by Ursula Bloom
‘Yes, he’s been.’
‘What does he say? Nerves, I don’t mind betting. I wish I could waste the time giving way to nerves and such rubbish, but my role is work; I’m always working.’
Then her silence penetrated his understanding, and he asked: ‘What did he say?’
‘I’m going to have a baby.’
That startled even George. ‘Good God!’ he said, ‘and that awful chit for rates, and the prices what they are. I need at least a couple of new suits. I can’t go without.’
She went to him. ‘You shan’t go without,’ she said tenderly. ‘It’s the son you always wanted, the steadying influence, you know.’
‘Oh, don’t try and make it worse. You know I only said that in a temper. When is it coming?’
‘October.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear! Troubles never do come singly, do they? I thought the rates were bad enough, and now this. Simpkins charged me exorbitantly over Muriel; we’ll have to do something cheaper this time.’
She let him rant on. It was so like him. Later in the quivering silence of the night, when with a splendid calm she faced that which all women fear, when she saw ahead that chaos of a future more closely fettered, more saddled, she was afraid. But the little arms came down to her again, not in phantasy, but in reality. Muriel had heard her crying, for she was sleeping in the child’s room, and, creeping out of her little bed, she came to Mary’s.
‘Mummy, what is it?’
‘I’m frightened, my pet, and worried. Life is so difficult, and ‒’ She had to tell, for to Muriel these things were no mystery. ‘And I’m afraid I’m going to have a baby.’
Muriel was childishly pleased. ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Bertha thinks she is going to have one too.’
Bertha was the unmarried housemaid!
II
George found a governess. She was thirty-one and she had a history attached to her. She had been engaged to a mining engineer who had gone out to Australia to make a home for her. Two years later she had followed, only to find that neither the mining engineer nor the home came up to expectations. The result had been thoroughly disastrous. Her baby had died, and she had returned to the old country, with no allowance and no definite separation, and she asked no salary.
‘But surely, George,’ said Mary, ‘won’t it present difficulties? I mean, what can we do? She must be paid.’
‘I think it an excellent arrangement. She just wants a comfy home, and people to be nice to her.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
George wasn’t quite sure where he had met her. He rather thought at a tea-shop, where she had passed him some cakes; anyway, he had known her a fairish time, he had met her people, and he was convinced that the arrangement would be an excellent one in every way.
So Mrs. Dane came to be Muriel’s governess. Mrs. Dane spoke French fluently, and played the piano well; she was everything that one could desire; she was amusing and witty, and Mary conceded that she liked her. She was tall and slight, with no pretensions to prettiness, but a certain piquant air with her that was rather attractive.
During the early part of the summer Mary was ashamed to admit that she had suspicions about George and Mrs. Dane, but with the start of the autumn she had to admit that her suspicions were entirely unfounded. Mrs. Dane even laughed at George. Muriel was devoted to her governess; scales took on an added impetus, French became attractive, they went for long rambles and studied botany together; from all this Mary, by reason of her approaching confinement, was debarred. She spent a lazy summer in the garden, listening to George cataloguing his expenses whilst she sewed at diminutive garments. Muriel’s little things had been given away, which was, so all the wise old women told her, the very cause of this event.
(‘Give them away?’ said Mrs. Moore, the village laundress. ‘Why, ma’am, you must be crazed. Beggin’ your pardon, but they allers says that brings about another, and sure enough …’)
‘Well, let’s hope it is a boy,’ said George.
That was rather a pleasant summer, and they seemed to be removed and remote from the guns in France and the general world upheaval. The garden was serenely peaceful, and the hot, lazy days over-sweet. Early in September, when the dew was beginning to lie late, and the evenings to close in with the white mist rising like smoke from the red-twigged willows by the river, Mamma dropped a bomb in their midst. Mamma considered it to be her duty to come and be with Mary in her illness. ‘At Mary’s age,’ wrote Mamma, ‘anything’ (several times underlined) ‘might happen.’
‘And, after all, I’m a poor little thirty-six,’ declared Mary.
