THE MATERNITY NURSE
Of course Alvina made everybody pay for her mood of submission and
sweetness. In a month’s time she was quite intolerable.
“I can’t stay here all my life,” she declared, stretching her eyes in a
way that irritated the other inmates of Manchester House extremely. “I
know I can’t. I can’t bear it. I simply can’t bear it, and there’s an
end of it. I can’t, I tell you. I can’t bear it. I’m buried
alive—simply buried alive. And it’s more than I can stand. It is,
really.”
There was an odd clang, like a taunt, in her voice. She was trying them
all.
“But what do you want, dear?” asked Miss Frost, knitting her dark brows
in agitation.
“I want to go away,” said Alvina bluntly.
Miss Frost gave a slight gesture with her right hand, of helpless
impatience. It was so characteristic, that Alvina almost laughed.
“But where do you want to go?” asked Miss Frost.
“I don’t know. I don’t care,” said Alvina. “Anywhere, if I can get out
of Woodhouse.”
“Do you wish you had gone to Australia?” put in Miss Pinnegar.
“No, I don’t wish I had gone to Australia,” retorted Alvina with a rude
laugh. “Australia isn’t the only other place besides Woodhouse.”
Miss Pinnegar was naturally offended. But the curious insolence which
sometimes came out in the girl was inherited direct from her father.
“You see, dear,” said Miss Frost, agitated: “if you knew what you
wanted, it would be easier to see the way.”
“I want to be a nurse,” rapped out Alvina.
Miss Frost stood still, with the stillness of a middle-aged
disapproving woman, and looked at her charge. She believed that Alvina
was just speaking at random. Yet she dared not check her, in her
present mood.
Alvina was indeed speaking at random. She had never thought of being a
nurse—the idea had never entered her head. If it had she would
certainly never have entertained it. But she had heard Alexander speak
of Nurse This and Sister That. And so she had rapped out her
declaration. And having rapped it out, she prepared herself to stick to
it. Nothing like leaping before you look.
“A nurse!” repeated Miss Frost. “But do you feel yourself fitted to be
a nurse? Do you think you could bear it?”
“Yes, I’m sure I could,” retorted Alvina. “I want to be a maternity
nurse—” She looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. “I
want to be a maternity nurse. Then I shouldn’t have to attend
operations.” And she laughed quickly.
Miss Frost’s right hand beat like a wounded bird. It was reminiscent of
the way she beat time, insistently, when she was giving music lessons,
sitting close beside her pupils at the piano. Now it beat without time
or reason. Alvina smiled brightly and cruelly.
“Whatever put such an idea into your head, Vina?” asked poor Miss
Frost.
“I don’t know,” said Alvina, still more archly and brightly.
“Of course you don’t mean it, dear,” said Miss Frost, quailing.
“Yes, I do. Why should I say it if I don’t.”
Miss Frost would have done anything to escape the arch, bright, cruel
eyes of her charge.
“Then we must think about it,” she said, numbly. And she went away.
Alvina floated off to her room, and sat by the window looking down on
the street. The bright, arch look was still on her face. But her heart
was sore. She wanted to cry, and fling herself on the breast of her
darling. But she couldn’t. No, for her life she couldn’t. Some little
devil sat in her breast and kept her smiling archly.
Somewhat to her amazement, he sat steadily on for days and days. Every
minute she expected him to go. Every minute she expected to break down,
to burst into tears and tenderness and reconciliation. But no—she did
not break down. She persisted. They all waited for the old loving Vina
to be herself again. But the new and recalcitrant Vina still shone
hard. She found a copy of _The Lancet_, and saw an advertisement of a
home in Islington where maternity nurses would be fully trained and
equipped in six months’ time. The fee was sixty guineas. Alvina
declared her intention of departing to this training home. She had two
hundred pounds of her own, bequeathed by her grandfather.
In Manchester House they were all horrified—not moved with grief, this
time, but shocked. It seemed such a repulsive and indelicate step to
take. Which it was. And which, in her curious perverseness, Alvina must
have intended it to be. Mrs. Houghton assumed a remote air of silence,
as if she did not hear any more, did not belong. She lapsed far away.
