“The question seems to be—” began the Englishman. He looked up and bowed
to a girl in black who had just come in from deck and was taking the
seat beside him. “The question seems to be—” The girl was having some
difficulty in removing her coat, and he turned to assist her.
“In my opinion,” remarked the distinguished alienist, who was returning
from a vacation in Vienna, “the question is whether or not civilization
is defeating its own aims in placing an exorbitant value on human life.”
As he spoke he leaned forward authoritatively and accented his words
with foreign precision.
“You mean that the survival of the fittest is checkmated,” remarked a
young journalist travelling in the interest of a New York daily, “that
civilization should practise artificial selection, as it were?”
The alienist shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly. “My dear sir,” he
protested, “I mean nothing. It is the question that means something.”
“Well, as I was saying,” began the Englishman again, reaching for the
salt and upsetting a spoonful, “the question seems to be whether or not,
in any circumstances, the saving of a human life may become positively
immoral.”
“Upon that point—” began the alienist; but a young woman, in a white
dress, who was seated on the Captain’s right interrupted him.
“How could it?” she asked. “At least I don’t see how it could. Do you,
Captain?”
“There is no doubt,” remarked the journalist, looking up from a
conversation he had drifted into with a lawyer from one of the Western
States, “that the more humane spirit pervading modern civilization has
not worked wholly for good in the development of the species. Probably,
for instance, if we had followed the Spartan practice of exposing
unhealthy infants, we should have retained something of the Spartan
hardihood. Certainly if we had been content to remain barbarians both
our digestions and our nerves would have been the better for it, and
melancholia would perhaps have been unknown. But, at the same time, the
loss of a number of the more heroic virtues is overbalanced by an
increase of the softer ones. Notably, human life has never before been
regarded so sacredly.”
“On the other side,” observed the lawyer, lifting his hand to adjust his
eyeglasses, and pausing to brush a crumb from his coat, “though it is
all very well to be philanthropic to the point of pauperizing half a
community and of growing squeamish about capital punishment, the whole
thing sometimes takes a disgustingly morbid turn. Why, it seems as if
criminals were the real American heroes! Only last week I visited a man
sentenced to death for the murder of his two wives, and, by Jove, the
place was literally besieged by women sympathizers. I counted six
bunches of roses in his cell, and at least fifty notes.”
“Oh, but that is a form of nervous hysteria!” said the girl in black,
“and must be considered separately. Every sentiment has its fanatics,
philanthropy as well as religion. But we can’t judge a movement by a few
over-wrought disciples.”
“Why not?” asked the Englishman, quietly. He was a middle-aged man, with
an optimistic expression and a build of comfortable solidity. “But to
return to the original proposition. I suppose we all accept as a
self-evident truth the axiom that the highest civilization is the one in
which the highest value is placed upon individual life.”
“And happiness,” added the girl in black.
“And happiness,” assented the Englishman.
“And yet,” commented the lawyer, “I think that most of us will admit
that such a society, where life is regarded as sacred because it is
valuable to the individual, not because it is valuable to the state,
tends to the non-production of heroes.”
“That the average will be higher and the exception lower,” observed the
journalist. “In other words, that there will be a general elevation of
the mass, accompanied by a corresponding lowering of the few.”
“On the whole, I think our system does very well,” said the Englishman,
carefully measuring the horseradish. “A mean between two extremes is apt
to be satisfactory in results. If we don’t produce a Marcus Aurelius or
a Seneca, neither do we produce a Nero or a Phocas. We may have lost
patriotism, but we have gained humanity, which is better. If we have
lost chivalry, we have acquired decency; and if we have ceased to be
picturesque, we have become cleanly, which is considerably more to be
desired.”
“I have never felt the romanticism of the Middle Ages,” remarked the
girl in black. “When I read of the glories of the Crusaders, I can’t
help remembering that a knight wore a single garment for a lifetime, and
hacked his horse to pieces for a whim. Just as I never think of that
chivalrous brute, Richard the Lion-Hearted, that I don’t see him
chopping off the heads of his prisoners.”
“Oh, I don’t think that any of us are sighing for a revival of the
Middle Ages,” returned the journalist. “The worship of the past has for
its devotees people who have known only the present.”
“Which is as it should be,” commented the lawyer. “If man were confined
to the worship of the knowable, all the world would lapse into atheism.”
“Just as the great lovers of humanity were generally hermits,” added the
girl in black. “I had an uncle who used to say that he never really
loved mankind until he went to live in the wilderness.”