‘Are you really, Mummy? I thought you were only twenty,’ said Muriel, for the letter had been dropped into a perfectly peaceful breakfast scene.
‘Say you have me, and I am half a nurse,’ Mrs. Dane suggested. ‘What is Mamma like?’
‘Mamma,’ said George heatedly, ‘is ‒’
‘I know exactly what he is going to say,’ interrupted Mary, ‘and he is quite right, but I do dislike the word so much. If once we get Mamma here we shan’t have a moment’s peace. The servants will leave, we shall be driven silly. Somebody has definitely got to think of something.’
‘Write a tactful letter,’ Mrs. Dane advised; ‘tell her there isn’t a bedroom, and that you will wire if there is any need.’
That was what they told Mamma, and she wrote back and stated that she knew they did not want her, but that their narrow-mindedness would not deter her from doing her duty. She would be with them on the twelfth. So much for their poor little subterfuge. Mamma added in a most significant postscript that this time she insisted upon the child being called Agnes, and would see to it herself.
Then it all happened suddenly, when no one expected it, at the end of September. Mary and George had a scene. He had discovered the pathetic little post-office savings book with its miserable balance of eleven pounds nine shillings and eightpence, and he brought it forth triumphantly one evening to where she sat by the dining-room fireside.
‘And what is this?’ he asked, flourishing it.
‘Some money I earned.’
George steadied himself. ‘You mean all my hard-earned stipend has been wasted on baby clothes while you had a vast amount lying here doing nothing?’
She said contemptuously: ‘Look at the “vast amount”.’
George looked, added it up, and in his haste made it eleven pounds ten shillings and eightpence, and refused to admit that he had made a mistake. ‘A wife should have no secrets from her husband,’ said he.
‘It wasn’t a very frightful secret.’
‘Where did you get the money from?’
‘That is my business.’
‘It wasn’t … from him?’ George had never any sense of decency about bringing dead Peter into an argument. He dragged him in by the heels whenever he could.
Deeply shocked, she answered: ‘No, it was not from him. I earned it, if you want to know.’
‘How? It might be any way.’
She said wearily and with closely compressed lips: ‘It was not that way.’
After a silence, he demanded: ‘Oh! Why are you keeping it? What is it for?’
‘It is for Muriel.’
He said ‘Oh,’ again, and then: ‘Of course you would think of her and not of me. I am sure I don’t understand some people’s view-points. It is very sickening to be always misunderstood and treated as a fool.’
That was when the pain went stabbing through her. It was a knife thrust into her and twisted. She felt that if it twisted again she would scream; she would not be able to bear it. Her wet hands closed firmly on the arms of her chair. She gripped, and her face, which had gone suddenly ashy, flooded redly again as the pain released her.
‘Don’t look at me so stupidly,’ said George. ‘Nobody ever thinks of me. People are so selfish. This big sum tucked away here, wasted I’m sure.’
She said helplessly: ‘The baby is coming.’
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br /> ‘Don’t I know the baby is coming? Haven’t I had to stint and starve for it all through the summer? Isn’t my suit dropping into rags upon me? As if I didn’t know the baby is coming!’
‘Yes, but now … soon … to-night.’ The rack loosed her; she huddled into her chair, pushing her hair back dankly from her brow. George did not say any more; he helped her upstairs to bed, and he told Mrs. Dane. Then he said that he would cycle into the town for Simpkins. Of course, he added, it would happen at night, and a wet night too, and no nurse. Mrs. Dane suggested that they should ask Anna George, the village ‘gamp,’ to sit with Mary until Dr. Simpkins and a nurse arrived; and George agreed. He went out with an ill grace.
Mary, lying in bed, was aware that a fire had been lit, that in an untrained but very competent manner Anna George was airing small garments and systematically boiling water. She was an oldish woman with straight, lank hair, and spectacles. Once she came to the bedside and stood there looking down at Mary.
‘There isn’t much I can do, ma’am,’ she said humbly. ‘Perhaps if you wouldn’t be above holding my hand … some say it do help.’
