CHAPTER II

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Lethbury accompanied his wife to the hospital in a mood of chastened
wonder. It did not occur to him to oppose her wish. He knew, of
course, that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation: the
jokes at the club, the inquiries, the explanations. He saw himself
in the comic role of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an
expiation. For in his rapid reconstruction of the past he found
himself cutting a shabbier figure than he cared to admit. He had
always been intolerant of stupid people, and it was his punishment
to be convicted of stupidity. As his mind traversed the years
between his marriage and this unexpected assumption of paternity, he
saw, in the light of an overheated imagination, many signs of
unwonted crassness. It was not that he had ceased to think his wife
stupid: she _was_ stupid, limited, inflexible; but there was a
pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its blind reachings
toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she would have
been happier with a child; but he had thought it mechanically,
because it had so often been thought before, because it was in the
nature of things to think it of every woman, because his wife was so
eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the
generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization
as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience.
Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the
one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of
increasing complexity had operated in both sexes, and he had not
seriously supposed that, outside the world of Christmas fiction and
anecdotic art, such truisms had any special hold on the feminine
imagination. Now he saw that the arts in question were kept alive by
the vitality of the sentiments they appealed to.

Lethbury was in fact going through a rapid process of readjustment.
His marriage had been a failure, but he had preserved toward his
wife the exact fidelity of act that is sometimes supposed to excuse
any divagation of feeling; so that, for years, the tie between them
had consisted mainly in his abstaining from making love to other
women. The abstention had not always been easy, for the world is
surprisingly well-stocked with the kind of woman one ought to have
married but did not; and Lethbury had not escaped the solicitation
of such alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost of
taking refuge in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of his
perceptions; and his world being thus limited, he had given unusual
care to its details, compensating himself for the narrowness of his
horizon by the minute finish of his foreground. It was a world of
fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a
blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an
intemperate flow of soul. To such a banquet his wife naturally
remained uninvited. The diet would have disagreed with her, and she
would probably have objected to the other guests. But Lethbury,
miscalculating her needs, had hitherto supposed that he had made
ample provision for them, and was consequently at liberty to enjoy
his own fare without any reproach of mendicancy at his gates. Now he
beheld her pressing a starved face against the windows of his life,
and in his imaginative reaction he invested her with a pathos
borrowed from the sense of his own shortcomings.

In the hospital, the imaginative process continued with increasing
force. He looked at his wife with new eyes. Formerly she had been to
him a mere bundle of negations, a labyrinth of dead walls and bolted
doors. There was nothing behind the walls, and the doors led
no-whither: he had sounded and listened often enough to be sure of
that. Now he felt like a traveller who, exploring some ancient ruin,
comes on an inner cell, intact amid the general dilapidation, and
painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses of the building.

His wife stood by a white crib in one of the wards. In the crib lay
a child, a year old, the nurse affirmed, but to Lethbury's eye a
mere dateless fragment of humanity projected against a background of
conjecture. Over this anonymous particle of life Mrs. Lethbury
leaned, such ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up, in
Correggio's Night-piece, from the child's body to the mother's
countenance. it was a light that irradiated and dazzled her. She
looked up at an inquiry of Lethbury's, but as their glances met he
perceived that she no longer saw him, that he had become as
invisible to her as she had long been to him. He had to transfer his
question to the nurse.

"What is the child's name?" he asked.

"We call her Jane," said the nurse.

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