Mrs. Jones was a friendly, kindly young woman, competent, sure of what she wanted, and at once firm and conciliatory. She was just out of the hospital, and there was still a trained nurse in the house. The little girl who was to be Millie’s baby now was about six weeks old.
“Her name is Joan,” Mrs. Jones explained to Millie. “This is her room, and you will use this bathroom, and you can keep her things on these shelves, and you will sleep here across the hall.”
Millie, with every desire in the world to conciliate her new mistress, nevertheless found herself saying in an exacting tone:
“I always want to sleep in the room with my babies, so I can hear them in the night.”
Mrs. Jones nodded willingly enough.
“If you prefer, that is quite all right,” she assented. “I will have a cot put in here for you; but I think by the time Joan is three months old we can give up her night feedings altogether. We did with Johnnie.”
Millie had already seen Johnnie, the son of the house, about six years old and a lively youngster. Although she had an infinite and understanding tenderness for little babies, she had long since learned that when they grew old enough to walk and to talk they began to escape from her. She knew that she could not, as the saying is, “get along with older children”; and she asked Mrs. Jones now:
“Do you want I should take care of Johnnie too?”
“He can dress himself,” Mrs. Jones said proudly. “And he sleeps all night, and he has breakfast and lunch with us. Charles gives him his supper, and he goes to bed before our dinner. I will want you to keep his room in order; but you won’t have much to do with him.”
“I like to give all my time to my baby,” Millie explained, and Mrs. Jones agreed:
“You’ll have very little else to do.”
The trained nurse left the next day, and Millie threw herself at once into the interminable routine of petty tasks which the care of a small baby brings in its train. Mrs. Jones had been unable to nurse the child more than two weeks, so that Joan was already on the bottle. Millie roused at about half-past five every morning, heated the first bottle over the small electric plate in the bathroom, and held it while Joan absorbed its contents. Afterward the baby slept for an hour or more, while Millie had time to dress, to have her breakfast in the kitchen with Charles and Laura, and to do some of the enormous amount of washing which had to be done every day. At eight O’clock she took Joan up and bathed her.
Another bottle, another sleep, another waking and another bottle, fresh clothing, and so to sleep again. Thus the recurring days.
In the care of Joan, Millie was perfectly and passionately happy; but not in her other relations. From the beginning she disliked young Johnnie so definitely that at times her feeling amounted to hatred. He was, of course, disorderly, and even though she might be tired and her back might be aching, it was necessary for her to busy herself about his room, forever putting back in their places things which he as continually threw into confusion again. Also, he was noisy, and whenever his shrill voice was upraised she expected him to wake Joan; and if she was near enough, she always tried to command him to silence. But the second or third time this occurred, Mrs. Jones reproved her.
“You must expect Johnnie to be noisy, Millie,” she told the nurse.
“He’ll wake my baby,” Millie jealously retorted.
Mrs. Jones smiled a little, and said, “I’m afraid we’re a noisy household. Joan will have to get used to living with us. You mustn’t keep hushing Johnnie. After all, he has his rights as well as Joan.”
Millie was silenced, because she knew by experience that those considerations which seemed to her so overwhelming would have no weight with her mistress; and her position was weak, since Joan was from the first a sound sleeper, quite undisturbed by anything that went on in the big house. But the fact that Joan never did waken could not prevent Millie’s being constantly afraid she would, and a remonstrance at Johnnie’s noise was forever on the tip of her tongue.
There were many other disturbing sounds in the house, and they all jarred on her taut nerves; so that after each burst of laughter, or cry, or concussion of a slamming door, she would sit tensely listening for long seconds, expecting a wail of distress from the room where Joan was sleeping.
It did not matter what the source of these noises might be, she resented them all equally. When Johnnie was to blame she was furious; and when older folk were responsible her anger was even more intense. One night two guests came in to dinner and, since the weather was bad, Mr. and Mrs. Jones insisted that they stay over night. When the four of them came upstairs to go to bed, there was a good deal of talking and laughing in the halls; and Millie’s anger overcame her prudence so that she put on her dressing gown, and—an absurd little figure with her small braid hanging between her shoulders—she came out into the hall and faced them with burning eyes, and said sharply:
“Joan has just gone to sleep. You’ll have to keep quiet. I can’t have her waked up now.”
Mr. Jones himself replied sternly, “She never wakes, Millie. And even if she did, she cannot expect us to go whispering about the house all the time.” He was a large man, his very bulk impressive, and Millie hated him as much as she feared him. But she dared make no reply and retreated to her own room full of bitter rage.
She soon found herself involved in continual discord with Charles, the house man who did the chores and served the meals, and with Laura, his wife, the cook. Millie had her meals with them in the kitchen, and it seemed to her that they were extravagant in their use of electricity and gas, and that they wasted food. The great love which she always gave her babies left in her nothing but angry resentment at the rest of the world; and, although she knew from experience that only trouble could come from any altercation between her and the other servants, she was unable to refrain from criticising their methods to them and to Mrs. Jones.