They held hands. Great tumultuous waves of pain tossed Mary to and fro. She must not cry out in case Muriel should wake and hear. Muriel must not be frightened at any cost. In between came long silences steeped in exhaustion; she thought of odd things: her hair which had changed recently from mouse-colour and gold to a speckled grey, although she was only thirty-six; Peter … Wally … George. Peter, with his whimsical mouth so full of kisses. No, she could not think physically now. This torture was the product of physical emotion, of kisses like that. She saw Peter again in a new way …
He was holding her in his arms. ‘There, there, it won’t be long. I’ll hold you all the time. You mustn’t be frightened. You shan’t be frightened’ … just as one talks to babies. Then the pain would come again, stabbing, thrusting pain, in the very midst of one. Throes of ghastly nausea in the wake of that disembowelling agony; hair wet against one’s face; teeth setting on the linen of the pillow; hands clutching for aid. Then Anna, ignorant yet tender. Was it Peter, or was it Anna?
‘There, there, it won’t be long …’ And deep in her heart that shivering terror, that awful realisation of the savagery of the pain. O God! why do women suffer in this fashion? Why do they suffer so tumultuously?
She thought, in between the throes, of men tramping, and of the tinkle of the piano in the Musike Salle in Wilhelm Strasse; of Frau Tietz in her Sunday frock; of Johnny tapping poor Papa’s best port; of Mamma losing at croquet to Mr. Jones. In the big crises of life one always thinks in trivialities.
Then she heard the hum of the doctor’s car purring through the silence of the oppressive night; turning in at the drive gate, louder and nearer. Just as she listened a frightful pain gripped her, and before she could smother it she had screamed her terror to the skies. She was oblivious to everything save the pain.
The pain was titanic …
III
With the laggard dawn Mary gave birth to a stillborn son. Hours afterwards, in the tawny splendour of an autumn afternoon, she regained consciousness. She had a very blurred recollection of the event itself. It was all smudged in with a memory of poor Papa’s best port, and Mamma losing at croquet to Mr. Jones. Anna George had gone, and a nurse was sitting primly before the fire reading a book. Then the haze came back again, the blur and the smudge and the too-vivid lights dancing in great darknesses; presently a clearer sensing, and George coming in and sitting down on a chair beside her. He had her hand in his, and he was pressing it in a manner which he meant to be consoling.
‘It’s all too sad,’ said George. ‘My little son. And I had always so wanted a little son.’
She wished that she could not see something hypocritical about George talking in this manner. George, who had not wanted a little son in the least, but had seized upon it as a good beginning to a pose. George’s imagination had always been excellent, though his sense of the ludicrous might be slightly lacking; he had never hesitated to give the liveliness of his fancy full play.
‘I feel very ill,’ she said.
‘That’s weakness. You’ll be better soon.’
‘Nothing’s wrong, is there?’
‘Wrong? Of course not.’
But she found almost at once that there was something wrong. She had not felt like this with Muriel; not a bit like this. She was lying in an inert and lethargic way; they fed her from a feeding-cup. That, too, had not happened before. Later, when she lay there and the white mist came like a film up from the river and across the fields to the very garden, she asked the nurse. ‘There is something wrong?’ she said.
‘You’ll be better soon.’
‘But there is something wrong?’
‘They had to operate. You need not worry. Just lie still and don’t worry. There is nothing to bother about at all.’
There ensued days of lying there in that same haze; lying there and dreaming of men marching, of a ship ploughing her way out through the furrows of the North Sea, rising and falling, and of a man who had died in China. She had visualised that so often that when she closed her eyes she could almost imagine the place: the gay street with the tea-shops and the joss-houses, the pepper trees with their fragile lacy leaves, and the flame-of-the-forest burning like braziers against the time-greyed branches. Then Peter, with his face sagging in pouchy folds, and his eyes peering out of hollow pits above a blanket. Peter, with his poor brittle hands pulling at the sheet and his mouth white like frosted grapes.
