All through the winter the charwoman came every day. And one midnight, in the first week of March, nineteen-five, Violet's child was born. It was a daughter.
CHAPTER XV
On that night Ransome acquired a dreadful knowledge. Granville was not a place where you could be born with any decency. It seemed to participate horribly in Violet's agony, to throb with her tortures and recoils, to fill itself shuddering with her cries, such cries as Ransome had never heard or conceived, that he would have believed impossible. They were savage, inhuman; the cries and groans of some outraged animal; there was menace in them and rebellion, terror, and an implacable resentment.
And as Ransome heard them his heart was torn with pity and with remorse too, as though Violet's agony accused him. He could not get rid of the idea that he had wronged her; an idea that he somehow felt he would never have had if the baby had been born a month later. He swore that she should never be put to this torture a second time; that if God would only spare her he would never, never quarrel with her, never say an unkind word to her again. He couldn't exactly recall any unkind words; so he nourished his anguish on the thought of the words he had very nearly said, also of the words he hadn't said, and of the things he hadn't done for her. Casting about for these, he found that he hadn't taken her to Earl's Court or the Coliseum half as often as he might. He had been wrapped up in himself, that's what he had been; a selfish, low brute. He felt that there was nothing he wouldn't do for Vi, if only God would spare her.
But God wouldn't. He wasn't sparing her now. God had proved that he was capable of anything. It was incredible to Ransome that Violet should live through that night. He wouldn't believe his mother and the doctor and the nurse when they told him that everything was as it should be. He knew that they were lying; they must be; it wasn't possible that any woman would go through that and live.
All this Ransome thought as he sat in the front parlor under the little creaking room. He would sit there where he could hear every sound, where it was almost as if he was by her bed and looking on.
And he wouldn't believe it was all over when at midnight they came and told him, and when he saw Violet lying in her mortal apathy, and when he kissed her poor drawn face. He couldn't believe that Violet's face wouldn't look like that forever, that it wouldn't keep forever its dreadful memory, the resentment that smoldered still under its white apathy.
For there could be no doubt that that was Violet's attitude—resentment, as of some wrong that had been done her. He didn't wonder at it. He resented the whole business himself.