Mrs. Jones at first received these reports without comment; but the situation became more and more acute until she was compelled at last to silence Millie and to bid her attend to her own work and let the others attend to theirs.
“You are here to take care of Joan, Millie,” she said definitely. “I do not ask you to supervise Charles and Laura. That is my business. They do their work and you do yours, and what they do or how they do it does not concern you.”
Millie, knowing the danger in such a course, nevertheless could not refrain from a protesting word. “I can’t have them wasting electric light the way they do,” she said stridently. And Mrs. Jones replied:
“If you can’t be happy here, Millie, you are perfectly free to go at any time; but I will not have you interfering with the other servants.”
Millie made no reply. At this word, this suggestion of her leaving, she had been struck with such stark terror that she could not speak. At this time she had been only about two months in the Jones household. In the normal course of events she might expect to stay until Joan was two years old, and there was always a chance that another baby might appear in the meantime to prolong her sojourn. To leave now, while Joan was still small, would be to lose her baby; and she could not bear to contemplate that possibility. Already Joan had ascended to that throne in her heart which so many babies had occupied before. They had become shades, shadows of lost loved ones in the background of her thoughts; but Joan was alive, actual, twelve or fourteen pounds of substantial, tangible, sweet flesh; and she began already to know Millie, to look forward to her appearances, and to respond to her caresses and endearments with wide and toothless smiles.
This is the tragedy of the baby nurse, that she loves her baby so completely that she will endure anything human flesh can endure rather than be separated from her charge. Millie would go to any length to avoid this catastrophe; and that afternoon, in a desperate desire to placate Mrs. Jones and to ameliorate the impatience which the other might be feeling, she made a cup of tea and took it up to her mistress with an apologetic word.
“I thought you might
like it,” she explained.
And Mrs. Jones thanked her, and the world was thereafter for a while serene.
Millie’s life during the next few months was a succession of irritating incidents from which she found escape in the hours she spent with the baby. Joan now slept less. Her night feedings had been abandoned. She had bottles four times a day; and from about seven O’clock in the morning till the ten-O’clock bottle, and from the two-O’clock bottle until that which she had at six, she was awake. In the morning Millie brought her downstairs to sit in the dining room while Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Johnnie had their breakfast. In the afternoon she took the baby for a ride in her perambulator and stayed away from the house, when the weather was fair, as late as it was possible, revelling in the long hours alone with Joan. But she could not always be with her baby, and in her relations with Charles and Laura and with Johnnie there were continual irritations.
Between her and Charles there was a continuing feud. Charles was devoted to Johnnie, and he so contrived his time as to be able to help the little boy dress in the morning and undress at night. The two were born companions. But Millie hated Johnnie, and he returned this feeling, not with hatred, because he was too young to feel that passion, but with resentment of her attentions and with an inclination to become fretful and angry at her ministrations. She hated Johnnie; but the fact that he welcomed Charles and liked to be with the man aroused in Millie an infuriating jealousy. Sometimes she and Charles became involved in arguments as to the simple business of keeping Johnnie’s room in order; and it seemed to Millie that Charles encouraged Johnnie to rebel at her authority and to be impudent to her.
One morning, when she brought Joan to the dining room, she had had such a passage with the man, and it had so wrought upon her nerves that she was in tears. When she came in, Mr. and Mrs. Jones and Johnnie were already at the table; and she burst out in explosive complaint, hating herself for doing it, knowing the risk she ran, yet unable to control her tongue. With tears streaming down her face she cried:
“Mrs. Jones, I want you to tell Johnnie that he isn’t to talk back to me the way he does.”
Mrs. Jones said quietly, “We’ll discuss that by and by, Millie.”
“He won’t do anything I tell him to,” Millie insisted. “And him and Charles just laugh at me.”
Charles, coming in just then with the coffee, was driven to self-defence.
“Johnnie’s all right, Mrs. Jones,” he said stoutly. “She won’t let him alone. She don’t understand boys. I can take care of Johnnie all right if she’d just leave him alone.”
Mrs. Jones said decisively, “That will do, Charles!”
“Yes, ma’am,” Charles agreed, and left the room.
But Millie, unutterably exasperated, cried again, “Johnnie’s got to be made to behave, ma’am.”
Mrs. Jones repeated, “We’ll discuss that later, Millie!”
And Millie, though she was almost beside herself with weeping rage, felt the menace in the other’s tone and left the room.
After her husband had gone, Mrs. Jones summoned Millie and said to her steadily:
“You are not to do such a thing as that again, Millie. I don’t want Mr. Jones bothered by anything that goes on at home. If you have anything to say to me, wait until he has gone and come to me quietly.”
Millie cried, “Well, I can’t stand the way Johnnie treats me.”
“Hereafter,” Mrs. Jones told her, “you need have no contact with Johnnie except to keep his room in order. Charles will take care of him, and I am sure you will get along all right if you avoid trouble with Johnnie or with Charles.”
“I can’t stand it,” Millie cried.
“If you can’t be happy here with us,” Mrs. Jones told her, “I would rather you did not stay. I don’t want anyone in the house who is unhappy.”