She was really very weak. Miss Pinnegar said: “Well really, if she
wants to do it, why, she might as well try.” And, as often with Miss
Pinnegar, this speech seemed to contain a veiled threat.
“A maternity nurse!” said James Houghton. “A maternity nurse! What
exactly do you mean by a maternity nurse?”
“A trained mid-wife,” said Miss Pinnegar curtly. “That’s it, isn’t it?
It is as far as I can see. A trained mid-wife.”
“Yes, of course,” said Alvina brightly.
“But—!” stammered James Houghton, pushing his spectacles up on to his
forehead, and making his long fleece of painfully thin hair uncover his
baldness. “I can’t understand that any young girl of any—any
upbringing, any upbringing whatever, should want to choose such a—such
an—occupation. I can’t understand it.”
“Can’t you?” said Alvina brightly.
“Oh well, if she _does_—” said Miss Pinnegar cryptically.
Miss Frost said very little. But she had serious confidential talks
with Dr. Fordham. Dr. Fordham didn’t approve, certainly he didn’t—but
neither did he see any great harm in it. At that time it was rather the
thing for young ladies to enter the nursing profession, if their hopes
had been blighted or checked in another direction! And so, enquiries
were made. Enquiries were made.
The upshot was, that Alvina was to go to Islington for her six months’
training. There was a great bustle, preparing her nursing outfit.
Instead of a trousseau, nurse’s uniforms in fine blue-and-white stripe,
with great white aprons. Instead of a wreath of orange blossom, a
rather chic nurse’s bonnet of blue silk, and for a trailing veil, a
blue silk fall.
Well and good! Alvina expected to become frightened, as the time drew
near. But no, she wasn’t a bit frightened. Miss Frost watched her
narrowly. Would there not be a return of the old, tender, sensitive,
shrinking Vina—the exquisitely sensitive and nervous, loving girl? No,
astounding as it may seem, there was no return of such a creature.
Alvina remained bright and ready, the half-hilarious clang remained in
her voice, taunting. She kissed them all good-bye, brightly and
sprightlily, and off she set. She wasn’t nervous.
She came to St. Pancras, she got her cab, she drove off to her
destination—and as she drove, she looked out of the window. Horrid,
vast, stony, dilapidated, crumbly-stuccoed streets and squares of
Islington, grey, grey, greyer by far than Woodhouse, and interminable.
How exceedingly sordid and disgusting! But instead of being repelled
and heartbroken, Alvina enjoyed it. She felt her trunk rumble on the
top of the cab, and still she looked out on the ghastly dilapidated
flat facades of Islington, and still she smiled brightly, as if there
were some charm in it all. Perhaps for her there was a charm in it all.
Perhaps it acted like a tonic on the little devil in her breast.
Perhaps if she had seen tufts of snowdrops—it was February—and
yew-hedges and cottage windows, she would have broken down. As it was,
she just enjoyed it. She enjoyed glimpsing in through uncurtained
windows, into sordid rooms where human beings moved as if sordidly
unaware. She enjoyed the smell of a toasted bloater, rather burnt. So
common! so indescribably common! And she detested bloaters, because of
the hairy feel of the spines in her mouth. But to smell them like this,
to know that she was in the region of “penny beef-steaks,” gave her a
perverse pleasure.
The cab stopped at a yellow house at the corner of a square where some
shabby bare trees were flecked with bits of blown paper, bits of paper
and refuse cluttered inside the round railings of each tree. She went
up some dirty-yellowish steps, and rang the “Patients’” bell, because
she knew she ought not to ring the “Tradesmen’s.” A servant, not
exactly dirty, but unattractive, let her into a hall painted a dull
drab, and floored with cocoa-matting, otherwise bare. Then up bare
stairs to a room where a stout, pale, common woman with two warts on
her face, was drinking tea. It was three o’clock. This was the matron.
The matron soon deposited her in a bedroom, not very small, but bare
and hard and dusty-seeming, and there left her. Alvina sat down on her
chair, looked at her box opposite her, looked round the uninviting
room, and smiled to herself. Then she rose and went to the window: a
very dirty window, looking down into a sort of well of an area, with
other wells ranging along, and straight opposite like a reflection
another solid range of back-premises, with iron stair-ways and horrid
little doors and washing and little W. C.’s and people creeping up and
down like vermin. Alvina shivered a little, but still smiled. Then
slowly she began to take off her hat. She put it down on the
drab-painted chest of drawers.
