SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village—the neighbor women coming in to help—rather fat women in aprons.
They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but stand about, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have the babies there would never be more than one child in a family. What do men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all the suffering in life, I always said—I said a woman feels everything deeper than a man—don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’s what it is.”
And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. He would be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; he is a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is about to help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever he goes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always says the same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and fresh air—that’s what I believe in. Throw open the doors and the windows. Let’s have some fresh air in here.”
While the child is being born he tells his one joke. One might as well be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in is in making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a damned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on a cake of soap—ha! that’s what I’m up to.”
A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of the house to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in a near-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under such conditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give him the feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointing accusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyed married men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set up the cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women—they are saying, half jokingly, half in earnest: “There, you devil; see what you have done—this is your doings.”
Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to the neighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy, now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by some invisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standing close together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must stand shoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage—as father would have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling the actor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.”
Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come upon the stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingering nervously the heavy gold watch chain—he is soon to lose it with all his other property in one of his frequent business failures—and from the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it sounds not unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a careless master, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughs again.
And that is myself—just being actually born into the world.
* * * * *
Which is one thing, but sometimes one’s fancy wants something else. As I lay, deep buried in the hay in the barn on another fall day, and as the resentment—born in me through having been made the son of two decaying, gentle families—grew deeper and deeper, and also as the grateful warmth of the departed summer—captured and held by the hay—stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood in a cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels—as the warmth took hold of my body, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fled from the field of fact and into the field of fancy.