DRIFTING
The second baby came in the middle of a blazing summer, unheralded by
the hopes, by the buds and blossoms of loving thought, which had
opened upon the first child's advent. Marie was remorsefully tender
over it, but Osborn continued to be one long uninterrupted sigh. The
doctor and nurse seemed to him voracious, greedy creatures seeking for
his life-blood. His second child was born at midnight. He came in one
day at 6.30 with the fear in his heart men know round and about these
agitating times, and found that fear was justified. The nurse had
already been sent for, the doctor had looked in once, and the
grandmother, fierce and tearful, was putting the first baby to bed.
She put it to bed in Osborn's dressing-room, intimating that he would
be responsible for it during the night for the next three weeks,
anyway.
He could not bear it. He went in and kissed the silent, stone-white
Marie, looked resentfully at George, answered his mother-in-law at
random, and hurried out again. He was shivering. He remembered too
well now that day which, too easily, he had forgotten.
He neither ate nor drank; he walked the Heath madly. He told himself
that not for hundreds of precious pounds would he wait in that flat,
wait for the sounds of anguish which would inevitably rise and echo
about those circumscribed walls. The July sun went down; the moon rose
up and found him still walking; still fearing and wondering.
He supposed he was a coward; he could not help it.
It was after twelve o'clock when at last he went home. He went because
he suddenly remembered they had left George in his charge, and while
there was little he could do for Marie, he could at least be faithful
to that trust. He came back shivering as he had gone out; and as he
fitted his latchkey with cold fingers into the lock he heard the
newborn infant's wail.
The nurse looked out into the corridor at the sound of his entrance;
she raised her finger, enjoining silence, and smiled. She was the same
nurse who had helped to usher baby George into the world, and who had
been so serenely certain that they would send for her again.
She vanished once more into Marie's room.
Osborn crept along the corridor and took off his boots; he was tired
out, but still he felt no hunger. Had he been hungry he would have
somehow thought it an act of criminal grossness to forage for food.
There was none to attend to him, for Mrs. Amber, having waited to
reassure herself of her daughter's safety, had been obliged to take
the last Tube train home since there was not room for her at the flat.
He was about to undress when the nurse came along the corridor and
tapped at his door.
He knew what she had come for. Once again, with that air of lasé
cheerfulness she summoned him to his wife's bedside, and once again he
stood there looking down upon Marie as she lay there, quiet and worn.
Her quietness was the most striking thing about her. She looked at him
steadily and remotely, as if he were a stranger, but with less
interest; there was even a little hostility about her regard. It
seemed a long while ago since he had fallen beside her bed and wept
with her over the catastrophic forces of Nature; they were both ages
older; as if a fog had drifted between them, their hearts were
obscured from each other. Generations and generations of battle, so
old as to be timeless, marked the ground between them.
He spoke hesitatingly, saying:
"How do you feel, dear?"
"I'm--glad it's over."
"So'm I."
"You managed to escape?"
He looked at her hastily, a little red creeping over his pallid face.
She spoke almost as to a deserter. "I couldn't have done any good," he
said.
She smiled and closed her eyes, as though against him. It was not a
natural smile, it drew her lips tight.
"What could I do?" he asked her pleadingly.
She opened her eyes again and looked at him in that remote and quiet
regard.
"Men are queer. If you had been suffering, I would never have run
away."
He wanted to expostulate, to explain how different such a case would
be; how, as a matter of course, a wife's place was beside her husband
in good and ill, most particularly ill--but he did not find the heart
to do it. She looked so fatigued and was so deadly quiet. He felt at a
loss, and looked around vaguely till his eye lighted on the cot.
There, beneath the muslin and ribbon which had at last been crisply
laundered, lay a burden, now minute, but about to cling and grow like
an Old Man of the Sea.
"How's the baby?" he asked, tiptoeing to it.
"It's a girl," said Marie; "I expect you've been told."
He had not been told, having made no inquiry. Here again the
story-books which had informed him of romantic life in his very young
days had been at fault; they made such an idealised picture of all
that had just taken place, and they told about the joy in the heart of
a man and the ecstasy in the heart of a woman. Osborn looked down upon
a tiny, red and crumpled face.
"I expect she'll grow up as pretty as her mother," he said with an
effort, "but now she's--she's curious, isn't she?"
With what relief he hailed the return of the nurse? It was so late
that she was stern and cross and cold with him as she shut him out.
Little George awoke at the sounds, cautious though they were, of his
father's undressing, and, crying for mummie, could not be consoled
until lifted out, and wildly and clumsily petted and lied to, and
cajoled. Even then he did not trust this daddy who was such a stranger
in the house; who was only jolly by fits and starts when they all woke
up in the pink room in the mornings; who hid behind a paper at
breakfast, and who, going away in a hurry directly afterwards, only
returned after George was asleep, or simulating sleep under threat of
a slapping. The baby missed his mother's loving arms and cried
miserably, hunched uncomfortably in Osborn's. But at last he must
sleep through sheer drowsiness, and they both went to bed. In the
morning Osborn dressed him before he went away, and was called upon to
make himself generally useful, and made to memorise a string of
errands.
The nurse would have no nonsense. She demanded and he complied.
He cursed her within himself. What a pack!
During those days once more Desmond was good to him, sheltering him at
his club, inviting him to play golf, or to run out into the country
with him in his two-seater. Once they took George because the nurse
was so firmly decided that they should do so, and they stayed out past
his bedtime, and tired him out, and made him furious.