Presently the servant came in with a tray, set it down, lit a naked
gas-jet, which roared faintly, and drew down a crackly dark-green
blind, which showed a tendency to fly back again alertly to the
ceiling.
“Thank you,” said Alvina, and the girl departed.
Then Miss Houghton drank her black tea and ate her bread and margarine.
Surely enough books have been written about heroines in similar
circumstances. There is no need to go into the details of Alvina’s six
months in Islington.
The food was objectionable—yet Alvina got fat on it. The air was
filthy—and yet never had her colour been so warm and fresh, her skin so
soft. Her companions were almost without exception vulgar and
coarse—yet never had she got on so well with women of her own age—or
older than herself. She was ready with a laugh and a word, and though
she was unable to venture on indecencies herself, yet she had an
amazing faculty for _looking_ knowing and indecent beyond words,
rolling her eyes and pitching her eyebrows in a certain way—oh, it was
quite sufficient for her companions! And yet, if they had ever actually
demanded a dirty story or a really open indecency from her, she would
have been floored.
But she enjoyed it. Amazing how she enjoyed it. She did not care _how_
revolting and indecent these nurses were—she put on a look as if she
were in with it all, and it all passed off as easy as winking. She
swung her haunches and arched her eyes with the best of them. And they
behaved as if she were exactly one of themselves. And yet, with the
curious cold tact of women, they left her alone, one and all, in
private: just ignored her.
It is truly incredible how Alvina became blooming and bouncing at this
time. Nothing shocked her, nothing upset her. She was always ready with
her hard, nurse’s laugh and her nurse’s quips. No one was better than
she at _double-entendres._ No one could better give the nurse’s leer.
She had it all in a fortnight. And never once did she feel anything but
exhilarated and in full swing. It seemed to her she had not a moment’s
time to brood or reflect about things—she was too much in the swing.
Every moment, in the swing, living, or active in full swing. When she
got into bed she went to sleep. When she awoke, it was morning, and she
got up. As soon as she was up and dressed she had somebody to answer,
something to say, something to do. Time passed like an express
train—and she seemed to have known no other life than this.
Not far away was a lying-in hospital. A dreadful place it was. There
she had to go, right off, and help with cases. There she had to attend
lectures and demonstrations. There she met the doctors and students.
Well, a pretty lot they were, one way and another. When she had put on
flesh and become pink and bouncing she was just their sort: just their
very ticket. Her voice had the right twang, her eyes the right roll,
her haunches the right swing. She seemed altogether just the ticket.
And yet she wasn’t.
It would be useless to say she was not shocked. She was profoundly and
awfully shocked. Her whole state was perhaps largely the result of
shock: a sort of play-acting based on hysteria. But the dreadful things
she saw in the lying-in hospital, and afterwards, went deep, and
finished her youth and her tutelage for ever. How many infernos deeper
than Miss Frost could ever know, did she not travel? the inferno of the
human animal, the human organism in its convulsions, the human social
beast in its abjection and its degradation.
For in her latter half she had to visit the slum cases. And such cases!
A woman lying on a bare, filthy floor, a few old coats thrown over her,
and vermin crawling everywhere, in spite of sanitary inspectors. But
what did the woman, the sufferer, herself care! She ground her teeth
and screamed and yelled with pains. In her calm periods she lay stupid
and indifferent—or she cursed a little. But abject, stupid indifference
was the bottom of it all: abject, brutal indifference to
everything—yes, everything. Just a piece of female functioning, no
more.
Alvina was supposed to receive a certain fee for these cases she
attended in their homes. A small proportion of her fee she kept for
herself, the rest she handed over to the Home. That was the agreement.
She received her grudged fee callously, threatened and exacted it when
it was not forthcoming. Ha!—if they didn’t have to pay you at all,
these slum-people, they would treat you with more contempt than if you
were one of themselves. It was one of the hardest lessons Alvina had to
learn—to bully these people, in their own hovels, into some sort of
obedience to her commands, and some sort of respect for her presence.
