I went up to one of them, leaned over and looked upon the crumpled patch of a little old red face. Then I realized I had come there to occupy myself in my period of expectancy and catch a glimpse of my child in advance.
The woman's face was bloodless, like the face of a drowned corpse, and fanned by long colorless locks limp as seaweed. Seeing the supplication in my eyes she lifted up the thick dirty-gray shawl with the air of a benefactress. "Three months." The first thing they tell of a child is its age.
The little worm very leisurely wrinkled its forehead of peeling satin and stretched itself, opened two rather glassy eyes encircled by mauve, and let out its guttural wail through a toothless aperture upholstered with flesh. The provident mother had already pulled a rubber pacifier out of her pocket, which transformed the wail into a monotonous greedy gurgle. "Will you be quiet! They're an awful trouble. You'll see," she declared, gauging my heavy figure. "I had bad luck, I had no milk. No use giving him gravy or bread soaked and boiled. He doesn't get any good out of them. If you think you can fatten them on the doctor's fine words, as if the doctors even know what they're talking about!"
"I believe you!" bawled a big blonde. The baby which she had a triumphant way of carrying had hanging cheeks and bottle-blue eyes in button-hole slits. "Just look at mine. At nine months it ate like us. What do you say to that, eh?"
A group gathered. "What are you here for then?" asked a huge creature with a gray ogress head, high cheekbones and skin streaked with fine veins. The blonde turned her baby over and showed its chubby flesh covered with a crusty, scabby, red-streaked sheath. "Oh, only this."
The ogress dropped into an empty place on the bench and paraded her darling on her knees. "My daughter's," she explained to the circle around her. "Her third. Maybe you think she hasn't got something to worry about—three babies and working in a factory. Babies—I know a thing or two about babies. I've had eleven." There was a general stir of compassion followed by protests. "I have two left." She danced the mite on her knee. Her tower of a body swayed back and forth, through her half-open jacket you could divine her dead breasts. There was something weird and horrible in the dismal accustomedness of her knees.
"The doctors make you fuss such a lot. You give the babies too much, and you don't give 'em enough, and you don't bathe 'em, and you don't weigh 'em. There wasn't such a lot of talk in my time, but they grew up all the same. I said to my daughter, 'Look here, you let me alone, either I know what to do or I don't know what to do.' I used to give mine toast-water, that was all." She tucked up the lank pads of hair clinging to either side of her face. "You boil two or three crusts of bread...."
"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.