Part 7 (1/2)
She was descending the stairs when she met Jupillon.
”Hallo!” said he, ”where are you going? going out?”
”I am going to lie in----It took me during the day. There was a great dinner-party here----Oh! but it was hard work! Why do you come here? I told you never to come; I don't want you to!”
”Because----I'll tell you----because just now I absolutely must have forty francs. 'Pon my word, I must.”
”Forty francs! Why I have just that for the midwife!”
”That's hard luck----look out! What do you want to do?” And he offered his arm to a.s.sist her. ”_Cristi!_ I'm going to have hard work to get 'em all the same.”
He had opened the carriage door.
”Where do you want him to take you?”
”To La Bourbe,” said Germinie. And she slipped the forty francs into his hand.
”No, no,” said Jupillon.
”Oh! nonsense----there or somewhere else! Besides, I have seven francs left.”
The cab started away.
Jupillon stood for a moment motionless on the sidewalk, looking at the two napoleons in his hand. Then he ran after the cab, stopped it, and said to Germinie through the window:
”At least, I can go with you?”
”No, I am in too much pain, I'd rather be alone,” she replied, writhing on the cus.h.i.+ons of the cab.
After an endless half hour, the cab stopped on Rue de Port-Royal, in front of a black door surmounted by a violet lantern, which announced to such medical students as happened to pa.s.s through the street that there was that night, and at that moment, the curious and interesting spectacle of a difficult labor in progress at La Maternite.
The driver descended from his box and rang. The concierge, a.s.sisted by a female attendant, took Germinie's arms and led her up-stairs to one of the four beds in the _salle d'accouchement_. Once in bed, her pains became somewhat less excruciating. She looked about her, saw the other beds, all empty, and, at the end of the immense room, a huge country-house fireplace in which a bright fire was blazing, and in front of which, hanging upon iron bars, sheets and cloths and bandages were drying.
Half an hour later, Germinie gave birth to a little girl. Her bed was moved into another room. She had been there several hours, lost in the blissful after-delivery weakness which follows the frightful agony of childbirth, happy and amazed to find that she was still alive, swimming in a sea of blessed relief and deeply penetrated with the joy of having created. Suddenly a loud cry: ”I am dying!” caused her to turn her eyes in the direction from which it came: she saw one of her neighbors throw her arms around the neck of one of the a.s.sistant nurses, fall back almost instantly, move a moment under the clothes, then lie perfectly still. Almost at the same instant, another shriek arose from a bed on the other side, a horrible, piercing, terrified shriek, as of one who sees death approaching: it was a woman calling the young a.s.sistant, with desperate gestures; the a.s.sistant ran to her, leaned over her, and fell in a dead faint upon the floor.
Thereupon silence reigned once more; but between the two dead bodies and the half-dead a.s.sistant, whom the cold floor did not restore to consciousness for more than an hour, Germinie and the other women who were still alive in the room lay quiet, not daring even to ring the bell that hung beside each bed to call for help.
Thereafter La Maternite was the scene of one of those terrible puerperal epidemics which breathe death upon human fecundity, of one of those cases of atmospheric poisoning which empty, in a twinkling and by whole rows, the beds of women lately delivered, and which once caused the closing of La Clinique. They believed that it was a visitation of the plague, a plague that turns the face black in a few hours, carries all before it and s.n.a.t.c.hes up the youngest and the strongest, a plague that issues from the cradle--the Black Plague of mothers! All about Germinie, at all hours, especially at night, women were dying such deaths as the milk-fever causes, deaths that seemed to violate all nature's laws, agonizing deaths, accompanied by wild shrieks and troubled by hallucinations and delirium, death agonies that compelled the application of the strait-waistcoat, death agonies that caused the victims to leap suddenly from their beds, carrying the clothes with them, and causing the whole room to shudder at the thought that they were dead bodies from the amphitheatre! Life departed as if it were torn from the body. The very disease a.s.sumed a ghastly shape and monstrous aspect. The bedclothes were lifted in the centre by the swelling caused by peritonitis, producing a vague, horrifying effect in the lamplight.
For five days Germinie, lying swathed and bandaged in her bed, closing her eyes and ears as best she could, had the strength to combat all these horrors, and yielded to them only at long intervals. She was determined to live, and she clung to her strength by thinking of her child and of mademoiselle. But, on the sixth day, her energy was exhausted, her courage forsook her. A cold wave flowed into her heart.
She said to herself that it was all over. The hand that death lays upon one's shoulder, the presentiment of death, was already touching her. She felt the first breath of the epidemic, the belief that she was its destined victim, and the impression that she was already half-possessed by it. Although unresigned, she succ.u.mbed. Her life, vanquished beforehand, hardly made an effort to struggle. At that crisis a head bent over her pillow, like a ray of light.
It was the head of the youngest of the pupil-a.s.sistants, a fair head, with long golden locks and blue eyes so soft and sweet that the dying saw heaven opening its gates therein. When they saw her, delirious women said: ”Look! the Blessed Virgin!”
”My child,” she said to Germinie, ”you must ask for your discharge at once. You must go away from here. You must dress warmly. You must wrap up well. As soon as you're at home and in bed, you must take a hot draught of something or other. You must try to take a sweat. Then, it won't do you any harm. But go away from here. It wouldn't be healthy for you here to-night,” she said, glancing around at the beds. ”Don't say that I told you to go: you would get me discharged if you should.”
XXI