She had to fight tooth and nail for this end. And in a week she was as
hard and callous to them as they to her. And so her work was well done.
She did not hate them. There they were. They had a certain life, and
you had to take them at their own worth in their own way. What else! If
one should be gentle, one was gentle. The difficulty did not lie there.
The difficulty lay in being sufficiently rough and hard: that was the
trouble. It cost a great struggle to be hard and callous enough. Glad
she would have been to be allowed to treat them quietly and gently,
with consideration. But pah—it was not their line. They wanted to be
callous, and if you were not callous to match, they made a fool of you
and prevented your doing your work.
Was Alvina her own real self all this time? The mighty question arises
upon us, what is one’s own real self? It certainly is not what we think
we are and ought to be. Alvina had been bred to think of herself as a
delicate, tender, chaste creature with unselfish inclinations and a
pure, “high” mind. Well, so she was, in the more-or-less exhausted part
of herself. But high-mindedness had really come to an end with James
Houghton, had really reached the point, not only of pathetic, but of
dry and anti-human, repulsive quixotry. In Alvina high-mindedness was
already stretched beyond the breaking point. Being a woman of some
flexibility of temper, wrought through generations to a fine, pliant
hardness, she flew back. She went right back on high-mindedness. Did
she thereby betray it?
We think not. If we turn over the head of the penny and look at the
tail, we don’t thereby deny or betray the head. We do but adjust it to
its own complement. And so with high-mindedness. It is but one side of
the medal—the crowned reverse. On the obverse the three legs still go
kicking the soft-footed spin of the universe, the dolphin flirts and
the crab leers.
So Alvina spun her medal, and her medal came down tails. Heads or
tails? Heads for generations. Then tails. See the poetic justice.
Now Alvina decided to accept the decision of her fate. Or rather, being
sufficiently a woman, she didn’t decide anything. She _was_ her own
fate. She went through her training experiences like another being. She
was not herself, said Everybody. When she came home to Woodhouse at
Easter, in her bonnet and cloak, everybody was simply knocked out.
Imagine that this frail, pallid, diffident girl, so ladylike, was now a
rather fat, warm-coloured young woman, strapping and strong-looking,
and with a certain bounce. Imagine her mother’s startled, almost
expiring:
“Why, Vina dear!”
Vina laughed. She knew how they were all feeling.
“At least it agrees with your _health_,” said her father,
sarcastically, to which Miss Pinnegar answered:
“Well, that’s a good deal.”
But Miss Frost said nothing the first day. Only the second day, at
breakfast, as Alvina ate rather rapidly and rather well, the
white-haired woman said quietly, with a tinge of cold contempt:
“How changed you are, dear!”
“Am I?” laughed Alvina. “Oh, not really.” And she gave the arch look
with her eyes, which made Miss Frost shudder.
Inwardly, Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from questioning. Alvina
was always speaking of the doctors: Doctor Young and Doctor Headley and
Doctor James. She spoke of theatres and music-halls with these young
men, and the jolly good time she had with them. And her blue-grey eyes
seemed to have become harder and greyer, lighter somehow. In her
wistfulness and her tender pathos, Alvina’s eyes would deepen their
blue, so beautiful. And now, in her floridity, they were bright and
arch and light-grey. The deep, tender, flowery blue was gone for ever.
They were luminous and crystalline, like the eyes of a changeling.
Miss Frost shuddered, and abstained from question. She wanted, she
_needed_ to ask of her charge: “Alvina, have you betrayed yourself with
any of these young men?” But coldly her heart abstained from asking—or
even from seriously thinking. She left the matter untouched for the
moment. She was already too much shocked.
Certainly Alvina represented the young doctors as very nice, but rather
fast young fellows. “My word, you have to have your wits about you with
them!” Imagine such a speech from a girl tenderly nurtured: a speech
uttered in her own home, and accompanied by a florid laugh, which would
lead a chaste, generous woman like Miss Frost to imagine—well, she
merely abstained from imagining anything. She had that strength of
mind. She never for one moment attempted to answer the question to
herself, as to whether Alvina had betrayed herself with any of these
young doctors, or not. The question remained stated, but completely
unanswered—coldly awaiting its answer. Only when Miss Frost kissed
Alvina good-bye at the station, tears came to her eyes, and she said
hurriedly, in a low voice:
“Remember we are all praying for you, dear!”
