II
THE winter passed pleasantly enough for her. Plenty of people came to the house, and there were many of the little dinners she enjoyed, when two, three, or more men came in informally and talked of their own affairs, or those of the nation, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
Nearly all these men were of the sort that, as she said, "lived by their wits." They were civilised, sophisticated, a little hard, living the rapid life of the city; and few of them had reached the age of forty, at which the pace would begin to tell against them. She liked their free speech, and the reflection of their intense and interested lives. Erhart came often, and rather bored her by his large and massive egotism; he did not fit in well with the others. He was, Basil said, too purely the artist type. Gerald Dallas came back, looking much older, quieter than ever, with more than his old devotion. Teresa was for him, she felt, not merely an attractive woman engaged in the laudable, but disabling work of child-bearing; she was an individuality which, once for all, had taken its place among the great facts of his life. His feeling for her was above any accident of her own life, or his. He never spoke of it, but in every other way he showed how important she was to him. The quiet hours they spent together were consoling to Teresa. Gerald's deep melancholy was like the effect of an autumn evening, of rainy woods, dark gliding streams, and the dull sunset gleam of defeat. He was a beaten man, but in many moods his sadness was more congenial to Teresa than Basil's buoyant optimism. Deep within her was a conviction that life, if it must be taken seriously, was a desperate business. Gerald seemed to her to fail not ignobly, for he at least had vision. He was one of the few people whom she could imagine existing after death. The world had obviously no use for him, but if there could conceivably be a better world, she thought Gerald suited to inhabit it. As a frivolous expression of this idea she modelled one day a little statuette of him, with wings, a halo round his bald forehead and a harp in his hand, which made him merry, for the first time since his illness.
••••••
On an evening when February was melting into March in a wild storm of snow, sleet, and wind, Basil came in just before dinner and found Teresa standing by the window. She turned a ghostly face upon him.
"The baby is going to be born to-night," she said. "I've sent for the doctor and the nurse."
Basil turned as white as she, and looked much more terrified.
"When did you telephone?—perhaps you're mistaken?—what time did it begin?—why doesn't he come?" he cried. "I'll telephone again."
He did so, but the specialist was out, and wouldn't be in for an hour. Basil paced the flat in an agony of nervous helplessness. Teresa stood silently by the window, leaning against the frame, looking out on the whirl of sleet that dashed against the glass. Now and then she moved slightly, but made no sound.
The nurse arrived, and Basil dashed out, got a cab, and drove off in pursuit of the doctor; ran him down, and haled him post-haste to the flat; where he pronounced that he would not be needed for many hours to come, and to Basil's dismay went off again. Two figures flickered before Basil's eyes: the nurse, calm and smiling, in her white uniform, moving swiftly about in Teresa's room; and Teresa, in her trailing black dress, walking slowly up and down the drawing-room, and perfectly silent. She did not reply to Basil's anxious questions, and hardly looked at him. He wandered about in a lost way. Dinner stood untasted in the dining-room. He looked into Teresa's room. It was flooded with electric light. All the orange shades, and his wife's other little vanities, had been taken away. The bed stood out bleak and chill, with tightly-drawn white sheets. The air smelt of drugs. This was no more the chamber of love, but a torture-chamber. Basil forgot what he had meant to ask the nurse, and went away with tears in his eyes.
It was a long night. No one thought of sleep. Toward morning the doctor came to stay. Teresa, exhausted, dozed for moments at a time, sitting on the couch in the drawing-room, holding Basil's hand; but after a few instants of semi-consciousness her eyes would start open, her pale face flush red, and Basil lifted her up, while she leaned her weight upon him and gasped, her lips tight closed. This went on for hours. … Seeing her exhaustion, Basil once poured out a glass of champagne and begged her to drink it. But Teresa, as the agony seized her again, blazed up for a moment, snatched the glass and flung the champagne in Basil's face and the goblet across the room, where it shivered to pieces.
"Dearest!" he murmured humbly.
Teresa looked at him murderously, then suddenly caught hold of him, and sobbed under her breath. …
The livid dawn brought in a grey morning of storm. They took Teresa away, into the room. Basil was sent out two or three times on hasty errands. He swallowed a cup of coffee, standing in the dining-room. Mary the cook sat there with her apron to her eyes, mumbling a prayer. He looked at her with terrified eyes.
"You don't think she's going to die, do you?" he said angrily.
