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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 5. I Become A Mother - Chapter 88 |
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_ FIFTH PART. I BECOME A MOTHER EIGHTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER
It was both very long and very short, for it passed like a dream. What wonderful happenings were crowded into it! First the nurse, from the dizzy heights of her greater experience and superior knowledge, indulged my infantile anxieties by allowing me to look on while baby was being bathed, and rewarded me for "being good" by many praises of my baby's beauty. "I've nursed a-many in my time," she said, "but I don't mind saying as I've never had a bonnier babby on my knee. Look at her legs now, so white and plump and dimpled. Have you _ever_ seen anythink so putty?" I confessed that I never had, and when nurse showed me how to fix the binder, and put on the barrow-coat without disturbing baby while asleep, I thought her a wonderful woman. Emmerjane, who had with difficulty been kept out of the room last night and was now rushing breathlessly up and down stairs, wished to hold baby for a moment, and at length out of the magnificence of my generosity I allowed her to do so, only warning her, as she loved her life, to hold tight and not let baby fall. "How'd you mean?" said the premature little mother. "_Me_ let her fall? Not much!" Every hour, according to the doctor's orders, I gave baby the breast. I do not know which was my greatest joy--to feast my eyes on her while she sucked and to see her little head fall back with her little mouth open when she had had enough, or to watch her when she stretched herself and hiccoughed, and then grasped my thumb with her little tight fingers. Oh, the wild, inexpressible delight of it! Every hour had its surprise. Every few minutes had their cause of wonder. It rather hurt me when baby cried, and I dare say my own foolish lip would drop at such moments, but when I saw that there were no tears in her eyes, and she was only calling for her food, I pleaded with nurse to let me give her the breast again. The sun shone all day long, and though the holland window blinds were kept down to subdue the light, for my sake and perhaps for baby's, I thought my room looked perfectly beautiful. It might be poor and shabby, but flights of angels could not have made it more heavenly than it was in my eyes then. In the afternoon nurse told me I must take some sleep myself, but I would not sleep until baby slept, so she had to give me my cherub again, and I sat up and rocked her and for a while I sang--as softly as I could--a little lullaby. It was a lullaby I had learned at Nemi from the Italian women in embroidered outside stays, who so love their children; and though I knew quite well that it had been written for the Mother of all Mothers, who, after she had been turned away from every door, had been forced to take refuge in a stable in Bethlehem, I was in such an ecstasy of spiritual happiness that I thought it no irreverence to change it a little and to sing it in my London lodging to my human child.
"Well, I never did! I thought as 'ow there was a' angel a-come into this room." "So there is, and here she is," I said, beaming down on my sleeping child. But the long, short, blissful day came to an end at last, and when night fell and I dropped asleep, there were two names of my dear ones on my lips, and if one of them was the name of him who (as I thought) was in heaven, the other was the name of her who was now lying in my arms. I may have been poor, but I felt like a queen with all the riches of life in my little room. I may have sinned against the world and the Church, but I felt as if God had justified me by His own triumphant law. The whole feminine soul in me seemed to swell and throb, and with my baby at my breast I wanted no more of earth or heaven. I was still bleeding from the bruises of Fate, but I felt healed of all my wounds, loaded with benefits, crowned with rewards. Four days passed like this, varied by visits from the doctor and my Welsh landlady. Then my nurse began to talk of leaving me. I did not care. In my ignorance of my condition, and the greed of my motherly love, I was not sorry she was going so soon. Indeed, I was beginning to be jealous of her, and was looking forward to having my baby all to myself. But nurse, as I remember, was a little ashamed and tried to excuse herself. "If I hadn't promised to nurse another lady, I wouldn't leave you, money or no money," she said. "But the girl" (meaning Emmerjane) "is always here, and if she isn't like a nurse she's 'andy." "Yes, yes, I shall be all right," I answered. On the fifth day my nurse left me, and shocking as that fact seems to me now, I thought little of it then. I was entirely happy. I had nothing in the world except my baby, and my baby had nothing in the world except me. I was still in the dungeon that had seemed so dreadful to me before--the great dungeon of London to one who is poor and friendless. But no matter! I was no longer alone, for there was one more inmate in my prison-house--my child.
