A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen Scott. Louisa Young

Van Nes. 5 came Dr. Slept 5 till 8. About 10.30 forehead appeared. 11:15 pulse weakened, instruments—no time for chloroform. Alive—rupture to rectum … stitches. Placenta easy— buried it in sand.

      25 Tues: Nurse Kist arrived. 12 walked with Ted to Nordwyck Binnen to buy things. 10pm, found her flushed. Went to interview Dr at his house. He said possibly never dance again and certainly not for 8 weeks.

      Later Kathleen wrote a fuller version:

      The local doctor, a little fat middle aged Dutchman with a stubbly beard, arrived with a black handbag containing, he said, anaesthetic; this, however, he left in the hall, both then and later. Then followed the most terrible hours that I had ever experienced. I had seen and heard things grim enough in the mountain hospital, but here must be, I thought, the ultimate agony. Hour after hour I held the hands, the head, the writhing body, the same hands and head and lovely body that has held European audiences enthralled. The cries and sights of a slaughterhouse could not be more terrible…

      Isadora said later that no woman who had ever had a child would have any reason to fear the Spanish Inquisition:

      It must have been a mild sport in comparison. Relentless, cruel, knowing no release, no pity, this terrible unseen genie had me in his grip and was, in continued spasms, tearing my bones and sinews apart. I have only to shut my eyes and I hear again my shrieks and groans … And for two days and two nights this unspeakable horror continued. And on the third morning, this absurd doctor brought out an immense pair of forceps and, without an anaesthetic of any sort, achieved the butchery.

      Kathleen tried to get the doctor to administer the anaesthetic he had in the hall, but ‘he seemed to reply only that there wasn’t time; he could not leave her to get it ready; and so the frenzied agony went on and on and on.’

      Not unusually for the time, Kathleen felt that an artistically sensitive person suffered more pain than a philistine, and Isadora believed that the more civilized the person, the more fearful the agony. She thought it a nonsense to speak of any kind of female emancipation until ‘this operation of childbirth, like other operations, shall be made painless and endurable’, and could not forgive ‘the unspeakable egotism and blindness of men of science who permit such atrocities when they can be remedied’. Kathleen, writing in 1932, expressed great relief that among the changes in women’s lot this suffering, at least, was no longer expected of them.

      And after the frenzy, the agony, the two days and two nights of unspeakable horror, there was the baby. ‘It was unhurt by it all,’ wrote Kathleen. ‘It was perfect. I turned from the horror with joy to the tiny miraculous object.’ She had a brief, fleeting moment of jealousy that it was not her son, and then a moment of shock that it was not anybody’s son, but a little girl. But soon she was ‘tending and purring over the queer little atom with that love that passes all understanding, the love of a woman for a newborn babe’. The mother herself felt ‘this tremendous love, surpassing the love of men. I was stretched and bleeding, torn and helpless, while the little being sucked and howled. Life, life, life! Give me life! Oh, where was my Art? My Art or any Art? What did I care for Art! I felt I was a God, and superior to any artist.’