There was no word of you coming then. And now you’re here – and
when I telephoned now she told me to go away and then she hung up. Frankie, you’re a devil! Why
are
you here? You’re up to something.” Rick was very angry and I must say it was a queer spot to be in. I had never seen him like this before. But I’d seen something tonight that made me not care.

I stuck my hands in my mackintosh pockets and there we stood in the rain, Rick blocking my way and glowering. “Well,” I said, “Rick, I had business with Hetty that arose – yesterday. And it had to be settled at once.”

“What business?”

“My business was with Hetty,” I said as coldly as I knew how, “and you can just stop hectoring me like this. But I’ll tell you something. Mrs. Broom and Hetty have had a row and I think Mrs. Broom will leave Hetty – or Hetty will leave Mrs. Broom more likely.”

“Mrs. Broom leave her?” said Richard, “she never will. She’s devoted to her! Hetty! Poor kid!” And he made a move as if to ring the bell again.

I put my hand on his arm. “Rick,” I said very earnestly, “there’s trouble between Hetty and Mrs. Broom and if you try to go in – well, they just won’t let you in. They’re not thinking about you now. I’m telling you, Rick. Now I’m going – no, I’ll take myself home, thank you, I don’t feel like having your company,” – not that he had shown any sign of taking me home, but I was going to get that in first – and I started down the steps, thinking that this was a good note on which to leave him. I looked back, though, and when I saw Rick standing there, I stopped and said, “Rick! Don’t start thinking that Hetty’s unhappy and that her heart is broken and that you have to do something about it. Believe me, Hetty’s heart has never broken yet, and it’s not going to begin now. Goodnight, dear Rick.”

I don’t know whether he heard what I said or cared what I said, because he turned away impatiently and applied himself again to the business of getting into the house. And I went home.

I walked all the way and got to my room wet through and pretty tired. I was devastated too, because take it whichever way you like, Rick was going to be very unhappy – and so was I, as far as I could see.

W
hen I got back to my room at Mrs. Plant’s I unpacked my bag and got ready for bed but I did not go to bed at once. I sat in the one comfortable chair smoking cigarette after cigarette. Lying back watching the sinuous, sensuous, slow convolutions of smoke rising and establishing a soft impalpable grey ceiling above me, in which I all but lost my thoughts, I contemplated the strange and poignant situation of Mrs. Broom. The focus of the
affaire Hetty
had shifted. I could not imagine what new relation would exist between mother and daughter. I wanted Paula to talk to, it was all so extraordinary. Or Mother. Although I had not thought of Mother and Father in relation to this whole matter, I am sure now that it was they who had been the unconscious or subconscious cause of my intervention, which in itself was a fight on behalf of Rick, whether he liked it or not. In this thankless and questionable fight I had handled dynamite, and in so doing had exploded the hidden mine of Mrs. Broom to my own great astonishment (“No man is an Iland,”).

I had just stood up ready to go to bed, when there was a knock at the door and the not very pleased face of Mrs. Plant looked in. “There’s a lady coming to see you, Miss Burnaby,” she said in her own particular tone of asperity, and naturally, for it was too late for visitors. She had gone to bed and had had to get up. And then came Hetty into the room, wonderfully smart and careless. Mrs. Plant gave her a look, and left.

“Hetty!” I said amazed, and perhaps my expression resembled Mrs. Plant’s because Hetty said, “Yes, I know, Frankie. But you’ve no
idea
how dreadful it’s been. Mouse was
frightful
to me.” And Hetty’s eyes were starry and her eyebrows piteous, but her voice was still light and indolent; nothing headlong, nothing lost, nothing distraught about this one who had left a woman in ruins. Hetty sank into the chair and dropped furs, bag, gloves. Gloves, I thought! How curious and how like her that Hetty remembered to bring her gloves. She took off her little hat and dropped that too and smoothed back the fair hair.

“Did you see Rick?” I asked quickly.

“Rick?” said Hetty vaguely. “Oh no, that was
too
much, what was the good? I didn’t want … and I knew, Frankie, you’d give me a bed. I almost thought … Oh,” as her eyes strayed around the room and she saw its plainness, “just that bed? … But it’ll do for tonight,” she said naïvely. “I knew you wouldn’t mind, Frankie.”

