Hetty Dorval (8 page)

Really to know the ocean, really to know that you are at sea, you must, in the dark, go out and feel the invisible wind and look out into the illimitable night. And perhaps if you look down over the rail you will see bright phosphorus tearing at the ship’s sides. Mother and I went out when it was dark to watch, too, the dwindling twinkling lights of land, each of which has a human significance in that place which it illumines. We could now hardly see the outline of the dark and faintly spangled shore. Many other passengers, leaning in twos and threes, also gazed into the dark. Before long I felt someone move up beside me. This was not accident, this was design. This person knew me, and had moved near to me because she knew me. I felt this, and was aware that she was about to speak. I could not see the face clearly but I knew that the person was Hetty.

“Frankie,” the very soft voice said hurriedly in the dark, “and your Mother? Mrs.… Burnaby? Just one word. Please. I must speak to you tonight. Frankie, you were my friend once … for a little while. I don’t know whether you are now or not. And you, Mrs. Burnaby, I cannot tell … but I think you are kind, and I’m casting myself on your generosity, both of you.” Hetty’s voice, usually indifferent and light, was urgent. I heard fear there. “I am going to be married, soon. I am marrying General Connot as soon as we land. He’s old, Mrs. Burnaby, but he knows about me. He knew me before, when I was nearly as young as Frankie.” (Was this woman of unknown experience really ever a girl like me?) “I shan’t trouble you at all, I promise, but please … it’s hard for me to ask this … 
can you forget that you ever knew me or heard my name? I want security,” her voice trembled a little, “I want it badly, and you can take it from me if you talk about me. Do you understand, Frankie? … 
You
understand, Mrs. Burnaby, don’t you? I had to speak now, I couldn’t wait.”

All the time that Hetty was speaking hurriedly and softly people were passing and re-passing in their evening promenade. A small man walked slowly with little steps along the line of leaning passengers, scrutinizing each dark figure and group beside the rail. He stopped near us and Hetty was as though she had not spoken. He recognized her whom he sought and said with relief in his voice, “Hetty, my dear! I lost you, where have you been?” and they moved away together.

It was hard to tell how much of Hetty was artful and how much was artless. But we knew that when she spoke to us she was sincere and frightened, and that we held her in our hands, and I think that whatever Hetty in her time had done to other women, Mother felt sorry for her. Mother was unsentimental, I would say, but she was quick to see and quick to sympathize. Women, and board-ship, and gossip – and Hetty must have known that she was too conspicuous to escape. We could easily do her irrevocable harm.

In our cabin Mother said, “You know, Frankie, I’m always inclined to mistrust a tremble in a woman’s voice. They do it on purpose, some of them. I’ve heard them and I always want to tremble back for fun when it’s just dramatizing. But if it’s real, then you pay attention, Frankie, because that’s when someone needs help or – anyway – understanding. And this was real. That woman is frightened of losing this security, and she very nearly has it. Perhaps she didn’t want it once, but she wants it now. Don’t let’s speak any more about her, Frankie, in
case we make a slip of some kind and hurt her. It would be awfully easy. There’s no need to do that. She is none of our affair now. She says this man knows about her. So let you and me be the three monkeys.” And we were.

I soon joined the confederacy of the young. We were not many but as far as we were concerned the ship was ours, with a reservation of deference to the ship’s officers. We were not intentionally rude to the grown-ups who lay and walked about the place. For the most part we did not see them; we only saw each other; simply they were not there. We were engrossed in our concerns. We played all day; we danced all evening; the rest of the time we ate and slept. Yet in the day-time and in the evening too I was aware of Hetty. It felt queer to be so near to her, without recognition. Even the board-ship critics, it seemed, could find small cause for gossip about her, although everyone noticed her. That was inevitable. Her only faults were that she engaged the attention of too many men without seeming to try to do so, and that she did not respond to nor placate the women. She was adept at being sweetly vague and un-noticing. Her very activities were passive, not active – if you can call it an activity to sit still and appear unconsciously lovely – and so she could not be blamed if the men liked to sit near her and talk, or if sometimes they asked her to sing. Billy Stocker and I, stopping near the Palm Room doors after dinner, sometimes heard the sound of a sweet true voice, singing. Hetty was sitting at the piano and singing as she sang to me at Lytton, partly because Sir Terence Connot asked her to and partly because she loved singing. Three or four men sat near in retrospective attitudes and old General Connot watched her. “I could if I would,” I thought as I looked at Hetty. But Mother and I were true to our ungiven word and Hetty landed safely in England.

