"He didn't see the girl very often. She lives at some little distance.
He was busy,--you know how he worked,--and she was chained at home, more
or less. Occasionally he slipped away for a week-end, to see her. One
time--the last time, about two months ago--he managed to get in a whole
week. It was as near happiness as Ferguson ever got, I imagine; for they
were able to fix a date. Good heaven, how he loved that girl! Just
before he went, he told me of the engagement. I barely knew her, but, as
I said, she's some sort of kin. Then, after he came back, he sent for me
to come and see him. I didn't like his cheek, but I went as though I had
been a laboratory boy. I'm not like you. Ferguson always did get me. He
wanted the greatest good of the greatest number. Nothing petty about
him. He was a big man.
"I went, as I say. And Ferguson told me, the very first thing, that the
engagement was off. He began by cocking his hair a good deal. But he
almost lost control of himself. He didn't cock it long: he ruffled it
instead, with his hands. I thought he was in a queer state, for he
seemed to want to give me, with his beautiful scientific precision--as
if he'd been preparing a slide--the details of a country walk he and she
had taken the day before he left. It began with grade-crossings, and I
simply couldn't imagine what he was getting at. It wasn't his business
to fight grade-crossings--though they might be a very pretty symbol for
the kind of thing he was fighting, tooth and nail, all the time. I
couldn't seem to see it, at first; but finally it came out. There was a
grade-crossing, with a 'Look out for the Engine' sign, and there was a
tow-headed infant in rags. They had noticed the infant before. It had
bandy legs and granulated eyelids, and seemed to be dumb. It had started
them off on eugenics. She was very keen on the subject; Ferguson, being
a big scientist, had some reserves. It was a real argument.
"Then everything happened at once. Tow-head with the sore eyes rocked
onto the track simultaneously with the whistle. They were about fifty
yards off. Ferguson sprinted back down the hill, the girl screaming
pointlessly meanwhile. There was just time--you'll have to take my word
for this; Ferguson explained it all to me in the most meticulous detail,
but I can't repeat that masterpiece of exposition--for Ferguson to
decide. To decide again, you understand, precisely as he had decided on
the _Argentina_. Rotten luck, wasn't it? He could just have flung
tow-head out of the way by getting under the engine himself. He grabbed
for tow-head, but he didn't roll onto the track. So tow-head was killed.
If he had got there ten seconds earlier, he could have done the trick.
He was ten seconds too late to save both Ferguson and tow-head. So--once
more--he saved Ferguson. Do you get the situation?"
"I should say I did!" shouted Chantry. "Twice in a man's life--good
Lord! I hope you walked out of his house at that point."
"I didn't. I was very much interested. And by the way, Chantry, if
Ferguson had given his life for tow-head, you would have been the first
man to write a pleasant little article for some damned highbrow review,
to prove that it was utterly wrong that Ferguson should have exchanged
his life for that of a little Polish defective. I can even see you
talking about the greatest good of the greatest number. You would have
loved the paradox of it; the mistaken martyr, self-preservation the
greatest altruism, and all the rest of it. But because Ferguson did
exactly what you would have said in your article that he ought to have
done, you are in a state of virtuous chill."
"I should have written no such article. I don't see how you can be so
flippant."
"Flippant--I? Have I the figure of a flippant man? Can't you
see--honestly, now, can't you see?--that it was a hideous misfortune for
that situation to come to Ferguson twice? Can't you see that it was
about as hard luck as a man ever had? Look at it just once from his
point of view."
"I can't," said Chantry frankly. "I can understand a man's being a
coward, saving his own skin because he wants to. But to save his own
skin on principle--humph! Talk of paradoxes: there's one for you.
There's not a principle on earth that tells you to save your own life
at some one's else expense. If he thought it was principle, he was the
bigger defective of the two. Of course it would have been a pity; of
course we should all have regretted it; but there's not a human being in
this town, high or low, who wouldn't have applauded, with whatever
regret--who wouldn't have said he did the only thing a self-respecting
man could do. Of course it's a shame; but that is the only way the race
has ever got on: by the strong, because they were strong, going under
for the weak, because they were weak. Otherwise we'd all be living, to
this day, in hell."
"I know; I know." Havelock's voice was touched with emotion. "That's the
convention--invented by individualists, for individualists. All sorts of
people would see it that way, still. But you've got more sense than
most; and I will make you at least see the other point of view. Suppose
Ferguson to have been a good Catholic--or a soldier in the ranks. If his
confessor or his commanding officer had told him to save his own skin,
you'd consider Ferguson justified; you might even consider the priest or
the officer justified. The one thing you can't stand is the man's giving
himself those orders. But let's not argue over it now--let's go back to
the story. I'll make you 'get' Ferguson, anyhow--even if I can't make
him 'get' you.
"Well, here comes in the girl."
