Domestic fiction; Family -- England -- Midlands -- Fiction; Midlands (England) -- Fiction
It was bad enough. But to her it was never deathly. Even the fierce,
tearing pain was exhilarating. She screamed and suffered, but was all
the time curiously alive and vital. She felt so powerfully alive and in
the hands of such a masterly force of life, that her bottom-most
feeling was one of exhilaration. She knew she was winning, winning, she
was always winning, with each onset of pain she was nearer to victory.
Probably he suffered more than she did. He was not shocked or
horrified. But he was screwed very tight in the vise of suffering.
It was a girl. The second of silence on her face when they said so
showed him she was disappointed. And a great blazing passion of
resentment and protest sprang up in his heart. In that moment he
claimed the child.
But when the milk came, and the infant sucked her breast, she seemed to
be leaping with extravagant bliss.
“It sucks me, it sucks me, it likes me—oh, it loves it!” she cried,
holding the child to her breast with her two hands covering it,
passionately.
And in a few moments, as she became used to her bliss, she looked at
the youth with glowing, unseeing eyes, and said:
“Anna Victrix.”
He went away, trembling, and slept. To her, her pains were the
wound-smart of a victor, she was the prouder.
When she was well again she was very happy. She called the baby Ursula.
Both Anna and her husband felt they must have a name that gave them
private satisfaction. The baby was tawny skinned, it had a curious
downy skin, and wisps of bronze hair, and the yellow grey eyes that
wavered, and then became golden-brown like the father’s. So they called
her Ursula because of the picture of the saint.
It was a rather delicate baby at first, but soon it became stronger,
and was restless as a young eel. Anna was worn out with the day-long
wrestling with its young vigour.
As a little animal, she loved and adored it and was happy. She loved
her husband, she kissed his eyes and nose and mouth, and made much of
him, she said his limbs were beautiful, she was fascinated by the
physical form of him.
And she was indeed Anna Victrix. He could not combat her any more. He
was out in the wilderness, alone with her. Having occasion to go to
London, he marvelled, as he returned, thinking of naked, lurking
savages on an island, how these had built up and created the great mass
of Oxford Street or Piccadilly. How had helpless savages, running with
their spears on the riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up
this great London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a
world of man upon a world of nature! It frightened and awed him. Man
was terrible, awful in his works. The works of man were more terrible
than man himself, almost monstrous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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