The Stars Look Down

by A. J. Cronin

  The theatre was very hot and it was full of a hot bubbling and hissing. At the head of the table the anæsthetist sat on a round white stool with metal cylinders near and red tubes and an enormous red bag. The anæsthetist was a woman, too, and she was very calm and bored.

  Great coloured bottles of antiseptic solution stood near the table and trays of instruments which came hot from the steaming sterilisers. The instruments were handed to Hilda. Hilda did not look at the instruments, she simply held out her black rubbery hand and an instrument was placed there, and Hilda used it.

  Hilda bent over the table slightly to use the Instruments. It was almost impossible to see what was on the table because the nurses pressed round closely as though looking and trying to screen what was on the table. It was Jenny, though, the body of Jenny. And yet it was not Jenny, nor Jenny’s body. Everything was covered up and swathed in white as with a great secrecy, white towels clipped everywhere, covering white towels.

  Only one neat square of Jenny’s body remained uncovered and the neat square showed up distinctly against the white clipped towels because the square was coloured a fine bright yellow. The picric acid did that. It was inside this square that everything was taking place, inside the square that Hilda used her instruments, her smooth rubbery hands.

  First there came the incision, yes, the incision came first. The warm shining lancet drew a slow firm line across the bright yellow skin and the skin took lips and smiled in a wide red smile. Little jets of red spouted from the smiling red lips and Hilda’s black hands moved and moved and a ring of shiny forceps lay all round the wound.

  Another incision, deeper and deeper inside the red mouth of the wound, which was not smiling now, but laughing, the lips were so wide.

  Then Hilda’s hand went right inside the wound. Hilda’s black shiny hand drew small and pointed like the black shiny head of a snake and penetrated deep within the wound. It was as though the laughing red mouth swallowed the head of the snake.

  After that more instruments were used and the forceps in the ring lay thickly one upon another. The confusion of instruments seemed inextricable, but it was not inextricable, it was all necessary and mathematical. It was impossible to see Hilda’s face behind the white gauze mask, but Hilda’s eyes showed above the white mask and the eyes were steeled. Hilda’s hands became the projection of Hilda’s eyes. They too were inexorable and steeled.

  It was necessary to be steeled. In the operating theatre the healthy body was a disenchantment, but in disease the body was obscene. Men should be brought to the operating theatre to view the last extremity of the painted smile. Useless, quite useless. Forgetfulness was too easy. Even now the wound itself was losing its horror and its instruments and forgetting and becoming again a warm smiling wound, a painted smile.

  The lips of the painted smiling wound drew together as the sutures quickly went in. Hilda put in the sutures with a beautiful precision and the lips of the wound puckered together thinly. It was nearly over now, sealed up and finished, and forgotten. The hissing and bubbling faded a little and the room did not seem to be so hot. The nurses did not press so closely round the table. One coughed into her mask and ended the long silence. Another began to count the bloodied swabs.

  In the cool high vestibule David stood motionless with his eyes upon the frosted doors. And at last the doors swung open and the wheeled stretcher came out. Two nurses wheeled the stretcher which moved without sound on its rubber tyres. The nurses did not see him as he pressed back against the wall, but he saw Jenny upon the stretcher. Jenny’s face was twisted sideways towards him, flushed and swollen; the eyelids and cheeks especially were very swollen and suffused as though Jenny were in a deep and beautiful drunken sleep. The cheeks puffed in and out as Jenny snored. The hair had fallen out of Jenny’s white cap and was tangled as if someone had tried to tug it out. Jenny did not look romantic now.

  He watched the swing doors of the ward close upon the wheeled stretcher as they took Jenny to her room at the end of the ward. Then he turned and saw Hilda coming down the incline from the theatre. She advanced towards him. She looked cold and remote and contemptuous. She said abruptly:

  “Well, it’s over, and she ought to be all right.”

  He was grateful for her hardness; he could not have borne anything else. He asked:

  “When can I see her?”

  “Some time this evening. It was not a long anæsthetic.” She paused. “By eight o’clock she should be receiving visitors.”