“I think we are drifting from the point,” said the alienist. “Was it
not: Can the saving of a human life ever prove to be an immoral act? I
once held that it could.”
“Did you act upon the theory?” asked the lawyer, with rising interest.
“I maintain that no proposition can be said to exist until it is
translated into action. Otherwise it is in an embryonic state merely.”
The alienist laid down his fork and leaned forward. He was a
notable-looking man of some thirty-odd years, who had made a sudden leap
into popularity through several successful cases. He had a nervous,
muscular face, with singularly penetrating eyes and hair of a light
sandy colour. His hands were white and well shaped.
“It was some years ago,” he said, bending a scintillant glance round the
table. “If you will listen—”
There followed a stir of assent, accompanied by a nod from the young
woman on the Captain’s right. “I feel as if it would be a ghost story,”
she declared.
“It is not a story at all,” returned the alienist, lifting his wineglass
and holding it against the light. “It is merely a fact.”
Then he glanced swiftly round the table as if challenging attention.
“As I said,” he began, slowly, “it was some few years ago. Just what
year it was does not matter; but at that time I had completed a course
at Heidelberg, and expected shortly to set out with an exploring party
for South Africa. It turned out afterward that I did not go, but for the
purpose of the present story it is sufficient that I intended to do so,
and had made my preparations accordingly. At Heidelberg I had lived
among a set of German students who were permeated with the metaphysics
of Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann, and the rest, and I was pretty well
saturated myself. At that age I was an ardent disciple of pessimism. I
am still a disciple, but my ardour has abated, which is not the fault of
pessimism, but the virtue of middle age—”
“A man is called conservative when he grows less radical,” interrupted
the journalist.
“Or when he grows less in every direction,” added the Englishman,
“except in physical bulk.” The alienist accepted the suggestions with an
inclination, and continued. “One of my most cherished convictions,” he
said, “was to the effect that every man is the sole arbiter of his fate.
As Schopenhauer has put it, _‘that there is nothing to which a man has a
more unassailable title than to his own life and person.’_ Indeed, that
particular sentence had become a kind of motto with our set, and some of
my companions even went so far as to preach the proper ending of life
with the ending of the power of individual usefulness.”
He paused to help himself to salad.
“I was in Scotland at the time, where I had spent a fortnight with my
parents, in a small village on the Kyles of Bute. While there I had
been treating an invalid cousin who had acquired the morphine habit,
and who, under my care, had determined to uproot it. Before leaving I
had secured from her the amount of the drug which she had in her
possession—some thirty grains—done up in a sealed package, and
labelled by a London chemist. As I was in haste, I put it in my bag,
thinking that I would add it to my case of medicines when I reached
Leicester, where I was to spend the night with an old schoolmate. I
took the boat at Tighnabruaich, the small village, found a local train
at Gourock, to reach Glasgow, with one minute in which to catch the
first express to London. I made the change, and secured a first-class
smoking-compartment, which I at first thought to be vacant; but when
the train had started a man came from the dressing-room and took the
seat across from me. At first I paid no heed to him, but upon looking
up once or twice and finding his eyes upon me, I became unpleasantly
conscious of his presence. He was thin almost to emaciation, and yet
there was a suggestion of physical force about him which it was
difficult to account for, since he was both short and slight. His
clothes were shabby, though well made, and his tie had the appearance
of having been tied in haste, or by nervous fingers. There was a trace
of sensuality about his mouth, over which he wore a drooping yellow
moustache tinged with gray, and he was somewhat bald on the crown of
his head, which lent a deceptive hint of intellectuality to his
uncovered forehead. As he crossed his legs, I saw that his boots were
carefully blacked, and that they were long and slender, tapering to a
decided point.”
“I have always held,” interpolated the lawyer, “that to judge a man’s
character you must look at his feet.”
The alienist sipped his claret and took up his words:
“After passing the first stop, I remembered a book at the bottom of my
bag, and unfastening the strap in my search for the book, I laid a
number of small articles on the seat beside me, among them the sealed
package bearing the morphine label and the name of the London chemist.
Having found the book, I turned to replace the articles, when I noticed
that the man across from me was gazing attentively at the labelled
package. For a moment his expression startled me, and I stared back at
him from across my open bag, into which I had dropped the articles.
There was in his eyes a curious mixture of passion and repulsion, and,
beyond it all, the look of a hungry hound when he sees food. Thinking
that I had chanced upon a victim of the opium craving, I closed the bag,
placed it in the net above my head, and opened my book.