A letter written in a large and simple hand reached me a few weeks later. It came from Bath and had been sent to me at Lytton to be forwarded. It read:

So now Hetty was Lady Connot. Mother and I felt that we were never likely to see her again but that still we should say nothing because you never can tell. For, as we told each other, we might, by way of being entertaining, relate the story of Hetty Dorval as it had concerned us, with all its damaging inferences, to someone who might turn out to be General Connot’s sister-in-law, or niece, or friend, unawares, and thereby cause more trouble than we should care for or could undo.

Mother had at last admitted to me that a very ugly story had followed Hetty from Shanghai to Vancouver and so to Lytton. But she did not know the actual truth of it.

T
he genius loci is an incalculable godling whose presence is felt by many people but certainly not by all. Many experience his presence but who knows his name and all his attributes? I have heard that some people who live on our Canadian prairie and are therefore used to flat spaces and far horizons, cannot for long endure even the medium-sized mountains of the Pacific coast. Others from the same prairie, however, find on our mountainous shore their true home. There is no rule about it. The thing goes deeper than like and dislike. It is the genius. To some the genius of a place is inimical; to some it is kind. Marcella Martin, who was a boarder with me at Mrs. Richards’ school, and older than I am, told me that she once went for a holiday with her parents to a valley in the high mountains of Oregon. The mountains ringed them closely round, Marcella said, rising abruptly from the near edge of their camping ground, treading on their toes by day and falling on their heads by night. Everyone but Marcella seemed to think this delightful. Marcella did not dare to confide to her parents that the claustrophobic effect of the mountains was driving her mad. She
became depressed and nervous, and when she heard that, the week before, a very nice young woman had been taken away “raving mad,” she knew perfectly well that the reason was not an unhappy love affair as was said, but that the immoderate mountains had done it. And she became very frightened. When she returned to Vancouver where the mountains are beautiful but moderate and are at a moderate distance, she became herself again and never had a recurrence of this disturbance. Of course, Marcella was an artist whose sensibility may have made her an easy prey to the rapacious god in that place.

My genius of place is a god of water. I have lived where two rivers flow together, and beside the brattling noise of China Creek which tumbles past our ranch house and turns our water wheel, and on the shore of the Pacific Ocean too – my home is there, and I shall go back. And so, when we came to England I was glad that we were to be beside the ocean. Mother’s godfather, old Mr. Trethewey, lived on the Cornish coast, and it was to his house set on the cliffs high above the windy Atlantic that we had a warm welcome.

When we landed, and all the fun of the days on board ship was behind us, I felt that nothing could ever be as good again. The thrills had gone to my head and I was a little above myself. In the train on the way to Cornwall I was moody and homesick for the ship’s friendships which had grown with tropical speed and were all scattered now. The future was bleak or perhaps mouldy – an old gentleman, a grown-up man, a very young girl, and an unknown boarding-school. Mother looked out of the window, reviving memories of green England. I looked too, and half the time I did not see England at all. It would have been pleasant enough if my mind had not been busy re-living the electric days just over. I looked at the future.

“Mother,” I said in a lofty tone that I had just acquired, “how old is this Molly Trethewey?”

“Molly? Oh, about twelve or thirteen – perhaps fourteen – I don’t know,” said Mother.

