Jane’s pregnancy

Jane’s pregnancy turns the Adams’ already precarious life into a narrowing struggle over work, money, and care. Discovered after Robert Adam has lost his job for marrying a woman who once served drinks at a bar, it removes a possible source of income just as the couple’s resources begin to run out. As the pregnancy advances, Jane’s labor at home and her care for her ill husband become inseparable; she gives birth prematurely and dies before the night is over.

Discovery and the loss of work

Robert tells the narrator that his employer dismissed him because his marriage to a former barmaid was said to damage the company’s prestige and threaten its sales. The narrator initially finds such a reason difficult to believe, but Robert shows him the employer’s handwritten letter. The pregnancy soon compounds the consequences of this dismissal. The narrator has sent Jane to seek work through acquaintances, but Robert opposes the idea of his wife taking a job, reflecting the period’s resistance to wives entering paid employment. Jane then realizes that even if she could secure a position, she would be unable to accept it because she is pregnant.

The timing makes the pregnancy consequential without making it a choice between simple alternatives: the household needs money, yet Jane cannot take up the work that might help provide it. Robert tries to reassure her that he still has some money in the bank, but the couple’s situation continues to deteriorate. Their circumstances expose how the stigma attached to Jane’s former work and Robert’s marriage has material effects beyond social disapproval: his job disappears, while her pregnancy restricts the means available to respond.

Domestic hardship as the pregnancy advances

Robert finds commission work selling fabric for a firm that makes umbrellas. He spends the day traveling with samples, including journeys to Barabazar, and returns home for a modest meal Jane has prepared before setting out again. The fabric is well known, but umbrella sales are limited; his commissions are too small to pay even for a servant or cook. Jane must therefore manage the household herself as her due date approaches.

The family lives in a dilapidated two-room flat in Williams Lane. Its plaster is peeling away to reveal the bricks beneath. The narrator, who visits Jane, contrasts this domestic labor and cramped accommodation with the life she had known at the Hotel Shahjahan: there, attendants escorted her to the dining room and she moved across soft carpets amid the hotel’s comforts. Now she cooks and tries to keep the flat in order while weakened by pregnancy. The contrast marks a material reversal, not merely a change of address. The hotel’s remembered ease cannot protect her from the accumulating demands of poverty, household work, and approaching childbirth.

Illness, premature birth, and death

As Jane’s delivery draws near, Robert contracts smallpox at home in Williams Lane. A priest tells the narrator that Robert must be taken to an infectious-disease hospital, but the practical questions are acute: who will care for him, who will care for Jane, and how will they pay? Jane refuses to leave her husband and stays beside him throughout the day; she has fainted the previous night. The narrator’s friends warn him to keep away and suggest sending money through the priest. He goes toward the house along Bowbazar Street but does not enter.

The account then turns to the consequences for Jane. When she asks how Robert is, those around her try to conceal that he has lost the sight of one eye. They are unpracticed at lying; their tears give away their distress, and one of them breaks down. Jane faints, and the boys carry her to the priest’s house. That same night she gives birth prematurely. In the early morning, the priests kneel and pray for her as she lies near death; she dies before the night has ended. The account does not state that childbirth alone caused her death, and the sequence leaves her final illness within the combined crisis of premature labor, her husband’s sickness, and their lack of resources.

Narrative significance

Jane’s pregnancy is presented through changing practical circumstances: first as the reason she cannot accept work, then as the approaching birth that intensifies the demands on a household without paid help, and finally through a premature delivery followed by her death. It is not an isolated family event. The job dismissal, inadequate commission income, poor housing, and Robert’s smallpox all shape the conditions in which she carries the pregnancy and gives birth.

The timing of her death also sets private suffering against the hotel’s ongoing business. While Jane’s friends are grieving and the priests are praying, the bar at the Hotel Shahjahan remains open and customers continue to call for drinks. The contrast does not lessen the particularity of her loss; it shows how easily the daily life of the hotel proceeds beside a catastrophe among people once connected to it. Pregnancy, in this episode, is both a bodily condition with an approaching due date and a point at which social exclusion and material hardship become impossible to separate from the family’s prospects.