The words struck Millie with a sobering effect, as though Mrs. Jones had dashed cold water in her face. They silenced her utterly, and drove her from the room to fight down all that day her desperate fear. That afternoon she made Mrs. Jones another cup of tea.
She thought Joan the most beautiful of babies and she thought of Joan always as her baby, and Joan seemed to Millie to feel that Millie was her whole world, too. When Millie came to her in the morning, even before the nurse entered the room, Joan was apt to begin to crow with delight at her coming. And when Millie bathed her, changed her garments, talked to her in that cheering, reassuring tone which, no matter what her own mood, she was always able to summon for Joan, Joan fairly wriggled with delight. When in the morning it came time for Mrs. Jones to go to town and Millie was summoned to take the baby Joan always came to her eagerly. And sometimes when either Mr. or Mrs. Jones offered to take the baby from Millie, Joan would laugh aloud and throw her arms around Millie’s neck and snuggle her face into the nurse’s shoulder as though it were a game which she played.
Millie used to nurse the memory of these scenes, and to tell herself over and over that Joan loved her more than she loved either her father or her mother; and thus thinking, she would hug Joan with a fierce tenderness full of passion. At such times Joan chuckled and babbled with delight as though these ferocious caresses were delightful to her. Millie revelled in these hours when she had Joan to herself, the rest of the world apart. But at those moments when she perceived that Joan had passed from one of the phases of babyhood to another, abandoning one little trick for the next, Millie felt a poignant alarm at the approach of the time when Joan would no longer be a baby at all and so would escape from her.
She stifled these forebodings, clinging to the present, refusing to consider the future, blinding herself to the inevitable end of all this happiness, insistently declining to look forward to the day when—one way or another—she would lose this baby, whom she loved, as she had lost so many before. Yet these fears, though they were stifled, had their effect upon her; her furtive dread sharpened her tongue, and she found herself saying and doing irritating things. At such moments she was full of regret, regret not so much because of what she had done as because by such actions she laid herself open to dismissal, ran the risk of losing Joan. And afterward she would seek to make amends, throwing herself into her work with new zeal, seeking tasks outside her appointed duties, paying her mistress small attentions, bringing her a potted plant, making a dress for Joan, or serving Mrs. Jones a cup of tea in the afternoon.
Thus her life was a succession of crimes and repentances, a series of passions each followed by fearful remorse. And there were days, occasionally weeks, when she held such a rigid bridle upon her tongue that her silence made her seem sulky; and there were other days when the check which she kept upon herself slipped, and she loosed in bitter words the blind and venomous anger which she felt against the whole world.
Once or twice she caught herself talking to Charles and Laura of Mr. and Mrs. Jones in terms frankly slanderous, and for days thereafter she was full of bitter and terrified self-reproach, moving cautiously, watching the demeanour of her mistress for any sign that her words had been reported, shrinking with fear of the destruction she had invited. She was her own worst enemy and she knew this as well as anyone, but it became more and more difficult for her to keep a curb upon her tongue.
As Joan approached her first birthday, half a dozen influences combined to produce a cumulative nervous strain which Millie found more and more tormenting. For one thing, the baby was maturing. Millie had wished to keep her as long as possible completely helpless and dependent, so she had prisoned her in her crib or in her perambulator, and Joan had not yet learned to creep. But Mrs. Jones at last insisted that Millie put the baby on the floor for an hour or two a day, to exercise those muscles which were ready to assume their functions.
The result was an increasingly rapid development of Joan’s powers. She set herself to the task of learning to manipulate her small body with a persistency as deliberate as though she were quite conscious of what she did. And she would sit upon the floor, pull herself forward over her
legs until she lay on her face, push herself back up to a sitting posture again, pull herself forward once more and roll on her back, and from this position again push herself up until she was sitting erect, following this routine over and over as though she had been set these tasks to do. She began also to exercise her voice, no longer in the meaningless outcries of infancy, but trying different tones, now shrill, now guttural; and some of these utterances assumed a form suggestive of speech, till it was easy to imagine she was trying to say something.
Millie had cared for so many babies that she knew what these signs portended. She knew that Joan would soon escape from her ministering care, and this knowledge oppressed her dreams.
The nurse was also at this time under an increased physical strain. Mrs. Jones was planning a birthday party for Joan, to which half a dozen other babies, a little younger or a little older, would be invited. Millie decided to make a dress which Joan should wear on that occasion; and into this work she threw all her energies, spending upon it every hour not directly devoted to Joan herself, working at it in the early morning, at moments snatched during the day, and late at night when she might better have been asleep. The result was that she was tired almost all the time, and this weariness served to break down in large and larger measure her self-control, till she was in continual conflict within herself, fighting to stifle the resentment which she felt against those among whom her life was cast.
There had long existed between her and Charles a state of open warfare; and this was brought to something like a crisis one evening when Mr. and Mrs. Jones had gone out to dinner. Charles, as he liked to do on such occasions, had put the young son of the house to bed. Millie was moved by some blind and senseless impulse, after Charles had gone downstairs, to get Johnnie up again and insist upon giving him a bath.
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 4