The River by Rumer Godden.

[midnight_birth]

Title: The River.
Author: Rumer Godden.
Genre: Literature, fiction, bildungsroman.
Country: England, U.K.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1946.
Summary: The tale is one of a child growing up. Harriet is caught between two worlds: her older sister is no longer a playmate, her brother is still a little boy. And the comforting rhythm of her privileged Indian childhood-the sounds of the jute factory, the colourful festivals that accompany each season, and the eternal ebb and flow of the river on its journey to the Bay of Bengal-is about to be shattered by a tragic event. Intense, vivid, and with a dark undertow, the book is a poignant portrait of the loss of a young girl's innocence.

My rating: 8.5/10
My review:


♥ The river was in Bengal, India, but for the purpose of this book, these thoughts, it might as easily have been a river in America, in Europe, in England, France, New Zealand or Timbuctoo. Its flavour would be different in each; Bogey's cobra would, of course, have been something else and the flavour of the people who lived by the river would be different.

That is what makes a family, the flavour, the family flavour, and no one outside the family, however loved and intimate, can share it.

♥ They lived in their house beside the river, in a jute-pressing works near a little Indian town; they had not been sent away out of the tropics because there was a war; this war, the last war, any war, it does not matter which war.

♥ "Do you like Latin, Bea?"

"No, of course I don't, but if I have to learn it," said Bea, "it is better to learn it quickly." She glanced across at Harriet. "You are always trying to stop things happening, Harriet, but you can't."

But Harriet still thought, privately, that she could.

♥ Harriet sighed. Latin, and algebra, and music and other things: eating liver, having an injection, seeing a mad pai-dog-how did Bea manage to take them all so quietly? How? Harriet sighed. She could not, nowadays, aspire to Bea.

"Nan, why is Bea so different?"

"She always was," said Nan,

"No, she is changing."

"She is growing up," said Nan. "We all have to, willy-nilly." Harriet did not much like the sound of that expression, "willy-nilly."

♥ She yawned again and reached for the Outline of History. Loves-and-Wars, she thought, flipping over the pages. Xerxes-Alexander-GothdandHuns-Arthurand-Guinevere-RichardtheLionheart-Marlborough-Kitchener. Love and war, love and hate all muddled up together.

..She liked Cleopatra best, but even thinking of Cleopatra she wondered that no one ever grew tired of it, of all this love and all this war. Or if they do, she thought, someone starts it all over again. It is as much life as living, thought Harriet. You are born, you are a he or a she, and you live until you die... Willy-nilly. Yes. Nan is right. It all is willy-nilly, though I think you could live very well without a war... and I suppose without being loved. But I hope I am loved, thought Harriet, as much as Cleopatra, and she thought, I wish I were not so young... children don't have loves or wars. She drew circles on her algebra. Or do they? wondered Harriet. Do they... of their kind?

♥ There are ritual festivals in every religion throughout the year, and every family keeps those it needs, the Chinese and the Roman Catholics being perhaps the most elaborate in theirs, though the old Russians and the Hindus come close and Tibet has charming holidays of its own. Diwali was a curious festival to find in the keeping of an European family, but in Harriet's, as in every large household in India, there was always someone who had to keep some one of the different festivals as they occurred; Nan was a Catholic: Abdullah, the old butler, was a Mohammedan, and so was Gaffura his assistant; Maila, the bearer, was a Buddhist from the State of Sikkim; the gardeners were Hindu Brahmins, Heaven Born; the sweeper and the Ayah were Hindu untouchables and Ram Prasad Singh, the gateman, the children's friend, was of the separate sect of Sikh. Now the gardeners were away in the bazaar, buying the little saucer earthenware festival lamps and the wicks and oil to float in them, while Abdullah and Maila were not interested. The children kept Diwali because it is an irresistible festival and no one could live in the country in which it is held and not be touched by it.

♥ Diwali, to the children, was also the official opening of the winter. The greenfly came, millions of insects that flew around the lights at dusk. The gardeners began to plant out vegetables and flower seeds. There was a coolness in the mornings and evenings, a thicker dew, more mosquitoes. Then Diwali came, and it was winter. Winter, the cold weather. That is the best time of all, thought Harriet with relish. It seemed to her, as she looked forward to it, a pageant of pleasantness. Soon we shall have fires, thought Harriet, and sweet peas. I wonder what we shall do this winter? What will happen? And as people far wiser than Harriet have thought, she answered herself. Nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing ever happens here.

♥ Harriet's river was a great slowly flowing mile-wide river between banks of mud and white sand, with fields flat to the horizon, jute-fields and rice-fields under a blue weight of sky. "If there is any space in me," Harriet said, when she was grown up, "it is from that sky."

♥ The children lived in the Big House of the Works. The Works were spread away from the bazaar along the river with the firm's houses and gardens on the further side. The life of every family is conditioned by the work of its elders; think of a doctor's house, or a writer's, a musician's or a missionary's. It is necessary for the whole family to live in the conditions that such work brings; for these children it was jute.

..In the inner dimness of the press-rooms was the sheen of the press-tubes, of brass locks, gong down with the pale shining heaps of jute that came up again as bales. There was a smell there of jute dust and coal, steam and hot oil and human sweat, that was one of the accompanying smells of their childhood, like the smell of cess and incense and frying ghee in the bazaar and of honey from the mustard and radish flowers when they were out in the fields, and in season, the stench of steeping jute.

