Yes--what was that?
She caught her breath and stopped; for as she was crossing the hall,
past the pale maid, a slow moaning crept down the stairs like a trickle
of blood,--a curious slow moaning, not human at all, more like some poor
animal, dying hopelessly by inches in a trap.
Virginia....
Catherine stood struck with horror. That noise? Virginia? Just like an
animal?
She looked round at Kate. Their white faces stared at each other. Kate’s
lips moved. ‘Since this morning,’ came out of them. ‘Since early this
morning. The master----’
She broke off, her pale lips remaining open.
Catherine turned and ran upstairs. She ran as one demented towards the
moaning. It must be stopped, it must be stopped. Virginia must be saved,
she couldn’t, she mustn’t be allowed to suffer like that, nobody should
be allowed to suffer like that, hours and hours....
She ran along the passage to Virginia’s room, the same room where
nineteen years ago Virginia herself had been born, but instead of
getting nearer the moaning she seemed to be going away from it.
Where was Virginia, then? Where had they put her?
She stood still to listen, and her heart beat so loud that she could
hardly hear. There--to the left, where the spare-rooms were. But why?
Why had they taken her there?
She ran down the passage to the left. Yes; here it was; behind this shut
door....
Catherine’s knees seemed to be going to give way. The sound was terribly
close,--so hopeless, so unceasing. What were they doing in there to her
child? What was God doing to let them?
Her shaking hand fumbled at the handle. She laid the other over it to
steady it. She mustn’t be like this, she knew; she mustn’t go in there
only to add to the terror that was there already.
With both hands gripping the handle she slowly turned it and went in.
Stephen.
Stephen half sitting, half lying on the floor up against a sofa. His
mother standing looking at him. No one else. The room shrouded in
dust-sheets, the bed piled high with spare blankets and pillows. Stephen
moaning.
‘Stephen!’ Catherine exclaimed, so much shocked that she could only
stare. Stephen--Stephen of all people--in such a state....
His mother turned and came towards her.
‘But--Virginia?’ said Catherine, her lips trembling, for if Stephen
could be reduced to this, what dreadful thing was happening to Virginia?
Mrs. Colquhoun took her face in both hands and kissed her,--really
kissed her. Her eyes were very bright, with red rims. She had evidently
been crying, and she had the look of those who have reached the end of
their tether.
‘All is going well I believe now with Virginia,’ she said. ‘I tell him
so, and he won’t listen. Do you think you could make him listen? There
was a terrible time before the second doctor came and put her under an
anæsthetic, and it upset him so that he--well, you see.’
And she made a gesture, half shame, half anger, and wholly unhappy,
towards the figure leaning against the sofa.
Then she added, her bright, tear-stained eyes on Catherine’s, ‘To think
that my son and God’s priest should go to pieces like this--should be
unable in a crisis to do his duty--should lose--should lose----’
She broke off, continuing to stare at Catherine with those bright,
incredulous eyes.
Catherine could only gaze at Stephen in dismay. No wonder Kate
downstairs hadn’t succeeded in saying what she was trying to say about
the master. Stephen, the firm-lipped, the strong denouncer of weakness,
the exhorting calm Christian--what a dreadful thing to happen. She
didn’t know husbands ever collapsed like that. George hadn’t. He had
been anxious and distressed, but he hadn’t moaned. The moaning had been
done, she remembered, exclusively by her. George had been her comfort,
her rock. What comfort could Virginia have got that day out of Stephen?
And it was after all Virginia who was having the baby.
‘Couldn’t the doctors give him something?’ she asked, feeling that poor
Stephen ought certainly too to be given a little chloroform to help him
through his hours of misery,--anything rather than that he should be
left lying there suffering like that.
‘I asked them to give him a soothing draught,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, ‘and
they only told me to take him away. Of course I took him away, for he
was killing Virginia, and here I’ve been shut up with him ever since.
Catherine----‘it was the first time she had called her that--‘I don’t
remember in our day----? I don’t remember that my husband----?’ And she
broke off, and stared at her with her bright, exhausted eyes.
‘George didn’t,’ said Catherine hesitatingly, ‘but I think--I think
Stephen loves Virginia more than perhaps----’
‘A nice way of loving,’ remarked Mrs. Colquhoun, who had had a terrible
day shut up with Stephen, and whose distress for him was by now shot
with indignation.
‘Oh, but he can’t help it. Dear Mrs. Colquhoun----’
‘Call me Milly.’
