ONCE MORE IN NEW YORK
Dr. Crossett was finding it a difficult matter to keep from falling to
sleep. The dinner had been stupid, even for a formal affair of this
sort, where one scarcely expects to be entertained. He had worked hard
all day at the hospital, and after making a brief speech introducing
the guest of honor of the evening, he sat with his chair pushed back
from the disordered dinner table and resigned himself to his fate. A
man could hardly be talked to death in two hours, he thought, and
after all there was hope; perhaps the half hour of informal
conversation that always followed the speech-making might be less
deadly than usual. What a fool he was to give his time to these riots
of platitude; he swore softly to himself as he looked through the haze
of tobacco smoke at the faces of many of the foremost medical and
psychological authorities of France, and, as he always did upon
occasions of this kind, laid elaborate plans for immediately resigning
from the society. He had in fact almost finished a mental draft of his
letter of resignation, when the sound of a hundred voices blending
into a confused babel of conversation warned him that the formal
speech-making was over.
"Thank God for that," he exclaimed in English, turning to his
right-hand neighbor, an American psychologist named Miller, whom he
had met for the first time that evening.
"You were not especially entertained?" questioned that gentleman, with
a smile. "And yet we have listened to several rather deep and weighty
opinions."
"Weighty, I grant you," replied the Doctor. "Heavy possibly would have
been a better word. Why is it that a man, who in himself is both wise
and entertaining, always becomes both a pedant and a bore when he
makes an after-dinner speech?"
"The effort to dominate too many, and too varied an assortment of
minds, no doubt, a species of self-hypnotism; but Professor Carney's
remarks on the distinction between insanity and moral depravity were
interesting. I have just arrived from America, and it is possible that
the ideas he advanced, although fresh to me, may be an old story to
you."
"We have worked much together, Carney and I," replied the Doctor. "He
knows the subject well enough, although we do not agree in all things.
He, for instance, classes many cases as insanity, which to me are
plainly a lack of moral, not of mental, strength. He denies the
existence of an absolutely unmoral person whose mind is sound and
whose power of reasoning is normal. To him such a case does not
exist."
"I wonder what he would have thought of a case I had an opportunity of
observing a few weeks ago," remarked Mr. Miller. "There he could find
no trace of insanity, no lack of logic, or of reason, but an absolute
absence of any moral sense. I think I have never seen a more perfect
example of the thing he denies. Here was a young woman, beautiful,
delicate of body, refined, of good manners, and moderately educated,
to whom no law of man or of society was sacred, who denied the power
of God as lightly as she defied the opinion of the world; who knew
nothing of shame, of duty, or of kindness, and whose mind was as clear
as yours or mine, and whose mental process was absolutely regular."
"Tell me of her," said Dr. Crossett eagerly. "I have several times
found cases that at first seemed to be as lacking in moral sense as
this one you describe, but always on close study I have found some
promptings of the softer impulses. I, for instance, have seen a thief
who robbed the poor-box of a church share his booty to feed a hungry
child whom he met casually upon the street. I have seen a burly brute,
who a few hours before had murdered his wife, weep over the sufferings
of an injured dog. Here there was not an absolute lack of the thing we
perhaps might call soul, although that examples of total and absolute
depravity exist among the sane is a favorite theory of mine. Tell me
of this woman!"
"She was a woman, although she looked to be little more than a child,"
began Mr. Miller. "It was at Narragansett Pier, a summer resort, not
far from New York. I had noticed her from the first, my attention
being attracted by the curious fact that, in spite of her gracious and
happy manner, both my grandchild and her little dog seemed to be
overcome by a queer aversion from the moment when they first came near
to her."
"Ah! You believe then----"
"Only that instinct warned them that this woman was not a friend. I,
myself, in spite of my age, felt a marked attraction, as all men did.