  He felt her coldness and again he was glad; kindness would have been odious, too abominable for words. Something of the hardness and cold brilliance of the theatre still clung to her and her words cut sharply like a knife. She would not stand in the vestibule. Almost impatiently, she flung open the door of her room and went in. The door remained open and although she appeared to have forgotten him he followed her into the room. He said in a low voice:

  “I want you to know that I’m grateful, Hilda.”

  “Grateful!” She moved about the room picking up reports and laying them down. Under her cold hardness she was deeply upset. Her whole purpose had been the success of the operation, she willed herself fiercely to succeed, to demonstrate before him her skill, her brilliance. And now that it was done she hated it. She saw her exquisite handiwork as brutal and crude, adjusting only the relations of the body and leaving the adjustments of the mind and soul untouched. What was the use! She patched up the carcass of the animal and that was about all. This worthless woman would return to him, sound only in body, still morbid in her soul. It rankled more deeply with Hilda because of her own feeling for David. This was not love—oh no, it was subtler far than that. He was the one man who had ever attracted her. At one time indeed she had almost willed herself to fall in love with him. Impossible! She could not love any man. The sense of her failure, that she could like but never love him, made it harder than ever to restore this woman, this Jenny, to him. She swung round. “I shall be here at eight this evening,” she said. “I’ll leave word then if you may see her.”

  “Very well.”

  She went to the tap and ran the water hard, filled a tumbler and, masking her emotion, drank it.

  “I must go round the ward now.”

  “Very well,” he said again.

  He went away. He went down the stairs and out of the hospital. At the end of John Street he jumped on to a bus going towards Battersea Bridge and in the bus his thoughts ran deeply. No matter what Jenny had done to him or to herself he was glad that she had come through. He could never dissever himself completely from Jenny, she was like a light shadow which had always lain across his heart. Through all these years of her absence she had still lived with him dimly, he had never forgotten her, and now that he had found her and everything was dead between them his curious sense of being bound and obligated to her persisted. He saw, perfectly, that Jenny was cheap and common and vulgar. He knew that she had been on the streets. His attitude should normally have been one of horror and disgust. But, no, he could not. Strange. All that was best in Jenny presented itself to him, he remembered her moments of unselfishness, her sudden kind impulses, her generosity with money, especially he remembered the honeymoon at Cullercoats and how Jenny had insisted that he take the money to buy himself a suit.

  He descended from the bus and walked along Blount Street and into his room. The house was very quiet. He sat down by the window and stared at the tree-tops of the park which showed above the opposite roofs, at the sky which showed beyond the tree-tops. The silence of the room sank into him, the tick of the clock took on a slow and measured rhythm, it was like the tramp of marching feet, of men marching slowly forward.

  He straightened himself unconsciously and his eye kindled towards the distant sky. He did not feel himself defeated now. The old stubborn impulse to fight and fight again was resurrected in his soul. Defeat was only contemptible when it brought submission in its train. He would abandon nothing. He still had his faith and the faith of the men behind h
im. The future remained to him. Hope came back to him with a great rush.

  Rising abruptly, he went over to the table and wrote three letters. He wrote to Nugent, to Heddon and to Wilson his agent in Sleescale. The letter to Wilson was important. He assured Wilson he would be in Sleescale on the next day but one to address the meeting of the local divisional executive. There was a vigorous optimism in the letter. He felt it himself as he read the letter and he was pleased. These last few days, while the approach of Jenny’s operation had banished all other thoughts from his head, the political situation had rapidly approached a head. In August, as he had predicted, forces in finance and politics had forced the vacillating Government out of office. The previous week, on October 6th, the temporary coalition had voluntarily dissolved. Nomination day for the new election was on the 16th October. David’s lips came together firmly. He would fight that election as never before. The proposed National policy he regarded as a determined attack upon the worker’s standard of living, instituted to meet a situation caused by the great banking interests. Drastic cuts in unemployment benefit were justified under the grotesque phrase “equality of sacrifice.” Sacrifices by the workers were intended to be certain, sacrifices by other sections of the community less so. Meanwhile four thousand millions of British capital were invested abroad. Labour was faced with the greatest crisis in its history. And it did not help Labour that certain of her leaders had thrown in their lot with the Coalition.

