Edwin accepted gratefully. It was harsh stuff that had been standing on the hob downstairs for some hours already. Mrs. Perkins was easily persuaded into doctoring hers with a tablespoonful of brandy from the bottle that is a regular constituent of the working class layette. The sister sat at the foot of the bed and stared lazily at Edwin.
“You look tired, doctor,” she said.
Edwin admitted that he had had a biggish day. “You ought to get a bit of sleep,” said the dark girl. “Sorry there bain’t no spare beds in the house; but you can turn in with me if you like.”
She looked so daringly provocative that Edwin had a horrible suspicion that she meant it; but it was evidently the sort of joke that Greville Street understood, for the patient on the bed cried, “Ethel, you are a cough-drop, you’ll make the doctor blush,” and Mrs. Perkins rocked with laughter until she spilt her tea.
“Well, why should you have all the fun, Sally? It isn’t every day we get a nice young man in the house.”
“Fun . . .,” said the patient wryly. “You’ll know all about this sort of fun some day.”
“Not just yet, thank you,” said Ethel. “I can look after myself better than that.”
She went downstairs again. Edwin was beginning to feel a little unhappy about the case. To his inexperience the long delay seemed abnormal, and his imagination presented to him a series of textbook disasters. While he stood doubting whether he should give himself away by sending to the hospital for the house-surgeon, he was startled by a sudden cry. Now, at any rate, there was no doubt about it. At this rate, he thought, it could not be long. But it took three hours: three hours of desperate struggle in which he could give no help, though the thing was so fierce that he found his sympathies snatched up into it: so that he held his breath and clenched his hands and felt his own temples bursting with effort. There had been no experience like it. As he sat at the bedside with the patient’s fingers clasped about his wrist, he had the feeling that this woman, who had joked with him half an hour before with the dry, courageous cynicism that colours the philosophy of her class, was not an individual human soul any longer; not a woman at all, but a mass of straining, tortured muscle animated by the first force of life. So it had been since the first woman cried out in the night under the tangles of Caucasus: so it would always be: the most sublime and terrible of all physical experiences, a state of sheer physical possession, more powerful than any spiritual ecstasy imaginable.
At five o’clock the baby was born—a boy, and Mrs. Perkins, standing by with a skein of twisted thread in her hand, danced with nervousness. Edwin’s hands also trembled; but his heart was lightened with a sudden relief, as though the labour had been his and his also the accomplishment. A palpably ridiculous state of mind . . . but it took him like that.
The dark girl put her head in at the door. She was very pale now. Had the whole household shared in these physical throes?