Free Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson

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, incase 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