MAYBE AN HOUR PASSED, SHE ROUSED us by yawning and sitting up. The following conversation began in the study. It ended round the kitchen table where Bella demolished most of a cold boiled ham with bread, cheese, pickles and two or three pints of sweet milky tea. Though used to her quick recovery from emotional shocks I had never before seen it happen so physically. Her face lost the thin haggard look, her cheeks grew rounder, her brow smoother and softer, the tiny lines and wrinkles faded from her freshening skin. From looking any age between twenty-five and forty she became any age between twenty-five and fifteen. Was my strictly scientific eye dazzled by the loving glance she gave me? Surely not, yet more than ham and tea were erasing her marks of weariness and strain. Her eyes fed on our face, her ears and brain digested our words into the substance of her thought, strengthening it as swiftly as her teeth and stomach used the eatables to renew her body. Between chewing and swallowing she spoke very wisely, provoking a debate which decided her future career, and mine too, and a date for our marriage. But perhaps her radiance did daze me slightly. I talked as much as Baxter and she put together but I remember hardly anything I said. However, I very distinctly recall exactly how the debate began.
Bell said, “Why did you sweat and stammer and tremble when I asked about my child, God? Were you afraid your answer would drive me mad?”
Baxter nodded with a force which made us fear for his neck.
She said, “I suppose that is not surprising. I was a child when I ran away from you—how could you have told childish Bell Baxter that she had lost a child of her own? Especially when you did not know who the dad was. You made me strong and sure of myself, God, by teaching me about the fine and mighty things in the world and showing I was one of them. You were too sane to teach a child about craziness and cruelty. I had to learn about those from people who were crazy and cruel themselves. I knew there was something wrong with the world as soon as Wedder told me I had been a mother. I knew my daughter could have been terribly hurt as soon as Dr. Hooker pointed smugly at the little poor girl and blind baby. When Mr. Astley explained how rich nations depend on infant mortalities I knew she might be dead, and I almost wished she were dead when I learned at Millie Cronquebil’s how weak and lonely women are used. You are to blame for nothing, God, nothing at all where I am concerned. But you know and hate (do you not?) how the weak are made to suffer?”
“Yes.”
“Did you never try to stop it?”
“Never,” said Baxter drearily, “though I once tried to lessen their pain by treating injured employees of the Blochairn iron foundry and St. Rollox locomotive works.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Because I was selfish,” said Baxter, starting to sweat and vibrate again, “and had found you. I wanted to win your love far more than I cared for the scorched and broken victims of heavy industry.”
Bella calmed him with a smile of tender amused dismay which was also in the tone of her voice.
“Dear God, what a lot of good I have prevented, just by existing! Harry Astley must be right—there are too many people in the world, especially pampered pets like me. We must start using your money properly, God. Let us take ship to Alexandria, find the little girl and her baby brother, adopt them and bring them back here.”
“No need to go so far Bell,” said Baxter, sighing. “Tomorrow I can walk with you up the High Street from Glasgow Cross. To our right you will see railway yards and warehouses on the ground of the old university: the university where Adam Smith devised his world-famous treatise on the Wealth of Nations and his universally neglected one on Social Sympathy. On the other side is a row of ordinary tenements with shops on the ground floor and behind that lie lands of stinking, overcrowded rooms where you will find as much huddled misery as you saw in the sunlight of Alexandria. There are closes where over a hundred people get all their drinking- and washing-water from one communal tap, rooms where a whole family squats in each corner. The commonest diseases are dysentery, rickets and tuberculosis. Here you may pick up any number of wretched little girls. Tell the parents you will train them to be domestic servants and they will bless you for removing them. Bring six of them here. With Mrs. Dinwiddie’s help you probably can, in three or four years, train most of them to clean a room and launder clothes. You are too ignorant to teach them anything better.”
Bella clutched the hair of her head in both hands and cried, “You sound like Harry Astley! Do you want to make me a cynical parasite too, God? Do you too think my hatred of suffering is nothing but displaced motherhood?”
“I will certainly think that if you start mothering children you cannot teach to be independent.”
“How can I teach that?”
“By learning to be independent yourself—independent of me and Candle too, whether you marry him or not. Are you willing to work hard?—outside a brothel, I mean.”
“You have seen me work hard for hours with the sick animals in our little hospital.”
“But now you want to help poor sick people.”
“You know I do.”
