XXXV
It was soon after this that I first knew I was going to have a baby. I went to see a doctor called Mrs. Chilcote, whose name I had seen on a brass plate at right angles to our road. She was a nice person; efficient I think, but like Mollie, not like Maud. She was kind to me afterwards very often. Then I went out on the heath and sat down on a seat under a tree; it was a birch tree and the little yellow leaves fluttered down from the tiny branches and I tried to think what it meant. It seemed to me then too wonderful almost to be true. I would have a son, I felt sure of that, and he would be all that I was not, and that Walter was not, nor Hugo; it seems funny now to remember that I thought all that; it did not strike me as improbable at all that my son should be perfect and all I could wish him to be, and I thought of my own relation to him—how I would be a perfect mother to him, as Cousin Delia had been to Guy and Hugo, as she had been even to me; that too did not seem difficult or unlikely to me. I thought:
‘I will never misunderstand him, nor be cross, nor wish him different from what he is.’
Other mothers made those mistakes, I knew, but I would not; and I thought of my son and worshipped him, shutting my eyes on the seat under the birch tree.
When Walter came home and I told him he kissed me and said he was glad, but he did not seem very much interested.
There had been some hitch at his College that afternoon. One of his lectures had been announced at the wrong time and he had not been there; he was thinking about that.
I minded his not caring more, but not badly.
I thought:
‘He will care when it is there.’
And I was so happy myself, so full of happiness, that nothing else could matter very much.
Next day I went down into Oxford Street to shop, and I looked at the people in the bus, and thought:
‘Which of these women have had children? How many of them have known this wonderful thing?’
Most of them probably had known it and yet they looked quite ordinary, quite dull and unexcited, and thinking of dull little things. I felt then that I could never be the same again, that I could not even look the same as I had a few months ago.
I thought:
‘How could anything else count at all if one has a child?’
And I was afraid crossing the streets that I should be run over, afraid when I was in the bus that it would upset, because this wonder was too great and this happiness.