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CHAPTER XI. OF THE BRIDGING OF A BREACH
When Jim reached Dr. Faraday's clinic, his generous impulse had, on the surface
of things, half spent itself. Daylight and the bustle of an urban civilisation
had permitted "the realities" to assert themselves again. Yet, there remained
a subconscious stratum in which things were not completely readjusted.
And when, before he was admitted, one of the house physicians gave him the details of the case, he felt something which was hardly a qualm of conscience; it was something deeper. He suddenly knew that he would never again entirely get rid of the mood of that night on the road: he had there had a revelation of things which would remain with him forever. There was a world which he had never before taken into account; and it was as if woman, by the very fact of her womanhood, lived in closer touch with it than man; this world was that of things elemental the reaction to which was in its nature and necessarily spiritual.
The startling disclosure of the house physician consisted in this that Jane was pregnant; that the operation which had been surgically successful had had to be made at the risk of killing both mother and child. The danger was by no means over. In the first place, traumatic shock might induce a premature birth; in that case the situation would be exceedingly grave. In the second place, the patient did not seem to have that determination to live which, by stimulating all hidden activities of the body, afforded the surgeon the greatest assistance in his endeavours to save life.
However, considered from the point of view of science, the operation could hardly have been performed under a more favourable prognosis; everything had gone well. Yes, Jim could see her for a few minutes, in the presence of the nurse.
The doctor pressed a button. A moment later Jim was being ushered along a high, white-washed corridor with a floor of polished concrete.
Then he stood in the door to the hospital room the air of which
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was heavy with the odour of iodoform.
In the bed lay Jane, very white and motionless, but a faint smile on her lips. It affected him strangely when he became aware, in the course of possibly ten seconds, that it was not the hard, bitter smile which she had always had for him during the last few years; it was the smile of a child, an almost helpless, deprecating smile.
With a step which, for so big a man, was strangely quick - and with the feeling that he was in the power of things beyond human control - he went, bent down, and kissed her brow as if that were a natural thing for him to do. That he could do it at all was due to the fact that he felt in her a response which he had not expected; a response, not so much to his attitude of the moment, as to that mood of the night before last.
There were quick tears in her eyes. "Did you hear?" she whispered.
He nodded. He could not trust himself to speak. All things must be changed if she could speak to him of that.
The nurse was watching Jane closely and now looked up at Jim. It was the signal for him to go.
He bent down. "I must not stay. I'll be in again as soon as they'll let me."
She closed her eyes in assent.
As he was on the point of leaving the place, he ran, in the vestibule, across Jane's father.
"Well, well, my boy," Mr. Atkinson said as they shook hands. He was upset. Behind his glasses he fought with his tears. "I haven't seen her yet. They won't let me. How is she? Is she going to live?"
"I hope so," Jim said. "I think so." Yet, at that very moment he was struck by the thought that two nights ago it had flashed across his mind how much death could simplify matters in his life. He felt as if he were drifting into inner conflicts to which he was not equal.
He went away with the older man. All they had been willing to tell the father was that the patient was doing well as could be expected
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"under the circumstances".
Jim had his baggage removed to the modest hostelry which his father-in-law patronised.
Several days went by; at last the house-physician would commit himself to the effect that he believed the danger to be past. Jim thought, with an almost shy softening of his mood, that perhaps his appearance at her bedside, with that great and strange experience of a certain night fresh upon him, had wrought a change.
Stephen Carter who had daily been enquiring over the telephone which he hated came down in person. So did Ann Aikins. Jane's brothers, too, made daily calls at the clinic; once they met their father in the vestibule; but he almost ignored them. One of them was working in the shop of a wire-fitter; the other, as a clerk in a department store on Main Street. Both would gladly have made up with their father and approached Jim in the matter. Mr. Atkinson briefly told Jim that he would make up with them when they came to him on the farm, willing to go to work and to stay there.