“For a while we rode in silence. Nothing was heard except the noise of
the train and the clicking of our bags as they jostled each other in the
receptacle above. I remember these details very vividly, because since
then I have recalled the slightest fact in connection with the incident.
I knew that the man across from me drew a cigar from his case, felt in
his pocket for an instant, and then turned to me for a match. At the
same time I experienced the feeling that the request veiled a larger
purpose, and that there were matches in the pocket into which he had
thrust his fingers.
“But, as I complied with his request, he glanced indifferently out of
the window, and following his gaze, I saw that we were passing a group
of low lying hills sprinkled with stray patches of heather, and that
across the hills a flock of sheep were filing, followed by a peasant
girl in a short skirt. It was the last faint reminder of the Highlands.
“The man across from me leaned out, looking back upon the neutral sky,
the sparse patches of heather, and the flock of sheep.
“‘What a tone the heather gives to a landscape!’ he remarked, and his
voice sounded forced and affected.
“I bowed without replying, and as he turned from the window, and a
draught of cinders blew in, I bent forward to lower the sash. In a
moment he spoke again:
“‘Do you go to London?’
“‘To Leicester,’ I answered, laying the book aside, impelled by a sudden
interest. ‘Why do you ask?’
“He flushed nervously.
“‘I—oh, nothing,’ he answered, and drew away from me.
“Then, as if with swift determination, he reached forward and lifted the
book I had laid on the seat. It was a treatise of Von Hartmann’s in
German.
“‘I had judged that you were a physician,’ he said, ‘a student, perhaps,
from a German university?’
“‘I am.’
“He paused for an instant, and then spoke in absent-minded reiteration,
‘So you don’t go on to London?’
“‘No,’ I returned, impatiently. ‘Can I do anything for you?’
“He handed me the book, regarding me resolutely as he did so.
“‘Are you a sensible man?’
“I bowed.
“‘And a philosopher?’
“‘In amateur fashion.’
“With feverish energy he went on more quickly, ‘You have in your
possession,’ he said, ‘something for which I would give my whole
fortune.’ He laid two half-sovereigns and some odd silver in the palm of
his hand. ‘This is all I possess,’ he continued, ‘but I would give it
gladly.’
“I looked at him curiously.
“‘You mean the morphine?’ I demanded.
“He nodded. ‘I don’t ask you to give it to me, I only ask—’
“I interrupted him. ‘Are you in pain?’
“He laughed softly, and I really believe he felt a tinge of amusement.
‘It is a question of expediency,’ he explained. If you happen to be a
moralist—’ He broke off.
“‘What of it?’ I inquired.
“He settled himself in his corner, resting his head against the
cushions.
“‘You get out at Leicester,’ he said, recklessly. ‘I go on to London,
where Providence, represented by Scotland Yard, is awaiting me.’
“I started. ‘For what?’
“‘They call it murder, I believe,’ he returned; but what they call it
matters very little. I call it divine justice—that also matters very
little. The point is—I shall arrive, they will be there before me. That
is settled. Every station along the road is watched.’
“I glanced out of the window.
“‘But you came from Glasgow,’ I suggested.
“‘Worse luck! I waited in the dressing-room until the train started. I
hoped to have the compartment alone, but—’ He leaned forward and lowered
the window-shade. ‘If you don’t object,’ he said, apologetically; ‘I
find the glare trying. It is a question for a moralist,’ he repeated.
‘Indeed, I may call myself a question for a moralist,’ and he smiled
again with that ugly humour. ‘To begin with the beginning, the question
is bred in the bone and it’s out in the blood.’ He nodded at my look of
surprise. ‘You are an American,’ he continued, ‘so am I. I was born in
Washington some thirty years ago. My father was a politician, whose
honour was held to be unimpeachable—which was a mistake. His name
doesn’t matter, but he became very wealthy through judicious
speculations in votes and other things. My mother has always suffered
from an incipient hysteria, which developed shortly before my birth.’ He
wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and knocked the ashes from his
cigar with a flick of his finger. ‘The motive for this is not far to
seek,’ he said, with a glance at my travelling-bag. He had the coolest
bravado I have ever met. ‘As a child,’ he went on, ‘I gave great
promise. Indeed, we moved to England that I might be educated at Oxford.
