Woman Part 13

"Oh, I know," interrupted the woman with the drowned-corpse face.

"Mine has bronchitis," went on the ogress. "I wonder where he caught it.

He never goes out and he sleeps close to the stove. I am going to try and see if I can't get a bottle of syrup...."

The folding-doors opened, a white-clad nurse made a sign, and all rose, each with the same enamored hugging-to-her of her wailing burden.

The crowd poured into an immense, well-heated room paved with white flag-stones and painted white. The light beat down hard through a row of bay-windows. At the far end presided a handsome old man in a white smock, an immaculate nurse at his side. "The doctor!" whispered the women in a tone of awed hostility. The man did indeed seem indifferent and just as G.o.d should be.

Spread out symmetrically on the bare table in front of him among other instruments was a complete apparatus of justice, bright and glittering--a set of scales with a basket and a row of copper weights drawing clamorous notes from the straggling music of the suns.h.i.+ne.

With remarkable dexterity the women undid the swaddling-clothes, turning, tucking up, unwrapping. The blonde swelled out her bosom as she stuck it full of pins; the ogress held her pins between her teeth. A suffocating odor of warm wool, sour milk, perspiration, and stale flesh arose amid the cries.

The line began to move. One after the other they went up tendering their children like poor plucked bruised flowers, with the idolatrous, skulking faith of believers approaching G.o.d.

From my bench, my heart frightfully wrung, I saw each showing me what I might make of my child ... a baby with its neck seamed with a reddish crack ... a baby with tiny, tiny limbs beneath an abdomen swelling like a bagpipe ... a baby whose ribs striped its body like a zebra's hide ...

a baby with a back all covered with boils....

"He has green movements." "He has a swollen stomach." "He has ringworm."

"He coughs." And the same slack answers to the doctor's questions: "I don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know."

The man cast his sovereign glance over the printed form held out to him, handled the little body, remained impa.s.sive while p.r.o.nouncing his rapid decision, and took up the next case.

Among the lethargic flock who went away with bowed heads, some, to rally their spirits, mumbled the flesh of their babies with fierce kisses as if to take revenge and show that this man after all had done them harm....

I got up, dragging my double weight.

So this is the maternal infatuation which is so sanctified and revered.

"I don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know." And I presumptuously was going to commit the same folly, I, who knew no better than they, who had not learned the unknown love awaiting me....

Why doesn't that man, the doctor, who _knows_, arise and s.n.a.t.c.h away these lives contaminated by the fond ignorance of the mothers, and proclaim that the instinct is fallible, fatal, even criminal?

Most of the women met me again under the porte-cochere, because I walked with difficulty. The one with the drowned-corpse face gave me a friendly little nod.

"You will see," her nod said, "it will soon be your turn...."

Yes, I know.... To be a mother.... In return for the gift of life, to have the right of death over one's child. And to use that right.

XIII

A rending, moments repeated incessantly, torture indescribable, pain embedded in the body, battle, cruel cries....

I remember everything and every second. I remember the seconds when I gnawed at my bedclothes, when I howled like a wild beast. I remember all of them and others. I remember that none of them was ever the last, how the hours added themselves to the seconds in an excruciating, inhuman succession of throes in which my whole being set furiously upon itself, how I no longer had the strength to suffer.

I twisted my head from side to side like a dying animal in entreaty; I stifled it in the pillows; it was wet with perspiration; I felt a new convulsion begin and break like a wave. And when an infernal force tore me with a pang greater than all the others, I heard vaguely a cry that was no longer mine, a film pa.s.sed over my pupils, I sank into an abyss sunlit and sultry. It was over ... it was over ... I fell asleep.

Did I remain in that state of lethargy and inertia for long? When I opened my eyes the whiteness and blankness of the walls of my room seemed to be released by a spring. About me was a startling silence peopled with sibilant whispers. I saw women stooping, then disappearing with their arms full of linen.

My baby! My baby!

His father, exultant, held him out to me. I became fully conscious. But goodness, how ugly he was! The shrivelled face of an old woman, the profile of a vulture, a forehead covered with plushy mucosities, cheeks smeared as with the yolk of an egg, hands on the outside exactly like a bird's and on the inside creased and red. And real nails!

At the fontanelle the pulse beneath the skin throbbed terrifyingly, and the fuzz on his skull was skimpier than pin-feathers on a fledgling.

I took him in my arms, stiff and long in his swaddling-clothes. His eyes opened half way and showed a gla.s.sy violet with milky gleams.

Our child? We both in turn dropped timid solemn kisses on his downy cheeks made of a sweet smell, and I dared not say anything.

Well?... The call of the blood, the rejoicing of the flesh, the issue of love, the instinct, the lurid mother-instinct at last?

No!

XIV

I should like to hold these things fast, for always.

I see them now as they really are, just as I see my son in his present form. But it is not enough to say: "I see them." I have carefully preserved all my pictures of him; I want to keep intact the memory of the heart he gave me.

This is not difficult to tell. Other feelings are too bound up with self for description. You'd have to explain a person's whole nature to understand them. Love is indefinable, grief is indefinable, but a mother's heart can open up like a book. It is uniform and simple, free from all alloy, and its very infiniteness is like finiteness.

My little boy is near me, awkwardly a.s.saying his first steps in the garden. Without raising my eyes from my work I watch him and I thank him.

It is he. Although he changes from day to day, I know his ways by heart: the big curl in which the sunlight lies coiled, the almost imperceptible arch of his eyebrows, mere shades of lines, the red pollen blown on the petals of his cheeks, his profile of curves, his neck of mother-of-pearl, the spreading fan of his fingers, his unique form which is unique only to me.

I must rack my brain in order to force into my memory that once he lay hidden in my warm womb and I carried him as though he were one of my organs, as though he were a secret, that I carried him as one carries a joy or a pain. I no longer remember this.

I am in a hurry for him to grow up and be able to listen; I should like to talk to him. I have found words for the others, though they awoke in me only an uncertain love and set my heart in chaos. He has given me an intelligible emotion, and to him I have said nothing.

I love him as I love no one, because he is the sole human being for whom I am _responsible_. My love is responsibility first and foremost. If he bends over, I suppress a cry; if the sun s.h.i.+nes too strong on him, I s.h.i.+eld him with my body; if he makes a new gesture, a slight disquiet flits through me. In whatever concerns him danger seems to lurk. He is a lively, approachable child, people like him, and when they come up and speak to him, I smile a pleasant, natural smile, though his life and his death keep up an incessant sport within me and incessantly it devolves upon me to secure his life. It is a tragic stake, a terribly cruel problem; it is the entire basis of mother-love.

He has run as far as the ivy thicket, thirty yards from my chair. I tremble so that I have to get up and leave my work. Every now and then he comes tottering to present me with a shaving of wood fished up from the sand he plays in, a big earth-coated pebble, treasure-troves of all sorts. "Look, mother." His attention flatters me.

If I were to disappear without leaving anything?... Without leaving a will? Or suppose that from beyond the tomb I were to say: "Before you took your first steps your life was all arranged. In order that you should be happy I kept you from having dignity or a sense of justice. No need for you to undergo the bitter struggle that presses upon a man, the primordial cares of existence, honesty--honor, in short. Are you not my child? If I have taken trouble and pains it was to deprive human beings all for your sake. You will be exempted from earning your bread and pursuing an occupation. You will depend upon the labor of others, you will be under the delusion that you are distinguished from those upon whom you depend. That is the end to which my efforts will have served."

But this is wrong, unwholesome, dishonorable.