"Is it nothing to you, ye that pass by . . . ?" MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD
God knows there was never a day on which I did not think of my dear one at home, wondering what was happening to her, and whether a certain dark fact which always lay at the back of my mind as a possibility was actually coming to pass. But she would be brave--I know that quite well--and I saw plainly that, if I had to get through the stiff job that was before me, I must put my shadowy fears away and think only of the dangers I was sure about. The first of these was that she might suppose our ship was lost, so as soon as we had set up on old Erebus the wooden lattice towers which contained our long-distance electric apparatus, I tried to send her that first message from the Antarctic which was to say we had not been shipwrecked. It was a thrilling moment. Exactly at the stroke of midnight on January 21, while the midnight sun was shining with its dull sullen glow, the whole of our company having gathered round, the wireless man prepared to despatch my message. As we were not sure of our machinery I had drawn up the words to suit any place into which they might fall if they missed their intended destination: "South Pole Expedition safe. All well. Send greetings to dear ones at home." For some forty seconds the sparks crackled out their snappy signals into the crisp night air, and then the settled calm returned, and we stood in breathless silence like beings on the edge of a world waiting for the answer to come as from another planet. It came. After a few minutes we heard from our magnetic detector the faint sound of the S signals, and then we broke into a great cheer. It was not much, but it was enough; and while our scientific staff were congratulating themselves that electric-wave telegraphy was not inhibited by long distance, or by the earth's curvature over an arc of a great circle, I was thinking of my dear one--that one way or another my message would reach her and she would be relieved. Then in splendid health and spirits--dogs, ponies, and men all A1--we started on our journey, making a bee-line for the Pole. Owing to the heavy weights we had to transport our progress was slow, much slower than we had expected; and though the going was fair and we kept a steady pace, travelling a good deal by night, it was not until the end of March that we reached Mount Darwin, which I had fixed on for the second of our electric power stations. By this time winter was approaching, the nights were beginning to be dark and cold, and the altitude (8000 ft.) was telling on some of us. Nevertheless our second installation got finished about the last week in April, and again we gathered round (not quite such a hearty company as before) while the wireless man spoke to the operator we had left on Erebus. Again the electrical radiations went crackling into space, and again we gave a cheer when the answer came back--all well and instruments in perfect order. Then, late as it was, we began on the last stage of our journey, which we knew would be a hard one. Three hundred geographical miles in front; temperature down to minus 40 deg.; the sun several weeks gone, and nothing before us but thickening twilight, cold winds, snow, the rare aurora and the frequent moon. But the worst fact was that our spirits were low, and do what I would to keep a good heart and cheer up the splendid fellows who had come with me, I could not help feeling the deepening effect of that sunless gloom. In spite of this, I broke camp on April 25, and started straight as a die for the South. It was a stiff fight over the upper glacier in latitude 85, with its razor-shaped ice, full of snow-covered crevasses, and three days out two of our best men fell into one of the worst of them. I saw the accident from a dozen yards away, and running up I lay on my stomach and shouted down, but it was a black bottomless gulf and not a sound or a sign came back to me. This cast a still deeper gloom on our company, who could not be cheered up, though I kept telling them we should be on the great plateau soon, please God, and then we should have a clear road to the Pole. We were not much better on top though, for the surface was much broken up, and in that brewing place of the winds there seemed to be nothing but surging seas of cumulus cloud and rolling waves of snow. The Polar march was telling on us badly. We were doing no more than seven miles at a stretch. So to help my shipmates to keep up their spirits (and perhaps to give a bit of a "heise" to my own) I had to sing all day long--though my darling is right that I have no more voice than a corn-crake. Sometimes I sang "Ramsey Town," because it did not want much music, but generally "Sally's the gel for me," because it had a rattling chorus. The men all joined in (scientific experts included), and if the angels took any heed of us, I think it must have touched them up to look down on our little company of puny men singing away as we trudged through that snowy wilderness which makes a man feel so small. But man can only do his best, and as Father Dan (God bless his old heart!) used to say, the angels can do no more. We were making middling hard work of it in the 88th parallel, with a temperature as low as 50 degrees of frost, when a shrieking, blinding blizzard came sweeping down on us from the south. I thought it might blow itself out, but it didn't, so we struck camp in a broad half-circle, building igloos (snow huts) with their backs (like rain-beaten cattle) to the storm. There we lay nine days--and it is not worth while now to say how much some of our men suffered from frozen fingers, and more from falling spirits. Sometimes I heard them saying (in voices that were intended to be loud enough for me to hear) it would have been better to have built winter quarters on the north of Darwin and settle there until the return of summer. And