Patrick White - Happy Valley

You could put out the lamp, Mrs Steele, he said, without turning to look.

Mrs Steele stood like a post. The Chinese woman climbed up silently on a chair and turned down the wick of the lamp, till the light was out, and a white smoke meandered up through the glass.

The doctor looked at his watch. It was nine o’clock. He had been there since the evening before, and now it was light again, and there was a shadow of bristle about his chin. The rims of his eyes were dry and taut. They felt as if they might never close again, stuck there, glued. The calves of his legs ached. He had been there how many hours? He would not count, could not be bothered to count. But it was a weary business, and the way she moaned, weary, with that pale hair flattened back from her face. Somebody was cooking bacon and eggs. He could smell the fat, smell the wick of the now extinguished lamp, and the little oil stove against which the Chinese woman was warming her skirts. It was monstrously cold in this room, in this wooden house with the snow piled up outside. The little stove seemed to make no impression on the temperature. He shivered and put his fingers on the woman’s pulse.

She opened her eyes and looked at him blankly.

It’ll soon be over now, he said.

It was like delivering a cow, he felt. When she moaned it was almost like the lowing of a cow. And that same bewildered stare. Or perhaps he had become callous. Some people called it professional, when perhaps it was just callousness. Not like that first time, the woman in the tenement in Sydney, somewhere out in Surry Hills. She had screamed, or that was what it sounded like, something very personal and connected with himself, so that his own body had tightened up with the screams, and he sweated behind the knees, and the afterbirth had almost made him sick. When he left the house, when he got on the tram and found himself in William Street, he could still hear the screams. They were stamped on wax inside his head, the record going round and round. At the bottom of William Street he got out of the tram and had to go into a pub to get a drink.

The poor soul’s havin’ an awful time, said Mrs Steele behind his back.

She was having an awful time. But she was strong, strong as a cow. And in a little while it would be over.

In a little while it was. The child was born dead. It was a red, motionless phenomenon that he picked up and handed to Mrs Steele, waiting to receive it in a folded towel. Mrs Steele sucked her teeth. You felt that Dr Halliday was responsible for the stillborn child. She could have delivered it better herself, and that poor soul lying on the bed, it was terrible, Mary Mother of God it was awful what women had to go through. She carried the child out of the room still sucking her teeth.

But she was strong, he repeated, in the absence of any genuine compassion. He could not summon this. He began to gather up his instruments, while the Chinese woman floated round the bed, so silent that she almost wasn’t there. He would wash his hands. There was a basin in the kitchen, the Chinese woman said. He would pack his bag, a small compact affair in darkish leather with his initials on the side in black. O.H. He had had it done in Sydney after taking his degree, correcting the man in the shop, saying it was not A but H, for HALLIDAY. It was good to have a bag with your initials on it. It made you feel important. You were less a medical student than a doctor. That was one stage, and the woman screaming in a tenement house in Surry Hills. Life in jerks, in stages. It ought to flow, theoretically, in an even rhythm, as he read (he was nineteen) in some book, and he must do something about his life, work it out into a neat formula, or make it flow beautifully. Everything would be beautiful. Then it began to move in jerks. And that was all wrong. He yawned. Perhaps Chalker would offer him bacon and eggs.

Mrs Steele was back in the room. While she was away she seemed to have caught on to the thread of the inevitable again, for she stood with her arms folded and began to compose a low, monotonous kind of recitative.

It’s funny, she said, it happened that way. It happened that way with my first. All the rest boys but the first. The first was a little girl. They’re good boys, my boys. There’s young Tom, just got a job in the post-office at Tumut. He’s good to ’is mother, Tom. Sends me money from Tumut. Tom says I oughtn’t stay on ’ere. Kambala’s no place for an elderly woman. When the summer comes I ought to go down to Tumut an’ live.

She went on like that, and Dr Halliday did not listen to her. He would be getting on down to Happy Valley. He would be there in time for lunch, leaving the publican’s wife to Mrs Steele. She would soon be about again. She was strong as a cow. Only the child was dead. So he went past the old woman, standing there as leisurely as a chorus from Euripides, and out into the passage, where the publican sat on a deal chair smoking the frayed remains of a cigarette. He would have to say something to the publican.

Well, he said, I’m sorry, Chalker. We’ve done all we can. I’m sorry it’s turned out like this.

The publican jumped to his feet and came forward, bending a little, nervously. He was relieved now that it was all over, even if not particularly moved, because he hadn’t really stopped to think about the child. Only his wife. The possibility of reproduction only moved dimly at the back of his mind. Sometimes it moved farther into the foreground, and he thought, well, a kid would show you there was nothing wrong, and afterwards it could lend a hand in the bar, give Rita a chance of laying up. So when he sidled nervously to the doctor there was a propitiatory smile on his flabby face.

Better luck next time, eh, doctor? he said.

Then he laughed. It was a wheezy, semi-coagulated noise. Halliday found it rather unpleasant. He refused to encourage Chalker’s relief and asked if he could wash his hands. There was yellow soap in the kitchen sink. Chalker hovered, talked, coughed. He was a big man, perpetually in his slippers, with yellowish whites to his eyes. A stream of soft platitude fell about Halliday as he washed his hands, as he accepted a whisky in the bar, as he refused an offer of bacon and eggs. No, he’d be getting down. His wife.

All right, doctor, said Chalker, unlatching the front door. If there’s ever anything I can do. You never can tell, eh? You never can tell.

Tell what? How these people talked, just another minute, as if they were afraid that this was the last human contact they would make. Halliday bent down in the tunnel of snow to fasten on his skis. And it might be up here, so quiet in the snow, a long, slow, seeping quiet. Chalker clung to the door. Literally clung. He was afraid of something slipping away, smiling feebly, and trying to make a joke. Halliday straightened up.

Good-bye, Chalker, he said.

So long, doctor. God, it’s cold, ain’t it? Freeze the snot on your nose.

He was shivering. Halliday was conscious of his own brutality as he felt his way along the tunnel and out towards the light. But he could not stop. He did not know what to say, and the man was not so much worse off than anyone else, if it came to that. Up here at Kambala or down at Happy Valley was a choice of evils. Only here the isolation was physical. That was why Chalker shivered like an unwanted dog.

At the end of the tunnel the valley widened out into a long sweep of snow. He slid off on his skis, his bag, fastened with a cord, bumping against his back. How the air cut. It shaved the flesh off your face. It made you feel lean, leaner, almost non-existent, as you arrived with a rush at the bottom of the slope. He was a little out of breath, for physically he was thirty-four. But it did not feel like that, feel like anything. He was sixteen, that night on the ferry in Sydney when he knew he could do anything, and Professor Birkett had said there was something in his poems that was not just adolescence, and he would be a writer, he would write poems and plays, particularly a play with some kind of metaphysical theme, only the trouble was to find the theme. A crow flew out of a tree with a half-hearted caw. He had not found the theme. He was now thirty-four. Hilda said she thought it was a lovely poem, she hoped he would write one for her, one she could feel was her very own, he must call it To H.G., though she knew he must wait to be inspired. She had grey eyes that were full of sympathy as they sat on that seat in the Botanical Gardens and there was a smell of old banana skins and squashed Moreton Bay figs. It was so easy to get sympathetic on a warm morning in the Botanical Gardens. You began to talk about ideals. It was Hilda’s sympathetic eyes. Later on you began to realize that sympathy in women was largely compound of stupidity and anxiety for the future. However, that was later on.