She and Mr. Povey were checking stock.
And Mr. Povey responded,
"Black alpaca B quality.
Width 20, t.a. 22 yards.
It wants ten minutes yet." He had glanced at the clock.
"Does it?" said Constance, well knowing that it wanted ten minutes.
The baby did not guess that a high invisible god named Samuel Povey, whom nothing escaped, and who could do everything at once, was controlling his universe from an inconceivable distance.
On the contrary, the baby was crying to himself, There is no God.
His weaning had reached the stage at which a baby really does not know what will happen next.
The annoyance had begun exactly three months after his first tooth, such being the rule of the gods, and it had grown more and more disconcerting.
No sooner did he accustom himself to a new phenomenon than it mysteriously ceased, and an old one took its place which he had utterly forgotten.
This afternoon his mother nursed him, but not until she had foolishly attempted to divert him from the seriousness of life by means of gewgaws of which he was sick.
Still; once at her rich breast, he forgave and forgot all.
He preferred her simple natural breast to more modern inventions.
And he had no shame, no modesty.
Nor had his mother.
It was an indecent carouse at which his father and Miss Insull had to assist.
But his father had shame. His father would have preferred that, as Miss Insull had kindly offered to stop and work on Thursday afternoon, and as the shop was chilly, the due rotation should have brought the bottle round at half-past five o'clock, and not the mother's breast.
He was a self-conscious parent, rather apologetic to the world, rather apt to stand off and pretend that he had nothing to do with the affair; and he genuinely disliked that anybody should witness the intimate scene of HIS wife feeding HIS baby.
Especially Miss Insull, that prim, dark, moustached spinster!
He would not have called it an outrage on Miss Insull, to force her to witness the scene, but his idea approached within sight of the word.
Constance blandly offered herself to the child, with the unconscious primitive savagery of a young mother, and as the baby fed, thoughts of her own mother flitted to and fro ceaselessly like vague shapes over the deep sea of content which filled her mind.
This illness of her mother's was abnormal, and the baby was now, for the first time perhaps, entirely normal in her consciousness.
The baby was something which could be disturbed, not something which did disturb.
What a change!
What a change that had seemed impossible until its full accomplishment!
For months before the birth, she had glimpsed at nights and in other silent hours the tremendous upset.
She had not allowed herself to be silly in advance; by temperament she was too sagacious, too well balanced for that; but she had had fitful instants of terror, when solid ground seemed to sink away from her, and imagination shook at what faced her.
Instants only!
Usually she could play the comedy of sensible calmness to almost perfection.
Then the appointed time drew nigh. And still she smiled, and Samuel smiled.
But the preparations, meticulous, intricate, revolutionary, belied their smiles.
The intense resolve to keep Mrs. Baines, by methods scrupulous or unscrupulous, away from Bursley until all was over, belied their smiles.
And then the first pains, sharp, shocking, cruel, heralds of torture!
But when they had withdrawn, she smiled, again, palely.
Then she was in bed, full of the sensation that the whole house was inverted and disorganized, hopelessly.
And the doctor came into the room.
She smiled at the doctor apologetically, foolishly, as if saying:
"We all come to it.
Here I am."
She was calm without.
Oh, but what a prey of abject fear within!
"I am at the edge of the precipice," her thought ran; "in a moment I shall be over."
And then the pains--not the heralds but the shattering army, endless, increasing in terror as they thundered across her.
Yet she could think, quite clearly:
"Now I'm in the middle of it.
This is it, the horror that I have not dared to look at.
My life's in the balance.
I may never get up again.
All has at last come to pass.