I
“_’Tis but a little piece of Childhood thrown away._”--John Ford.
She wandered about the wards at the Infants’ Hospital, a privileged
person, ignored, tolerated, looked on askance by the properly
caparisoned, properly certificated, properly trained nurses. She was
not a nurse, she was not even a probationer, except by courtesy; she
was the daughter of the founder of the Hospital, Dr. Emeric Favarger.
She spent many hours there, lounging about, asking irrelevant
questions of the nurses and the visiting doctors, getting into the way
as only a privileged person can do. She was no good, she could not
even amuse a baby, or keep it quiet for a moment until expert
assistance arrived. She was there, it was understood, because she
liked it; because the grey-green walls and absence of decoration were
soothing to her, and the rows of white cots, to the number of thirty,
each with its frontal brass denoting the name and style of its
god-parent and pecuniary backer that lined both sides of the room. Her
own name, Adelaide Favarger, figured over one little bed, and she was
used to take up its puling occupant now and again. She would linger,
casting her liquid glances at its chance, constantly varied, occupant
lying there, with some at least of the creases of ill-nurture and
previous ill-usage smoothed out and eased by the bands of merciful
sleep.
She was twenty-five years of age, unmarried, motherless, the only
daughter of Dr. Favarger. He was old, and had grown excessively rich,
and had found himself able long since to retire from the activities of
the profession. He still had his room in the Hospital, lectured there
twice a week, and saw foreign doctors, departmental authorities,
philanthropists and other persons who were interested in this
particular new departure. This he had inaugurated himself, hoping to
see it lead to Eugenical cultivation of the uncounted progeny of the
struggling, uninstructed masses. At home, in the immense
wool-gathering house he rented in Portland Place, he had a room the
door of which was kept always closed. Behind this he was understood to
be engaged in “experiments.” He entered it, never from the house, but
by a door that gave on a mews at the back. As people said,
anything--all sorts of things--might be going on in that house and
never be heard of. It was known that Dr. Favarger bred and kept there
countless cats; he wrote and commented learnedly on their habits in
the monthlies. He was a man who might have been asked out to dinner
every night in the year if he had chosen to let himself figure in the
list of Society’s possible guests. But that he had always refused to
do, and his daughter shared his self-imposed solitude. She was not the
kind of girl whom hostesses asked out alone, or at a moment’s notice,
to fill up a gap. She had no cordiality, no entrain, no “go.” She was
attractive but not charming, the image of her father, whose hooked
beaky nose she had inherited, together with passionate, regretful eyes
that her dead mother had left her.
But no restraint was put upon her exercise of hospitality in Portland
Place. She could ask any one she liked to dinner and she availed
herself constantly of the privilege--but the proportion of male guests
who put their knees under the old mahogany dining-table and drank her
father’s old port, which was almost famous, was far in excess of the
female. But Adelaide did not object to this proportion. Still, sly,
silent with an air of biding her time, at eighteen; by the time she
was twenty-five, the passion in her eyes was tremendous; she glowed in
her dark setting, a meagre Circe who gathered the ready-made beasts
about her, and shook no deterrent wand at them.
These were her evenings, smoke of cigars, fumes of liqueurs,
conversations of veiled indecency under the guise of scientific
discussion, which were led by her father; the cynical, heartless old
man, holding forth indifferently, from sheer love of talking, to the
audiences of queer, inferior, second-rate men that his daughter
provided for him nightly. And for her days, they were mostly spent
within the four walls of the abode of sanitation and physical purity
that represented the outcome of both their theories of life. Adelaide
had no sense of humour, but the cruel old man was apt to say that his
daughter was the only microbe in the establishment--that miracle of
asepticism. He gave her plenty of pocket-money, gibed at her to her
friends before her face, but allowed her to do exactly as she liked,
and with no consideration for her extreme youth and the life she had
to live when he was gone, fared contemptuously towards the grave of
known finality that awaited him. He had done his best for the world in
the establishment of a higher ideal of infant feeding and early
physical culture.
He had done well by his daughter, he had fulfilled his duty as he
considered it towards her mind and body. He had given her the best of
educations. She had been to school by the sea as a child, as a girl to
college. She had insisted on being highly trained and educated up to
the nadir of her powers, and had her views cut and dried at sixteen.
Carefully concentrating herself, with feverish intentness on
efficiency, she had managed to do well in the tripos at Oxford, but
her friends said that she had been screwed up to the required pitch by
her imperious vanity. The girls of her year who had come out below her
in Honours used to laugh when they met her afterwards in the street;
for them she was the crank who had outstripped them, peering as her
habit was, under the hoods of perambulators, on her way to lectures on
Eugenics and Baby-Culture. They had heard all about her desire, nay,
her fixed determination, to marry and worthily contribute to the
World-Force, in the usual manner. At Somerville Hall, she had made no
secret of her intention to bear an Eugenical child, or two, having
first selected its father carefully, from a physiological point of
view. Oh, yes, she had talked of nothing else at tea parties and
walks, and had bored them so that when she left she had made no
harvest of life-friends. They had tossed their learned young heads,
and quite expected, some day, to hear of Adelaide Favarger, in spite
of her big talk, as the feeble hang-dog mother, if a mother at all, of
one puny infant, begotten of nerves and hysteria, by the usual
self-selecting father. That is, if any man chose her, and this, in
spite of her wealth, they were inclined to doubt.