♥ Other firms were scattered up and down the river, and to them assistants came, young men from England and Scotland, usually from Scotland, even from Greece, who came out raw and young to learn the trade and ended up as magnates. Later on, they married, and too often, Father said, their wives ended up as magnums.

♥ Perhaps the place and the life were alien, circumscribed, dull to the grown-ups who lived there; for the children it was their world of home. They lived in the Big House in a big garden on the river with the tall flowering cork tree by their front steps. It was their world, complete. Up to this winter it had been completely happy.

♥ She often asked the others, "What shall you be when you are grown up?" It was always Harriet who started these discussions. No one else really liked them except Victoria, who was too young to know what she was, even now.

♥ "It would be wonderful to be a doctor, to save people's lives, and give your own life up." The vista was exciting. "Wonderful," said Harriet. "Wouldn't you like that, Bea?"

"No," said Bea. "I want my life for myself."

Harriet was too truthful to deny that she did too, and she tore herself away from the thought of being a doctor. "So many grown-up people seem to be nothing very much," she said.

.."You will be what you are. You will have to be," said Nan, who was unconcernedly darning. "In the end everyone is what they are."

.."Bea, what will you be? An actress? Or a hospital nurse? Or a doctor? A great doctor? When you are grown up, what will you be?"

"How can I tell till I get there?" asked Bea.

"But say. You must say. You must be something."

"I shall wait till I am," said Bea, tolerantly, "and then be it."

"That is a funny sort of answer," said Harriet, disgusted.

"It is rather a good one," said Nan.

♥ Nan? Well, Nan was Nan, and to Harriet that was like bread, too everyday and too necessary to be regarded, though she was the staff of life.

♥ "Because he was hurt so badly," said Mother. "Unbearably hurt."

Looking at Captain John now in the light of this soft warm morning, as he bent his head down by Victoria's, as Victoria leant against his knee, it was difficult to think of him as being unbearably hurt. Unbearably? questioned Harriet, wrinkling her forehead. What is unbearable? When I caught my nail in the railway carriage door I went mad with pain. Mad. Then why isn't he mad? Why didn't he die? What is it that made him live and not go mad? He must be stronger than we think, said Harriet, looking at Captain John.

♥ "It is your turn, Captain John," she said, wanting to reciprocate. "Let us make a charm for you. Let us see what you are going to be."

Valerie nudged her sharply. "What a silly you are!" she whispered down Harriet's neck. "You will make him feel awful. How can he be anything?"

But-he has to be, thought Harriet. Of course he has to be. He didn't die.

♥ There were squirrels and lizards in the garden, and birds: bulbuls and kingfishers and doves and the magpie robin and sunbirds and tree pies and wagtails and hawks. Birds are little live landmarks and more truthful than flowers; they cannot be transplanted, not grafted, nor turned blue and pink. The birds were in the flavour of that garden, as the white paddy birds and the vultures were part of the flavour of the fields, and the circling kites and the kingfishers of the river..

♥ Besides their eyes, Nan and Victoria were alike in that at the moment, they were both perfect. Victoria had reached the stage of completed babyhood; little girls, especially, sometimes linger in this stage for three or four months, and during that time they are quite unconsciously perfect. Victoria had no troubles, she did not trouble anyone, nor did Nan. Nan had completed her hard womanhood, and she had managed to shed her troubles. She had reclaimed, through living and service, what Victoria had not yet lost.

♥ "Brooding?" said Victoria, looking up at the nest. "Is that brooding?" she said. "She looks... happy."

"I think she is," said Captain John, seriously. "She sits on her nest and she feels the whole world going round her, and she takes everything she wants from the world and puts it into her eggs."

"You shouldn't tell Victoria things like that," said Bea. "She thinks they are true."

"But they are true," said Captain John.

♥ It was funny to think that she, Harriet, who was still a child herself, could remember a time when Victoria, standing so large and solid on the verandah beside them, was not. Then there was no Victoria. And there was no gap before, thought Harriet, puzzled. There was no empty place and yet we fitted her in. It was funny, and notable, that families always did fit the babies in. Then she remembered, what she was supposed to know and had been told and still could not yet realize, that soon, in a month or two, or three or was it four, they, the family, were to have another baby themselves.

♥ "Are we in eggs?" Victoria had asked. Fancy asking that, thought Harriet, wandering away but it would be funny if we were. As she said it, she was frightened. She had too often this feeling of being enclosed, shut in a small shape like a dome, and, if it were an egg, she had no beak to break it. "How can I get out? I never can get out," she was just going to say in a panic, and then she remembered that, if she were in an egg, just like the chick, she would grow too big for it and break it. The thing is to grow very quickly, said Harriet to herself, and she said aloud, "Nan says we change our skin seven times in our lives. Perhaps this is the same idea."

"That is snakes, not people," said Bogey.

♥ She went back to the house, and on her way she passed Victoria with her doll. "I play so beautifully with my baby," she said to Harriet as Harriet passed. "She was born again yesterday."

"You are always having her born," said Harriet scornfully.

"Why not?" asked Victoria. "You can be born again and again, can't you?"

It was puzzling. Every time Harriet examined somebody's silly remark, it seemed not to be so silly. "I don't understand it," she said, and she wondered who could explain it to her; its surface silliness was such that she doubted if she would find anyone to whom she could make clear what she wanted to ask. Then she made up her mind; she would risk a chance and ask Captain John.