“Oh, just a kid!” I said, in my new loftiest manner. This did not have a good effect on Mother.

“Frankie, you can be very irritating,” she said coolly. “You have been getting a bit too bumptious the last few days. It’s a good thing for you that the ocean voyage ended, it was about a day too long. I’d like to remind you that
you
were fourteen two years ago, and that up till now the world owes you nothing whatever. You owe the world everything and now you are being offered a home by Uncle David Trethewey and his nephew Richard and his niece Molly and it doesn’t matter what age she is. She can be two if she likes. And moreover,” looking at her wrist watch, “you’ve got just about an hour in which to get natural again, and not be a silly ass like that Pamela Something on the ship.” And Mother turned to the window and continued to look out with detached interest.

Well really! Me! Irritating! Bumptious! Well! Mother must have been saving this up for a day or two, the way she said it.

I should like to describe Molly and Richard and their guardian, “our” Uncle David Trethewey, because they are very important to me and have meant a great deal in my life, and now they always will. But this is not a story of me, nor of them, in a way, but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared. It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell. I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance. Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and
therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill. Take your choice. But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself. And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known. One guesses only from what one discerns. Any positive efforts that one could discern on the part of Hetty were directed towards isolating herself from responsibilities to other people. She endeavoured to island herself in her own particular world of comfort and irresponsibility. (“I will
not
have my life complicated.”) But “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe”; said Mother’s poet three hundred years ago, and Hetty could not island herself, because we impinge on each other, we touch, we glance, we press, we touch again, we cannot escape. “No man is an Iland.” Who touched me? …

And so I will write down something about Richard and Molly who were candid and knowable, and whom I came to love so well. I must write it because their relationship to each other, and to myself, is part of the story of Hetty Dorval.

Richard and Molly are brother and sister born with years between them of parents who died when Molly was five years old and Richard a boy of eighteen.

Richard at once took Molly as his care. He was not only a brother, he was all the father and mother and nurse that a big boy can be to a little sister. Although their father’s older brother – our Uncle David – became their real guardian and Molly lived in his home, Richard felt all a big brother’s solicitude for
her, and shared her guardianship with her uncle, who encouraged this. Molly on her side lived her happy child’s life by the sea with her uncle, looking always for Richard’s returnings from Cambridge, and later from the journeys near and far on which he was sent by his engineering firm.

During the short week that Mother and I first spent at Cliff House we soon understood this. Richard was there in essence, for he seemed to be the complement of Molly’s life and of Uncle David’s too, and the near coming of Christmas meant the coming of Richard. During that week, this little nut-brown Molly taught me the neighbourhood. We went together down the hill to the village and the quay and watched the fishermen at their boats and at their nets. While Mother and Uncle David talked their long renewing talks, Molly and I climbed amongst the heather. Nothing lay between the house and the edge of the cliff but heather. There seemed to be a very large quantity of sky above for so small a country as England, I thought, and at the foot of the cliffs, from tide marks to horizon, lay the ocean. There was smallness, but there were horizons, too. I discovered that English skies are large, and whether they are dull and lowering, or luminously moist and grey, or blue with infinitely great and billowing white clouds, they have a particular quality of space and Englishness. When Mother and I left to do the school-hunting business that had to be finished before Christmas week, Uncle David and Molly were established in my affection as people I belonged with and wanted to come back to.

Father’s cable about the bungalow came to Mother on Christmas Day, and Mother was half laughing and half crying. I realized that the bond between Mother and Father was so close that this separation of six thousand miles was like a physical hurt to Mother, and Christmas made it worse.
Uncle David, Richard and Molly were kind and perfect, but that was not enough. I would have been entirely happy in this English Christmas had it not been for the queer infusion of distress for Mother and the realization that, love her as I did and as she loved me, we were all of us as shadows to her compared with Father. When Mother’s loving duty was done to me and I was cheerfully settled at school near London, she left England for home with unrestrained delight.