Alone in the unlit, stuffy passage, Mavis whispered her troubles to Jill. Tears came to her eyes, which she held back by thinking persistently of the loved one. While she waited, she heard the clatter of plates and the clink of glasses in the kitchen. Mavis would have gone for a short walk, but she had a superstitious fear of going out of doors again till after her baby was born.
The sharp cry, as of one suddenly assailed by pain, came from the floor overhead. Then a door opened, and footsteps came to the top of the first flight of stairs.
"Mrs Gowler! Mrs Gowler!" cried a woman's voice frantically. But the woman had to call many times before her voice triumphed over the thickness of the kitchen door and the noise of the meal.
"Oo is it?" asked Mrs Gowler, when she presently came from the kitchen, with her mouth full of bread, cheese, stout, and spring onions.
"Liz—Mrs Summerville!" replied the woman.
"'Arf a mo', an' I'll be up," grumbled Mrs Gowler, as she returned to the kitchen, to emerge a few seconds later pinning on her apron.
"You finish yer supper, Oscar, but don't drink all the stout," she called to her son, as she went up the stairs. Before she had got to the landing, the cry was heard again and yet again. It sounded to Mavis like some wounded animal being tortured beyond endurance. The cries continued, to seem louder when a door was opened, and to be correspondingly deadened when this was closed. Mavis shuddered; anticipation of the torment she would have to endure chilled the blood in her veins; cold shivers coursed down her back. It was as if she were imprisoned in a house of pain, from which she could only escape by enduring the most poignant of all torture inflicted by nature on sensitive human bodies. The cries became continuous. Mavis placed her fingers in her ears to shut them out. For all this precaution, a scream of pain penetrated to her hearing. A few moments later, when she had to use her hands in order to prevent Jill from jumping on to her lap, she did not hear a sound. Some quarter of an hour later, Mrs Gowler descended the stairs.
"A quick job that," she remarked to Mavis, who did not make any reply. "Let's 'ope you'll be as sharp," added the woman, as she disappeared into the kitchen.
Mavis gathered from these remarks that a mother had been delivered of a child during Mrs Gowler's brief sojourn upstairs. The latter confirmed this surmise by saying a little later, when she issued from the kitchen drying her hands and bared arms on a towel:
"The worst of these here nursing 'omes is that yer never knows when you're going to be on the job. I didn't expect Liz till termorrer."