♥ Talking to Harriet he had not changed his lounging, dreaming attitude, and he forgot to smooth his hair and pull his tie straight. He looked down into her eyes lazily without thinking of himself.

♥ "My idea," said Captain John, "isn't very different from Victoria's, though she didn't mean hers in this way. I have an idea," said Captain John, his eyes looking now, not at Harriet, but across the rail to the garden, "that we go on being born again and again because we have to, with each thing that happens to us, each new episode."

"What is an episode?"

"It really means an incident... between two acts."

"I don't understand."

"Call it an incident, a happening. With each new happening, perhaps with each person we meet if they are important to us, we must either be born again, or die a little bit; big deaths and little ones. Big and little births."

"I should think it would be better to go on being born, than to die all the time," said Harriet.

"If we can," said Captain John, "but it takes a bit of doing. It is called growing, Harriet, and it is often painful and difficult. On the whole, it is very much easier to die."

♥ Mrs. Milligan, Harriet identified her without a flicker of interest. How few, how very, very few people were important, she thought, and lazily she began to think over the people who were important to her. Father-Mother-Bea-Bogey-Victoria. That was automatic, and she did not realize that, as she said their names, she did not think of them at all. Nan?

♥ A whirr and a splash made her jump so that she almost fell off the jetty. A kingfisher had struck from a branch above her. Now it sat on a post with the fish still bending and jerking in its beak. The poor fish had been placidly, happily, swimming and feeding somewhere under the jetty, and then, out of its element, from another, it had been seized and carried off. And swallowed, thought Harriet regretfully, watching it disappear.

I wonder what other fishes think? thought Harriet, but then, that was the same with any dying; one person was seized and taken away. But what does it feel like if that comes right plumb in the middle of your family? She could not think of it, it seemed impossible and yet she had just seen it happen. Things do happen, she told herself, but she was lulled again with the sound of the river running in her ears. Those were fishes, Harriet told herself comfortably. Only fishes.

♥ All these thoughts seemed like cracks in the wholeness of Harriet's unconsciousness. It had cracked before, of course, but now she was growing rapaciously.

♥ Very often now she went to watch the river. It flowed down in negroid peace, in sun, in green strong water. Harriet, now she was growing from a little girl into a big one, was beginning to sense its peace. "It comes from a source," said Harriet, who learnt geography. "From very far away, from a trickle from a spring, no one knows where exactly, or perhaps they do know; it doesn't matter. It is going to something far bigger than itself, though it, itself, looks big enough. It is going to the sea," said Harriet, "and nothing will stop it. Nothing stops days, or rivers," said Harriet with certainty.

♥ "Bea. I don't want to."

"Don't want to what?"

"Be a corpse."

"But you are not," said Bea, practically.

"But I shall be," said Harriet, and she began to cry.

"Don't you think you could wait till you are" said Bea. "I am so sleepy, Harriet." Then as the fact of Harriet's sobs was borne in upon her, she said, more gently, "Couldn't you wait till the morning, Harry?"

"No. No. I can't," sobbed Harriet. "I am frightened, Bea. I can't get the feeling of Bathsheba off my hands. I am frightened, Bea."

"Don't cry" said Bea, kindly. She sat up in bed, and by the verandah light, Harriet could see her shoulders in her white yoked nightgown, and the fall of her dark hair. "Don't cry, Harry. It isn't anything to cry about. I am sure it is not."

The sound of her normal little voice was comforting to Harriet, until she thought that Bea too must die, dark hair, voice and all. Then I shall never hear her voice again, cried Harriet silently, and Mother must die, and Nan, and Nan is old and must die quite soon.

♥ "Don't you ever think about dying, Bea?"

"Well, yes, I do," said Bea.

"Then what do you think?" she asked.

"It is hard to know what I think," said Bea's small voice out of the darkness. "But I know a few things."

"Wh-what do you know?" quavered Harriet, and she said suspiciously, "Nan and Mother and Ram Prasad tell us things about heaven and Jesus and Bhramo, but they don't really know."

"I think they are all wrong," said Bea severely. "Mine are not things like that. They are more simple things." And she added, as if this had only just occurred to her, "More sensible things."

"Wh-what sort of th-things?"

"This," said Bea. "When anything, anybody, is dead, like Bathsheba, it is dead. The life, the breath, the... the warm in it, is gone."

"Nan calls it the spirit."

"The spirit then," said Bea. "I call it the 'warm,' but the spirit of the warm is gone."

"Yes," said Harriet. "Yes. It was gone out of Bathsheba."

"The body is left behind," said Bea, "and what happens to it? It goes bad."

"Don't!" said Harriet, and shuddered.

"You can't keep a body..."

"Except mummies and those Rajahs who are pickled in honey," said Harriet.

"Then I think," said Bea, and she contradicted herself. "Then I know, that it isn't meant to go on. It is useless. The body isn't any use, any more."

"Yes?" said Harriet.

"But the other, the warm, has gone. It doesn't stay and go bad. So I think," said Bea, "that it is of some use. That it has gone to something, somewhere."

"But where?" asked Harriet. "Where?"

