A Nativity

It was by no means a bad street for Brixton, and Jim Gibson had always counted himself a respectable man. In five years he had saved nearly a hundred pounds from his thirty-five shillings a week, and he had done wisely to take a wife, and had been lucky as well as clever to find so steady a decent a girl as Liz Day. They lived in a cheery and clean little house of four rooms, and Saturday noon always inaugurated a little honeymoon, lasting till it was time for Jim to go to the works at dawn on Monday.

It was only in the second year of the marriage that this routine met with interruption, from Fact Number One in the life of humanity. There was no shadow of dread in the future; Liz was as healthy as a young panther, and there was plenty of money in the savings bank. But Nature is a fantastic mother, and takes her toll of the mind when the body has been fortified against her. The mere disturbance served to disturb; and, with no fear, the nerves of Jim Gibson were insensibly sensitised.

After all, the ordeal was novel: neighbours of good intention told stories, ranging from the latest layman's version of hospital facts to fables which would have lowered the intellectual standard of a Sussex peasant. Now and again Jim would experience that eerie feeling that one sometimes has in church, sometimes when—perhaps in the desert where one has been alone for hours—one suddenly realises that one is alone. Alarm without cause in reason, but in the innate atavistic memory, in the very structure of the nerves which are trained by heredity to remember the countless accidents of childbirth in the past.

But Jim Gibson was a steady and temperate man; he had no fear of ghosts, and hard work and sane living had made him proof against more than temporary uneasiness.

Yet now husband and wife sat alone, and fell to silence, a deeper communion and a truer sympathy perhaps than when they had passed their evenings in merry talk or lover's play, for all that, a state too subtle and high-strung for anyone not so broad-based and grounded in intellectual knowledge as to find in objective thought a refuge from the strain of constant introspection.

Not that in any conscious sense either of them were so foolish or so unfortunate as to partake of the torture-sacrament which is the daily bread and wine of every artist; but the inherent metaphysical tendency which haunts even the grossest of mankind in weaker moments, let slip a leash of silent sleuth-hounds on them. They had the sense of the quarry. If love grew truer and deeper, may it not have been under the Shadow of the Wings of that Swan whose name is equally Life and Death.

In the last month of the appointed time, Liz sent for her young sister Olive, a scrubby child of sixteen with big black eyes, a body like a snake's, short curls of black and a thin scarlet slit of a mouth. Her manner was at once languid and acrid, her tongue sly and sharp. But she tackled the housework with contemptuous vigour.

Her advent was a new disturbance; she prevented both the open and the silent communion of the married lovers, the former by her presence, the latter by her talk. She rattled on continuously from supper-time to bed-time. It was a sort of separation, a moral barrier, only the more inevitable because it was so natural and so right. But Jim grew to hate her; just as one hates the harmless unnecessary person in a railway-carriage, whether it ne the joys of company or those of solitude that he is spoiling.

The occasional visits of the midwife were a solace; the big motherly woman radiated cheerfulness and gin whenever she dropped in to pass the time of day.

And one Tuesday in May Jim returned to find Olive alone in the sitting-room in a state of suppressed excitement. Her hands were clenched, and her eyes sparkling with some neurosis that she—less than any other woman in the world—could define or name. And she had not prepared the supper.

Liz was upstairs in the bedroom, and the midwife was with her. The husband ran anxiously to the door; the old woman would brook no interference, and bade him wait till he was wanted.

He returned to the sitting-room, and walked restlessly round like a caged beast. Olive sat deathly still, and flushed and paled by turns.

Twenty minutes later the midwife called to him to run for the doctor. Five minutes later he returned, with a young man in spectacles, swinging a black bag, and wearing the air of a jaded mule. He brusquely told the husband to stay below, and made for the staircase.

Jim flung himself into a chair. Every nerve was on fire. The craving of the morphine slave was like his mood.

Olive faced him, equally helpless, equally excited. From time to time the groans of the wife pressed their weird weight upon the panting silence.

Suddenly the tension became unbearable. The nameless disquietude of the man and the girl took shape, interpreted themselves as passion. It was the extremity of fear. The groans ceased abruptly; a scream, jagged and rasping, cut the sir.

It determined the crisis. In a second, blind and raving, Jim flung himself upon Olive, and crushed her as a bear crushes a hunter.

The girl comprehended herself, scratched and bit.

It was the death-struggle against Nature, to which there is only one end. The screams of the two sisters mingled, as one child was born, another was begotten.

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