Hetty Dorval (6 page)

Most of the fair people lived in their vans or trailers. Some tried to get lodgings in Lytton. Old Mrs. Anderson who let clean rooms to clean business men was affronted. “Them show people askin’ me for rooms!” she said, “No, sir! Just let one of ‘em in and you’ll have the whole lot goin’ upstairs usin’ the bathroom and God knows what!”

I went to the fair with Ernestine and her father and mother. We walked through the dark quiet Lytton street under a night of stars towards the garish lights and music. The prancing excitement that Ernestine and I felt was all mixed up with the greasy smells from the hot-dog stand; the sudden light and the sudden darkness; the cacophony of sound; motion revolving horizontally, vertically, passing and repassing; drifting town and country people; darting children; barking dogs; all happening together, noise, flare, smell, motion, and the small crowds standing with upturned faces
gazing at the picture in front of the lighted booth of Torquil the Lobster Boy.

There hung Torquil’s picture on the painted and concealing screen. Torquil was large and pink. He sat upon a sand pile in a marine landscape and looked at nothing. His arms ended in out-size claws or snappers. So did his legs. It was impossible to tell from his picture how Torquil moved about. Was Torquil the subject of some affliction that separated him tragically from his fellows, or did he put on his snappers in the morning, and at night unscrew them and go to bed?

We all crowded in. Torquil sat against a back-drop of whales and fishes. We stared avidly at him as he chewed gum and looked cynically upon us. When he waved his blistered pink flannelly snappers at us a satisfaction filled the crowd. We did not quibble at Torquil for having been boiled until his snappers were red. We drifted on, and on, and circled and swung, and Ernestine and I went to bed that night whirling with lights and music and Torquil the Lobster Boy. I went to sleep to a rhythm – “Torquil the Lobster
Boy
. Torquil the Lobster Boy. Torquil the …”

Next night we went with some other children and their parents, whom we quickly lost. Suddenly I thought, this is my chance; no one will miss me; and I slipped away from the weaving crowd. Smell and flare melted into noise and noise into flare as I hurried away through the dark street to the other end of Lytton where the houses thinned out to nothing; up the dark slopes with hardly a sound of the calliope in the distance; through the scent of the sage-brush and the noise of the white-laced rushing river, up to where the bungalow showed against the sky. The windows shone square and bright. I went on, without stopping to look in at the window
(“My
daughter
a Peeping Tom!”), and knocked on the door. The door opened and showed the solid form of Mrs. Broom with Sailor beside her. She peered at me. “Oh, it’s you. Well?”

“Please may I see Mrs. Dorval just a minute?” I asked.

Mrs. Broom did not answer, and I really thought she was going to shut the door in my face when I saw behind her Mrs. Dorval standing. She was in her dressing-gown and I think she must have been ready for bed, for her fair hair was tied back straight from her face and this gave her in the firelight the look of a child.

“Oh,” she cried, “it’s my faithless Frankie! Where
have
you been? Come in and shut the door.”

I did. Mrs. Broom went into the kitchen and Sailor ambled to the hearthrug and lay down.

I stood there gazing at Mrs. Dorval, probably with my face incandescent with the devotion and distress of youth. It flashed through my mind that here I was, all alone, looking at the beautiful Mrs. Dorval, while at the other end of Lytton hundreds of people were paying money to gaze upon Torquil the Lobster Boy. They should have paid money to see Mrs. Dorval. They would have turned and left him.

“Mrs. Dorval,” I began, very solemnly I suppose, for she laughed at me and said, “Sit down, Frankie, and don’t look so serious. Do you think if you tried hard you could call me Hetty?” And she sat on the couch and leaned forward smiling, her hands clasped upon her knees.

“Oh no, Mrs. Dorval, I couldn’t possibly call you Hetty! I wouldn’t feel right. And I can’t sit down because I’ve just come to say good-bye.”

Hetty’s eyebrows grew tragic (which of course meant nothing). “Oh, Frankie, are you going away?”

Here was a way out. “Yes,” I said, “I’m going away –” and then with a rush of truthfulness, “but not yet, and that’s not why I’ve come. It isn’t that, it’s that I mustn’t come again. Father and Mother don’t know I’m here tonight, but,” I gobbled, “I shall tell them because they didn’t mean me to come. And I’m sorry, Mrs. Dorval, because I loved it, but I can’t come again.” There. It was done.

