“I tell you I don’t want to hear about Joe Gowlan,” Jenny exclaimed in a tense voice. “If you want to know, I loathe and detest the very sound of his name.”
But Ada, seating herself at the table and placing her plump hands on the cosy as though to warm them, went on, maddeningly:
“You can’t think how wonderful he’s got on. He’s the head of the department, works clean and everything, dresses a perfect treat. Why, Jenny, the last time he come in he told us he was going up to supper at the Millingtons’ house. Up to their house on Hilltop, Jenny, can you beat that? I’m telling you, my lady, you made a big mistake when you let Joe slip through your fingers. He’s the man I’d have liked to see my son-in-law.”
Jenny’s face was very white, she clenched her fists tight, her voice turned shrill.
“I won’t have you speak that way, mother. I won’t have you mention Joe in the same breath as David. Joe’s an absolute rotter and David’s the best man that ever lived.”
She stared at Ada challengingly. But this time Jenny could not dominate her mother. Her condition made her weak physically; and spiritually she was in a state of curious compromise. Ada had an excellent chance to make Jenny “lie down to her for once” and Ada took that chance.
“Huh!” she declared with a toss of her head. “What a way to talk. You would never think you had played about with him to hear you.”
Jenny’s eyes fell. She shivered slightly and was silent.
At that moment the door opened and David entered. He had just returned from the Harbour Board offices where he had been given temporary clerical work. Ada turned towards him with a little condescending smile. But before she could speak Jenny, upon the sofa, gave a dolorous cry and clapped her hand to her side.
“Oh dear,” she whispered. “I’ve got a pain.”
Ada hesitated, contemplating her daughter between resentment and doubt.
“You can’t,” she said at last. “It’s a week before your time.”
“Oh yes, I can,” Jenny answered in a breathless voice. “I know I can, See, here it is again.”
“Well I never,” Ada declared. “I believe it is.” Sympathy rushed over her. “My poor lamb!” She knelt down and put her hand on Jenny’s stomach. “Yes indeed it is, well, well, did you ever?” And then to David as though the whole situation were completely altered, and he, in some mysterious manner, to blame: “Go on. Fetch the doctor. Don’t stand there looking at her.”
With a quick look at Jenny David went for Dr. Scott, whom he found taking his evening surgery. Scott was an elderly red-faced bony man, very offhand and laconic, with a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting in the middle of a conversation. He was in every way extremely unprofessional. He always wore riding-breeches and a long check jacket with enormous pockets stuffed full of everything: pipe, pills, half a bandage, some blue raisins, two empty thermometer cases, a pocket lance never sterilised, and a gum elastic catheter which whipped across the room whenever he pulled out his musty handkerchief. But in spite of his oddity, untidiness and complete lack of asepsis he was an excellent doctor.
Yet he seemed to attach little urgency to Jenny’s first pain. He hawked, spat and nodded:
“I’ll look round in an hour.” Then he called out through the open door into his waiting-room: “Next, please.”
David was upset because Scott did not come at once. He returned home to find that Jenny and Ada had both gone upstairs. He waited restlessly for Scott’s arrival.
Yet when the doctor appeared at seven o’clock, though Jenny’s pains were much worse, he assured David that he could do nothing in the meantime. David understood that a first confinement was always a protracted business and he asked the doctor if Jenny would have to suffer long. Staring into the kitchen fire a minute before spitting into it Scott replied:
“I don’t think she’ll be that long, mind ye. I’ll look back before twelve!”
It was hard to wait until twelve. Jenny’s pains became rapid and severe. She seemed to have no strength and no spirit to endure the pains. She was by turns peevish, anguished, hysterical, exhausted. The bedroom on which she had expended such care and thought, with the befrilled cot in one corner and the new muslin curtains on the windows, and the pretty lace doyleys set upon the dressing-table became littered and disordered. It was bad enough when Ada upset the kettle, but the climax came with a faint mewing which set Jenny screaming and revealed the fact that “Pretty” was below the bed.
Then Jenny gave up. Though Ada told her she must walk about, she lay across her bed sprawling, holding her stomach, weeping on a huddle of twisted bed-clothes. She forgot all about the Chickabiddy’s Journal and Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home. She got completely out of hand, lying on her back across that disordered bed with her legs apart, her night-dress drawn up, her hair tumbled about her pale thin face, her brow streaming with sweat. From time to time she closed her eyes and screamed. “Oh dear God,” she screamed, “ah, ah, ah, there it is again, oh my God my back, ah, ah, ah, oh mother give me a drink that water there it’s worse quick dear God, mother.” It was not quite so romantic as Jenny had imagined.
Scott came at twelve sharp and went straight upstairs. The door slammed upon Scott, Ada and the screeching Jenny. There was more screeching, the heavy tramp of Scott’s boots, then silence.
Chloroform, thank God, David thought. He sat hunched up in a chair in the kitchen before the nearly out fire. He had suffered every pain with Jenny and now the chloroform silence brought him an almost agonised relief. Human suffering always affected him profoundly and Jenny’s suffering seemed the epitome of all inevitable human pain. He thought of her with tenderness. He forgot all the quarrels and disputes and bickerings that had occurred between them. He forgot her pettiness, her petulance and her vanities. He began to consider the child and once again the child appeared to him as a symbol — a new life rising from amongst the dead. He had a vision of the battlefields where the dead lay in attitudes stranger even than they had lain within the pit. Soon he would be there, in France, on these battlefields. Nugent had written to him from the front where he was serving as a stretcher bearer in an ambulance unit attached to the Northumberland Fusiliers. By joining up at the same headquarters at Tynecastle, he also would get out with the Fusiliers and he hoped his unit would be near to Nugent’s.
A moaning came from the room overhead and then a singing, Jenny’s voice singing. He heard it quite plainly, a verse from one of her old sentimental songs, but the words came curiously ribald and slurred. That was another effect of the chloroform. It made people sing as though they were drunk.
Then again there was silence, a very long silence broken by the sudden coming of another voice, a thin new voice, not Jenny’s or Ada’s or Scott’s voice, but an altogether new voice which cried and piped like a little flute. The sound of that thin voice emerging from the pain and the shouting and the dark succeeding silence struck into David’s heart. Again the symboclass="underline" out of the chaos the new dawn. He sat perfectly still, his hands clasped together, his head uplifted, a strange presentiment in his eyes.
Half an hour later Scott clumped down the stairs and entered the kitchen. His face wore that tired and distasteful look which confinements often bring to the faces of overworked and disillusioned doctors. He fumbled in his pocket for a blue raisin. Scott always declared that he carried about these blue raisins to give to children; they were a marvellous cure for worms, he said. But Scott really liked the blue raisins himself and that was why he carried them about.