  Half-past six. A glance at the clock showed David it was later than he had imagined. He made himself a cup of cocoa and drank it slowly, reading the evening paper which Mrs. Tucker had just brought in. The paper was full of garbled propaganda. Keep Industry safe from Nationalisation. Bolshevism gone mad. The Nightmare of Labour Control—these phrases struck his eye. There was a cartoon indicating a valiant John Bull in the act of stamping on a loathsome viper. The viper was plainly labelled: Socialism. Several of Bebbington’s choicer sayings were prominently reported. Bebbington was now a hero in the National Cause. The day before he had declared: “Peace in Industry is threatened by doctrines of class warfare. We are safeguarding the worker from himself!”

  David smiled grimly and let the paper fall upon the table. When he got back to Sleescale he would have something to say upon that same point. Something a little different perhaps.

  By now it was after seven o’clock and he rose, washed his face and hands, took his hat and went out. The strange lightness persisted within him and was heightened by the beauty of the evening. As he crossed Battersea Bridge the sky was red and gold and the river held the coloured brightness of the sky. He reached the hospital in a mood very different from his despondency of the afternoon. Everything was easy if one had courage.

  At the top of the stairs he ran straight into Hilda. She had just made her evening visit and was standing with Sister Clegg in the vestibule talking for a moment before she went away. He stopped.

  “Is it all right for me to go in?” he asked.

  “Yes, it is quite all right,” Hilda said. She was more composed than she had been in the afternoon. Perhaps, like him, she had reasoned herself into this composure. Her manner was remote and formal, but it was above everything composed. “I think you will find her extremely comfortable,” she added. “The anæsthetic has not upset her; she has come through it all remarkably well.”

  He could find nothing to say. He was conscious of them both studying him. Sister Clegg in particular seemed always to have a feminine unconquerable curiosity towards him.

  “I told her you were coming,” Hilda said calmly. “She seemed very pleased.”

  Sister Clegg looked at Hilda and smiled her cold smile. Aside, she said:

  “She actually asked me if her hair was all right.”

  David flushed slightly. There was something inhuman in Sister Clegg’s frigid exposure of Jenny’s vanity. A quick reply rose to his lips. But he did not make that reply. As he raised his eyes to Sister Clegg a young nurse rushed out of the ward. She was a junior nurse or she would not have rushed like that. Her face was flour white. She looked frightened. When she saw Sister Clegg she gave a little gasp of relief.

  “Come, Sister,” she said. “Come!”

  Sister Clegg did not ask any question. She knew what that look meant on a junior nurse’s face. It meant an emergency. She turned without a word and walked back into the ward. Hilda stood for a moment; then she too turned and walked into the ward.

  David remained alone in the vestibule. The incident had happened so suddenly it left him at a loss. He did not know whether he ought to pass through the ward if there was some trouble in the ward. But before he decided Hilda was back again. Hilda was back with an almost unbelievable urgency.

  “Go into the waiting-room,” Hilda said.

  He stared at Hilda. Two nurses came out of the ward and walked rapidly towards the operating theatre; they walked abreast, vaguely unreal, like the advance of a forthcoming procession. Then the lights of the theatre clicked on and the frosted glass doors of the theatre showed bright and white like an illumined cinema screen.

  “Go into the waiting-room,” Hilda repeated. The urgency was in her voice now, in her eyes, her harsh commanding face. There was nothing else to do. He obeyed; he went into the waiting-room. The door closed behind him and he heard the quick sound of Hilda’s steps.

  The emergency was Jenny, he knew that with a sudden chilling certainty. He stood in the bare waiting-room listening to the sound of feet crossing and recrossing the vestibule. He heard the whine of the lift. He heard more steps. A period of silence followed, then he heard a sound which absolutely horrified him: it was the sound of someone running. Someone ran from the theatre to Hilda’s room and then ran back again. His heart contracted. When discipline yielded itself to such haste the emergency must be serious oh, desperately serious. The thought caused him to stand motionless as though frozen.

