Praxis Read Free

they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don’t like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn’t suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them. They have found their own solution to the three-fold pain—one I never thought of. They do not try, as we did, to understand it and get the better of it. They simply wipe out the pain by doing away with its three centres—the heart, the soul and the mind. Brilliant! Heartless, soulless, mindless—free!
    Listen, I have had good times. It is only on bad days that I regret the past and hate the young. I helped to change the world. I made life what it is for those lovely, lively, trampling girls upon the bus.
    Look at me, I said to you. Look at me, Praxis Duveen. Better for me to look at myself, to search out the truth, and the root of my pain, and yours, and try to determine, even now, whether it comes from inside or from outside, whether we are born with it, or have it foisted upon us. Before my writing hand seizes up, my elbow rots, my toe falls off.
    In the meantime, sisters, I absolve you from your neglect of me. You do what you can. So will I.

3
    A FTER BEN’S DEFECTION, HIS mother, a stately, large-busted matron, often moved by compassion, came presently to visit her son’s abandoned common-law wife. She found two little girls of whose existence she had not known. Both stared up at her with her son’s sad defiant eyes. Their hair was uncombed, their white dresses soiled, their mother distraught. The maid had left: the rent was unpaid. There was no food in the cupboard. Ben’s mother left quickly, in her chauffeured Rolls-Royce.
    A letter from solicitors followed, hand-delivered the next day. The rent was to be paid: the little girls provided for. If their mother was in financial or practical difficulty, she could make special application to the solicitors at any time, who would judge the merits of the case, and pay out accordingly.
    Goodbye, Benjamin Duveen. Off to greener golf-courses; three fine sons: and Ruth, a woman who loved him for what he was, and not what he wasn’t.
    Lucy presently wrote to the solicitors asking if she could move away, move house, start a new life somewhere else with the girls, and still have the rent paid: but they would not hear of it. Continuity, they said, was important for children. So Lucy perforce stayed where she was, seldom leaving the house. She should have been grateful to the Duveens, and so she was. Many families would have preferred to have ignored her existence altogether. She could have gone into service, to the workhouse, or on the streets. The little bastards to a Barnado Home.
    Henry Whitechapel, arriving in the May of the following season, looked out for Mrs. Duveen on the beach, and missed her. He made his way to 109 Holden Road, and found the garden unkempt, the gravel drive full of weeds, the motorcar gone and curtains drawn, so that he thought at first the house was empty. But Hypatia and Praxis were playing on the lawn. Or rather, Hypatia was sitting sketching a plant, and Praxis was sitting in a puddle and her wet drawers, when she stood, hung down muddily round her knees.
    ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.
    ‘Crying,’ said Praxis.
    ‘Shush,’ called out Hypatia. ‘You silly little girl.’
    ‘Well, she is,’ said Praxis. ‘Silly girl yourself.’
    Hypatia sighed heavily and raised her narrow eyebrows. She had a receding chin and slightly buck teeth, yellowish: a muddy complexion and dull brown hair with a tendency to grease, but was either unaware of these deficiencies, or affected unawareness. Her look was supercilious.
    ‘And your father?’
    ‘He’s left,’ said Praxis.
    ‘He’s away at the moment,’ corrected Hypatia.
    Henry took the opportunity of knocking at the door. He was not normally so bold, but his life that day seemed desperate,