The Manner Of His Birth

: THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WONDER

I



Stoke-Underhill lies in the flat of the valley that separates the

Hampden from the Quainton Hills. The main road from London to Ailesworth

does not pass through Stoke, but from the highway you can see the ascent

of the bridge over the railway, down the vista of a straight mile of

side road; and, beyond, a glimpse of scattered cottages. That is all,

and as a matter of fact, no one who is not keeping a sh rp look-out

would ever notice the village, for the eye is drawn to admire the bluff

of Deane Hill, the highest point of the Hampdens, which lowers over the

little hamlet of Stoke and gives it a second name; and to the church

tower of Chilborough Beacon, away to the right, another landmark.



The attraction which Stoke-Underhill held for Stott, lay not in its

seclusion or its picturesqueness but in its nearness to the County

Ground. Stott could ride the two flat miles which separated him from the

scene of his work in ten minutes, and Ailesworth station is only a mile

beyond. So when he found that there was a suitable cottage to let in

Stoke, he looked no farther for a home; he was completely satisfied.



Stott's absorption in any matter that was occupying his mind made him

exceedingly careless about the detail of his affairs. He took the first

cottage that offered when he looked for a home, he took the first woman

who offered when he looked for a wife.



Stott was not an attractive man to women. He was short and plain, and he

had an appearance of being slightly deformed, a "monkeyish" look, due to

his build and his long arms. Still, he was famous, and might, doubtless,

have been accepted by a dozen comely young women for that reason, even

after his accident. But if Stott was unattractive to women, women were

even more unattractive to Stott. "No opinion of women?" he used to say.

"Ever seen a gel try to throw a cricket ball? You 'ave? Well, ain't that

enough to put you off women?" That was Stott's intellectual standard;

physically, he had never felt drawn to women.



Ellen Mary Jakes exhibited no superiority over her sisters in the matter

of throwing a cricket ball. She was a friend of Ginger's mother, and

she was a woman of forty-two, who had long since been relegated to some

remote shelf of the matrimonial exchange. But her physical disadvantages

were outbalanced by her mental qualities. Ellen Mary was not a

book-worm, she read nothing but the evening and Sunday papers, but she

had a reasoning and intelligent mind.



She had often contemplated the state of matrimony, and had made more

than one tentative essay in that direction. She had walked out with

three or four sprigs of the Ailesworth bourgeoisie in her time, and the

shadow of middle-age had crept upon her before she realised that however

pliant her disposition, her lack of physical charm put her at the mercy

of the first bright-eyed rival. At thirty-five Ellen had decided, with

admirable philosophy, that marriage was not for her, and had assumed,

with apparent complacency, the outward evidences of a dignified

spinsterhood. She had discarded gay hats and ribbons, imitation

jewellery, unreliable cheap shoes, and chill diaphanous stockings, and

had found some solace for her singleness in more comfortable and

suitable apparel.



When Ellen, a declared spinster of seven years' standing, was first

taken into the confidence of Ginger Stott's mother, the scheme which she

afterwards elaborated immediately presented itself to her mind. This

fact is a curious instance of Ellen Mary's mobility of intellect, and

the student of heredity may here find matter for careful thought.[3]



The confidence in question was Ginger's declared intention of becoming

the father of the world's greatest bowler. Mrs. Stott was a dark,

garrulous, rather deaf little woman, with a keen eye for the main

chance; she might have become a successful woman of business if she had

not been by nature both stingy and a cheat. When her son presented his

determination, her first thought was to find some woman who would not

dissipate her son's substance, and in her opinion--not expressed to

Ginger--the advertised purpose of the contemplated marriage evidenced a

wasteful disposition.



Mrs. Stott did not think of Ellen Mary as a possible daughter-in-law,

but she did hold forth for an hour and three-quarters on the

contemptible qualities of the young maidens, first of Ailesworth, and

then with a wider swoop that was not justified by her limited

experience, of the girls of England, Scotland, and Ireland at large.



It required the flexible reasoning powers of Ellen Mary to find a

solution of the problem. Any ordinary, average woman of forty-two, a

declared spinster of seven years' standing, who had lived all her life

in a provincial town, would have been mentally unable to realise the

possibilities of the situation. Such a representative of the decaying

sexual instinct would have needed the stimulus of courtship, at the

least of some hint of preference displayed by the suitor. Ruled by the

conventions which hold her sex in bondage, she would have deemed it

unwomanly to make advances by any means other than innuendo, the subtle

suggestions which are the instruments of her sex, but which are often

too delicate to pierce the understanding of the obtuse and slow-witted

male.