Milly? These barriers tumbling down all round before the blast of a
crisis bewildered Catherine. Stephen, who had been so firmly entrenched
behind example and precept, lying exposed there, so helplessly and
completely exposed that she hardly liked to look at him, hardly liked
either him or his mother to know she was there, because of later on when
he should be normal again and they both might be humiliated by the
recollection, and Mrs. Colquhoun, not only turning on her adored son
but flinging away her insincerities and kissing her with almost eager
affection and demanding to be called Milly. Strange by-products of
Virginia’s suffering, thought Catherine. ‘I must go to her,’ she said,
going towards the door.
‘Dear Catherine,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun holding her back, ‘they won’t let
you in. It will soon be over now. And what will she say,’ she added,
turning to Stephen and raising her voice, ‘what will she say when she
asks for her husband and he is incapable of coming to her side?’
But Stephen was far beyond reacting to any twittings.
‘Oh, but he will be--won’t you, Stephen,’ said Catherine. ‘You’re going
to be so happy, you and Virginia--so, so happy, and forget all about
this----’
And she ran over to him, and stooped down and kissed him.
But Stephen only moaned.
‘He ought to go to bed and have a doctor,’ Catherine said, looking round
at Mrs. Colquhoun.
‘<i>He</i> isn’t having the baby,’ was Mrs. Colquhoun’s reply.
‘No--but mental agony is worse than physical,’ said Catherine.
‘Not if it’s babies,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun firmly.
What a strange night that was. What a night of mixed emotions,--great
fear, deep pity immense surprise; and what a clearing up in Catherine’s
mind of nonsense, of her own private follies. None of the three in that
room had yet in their lives been up against this kind of reality, this
stark, ruthless reality, before. There were hours and hours to think in,
hours and hours to feel in. A few yards away lay Virginia, hanging
between life and death. From her room came no moans. An august silence
enveloped it, as of issues too great and solemn being settled within for
any crying out. It was the slowest, most difficult of births. She
herself was far away, profoundly unconcerned, wrapped in the
mercifulness of unconsciousness; but how long could even the youngest,
strongest body stand this awful strain on it?
The two women away in that spare-room on the other side of the house
didn’t dare let themselves even look at this question. It lay cold and
heavy on the heart of each, and they turned away their mind’s eyes and
busied themselves as best they could,--Catherine with stroking Stephen
and murmuring words of comfort in his ear, of which he took no notice,
and Mrs. Colquhoun with making tea.
All night long poor Mrs. Colquhoun, herself within an ace of collapse,
made fresh tea at short intervals, finding in the rattle of the cups and
saucers a way of drowning some at least of her unhappy son’s
nerve-racking moans and her own thoughts. She couldn’t and wouldn’t
contemplate the possibility of anything happening to Virginia; she
insisted to herself that in that quarter all was well. Two doctors and a
skilled nurse, two doctors and a skilled nurse, she kept on repeating in
her mind, her shaking hands upsetting the cups. A difficult birth, of
course, and a long one, but that was nothing unusual with the first
child. Nonsense, nonsense, to let even the edge of an imagining of
possible disaster slide into one’s mind. One had quite enough to think
of without that, with Stephen lying there disgracing himself and her,
denying in effect his God, and certainly abandoning his manhood,--for
Virginia’s screams before the anæsthetist arrived, those awful, awful
screams coming from his gentle wife, had sent the unhappy Stephen, after
two hours of having to listen to them, out of his mind. He had killed
her, he was her murderer, he had killed her, killed her with his
love....
‘Nonsense,’ his mother had said in her most matter-of-fact way, on his
shouting out things like this for every one to hear,--really excessively
shocking things when one remembered all the young maids in the house;
and then with trembling hands she had led him into this distant room,
and he had thrown himself down where he had ever since been lying, and
had said no word more, but only ceaselessly moaned.
And Mrs. Colquhoun, who had never in her life overwhelmingly loved, and
never till that day known she possessed any nerves, looked on at first
helplessly, and then indignantly, and the whole time uncomprehendingly.
It was all very well, and of course a husband was anxious on such
occasions, and should and was expected to show feeling, but within
decent limits. These limits were not decent. Anything but. What would
the parish say if it saw him? What did the servants say, who could hear
him?
She put aspirin into his heedless mouth, and asked him severely if he
had forgotten God. She tried to twit him into manliness and
priestliness. She actually shook him once, believing that counter-shocks
were good for the nerves. Useless, all useless; and by the time
Catherine arrived she herself was very nearly done for.
But tea, the domesticities,--natural, reassuring little
activities,--were, she found, the only real props. Not prayer. Strange,
not once did she wish to pray. If Stephen had prayed it would have been
a good thing, but it wouldn’t have been a good thing for her to pray. No
emotions, if you please, she admonished herself several times aloud--it
froze Catherine’s blood to hear her--duty, duty, duty; the making of tea
to sustain the body, to compose the nerves by the routine of it,--this
was the real anchor. She would gladly have gone round with a duster,
dusting the ornaments that collect in spare-rooms, but to dust at night
seemed too highly unnatural to offer a hope of forgetfulness.