“No, don’t do that!” cried Alvina involuntarily, without knowing what
she said.
And then the train moved out, and she saw her darling standing there on
the station, the pale, well-modelled face looking out from behind the
gold-rimmed spectacles, wistfully, the strong, rather stout figure
standing very still and unchangeable, under its coat and skirt of dark
purple, the white hair glistening under the folded dark hat. Alvina
threw herself down on the seat of her carriage. She loved her darling.
She would love her through eternity. She knew she was right—amply and
beautifully right, her darling, her beloved Miss Frost. Eternally and
gloriously right.
And yet—and yet—it was a right which was fulfilled. There were other
rights. There was another side to the medal. Purity and
high-mindedness—the beautiful, but unbearable tyranny. The beautiful,
unbearable tyranny of Miss Frost! It was time now for Miss Frost to
die. It was time for that perfected flower to be gathered to
immortality. A lovely _immortel_. But an obstruction to other, purple
and carmine blossoms which were in bud on the stem. A lovely
edelweiss—but time it was gathered into eternity. Black-purple and red
anemones were due, real Adonis blood, and strange individual orchids,
spotted and fantastic. Time for Miss Frost to die. She, Alvina, who
loved her as no one else would ever love her, with that love which goes
to the core of the universe, knew that it was time for her darling to
be folded, oh, so gently and softly, into immortality. Mortality was
busy with the day after her day. It was time for Miss Frost to die. As
Alvina sat motionless in the train, running from Woodhouse to Tibshelf,
it decided itself in her.
She was glad to be back in Islington, among all the horrors of her
confinement cases. The doctors she knew hailed her. On the whole, these
young men had not any too deep respect for the nurses as a whole. Why
drag in respect? Human functions were too obviously established to make
any great fuss about. And so the doctors put their arms round Alvina’s
waist, because she was plump, and they kissed her face, because the
skin was soft. And she laughed and squirmed a little, so that they felt
all the more her warmth and softness under their arm’s pressure.
“It’s no use, you know,” she said, laughing rather breathless, but
looking into their eyes with a curious definite look of unchangeable
resistance. This only piqued them.
“What’s no use?” they asked.
She shook her head slightly.
“It isn’t any use your behaving like that with me,” she said, with the
same challenging definiteness, finality: a flat negative.
“Who’re you telling?” they said.
For she did not at all forbid them to “behave like that.” Not in the
least. She almost encouraged them. She laughed and arched her eyes and
flirted. But her backbone became only the stronger and firmer. Soft and
supple as she was, her backbone never yielded for an instant. It could
not. She had to confess that she liked the young doctors. They were
alert, their faces were clean and bright-looking. She liked the sort of
intimacy with them, when they kissed her and wrestled with her in the
empty laboratories or corridors—often in the intervals of most critical
and appalling cases. She liked their arm round her waist, the kisses as
she reached back her face, straining away, the sometimes desperate
struggles. They took unpardonable liberties. They pinched her haunches
and attacked her in unheard-of ways. Sometimes her blood really came up
in the fight, and she felt as if, with her hands, she could tear any
man, any male creature, limb from limb. A super-human, voltaic force
filled her. For a moment she surged in massive, inhuman, female
strength. The men always wilted. And invariably, when they wilted, she
touched them with a sudden gentle touch, pitying. So that she always
remained friends with them. When her curious Amazonic power left her
again, and she was just a mere woman, she made shy eyes at them once
more, and treated them with the inevitable female-to-male homage.
The men liked her. They cocked their eyes at her, when she was not
looking, and wondered at her. They wondered over her. They had been
beaten by her, every one of them. But they did not openly know it. They
looked at her, as if she were Woman itself, some creature not quite
personal. What they noticed, all of them, was the way her brown hair
looped over her ears. There was something chaste, and noble, and
war-like about it. The remote quality which hung about her in the midst
of her intimacies and her frequencies, nothing high or lofty, but
something given to the struggle and as yet invincible in the struggle,
made them seek her out.