Ellen Mary stood outside the ruck that determines the destinies of all

such typical representatives. She considered the idea presented to her

by Mrs. Stott with an open and mobile intelligence. She weighed the

character of Ginger, the possibilities of rejection, and the influence

of Mrs. Stott; and she gave no thought to the conventions, nor to the

criticisms of Ailesworth society. When she had decided that such chances

as she could calculate were in her favour, Ellen made up her mind,

walked out to the County Ground one windy October forenoon, and

discovered Ginger experimenting with grass seed in a shed off the

pavilion.



In this shed she offered herself, while Ginger worked on, attentive but

unresponsive. Perhaps she did not make an offer so much as state a case.

A masterly case, without question; for who can doubt that Stott, however

procrastinating and unwilling to make a definite overture, must already

have had some type of womanhood in his mind; some conception, the seed

of an ideal.



I find a quality of romance in this courageous and unusual wooing of

Ellen Mary's; but more, I find evidences of the remarkable quality of

her intelligence. In other circumstances the name of Ellen Mary Jakes

might have stood for individual achievement; instead of that, she is

remembered as a common woman who happened to be the mother of Victor

Stott. But when the facts are examined, can we say that chance entered?

If ever the birth of a child was deliberately designed by both parents,

it was in the case under consideration. And in what a strange setting

was the inception first displayed.



Ellen Mary, a gaunt, tall, somewhat untidy woman, stood at the narrow

door of the little shed off the Ailesworth pavilion; with one hand,

shoulder-high, she steadied herself against the door frame, with the

other she continually pushed forward the rusty bonnet which had been

loosened during her walk by the equinoctial gale that now tore at the

door of the shed, and necessitated the employment of a wary foot to keep

the door from slamming. With all these distractions she still made good

her case, though she had to raise her voice above the multitudinous

sounds of the wind, and though she had to address the unresponsive

shoulders of a man who bent over shallow trays of earth set on a trestle

table under the small and dirty window. It is heroic, but she had her

reward in full measure. Presently her voice ceased, and she waited in

silence for the answer that should decide her destiny. There was an

interval broken only by the tireless passion of the wind, and then

Ginger Stott, the best-known man in England, looked up and stared

through the incrusted pane of glass before him at the dim vision of

stooping grass and swaying hedge. Unconsciously his hand strayed to his

pockets, and then he said in a low, thoughtful voice: "Well! I dunno why

not."





II



Dr. O'Connell's face was white and drawn, and the redness of his eyelids

more pronounced than ever as he faced Stott in the pale October dawn. He

clutched at his beard with a nervous, combing movement, as he shook his

head decidedly in answer to the question put to him.



"If it's not dead, now, 'twill be in very few hours," he said.



Stott was shaken by the feeble passion of a man who has spent many weary

hours of suspense. His anger thrilled out in a feeble stream of

hackneyed profanities.



O'Connell looked down on him with contempt. At sunrise, after a

sleepless night, a man is a creature of unrealised emotions.



"Damn it, control yourself, man!" growled O'Connell, himself

uncontrolled, "your wife'll pull through with care, though she'll never

have another child." O'Connell did not understand; he was an Irishman,

and no cricketer; he had been called in because he had a reputation for

his skill in obstetrics.



Stott stared at him fiercely. The two men seemed as if about to grapple

desperately for life in the windy, grey twilight.



O'Connell recovered his self-control first, and began again to claw

nervously at his beard. "Don't be a fool," he said, "it's only what you

could expect. Her first child, and her a woman of near fifty." He

returned to the upstairs room; Stott seized his cap and went out into

the chill world of sunrise.



"She'll do, if there are no complications," said O'Connell to the

nurse, as he bent over the still, exhausted figure of Mrs. Stott. "She's

a wonderful woman to have delivered such a child alive."



The nurse shivered, and avoiding any glance at the huddle that lay on an

improvised sofa-bed, she said: "It can't live, can it?"



O'Connell, still intent on his first patient, shook his head. "Never

cried after delivery," he muttered--"the worst sign." He was silent for

a moment and then he added: "But, to be sure, it's a freak of some

kind." His scientific curiosity led him to make a further investigation.

He left the bed and began to examine the huddle on the sofa-couch.

Victor Stott owed his life, in the first instance, to this scientific

curiosity of O'Connell's.



The nurse, a capable, but sentimental woman, turned to the window and

looked out at the watery trickle of feeble sunlight that now illumined

the wilderness of Stott's garden.