♥ She tried to remember the names of the stars as she lay, and she thought how much longer stars and things like trees and rocks went on than people, mountains and islands and sands, she thought, and man-made things as well: songs and pictures and rare vases and poems. "Things are the thing," said Harriet sleepily, and then a thought came like a spear from one of those stars, but real, truthful. It had occurred to her that she, Harriet, might possibly, one day, if she were good enough, have some small part in that. One of my poems might still be alive in... thought Harriet... say, A.D. 4000. It might. I don't say it will, but it might. I should be like the Chinese poets, she thought dizzily. Or like Keats or Shakespeare, she thought, and she was filled with a sense of her own responsibility. That was a new sensation for Harriet. She was not given to responsibility and it gave her a feeling, more serious, more humble, than she had ever known. "I must work," said Harriet earnestly. "I must work and work and work." Like Queen Victoria she thought, I will be good. I will be good.

♥ "Leave him alone," said Nan.

"But I want to do something for him."

"You can pray for him."

"Oh, Nan!"

"You can," said Nan certainly, and then she added, as a warning, "and Harriet, you are not to do anything else."

But Harriet, being Harriet, did, and was snubbed.

She went away with his snub stinging in her, into the Secret Hole, where she sat down on her box, in the darkest shade. She sat holding her knees in her arms, her face turned down on them, and the stinging passed into a peculiar hurt. "I-I hate him," said Harriet, with clenched teeth.

Ayah came presently and found her. "What is it, Harry Baba? What is it, Harriet Rajah?"

"I have a pain," said Harriet; she did not know what else to call it.

Ayah began to rub her legs, though the pain, of course, was not in her legs. Harriet had had pains in her legs and arms recently that Nan called "growing pains." Now she felt as if she were being stretched to hold this one. This was not exactly a pain, though it hurt. It ached, but it was not like the ache she had had with dysentery, it was not sore, and it was not like toothache, that awful toothache she had when her tooth fell out. Analyzing her pain, it began to go away, and she immediately forgot what it had been like.

Every family has its milestones; the first teeth come and the first teeth go; there is the first short hair-cut, the first braces, the first number one shoes, the first birthday in double figures. Events happen too, which change families and family relations, and sometimes, often, one member is struck at more than another. Now, this feeling of pain, of hurt, had come to Harriet. This winter strange things seemed to be happening to her, eventual things. She felt herself growing and growing as she sat there in the gloom of the Secret Hole.

But soon she had regained her halcyon insouciance.

♥ Harriet was really too interested in herself to think about the cobra. She was hurt again. She was often hurt now. Things hurt her that would not have hurt her before, that she would have skimmed over without noticing. She was different. She was altogether puzzled..

♥ As Bea grew into being only Bea, she grew mysteriously better-looking. She grew beautiful.

"What a beautiful child," people said when they saw her.

Harriet and Bogey went behind a bush to discuss whether or not they would tell this to Bea.

"We don't want to make her conceited," said Harriet, and she did not know herself why she said that.

"Oh, tell her. Tell her. Tell her," begged Bogey.

When they told Bea she did not become conceited. She seemed simply to take it as her due and to be unmoved by it, on a way that made Harriet feel breathless.

♥ Why do I want to be pretty suddenly? asked Harriet, and she did not know. Certainly she had never bothered about it before, but then she had never bothered about anything very much. What is the matter with me? thought Harriet. Why do I keep on having these... cracks? Why is everything suddenly so funny?

She was unhappy again in rifts, in, as she called them, cracks: for ten minutes, or for a minute only, or for a whole half hour. "It isn't fair," said Harriet in a temper, "for a family not to be the same. To be half ugly and half pretty, to grow up at different times," complained Harriet. With all she felt, and truly felt, another part of her was watching and found it interesting. She watched herself when she went to brood in the Secret Hole, when she went to sit on the jetty or under the cork tree. "I give up," said Harriet crossly, but the other part of her was far too interested to give up.

♥ I believe he likes doing it, thought Harriet, and she marvelled that Bea never lost patience or let him know she knew he was pretending.

"What is the name of those flowers?"

"Petunias," said Bea.

He bent down to smell one. "They remind me of you," he said to Bea. "No, you remind me of them, one of those purple ones," he said, "or a white one."

Bea took it with the same calmness, almost with primness, but Harriet wad dizzy. They are both behaving like grown-up people, she thought indignantly, or they are both behaving like children. Why?

♥ "Why did the Ancient Britons find it so hard to make their boats, Bogey?"

"Because they had to make the inside bigger than the outside," said Bogey gravely, his eyes on the sky.

He was not capable of being made to feel guilty, like Harriet who knew she dreamed. He simply removed himself, and they were tired of the chase long before he was caught.

♥ It was nearly Christmas. "It must be a quiet Christmas," said Mother as she had said about the winter. "A quiet Christmas, and you must be content with little presents."

The war again, thought Harriet angrily. She wanted Christmas to have its full panoply. She wanted the right to be happy and excited without this horrible onus of caring about other people, the hungry children, the wounded soldiers, the women left without husbands and fathers. "And even if there isn't a war, it is just the same," she said. "There are always hurt people ad starved people, and beaten people and misery."

"And there are always the people who don't care," said Bea.

"Well, I care really. I have to," said Harriet.

♥ "But what good does it do?" asked Bea. "Fighting?"

"Well, that is not the only point," said Captain John slowly.

"Why not? What other point could there be?"

"It is something," he said, "to believe enough to die for that belief. Perhaps it is more than something, perhaps it is everything-to-aspire-to try."

"Yes," breathed Harriet. "Like martyrs."

"I think the martyrs were stupid," said Bea. "I think soldiers are too. Fighting is stupid."