The appeal of sex in this woman was overpowering, although I looked in
vain for the evidences of a passionate nature; physically she was
normal, a slight valvular trouble of the heart I fancy, from what I
heard, but nothing more. She had left a good home to travel about with
a rather dissipated party, all of whom were of much coarser fibre than
herself. I later had a long conversation with the young man, who had
spent in a few weeks a small fortune upon her. He loved her in his
way. She traded upon his love, but I am convinced that she never
rewarded it. I happened to come upon her one day as she lay asleep on
the sand; her face was like a mirror, reflecting the thoughts that
were running through her mind. At first I saw a fierce sexual passion
that frightened me; then as that passed another nature seemed to claim
her, and her look became so pure, so innocent, that I found myself
instinctively raising my hat and standing bareheaded in the sun. Wave
after wave of feeling passed over her sensitive features, good
following bad, purity following lust, the innocence of a child
following the look seen only on the face of one to whom all innocence
is a thing to laugh at. Doctor, I saw on that girl's face what one
might almost call a struggle between good impulses, inherited perhaps
from a pure mother, nurtured no doubt in an honest home, and the evil
of a nature in which, when she was conscious, there was no spark of
decency or honor left. It was like looking on at the struggles of a
divided soul, and slowly seeing the defeat of the good, the triumph of
the evil."
"This is indeed a terrible case," exclaimed Dr. Crossett. "What was
the end?"
"What the real end will be one can only guess," replied Mr. Miller.
"The end, so far as this episode of her life is concerned, began by a
brutal killing of my little granddaughter's dog, quite the most
dreadful scene I ever witnessed, and ended by her leaving the hotel in
the company of a man, who for her sake forgot the daughter whom he
loved with a most unusual affection and, blinded by the power of this
creature's animal sex appeal, made himself a laughing stock to his
acquaintances and a sorrow to his friends. The father disgraced in his
old age, the dupe of this girl who was but little older than the
daughter he left ashamed and heart-broken. Two men, one a young
life-guard, the other the fellow with whom she left her home, each of
them she left with good cause to remember her, and left with a poorer
opinion of the world and a bitterness against all women that will in
the end help on the evil she created in their hearts. To my little
grandchild she brought her first knowledge of the wickedness of the
world. To all whom she met she brought a sorrow; upon all whom she
left she left a trace of her own unworthiness."
"This is horrible, Mr. Miller," exclaimed Dr. Crossett. "Who was this
woman?"
"Her name," replied Mr. Miller, "was Lola Barnhelm! Doctor!" He sprang
to his feet as he saw the look on Dr. Crossett's face. "Doctor!"
"All right, sir, I--I beg your pardon."
Dr. Crossett slowly poured himself a glass of brandy from the small
decanter on the table and raised it to his lips with a hand that
trembled visibly. "I--I am not quite myself to-night, sir," he
continued; "I am going to ask you to excuse me. Gentlemen." He rose, a
little unsteadily, and stood looking about him at the smiling faces
that turned to him. "Gentlemen," he repeated, "I find that I must
leave you. Will you pardon my lack of formality and allow me to say
good night?"
He left the room, refusing the many anxious offers of company, for he
was a rarely popular man, and there was something in the gray pallor
of his face that told them that he was suffering, and jumping into a
cab he gave the address of his apartment. During his long drive across
Paris, for he lived at the further end of the Boulevard St. Germain,
he sat motionless, struck dumb with the horror of the thing he had
heard.
"Lola! Lola! Her mother." He could see them both until the tears
blinded his eyes. "That she should come to this. Lola, to her child,
the child that might have been his! Great God!" As he unlocked the
door of his private hall his man came out to meet him.
"A letter, Doctor, marked important."
"Very well, Louis; you need not wait."
He went slowly into his study, and was about to drop the letter
carelessly on the table as the New York post-mark caught his eye. He
looked again; the envelope was addressed in what looked like a child's
unformed handwriting. He opened it.
"'My dear doctor,'" he read, "'if you love the doctor like I
think you love him, come; he needs you. He is sick, and he
looks like he wanted to die. There ain't nobody else. Please
come. Excuse spelling and things and come; we need you.
MARIA.'"
He caught the next steamer from Liverpool.