_ Constance stood at the large, many-paned window in the parlour.
She was stouter. Although always plump, her figure had been
comely, with a neat, well-marked waist. But now the shapeliness
had gone; the waist-line no longer existed, and there were no more
crinolines to create it artificially. An observer not under the
charm of her face might have been excused for calling her fat and
lumpy. The face, grave, kind, and expectant, with its radiant,
fresh cheeks, and the rounded softness of its curves, atoned for
the figure. She was nearly twenty-nine years of age.
It was late in October. In Wedgwood Street, next to Boulton
Terrace, all the little brown houses had been pulled down to make
room for a palatial covered market, whose foundations were then
being dug. This destruction exposed a vast area of sky to the
north-east. A great dark cloud with an untidy edge rose massively
out of the depths and curtained off the tender blue of approaching
dusk; while in the west, behind Constance, the sun was setting in
calm and gorgeous melancholy on the Thursday hush of the town. It
was one of those afternoons which gather up all the sadness of the
moving earth and transform it into beauty.
Samuel Povey turned the corner from Wedgwood Street, and crossed
King Street obliquely to the front-door, which Constance opened.
He seemed tired and anxious.
"Well?" demanded Constance, as he entered.
"She's no better. There's no getting away from it, she's worse. I
should have stayed, only I knew you'd be worrying. So I caught the
three-fifty."
"How is that Mrs. Gilchrist shaping as a nurse?"
"She's very good," said Samuel, with conviction. "Very good!"
"What a blessing! I suppose you didn't happen to see the doctor?"
"Yes, I did."
"What did he say to you?"
Samuel gave a deprecating gesture. "Didn't say anything
particular. With dropsy, at that stage, you know ..."
Constance had returned to the window, her expectancy apparently
unappeased.
"I don't like the look of that cloud," she murmured.
"What! Are they out still?" Samuel inquired, taking off his
overcoat.
"Here they are!" cried Constance. Her features suddenly
transfigured, she sprang to the door, pulled it open, and
descended the steps.
A perambulator was being rapidly pushed up the slope by a
breathless girl.
"Amy," Constance gently protested, "I told you not to venture
far."
"I hurried all I could, mum, soon as I seed that cloud," the girl
puffed, with the air of one who is seriously thankful to have
escaped a great disaster.
Constance dived into the recesses of the perambulator and
extricated from its cocoon the centre of the universe, and
scrutinized him with quiet passion, and then rushed with him into
the house, though not a drop of rain had yet fallen.
"Precious!" exclaimed Amy, in ecstasy, her young virginal eyes
following him till he disappeared. Then she wheeled away the
perambulator, which now had no more value nor interest than an
egg-shell. It was necessary to take it right round to the Brougham
Street yard entrance, past the front of the closed shop.
Constance sat down on the horsehair sofa and hugged and kissed her
prize before removing his bonnet.
"Here's Daddy!" she said to him, as if imparting strange and
rapturous tidings. "Here's Daddy come back from hanging up his
coat in the passage! Daddy rubbing his hands!" And then, with a
swift transition of voice and features: "Do look at him, Sam!"
Samuel, preoccupied, stooped forward. "Oh, you little scoundrel!
Oh, you little scoundrel!" he greeted the baby, advancing his
finger towards the baby's nose.
The baby, who had hitherto maintained a passive indifference to
external phenomena, lifted elbows and toes, blew bubbles from his
tiny mouth, and stared at the finger with the most ravishing,
roguish smile, as though saying: "I know that great sticking-out
limb, and there is a joke about it which no one but me can see,
and which is my secret joy that you shall never share."
"Tea ready?" Samuel asked, resuming his gravity and his ordinary
pose.
"You must give the girl time to take her things off," said
Constance. "We'll have the table drawn, away from the fire, and
baby can lie on his shawl on the hearthrug while we're having
tea." Then to the baby, in rapture: "And play with his toys; all
his nice, nice toys!"
"You know Miss Insull is staying for tea?"
Constance, her head bent over the baby, who formed a white patch
on her comfortable brown frock, nodded without speaking.
