Hetty Dorval (13 page)

Here I was, lying beside Hetty Dorval. It was really funny.
Mother, little dragon, what do you think of this?

I lay there trying to be as comfortable as I could in one-third of my own single bed, and trying to go to sleep. Little by little Hetty relaxed into a spacious S again. I got out of bed, furious, turned back the bedclothes, woke her and said, “
HETTY, MOVE OVER
,” and gave her an almighty smack on her round silken bottom. Hetty was very much surprised and a little plaintive, but very soon we were as we had been before. If I was to get any sleep, either she or I had to get out of that bed and sleep in the chair. I become more injured and enraged. Hetty’s pleasant seduction of Richard, her base treatment of her mother, the trouble (and expense, for I had a very small allowance) to which she had put me, all became swallowed up in the magnitude of the fact that Hetty was sleeping in my bed and I was lying on the edge of it, angry and uncomfortable. And I wanted to get to sleep. Hetty asleep was Hetty peaceful so the only thing was to get out and let her have the bed. I got up, curled myself in the chair, covered myself with coats unpleasantly – the coats seemed to be all arms and legs and gaps – and at last went to sleep, rather chilly and in extreme discomfort.

I awoke slowly in a grey morning to hear soft singing. I opened my eyes and saw Hetty at my wash-basin.

She did not sing loudly but very sweetly, and I never hated singing worse. As I opened my eyes I realized that I was stiff, but I was not going to let Hetty be sorry for me.

“Hello,” I said, “you were so greedy that I slept in the chair. I’ve had a marvellous night, and I feel fine. How soon are you going?”

“I found your face cream, Frankie, do you mind?” said Hetty, rubbing her chin with slow experienced finger-tips. “Frankie, you
have
been sweet!” (Oh
no, I hadn’t.)
“Will you do something for me?” Her gentle effrontery was very effective. “Do run down to the telephone wherever it is and ring up Jules Stern – he’s at Claridge’s – and tell him to call for me here. At once. Before he goes. Hurry, Frankie, if you don’t mind, darling. I’ll tell you after.”

My impulse was to say, “Telephone your Jules Stern yourself,” but I was so anxious to get rid of Hetty, to get her out of my sight and never see her again that I ran downstairs in my dressing-gown, hoping that I would not meet Mrs. Plant, who did not like dressing-gowns.

I got Claridge’s, and I got through to Mr. Stern’s room. A man’s voice answered, “Yes? Here Jules Stern.”

“Mr. Stern,” I said – here was a new world of Hetty’s – “I am speaking for Lady Connot.”

“For Lady Connot? Yes? Who is speaking? That is not Mrs. Broom?” said the voice eagerly and with foreign consonants.

But I was going to remain anonymous. “I am speaking
for Lady Connot. She would like you to call for her as soon as possible, this morning, now, she said, at this address.”

“One moment,
bitte,”
said Jules Stern, in a great hurry. “Yes?”

I gave him the address and then he said anxiously, “She is well? Lady Connot is not ill?”

“No,” I said and I think I laughed, “Lady Connot is very well indeed.”

“Ah,” came a thankful breathing, “tell her I will come soon. At once.” Jules Stern sounded so grateful that it was prophetic. I hung up and went back upstairs to my room. Hetty was nearly dressed. She sat down. “Well? You got him?” she asked cheerfully.

“Yes, I got him and he’s coming at once, and he can’t come too soon for me. I don’t want you here again! You muddle up my life too much. Please, Hetty, look after your own affairs but keep away from me. I’ve got my own life to live and I don’t want ever to see you again –
ever,”
I said, feeling injured, stiff and, this morning, as hard as nails to Hetty Dorval.

“I understand
exactly
. I feel for you,” said Hetty regarding me sympathetically. “It is preposterous the way other people clutter up and complicate one’s life. It is my own phobia, Frankie, and I understand you … so well. But I must tell you about Jules. You wouldn’t like him, Frankie – oh no, you’d not like Jules at all. Poor Jules was very upset, about Richard, I mean. He’s never seen Rick, but of course he knew there was suddenly someone. Rick is a thousand times nicer, but it wouldn’t do.” Reflectively, “I see quite plainly that it wouldn’t do. And young girls are all very well but … one can’t give up one’s
life
, exactly, can one? … And Jules has put off and put off going back to Vienna, so I think I’ll go with him,
Frankie. Now. I’ve always longed to live in Vienna, it sounds just what I’d like – riding in the Prater – and the music, too. Jules would look awfully funny on a horse, but he doesn’t need to ride. I shall ride. But he adores music. He plays magnificently. And he’s terribly rich. There’s something very
sweet
about Jules,” she said, pulling her gloves.

“Oh, Hetty, you make me sick!” I said angrily, and then I stopped, glad that Rick was free of this woman, trouble or no, since she preferred the rich Jules Stern to him.

Hetty seemed very much surprised at this outburst and her eyebrows lifted in tragic gaiety. “Frankie, you’re incomprehensible! I thought you’d be so pleased!” Standing there hatted and furred and gloved, she looked vaguely at the disordered room. “Darling, could I help you with the bed?” This offer was, I think, Hetty’s great atonement for everything, although of course she had no intention of helping with the bed.

I pushed her out of the room. “No, no, don’t help me with anything! There’s a lovely horsehair sitting-room down on the first floor and you can wait there. I’m busy, busy, busy, Hetty – and I’m going back to Paris! Good-bye, good-bye.” “– And oh, Hetty,” I said, “don’t come back for anything. If you’ve left something I’ll throw it down to you out of the window!”

Hetty stood for one moment in the little shadowed hall facing me with a teasing pretty look. She was a picture of elegant sweetness as she stood there. Although I had fought her and driven her off, and would fight her again if I had to and defeat her, too, she was hard to hate as I looked at her. She made a gesture of good-bye and went down the stairs.
(Mrs. Broom, to what a bleak morning you awoke all alone.)