“Would you exhaust your brain and body by toiling in grim places where courage as well as strong judgement is needed?”
“I am ignorant and confused but not a fool or a coward. Give me work which uses me utterly!”
“Then you know what you should become.”
“No—tell me!”
“If the answer is not already in your mind,” said Baxter gloomily, “nothing I can say is any good.”
“Please give me a clue.”
“Your work will need hard study as well as practice, but your best friends can help with both.”
“I will be a doctor.”
Her face was wet with tears and his with sweat, yet they smiled and nodded to each other with such perfect understanding that I nearly envied them, though throughout this talk I had been holding Bell’s hand. Perhaps she sensed the envy for she kissed me and said, “Think of all the lectures you will be able to give me, Candle, and how hard I will have to listen!”
“Baxter knows a lot more than I do,” I told her.
“Yes,” said Baxter, “but I will never tell people all of it.”
**************
The stars above divide reported speech from a fast summary.
Baxter told us there were only four women doctors in Britain just now, all with degrees from foreign universities, but the Enabling Bill of 1876 and the work of Sophia Jex-Blake had resulted in Dublin University opening its doors to women medical students and Scottish universities must soon do the same. Meanwhile he would return to work in the charity wards of an east Glasgow infirmary if Bella would enrol as a trainee nurse there. If she did well under the discipline he would contrive to get her assisting him as a theatre nurse. Thus, when she at last went to medical college (whether in Dublin or Glasgow) the lectures would mean more to her than the memory exercises most first-year students found them. He said all doctors and surgeons should be recruited from the nursing profession or begin by working in it. He then argued so fiercely that manual work be the primary training for every British profession that we took a while getting him back to the point.
He then asked Bella if she wished to be a general practitioner or to help particular kinds of people. She said she wanted to help little girls, mothers and prostitutes. He said this was a good idea because at present almost all who worked with these people had different sexual organs from their patients. Bella said she was determined to teach all the women who came to her the most modern and effective contraceptive methods. Baxter and I advised her to keep this intention secret until she was able to practise it. What she then told her patients in the privacy of a consultingroom would be unlikely to cause a public scandal. If she wished to argue publicly for birth control she would do so most effectively after working as a fully qualified clinician for at least five years. She only agreed with us when we admitted that the length of the waiting-period must be her choice and no one else’s.
Then Baxter turned to me and said friends of his father had kept him informed of my standing in the Glasgow medical profession. I was a good diagnostic and bacterial pathologist, with wide knowledge of the hygiene which allowed the efficient functioning of the human organism. These were exactly the qualifications needed by a public health officer, and he hoped I would consider that. Prevention of disease was more important than cure. There were no better public benefactors than those who strove to make Glasgow better watered, drained and lit—better housed, in short. But his main reason for wanting me in such a position was personal. When Bella eventually got charge of her own clinic (and he would put his fortune into helping her create one) the support of a highly placed local government official would be very useful to her. This argument convinced me.
I now raised the question of my marriage, and suggested it be as soon as possible. Bella said she must first make sure she had contracted no venereal infection through her work for Madame Cronquebil. Baxter said six weeks of sexual quarantine should be sufficient, then said he was tired, hade an abrupt good-bye and went upstairs. I realized that the thought of Bella marrying me instead of him still caused him pain. I told her so, and she laughed at the idea. She did not deny it, but thought it a piece of daftness he would easily recover from. This is the only area in which I found my dear Bella unfeeling toward the pain of another. But when we got children of our own I discovered most younger people are happily unfeeling toward parents and guardians they feel confident with.
So we kissed good night, and went upstairs to the landing from which her bedroom opened, and kissed good night again. She murmured, “You are a lot stronger, Candle. You nearly fainted when we did this in the old days.”
I said I feared I was less sensitive now—my body had missed her for so long that it did not yet truly believe she was with me. She laughed quietly and said she was less passionate too.
“I need cuddles more than weddings, nowadays,” she said, “and I haven’t had a decent all-night-long cuddle since Wedder started sleeping upside-down after Alexandria. Let us sleep together tonight, you necessary Candle. With a sheet between us I can feel your arms all round me yet do you no harm. Would you mind cuddling me just like that?”
I said I would love to do it and that exactly this preliminary marriage rite was very frequent in rural Scotland, where it was called “bundling”.
So we went to bed and bundled, and have not slept apart since, except when she has to attend London meetings of the Fabian Society.