Samuel Povey, walking to and fro, began to enter into details of
his hasty journey to Axe. Old Mrs. Baines, having beheld her
grandson, was preparing to quit this world. Never again would she
exclaim, in her brusque tone of genial ruthlessness:
'Fiddlesticks!' The situation was very difficult and distressing,
for Constance could not leave her baby, and she would not, until
the last urgency, run the risks of a journey with him to Axe. He
was being weaned. In any case Constance could not have undertaken
the nursing of her mother. A nurse had to be found. Mr. Povey had
discovered one in the person of Mrs. Gilchrist, the second wife of
a farmer at Malpas in Cheshire, whose first wife had been a sister
of the late John Baines. All the credit of Mrs. Gilchrist was due
to Samuel Povey. Mrs. Baines fretted seriously about Sophia, who
had given no sign of life for a very long time. Mr. Povey went to
Manchester and ascertained definitely from the relatives of Scales
that nothing was known of the pair. He did not go to Manchester
especially on this errand. About once in three weeks, on Tuesdays,
he had to visit the Manchester warehouses; but the tracking of
Scales's relative cost him so much trouble and time that,
curiously, he came to believe that he had gone to Manchester one
Tuesday for no other end. Although he was very busy indeed in the
shop, he flew over to Axe and back whenever he possibly could, to
the neglect of his affairs. He was glad to do all that was in his
power; even if he had not done it graciously his sensitive,
tyrannic conscience would have forced him to do it. But
nevertheless he felt rather virtuous, and worry and fatigue and
loss of sleep intensified this sense of virtue.
"So that if there is any sudden change they will telegraph," he
finished, to Constance.
She raised her head. The words, clinching what had led up to them,
drew her from her dream and she saw, for a moment, her mother in
an agony.
"But you don't surely mean--?" she began, trying to disperse the
painful vision as unjustified by the facts.
"My dear girl," said Samuel, with head singing, and hot eyes, and
a consciousness of high tension in every nerve of his body, "I
simply mean that if there's any sudden change they will
telegraph."
While they had tea, Samuel sitting opposite to his wife, and Miss
Insull nearly against the wall (owing to the moving of the table),
the baby rolled about on the hearthrug, which had been covered
with a large soft woollen shawl, originally the property of his
great-grandmother. He had no cares, no responsibilities. The shawl
was so vast that he could not clearly distinguish objects beyond
its confines. On it lay an indiarubber ball, an indiarubber doll,
a rattle, and fan. He vaguely recollected all four items, with
their respective properties. The fire also was an old friend. He
had occasionally tried to touch it, but a high bright fence always
came in between. For ten months he had never spent a day without
making experiments on this shifting universe in which he alone
remained firm and stationary. The experiments were chiefly
conducted out of idle amusement, but he was serious on the subject
of food. Lately the behaviour of the universe in regard to his
food had somewhat perplexed him, had indeed annoyed him. However,
he was of a forgetful, happy disposition, and so long as the
universe continued to fulfil its sole end as a machinery for the
satisfaction, somehow, of his imperious desires, he was not
inclined to remonstrate. He gazed at the flames and laughed, and
laughed because he had laughed. He pushed the ball away and
wriggled after it, and captured it with the assurance of practice.
He tried to swallow the doll, and it was not until he had tried
several times to swallow it that he remembered the failure of
previous efforts and philosophically desisted. He rolled with a
fearful shock, arms and legs in air, against the mountainous flank
of that mammoth Fan, and clutched at Fan's ear. The whole mass of
Fan upheaved and vanished from his view, and was instantly
forgotten by him. He seized the doll and tried to swallow it, and
repeated the exhibition of his skill with the ball. Then he saw
the fire again and laughed. And so he existed for centuries: no
responsibilities, no appetites; and the shawl was vast. Terrific
operations went on over his head. Giants moved to and fro. Great
vessels were carried off and great books were brought and deep
voices rumbled regularly in the spaces beyond the shawl. But he
remained oblivious. At last he became aware that a face was
looking down at his. He recognized it, and immediately an
uncomfortable sensation in his stomach disturbed him; he tolerated
it for fifty years or so, and then he gave a little cry. Life had
resumed its seriousness.
"Black alpaca. B quality. Width 20, t.a. 22 yards," Miss Insull
read out of a great book. She and Mr. Povey were checking stock.
And Mr. Povey responded, "Black alpaca B quality. Width 20, t.a.
22 yards. It wants ten minutes yet." He had glanced at the clock.
"Does it?" said Constance, well knowing that it wanted ten
minutes.
The baby did not guess that a high invisible god named Samuel
Povey, whom nothing escaped, and who could do everything at once,
was controlling his universe from an inconceivable distance. On
the contrary, the baby was crying to himself, There is no God.
