I collected for Mrs. Ebstein a wardrobe of tiny garments. Some of them
were Jean’s outgrown clothing. Some of them I made myself, sitting alone
in my study in the early winter evenings.
It was almost Christmas time when I took them down to Snow Street. I too
climbed the long flights of stairs, and passed through the noisy room
where the seven children lived.
I found Mrs. Ebstein in her room alone. When I opened my bag and gave
her its contents, her face shone. She grasped both my hands and gave me
a great kiss.
“You are so good toward me!” she said in broken English. “You make so
much trouble for me!”
Then she stroked the little socks. “Wie niedlich! Wie reizend!”
We talked for some time in bad English and worse German. When at last I
rose to go, Mrs. Ebstein took both my hands again.
“I did not know,” she said, “but you are so good,—and I am ganz allein!
No sister, keine Mutter. Will you come mit the doctor-lady when she
comes?”
And smiling to see into what strange paths my endeavour to serve
humanity was leading me, I promised. She was so young; she was so far
away from home.
Her child was born on the night of the twenty-sixth of December. I went
down in the afternoon with the Doctor; and all night long I waited and
watched, in the outer room, from which the seven children had been
banished.
The Doctor and the district nurse cared for the patient.
Sitting out by the fire, I hung the little flannel robes again and again
in the warmest place, saying over and over the lines of the folk-song:—
“Mine ear is full of the murmur of rocking cradles.
‘For a single cradle,’ saith Nature, ‘I would give every one of my
graves.’”
All night long I was hushed into awe by the coming of new life, and hurt
by a pain that the presence of death does not give.
When it was almost morning, I heard a cry, and the words of the
folk-song changed into the words of the Bible: “And so she brought forth
her first-born child.”
We were high over the city. It was just before dawn. In the east I
caught the first hint of the morning light, and down below me I saw the
roofs of the city dimly outlined in the fading darkness.
As I watched, the Doctor came out and joined me, weary, but with a look
upon her face that I had never seen before.
“I never perform this service,” she said slowly, “without feeling that I
have been doing a sacrificial act.”
I did not speak.
“No wonder,” said the Doctor, “that the symbol of the world’s salvation
has been so long a mother with her baby in her arms. It pictures the
greatest glory of all our human life.”
The light grew stronger in the east. The Doctor’s eyes were strained
toward it, and her face was very beautiful.
“I suppose it is because it is so near Christmas time that I think of
this,” she continued. “I wonder why we have always tried to read a
supernatural meaning into the story of the Christ-child. ‘The Holy Ghost
shall come upon thee,—the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee;
therefore the holy thing that shall be born of thee’—I tell you,” said
the Doctor, interrupting herself energetically, “that means only that
the birth of human life is always sacred. We might well say at every
birth: ‘Go and search—for the young child—and bring me word—that I may
come and worship him.’”
We watched the light grow strong and clear over the quiet city. The
grimy tenement houses and the polluted streets became more and more
distinct. Then the noise of rattling wheels and of hurrying feet came
faintly to our ears. The toil of another day had begun.
After a time the nurse came out of the inner room, holding in her arms
the newborn child. It was wriggling in the garments in which it had been
wrapped. The Doctor looked down at the little purple face and screwed-up
nose, and her expression changed to one of professional disgust.
“I haven’t a doubt,” she muttered, “that it is a poor, miserable,
rickety little vagabond. Why must there be this terrible increase of
population among paupers?”