conducted at the hotel's _bureau_; "but if the price of these rooms is a
criterion, you French make us pay well for it."
Dr. Boussingault's glance journeyed to the partly open doors of the
bathroom, displaying a tiled whiteness.
"And without doubt a bath?" he enquired.
"A bath," nodded Stainton.
"And me"--Boussingault shook his bullet-like head--"I well recall when
the water-carts stopped at the corners of the streets too narrow for
their progress, and one called from the high window that one wished to
buy so much and so much, because one bathed oneself or the servant
washed the linen to-day."
He talked for a while, again rhapsodically, of the old city, the city of
his youth, and, when he chanced to touch upon its restaurants, Stainton
asked him if, that evening or the next, he would dine with Muriel and
himself.
"Ah, no," said Boussingault. "It is that madame and you, monsieur, shall
dine with me. To-night? To-morrow night?"
Stainton accepted for the following evening.
"And at what spot would you prefer, monsieur?"
"I don't know," said Jim. "I have eaten _sole a la Marguery_. We might
catch that in its native waters: we might dine at Marguery's."
"Well," the Frenchman shrugged, "Marguery is not bad. At least the
kitchen is tolerable. But you should eat your sole as she swims."
They were not, however, destined to keep the appointment on the day set,
for, during that morning came a _petit bleu_ from Boussingault,
postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing
with fine spencerian regrets to the effect that its writer had been
imperatively summoned to Grenoble for consultation in an illness
"occurring in a family distinguished."
"I don't care if we never see him," said Muriel. "I could hear him
through the door: he talks too loud."
They consoled themselves and wearied themselves with sightseeing, and
often this tried Muriel's nerves. Secretly she still watched for the
appearance of signs to indicate her condition and secretly she tightened
her stays, long before any signs could appear. She was often sick in the
mornings, though with decreasing recurrence, and, when she began to feel
relief by the diminution, she became the more despondent upon
realisation of its cause. Moreover, even the comfort of _petit dejeuner_
in bed did not compensate for those crumbs for which no one could be
held responsible.
True to his policy to "let nature take her course," Stainton maintained
a firm reticence upon the subject uppermost in the minds of both, but
this reticence was applied only to his speech; and his solicitude, his
patient but patent care, and his evident anxiety often annoyed her,
since they kept her destiny before her and seemed to her apprehensive
imagination--what they were far from being--no more than the expressions
of a fear that she might make some physical revelation of her state in a
public and embarrassing manner.
"You don't think of me!" she one day wept, when he had put her into a
_taxi-metre_ to drive a few hundred yards.
"Muriel," said Stainton, "I think of nothing else."
"No, you don't think of me," she insisted. "You think only of--of _it_.
You're worried about me as a mother and not as a wife. You are!"
Stainton protested, grieved to the heart; but she would not hear him.
"It's as if you were a stock-farmer," she said, the tears in her velvety
eyes, "and I were only your favorite thoroughbred in foal."
This simile he found revolting. It required all his masculine philosophy
satisfactorily to account for her use of it, and, even when that had
been applied, he reprimanded her, with kindness, but with decisiveness
also. It was some time before she begged his pardon and condemned
herself; some time before he soothed her and told her, what she hated to
hear, that her words had risen not from herself but from her condition.
They went to Marguery's, when the doctor returned to Paris, rather worn
out by their week of sightseeing; but they found the crowded restaurant
pleasantly diverting. The chatter of the diners, the scurrying of the
waiters, and the gratification of the leather-covered seat from which,
across a shining table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made
them forget for a space the subject that one of them was weary of
remembering.
Then, by some mischance, Stainton hit upon a fatal topic.
"Doctor," he said, "I am sure you can give me some authoritative
information on a matter that I have read a little of. I mean the
question of the decrease in the French birth-rate and the efforts to
stop it and build up not only a larger race but a race of the best
stock."
He saw instantly that he had struck the little man's hobby. Dr.
Boussingault sat with one thick knee covered by his serviette and thrust
into the aisle for the _garcons_ to stumble over. His dark eyes, keen
and expressive, were shaped like wide almonds and, unobscured by any
vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his glasses
in a lively disregard of the phlegmatic indications given by the dark
bags beneath them.
"The most healthy sign in France to-day," he said. "Absolutely."
"You mean the effort to increase and better the stock?"
"No. One thousand no's. The success in decreasing it."
"My dear sir----"
The doctor waved his hands. He drank no alcohol, he said; only some wine
of the country, red; but of this, heavily diluted by water, he was
drinking copiously.
"Attend, monsieur. I know well, my God, these good people who go to
England and have international congresses and, between the dinners given
by Her Grace of Dulpuddle and the lawn parties, when one permits them to
enter the park of the Castle Cad, indulge in a debauch of scientific
verbosity. But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard
one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry,
and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them
say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and
breathed: "_I_ say one word: 'Environment!'--and they silence
themselves."
Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed.
"I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their
purpose is the improvement of the race."
"Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How
do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good
the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong
sons and some robust daughters? _Jamais!_ Rather by to continue the
present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has
made unfit, by to encourage breeding--million thunders, yes, among those
very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits _them_!"
Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the talk would soon turn
to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced
at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of
_canard sauvage_ that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she
must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were
talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a
physician. Nevertheless, he wavered.
"I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the
poor to increase the population?"
The Frenchman's broad, pale lips smiled. He shrugged.
"Money? My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot
say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your
country and in England these savants--name of God!--want what they call
the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this
reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault
leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive
forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor
to produce families, they are the _proprietaires_ and those lackeys of
the _proprietaires_, the generals of the armies. The _proprietaire_
wants much workers, and he wants workers so bound by family
'responsibilities'"--the Frenchman hissed the s's of this word--"that
they dare not revolt; he wants competition for the workers, for she
lowers the wage. For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to
the monster, War."
"You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton.
"Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I:
Boussingault, _medecin_!"
"At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along
without children, you know."
He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms
and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse
into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled.
Jim regarded the neighboring tables, but no one of the company there
paid any attention to the commanding tones of the physician, probably
because nearly all the guests of the restaurant were engaged in talk
that was quite as violent as that of Paul Achille. Muriel might have
been a thousand miles away.
Now the word "children" again loosed the storm.
"Children?" shouted the doctor. "Let us be reasonable! Let us regard
with equanimity the children! They ask the poor for the children, these
_proprietaires_; but what they would say is servants and _filles de
joie_ to work for them. They will not pay the man sufficient to make a
marriage; they pretend not to like that the women bear children without
marriage--and they run about and sob for more babies! _Bien._ In effect,
then, what is it that the labourer to them replies? He replies: 'Give
me the 'abitable houses, and then I will give you in'abitants--not
before.'"
Dr. Boussingault produced a huge handkerchief, shook it, mopped his
sparkling brow, and resumed absolute immobility.
Stainton was now sincerely interested. He had thought somewhat upon
these matters and, although he saw as yet no personal relevance in them,
he had an intellectual appetite for their discussion.
"As I see it," he said, "none of these people that are trying to improve
the breed denies that the poor are in a bad way, but just because the
poor are in a bad way, they fail to be the stuff by which the race can
be improved. I am now speaking, you understand, of what you, doctor,
consider the American and English savants. What they are after is to
increase the best, and their best raw material is found in the sons of
the well-to-do, because the well-to-do are the intelligent, are the
people that do the work of the world."
Boussingault chortled derisively.
"What propelled your ship to France?" he demanded. "An engine, is it
not? But the engine, it is necessary that it be fed, and think you that
the man who put the coal in that engine was well-to-do? Who grinds your
corn, who makes your shoes, who builds your house? Name of God!"
"I am thinking about the directing intelligence, doctor. The improper
character tossed into the human pond sinks to its bottom, and the proper
character, even if placed at its bottom, rises to the top."
"So you propose to improve the race, monsieur, by breeding from the
thieving millionaire risen to the top of the pond and by letting the
Christs sink, as they have always sanken? Do not talk of breeding for
ability until you give a chance for to develop the ability that now goes
everywhere to waste. Men and women they will mate in spite of you."
"The process would strengthen marriage," said Stainton.
"But yes," replied the Frenchman. "Marriage is of relations the most
intimate: they would make it the most public. It was wrong enough, my
God, when, after centuries of no attention to marriage, the church
quickly assumed of it the control and made of it a public ceremony. It
will be more bad when the police assume of it the control and make of it
a public scandal."
Muriel raised her great, dark eyes to the doctor and then lowered them
to her plate.
Stainton shifted uneasily.
"I do not believe in that sort of thing and never would," he said, "but
I am sure that marriage is the best friend of the race's future."
"Not so long as it is directed even as it now is. Not so long as the
diseased 'usband may legally force a child on his wife, or the
wife-merely-lazy may refuse to bear a child to a healthy 'usband. A wife
can divorce a 'usband because he is sterile through not his own fault,
but if he is sterile because he wants sterility, she must continue to be
his wife. You speak well as if to make people to breed it is necessary
but to go to whip them, or trick them, into a wedding. Marriage does not
imply parenthood. That relationship is arbitrary."
This was something more than Jim had counted on. A slow flush mounted to
his iron-grey hair. He saw that Muriel attended entirely to her food,
and he did not know whether to admire this peace as evidence of her
self-control or to wonder how she could hear such things and give no
sign of hearing them.
The doctor, however, ran from bad to worse.
