AT FIRST I THINK IT IS A HORRIFIC DREAM FROM WHICH I HAVE just awakened, petrified and breathless. Then I grasp that it is actually happening, in the flat above mine. I make out the screams and groans of a woman apparently being tortured, the angry growls of a man, and a second woman (I think) ranting like a fishwife. My good little Nurse wakes up, throws on her flannel dressing gown, and flies upstairs.
I hear her running footsteps on the stairs, the creak of a door opening, then a man bellowing. Hyena howls from a woman. Nurse’s words are indistinct. A door bangs open and the screaming spills out onto the landing. The fishwife woman screeches some more, the man roars at high volume. “If you bother us again, I swear I’ll fillet you like a fish, and that finicky old lady you work for, too.”
Not having made the acquaintance of my new neighbors, I am surprised they are aware of my existence. Nurse returns, pale and tremulous, and describes the squalid scene unfolding up there. An unmarried couple, “very drunk and coarse, Miss,” are in the process of bringing an infant into the world with the assistance of an equally inebriated nurse. When Nurse offered medical assistance, the people hurled profanities at her and threatened her (and me) with violence.
And then the ghastly birth goes on all night right over my head, noisily, agonizingly, until I wish the woman would just die and no one else would ever have to bring an infant into the world.
The next morning the “parents” and their nurse are still drunk. The infant is dead. The mother, Miss Clarke tells us, did not want to see “the brat,” a beautiful infant boy who lived for three hours. They had not brought a rag to wrap the poor child in, which certainly seems suspicious to me. When told “it” was dead, the mother was glad and worried about whether the doctor could bring her waist into shape. She had laced herself as tight as possible to conceal the pregnancy. And then she asked, “Oh, where is my sealskin jacket?” I assume the police will investigate and that murder charges will perhaps be filed. But nothing happens.
I implore Nurse not to leave my side the next night. I cannot stop shaking and my heart is in great distress.
“Beating irregular again, Miss?”
“Strange jumps and hideous sinkings. It has never been this bad before.”
Nurse strokes my fevered brow and says, “Let me get you a bromide and we’ll see about fetching a doctor. If only Mr. James or Miss Loring was here!” Bringing me a glass of water, she mixes in a mustard-colored powder, and helps me to sit up and drink it. From her anxiety I deduce that I must appear one step from the grave.
“No, Nurse! I can’t face another doctor.”
“Then, I shall cable Mr. James in Italy and he will know what to do.”
“Oh, how do you bear it?”
“What, Miss?”
“The suffering, the wretched lives people lead.”
“Oh, it is well enough for me. I am very sorry for your headaches and other pains, Miss.” She really is. What a dear person she is.
“Did you ever hear such howls? Like the hounds of hell. I can still hear them! Oh, the lot of women is hard, Nurse.”
“Well, Miss, since you ask, I have heard and seen worse.”
“I wish you had not told me that. My mind has already gone into such a cramp about it.”
“It is a blessing the poor little thing only lived a few hours. Such a life it would have led.”
“I suspect deeds of darkness, Nurse. Even in the best case, a human soul was surely left to die. Are they—those people—?”
“Constable made them leave. The good lord only knows where they will go.”
And there the tale ends. Apparently no one is interested in inquiring further into the death of an innocent infant.
HENRY JAMES
HAMILTON TERRACE, LEAMINGTON
APRIL 19TH 1889
TO WILLIAM JAMES
I found myself the subject of a telegraphic call and rushed to Alice’s side to learn that she had had a very bad attack of the heart—it threatened to be fatal for some hours. . . . The violence of the heart was brought on by nervous agitation about the miserable accouchement that took place in the flat above hers. (It is always dread and fear with her.) She was thrown into such a state of nervous terror I had to remain with her for a week.
It is odd how, in her extreme seclusion, she is liable to assaults of chance from the outside. For the present, she has taken the rest of the house for herself.
WILLIAM JAMES
CAMBRIDGE, MASS
APRIL 30TH, 1889
TO HENRY JAMES
The Physiological Congress in Paris begins Aug. 5. I can’t help feeling in my bones that I ought to go, so I probably shall. If so, I shall be on the Cephalonia, sailing June 22. I shall disembark at Queenstown, as I am more than curious to see the Emerald Isle. Then I shall come to you. How good it will be to see poor Alice again and to hear your discourse.
HENRY JAMES
DE VERE GARDENS, LONDON
MAY 25TH, 1889
TO WILLIAM JAMES
It is much better I shouldn’t tell Alice anything of your approach till you are here, as you are quite right in supposing that every form of expectation and waiting &c is a bad element for her . . . The whole business of AK’s will was a particularly bad time for her—for she shared in the disconcerted feeling I had (and tried to hide from her) that AK’s large estimate of the needs of the Stamford Walshes (as well as the faraway Minnesota Cochranes) as compared with her sense of ours, with whom her life had been passed, seems a slap in the face.