As I watched with satisfaction Hetty going down the narrow stairs, I knew that before she had taken three steps she
had forgotten me, and she had forgotten Richard. She was on her way.

Six weeks later the German Army occupied Vienna. There arose a wall of silence around the city, through which only faint confused sounds were sometimes heard.

Ethel Wilson’s work is mainly in the form of what Henry James called “the beautiful and blest novella,” the short novel with a streamlined narrative aimed from the beginning at a specific resolution.
The Innocent Traveller
is longer and less shapely, doubtless because its scatterbrained gabbling heroine lasts for a hundred years. This book, however, began as Ethel Wilson’s first sustained effort, and gave her an unusual amount of trouble. But
Hetty Dorval
, the two stories in
The Equations of Love, Swamp Angel
, and
Love and Salt Water
are exquisite examples of the novella form. The dénouement of
Hetty Dorval
, with its old-style recognition scene, may seem over-designed for contemporary readers accustomed to finding such things only in detective stories and the like, but perhaps contemporary tastes could do with some expanding.

Besides, it is easy to miss the real irony of Hetty Dorval’s servant turning out to be her mother. Part of the irony is that Hetty is no freak in this respect: Mrs. Broom is typical of the millions of mothers of adolescent and arrested-adolescent sons or daughters who have never been recognized as anything but servants. Then again, most of us, up to a point, take
Longfellow’s advice and act in the living present, but for normal people the present is at the end of the past: it is seen in a continuous temporal dimension. Hetty lives in an abstract present and her past keeps disappearing from her awareness: she can remember having seen people before but she cannot remember friendships, much less obligations. She has the charm of the self-absorbed narcissist who inspires admiration but is never touched by it, a fascination endearing in a baby or a housecat but frightening in an adult human. She is constantly spoken of as though her worst quality is her instinct to walk out of situations as soon as they involve her in responsibilities; but what makes her sinister is rather the way she walks into them. Wherever she is, some male in her orbit will move toward her, and the praying mantis will soon have another meal. But when nemesis is finally outraged beyond endurance, and confronts her with her entire past in accusation and righteous wrath, there is no melodrama: she merely stares at it innocently and waits for it to go away. It does: that is not how the Hettys of this world are caught. If they are caught, it is by totally unrelated accidents, like the one indicated unobtrusively in the last two sentences.

If the book were, as its title threatens, the story of Hetty Dorval, it might become tedious. But it is really the story of how the narrator Frankie grows from a child of thirteen into a mature woman. She has a decent father, a shrewd careful mother, and some good friends ready to help her over the rough spots. But they are dead or absent when the crisis comes, and it is Hetty, who never did anything in her life except help herself, Hetty who is not a friend but keeps turning up like an apparition in a Victorian ghost story, who actually becomes the midwife in Frankie’s second birth. Of course her help is purely negative, but it is help none the less.

We first see Frankie and Hetty in the tightly constricted society of a small town in the British Columbia hinterland, where the impetuous Thompson River plunges into the devious and dangerous Fraser. Why Hetty went there and how her reputation preceded her we are not clearly told, but the fact that she is cut off from her community is mainly her own doing. No man is an island, says John Donne in the great meditation that forms the motto of the book, but Hetty is determined to be and remain an island. Frankie is naturally enchanted by a much older stranger from the outside world, and one who gives her some sense, however shallow, of what it would be like to be a complete individual in her own right. Even the pact to keep their friendship secret, though silly and creating a rift with her family, helps in a way to develop this sense. Gradually the relation changes, until at the end Hetty, temporarily in trouble, comes to Frankie and asks to share her bed, lying down in it in a (what else?) S-curve that takes up all the room. Frankie gives her a hard smack on the posterior and tells her to move over: this does not get her a fair share of the bed, naturally, but it marks the final reversal of the adult-child relation between the two.

In the background is the close proximity of nature, the
genius loci
as the author calls it, and the loving descriptions of it give the story a most distinctive beauty. But for all the beauty there is a predatory side to nature, a total indifference of every living thing to the welfare or comfort of others, with which Hetty’s self-absorption blends. It is the seasonal flight of wild geese that makes the most lasting impression on both: doubtless it suggests directed flight to Frankie and simple escape to Hetty.

Hetty Dorval
establishes Ethel Wilson’s world, a world bounded on the west by Vancouver Island and on the east by the Okanagan valley, which links up readily with the rest of Canada and with England, but seldom crosses the United States boundary. In
Hetty Dorval
many themes are embryonic that are more deeply explored in later works. It is interesting to contrast Hetty with the heroine of “Lilly’s Story” in
The Equations of Love
, who starts out as a kicked-around alleycat but forms an iron resolution to live “like folks,” to achieve bourgeois respectability for herself and her daughter, and finally succeeds. She too obliterates her past, but with a vision of a future society to counterbalance it. The evocations of the British Columbia landscape, with its hills and alfalfa fields and fishing streams, have a symbolic relevance to the action, but no real “objective correlative” emerges, like the series of images which (as a somewhat defensive prefatory note tells us) are correlated with Topaz in
The Innocent Traveller
, much less anything like the revolver that gives its name to
Swamp Angel
. Carefully limited, quiet and unpretentious,
Hetty Dorval
is a typical first novel of a writer of great ability and a sure sense of direction.

FICTION
Hetty Dorval (1947)
The Innocent Traveller (1949)
The Equations of Love (1952)
Swamp Angel (1954)
Love and Salt Water (1956)
Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories (1961)

SELECTED WRITINGS
Ethel Wilson: Stories, Essays,
and Letters [ed. David Stouck] (1987)