And so it was that very soon Hetty was sitting up in my bed, dressed in my best night-dress and saying, “You know, Frankie, I liked your mother.”
Did you? You never knew my mother
. But Hetty took the words out of my mind, “I never knew her, of course, but I observed her on the boat. Your mother’s good, Frankie, and she’s funny too. Amusing, I mean. She’d be fun to be with. I really wish I’d known her in Lytton.”

“Mother’s a darling, she –” I began, and stopped. I couldn’t talk to Hetty, of all people, about my mother – then.

Hetty looked beyond me. “Do you remember that mare I had in Lytton? Juniper? Wasn’t she a beauty? Sometimes when the moon was full I used to saddle Juniper and ride at night down to the Bridge, and across, and up the Lillooet road and off into the hills. And Frankie, it was so queer and beautiful and like nothing else. Though there was nothing round you but the hills and the sage, all very still except for the sound of the river, you felt life in everything and in the moon too. All the shapes different at night. And such stars. And once in the moonlight the geese going over. I remember the shadows the moonlight made on the ground, great round sage-bushes all changed at night into something alive, and everything else silver. And once or twice the northern lights – yes, really. And then the coyotes baying in the hills to the moon – all together, do you remember, Frankie, such queer high yelling as they made, on, and on, and on?”

Yes, I remembered, standing there in London at the foot of a small shabby brass bedstead listening to Hetty, looking at her and wondering, “Do nocturnal animals feel like that? What is Hetty?” I remembered the yelling of the coyotes in the hills, and the moon shining on the hills and on the river; the smell of the sage; and the sudden silence as the coyotes stopped for a moment in their singing all together. I remembered the two coloured rivers. And my home. What a strange Hetty, after such an evening, calling up this magic – for it was a disturbing magic to me, the genius of my home – and Hetty’s smart wrinkly gloves lying on the floor, her little black hat lying there too. I remembered Lytton, and the rivers, and the Bridge, all as real as ever in British Columbia while we looked at each other in London, yet saw them plainly.

As she talked, the hard light of the badly shaded electric bulb above my bed shone upon Hetty’s face and then I saw the lines, faintly. But they were there. Her clever make-up was not there, and she no longer looked ageless, but a little old. “Mouse didn’t like me to take those rides, she was afraid of Indians or animals or something. And Juniper was often nervous. But I never loved anything so much in all my life, Frankie. It sounds ridiculous, but I never felt so
free
, before or since. You know … 
people
 …” and her voice trailed off.

The word “Mouse,” spoken casually and with no emotion at all, reminded me and made me angry. Hetty was here, inescapable, for the night. After that I had done with her. Finished. “Move over, Hetty,” I said crossly, “I’ve got to get to sleep,” and I got in.

“Yes, Frankie,” said Hetty as docile as a child. She turned over in bed and made a beautiful S with herself that nearly pushed me out, and settled herself to sleep. I looked down at her in mystification, for almost before I had time to turn out the light, this woman, whose mind should have been full of consuming sorrow or of rage or even of compassion, was sweetly asleep, the curves of her cheek and of her lips very innocent and tender.

There is that in sleep which reduces us all to one common denominator of helplessness and vulnerable humanity. The soft rise and fall of the unconscious sleeper’s breast is a miracle. It is a binding symbol of our humanity. The child in the lost attitude of sleep is all children, everywhere, in all time. A sleeping human being is all people, sleeping, everywhere since time began. There is that in the sleeper that arrests one, pitying, and that makes us all the same. The rise and the fall of the frail envelope of skin that contains the microcosm of wonder, is the touching sign. If one had an enemy, and if
one saw that enemy sleeping, one might be dangerously moved in pity of spirit by what lies there, unconscious. I looked at Hetty and could almost forgive her because she was Hetty, sleeping; but that did not prevent me from prodding her and saying, “Hetty,
move
over, I’ve got to get to sleep!” There was a murmur, “Oh,
poor
Frankie,” and she moved luxuriously nearer to her edge of the bed and I lay down and turned off the light.