She wasn’t a girl who appealed to the men that marry. They felt that,
and they were right.
For men, looking at Adelaide Favarger with the instinctive and
unconscious cunning of the male, that makes in the long run so surely
for what Adelaide herself would have called the World Purpose, were
likely to pass her by, as sexually ineligible for motherhood.
Socially, too, she did not appear apt to satisfy their own particular
standards of comfort and pleasure. Though, indubitably, Adelaide would
be rich, they feared to take a wife out of the dreary, ill-managed,
ill-cleaned house in Portland Place, full of unprobed corners and
flights of stairs that seemed to drop you into plumbless depths of
scullerydom and basement. The hall and dining-room were full of
valuable mahogany furniture whose dull unpolished surfaces reflected
nothing, the drawing-room was spread with rich yellow damask, that
draped the sofas and chairs, and hung as curtains to mask as much
scanty light as was willing to filter in through the tall windows that
no normal housemaid could reach up to clean. No one did clean them.
The curtains soared out of sight into the dusty ceilings and the
chance hand, essaying to draw them further apart, shook out a dusty
flavour that nipped the nostrils and was forthwith obliged to desist.
Adelaide’s dinners, and she gave a great many of them, were ill
cooked, scrambling and depressing. But the wine, Dr. Favarger’s own
province, was excellent. He himself would have none of it. As soon as
the sweets were put on, it was the old Doctor’s custom to rise, to
stuff his creased napkin into the middle of his plate, and to leave
the room without comment. It was always the same. He did not as a rule
appear again: he disliked the kind of man that his daughter was apt to
invite, and he had no desire to control her in the matter. The men
were rather sorry to see him go, he was lazy, cynical and fascinating.
There was one of Adelaide’s men whom he perhaps did not dislike. Yet,
although he would not sit out the dinner even for him, the only time
that Wald Ensor dined with Adelaide he stayed until the coffee and
cigarettes were put on. Perhaps it was because he had himself
introduced his daughter to the amiable young man at the Children’s
Hospital. Ensor came to inquire after a child, whom he had kindly been
instrumental in bringing in. It was dying of malnutrition. Its slum
mother, stupid, underfed and wretched, but not vile, could not nourish
it properly even if she would.
The image of the tall, handsome young fellow with the perishing child
in his arms had never left Adelaide; she had fallen in love with Wald
Ensor, and with Adelaide, to fall in love was to ask to dinner.
Ensor came. He was excessively fascinating to Adelaide, because he was
so different from her other young men and especially from the
second-rate Chelsea artist whom she had asked to make a fourth, and
whom she already considered a survival from her old days of bad taste.
Ensor’s manner was perfection. He was shyish, grave, intent, and
self-contained, talked prettily to her father about his hospital and
his cats and respectfully to herself about the subjects in which a
young lady should be interested. Adelaide was not interested, but she
instinctively forebore to disabuse him.
She was too young, too reckless, too much unversed in strategy, to
conceal the trend of her feelings and directing, as she did, all her
conversation and her eyes towards Ensor, she seriously alienated the
liking of her late friend, ally and limner, Mr. Wallace Marks, R.I.B.
He bided his time, however, and as long as Dr. Favarger presided over
his own table, he listened in a frankly bored manner which contrasted
with Wald Ensor’s polite attention to talk which he only
half-approved, coming from the lips of this savage irresponsible old
savant, the indifferent natural guardian of a young girl’s delicate
morals.
“There is something,” the old hook-nosed man was saying, “something to
be said for the woman who ill-treats her children.”
Adelaide protested conventionally. “Nothing!” she said.
“My daughter,” said her father spitefully, without looking in her
direction, “wishes to impress you with the fact of her well-known love
for babies. She does not, however, really care for them a bit. She has
never considered these matters scientifically in her life, although
she’s always hanging round the Hospital, and hindering my young
assistants. If she had a child, she’d neglect it. Cruelty--masked by
Philanthropy! Look for it deep--it’s there!” His nose appeared cold,
sharp and ferreting. He did not smile. Ensor shuddered.
Adelaide made a wry face and Ensor was sorry for her,
disproportionately so, for she did not really mind being teased by her
parent. The old man continued--
“On the lines I have been mentioning to you, Ensor, even child-murder
is excusable, obeying, as it may be said to do, an almost forgotten
animal instinct. A cat, say, who by some circumstance or other has
been disturbed before parturition and rendered hysterical----”
“Good Lord, a hysterical cat----” ejaculated the bounder.