Hetty looked at me and I did not know what she was thinking.

“People are very tiresome,” she said thoughtfully. “I have come as far away from people as I can, and yet they go on being tiresome. They make scenes and complicate life terribly. I don’t want to have my life complicated and I can’t bear scenes. I don’t really like women, Frankie – except Mouse, of course – they’re the worst, but I thought that you, being just a child … and when I saw how you loved the wild geese, I liked you.” I nodded.

She looked at the fire a minute and then went on. “I know what they’ve told you, Frankie. They’ve told you I’m bad. You must try to believe,” she turned her brilliant look on me, “that I’m
not
bad, and that if you knew a little more, you’d understand about it. Can you believe that? … Do
you
think I’m bad, Frankie?” she said, laughing a little.

I almost whispered, “No.”

“Try and stay my friend,” she said. “Even if you can’t come to see me, try and stay my friend … Very well … Good-bye …” and with as little emotion as she would have shown in saying good-bye to the postman she got up – she did not come over to touch me – and went into her bedroom and shut the door. It made it easier and harder that she did not come and touch me. She left me standing in the suddenly
withdrawn intimacy of the firelit room, with only Sailor sleeping there on the hearth.

I had stood only a moment when Mouse, who must have been listening, came into the room. She opened the front door. “You’d best be going,” she said. And I went.

T
hat was on Thursday night. Friday was Empire day and a holiday everywhere. I left for home early on Friday morning and met on the Lillooet road plenty of cars, a waggon or two, an old buggy, a buckboard, Indians on their cayuses with their dogs trotting behind – people going in to Lytton for the fair. I had to pull in to the wayside again and again. When I rode into the yard at the ranch I found Father sitting on the verandah steps. Holidays made not much difference at the ranch, but it was near lunch-time, and so Father was sitting on the steps in the spring sunshine, reading a newspaper three days old, his long legs sprawling out before him. He looked up. “Hello, kid!” he said with a smile, and lowered the newspaper, looking at me with his special kind quick look. I could see that everything was all right now. I jumped off Maxey and ran up and kissed him. I told him all about the fair and sideshows and he listened to me. Then he took up his newspaper again. “Mother’s up at the garden,” he said and continued his reading. But now I had to tell him about my visit, and get it over. I stood up in
front of him in my overalls and buckskin jacket and with my hands behind me.

“Father,” I said.

“Well, what?” he said mildly, with his eyes on the page.

“Father, I want to tell you I’m not going to Mrs. Dorval’s any more.”

“You don’t say! Very nice of you, I’m sure,” Father said without looking up, in a half-teasing half-sarcastic way he had.

But now was the hard part. I said again, “Father.”

“Now, Frankie, it’s over and done with, stop harping on it,” he said impatiently.

“But, Father, I went there last night again because I had to say good-bye, but I won’t go any more.”

Father lowered the newspaper and pushed his rancher’s broad-brimmed hat back from his forehead and looked at me as if he couldn’t believe his eyes and ears.

“Well, I’ll be blowed,” he said slowly. “I can’t understand
you!”

“But
Father
 …”

“I don’t – want – to – hear – anything – more – about – it,” he said pausing emphatically at each word. “You go and talk to your mother.” And I left him rattling the newspaper about at arm’s length and scowling at the newsprint.

Not long after that last visit of mine to the bungalow Mother told me that they had decided to send me down to the Coast to school, instead of waiting till the following year. Father had begun to think me unpredictable and felt that, as things were, I had too much time on my hands. Yet they did not want to bring me back to the ranch, away from school and all the other children. So at the end of the summer Mother and I drove to the Coast along the great road that hugs the Fraser Canyon, and I went to a little school in Vancouver near
Stanley Park. It was small, with about eight boarders, and we slept in three attic rooms at the top of the tall house. The house was old, there was little equipment of any kind, the fare was plain, but old Mrs. Richards was kind, and Mrs. Brookes, her daughter, was really concerned with education. She brought to the subjects she taught us an interest that was never perfunctory, and our lessons had meaning and direction. I think that old Mrs. Richards was interested in her pupils, while young Mrs. Brookes was interested in their education, and this worked out very well.

We were so near to Stanley Park that it was our playground and paradise. We liked our bedrooms on the top floor because we saw into the Park and across the lagoon. Over the forests of the Park we saw the mountains across the Inlet, and looking the other way, to the west, we could see the waters of English Bay and the great sunsets over the ocean.