"Perhaps it is," said Captain John. "But perhaps that is neither here nor there. Perhaps the thing is, to believe."

"And get killed for it?"

"If necessary."

"I think so," said Harriet. "If I were brave enough... only I wouldn't be," she said. "But I believe in things."

"Oh you!" said Valerie. "You will believe in anything.

"That is better than believing in nothing," said Captain John.

♥ Bea sat with her legs curled under her, sitting sideways into her white skirts that were patterned with a pattern of old rose stencillings. Harriet's dress was the same, except that it was patterned with china blue; that difference changed its whole character, it looked merely crisp and fresh, while Bea's... "looks like... poetry," said Harriet. Why are some colours filled with poetry and others not?

♥ She tilted her head and looked up through the branches of the cork tree to see the clouds moving and the house and tree tilting back against the clouds.

"Funny," said Harriet to herself. "The world goes on turning, and it has all these troubles in it."

..Horrible-wounds-and-milk-and-bread-and-butter-and-loving-and-quarrelling-and-wars. What was a quarrel but a little war? And there were wars all over the world. They have even come in here, thought Harriet, looking at the big stone house that was her home. But, thought Harriet, this is the world.

♥ Every family has something, when it has left home, that is for it a symbol of home, that, for it, for ever afterwards, brings home back. It may be a glimpse of the dappled flank of a rocking-horse, a certain pattern of curtain, of firelight shining on a brass fender, of light on the rim of a plate; it may be a saying, sweet or sharp, like: It will only end in tears. Do you think I am made of money? It is six of one and half a dozen of the other; it may be a song or a sound; the sound of a lawn-mower, or the swish of water, or of birds singing at dawn; it may be a custom (every family has different customs), or a taste: of a special pudding or burnt treacle tart or dripping toast; or it may be scent or a smell: of flowers, or furniture polish or cooking, toffee or sausages, or saffron bread or onions or boiling jam. These symbols are all that are left of that lost world in our new one. There was no knowing what would remain afterwards of hers for Harriet.

Being European in India, the flavour of Harriet's home was naturally different from most; it was not entirely European, it was not entirely Indian; it was a mixture of both.

♥ Of the families who keep Christmas, some keep it rather more, some rather less. Harriet's family kept it implicitly.

..Their Bengali Christmas had its own brand too; it was always perfect weather, the weather of a cool fresh summer day. The day began the night before, as Bogey said, with carols and hanging up stockings that led to the opening of stockings the next morning and early church in the Masonic Lodge (the town had no church), where the gardeners gave each person, even children, a bunch of violets wired with ferns. Then the merchants and clerks of the Works and the district came to call on Father with baskets of fruit and flowers and vegetables and nuts and whisky and Christmas cakes decorated with white icing, tinsel and pink-paper roses. The servants' children came to see the tree and be given crackers, oranges and four-anna pieces. The young men from the Red House came to lunch and in the evening there was a Christmas tree.

All this happened every year, but there was, besides this, a thread of holiness, a quiet and pomp that seemed to Harriet to have in it the significance of the Wise King's gold. It linked Christmas with something larger than itself, something as large as... what? Harriet thought it was a largeness that had something to do with the river, that began as a trickle and ended in the sea. Afterwards she wondered if this feeling in Christmas came from Nan. This year, as the time drew on and there was much less of everything, less buying and hiding and writing and planning, it was there again and it was more pronounced.

♥ On occasions, very occasionally, things happen as you feel they will, as you feel in your bones they will.

♥ Father had cut the story out and pasted it into his scrap-book. He showed Harriet what he had written. Harriet's first published work, and the date. First! With the feeling of elation there came to Harriet a feeling of responsibility. She had avowed herself. She had signed herself away. It was public now. She was different. With all the glory, she wished she could have kept herself a secret.

♥ "Yes. He is going away. We sh-shant's see him any more."

"No," agreed Harriet. "Then we shan't." She sat on the bed feeling more sore, more than ever cold and separated. "But not yet Bea," she said, "not yet. Not now."

"No, not yet," said Bea, but she cried as hard as ever.

"Bea, don't cry so hard. Don't Bea. He isn't going yet."

"I am not crying because he is going," said Bea. "I am crying because..."

"Because?"

"Because it is going," said Bea in another rush.

"It? What 'it' Bea?"

"It is all going so quickly," said Bea. "Too quickly. It is going far too fast."

"Mmm," said Harriet, beginning to understand.

"Much too quickly and too fast," cried Bea. "It is all changing, and I don't w-want it to change."

"But it hasn't changed," said Harriet. As she said that she knew that it was false. How much had changed even since this morning? Everything had changed.

"I like it to stay as it is," said Bea. "I don't want this to end, ever. I want it to stay like this always, but it won't."

"No, it won't." Harriet had to agree again sadly. There was nothing else for her to do.

"We can't keep it, and to-day was so l-lovely-happy." Bea's head went down in her pillow again. "I want it to be like this for ever and ever," she cried.

So did Harriet. She sat hurt and cold and silent on Bea's bed until Bea put out a hand to her.

