Through Russia | Page 6

trickled
down her tense and livid features.
Thereupon I turned to her again, and, throwing down cooking-pot,
teapot, and wallet, laid her on her back, and strove to bend her knees
upwards in the direction of her body. Meanwhile she sought to repel
me with blows on face and breast, and at length rolled on to her
stomach. Then, raising herself on all fours, she, sobbing, gasping, and
cursing in a breath, crawled away like a bear into a remoter portion of
the thicket.
"Beast!" she panted. "Oh, you devil!"
Yet, even as the words escaped her lips, her arms gave way beneath her,
and she collapsed upon her face, with legs stretched out, and her lips
emitting a fresh series of convulsive moans.
Excited now to fever pitch, I hurriedly recalled my small store of
knowledge of such cases and finally decided to turn her on her back,
and, as before, to strive to bend her knees upwards in the direction of
her body. Already signs of imminent parturition were not wanting.
"Lie still," I said, "and if you do that it will not be long before you are
delivered of the child."
Whereafter, running down to the sea, I pulled up my sleeves, and, on
returning, embarked upon my role, of accoucheur.
Scoring the earth with her fingers, uprooting tufts of withered grass,

and struggling to thrust them into her mouth, scattering soil over her
terrible, inhuman face and bloodshot eyes, the woman writhed like a
strip of birch bark in a wood fire. Indeed, by this time a little head was
coming into view, and it needed all my efforts to quell the twitchings of
her legs, to help the child to issue, and to prevent its mother from
thrusting grass down her distorted, moaning throat. Meanwhile we
cursed one another-- she through her teeth, and I in an undertone; she, I
should surmise, out of pain and shame, and I, I feel certain, out of
nervousness, mingled with a perfect agony of compassion.
"O Lord!" she gasped with blue lips flecked with foam as her eyes
(suddenly bereft of their colour in the sunlight) shed tears born of the
intolerable anguish of the maternal function, and her body writhed and
twisted as though her frame had been severed in the middle.
"Away, you brute!" was her oft-repeated cry as with her weak hands,
hands seemingly dislocated at the wrists, she strove to thrust me to a
distance. Yet all the time I kept saying persuasively: "You fool! Bring
forth as quickly as you can!" and, as a matter of fact, was feeling so
sorry for her that tears continued to spurt from my eyes as much as
from hers, and my very heart contracted with pity. Also, never did I
cease to feel that I ought to keep saying something; wherefore, I
repeated, and again repeated: "Now then! Bring forth as quickly as ever
you can!"
And at last my hands did indeed hold a human creature in all its pristine
beauty. Nor could even the mist of tears prevent me from seeing that
that human creature was red in the face, and that to judge from the
manner in which it kept kicking and resisting and uttering hoarse wails
(while still bound to its mother by the ligament), it was feeling
dissatisfied in advance with the world. Yes, blue-eyed, and with a nose
absurdly sunken between a pair of scarlet, rumpled cheeks and lips
which ceaselessly quivered and contracted, it kept bawling: "A-aah!
A-a-ah!"
Moreover, so slippery was it that, as I knelt and looked at it and
laughed with relief at the fact that it had arrived safely, I came near to
letting it fall upon the ground: wherefore I entirely forgot what next I
ought to have done.
"Cut it!" at length whispered the mother with eyes closed, and features
suddenly swollen and resembling those of a corpse.

"A knife!" again she whispered with her livid lips. "Cut it!"
My pocket-knife I had had stolen from me in the workmen's barraque;
but with my teeth I severed the caul, and then the child gave renewed
tongue in true Orlovian fashion, while the mother smiled. Also, in some
curious fashion, the mother's unfathomable eyes regained their colour,
and became filled as with blue fire as, plunging a hand into her bodice
and feeling for the pocket, she contrived to articulate with raw and
blood-flecked lips:
"I have not a single piece of string or riband to bind the caul with."
Upon that I set to, and managed to produce a piece of riband, and to
fasten it in the required position.
Thereafter she smiled more brightly than ever. So radiantly did she
smile that my eyes came near to being blinded with the spectacle.
"And now