Leaning her childish face and full chin on the shelf of the prie-Dieu, her eyes fixed, she laughed, out of some hidden capacity, some lost subterranean humour; as it ceased, she leaned still further forward in a swoon, waking and yet heavy, like one in sleep.
When Felix returned that evening Robin was dozing in a chair, one hand under her cheek and one arm fallen. A book was lying on the floor beneath her hand. The book was the memoirs of the Marquis de Sade; a line was underscored: Et lui rendit pendant sa captivité les milles services qu’un amour dévoué est seul capable de rendre, and suddenly into his mind came the question: ‘What is wrong?’
She awoke but did not move. He came and took her by the arm and lifted her toward him. She put her hand against his chest and pushed him, she looked frightened, she opened her mouth but no words came. He stepped back, he tried to speak but they moved aside from each other saying nothing.
That night she was taken with pains. She began to curse loudly, a thing that Felix was totally unprepared for; with the most foolish gestures he tried to make her comfortable.
‘Go to hell!’ she cried. She moved slowly, bent away from him, chair by chair; she was drunk—her hair was swinging in her eyes.
Amid loud and frantic cries of affirmation and despair Robin was delivered. Shuddering in the double pains of birth and fury, cursing like a sailor, she rose up on her elbow in her bloody gown, looking about her in the bed as if she had lost something. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, for Christ’s sake!’ she kept crying like a child who has walked into the commencement of a horror.
A week out of bed she was lost, as if she had done something irreparable, as if this act had caught her attention for the first time.
One night, Felix, having come in unheard, found her standing in the centre of the floor holding the child high in her hand as if she were about to dash it down; but she brought it down gently.
The child was small, a boy, and sad. It slept too much in a quivering palsy of nerves, it made few voluntary movements; it whimpered.
Robin took to wandering again, to intermittent travel from which she came back hours, days later, disinterested. People were uneasy when she spoke to them; confronted with a catastrophe that had yet no beginning.