Archibald Cronin - The Stars Look Down

With a quick look at Jenny David went for Dr. Scott, whom he found taking his evening surgery. Scott was an elderly red-faced bony man, very offhand and laconic, with a disconcerting habit of hawking and spitting in the middle of a conversation. He was in every way extremely unprofessional. He always wore riding-breeches and a long check jacket with enormous pockets stuffed full of everything: pipe, pills, half a bandage, some blue raisins, two empty thermometer cases, a pocket lance never sterilised, and a gum elastic catheter which whipped across the room whenever he pulled out his musty handkerchief. But in spite of his oddity, untidiness and complete lack of asepsis he was an excellent doctor.

Yet he seemed to attach little urgency to Jenny’s first pain. He hawked, spat and nodded:

“I’ll look round in an hour.” Then he called out through the open door into his waiting-room: “Next, please.”

David was upset because Scott did not come at once. He returned home to find that Jenny and Ada had both gone upstairs. He waited restlessly for Scott’s arrival.

Yet when the doctor appeared at seven o’clock, though Jenny’s pains were much worse, he assured David that he could do nothing in the meantime. David understood that a first confinement was always a protracted business and he asked the doctor if Jenny would have to suffer long. Staring into the kitchen fire a minute before spitting into it Scott replied:

“I don’t think she’ll be that long, mind ye. I’ll look back before twelve!”

It was hard to wait until twelve. Jenny’s pains became rapid and severe. She seemed to have no strength and no spirit to endure the pains. She was by turns peevish, anguished, hysterical, exhausted. The bedroom on which she had expended such care and thought, with the befrilled cot in one corner and the new muslin curtains on the windows, and the pretty lace doyleys set upon the dressing-table became littered and disordered. It was bad enough when Ada upset the kettle, but the climax came with a faint mewing which set Jenny screaming and revealed the fact that “Pretty” was below the bed.

Then Jenny gave up. Though Ada told her she must walk about, she lay across her bed sprawling, holding her stomach, weeping on a huddle of twisted bed-clothes. She forgot all about the Chickabiddy’s Journal and Sunny Half-hours in the Happy Home . She got completely out of hand, lying on her back across that disordered bed with her legs apart, her night-dress drawn up, her hair tumbled about her pale thin face, her brow streaming with sweat. From time to time she closed her eyes and screamed. “Oh dear God,” she screamed, “ah, ah, ah, there it is again, oh my God my back, ah, ah, ah, oh mother give me a drink that water there it’s worse quick dear God, mother.” It was not quite so romantic as Jenny had imagined.

Scott came at twelve sharp and went straight upstairs. The door slammed upon Scott, Ada and the screeching Jenny. There was more screeching, the heavy tramp of Scott’s boots, then silence.

Chloroform, thank God, David thought. He sat hunched up in a chair in the kitchen before the nearly out fire. He had suffered every pain with Jenny and now the chloroform silence brought him an almost agonised relief. Human suffering always affected him profoundly and Jenny’s suffering seemed the epitome of all inevitable human pain. He thought of her with tenderness. He forgot all the quarrels and disputes and bickerings that had occurred between them. He forgot her pettiness, her petulance and her vanities. He began to consider the child and once again the child appeared to him as a symbol — a new life rising from amongst the dead. He had a vision of the battlefields where the dead lay in attitudes stranger even than they had lain within the pit. Soon he would be there, in France, on these battlefields. Nugent had written to him from the front where he was serving as a stretcher bearer in an ambulance unit attached to the Northumberland Fusiliers. By joining up at the same headquarters at Tynecastle, he also would get out with the Fusiliers and he hoped his unit would be near to Nugent’s.

A moaning came from the room overhead and then a singing, Jenny’s voice singing. He heard it quite plainly, a verse from one of her old sentimental songs, but the words came curiously ribald and slurred. That was another effect of the chloroform. It made people sing as though they were drunk.

Then again there was silence, a very long silence broken by the sudden coming of another voice, a thin new voice, not Jenny’s or Ada’s or Scott’s voice, but an altogether new voice which cried and piped like a little flute. The sound of that thin voice emerging from the pain and the shouting and the dark succeeding silence struck into David’s heart. Again the symbol: out of the chaos the new dawn. He sat perfectly still, his hands clasped together, his head uplifted, a strange presentiment in his eyes.

Half an hour later Scott clumped down the stairs and entered the kitchen. His face wore that tired and distasteful look which confinements often bring to the faces of overworked and disillusioned doctors. He fumbled in his pocket for a blue raisin. Scott always declared that he carried about these blue raisins to give to children; they were a marvellous cure for worms, he said. But Scott really liked the blue raisins himself and that was why he carried them about.

He found a blue raisin and began to chew it. He said in a non-committal way:

“Well, the little article’s arrived.”

David did not speak. He swallowed; nodded his head.

“A boy,” Scott said with a sort of automatic response, trying to infuse enthusiasm into his words, but failing.

“Is Jenny all right?”

“Oh, your wife’s quite comfortable, perfectly comfortable.” Scott paused and threw a very queer look at David. “The baby’s inclined to be delicate though. He’ll need a bit of attention one way and another.”

He threw another queerly suspicious look at David, but he said no more. He was a coarse old man with a low-class country and colliery practice. But he was not coarse now. He looked merely fatigued with life which, at a moment such as this, seemed to him terrible and incomprehensible. Stretching his arms above his head he yawned. He nodded to David and he spat into the fire that had gone out. Then he went out himself.

David stood in the centre of the empty kitchen for a few moments before going upstairs. He knocked at the bedroom door and entered. He wanted to be beside Jenny and the child. But Jenny was overcome, completely overcome, not yet fully recovered from the anæsthetic and inclined to be hysterical as well. Ada, too, was bustling and cross, fussing him out of the room at once. He had to leave it at that and return downstairs. He made his bed on the parlour sofa. The house was completely silent before he slept.

But next morning he saw the baby. While he sat at his breakfast of cocoa and bread Ada brought the baby down quite proudly as though she had done it all herself. The baby was freshly washed and powdered and dressed up in a lace-trimmed Carricoat, from the Chickabiddy’s set, which draped its tiny body most importantly. But for all its important trimmings the baby was very ugly and puny. It had black hair and blinking eyes and a flat pushed-in watery little nose and was pale and sickly and small. The baby was so ugly and small that David’s heart melted into fresh tenderness. He put down the cup of cocoa and took the baby on his knee. The feel of the baby upon his knee was absurd and wonderful. The baby’s eyes blinked timidly towards his. There was an apology in the timid blinking of the baby’s eyes.

“There, now, there!” Ada took up the baby again and dandled it up and down. “Your father’s clumsy with the pet!”