Page:Storm Over Paris.pdf/77

embarrassed. Well, well. I've seen plenty of them. Shy and modest-but they do it just the same. What do you say Madame Berger? You were ashamed once too, weren't you? What's the matter? Did both of you lose your tongues? You can at least smile. Well, well. They've both got their faces screwed up, as though they'd been soaked in vinegar or something..."

Anna, realizing Gertrude's embarrassment, turned and went to the window. The old woman didn't stop her ceaseless chatter. Anna leaned against the table, her back towards the bed. Behind her she could hear Gertrude groaning. "Mama! Mama!" Then she heard a wild, piercing shriek. The clamor awakened the children who added their cries to their mother's groans. Anna hurried to quiet them back to sleep.

Beneath Gertrude's body the bedsheet was a welter of blood. To stifle her shrieks she had stuffed a piece of cloth between her teeth and was biting fiercely on it. Her face was almost black, her gaze wild. Her pulse beat savagely. The blue veins stood out against her temples. Pearly drops of perspiration rolled from her cheeks. "A glass, s'il vous plaît!" the woman shouted. "Here's your four-month boy." Anna felt the fingers of nausea grip her stomach. It seemed to her that all creation had aborted, that the body of life itself had strangled the future in its womb, ejecting it, rejecting it, tossing the bleeding foetus on the soot-covered fire-place where it shivered in its glass like a formless jelly-fish trapped in shallow water...

Later it was quiet in the room. The old woman had gone Gertrude was fast asleep. The stillness lay heavy under a thick blanket. The slightest sound would fray taut nerves. The hands of the clock were joined together at midnight. A dead silence. Terror; a black-draped funeral procession; weeping