One of Lifes Slaves | Page 2

pail. She had heard so much about the town from
cattle-dealers that came over the mountain, that a longing and
restlessness had taken possession of her.
And then she had gone out to service in the town.
She was about as suitable there as a tumble-down haystack in a
handsome town street, or as a cow on a flight of stairs--that is to say,
not at all.
She used to waste her time on the market-place by all the hay loads.
She must see and feel the hay--that was not at all like mountain grass.
"No indeed! Mountain grass was so soft, and then, how it smelt! Oh
dear no!"
But her mistress had other uses for her servant than letting her spend
the morning talking to hay-cart drivers. So she went from place to place,
each time descending both as regarded wages and mistress. Barbara
was good-natured and honest; but she had one fault--the great one of
being totally unfit for all possible town situations.
Yet Society has, as we know, a wonderful faculty for making use of,
assimilating and reconstructing everything, even the apparently most
meaningless and useless, for its own purpose. And the way it took,
quickly enough, with poor Barbara was that she became the only thing
in which she could be of any service in the town--namely, a nurse.
It was a sad time and a hard struggle while the shame lasted, almost

enough to kill her; and after that, she never thought of returning to the
Heimdal mountains again.
But things were to be still harder.
The various social claims, which an age of progress increasingly lays
upon the lady of the house in the upper classes of society, asserted
themselves here in the town by an ever increasing demand for nurses.
"The reason," as Dr. Schneibel explained, "was simply a law of
Nature--you can't be a milch-cow and an intelligent human being at the
same time. The renovation of blood and nerves must be artificially
conveyed from that class of society which stands nearer to Nature."
And now the thing was to find an extra-healthy, thoroughly strong
nurse for Consul-General Veyergang's two delicate, newly-arrived,
little ones.
Dr. Schneibel had very thoughtfully kept a nurse in reserve for Mrs.
Veyergang--"a really remarkable specimen of the original healthiness
in the common stock. One might say--h'm, h'm--that if Mrs. Veyergang
could not get to the mountains, the mountains were so courteous as to
come to her. The girl still had an odour of the cowshed about her
perhaps; but when all's said and done, that was only a stronger
assurance of originality. And that is an important factor in our day,
madam, when milk is adulterated even from the very cows
themselves.--Quite young, scarcely twenty!"
Barbara Högden had not the faintest suspicion, as she carried water and
wood, or stood at the edge of the ice beating linen, or did any drudgery
she could find to do, in order to earn a little money to pay for herself
and her baby at the tinsmith's, that, from her deepest degradation, she
had risen at one step to the rank of an exceptionally sought-after and
esteemed person in the town.
For a nurse is an esteemed person. Indeed, she is on the expectancy list
to become respected.

After having nursed her mistress's child, and been a correspondingly
unnatural mother to her own, she ends by sleeping on down, and being
considered in every way, until a new nurse for a new heir deposes her
from her dynasty.
Should she prefer to give her own little baby the only treasure she
possesses, her healthy breast, should she really be so blind to her own
interests, why then the case is different, and (to use Dr. Schneibel's
words) not altogether unmerited, only a result of the social economy to
which she does not know how to be intelligently subordinate, and
which will reduce her, with the inexorable logic of the laws of
civilisation, to a useless superfluity, which Society's organism rejects.
Or, vulgarly speaking, she is left with shame, contempt and poverty
resting upon both her and her illegitimate offspring. As a private
individual, she is in a sense right; but socially, as a member of
society----!
At first poor Barbara was quite blind on this point, utterly obstinate,
rigid as a mountain pony that could not be got to stir.
Dr. Schneibel was standing for the third time at the tinsmith's, with his
stick under his nose, while his gig waited down in the road. Each time
he had added to both wages and arguments, and had again and again
pointed out how bad it would be both for her and her boy if she
continued so obstinate. He appealed to her own good sense. How could
she expect to bring