..The day was gone. However they might lie awake and cry or ache, they could not claim it back again. Who was it who had said you could not stop days or rivers? Harriet could hear the river running in the dark, that was not really dark but moonlight. She shivered. In six or seven weeks perhaps he will go away. She tried to make herself believe that, but it did not seem, nor feel, true. What will Bea feel then? wondered Harriet. Will she feel worse than I shall? In books people are happy for ever and for ever. But those books are nonsense. Nothing is for ever and for ever, thought Harriet. It all goes away. But does it? Again she was struck by a doubt. Does it all go, be lost and ended-or in some way do you have it still? Could that be true? "Is everything a bit true?" she had said to Captain John. Then she lost that hope. No. It is gone, thought Harriet. I didn't notice it before, but now I see. I see it-horribly. Why didn't I see it before? Because I was little?

♥ "What are the signs of getting old-like us?" asked Harriet.

"Lots of things I expect," answered Bea wearily. "Do yuu want to know how?"

"Yes."

"Growing up, of course-"

"Growing pains?" asked Harriet.

"I suppose so. Learning more. Being more with Mother and less with Nan; not liking playing so much, nor pretending; understanding things more and feeling them longer; wearing liberty bodices; and oh, yes," said Bea, "I remember when we came down from Darjeeling this year, finding everything had grown far more little than I expected. When I went away it all seemed so big. When I came back, it was little; and I suppose," said Bea slowly, "being friends with Captain John has made me old."

I am not so far behind all that, thought Harriet to herself.

♥ "I want to talk to you," said Mother. "I think you are old enough to have this talk with me."

Harriet, as a matter of fact, was not at all old that morning. She looked down, as she sat, at her brown scratched knees with their sprinkling of golden hairs, and at the shortness of her green-and-white checked gingham dress. The dress bore all the stains and marks of that morning's experiences: papaya-juice-from-breakfast-Prussian-blue-from-painting-the-Sea-of-Azov-a-little-torn-hole-from-climbing-trees-a-long-mark-from-falling-down-while-chasing-Bogey-on-the-dewy-lawn.

.."Well!" said Harriet. "Well!"

She looked down at herself, and it was true that she was exactly as before, the same knees, the same hairiness, the dress with the same stains and marks. "But-I didn't know what I was, what I am, what I am going to be," said Harriet. For all she knew, had known up to now, she might have been the same as Bogey. Gone, and she thought regretfully of them for a moment, gone were some pleasing vistas she had seen for herself and Bogey; running away to sea and becoming cabin boys; turning into Red Indians, I should have to be a squaw, and I don't like squaws, thought Harriet; being an explorer, no, I suppose women are not really suitable for explorers, thought Harriet, they would be too inconvenient. And every month... like the moon and the tides... the moon brings tides to the world and the world has to have them... it can't help its tides, and no more can I. All at once it seemed exceedingly merciless to the small Harriet, sitting on just such another wicker stool as Bea's in Mother's room.

"I wish I was Bogey," said Harriet.

"I know," said Mother. "I often wanted to be a boy."

♥ After Bea had gone, Mother sat still, and once again Harriet heard her sigh, but she herself was too engrossed with herself, with being Harriet, to feel this. "I don't think," she said, "that I can be-quite an ordinary woman, Mother."

"You will be the same as every woman when your turn comes," said Mother, "and so will Bea... just as you said, willy-nilly. And now," she said, "perhaps you had better go back to your playing."

♥ Why did all the people come? wondered Harriet. They came as if they had a right to come, as if it were their duty. Now Mr. Marshall, who was wearing a grey suit, not whites as he usually did, came and stood talking with a set grave face. They had come for Bogey? Why? "Why do-they-all come?" Harriet asked Bea.

"It is the custom," said Bea. "Bogey has to be buried."

"Buried?" said Harriet startled.

"Yes. You know that," said Bea.

Harriet knew. She had always known, but it had not come to her before. When you died, you did not belong to yourself, nor to your family; you belonged to custom, and places and countries and religions; even a small boy like Bogey.

♥ Nan forgot to pack Bogey's toothbrush. When Harriet was having her bath she saw it still there: Bea, pink; Harriet, green; Bogey, red; Victoria, blue. Harriet stood up in the hot water and took Bogey's down.

"What are you hiding in your hand, Harriet?"

When Harriet showed, Nan turned her back and tidied the towels on the rack.

"You can't keep that, Harriet," she said.

"No," Harriet agreed forlornly.

She put her head down on the zinc edge of the bath. Nan stayed by the towels, smoothing them down.

"We don't need to keep things, Harriet."

"No," said Harriet, not agreeing; then, as she relinquished the toothbrush, it was true. The less she had of Bogey, the more clearly she saw him.

There began the shoots of life. Whether they were wanted or not, there were shoots of life.

♥ "It is so-horrid-so cruel," Harriet burst out.

Nan went on with her sewing.

"Going on and on. We go on as if nothing had happened," wept Harriet.

"No, we don't," said Nan. "All we do is to go on. What else are we to do, Harriet?"

"It is as if we had wiped Bogey away. Look at you, making button-holes!" wept Harriet.

"What do you think I should do?" asked Nan quietly,

"That is just it," Harriet could not hold her tears. "It happens, and then things come round again, begin again, and you can't stop them. They go on happening, whatever happens."

"Yes, they go on happening, said Nan, "over and over again, for everyone, sometime, Harriet."

Harriet sat down on the floor, and wiped her eyes on the back of her hand. She felt hollowed with her unhappiness, and then, as she sat there, leaning against Nan's chair, another astonishing shoot came up in her mind. "No," said Harriet, horrified at herself. "No. No, I can't. I mustn't. Write about this? No. No. I can't," but it was already forming inside her head, as Nan stitched buttonholes again, and again she heard the sound of her life, the steam puff-wait-puff and the river. It was true; on the surface, even deeper, it was all exactly and evenly the same.