My father considered the ecclesiastical atmosphere to be beneficial. But
while at college I got into trouble with a woman, and I left. My father
died, his fortune burst like a bubble, and my mother moved to the
country. I was put into a banking office, but I got into more trouble
with women, this time two of them. One was a variety actress, and I
married her. I didn’t want to do it. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help
it, and I did it. A month later I left her. I changed my name and went
to Belfast where I resolved to become an honest man. It was a tough job,
but I laboured and I succeeded for a time. The variety actress began
looking for me, but I escaped her, and have escaped her so far. That was
eight years ago. And several years after reaching Belfast I met another
woman. She was different. I fell ill of fever in Ireland, and she nursed
me. She was a good woman, with a broad Irish face, strong hands, and
motherly shoulders. I was weak and she was strong, and I fell in love
with her. I tried to tell her about the variety actress, but somehow I
couldn’t, and I married her.’ He shot the stump of his cigar through the
opposite window and lighted another, this time drawing the match from
his pocket. ‘She is an honest woman,’ he said, ‘as honest as the day.
She believes in me. It would kill her to know about the variety actress
and all the others. There is one child, a girl, a freckle-faced mite
just like her mother, and another is coming.’
“‘She knows nothing of this affair?’
“‘Not a blamed thing. She is the kind of woman who is good because she
can’t help herself. She enjoys it. I never did. My mother is different
too. She would die if other people knew of this; my wife would die if
she knew of it herself. Well, I got tired, and I wanted money, so I left
her and went to Dublin. I changed my name and got a clerkship in a
shipping-office. My wife thinks I went to America to get work, and if
she never hears of me she’ll probably think no worse. I did intend going
to America, but somehow I didn’t. I got in with a man who signed
somebody’s name to a cheque and got me to present it. Then we quarrelled
about the money; the man threw the job on me, and the affair came out.
But before they arrested me, I ran him down and shot him. I was ridding
the world of a damned traitor.’
“He raised the shade with a nervous hand; but the sun flashed into his
eyes, and he lowered it.
“‘I suppose I’d hang for it,’ he said. ‘There isn’t much doubt of that.
If I waited, I’d hang for it, but I am not going to wait. I am going to
die.’
“‘And how?’
“‘Before this train reaches London,’ he replied. ‘I am a dead man. There
are two ways. I might say three, except that a pitch from the carriage
might mean only a broken leg. But there is this—’ He drew a vial from
his pocket and held it to the light. It contained an ounce or so of
carbolic acid.
“‘One of the most corrosive of irritants,’ I observed.
“‘And there is—your package.’
“My first impulse was to force the vial from him. He was a slight man,
and I could have overcome him with but little exertion. But the exertion
I did not make. I should as soon have thought, when my rational humour
reasserted itself, of knocking a man down and robbing him of his watch.
The acid was as exclusively his property as the clothes he wore, and
equally his life was his own. Had he declared his intention to hurl
himself from the window, I might not have made way for him, but I should
certainly not have obstructed his passage.
“But the morphine was mine, and that I should assist him was another
matter, so I said:
“‘The package belongs to me.’
“‘And you will not exchange?’
“‘Certainly not.’
“He answered, almost angrily:
“‘Why not be reasonable? You admit that I am in a mess of it?’
“‘Readily.’
“‘You also admit that my life is morally my own?’
“‘Equally.’
“‘That its continuance could in no wise prove to be of benefit to
society?’
“‘I do.’
“‘That for all connected with me it is better that I should die unknown
and under an assumed name?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Then you admit also that the best I can do is to kill myself before
reaching London?’
“‘Perhaps.’
“‘So you will leave me the morphine when you get off at Leicester?’
“‘No.’
“He struck the window-sill impatiently with the palm of his hand.
“‘And why not?’
“I hesitated an instant.
“‘Because, upon the whole, I do not care to be the instrument of your
self-destruction.’
“‘Don’t be a fool!’ he retorted. ‘Speak honestly, and say that because
of a little moral shrinking on your part, you prefer to leave a human
being to a death of agony. I don’t like physical pain. I am like a woman
about it, but it is better than hanging, or life-imprisonment, or any
jury finding.’
“I became exhortatory.
“‘Why not face it like a man and take your chances? Who knows—’
“‘I have had my chances,’ he returned. ‘I have squandered more chances
than most men ever lay eyes on, and I don’t care. If I had the
opportunity, I’d squander them again. It is the only thing chances are
made for.’
“‘What, a scoundrel you are!’ I exclaimed.
