Lethbury accompanied his wife to the hospital in a mood of chastened
wonder. It did not occur to him to oppose her wish. He knew, of course,
that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation: the jokes at the
club, the inquiries, the explanations. He saw himself in the comic role
of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an expiation. For in his
rapid reconstruction of the past he found himself cutting a shabbier
figure than he cared to admit. He had always been intolerant of stupid
people, and it was his punishment to be convicted of stupidity. As his
mind traversed the years between his marriage and this unexpected
assumption of paternity, he saw, in the light of an overheated
imagination, many signs of unwonted crassness. It was not that he had
ceased to think his wife stupid: she _was_ stupid, limited, inflexible;
but there was a pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its
blind reachings toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she
would have been happier with a child; but he had thought it
mechanically, because it had so often been thought before, because it
was in the nature of things to think it of every woman, because his
wife was so eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the
generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as
merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity
was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to
which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing complexity
had operated in both sexes, and he had not seriously supposed that,
outside the world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms
had any special hold on the feminine imagination. Now he saw that the
arts in question were kept alive by the vitality of the sentiments they
appealed to.
Lethbury was in fact going through a rapid process of readjustment. His
marriage had been a failure, but he had preserved toward his wife the
exact fidelity of act that is sometimes supposed to excuse any
divagation of feeling; so that, for years, the tie between them had
consisted mainly in his abstaining from making love to other women. The
abstention had not always been easy, for the world is surprisingly
well-stocked with the kind of woman one ought to have married but did
not; and Lethbury had not escaped the solicitation of such
alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost of taking
refuge in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of his perceptions; and his
world being thus limited, he had given unusual care to its details,
compensating himself for the narrowness of his horizon by the minute
finish of his foreground. It was a world of fine shadings and the
nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the
feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. To such
a banquet his wife naturally remained uninvited. The diet would have
disagreed with her, and she would probably have objected to the other
guests. But Lethbury, miscalculating her needs, had hitherto supposed
that he had made ample provision for them, and was consequently at
liberty to enjoy his own fare without any reproach of mendicancy at his
gates. Now he beheld her pressing a starved face against the windows of
his life, and in his imaginative reaction he invested her with a pathos
borrowed from the sense of his own shortcomings.
In the hospital, the imaginative process continued with increasing
force. He looked at his wife with new eyes. Formerly she had been to
him a mere bundle of negations, a labyrinth of dead walls and bolted
doors. There was nothing behind the walls, and the doors led
no-whither: he had sounded and listened often enough to be sure of
that. Now he felt like a traveller who, exploring some ancient ruin,
comes on an inner cell, intact amid the general dilapidation, and
painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses of the building.
His wife stood by a white crib in one of the wards. In the crib lay a
child, a year old, the nurse affirmed, but to Lethbury's eye a mere
dateless fragment of humanity projected against a background of
conjecture. Over this anonymous particle of life Mrs. Lethbury leaned,
such ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up, in Correggio's
Night-piece, from the child's body to the mother's countenance. It was
a light that irradiated and dazzled her. She looked up at an inquiry of
Lethbury's, but as their glances met he perceived that she no longer
saw him, that he had become as invisible to her as she had long been to
him. He had to transfer his question to the nurse.
"What is the child's name?" he asked.
"We call her Jane," said the nurse.