So she kept on ringing the bell for fresh hot water and more cups, and
just the sight of the housemaid in her cap and apron at the door--she
wasn’t allowed inside, because of Stephen--seemed to hold Mrs. Colquhoun
down to sanity. There were other things in the world besides suffering;
there were next mornings, and the precious routine of life with its
baths and breakfasts and orders to the cook,--how she longed for that,
how she longed to be back in her safe shell again, with everything
normal about her, and Stephen in his senses, and the sickening load of
fear on her heart lifted away and forgotten.
A cup was chipped. She held it to the light. Kate, of course, who really
was most careless with china. At that rate Virginia would soon have none
left.
She rang the bell and sent the housemaid for Kate, and when she came,
her cap a little crooked and her hair a little wispy, Mrs. Colquhoun
took the cup out into the passage to her and scolded her soundly, and it
did them both good, and Kate was so much restored by this breath of
normality that she was able to ask in a whisper how the master was, and
Mrs. Colquhoun, dropping unconsciously into the very language of the
occasion, replied that he was doing nicely.
And indeed Stephen’s moans seemed less since Catherine had taken his
head on her lap and was stroking and patting him. She stroked and patted
without stopping, and every now and then bent down and murmured words of
encouragement in his ear, or else, when she found no words because her
own heart was so full of fear, simply bent down and kissed him. Did he
hear? Did he feel? She couldn’t tell; but she thought his moans grew
quieter, and that he seemed dimly conscious of comfort when her hand
passed softly down his sunken face.
‘You’ll wear yourself out,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun, pursing her lips to
keep them from quivering.
‘It comforts me,’ said Catherine.
‘You’d much better have another cup of tea.’
‘How passionately he loves her. I didn’t quite realise----’
‘Loving passionately seems to get people into nice messes,’ said Mrs.
Colquhoun grimly.
‘I suppose one really oughtn’t to love too much,’ said Catherine.
‘I consider Stephen preached himself into it. That course of sermons
last Lent--you remember? I thought at the time that he was almost too
eloquent. It sometimes very nearly wasn’t quite what one wishes a parish
to hear. The love he talked about--well, he started with St. John’s
ideas, but soon got away from them into something else. People,
especially the servants, listened open-mouthed. They wouldn’t have done
that if there hadn’t been something else in it besides the Bible. And
you know, Catherine, one can talk oneself into anything, and in my
opinion that is what Stephen did. And he came to think so much and so
often of that side of life that he forgot moderation, and here he is.
This is his punishment, and my disgrace.’
‘No, no,’ said Catherine soothingly.
‘It is--it is.’ And Mrs. Colquhoun, who had kept up so courageously till
then, bowed her head over the teatray and wept.
It would be useless, Catherine felt, to argue with poor Mrs. Colquhoun
about love, so gently laying Stephen’s head on a cushion she went over
to her and sat down beside her and put her arm round her and began to
stroke her too, and murmur soothing words.
How strange it was, this night of fear spent stroking the Colquhouns.
That queer imp that sits in a detached corner of one’s mind refusing to
be serious just when it most should be, actually forced her at this
moment, when hope was at its faintest, to laugh inside herself at the
odd turn her relationship with Stephen and his mother had taken. The
collapsed Colquhouns; the towers of strength laid low; and she, the
disapproved of, the sinner as Stephen thought, and perhaps he had told
his mother and she thought it too, being their only support and
comforter. The collapsed Colquhouns. It really was funny--very
funny--very fun....
Why, what was this? She too crying?
Horrified she jumped up, and hurried across to the window and flung it
open as far as it would go, and stood at it with her face to the damp
night air and struggled with herself, squeezing back those ill-timed
tears; and as she stood there the sluggish air suddenly became a
draught, and turning quickly she found the door had been opened, and a
strange man was framed in it, with Kate in the background ushering him
in.
One of the doctors. She flew to him. He was very red, with drops of
sweat on his forehead.
‘Where’s that husband?’ he asked, looking round the room and speaking
cheerfully, though his eyes were serious. ‘Oh--I see. Still no good to
us. I never saw such a fellow. He might be having the baby himself.
Well, his mother, then. Oh dear--what’s this? Tears? Come, come,’ he
said, laying his hand on Mrs. Colquhoun’s shoulder very kindly, and
looking at Catherine. ‘Are you the other grandmother?’ he asked,
smiling.
‘Grandmother?’
‘A whacking boy. The biggest I’ve brought into the world for a long
time.’