"Most of the children in this world are here by accident. They are not
wanted, no, because they are too much trouble or too much cost, or they
are girls, as the case may be. They are not a tie binding their parents'
love by their presence; generally they are a sword to divide it by
necessitating economies. What married man, even rich, does not endeavour
to limit the number of his little ones, _hein_?" To Jim's horror the
doctor broadly winked. "What unmarried man does not endeavour to
suppress his little ones altogether? Both will in private joke the one
to the other about it, and both fear it should publicly be known.
Marriage? Poof! It is the name of a _prix fixe_ charged for
respectability."
Stainton was not the man to try to evade an issue by an attempt to
divert the conversation, and he saw that the doctor was not the man to
be diverted. As the waiter brought the coffee ("No cognac, thank you,"
said Boussingault; "no alcohol") Jim challenged direct.
"You shock me," declared the American, "by what you tell me about
children not being wanted. I don't agree with you there. Of course, that
is sometimes the case in irregular relations, but I think too well of
humanity to believe that, by married parents of any means at all,
children are not wanted after they get here."
"None?"
Both men turned: it was Muriel that had spoken. Her face grew scarlet
under their look.
The doctor's glance was keen.
"I am of madame's mind," said he, quietly.
Stainton strove to pass the embarrassing interruption.
"Well, doctor," he said, and from the corner of his eye saw with
satisfaction that Muriel busied herself with an intricate ice, "I stick
to my belief in humanity."
Boussingault flourished his coffee cup and spilled a liberal portion of
its contents.
"In what world do you live?" he asked.
"In an eminently sane one," said Stainton.
"_Bien_; I knew it was not the real world. In your world you know
nothing, then, of all the ways, direct and indirect, to make women bear
babies they do not want; in it you know nothing of the child unloved and
scarcely endured; in it you know nothing of the boy or girl for these
reasons, or because the mother hated the price of marriage, afflicted
with morbid nerves and will-atrophy. Those who would improve the race
must know of these things, but they consider them not. They consider not
that there is the motherly-physical inclination combined with physical
ability; that degrees of inclination and ability vary. They make one law
for all that, by physique only, appear fit. Good, then: the person the
best fitted for their plan is she who will not let them send her to the
altar as if she had no proper will. Again, suppose you forbid the
'unfit' to marry? You straightway increase not only the number of
illegitimate children, but of illegitimate unfit children, for the
illegitimate child, in our mad world, has not the whole of a chance. M.
Stainton, your savants would raise the race by oppressing the
individuals."
Stainton's anxiety was now to end the meal. He felt that matters had
gone far enough, and he feared that the topic of discussion had proved a
morbid one for a prospective mother. He murmured something about the
survival of the fittest.
"The survival of the fittest," roared Boussingault. "My good friend,
who is it that is fitted to survive? He who can? The brute? You say"--he
had quite placed poor Stainton in the opposition by this time--"you say
that you would rather have for parent a robust burglar than a tubercular
bishop. Me, Boussingault, I choose the bishop, for it is better to have
ill health with money to hire Boussingaults than good health without
money to buy food. 'Defectives'! Holy blue! The prize-fighter in New
York who murders the little girl is of splendid physique and gives
extraordinary care to his body. He is scrupulously clean. He does not
smoke, does not even drink red wine. Of the sixteen children of his
parents only seven prove, by survival, fitness to survive. He is of
them--and he murders the little girl."
"Well," said Stainton, smiling, "perhaps sixteen is _too_ many."
"Tell me why," said the Frenchman. "Our great Massenet is of a
family of children"--he swung his arm and dropped his emptied
cup--"countless--absolutely countless. Environment, that is what you
forget; environment, and inclination and _suitable_ physique. What to
do? You should change the economic conditions that breed your
'defectives' as a refuse-heap breeds flies, but instead you propose to
spend time and money to try to 'segregate' defectives as fast as you
manufacture them. 'Segregate' and 'sterilize'? I have yet to hear of one
of you sterilising a degenerate child of your own. You produce them
not? Often. And you produce the good? Francis Galton left no child at
all. I, Boussingault, say to you: breed a Florence Nightingale and an
Isaac Newton and bring them up in a city slum and set them to work in a
city factory, and their very good breeding will be society's loss.
Truly. What you will have will not be a philanthropist and a scientist,
but only a more than commonly seductive _fille_ and a more than commonly
clever thief. You cannot breed a free race until you have given to the
possible mothers of it freedom of choice; and you cannot breed a healthy
race until you have given to papa and mamma and baby proper food and
surroundings--until you have given the man working the full pay for his
toil."
He leaned back in his chair, held his handkerchief before his mouth
without concealing it, and began to pick his teeth.
Muriel rose; she was pale. The two men started also to rise.
"Please don't," said Muriel. "I shall be back in a moment."
"Dearest----" began Stainton.
Muriel's answer was one look. She hurried from the room.
"My wife," said Stainton, resuming his seat, "is not very well."