They felt safe with her. They knew she would not let them down. She
would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any
way. She didn’t care about them. And so, because of her isolate
self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they were
ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular hoped he
might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy hair and a
pugnacious face. The battle-spirit was really roused in him, and he
heartily liked the woman. If he could have overcome her he would have
been mad to marry her.
With him, she summoned up all her mettle. She had never to be off her
guard for a single minute. The treacherous suddenness of his attack—for
he was treachery itself—had to be met by the voltaic suddenness of her
resistance and counter-attack. It was nothing less than magical the way
the soft, slumbering body of the woman could leap in one jet into
terrible, overwhelming voltaic force, something strange and massive, at
the first treacherous touch of the man’s determined hand. His strength
was so different from hers—quick, muscular, lambent. But hers was deep
and heaving, like the strange heaving of an earthquake, or the heave of
a bull as it rises from earth. And by sheer non-human power, electric
and paralysing, she could overcome the brawny red-headed fellow.
He was nearly a match for her. But she did not like him. The two were
enemies—and good acquaintances. They were more or less matched. But as
he found himself continually foiled, he became sulky, like a bear with
a sore head. And then she avoided him.
She really liked Young and James much better. James was a quick,
slender, dark-haired fellow, a gentleman, who was always trying to
catch her out with his quickness. She liked his fine, slim limbs, and
his exaggerated generosity. He would ask her out to ridiculously
expensive suppers, and send her sweets and flowers, fabulously
recherché. He was always immaculately well-dressed.
“Of course, as a lady _and_ a nurse,” he said to her, “you are two
sorts of women in one.”
But she was not impressed by his wisdom.
She was most strongly inclined to Young. He was a plump young man of
middle height, with those blue eyes of a little boy which are so
knowing: particularly of a woman’s secrets. It is a strange thing that
these childish men have such a deep, half-perverse knowledge of the
other sex. Young was certainly innocent as far as acts went. Yet his
hair was going thin at the crown already.
He also played with her—being a doctor, and she a nurse who encouraged
it. He too touched her and kissed her: and did _not_ rouse her to
contest. For his touch and his kiss had that nearness of a little
boy’s, which nearly melted her. She could almost have succumbed to him.
If it had not been that with him there was no question of succumbing.
She would have had to take him between her hands and caress and cajole
him like a cherub, into a fall. And though she would have like to do
so, yet that inflexible stiffness of her backbone prevented her. She
could not do as she liked. There was an inflexible fate within her,
which shaped her ends.
Sometimes she wondered to herself, over her own virginity. Was it worth
much, after all, behaving as she did? Did she care about it, anyhow?
Didn’t she rather despise it? To sin in thought was as bad as to sin in
act. If the thought was the same as the act, how much more was her
behaviour equivalent to a whole committal? She wished she were wholly
committed. She wished she had gone the whole length.
But sophistry and wishing did her no good. There she was, still
isolate. And still there was that in her which would preserve her
intact, sophistry and deliberate intention notwithstanding. Her time
was up. She was returning to Woodhouse virgin as she had left it. In a
measure she felt herself beaten. Why? Who knows. But so it was, she
felt herself beaten, condemned to go back to what she was before. Fate
had been too strong for her and her desires: fate which was not an
external association of forces, but which was integral in her own
nature. Her own inscrutable nature was her fate: sore against her will.
It was August when she came home, in her nurse’s uniform. She was
beaten by fate, as far as chastity and virginity went. But she came
home with high material hopes. Here was James Houghton’s own daughter.
She had an affluent future ahead of her. A fully-qualified maternity
nurse, she was going to bring all the babies of the district easily and
triumphantly into the world. She was going to charge the regulation fee
of two guineas a case: and even on a modest estimate of ten babies a
month, she would have twenty guineas. For well-to-do mothers she would
charge from three to five guineas. At this calculation she would make
an easy three hundred a year, without slaving either. She would be
independent, she could laugh every one in the face.
She bounced back into Woodhouse to make her fortune.