His weaning had reached the stage at which a baby really does not
know what will happen next. The annoyance had begun exactly three
months after his first tooth, such being the rule of the gods, and
it had grown more and more disconcerting. No sooner did he
accustom himself to a new phenomenon than it mysteriously ceased,
and an old one took its place which he had utterly forgotten. This
afternoon his mother nursed him, but not until she had foolishly
attempted to divert him from the seriousness of life by means of
gewgaws of which he was sick. Still; once at her rich breast, he
forgave and forgot all. He preferred her simple natural breast to
more modern inventions. And he had no shame, no modesty. Nor had
his mother. It was an indecent carouse at which his father and
Miss Insull had to assist. But his father had shame. His father
would have preferred that, as Miss Insull had kindly offered to
stop and work on Thursday afternoon, and as the shop was chilly,
the due rotation should have brought the bottle round at half-past
five o'clock, and not the mother's breast. He was a self-conscious
parent, rather apologetic to the world, rather apt to stand off
and pretend that he had nothing to do with the affair; and he
genuinely disliked that anybody should witness the intimate scene
of HIS wife feeding HIS baby. Especially Miss Insull, that prim,
dark, moustached spinster! He would not have called it an outrage
on Miss Insull, to force her to witness the scene, but his idea
approached within sight of the word.
Constance blandly offered herself to the child, with the
unconscious primitive savagery of a young mother, and as the baby
fed, thoughts of her own mother flitted to and fro ceaselessly
like vague shapes over the deep sea of content which filled her
mind. This illness of her mother's was abnormal, and the baby was
now, for the first time perhaps, entirely normal in her
consciousness. The baby was something which could be disturbed,
not something which did disturb. What a change! What a change that
had seemed impossible until its full accomplishment!
For months before the birth, she had glimpsed at nights and in
other silent hours the tremendous upset. She had not allowed
herself to be silly in advance; by temperament she was too
sagacious, too well balanced for that; but she had had fitful
instants of terror, when solid ground seemed to sink away from
her, and imagination shook at what faced her. Instants only!
Usually she could play the comedy of sensible calmness to almost
perfection. Then the appointed time drew nigh. And still she
smiled, and Samuel smiled. But the preparations, meticulous,
intricate, revolutionary, belied their smiles. The intense resolve
to keep Mrs. Baines, by methods scrupulous or unscrupulous, away
from Bursley until all was over, belied their smiles. And then the
first pains, sharp, shocking, cruel, heralds of torture! But when
they had withdrawn, she smiled, again, palely. Then she was in
bed, full of the sensation that the whole house was inverted and
disorganized, hopelessly. And the doctor came into the room. She
smiled at the doctor apologetically, foolishly, as if saying: "We
all come to it. Here I am." She was calm without. Oh, but what a
prey of abject fear within! "I am at the edge of the precipice,"
her thought ran; "in a moment I shall be over." And then the
pains--not the heralds but the shattering army, endless,
increasing in terror as they thundered across her. Yet she could
think, quite clearly: "Now I'm in the middle of it. This is it,
the horror that I have not dared to look at. My life's in the
balance. I may never get up again. All has at last come to pass.
It seemed as if it would never come, as if this thing could not
happen to me. But at last it has come to pass!"
Ah! Some one put the twisted end of a towel into her hand again--
she had loosed it; and she pulled, pulled, enough to break cables.
And then she shrieked. It was for pity. It was for some one to
help her, at any rate to take notice of her. She was dying. Her
soul was leaving her. And she was alone, panic-stricken, in the
midst of a cataclysm a thousand times surpassing all that she had
imagined of sickening horror. "I cannot endure this," she thought
passionately. "It is impossible that I should be asked to endure
this!" And then she wept; beaten, terrorized, smashed and riven.
No commonsense now! No wise calmness now! No self-respect now!
Why, not even a woman now! Nothing but a kind of animalized
victim! And then the supreme endless spasm, during which she gave
up the ghost and bade good-bye to her very self.
She was lying quite comfortable in the soft bed; idle, silly:
happiness forming like a thin crust over the lava of her anguish
and her fright. And by her side was the soul that had fought its
way out of her, ruthlessly; the secret disturber revealed to the
light of morning. Curious to look at! Not like any baby that she
had ever seen; red, creased, brutish! But--for some reason that
she did not examine--she folded it in an immense tenderness.
Sam was by the bed, away from her eyes. She was so comfortable and
silly that she could not move her head nor even ask him to come
round to her eyes. She had to wait till he came.
In the afternoon the doctor returned, and astounded her by saying
that hers had been an ideal confinement. She was too weary to
rebuke him for a senseless, blind, callous old man. But she knew
what she knew. "No one will ever guess," she thought, "no one ever
can guess, what I've been through! Talk as you like. I KNOW, now."
Gradually she had resumed cognizance of her household, perceiving
that it was demoralized from top to bottom, and that when the time
came to begin upon it she would not be able to settle where to
begin, even supposing that the baby were not there to monopolize
her attention. The task appalled her. Then she wanted to get up.