"Oh, no, Heaven forbid, but it do be so long," gasped the girl.
He went back and waited outside the door. He heard the doctor's voice, now quick and brusque, as he gave an order; now curiously gentle, as though he spoke to a child. …
All night she had not made a sound of pain. And, now, when the chloroform had put her will to sleep, and the voice began, Basil thought at first it was some animal crying in the street. It was with a horrible leap of the heart that he realised it—that was Teresa's voice. It sounded to him as though it came from far away—a wail from some cruel dark world of woe and anguish. And it went on and on. …
Then came a shrill scream that seemed to tear the heart out of his breast—another—and another. Then silence. … He leaned against the door, faint with terror.
The nurse came out to him, after a time and said smiling, "You have a fine boy." He seized both her hands and began to weep hysterically. … Later, they let him in to see Teresa. She lay with her eyes closed. His tears fell on her hands. She murmured:
"The jaws of death—the jaws of death—I'm all ground and chewed to atoms, Basil. I feel as if I had died"
He could say nothing. The baby, about which he had not thought at all, began to cry. The nurse was bathing it, and she held it out for Basil to see—a red, angry creature, with bristles of black hair and pale-blue eyes. It shrieked lustily with wide-open mouth.
"Let me see him," said Teresa faintly.
The nurse brought the baby; and after one curious look of inspection, the young mother remarked:
"How very hideous he is. Take him away."
••••••
A week later Teresa confided to Basil, tearfully, that she did not like the baby, and that she was sure he was going to be a frightful nuisance and spoil their life together. She complained viciously, too, of her continued physical sufferings and weakness, and her disturbed nights. She had braced herself with all her strength for the great ordeal of giving birth; and the minor discomforts and annoyances which followed she resented as something not taken into the bargain.
Basil groaned, and buried his face in the pillow beside her. He had caught a fearful cold on the night of the baby's birth, and he had had no rest or peace since. His household was disorganised, he was nervously anxious about the baby, which encountered the usual difficulties in adapting itself to a new environment, and signalised its displeasure by fairly continuous screaming; and Teresa's rebellion was the final straw.
"You see I was right," Teresa said weakly, "and you were wrong. You're always so cocksure with your theories! You were sure I should love the baby, and I don't believe you even like it yourself."
"I wish you'd keep quiet," growled Basil. "I think you're very silly. Why don't you make the best of things?"
"I won't. I never will make the best of things. It's a horrid confession of weakness. I insist on seeing them as they are. You're afraid to. You know we were perfectly happy before"
She stopped, and two tears grew in her eyes and wandered down her cheeks. In spite of her physical uneasiness, she had the strange new beauty that women buy with the birth-pangs. Her white skin glowed with freshness, her lips were fuller and redder, and the two thick dark braids of hair lying across her shoulders framed an oval of cheeks and chin, exquisitely youthful and tender.
The baby, which was being carried about in the next room, a pathetic bundle of flannel over the nurse's brawny arm, now lifted up its voice again, and Teresa cried:
"For heaven's sake, Basil, shut the doors! If that creature cries any more, I shall go mad!"
But it was time for the baby to be fed, and the nurse remorselessly brought it in. Teresa sulkily turned on her side and stretched out her arm to receive it. But when the baby, with whimpering eagerness and frantic clutches of its fingers, had settled to the breast, she looked down on it and smiled half unwillingly.
"How cuddly it is! So soft and warm! If only it wouldn't howl so—I wouldn't mind so much if it were always like this."
At the change in her voice Basil raised his head.
"Poor little thing, it's because it's hungry, or has the colic—I should think you'd be sorry for it," he said reproachfully.
Teresa lifted the baby's wrinkled red hands and listened to the small sound of sensuous content which it made in feeding.
"He sings just like a kettle—or an asthmatic kitten," she said, looking amused.
Basil's tired face, showing deep lines of nervous and physical strain, changed, too, as he looked at the picture of Teresa and the baby—her profile, with the long braid across the cheek, her ivory-white gleaming shoulders and breast, her dark lashes drooping as she gazed at the child with a quizzical smile in which emotion stirred—physical pleasure and perhaps a spiritual tenderness.
"You don't know how beautiful you are," said Basil, in a low, rapt tone.
She looked up at him softly, put up her free arm and drew his head down on her full breast.
"If I'm more beautiful for you, I don't mind it all," she said. "All the babies in the world aren't worth you."