The world goes round.
No, thought Harrier, trying not to listen to herself; it carried her on.

The river runs, the round world spins.
Dawn and lamplight, thought Harriet. Midnight Moon. She shut her eyes and said it over to hear, in the old familiar way, if the words ran. It seemed to her that they ran properly and she went on:-

The river runs, the round world spins.
Dawn and lamplight. Midnight. Noon.
Sun follows day. Night, stars and moon.
The customary happiness and suspense and power filled her. She felt lifted, again as if she were rising up. She was ashamed, she tried to crush the words down, but they could not keep down. They insisted on rising.

Sun follows day. Night, stars and moon
...the end begins
"Nan," said Harriet, shocked.

"Yes, dear?"

"Nan, how can I be happy? How can I."

If surprising things came out of Harriet, no surprises ever came out of Nan.

"It isn't for us to dictate, Harriet."

♥ "Mother-I-I knew about-the-the-cobra-Mother."

"Yes, Harriet. I know you did," said Mother.

"Mother-I-"

"It is no use talking about it now," said Mother.

There had been shocks. Ram Prasad was sent away. "But why?" demanded Harriet. "Why? He only knew it was there. He didn't know that Bogey-"

"There is no excuse for Ram Prasad. No excuse at all," said Nan hardly.

Ram Prasad was, later, forgiven and reinstated, but that had given Harriet a glimpse of how people felt. Did they then, think as hardly of her? She had only, so far, thought hardly of herself. Now Valerie's words burnt into her. Everyone knows. Everyone knows.

.."It isn't only Valerie," cried Harriet in despair. "You didn't hear what she said. Oh, Nan, does everyone know? Does everyone say-that?"

"I expect they do," said Nan calmly. "You have to expect that because it is partly true, Harriet."

"Yes, but-who could have thought-"

"You could have thought," said Nan. "You didn't use your sense. You know you didn't, and for that a cruel lesson has been given." Her voice trembled and she looked with indescribable pity at Harriet, but she went on. "Very cruel, but perfectly just," said Nan.
"You can't complain about it. You must not."

"What am I to do? What can I do?" cried Harriet.

"It is a thing that will have to pass away from you, Harriet."

"It never will, Nan. Never! Never!"

"Yes, Harriet, it will," said Nan. "You have plenty of courage and you are strong. I have faith that it will."

♥ The up steamer and the down steamer, the mail steamers, had passed for the day and the river flowed calm and untroubled between its banks. Now under the bank it showed shallows of light, yellow, where the late sun struck down into it; further out the water was deeply green, and beyond, in midstream, it showed only a surface with flat pale colours. On the further bank, a mile across stream, there was a line of unbroken brilliant yellow above a line of white, the mustard fields in flower above the river's edge of sand. The temple showed its roof among the trees and country boats, their sails set square, moved gently down before the current and the wind. Other boats passed, towed upstream by boatmen leaning on long towing lines. A peasant was washing the flanks of his cows in the river above the garden, and on the sand and in the mud lay the halves of empty shells, bleached white, that had baked all day in the hot sun.

"How beautiful it is," said Harriet. Its beauty penetrated into the heat and the ache of the hollowness inside her. It had a quiet unhurriedness, a time beat that was infinitely soothing to Harriet. "You can't stop days or rivers," not stop them, and not hurry them. Her cheeks grew cool and the ferment in her heart grew quieter too, more slow.

♥ Harriet looked at Nan sharply. There was no sign in Nan's face of anything but satisfaction over the excellence of the enamel. "Nan is like a clock," said Harriet to herself. "Every minute she ticks just that minute. Nothing else." She said it irritably, but she sensed that all the other minutes were in Nan as well, a tremendous aggregate of minutes. She said slowly, "Nan, have you seen hundreds of babies born?"

"Not hundreds," said Nan, "but many. Very many."

"And have you seen a great many people die?"

"Don't, Harriet," said Bea sharply.

"But have you, Nan?"

"A great many, Harriet."

"I don't understand," said Harriet more slowly. "I don't understand how you keep yourself so clear."

"Don't you?" said Nan, but she did not tell them.

♥ "How can we be expected to have another baby and to like it? That is asking too much," said Harriet. "How can Mother?"

"If she is, she can. That is the answer," said Bea. "Harry, we ought to go and wash for supper."

Harriet was silent, thinking, and then she said, "It is too hard to be a person. You don't only have to go on and on. You have to be-" she looked for the word she needed and could not find it. Then, "You have to be tall as well," said Harriet.

♥ An overwhelming loneliness filled her and the old misunderstood pain. She went again to the Secret Hole and again sat there by her soap-box, with her knees under her chin, brooding. Am I always going to be lonely? thought Harriet, and the right answer seemed to be, "Yes, I expect I am."

♥ How silly I was when I wrote it, thought Harriet. Valerie was right. It was all babyish and silly or else crude; the funny bits were not funny; the beautiful bits were too beautiful. "I hate my writing," said Harriet.

The day ends, the end begins.
She had not finished the poem. She looked at it. "Nothing leaves off," said Harriet crossly. "But I shall leave off," and she threw the book back in the box.