  A long time passed, a very long time. He did not know how long. Half an hour, perhaps an hour, he simply did not know. Immobilised, strained to an attitude of listening, his muscles refused to allow him to look at his watch.

  Suddenly the door opened and Hilda entered the room. He could not believe it was Hilda, the change in her was so great; she seemed exhausted and spiritually spent. She said almost wearily:

  “You had better go to see her now.”

  He came forward hurriedly.

  “What has happened?”

  She looked at him.

  “Hæmorrhage.”

  He repeated the word.

  Her lips contracted. She said very distinctly and bitterly:

  “The moment Sister came out of the room she raised herself in bed. She reached for a mirror. To see if she was pretty.” The bitterness, the defeatedness in Hilda’s voice was terrible. “To see if she was pretty, if her hair was straight, to use her lipstick. Can you think of it? Reaching for a mirror, after all I’d done.” Hilda broke off, wholly overcome, her hardness of that afternoon forgotten, her sole thought the destruction of her handiwork. It prostrated her. She flung the door wide with a helpless gesture. “You’d better go now if you wish to see her.”

  He went out of the waiting-room and through the ward and into Jenny’s room. Jenny lay flat on her back with the end of the bed raised high on blocks. Sister Clegg was giving Jenny an injection into her arm. The room was in confusion, basins everywhere and ice and towels. The pieces of a smashed hand mirror were lying on the floor.

  Jenny’s face was the colour of clay. She breathed in little shallow gasps. Her eyes were upon the ceiling. They were terrified, the eyes; they seemed to cling to the ceiling as though afraid to let the ceiling go.

  His heart melted and flooded through him. He fell on his knees beside the bed.

  “Jenny,” he said. “Oh, Jenny, Jenny.”

  The eyes removed themselves from the ceiling and wavered towards him. Excusingly, the white lips whispered:

  “I wanted to be nice for you.”

  Tears ran down his f
ace. He took her bloodless hand and held it.

  “Jenny,” he said. “Oh, Jenny, Jenny, my dear.”

  She whispered, as though it were a lesson:

  “I wanted to be nice for you.”

  Tears choked him; he could not speak. He pressed the white hand against his cheek.

  “I’m thirsty,” she gasped feebly. “Can I have a drink?”

  He took the drinking cup—funny, like a little tea-pot!—and held it to her white lips. She raised her hand weakly and took the drinking-cup. Then a faint shiver went through her body. The liquid in the drinking-cup spilled all over her nightgown.

  Everything had turned out for the best for Jenny in the end. The little finger of her hand which still held the drinking-cup was politely curved. That would have pleased Jenny if she had known. Jenny had died polite.

  TWENTY-TWO

  At half-past eight on the morning after Jenny’s funeral David stepped on to the platform of Sleescale Station and was met by Peter Wilson. The whole of the previous day, October 15th, had been a swift unreality of sadness, completing the last pitiful arrangements, following all that remained of Jenny to the cemetery, placing a wreath of flowers upon her grave. He had travelled from London by the night train and he had not slept much. Yet he did not feel tired; the keen wind blowing from the sea struck along the platform and braced him with a tense energy. He had a curious sense of physical resistance as he put down his suit-case and shook hands with Wilson.

  “Here you are,” Wilson said, “and not before time.” Wilson’s slow, good-natured smile was absent. His little pointed beard made those restless jerks which always indicated some disturbance in his mind. “It’s a great pity you missed your meeting yesterday, the Committee was extremely put about. You can’t know what we’re up against.”

  “I imagine it’s going to be a hard fight,” David answered quietly.

  “Perhaps harder,” Wilson declared. “Have you heard who they’re putting up against you?” He paused, searching David’s eyes with a perturbed inquiry; then he threw out violently: “It’s Gowlan.”