"It's a gay life!" said Osborn to Rokeby, "a gay life, what?"
Marie sent the nurse away at the end of three weeks, and tackled her
increased household alone. She was unable to nurse the baby, and the
doctor ordered it to be fed upon the patent food which George used to
have, so she was obliged to ask Osborn to increase the housekeeping
allowance.
They discussed long and seriously the ways and means to the increase
and the amount of it. "Half a crown," was her reiteration; "on half a
crown I'd do it somehow."
And he asked: "Yes! But where's the half-crown to come from?"
"You must find it," she said at last.
With compressed lips and lowering brow the young man thought it out.
"I give you all I can--"
"And I take as little as I can."
"I'm sick of these discussions about money."
"So'm I."
"It seems as if we were sick of the whole thing, doesn't it?"
Being a woman, she dared not confirm verbally those reckless words;
their very recklessness caused her to fear. If they _were_ sick
of the whole thing--well, what about it? What were they to do? They
were in it, weren't they, up to their necks? Of two people who
mutually recognised the plight, only one must foam and rage and
stutter out unpalatable truths about it; it was for the other to pour
on the oil, to deceive and pretend and propitiate and cajole, to try
to keep things running and the creaking machinery at work.
Because--what else remained to do?
But when Osborn rapped out: "It seems as if we were sick of the whole
thing, doesn't it?" though she would not confirm this in words, her
silence confirmed it, her silence and her look. They made him hesitate
and catch his breath.
"Well?" he asked.
"I'm not going to say such things."
"But you know they're true, don't you?" he asked in despair.
"You ought to think, as I do, that the babies are worth it all."
"When two people begin telling each other what they _ought_ to
do, they're reaching the limit."
"You've often told me what I ought to do."
"I don't know what's coming to women."
"A revolution!"
"Rubbish!" said Osborn. "Women have no power to revolt, and no reason
either."
"It's true we've no power; that's what keeps most of us quiet."
"I wish it would keep you quiet."
"You see, I can't help it, can I? Keeping quiet doesn't ask you for
this other half-crown, and I've got to ask you. I can't help it."
"I daresay not," he admitted reluctantly. "But--"
"Can I have it?" she asked doggedly.
"Oh, take it!" he flared, flung half-a-crown on the table, rose, and
went out. She sat for a while looking at the half-crown, then she took
it in her hand, and wanted to pitch it into the street for the first
beggar to profit by, but, remembering that she was a beggar too, she
kept it.
Osborn entered into further discussion of the matter in a reasonable
vein.
"Half-a-crown a week's six pound ten a year. Sure you can't manage
without?"
"How do you mean?"
"Well, lots of women have to--to--manage."
"There's a limit even to management."
"I suppose there is. Very well."
"You mean I'm to have it?"
"All right."
"Thank you very much, dear," said Marie very slowly after a while.
"You don't seem in a particular hurry to say it."
"Why should I say it?"
"What! when I've just arranged to give you six pound ten--"
"To feed your daughter."
"Oh, well--"
"Anyway, I _have_ said it. I've said 'Thank you very much,'
haven't I? Do you want me to show more gratitude?"
"It beats me to think what's come over women."
They sat on either side of their hearth looking at one another in
unconcealed bewilderment.
"If you cared to let me make out a budget, Osborn," she said suddenly,
"I think we could arrange it all better. So much for everything, you
know."
"Oh, yes, I know! I know all about it, thanks! If you want to dole out
my pocket-money, my dear, I'm off.... I'm completely off it! No, thank
you. I'll keep my hands on my own income."
"I only meant--"
"Women never seem satisfied," said Osborn wrathfully.
As he looked at her sitting there, thin and fair and reserved as she
never used to be, with the sheen of her glossy hair almost vanished,
and all of her pretty insouciance gone, he saw no more the gay girl,
the wifely comrade, whom he had married. In her place sat the
immemorial hag, the married man's bane, the blood-sucker, the enemy,
the asker.
She had taken from him a sum equivalent to twice his weekly
tobacco-money.
The sacrifice of _all_ his tobacco would not provide for that red
and crumpled baby lying in its fine basket. He took that as a
comparison, with no intention of sacrificing his tobacco; but it just
gave one the figures involved.
As if feeling through her reserve the gist of his thoughts, she
smiled.
"Poor old Osborn!" she said.
"You can stretch an income, and stretch it," said Osborn, "but it
isn't eternally elastic, you know."
"_Don't_ I know it!"
"Well, all I ask you to do," said Osborn, "is to remember it."
Then life went round as before, except that a great anxiety as to
meeting the weekly bills fell upon Marie. Sometimes they were a
shilling up and sometimes a shilling down. The day when the greasy
books fell through the letter-box into the hall was a day to add a
grey hair to the brightest head.
With two babies to dress, she rose earlier; she swept and dusted and
cooked quicker; she sent Osborn off to his work as punctually as
before; she wheeled two infants instead of one out in the grey
perambulator to the open-air market. And there her bargaining became
sharp, thin and shrewish. She fought the merchants smartly, and
sometimes she won and sometimes they. During the day Grannie Amber
usually came in and lent a hand about the babies' bedtime. At 6.30
Osborn came home, a little peevish until after dinner. After dinner he
went out again if the new baby cried or if anything went wrong. Once a
quarter the demand for the rent came upon him like a fresh blow; once
a month he paid the furniture instalment; once a week he gave up, like
life-blood, thirty-two and sixpence to her whose palm was always
ready.
"It's a gay life!" he often said with a twisted smile, "A gay life,
what?"