Free Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson Page B

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 andtherefore 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 forher, 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,