--“will tear or otherwise destroy the progeny that she foresees
herself unable to feed or attend to. So do unhappy servant girls,
faced, in their hour of trial, with the problem of the disposal of
illegitimate offspring, reserve to themselves the right of destroying
what their instinct tells them they will be unable in the future to
protect and nourish----”
“Oh, Father,” protested Adelaide again and her tone was sincere.
“Think of it! The tender young life, the helpless weakling, bone of
one’s bone, flesh of one’s flesh.… Motherhood is so sacred--it should,
I think, be subsidized by the State. A capitation fee for every child.
Then the mother would have the wherewithal to nourish herself properly
and maternal feeling would do the rest.”
Dr. Favarger smiled, a smile without kindness in it. It was his
daughter’s smile. She had that too, as well as his nose.
“Even then, she or you would probably have none of these fine feelings
at the moment. She has suffered physically; she is irresponsible: mere
brutal selfish instinct dominates her. And if she desists, if she does
make an attempt to salve it, she has to watch the hapless infant”--he
sneered--“through her care, surviving, but as a hopeless idiot.… Of
course,” he continued, “I except cases of mere cruelty, such as
baby-farming. If a woman kills or ill-treats the child of another, no
natural feeling except greed of gain can possibly come into play, not
even vanity----”
“Vanity?” said Adelaide.
“Yes, Mother’s vanity, a huge non-negligible factor in these matters.
But in most cases it is not necessary to plead it, for nature’s broad
back may easily take the blame. And when a woman of our own class,
maybe, is brought before the magistrate and fined or imprisoned
because she has taken a rod to the ugly duckling, or systematically
ill-treated a weakly, ungracious child to the point of extinction, she
might plead that she is only doing what a cat or any other perfectly
normal animal does when one of her young is not up to sample, and
seems obviously degenerate to her keener sense. My cat Philippa, for
instance----”
Adelaide sneered. The bounder fidgeted. Ensor preserved his attitude
of somewhat strained attention.
--“Had a fine litter of four the other day. I found one of them, to my
uninstructed eye, as healthy as the others, on the cold stone floor
for three successive mornings before it died. She had thrown it out of
the nest, she had refused to feed it, she had just weeded it out. Why?
It was unfit to live. And if you study these trials that come up every
now and then, and observe carefully the characteristics of the little
victims as described by the officers of the S.P.C.C., you will see
that in most cases these brutalized children are slow,
unprepossessing, unpleasant and sometimes revolting in their habits.
They work up through the first few years of infancy, unpetted,
neglected, marked down to develop all the successive stages of
degeneracy. They are obviously better dead. No pretty, healthy,
fetching child--a child like the egregious infant in _Bubbles_,
say,--ever appears in court on such a plea. There Mother’s vanity
comes in.…”
He would have continued, but Adelaide, whom this conversation neither
pleased nor interested, rose. The bounder heaved an audible sigh of
relief. Ensor, though he had been interested, even a little charmed by
the old man’s manner, could not help deploring that this extremely
technical and advanced conversation had not postdated the young girl’s
departure.
Old Dr. Favarger left the room with Adelaide. He said to her in the
hall, before he hobbled away to his own study and sleeping apartment
on the ground floor--
“You have picked up a gentleman for once.”
She walked on as if he had not spoken. She always made a point of not
answering her father when he girded at her. His approval of Ensor,
though not unpleasing, was absolutely immaterial to her. She loved
him, she meant to have him, through the door of marriage or no. She
went upstairs to the drawing-room to await the two men, and flung
herself down on the great yellow sofa with the black cushions, too
nervous even to smoke. She was convinced, albeit for the twentieth
time, that she had found the Eugenical father at last.
* * * * * * *
Wald Ensor, the gentleman according to Dr. Favarger’s acceptance, left
sitting after an atrocious dinner, with a man who could not possibly
fulfil the Doctor’s conditions, felt extremely uncomfortable. His
annoyance grew as his messmate tended to grow familiar in
conversation. A wretched artist from Chelsea, self-styled modern, with
white hair and a dyed moustache, to whom the host had not vouchsafed a
word all dinner! The fine old man had been annoyed by his cockney
accent, presumably. He had talked, although she did not listen,
psychology with Adelaide, and his pert underbred voice had broken in
all the while through Dr. Favarger’s cultivated tones. Now that the
host and hostess were gone, this bounder ventured to turn the
analytical method on to his hostess herself, and Ensor did not know
how to stop him. He fidgeted about on his Spanish leather covered
chair, and made various efforts to do so, but in vain.
“Nice girl, very,” the creature went on. “With a face like an old
master--one of those Primitives, don’t you know? Lots of drawing
about. Pity she’s so morbid.”
Wald Ensor made a gesture of negation.
“Oh, yes, she is. Talks of nothing but Eugenics and so on. Thinks of
nothing but the other thing.… It’s only a mask, with these women you
know, all that rot about child-bearing and being subsidized by the
State and so on. She’s an erotomaniac, that’s what she is--sits about
on yellow sofas and asks men to love her. They do that fast enough,
she’s very good fun--but they don’t marry her.… Do you know Gertrude?
Do you know why they put up with her--she’s the cook--why the dinners
here are so confoundedly bad?”--
“No, I don’t, and----” Ensor expostulated. His blood boiled, he didn’t
think he could stand it any longer, he wanted to throw his glass in
the fellow’s face. He rose.…
The other man, nothing abashed, although their conversation had hardly
lasted the canonical few minutes, rose too, saying amiably, “So! Let’s
join our hostess.”