ts, those three severe women? She might, perhaps, have lived
with them when the jolly, handsome butcher died, with them in their
house at Clapton, with them eternally dusting innumerable china
ornaments and correcting elusive mats. The invitation had been extended,
but was forbidding as a mourning-card or the melancholy visit of an
insurance agent with his gossip of death. Death? Was she going to die?

It did not matter. The pain was growing more acute. She dragged herself
to the door and called down to the midwife; called two or three times.

There was no answer except from the clock, with its whisper of Death and
Death. Where was the woman? Where was Charlie? She called again. Then
she remembered, through what seemed years of grinding agony, that the
street door was slammed some time ago. Charlie must have gone out. With
the woman? Had he run away with her? Was she, the wife, forever
abandoned? Was there no life in all the world to reach her solitude? The
house was fearfully, unnaturally silent. She reached up to the cold gas
bracket, and the light flared up without adding a ray of cheerfulness to
the creaking passage. Higher still she turned it, until it sang towards
the ceiling, a thin geyser of flame. The chequers upon the oil-cloth
became blurred, as tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes. She was
deserted, and in pain.

Her mind sailed off along morbid channels to the grim populations of
hysteria. She experienced the merely nervous sensation of many black
beetles running at liberty around the empty kitchen. It was a
visualization of tingling nerves, and, fostered by the weakening
influence of labor pains, it extended beyond the mere thought to the
endowment of a mental picture with powerful and malign purpose, so that,
after a moment or two, she came to imagining that between her and the
world outside black beetles were creating an impassable barrier.

Could Charlie and the woman really have run away? She called again and
peered over the flimsy balustrade down to the ground floor. Or was the
woman lying in the kitchen drunk? Lying there, incapable of action,
among the black beetles? She called again:

"Mrs. Nightman! Mrs. Nightman!"

How dry her hands were, how parched her tongue; and her eyes, how they
burned.

Was she actually dying? Was this engulfing silence the beginning of
death? What was death?

And what was that? What were those three tall, black figures, moving
along the narrow passage downsta