She was learning to know Peter in a new way now. Before it had been physical, now it was that she could think of him spiritually. The Peter who had passed on. This triumphant soul of his seemed very near. She, too, had gone down to the gateway of death in the hurtful thrusting of that pain-filled night. In and out of the lights and darknesses of the ghastly agonies and subsequent exhaustions Peter had flitted. He had not been able to come closer, and the fault lay within herself. She had seen him wrongly, shaping him physically, when he could only approach her through spiritual channels. But he had been near. She knew that he had been near. Not the Peter whom she had known, but a new and radiant soul of Peter, stronger, far stronger ‒ freed from earthly disillusion and reasoning, a great and vivid soul.
So she would lie and think, with her eyes, those purple eyes, watching the corn cut in the meadow beyond the paddock, watching the earth change from the gold of harvest to its deep motherly redness of soil; hearing the cows lowing as they went to pasture at dawn and returned at dusk. And she would ask for the shawl which he had given her, and lie there with her face buried in its folds.
Strange roses and lilies embroidered upon it; hummingbirds and butterflies; the picture of all she once might have had, but which she had refused. Exquisite colouring of something she had missed.
Then she would think of Peter in the radiant glory of afterwards; not of the petty little afterwards of George’s teaching, where white angels sang chillingly to gilt harps. Peter, in the radiance of an astral plane, risen above the purged clay of the grave to the great hereafter.
The hereafter …
It was coming very near. She had never thought about it before, but had accepted it with the quiet trustfulness of most people. Church on Sunday, and the nice hymns which she loved, and the placid prayers; opposite, St. John in the window, wearing his halo in a smug, contented manner that was most irritating. The dead people in their slim graves without, lying in meaningless lines, people of no consequence, now nice angels singing in Heaven. It was so wrong. It was not like that at all ‒ not at all …
Having been near death, she knew. She saw life differently; she saw it as a school like the one in the Wilhelm Strasse: the more difficult the passages which one tried to play, the higher the standard gained. And the Master never taxed the powers too greatly; He knew too well the capacity of the pupils. Life, the supreme lesson, the supreme series of lessons. Afterwards, the quiet contemplation on the other plane, w
here Peter was, where understanding was, where love lived.
Lying there in the tranquil room, with the laggard October days rising late and dying early, she felt that this was a needed rest, for ahead lay some strong demand upon her strength, a final galvanisation of her efforts, a concentration that would tax her powers to the uttermost. So she lay and slept, and dreamt the marching of feet and the clank of arms, and the proximity of a hovering soul.
In her tardy convalescence she saw it, that grim shadow upon her path. Muriel was practising ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ in the room below. Ta-rom-ta-roppity-rom-ta-roppity-ta-ra-ra-ropity-rom. George was coming up the garden with Mrs. Dane, and they had no idea that Mary was observing them from the window. They stopped by the spring garden and, searching under the ivied wall, George produced a sickly primrose, that abnormally early primrose which is the harbinger of bad fortune. George kissed it solemnly. There was something a trifle ridiculous about George looking amorous and kissing the primrose. He had grown stouter, and his cheeks sagged a little; his early fresh colour had become hard and set and was now florid. He kissed the primrose, and then put it to Mrs. Dane’s lips; after that, he kissed her. It made Mary feel sick, and yet at the same time, to her shame, she was amused. She had fallen out of love with George, and could afford
to be amused at him, but his promiscuous kisses were a menace to her happiness and to Muriel too. They could not continue.
She spoke to him that evening when he came up to bed. George undressed by the firelight with clumsy, unmethodical movements, and she, lying there, thought that perhaps the moment might be propitious.
‘George,’ she said, ‘I saw you kiss Mrs. Dane to-day.’
George did not deny it as she had expected. ‘We are soul-mates,’ he said; ‘she lost her little son too.’
Mary ignored the inference. It was not the parry that she had expected, and she was rather amazed that George should be so stupid.
‘It can’t go on, dear, truly it can’t. It’s such an insult to me; Mrs. Dane must leave, she must really.’
George came to a standstill, with his braces dripping over his trousers as he brushed his hair before the overmantel. ‘What if I refuse to part with her? She is everything to me, everything. We feel alike, we think alike, we are not material. She doesn’t care about money and position, and all the stupid, ordinary things you care about. She has a soul.’