Then she got up. What a blow to self-confidence! She went back to
bed like a little scared rabbit to its hole, glad, glad to be on
the soft pillows again. She said: "Yet the time must come when I
shall be downstairs, and walking about and meeting people, and
cooking and superintending the millinery." Well, it did come--
except that she had to renounce the millinery to Miss Insull--but
it was not the same. No, different! The baby pushed everything
else on to another plane. He was a terrific intruder; not one
minute of her old daily life was left; he made no compromise
whatever. If she turned away her gaze from him he might pop off
into eternity and leave her.
And now she was calmly and sensibly giving him suck in presence of
Miss Insull. She was used to his importance, to the fragility of
his organism, to waking twice every night, to being fat. She was
strong again. The convulsive twitching that for six months had
worried her repose, had quite disappeared. The state of being a
mother was normal, and the baby was so normal that she could not
conceive the house without him.
All in ten months!
When the baby was installed in his cot for the night, she came
downstairs and found Miss Insull and Samuel still working, and
Larder than ever, but at addition sums now. She sat down, leaving
the door open at the foot of the stairs. She had embroidery in
hand: a cap. And while Miss Insull and Samuel combined pounds,
shillings, and pence, whispering at great speed, she bent over the
delicate, intimate, wasteful handiwork, drawing the needle with
slow exactitude. Then she would raise her head and listen.
"Excuse me," said Miss Insull, "I think I hear baby crying."
"And two are eight and three are eleven. He must cry," said Mr.
Povey, rapidly, without looking up.
The baby's parents did not make a practice of discussing their
domestic existence even with Miss Insull; but Constance had to
justify herself as a mother.
"I've made perfectly sure he's comfortable," said Constance. "He's
only crying because he fancies he's neglected. And we think he
can't begin too early to learn."
"How right you are!" said Miss Insull. "Two and carry three."
That distant, feeble, querulous, pitiful cry continued
obstinately. It continued for thirty minutes. Constance could not
proceed with her work. The cry disintegrated her will, dissolved
her hard sagacity.
Without a word she crept upstairs, having carefully deposed the
cap on her rocking-chair.
Mr. Povey hesitated a moment and then bounded up after her,
startling Fan. He shut the door on Miss Insull, but Fan was too
quick for him. He saw Constance with her hand on the bedroom door.
"My dear girl," he protested, holding himself in. "Now what ARE
you going to do?"
"I'm just listening," said Constance.
"Do be reasonable and come downstairs."
He spoke in a low voice, scarcely masking his nervous irritation,
and tiptoed along the corridor towards her and up the two steps
past the gas-burner. Fan followed, wagging her tail expectant.
"Suppose he's not well?" Constance suggested.
"Pshaw!" Mr. Povey exclaimed contemptuously. "You remember what
happened last night and what you said!"
They argued, subduing their tones to the false semblance of good-
will, there in the closeness of the corridor. Fan, deceived,
ceased to wag her tail and then trotted away. The baby's cry,
behind the door, rose to a mysterious despairing howl, which had
such an effect on Constance's heart that she could have walked
through fire to reach the baby. But Mr. Povey's will held her. And
she rebelled, angry, hurt, resentful. Commonsense, the ideal of
mutual forbearance, had winged away from that excited pair. It
would have assuredly ended in a quarrel, with Samuel glaring at
her in black fury from the other side of a bottomless chasm, had
not Miss Insull most surprisingly burst up the stairs.
Mr. Povey turned to face her, swallowing his emotion.
"A telegram!" said Miss Insull. "The postmaster brought it down
himself--"
"What? Mr. Derry?" asked Samuel, opening the telegram with an
affectation of majesty.
"Yes. He said it was too late for delivery by rights. But as it
seemed very important ..."
Samuel scanned it and nodded gravely; then gave it to his wife.
Tears came into her eyes.
"I'll get Cousin Daniel to drive me over at once," said Samuel,
master of himself and of the situation.
"Wouldn't it be better to hire?" Constance suggested. She had a
prejudice against Daniel.
Mr. Povey shook his head. "He offered," he replied. "I can't
refuse his offer."
"Put your thick overcoat on, dear," said Constance, in a dream,
descending with him.
"I hope it isn't--" Miss Insull stopped.
"Yes it is, Miss Insull," said Samuel, deliberately.
In less than a minute he was gone.
Constance ran upstairs. But the cry had ceased. She turned the
door-knob softly, slowly, and crept into the chamber. A night-
light made large shadows among the heavy mahogany and the crimson,
tasselled rep in the close-curtained room. And between the bed and
the ottoman (on which lay Samuel's newly-bought family Bible) the
cot loomed in the shadows. She picked up the night-light and stole
round the bed. Yes, he had decided to fall asleep. The hazard of
death afar off had just defeated his devilish obstinacy. Fate had
bested him. How marvellously soft and delicate that tear-stained
cheek! How frail that tiny, tiny clenched hand! In Constance grief
and joy were mystically united. _