Then, one day, Dr. Faraday himself pronounced the patient out of danger provided that no emotional shock was allowed to come to her. That very night, Jim found in the visitors' book which, at her father's request, had been specially kept for Jane, the signature "Arthur Forrest". It was something of a shock to him, in the light of his recent thoughts of his brother. He left word with the telephone operator in the vestibule who received all visitors, giving his address, that, should Mr. Arthur Forrest return, he would be glad to see him.
A few days later the brothers met. Arthur was cool but not hostile. He was not nearly as tall as his brother; he stooped. But he was broad-shouldered; he looked typically the farmer. Nothing of any deeper import was said. Arthur gave the information that he had happened to be in the city when he had heard of his sister-in-law's illness; as if he wished to remove all possibility of its being inferred that he had come on purpose. Seeing that she was out of danger, he would
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go home on the morrow.
Jane was rapidly regaining her strength. Stephen Carter and Ann Aikins saw her together and left again.
Only Jim and Jane's father remained.
Three weeks after the operation she was sitting up in a wheel-chair. Plans were laid for a change of air. She did not expect her confinement before the end of the summer or in early fall. It was agreed that she should spend a month at Banff. Her father would accompany her; at Stockton, they would pick up Norah and her governess. To make sure of all comfort which money could buy, a drawing room was reserved for her in the train, a week ahead of time.
It was the middle of July when she was dismissed from the clinic. To make sure that all arrangements would run according to programme, her father left for Stockton the day before, to meet her again there when Jim would leave her.
Thus, in the strange city, husband and wife were alone for a day: the first time such had happened since their marriage; for Jane had never felt the desire for travel or holiday.
Jim rented a car; and they went to the lake.
Jane, still weak and in the mood of convalescence - a white mood in which life seems strange and disconnected with the well-remembered self, like a spectacle at which you look on - felt a peculiar, yet almost melancholy happiness, free of pain and exempt from even such joys as partake of passion. She had stood on the brink of things eternal; and her inclinations and aversions of the past seemed somewhat irrelevant. She was willing to forgive; to begin a new chapter; to let life have its way; to hold still and accept. Besides, was this a new Jim? Or had she in the past merely failed to see the whole of him? The world, with its clashing colours and discordances of sound, somehow seemed harmonised, subdued, consistent with itself and her, yet strangely touching, like the willfulness of a small child.
For the first time in her life she realised herself as a mother;
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but, curiously, not as the mother of the child she had born nine years ago;
that girl, Norah, much as she suffered from the fact, remained strange to
her, almost foreign; not once since she had known that it was growing in her,
had its father bridged or tried to bridge the chasm which normally gaped between
them; though she knew now that such a chasm normally gaped between any two
personalities.
She realised her motherhood rather for the still unborn being which together with herself had so recently been in danger of death; unlike herself it would have meant for the unborn child that it should never even see the light of day. The miracle of nascent life seemed all the sweeter now. She thought of the time, soon to come, when its little body would rest on her knees; when it would clap its hands and smile with toothless mouth; and when, in an urge of its whole being, it would reach for her breast. She had not suckled Norah and thought of herself as she had been at the time with a smile: then, all the attributes of her femininity had still been to her, if not a matter of shame, at least a matter of almost impatient wonder: things which constituted a difference from the male only recently realised. Sex had been a puzzle to her, an imperfection in the scheme of things which she had been inclined to exaggerate to herself. Now she thought she accepted it as a fundamental condition of life. Yes, she felt like a matriarch in whose womb lay the seed of a future which must of necessity be much like the past. The male principle was the minor phenomenon, necessary only for the evocation of the functions of the female; and, since man's concern in the most essential function of the female life-that of reproducing and propagating itself - was momentary only, it evolved upon him with a certain justice and fitness to provide for woman and her offspring.
Love - in the sense in which she had dreamed of its possibility but a year ago; in the sense in which she as well as Ann Aikins seemed to have missed it in life - was to her, at the present moment, but a summer madness, hugely exaggerated in its importance by a sex-mad age.
