The Stars Look Down (41 page)

Then she began to take up her music again. She sat at the piano through the day practising and trying out her voice and she learned two lullabies. She wanted to be more accomplished. At this stage her attitude expressed a secret remorse: she was not good enough for David, she should have been better in every way, more talented, more intellectual. She wanted to be able to talk to David, to have discussions, real discussions upon the subjects which interested him, all about things that mattered, social and economic and political problems. With this in mind she dipped into his books once or twice to elevate her intellectual plane and bring grist to the mills of philosophical discussion. But the books were not very encouraging and in the end she was obliged to give them up.

Still, if she could not be clever she could be good. Ah, yes, she could be good. She purchased a little volume entitled
Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home
and she read it devotedly. She read it like a child learning a lesson, her lips moving slightly over the words, the book resting in her lap
on top of the crochet work. After one particularly sunny half-hour she fastened her swimming eyes on David and exclaimed emotionally:

“I’m just a silly little thing, David. But I’m not bad really. It says here we all make mistakes but we can lift ourselves up again. I’m not bad, am I, David, I’m not really bad?”

He assured her patiently that she was not bad.

She looked at him for a moment, then said with a sudden gush:

“Oh, David, you’re the best man that ever was. Really you are, David, the best in all the world.”

Never before had Jenny seemed to him so much a child. She was a child. It was simply ridiculous that she should be having a baby. He was gentle with her. Often at nights when they lay in bed together and she would start, troubled and frightened in her sleep, and cling to him, he could feel her swollen body and the infant moving within her. Tenderness came over him and he soothed her through these midnight whimperings.

He had asked Jenny if she would like Martha, his own mother, to look after the house and nurse her while she was lying-in and Jenny, with her new submissiveness, had agreed. But when Martha came down to make arrangements that one interview proved the reconciliation to be impossible. Martha met David on his way home. Her colour was high. “I can’t do it,” she declared in a contained voice. “It’s no use at all. The less I have to do with her the better. I cannot stand her and she cannot stand me. So that must just be the end of it.” She walked off before he could reply.

So it was arranged for Ada Sunley to come through from Tynecastle. Ada arrived on the 2nd of December, a wet and windy day, stepping heavily out of the train with a small yellow suit-case made secure with cord. David met her at the station, carried the suit-case to Lamb Lane. Ada’s mood was very offhand, she did not seem particularly pleased to come, at least she did not seem pleased with David. She was reserved and rather cold towards him and inclined to be cross at the household’s limitations; she was not an hour in the house before she sent him out to buy a bedpan. Her preparations, her fussings and bustlings were tremendous. Shorn of the comfort of her own slatternly back room, prised from the indolent ease of her favourite rocker, she assumed an unnatural activity, the terrible waddling activity of the fat woman. She was assiduous towards Jenny, assiduous and
pitying. “Come away, my poor lamb,” she seemed to say. “At least you have your mother beside you.”

Ada’s tongue was particularly active. She gave Jenny all the news. Sally had finished up unexpectedly on her winter pantomime tour, the show had suddenly come to grief, it wasn’t any good, and Sally was out of work again and looking for an engagement. Sally never seemed to be doing anything else but looking for an engagement, Ada added ruefully. There was some talk of concerts being organised for the wounded soldiers and Sally might be asked to take part in those, but it would be voluntary work without a penny piece of pay. Ada deplored equally Sally’s inability to earn a decent settled wage and the stupid ambition which drove her to continue with the whole hopeless business of the stage. She wished to heaven that Sally had never chucked the Telephone Exchange.

By a gradual process of approach Ada arrived at the topic of Joe. They were in the kitchen together, Jenny and Ada, on the day following Ada’s arrival and Ada was making Jenny a cup of tea. With a very casual air Ada remarked:

“By the bye, you didn’t know that Joe had been to see us?”

Jenny, who was reclining upon the sofa, stiffened suddenly and her pale languorous face sealed up like an oyster. There was a silence, then she said in a frozen voice:

“I don’t know anything about Joe Gowlan and I don’t care either. I despise him.”

Ada carefully adjusted the cosy on the tea-pot.

“He did come though, Jenny, dropped in as nice as you please, and dropped in once or twice since, he has. You needn’t run him down because you missed him, Jenny. That was your mistake, my lady. He’s a nice fellow, if it’s the last word I say. He’s going to get Phyllis and Clarry into the munitions when it goes up at Wirtley. He’s back again at Millington’s and doing wonderful.”

“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 symbol: 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.

He found a blue raisin and began to chew it. He said in a non-committal way:

“Well, the little article’s arrived.”

David did not speak. He swallowed; nodded his head.

“A boy,” Scott said with a sort of automatic response, trying to infuse enthusiasm into his words, but failing.

“Is Jenny all right?”

“Oh, your wife’s quite comfortable, perfectly comfortable.” Scott paused and threw a very queer look at David. “The baby’s inclined to be delicate though. He’ll need a bit of attention one way and another.”

He threw another queerly suspicious look at David, but he said no more. He was a coarse old man with a low-class country and colliery practice. But he was not coarse now. He looked merely fatigued with life which, at a moment such as this, seemed to him terrible and incomprehensible. Stretching his arms above his head he yawned. He nodded to David and he spat into the fire that had gone out. Then he went out himself.

David stood in the centre of the empty kitchen for a few moments before going upstairs. He knocked at the bedroom door and entered. He wanted to be beside Jenny and the child. But Jenny was overcome, completely overcome, not yet fully recovered from the anæsthetic and inclined to be hysterical as well. Ada, too, was bustling and cross, fussing him out of the room at once. He had to leave it at that and return downstairs. He made his bed on the parlour sofa. The house was completely silent before he slept.