"You desolate me," replied the physician as he grunted his way back
into his chair. "But now that madame absents herself for a moment, let
me be explicit."
"Explicit?" said Stainton. "I should have thought--Why, you have been
talking as if the very construction of society were a crime!"
"Ah," said Boussingault, delightedly, "then you perceive just my point.
That is it; you put it well: modern society is The Great Crime--life is
The Great Sin--what we have made of Life. Disease, Ignorance, Poverty,
Wage-slavery, Child-slavery, Lust-slavery, Marriage-slavery! Marriage
does not produce good children more than bad. Some of the highest types
of humanity have been produced by the left hand. You ignore the positive
side of selective breeding. If you can decide what constitutes a 'fit'
man, how can you limit his racial gifts to the child-bearing capacities
of one woman? And the woman, her, too; you must provide for selective
futile polygamy and polyandry. You must be presented to the unmarried
mother----"
"Really----" began Stainton.
"There is something in these your theories," interposed Boussingault,
rushing to his conclusion, "but here you go too far and there half-way.
In Germany, until German bureaucracy captures them, they are the great
aids to the revolt of Womankind, your theories. Educate for parenthood,
endow mothers, pension during pregnancy and nursing--what then? Name of
God! You have more to do than that, my friend--_we_ have more to do: we
have to give every child born an equal chance, every man how much he
earns; we must build a society where no superstition, no economic
strain, no selfish 'usband keeps childless the woman that wants to be
and ought to be a mother in marriage or outside; and we must recognise
of all other women their inalienable right to refuse motherhood!"
Stainton rose quickly.
"Here comes my wife," he said. "I am afraid we shall have to hurry away,
doctor."
XII
MONTMARTRE
Alone in their _taxi-metre_, Stainton and Muriel preserved for some time
an awkward silence. Jim was waiting for some hint from her to indicate
what would be his safest course. His wife sat rigid, her fists clenched
in her lap.
"That doctor is a strange type," said Stainton at last.
"Horrid man! He's a _horrid_ man!" gasped Muriel.
"Well, of course," said Stainton, seeking to steer her into the
quiescence of a judicial attitude, "he is all wrong in his
conclusions----"
"He picked his teeth," said Muriel.
Jim had preserved his own good manners to the age of fifty, but his
years in mining-camps had blunted his observation of the lack of nicety
in others.
"Did he?" asked Jim.
"Didn't you _see_ him? He carries a gold toothpick around with him. I
believe he was proud of it. It's--that's what made me sick."
"Then," enquired Jim, growing uncomfortable, "it wasn't what he said?"
"Said? You both sat up there and quarrelled----"
"We didn't quarrel. The doctor has what seems to be the national manner,
but we were merely discussing----"
"You were discussing me!" said Muriel. "I thought I should die. I don't
know how I bore it; I----"
Jim slipped his arm around her waist. "My dear, my dear, how could you
think such a thing? We were talking about a general subject. We
were----Why, we didn't say anything that could possibly affect you."
"I don't care," Muriel declared: "everything that _he said_--that
man--was awful."
"It was," admitted Stainton, glad that the burden of offence had again
been shifted to Boussingault's shoulders. "It was, rather. I didn't know
whether you were paying attention to it at all. To some of it I hoped
you weren't."
"Nobody could help hearing such shouting. I was so afraid there might be
some English or Americans there."
"Still, you didn't appear to hear,"--Stainton spoke with relief at
thought of this,--"so it was as well as it could be."
"I must have shown it, Jim. I thought my face would burn away."
"At any rate, you didn't talk."
"How _could_ I?"
Stainton was silent for a few seconds. Then he asked:
"What did you mean by your question?"
Muriel took some time to reply:
"What question?"
"You know: the only one you asked--about--about children not being
wanted?"
This time Muriel's answer was swift: she took her husband's broad
shoulders in her arms and, as they rolled down the boulevard, began
sobbing.
"I never want to see him again!" she vowed. "Never bring him to the
hotel. I won't be at home if he comes. I won't see him. I won't!"
She suggested changing their hotel. She declared that, even if they did
change, she could not sleep that night. She begged him to take her
somewhere to amuse her and get her thoughts away from the dreadful
Boussingault.
It was Stainton who proposed that they should see Montmartre--which
term, when used by the travelling American, means to see two or three
places in Montmartre conducted largely for Americans, which charge in
strict accord with the French ideas of the average American's
pocketbook, and are visible only between the hours of ten o'clock at
night and four o'clock in the morning.
"Very well," said Jim; "we might go to Montmartre. I think we ought to
see Montmartre."
"What's that?" asked Muriel.
"It's--oh, it's a part of Paris. You'll know when we get there."
"I don't remember hearing of it in our French course."
"I don't think it's included in the French course of a convent. I hope
not."
"Why not?"
"For the very reason that we ought to go see it--now."