at other times I heard them counting the distance to the Pole--a hundred geographical miles, making twenty days' march at this season, with the heavy weights we had to carry, and the dwindling of our dogs and ponies, for we had killed a lot of them for food. But I would not give in, for I felt that to go back without finishing my job would break my heart; and one day when old Treacle said, "No use, guv'nor, let's give it best," I flew at him like a hunted tiger. All the same I was more than a bit down myself, for there were days when death was very near, and one night it really broke me up to hear a big strapping chap saying to the man who shared his two-man sack, "I shouldn't care a whiff if it wasn't for the wife and the kiddies." God knows I had my own anchor at home, and sometimes it had a devil of a tug at me. I fought myself hard, though, and at last in my desire to go on and my yearning to go back to my dear one, I made an awful proposal, such as a man does not much like to think of after a crisis is over. "Shipmates," I said, "it isn't exactly my fault that we are here in the middle of winter, but here we are, and we must make the best of it. I am going forward, and those who want to go with me can go. But those who don't want to go can stay; and so that no one may have it on his conscience that he has kept his comrades back, whether by weakness or by will, I have told the doctor to serve out a dose of something to every man, that he may end it whenever he wants to." To my surprise that awful proposal was joyfully received; and never so long as I live shall I forget the sight o' O'Sullivan going round the broad circle of my shipmates in the blue gloom of that noonday twilight and handing something to every one of them, while nobody spoke, and Death seemed to look us in the face. And now I come to the incident for which I have told this story. I could not get a wink of sleep that night for thinking of the brave fellows I had doomed to death by their own hands (for that was what it came to), because their souls were starving and they were thinking of home. My soul was starving too, and whether it was the altitude (now 11,000 ft.) that was getting into my head, and giving me that draught in the brain which only travellers in frozen regions know, or the Power higher than Nature which speaks to a man in great solitudes when life is low, I cannot say, but as God is my witness, I was hearing again the voices of my dear ones so far away. Sometimes they were the voices of my old people in Ellan, but more frequently, and most importunately, it was Mary's voice, calling me by my name, and crying to me for help as if she were in the shadow of some threatening danger. "Martin! Martin! Martin!" When this idea took clear possession of me--it was about three a.m. and the hurricane was yowling like a wounded dog--the answering thought came quick. I must go back. No matter at what cost or sacrifice--I must go back. It was in vain I reflected that the trouble which threatened my darling (whatever it was, and I thought I knew) might be all over before I reached her side--I must go back. And even when I reminded myself that I was within twenty days' march of that last point of my journey which was to be the crown and completion of it all, I also remembered that my dear one was calling me, and I had no choice but to obey. Next morning, in the first light of the dim Antarctic glow, I crept out of my snow hut to look south with powerful glasses in order to make sure that there was no reason why I should change my mind. There was none. Although the snow had ceased the blizzard was blowing a hundred miles an hour in cutting gusts, so with a bleeding heart (and yet a hot one) I told Treacle to call rip our company, and when they stood round me in the shelter of my hut I said: "Shipmates, I have been thinking things over during the night, and I see them differently now. Nature is stronger than man, and the nature that is inside of us sometimes hits us harder than that which is without. I think it is that way with us here, and I believe there isn't a man of you who wouldn't go forward with me if he had nobody to think of except himself. . . . Well, perhaps _I_ have somebody to think of, too, so we'll stick together, shipmates, and whatever regrets there may be, or disappointments, or heart-breakings, we'll . . . we'll go back home." I think it says something for the mettle my men were made of that there was never a cheer after I said that, for they could see what it cost me to say it. But by God, there was a shout when I added: "We've drawn a blank this time, boys, but we'll draw a winner yet, and I ask you to swear that you'll come back with me next year, please God, to finish the work we've begun." Then we gripped hands in that desolate place, and took our solemn oath, and God knows we meant to keep it. It did not take long to strike camp, I can tell you. The men were bustling about like boys and we had nothing to think of now but the packing of the food and the harnessing of the dogs and ponies, for we were leaving everything else behind us. At the last moment before we turned northward I planted the Union Jack on the highest hummock of snow, and when we were a hundred yards off I looked back through the gloom and saw it blowing stiffly in the wind. I don't think I need tell how deeply that sight cut me, but if life has another such moment coming for me all I have to say is that I hope I may die before I live to see it--which is Irish, but most damnably true. That was twelve o'clock noon on the eighth day of June and anybody may make what he likes of what I say, but as nearly as I can calculate the difference of time between London and where we were in the 88th latitude it was the very hour of my dear one's peril. M.C. [END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM] _ |
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