♥ "Nan, you have seen so many babies," said Harriet. "Do they always seem new and exciting, like this, to you?"

"Always new," said Nan, "and exciting."

"Every time?"

"Every time."

Harriet pondered. "But we don't want another boy, do we?" she said jealously.

"That isn't left to us," said Nan. "It won't be another anything. It will be itself."

♥ At the window, Harriet met the chill of the early hours. There was no freshness in it yet, the dew had not fallen; the night was still strong. Far away, over and over again, she could hear the jackals howling and the two sounds, always present, always reminding her: puff-wait-puff, and the running of the river.

The strong night scent came to her again from the Lady of the Night; it was heavy, more than ever drenching, in the dark. She did not like it. She shivered.

Usually now all of them in the family would have been asleep, like any sleeping family. She thought of all the families safely and unadventurously asleep and then of how her own was scattered. Only Victoria was in her place. Mother's room was out of bounds, she could not know what was happening to Mother; Father was awake, walking between the verandah and the drawing-room, she had heard him while Nan poured out tea. Bea was across the river, and she herself was standing here tied with excitement so that she felt as if she had a knot in her stomach, with the coldness of the night blowing on her forehead and the cold howling of the jackals in her ears. And Bogey... where was Bogey? The warm of him was gone. It didn't stay-it wasn't made blue by the cobra... then where... where...?

♥ Then Nan started, her hands unclasped, and a sound ran through Harriet from her scalp to her feet and from her feet up again.

It was a new sound. First it was a sound like birds chirping; like sparrows in twigs; a twig sound; then it grew; it was broken into hiccoughs: coughs; it was like a little engine starting; it grew again, and it was the baby crying. It was the actual baby crying.

♥ "Is it broken?"

She stood there while he looked at the torn kite. She kept her lips stiff. She meant to fly that kite. It was important to her that she should, because she had, in true Harriet fashion, made it into an omen. If it flies, I shall fly, is what Harriet had decided.

"It can be mended," grunted Ram Prasad.

♥ They flew the kite while the afternoon grew later and richer in the world beyond the parapet, until the small clouds took the sunset as they had on the walk by the river. The same sounds, the same smells, came up to them.

Now I have been up here long enough, thought Harriet. I am tired. She began to wind the kite in.

"Are you bringing it down?" he asked regretfully.

"Yes." She added, "I always like them to be in before the first star comes."

"Why?"

"Because it would be fatal for them to be out then,"she said seriously. "The star would turn them back into paper."

♥ "She is very ugly, isn't she?" said Harriet.

"Look again," said Captain John.

Harriet looked, at the line of cheek and the forehead where the veins spread, at the tiny mottled lids, like seals or sleeping shells, that showed a line of hairs that were lashes. She saw the nose and the mouth whose corners folded as it slept, and the chin. "There is a dimple in her chin, like Father's," she whispered, and Captain John nodded. The lobe of the one ear Harriet could see was laid flat to the head with a glimpse of tender skin behind it, going into the line of the back of the head turned into the shawl. The head was covered with fluff, a down, that was gold too. Harriet looked at the doubled fist, and at the hand and the fingers and the nails. "I like the nails," said Harriet. And Mother made her, she thought, finished, complete outside and inside. That was the wonder. This, this like to like. That was the wonder: foals, little horses, to horses; rabbits to rabbits; people to people; all made without a mistake. And without a pattern, thought Harriet, touching the baby's hand. It was always a fresh shock to find it warm, soft an firm, the feel of a real hand... Where did Mother-what did Mother-she thought. Queer, what people can make: the flight of a kite-and poems-and babies. What a funny power-and I too, one day! thought Harriet; see, how I have grown already.

♥ "Do you remember Diwali, Captain John? There were drums there too,."

"Diwali?"

"The Feast of Lights." He nodded. "Funny," said Harriet, "we talked about living, and being born and dying, and we didn't know then about... Bogey... nor the baby really... nor anything...." And she said under her breath, "Bellum... Belli... Bello... Amamus... Amatis... Amant. I was doing those then. How young I was, thought Harriet. Now how I have grown. And she sad aloud to Captain John, "Are you any different?"

"I think I am," said Captain John.

"Because you have decided to go?" asked Harriet.

"Partly, perhaps."

Harriet nodded. "That is what Nan used to say. 'Leave him. He will go on when he is ready.' I used to wonder what was wrong with you," she said candidly. "You hadn't died... but..."

"I wasn't alive?" he suggested.

"You hadn't come alive," said Harriet, and she said, "You were like the baby... you had to be born... You were quite right when you said that," said Harriet. "I died a bit... with Bogey. I died much more when Valerie said that to me... for a long time I didn't come alive... not the whole afternoon!" she said.

"You are alive now, Harriet."

"Yes, and so are you..."

She had a sudden excess of happiness as she had had that other morning, long ago.

"Look at my tree," she said. "Do you see it turning... Up in the stars? Sometimes," she said, remembering that morning, "I write poems that are taller than I am."

.."You will be a real writer one day, Harriet."

"Oh, yes," said Harriet. "I shall be very great and very very famous."

He did not say anything to that and she ran her hand up and down the tree's smooth bark. The woodpeckers, of course, had gone to bed. "Does everyone have one?" she asked.

"Have what? A poem?"

"No, a tree."

"Not everyone finds theirs so soon," said Captain John. "You are lucky, Harriet. That is where I am going," he said more firmly. "I am going to look for mine."