"Nurse!" The imperative call startled her; she turned nervously.



"Yes, doctor?" she said, making no movement towards him.



"Come here!" O'Connell was kneeling by the sofa. "There seems to be

complete paralysis of all the motor centres," he went on; "but the

child's not dead. We'll try artificial respiration."



The nurse overcame her repugnance by a visible effort. "Is it ... is it

worth while?" she asked, regarding the flaccid, tumbled, wax-like thing,

with its bloated, white globe of a skull. Every muscle of it was relaxed

and limp, its eyes shut, its tiny jaw hanging. "Wouldn't it be better to

let it die...?"



O'Connell did not seem to hear her. He waved an impatient hand for her

assistance. "Outside my experience," he muttered, "no heart-beat

discernible, no breath ... yet it is indubitably alive." He depressed

the soft, plastic ribs and gave the feeble heart a gentle squeeze.



"It's beating," he ejaculated, after a pause, with an ear close to the

little chest, "but still no breath! Come!"



The diminutive lungs were as readily open to suggestion as the wee

heart: a few movements of the twigs they called arms, and the breath

came. O'Connell closed the mouth and it remained closed, adjusted the

limbs, and they stayed in the positions in which they were placed. At

last he gently lifted the lids of the eyes.



The nurse shivered and drew back. Even O'Connell was startled, for the

eyes that stared into his own seemed to be heavy with a brooding

intelligence....



Stott came back at ten o'clock, after a morose trudge through the misty

rain. He found the nurse in the sitting-room.



"Doctor gone?" he asked.



The nurse nodded.



"Dead, I suppose?" Stott gave an upward twist of his head towards the

room above.



The nurse shook her head.



"Can't live though?" There was a note of faint hope in his voice.



The nurse drew herself together and sighed deeply. "Yes! we believe

it'll live, Mr. Stott," she said. "But ... it's a very remarkable baby."



How that phrase always recurred!





III



There were no complications, but Mrs. Stott's recovery was not rapid. It

was considered advisable that she should not see the child. She thought

that they were lying to her, that the child was dead and, so, resigned

herself. But her husband saw it.



He had never seen so young an infant before, and, just for one moment,

he believed that it was a normal child.



"What an 'ead!" was his first ejaculation, and then he realised the

significance of that sign. Fear came into his eyes, and his mouth fell

open. "'Ere, I say, nurse, it's ... it's a wrong 'un, ain't it?" he

gasped.



"I'm sure I can't tell you, Mr. Stott," broke out the nurse

hysterically. She had been tending that curious baby for three hours,

and she was on the verge of a break-down. There was no wet-nurse to be

had, but a woman from the village had been sent for. She was expected

every moment.



"More like a tadpole than anything," mused the unhappy father.



"Oh! Mr. Stott, for goodness' sake, don't," cried the nurse. "If you

only knew...."



"Knew what?" questioned Stott, still staring at the motionless figure of

his son, who lay with closed eyes, apparently unconscious.



"There's something--I don't know," began the nurse, and then after a

pause, during which she seemed to struggle for some means of expression,

she continued with a sigh of utter weariness, "You'll know when it opens

its eyes. Oh! Why doesn't that woman come, the woman you sent for?"



"She'll be 'ere directly," replied Stott. "What d'you mean about there

bein' something ... something what?"



"Uncanny," said the nurse without conviction. "I do wish that woman

would come. I've been up the best part of the night, and now ..."



"Uncanny? As how?" persisted Stott.



"Not normal," explained the nurse. "I can't tell you more than that."



"But 'ow? What way?"



He did not receive an answer then, for the long expected relief came at

last, a great hulk of a woman, who became voluble when she saw the child

she had come to nurse.



"Oh! dear, oh! dear," the stream began. "How unforchnit, and 'er first,

too. It'll be a idjit, I'm afraid. Mrs. 'Arrison's third was the very

spit of it...."



The stream ran on, but Stott heard no more. An idiot! He had fathered an

idiot! That was the end of his dreams and ambitions! He had had an

hour's sleep on the sitting-room sofa. He went out to his work at the

County Ground with a heart full of blasphemy.



When he returned at four o'clock he met the stout woman on the doorstep.

She put up a hand to her rolling breast, closed her eyes tightly, and

gasped as though completely overcome by this trifling rencounter.



"'Ow is it?" questioned the obsessed Stott.



