De quels ravissements nous privent nos intempérances.         
          JOUBERT.

WHEN Annette’s baby—a boy—was born, Gertrude was the first to go and see it. She took with her a woollen bonnet and a horn spoon.

Having become capitalists with the enormous sum that had come to Annette, they had left their lodgings for a little house in a row of little houses each of seven rooms and a scullery. They had a little maid, who opened the door to Gertrude. She was a tiny wizened creature but very voluble. Gertrude was not a yard inside the house when she had a full description of the baby, its layette, Annette’s condition and appearance, and the devotion of Bennett, who, she said, “never had no eyes for nothink ’cept ’is ugly little wife.”

Gertrude was shown upstairs, to find Annette sitting up chattering to an enormously fat woman, who was introduced to her as Mrs. Entwistle. They were talking about Serge, of whom the fat woman expressed the most glowing admiration.

The baby, a very little one, ugly and blotched, was handed to Gertrude, and she was properly ecstatic over it. Mrs. Entwistle said:

“Eeh! Ow I did ’ave to slap ’is little buttocks to make ’im cry!”

“Slap?” said Gertrude, rather horrified.

“Eeh! Miss, didn’t ye know that? Well, I never. Sometimes you ’ave to fair leather into ’em.”

Gertrude held the baby in her arms and hugged him [Pg 275]close to her breast. She was feeling very mournful, and envy tugged at her heart. She said:

“It’s a very little house you live in.”

“Isn’t it? But we love it. It’s just big enough for the three of us.”

“How—how is Bennett?”

“Oh! He’s very well, and he gets more money now, though still very little. I’m afraid we shall never have very much as long as he remains in business, and if he left it I suppose we should have nothing. But we don’t think about it—much.”

“You must be very happy.”

Very mournfully Gertrude said this. She was disappointed. She had fancied that when she held Annette’s baby in her arms she would feel all kinds of beautiful and exalted emotions. It was certainly pleasant to feel its warmth, and to hold it, so helpless as it was, gave her a genial sense of protection, but she was wanting, hoping for more than that. And when Annette replied that she was very happy—she looked it too—Gertrude realised painfully that she was brutally indifferent.

The starving cannot rejoice with the well-fed.

Gertrude felt her life trickling away through her fingers: worst of all, though she was not conscious of it, her desire for life was ebbing away from her. All the bitterness, all the hunger, all the hard envy in her heart she translated into one word: “Old.” She said to herself: “I am getting old.” . . . Having come to a concise and rounded thought she was pricked by it into revolt, and she said gently, at first, to Annette:

“I envy you. I remember you when you were a little girl. I have always thought of you as little, so that I have hardly known you. . . . And I must have always seemed to you beyond your reach. Now it is you who are beyond mine. Isn’t it funny?”

She gave the child to Annette, watched it blindly wriggling against its mother’s breast, and tears trickled down her nose on to the counterpane. Annette was so engrossed in her boy that she did not notice it, and Gertrude was at once ashamed of her tears, brushed them [Pg 276]away, and angrily, in her heart, accused Annette of selfishness. She would have been so grateful only for a little pressure of the hand, a little smile, something that would bid her come into the circle of warmth, so radiant with the joy of the child. She was too timid, too much taken up with pity for herself, to force her way in. She dared not assume that she would be welcome, for she was too conscious of her own awkwardness.

She let slip the opportunity as she had spoiled so many. The conflict in her soul left her bruised and sore, and she almost hated Annette—Annette who had lied and cheated to take her lover. She turned from her thwarted emotion to sentimentality, raked over the ashes of the past, and artificially reconstructed the ruses and strategems that she supposed Annette had used to capture Bennett during her absence. . . . With effusive cordiality she kissed Annette and the baby and promised often to come and see it. A little awkwardly—she was not always tactful—Annette explained that Bennett’s sister was to be the baby’s Godmother. That gave Gertrude the handle she was seeking, and she persuaded herself that she had deliberately been slighted.

She went away almost without another word. On her way home she was thrust by her fancied injuries into contemplating her future. As people always do when they contemplate the future, she lost sight of the infinite gradations which led from the point at which she stood to the point on which her eyes were fixed, so that all her forward life was presented to her mental vision as acid, cold, bi............