"And you said there was no girl in it!"
Chantry could not resist that. He believed that Havelock's assertion had
been made only because he didn't want the girl in it--resented her being
there.
"There isn't, as I see it," replied Havelock the Dane quietly. "From my
point of view, the story is over. Ferguson's decision: that is the whole
thing--made more interesting, more valuable, because the repetition of
the thing proves beyond a doubt that he acted on principle, not on
impulse. If he had flung himself into the life-boat because he was a
coward, he would have been ashamed of it; and whatever he might have
done afterwards, he would never have done that thing again. He would
have been sensitive: not saving his own life would have turned into an
obsession with him. But there is left, I admit, the murder. And murders
always take the public. So I'll give you the murder--though it throws no
light on Ferguson, who is the only thing in the whole accursed affair
that really counts."
"The murder? I don't see--unless you mean the murdering of the
tow-headed child."
"I mean the murder of Ferguson by the girl he loved."
"You said 'suicide' a little while ago," panted Chantry.
"Technically, yes. She was a hundred miles away when it happened. But
she did it just the same. Oh, I suppose I've got to tell you, as
Ferguson told me."
"Did he tell you he was going to kill himself?" Chantry's voice was
sharp.
"He did not. Ferguson wasn't a fool. But it was plain as day to me after
it happened, that he had done it himself."
"How--"
"I'm telling you this, am I not? Let me tell it, then. The thing
happened in no time, of course. The girl got over screaming, and ran
down to the track, frightened out of her wits. The train managed to
stop, about twice its own length farther down, round a bend in the
track, and the conductor and brakeman came running back. The mother came
out of her hovel, carrying twins. The--the--thing was on the track,
across the rails. It was a beastly mess, and Ferguson got the girl away;
set her down to cry in a pasture, and then went back and helped out, and
gave his testimony, and left money, a lot of it, with the mother,
and--all the rest. You can imagine it. No one there considered that
Ferguson ought to have saved the child; no one but Ferguson dreamed that
he could have. Indeed, an ordinary man, in Ferguson's place, wouldn't
have supposed he could. It was only that brain, working like lightning,
working as no plain man's could, that had made the calculation and
_seen_. There were no preliminary seconds lost in surprise or shock, you
see. Ferguson's mind hadn't been jarred from its pace for an instant.
The thing had happened too quickly for any one--except Ferguson--to
understand what was going on. Therefore he ought to have laid that
super-normal brain under the wheels, of course!
"Ferguson was so sane, himself, that he couldn't understand, even after
he had been engaged six months, our little everyday madnesses. It never
occurred to him, when he got back to the girl and she began all sorts of
hysterical questions, not to answer them straight. It was by way of
describing the event simply, that he informed her that he would just
have had time to pull the creature out, but not enough to pull himself
back afterwards. Ferguson was used to calculating things in millionths
of an inch; she wasn't. I dare say the single second that had given
Ferguson time to turn round in his mind, she conceived of as a minute,
at least. It would have taken her a week to turn round in her own mind,
no doubt--a month, a year, perhaps. How do I know? But she got the
essential fact: that Ferguson had made a choice. Then she rounded on
him. It would have killed her to lose him, but she would rather have
lost him than to see him standing before her, etc., etc. Ferguson quoted
a lot of her talk straight to me, and I can remember it; but you needn't
ask me to soil my mouth with it. 'And half an hour before, she had been
saying with a good deal of heat that that little runt ought never to
have been born, and that if we had decent laws it never would have been
allowed to live." Ferguson said that to me, with a kind of bewilderment.
You see, he had made the mistake of taking that little fool seriously.
Well, he loved her. You can't go below that: that's rock-bottom.
Ferguson couldn't dig any deeper down for his way out. There _was_ no
deeper down.
"Apparently Ferguson still thought he could argue it out with her. She
so believed in eugenics, you see--a very radical, compared with
Ferguson. It was she who had had no doubt about tow-head. And the
love-part of it seemed to him fixed: it didn't occur to him that that
was debatable. So he stuck to something that could be discussed.
Then--and this was his moment of exceeding folly--he caught at the old
episode of the _Argentina_. _That_ had nothing to do with her present
state of shock. She had seen tow-head; but she hadn't seen the sprinkled
Mediterranean. And she had accepted that. At least, she had spoken of
his survival as though it had been one of the few times when God had
done precisely the right thing. So he took that to explain with. The
fool! The reasonable fool!
"Then--oh, then she went wild. (Yet she must have known there were a
thousand chances on the _Argentina_ for him to throw his life away, and
precious few to save it.) She backed up against a tree and stretched her
arms out like this"--Havelock made a clumsy stage-gesture of aversion
from Chantry, the villain. "And for an instant he thought she was afraid
of a Jersey cow that had come up to take part in the discussion. So he
threw a twig at its nose."