"Oh dear! Oh dear!" panted the stout woman, "the leas' thing upsets me

this afternoon...." She wandered away into irrelevant fluency, but Stott

was autocratic; his insistent questions overcame the inertia of even

Mrs. Reade at last. The substance of her information, freed from

extraneous matter, was as follows:



"Oh! 'ealthy? It'll live, I've no doubt, if that's what you mean; but

'elpless...! There, 'elpless is no word.... Learn 'im to open his mouth,

learn 'im to close 'is 'ands, learn 'im to go to sleep, learn 'im

everythink. I've never seen nothink like it, never in all my days, and

I've 'elped to bring a few into the world.... I can't begin to tell you

about it, Mr. Stott, and that's the solemn truth. When 'e first looked

at me, I near 'ad a faint. A old-fashioned, wise sort of look as 'e

might 'a been a 'undred. 'Lord 'elp us, nurse,' I says, 'Lord 'elp us.'

I was that opset, I didn't rightly know what I was a-saying...."



Stott pushed past the agitated Mrs. Reade, and went into the

sitting-room. He had had neither breakfast nor lunch; there was no sign

of any preparation for his tea, and the fireplace was grey with the

cinders of last night's fire. For some minutes he sat in deep

despondency, a hero faced with the uncompromising detail of domestic

neglect. Then he rose and called to the nurse.



She appeared at the head of the steep, narrow staircase. "Sh!" she

warned, with a finger to her lips.



"I'm goin' out again," said Stott in a slightly modulated voice.



"Mrs. Reade's coming back presently," replied the nurse, and looked over

her shoulder.



"Want me to wait?" asked Stott.



The nurse came down a few steps. "It's only in case any one was wanted,"

she began, "I've got two of 'em on my hands, you see. They're both doing

well as far as that goes. Only ..." She broke off and drifted into small

talk. Ever and again she stopped and listened intently, and looked back

towards the half-open door of the upstairs room.



Stott fidgeted, and then, as the flow of conversation gave no sign of

running dry, he dammed it abruptly. "Look 'ere, miss," he said, "I've

'ad nothing to eat since last night."



"Oh! dear!" ejaculated the nurse. "If--perhaps, if you'd just stay here

and listen, I could get you something." She seemed relieved to have some

excuse for coming down.



While she bustled about the kitchen, Stott, half-way upstairs, stayed

and listened. The house was very silent, the only sound was the hushed

clatter made by the nurse in the kitchen. There was an atmosphere of

wariness about the place that affected even so callous a person as

Stott. He listened with strained attention, his eyes fixed on the

half-open door. He was not an imaginative man, but he was beset with

apprehension as to what lay behind that door. He looked for something

inhuman that might come crawling through the aperture, something

grotesque, preternaturally wise and threatening--something horribly

unnatural.



The window of the upstairs room was evidently open, and now and again

the door creaked faintly. When that happened Stott gripped the handrail,

and grew damp and hot. He looked always at the shadows under the door.

If it crawled ...



The nurse stood at the door of the sitting-room while Stott ate, and

presently Mrs. Reade came grunting and panting up the brick path.



"I'm going out, now," said Stott resolutely, and he rose to his feet,

though his meal was barely finished.



"You'll be back before Mrs. Reade goes?" asked the nurse, and passed a

hand over her tired eyes. "She'll be here till ten o'clock. I'm going to

lie down."



"I'll be back by ten," Stott assured her as he went out.



He did come back at ten o'clock, but he was stupidly drunk.





IV



The Stotts' cottage was no place to live in during the next few days,

but the nurse made one stipulation: Mr. Stott must come home to sleep.

He slept on an improvised bed in the sitting-room, and during the night

the nurse came down many times and listened to the sound of his snores.

She would put her ear against the door, and rest her nerves with the

thought of human companionship. Sometimes she opened the door quietly

and watched him as he slept. Except at night, when he was rarely quite

sober, Stott only visited his cottage once a day, at lunch time; from

seven in the morning till ten at night he remained in Ailesworth save

for this one call of inquiry.



It was such a still house. Ellen Mary only spoke when speech was

absolutely required, and then her words were the fewest possible, and

were spoken in a whisper. The child made no sound of any kind. Even Mrs.

Reade tried to subdue her stertorous breathing, to move with less

ponderous quakings. The neighbours told her she looked thinner.



Little wonder that during the long night vigil the nurse, moving

silently between the two upstairs rooms, should pause on the landing and

lean over the handrail; little wonder that she should give a long sigh

of relief when she heard the music of Stott's snore ascend from the

sitting-room.