There was in our bedroom a large circular mirror of good glass with a cheap old frame. This mirror had been placed, probably by chance, so that it isolated and held a reflection of the Sleeping Beauty. You looked through your window and there the mountains lay loftily to the sky. The Sleeping Beauty’s covering of forest, drawn up over her knees, descends into a valley, and from this valley rises another mountain. You turned, and stepped aside, and saw at an angle that the circular mirror had seized and isolated a portion of the beautiful descending and ascending lines of the mountains and the great dark pointed fir trees of the nearby Park below. It became the habit of the four of us in the bedroom to look at our “picture.” When our mothers came to see the school we would take them upstairs, and “Look,” we would say, “at the picture!” One of us had first discovered it, and on fine days there it was awaiting us in soft clarity. This reflection, held in
the circular frame, had more unity and significance than when you turned and saw its substance as only a part of the true, flowing, continuous line of the mountains. I learned from these mountains and from the picture in the mirror the potent and insinuating quality of line, be it in a mountain, or in a tree, or in a human face. And perhaps the others afterwards discovered this and more, far more than I did (because Marcella Martin became an artist). But at that time we gabbled continuously and extravagantly, not about these things but about ourselves and our likes and dislikes, about the “thrilling” or the “loathsome” hockey, the heavenly swimming, the school play, the bread puddings, our friends and their brothers, a new dress and “what Marion said. My dear, it was a scream!” – these were the things which mattered so much then, and which are now almost forgotten, while what remains clearer and more lasting even than the cheerful reality of old Mrs. Richards beaming anxiously behind a large brown teapot, is a still reflection of mountains in a round mirror.

It was at the end of my last term at Mrs. Richards’ that I saw Hetty Dorval again.

Three of us were in the town, choosing a good-bye present for old Mrs. Richards. As we leaned over the counter, I looked up, and there, across the large jewellery store, was Hetty. She was as beautiful there as when, in Lytton, no one had challenged comparison, and she made everyone else in the shop appear ordinary. She held up a string of pearls and looked at them, intent, her pretty head tilted connoisseur-wise. Mrs. Broom stood beside her. Hetty turned to Mrs. Broom and spoke. I could almost hear her tone, cajoling, “Mouse,
which
would you have if you were me?” I looked away from her in something like panic. I did not want, now, to be enthralled by or involved with Hetty again. Neither, did
I imagine, would Hetty welcome a school girl in a navy blue uniform. Mouse certainly would not. So I turned my back on where they stood, and bent over the counter once more. I felt a little shamefaced and agitated.

Mother had been very clever about Hetty. Mother was no psychologist by the book, but she had a good working knowledge of human beings. Instead of keeping the Hetty episode as a dark corner of my young life, Hetty was trotted out into the open, but only when it seemed natural. “You mustn’t mind, Frankie, but Father and I always call her The Menace, because she was, you know.” Mother had never seen Hetty, and I could not bring myself to try, and to fail, to describe what Hetty looked like, and the feeling that she gave people. I should have sounded silly.

The importance and excitement of my last week at school vanished and never returned, with the news that Ernestine had been drowned in trying to save her dog. When we are young we have, by nature, no concern with permanent change or with death. Life is forever. Then suddenly comes the moment when death makes the entrance into experience, very simply, inexorably; our awareness is enlarged and we move forward with dismay into the common lot, and the bright innocent sureness of permanency has left us. There had never been a time when I could not remember my almost daily companion Ernestine; she was my very particular friend and I was hers, and nearly all our fun (and that was nearly all our life) had been together. And now Ernestine, not I, had waded regardless into the dull swirling shallows of the Fraser River and got caught in the current, and was gone. I was aghast at the mysterious ceasing-to-be of Ernestine, and in a new awe of her. On the journey home I had always watched with happy rising excitement for the first small bunch of sage growing
beside the railroad track (“There it is!”) which signified the change in vegetation, the beginning of the sage-brush country, Lytton, and home. But now I was only gloomily aware of it and of the slowing up of the train at Lytton station, which looked surprisingly the same as before. But Mother and Father were waiting there. I saw Mother’s raised face and her bright eyes searching the windows with the comfort of a familiar and loving look. – Do you not know it, that look? – We drove away across the Bridge and along the dusty hairpin road, home.