“‘Well, I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘there have been worse men. I never
said a harsh word to a woman, and I never hit a man when he was down—’
“I blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to hit you,’ I responded.
“He took no notice.
“‘I like my wife,’ he said. ‘She is a good woman, and I’d do a good deal
to keep her and the children from knowing the truth. Perhaps I’d kill
myself even if I didn’t want to. I don’t know, but I am tired—damned
tired.’
“‘And yet you deserted her.’
“‘I did. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. If I were free to go
back to her to-morrow, unless I was ill and wanted nursing, I’d see that
she had grown shapeless, and that her hands were coarse.’ He stretched
out his own, which were singularly white and delicate. ‘I believe I’d
leave her in a week,’ he said.
“Then with an eager movement he pointed to my bag.
“‘That is the ending of the difficulty,’ he added. ‘Otherwise I swear
that before the train gets to London, I will swallow this stuff and die
like a rat.’
“‘I admit your right to die in any manner you choose; but I don’t see
that it is my place to assist you. It is an ugly job.”
“‘So am I,’ he retorted, grimly. ‘At any rate, if you leave the train
with that package in your bag it will be cowardice—sheer cowardice. And
for the sake of your cowardice you will damn me to this.’ He touched the
vial.
“‘It won’t be pleasant,’ I said, and we were silent.
“I knew that the man had spoken the truth. I was accustomed to lies, and
had learned to detect them. I knew, also, that the world would be well
rid of him and his kind. Why I should preserve him for death upon the
gallows I did not see. The majesty of the law would be in no way ruffled
by his premature departure; and if I could trust that part of his story,
the lives of innocent women and children would, in the other case,
suffer considerably. And, even if I and my unopened bag alighted at
Leicester, I was sure that he would never reach London alive. He was a
desperate man, this I read in his set face, his dazed eyes, his nervous
hands. He was a poor devil, and I was sorry for him. Why, then, should I
contribute, by my refusal to comply with his request, an additional hour
of agony to his existence? Could I, with my pretence of philosophic
freedom, alight at my station, leaving him to swallow the acid and die
like a rat in a cage before the journey was over? I remembered that I
had once seen a guinea-pig die from the effects of carbolic acid, and
the remembrance sickened me.
“As I sat there listening to the noise of the slackening train, which
was nearing Leicester, I thought of a hundred things. I thought of
Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann. I thought of the dying guinea-pig. I
thought of the broad-faced Irish wife and the two children.
“Then ‘Leicester’ flashed before me, and the train stopped. I rose,
gathered my coat and rug, and lifted the volume of Von Hartmann from the
seat. The man remained motionless in the corner of the compartment, but
his eyes followed me.
“I stooped, opened my bag, and laid the chemist’s package on the seat.
Then I stepped out, closing the door after me.”
As the speaker finished, he reached forward, selected an almond from the
stand of nuts, fitted it carefully between the crackers, and cracked it
slowly.
The young woman in the white dress started up with a shudder.
“What a horrible story!” she exclaimed; “for it is a story, after all,
and not a fact.”
“A point, rather,” suggested the Englishman; “but is that all?”
“All of the point,” returned the alienist. “The next day I saw in the
_Times_ that a man, supposed to be James Morganson, who was wanted for
murder, was found dead in a first-class smoking-compartment of the
Midland Railway. Coroner’s verdict, ‘Death resulting from an overdose of
opium, taken with suicidal intent.’”
The journalist dropped a lump of sugar in his cup and watched it
attentively.
“I don’t think I could have done it,” he said. “I might have left him
with his carbolic. But I couldn’t have deliberately given him his
death-potion.”
“But as long as he was going to die,” responded the girl in black, “it
was better to let him die painlessly.”
The Englishman smiled. “Can a woman ever consider the ethical side of a
question when the sympathetic one is visible?” he asked.
The alienist cracked another almond. “I was sincere,” he said. “Of that
there is no doubt. I thought I did right. The question is—did I do
right?”
“It would have been wiser,” began the lawyer, argumentatively, “since
you were the stronger, to take the vial from him and leave him to the
care of the law.”
“But the wife and children,” replied the girl in black. “And hanging is
so horrible!”
“So is murder,” responded the lawyer, dryly.
The young woman on the Captain’s right laid her napkin on the table and
rose. “I don’t know what was right,” she said, “but I do know that in
your place I should have felt like a murderer.”
The alienist smiled half cynically. “So I did,” he answered; “but there
is such a thing, my dear young lady, as a conscientious murderer.”