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All the more, therefore, was her mood conciliatory. This man by her side was the father of her unborn child. He was fundamentally a stranger to her whose reactions she did not understand. For that she had hated him in the past; and she smiled at herself. He was no fairy-prince; he was not perfection. Again she smiled at herself because, in a still remoter past, she had seen both in him. She had been so young then! Youth knows of no moderation, no compromise; it is all or nothing for youth. And, though she was not much beyond thirty, she seemed, on this day, very old and experienced to herself; she seemed as one for whom there was nothing in store except motherhood; and in motherhood she felt happy. "Life is an integration," her friend had said. Yes, she was being integrated into a definite entity; and, after all was said and done, she owed this integration to the man by her side.
She had just returned from the edge of the grave; never would she revive the past!
So, when they sat together on the veranda of the huge hotel at the beach whence they could overlook the grey lake with its curving shore, she smiled at him; and he seemed strangely softened. He had little attentions for her of which he would never have thought in the past. He fetched a cushion for her back; a stool for her feet; and he let her order the dinner without uttering a wish for himself.
Then they re-entered the car and went north, through the forest, in the direction of Gimli. They had gone perhaps ten or twelve miles when they passed through a glade in the bush which was spangled with flowers: white stitchwort and strawberry blossoms; and, in the margin of the woods, the yellow pouches of lady's-slippers, with thick mats here and there, of shinleaf, the nodding, pink racemes of the pyrola of our latitudes. Over it all lay a hazy flood of seemingly stationary sunlight. The sight of this glade touched her like the sight of a refuge; she had suddenly no desire to go on; she had only one desire: to perpetuate the moment.
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Without turning she touched the man by her side on the arm and nodded into this glade.
He stopped the car.
"Let us drive in there," she said. "I just want to sit." Something like a flush had mounted into her cheeks.
He manoeuvred the car through the ditch and across the glade till it invaded the dense tangle of the underbrush within the aisles of the forest. Jane leaned over the door on her side and scanned the bottom of the woods. They happened to have run into a patch of white clover; and it was humming with bees; for this was the centre of apiculture in Manitoba. All the flowerheads of this clover showed a peculiar phenomenon: the lower and outer tiers of florets were brown and reflexed downward; the upper and inner ones stood still white, bunched, and intact. These, the inner ones, were virgin; the lower ones were fertilised: they were fulfilling their destiny. It is true they were no longer so pretty; their white petals were beginning to brown, to distend, to be shed. But what did that matter? Beauty and attractiveness were, in life, no end in themselves; they were subservient to an ulterior purpose. An end in themselves they could be in art alone. Art was man's protest against change; but the very essence of life was that change! If there was sadness in the thought, she must accept that sadness as an innate condition of things. For a fleeting moment she had a vision of a race on earth which endlessly reproduced itself for a senseless and ceaseless repetition of circles of change; but she deliberately put it away. It was not for her to question eternal things. She had no share in shaping the fate of the world.
She leaned back in her seat; and again, with the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the man by her side, the father of the unborn child within her, and her husband. He had told her a little of the night when he had tried to reach the train; and now she smiled at him. Let the past be the past! Did she not feel happy? And was it not he who had given that happiness?
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So, when he bent forward, her lips met his halfway; and she closed her eyes. When his arm found its way around her waist, an infinite restfulness invaded her. She seemed to have reached life's goal. True, there was resignation in the acceptance of it; but even that resignation seemed sweet. Why struggle and fight against what seemed imposed by powers deaf to the cry of the human atom?
They sat thus for hours; time seemed timeless; there was no division of continuity.
An evening chill awoke her; and she disengaged herself.
Without a word he started the car, backed it out of the brush, and returned to the road. All things seemed settled between them, forever. What had been wrong was forgotten, forgiven; and thus it was best.
Next morning, at eight o'clock, they boarded the train going west.
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