O'Connell called twice every day during the first week, not because it

was necessary for him to visit his two patients, but because the infant

fascinated him. He would wait for it to open its eyes, and then he

would get up and leave the room hurriedly. Always he intended to return

the infant's stare, but when the opportunity was given to him, he always

rose and left the room--no matter how long and deliberately he had

braced himself to another course of action.



It was on a Thursday that the baby was born, and it was on the following

Thursday that the circumstance of the household was reshaped.



O'Connell came in the morning, full of resolution. After he had

pronounced Mrs. Stott well on the way to recovery, he paid the usual

visit to his younger patient. The child lay, relaxed, at full length, in

the little cot which had been provided for him. His eyes were, as usual,

closed, and he had all the appearance of the ordinary hydrocephalic

idiot.



O'Connell sat down by the cot, listened to the child's breathing and

heart-beat, lifted and let fall again the lax wrist, turned back the

eyelid, revealing only the white of the upturned eyeball, and then

composed himself to await the natural waking of the child, if it were

asleep--always a matter of uncertainty.



The nurse stood near him, silent, but she looked away from the cot.



"Hydrocephalus!" murmured O'Connell, staring at his tiny patient,

"hydrocephalus, without a doubt. Eh? nurse!"



"Yes, perhaps! I don't know, doctor."



"Oh, not a doubt of it, not a doubt," repeated O'Connell, and then came

a flicker of the child's eyelids and a weak crumpling of the tiny hand.



O'Connell caught his breath and clawed at his beard. "Hydrocephalus," he

muttered with set jaw and drawn eyebrows.



The tiny hand straightened with a movement that suggested the recovery

of crushed grass, the mouth opened in a microscopic yawn, and then the

eyelids were slowly raised and a steady unwavering stare of profoundest

intelligence met O'Connell's gaze.



He clenched his hands, shifted in his chair, and then rose abruptly and

turned to the window.



"I--it won't be necessary for me to come again, nurse," he said curtly;

"they are both doing perfectly well."



"Not come again?" There was dismay in the nurse's question.



"No! No! It's unnecessary ..." He broke off, and made for the door

without another glance in the direction of the cot.



Nurse followed him downstairs.



"If I'm wanted--you can easily send for me," said O'Connell, as he went

out. As he moved away he dragged at his beard and murmured:

"Hydrocephalus, not a doubt of it."



Following his departure, Mrs. Reade heard curious and most unwonted

laughter, and cautiously blundered downstairs to investigate. She found

the nurse in an advanced condition of hysteria, laughing, gurgling,

weeping, and intermittently crying in a shrill voice: "Oh! Lord have

mercy; Lord ha' mercy!"



"Now, see you 'ere, my dear," said Mrs. Reade, when nurse had been

recovered to a red-eyed sanity, "it's time she was told. I've never 'eld

with keepin' it from 'er, myself, and I've 'ad more experience than

many...." Mrs. Reade argued with abundant recourse to parenthesis.



"Is she strog edough?" asked the nurse, still with tears in her voice;

"cad she bear the sight of hib?" She blew her nose vigorously, and then

continued with greater clearness: "I'm afraid it may turn her head."



Out of her deep store of wisdom, Mrs. Reade produced a fact which she

elaborated and confirmed by apt illustration, adducing more particularly

the instance of Mrs. Harrison's third. "She's 'is mother," was the

essence of her argument, a fact of deep and strange significance.



The nurse yielded, and so the circumstance of Stott's household was

changed, and Stott himself was once more able to come home to meals.



The nurse, wisely, left all diplomacy to the capable Mrs. Reade, a woman

specially fitted by nature for the breaking of news. She delivered a

long, a record-breaking circumlocution, and it seemed that Ellen Mary,

who lay with closed eyes, gathered no hint of its import. But when the

impressive harangue was slowly rustling to collapse like an exhausted

balloon, she opened her eyes and said quite clearly,



"What's wrong with 'im, then?"



The question had the effect of reinflation, but at last the child itself

was brought, and it was open-eyed.



The supreme ambition of all great women--and have not all women the

potentialities of greatness?--is to give birth to a god. That ambition

it is which is marred by the disappointing birth of a female child--when

the man-child is born, there is always hope, and slow is the realisation

of failure. That realisation never came to Ellen Mary. She accepted her

child with the fear that is adoration. When she dropped her eyes before

her god's searching glance, she did it in reverence. She hid her faith

from the world, but in her heart she believed that she was blessed above

all women. In secret, she worshipped the inscrutable wonder that had

used her as the instrument of his incarnation. Perhaps she was

right....