 | | more, eugenics are all the ragethe my brains and your beauty syndromeand beauty resides in the younger women. So let's transmit the Life Force! It's our duty, not just our desire. Older women are having an even harder time of it than usual, as lofty statements all but drown the creaks and groans of riven homes.
|
| | But too late now. It's 5 August 1914. You can't afford to know it, just at the moment. Very well. Put it from your mind. Lie back on your feather pillows, in their stiff white cotton slips, the draw-sheet ready, the midwife back from the kitchen; lie back and think, if you can, of love.
|
| | But how can you, for more than a minute or two? I know, I know. Here you must lie in dreary Hunstantonyou, accustomed to cities: to Edinburgh, where you were reared; to London, where you had such early, instant successbecause this is where your lover has decided you will live! And he is supposed to be here, and he isn't.
|
| | The rhythm of the pains gets more insistent, your body convulseswhat is this; is this the Life Force? The light of the sun spreading a monstrous flower of pain against burning, closed eyelids: is this your destiny? Oh yes indeed, what else, indeed it is; your body is not yours: they are right in what they say: this is indeed the Life Force, and it's killing you. (It's not, you know. Merely the transition from the First to Second Stage. You know so little, so very little: terms such as First Stage, Second Stage, Three Fingers Dilated, are not in common currency, not even in the midwife's handbook: not fit knowledge for a woman, on 5 August 1914midnight has come and gonefor how can the soul, the spirit, triumph if the body is too well understood?) All is ignorance, all is faith: all is terror, and you are mystified, and you are hurting, and all you understand is pain, anguish, punishment, and the war is breaking out and your lover is not even here, and it's Too Late!
|
| | Push, Rebecca, push, and good for you! Of course you did all these things. Lied, deceived, loved and lost. I'm glad you were deaf to common sense, conventional morality, and indifferent tothough always conscious ofsocial disgrace. The Life Force was with you and the baby wasis, for here he is. Pain stops: reason asserts itselfworth it all! New life, new energy. Perfect, and perfectly helpless. There is something here that will love and not argueat least not for a time. Something which can be the flawless recipient of love, as no grown man can ever be.
|
| | There now, it's over. Lie back, be well, and now you can indeed think of love. The church bells are ringing: and if not because Anthony is born but because war has broken out and the whole nation must be roused to hate, never mind.
|
|
