THE EUGENIC BRIDE
Scandal, such as that which Kennedy unearthed in this Pearcy case, was
never much to his liking, yet he seemed destined, about this period of
his career, to have a good deal of it.
We had scarcely finished with the indictment that followed the arrest
of young Pearcy, when we were confronted by a situation which was as
unique as it was intensely modern.
“There’s absolutely no insanity in Eugenia’s family,” I heard a young
man remark to Kennedy, as my key turned in the lock of the laboratory
door.
For a moment I hesitated about breaking in on a confidential
conference, then reflected that, as they had probably already heard me
at the lock, I had better go in and excuse myself.
As I swung the door open, I saw a young man pacing up and down the
laboratory nervously, too preoccupied even to notice the slight noise I
had made.
He paused in his nervous walk and faced Kennedy, his back to me.
“Kennedy,” he said huskily, “I wouldn’t care if there was insanity in
her family—for, my God!—the tragedy of it all now—I love her!”
He turned, following Kennedy’s eyes in my direction, and I saw on his
face the most haggard, haunting look of anxiety that I had ever seen on
a young person.
Instantly I recognized from the pictures I had seen in the newspapers
young Quincy Atherton, the last of this famous line of the family, who
had attracted a great deal of attention several months previously by
what the newspapers had called his search through society for a
“eugenics bride,” to infuse new blood into the Atherton stock.
“You need have no fear that Mr. Jameson will be like the other
newspaper men,” reassured Craig, as he introduced us, mindful of the
prejudice which the unpleasant notoriety of Atherton’s marriage had
already engendered in his mind.
I recalled that when I had first heard of Atherton’s “eugenic
marriage,” I had instinctively felt a prejudice against the very idea
of such cold, calculating, materialistic, scientific mating, as if one
of the last fixed points were disappearing in the chaos of the social
and sex upheaval.
Now, I saw that one great fact of life must always remain. We might
ride in hydroaeroplanes, delve into the very soul by psychanalysis,
perhaps even run our machines by the internal forces of radium—even
marry according to Galton or Mendel. But there would always be love,
deep passionate love of the man for the woman, love which all the
discoveries of science might perhaps direct a little less blindly, but
the consuming flame of which not all the coldness of science could ever
quench. No tampering with the roots of human nature could ever change
the roots.
I must say that I rather liked young Atherton. He had a frank, open
face, the most prominent feature of which was his somewhat aristocratic
nose. Otherwise he impressed one as being the victim of heredity in
faults, if at all serious, against which he was struggling heroically.
It was a most pathetic story which he told, a story of how his family
had degenerated from the strong stock of his ancestors until he was the
last of the line. He told of his education, how he had fallen, a rather
wild youth bent in the footsteps of his father who had been a
notoriously good clubfellow, under the influence of a college
professor, Dr. Crafts, a classmate of his father’s, of how the
professor had carefully and persistently fostered in him an idea that
had completely changed him.
“Crafts always said it was a case of eugenics against euthenics,”
remarked Atherton, “of birth against environment. He would tell me over
and over that birth gave me the clay, and it wasn’t such bad clay after
all, but that environment would shape the vessel.”
Then Atherton launched into a description of how he had striven to find
a girl who had the strong qualities his family germ plasm seemed to
have lost, mainly, I gathered, resistance to a taint much like manic
depressive insanity. And as he talked, it was borne in on me that,
after all, contrary to my first prejudice, there was nothing very
romantic indeed about disregarding the plain teachings of science on
the subject of marriage and one’s children.
In his search for a bride, Dr. Crafts, who had founded a sort of
Eugenics Bureau, had come to advise him. Others may have looked up
their brides in Bradstreet’s, or at least the Social Register. Atherton
had gone higher, had been overjoyed to find that a girl he had met in
the West, Eugenia Gilman, measured up to what his friend told him were
the latest teachings of science. He had been overjoyed because, long
before Crafts had told him, he had found out that he loved her deeply.
“And now,” he went on, half choking with emotion, “she is apparently
suffering from just the same sort of depression as I myself might
suffer from if the recessive trait became active.”
“What do you mean, for instance?” asked Craig.
“Well, for one thing, she has the delusion that my relatives are
persecuting her.”
“Persecuting her?” repeated Craig, stifling the remark that that was
not in itself a new thing in this or any other family. “How?”
“Oh, making her feel that, after all, it is Atherton family rather than
Gilman health that counts—little remarks that when our baby is born,
they hope it will resemble Quincy rather than Eugenia, and all that
sort of thing, only worse and more cutting, until the thing has begun
to prey on her mind.”
“I see,” remarked Kennedy thoughtfully. “But don’t you think this is a
case for a—a doctor, rather than a detective?”
Atherton glanced up quickly. “Kennedy,” he answered slowly, “where
millions of dollars are involved, no one can guess to what lengths the
human mind will go—no one, except you.”
“Then you have suspicions of something worse?”
“Y-yes—but nothing definite. Now, take this case. If I should die
childless, after my wife, the Atherton estate would descend to my
nearest relative, Burroughs Atherton, a cousin.”
“Unless you willed it to—”
“I have already drawn a will,” he interrupted, “and in case I survive
Eugenia and die childless, the money goes to the founding of a larger
Eugenics Bureau, to prevent in the future, as much as possible,
tragedies such as this of which I find myself a part. If the case is
reversed, Eugenia will get her third and the remainder will go to the
Bureau or the Foundation, as I call the new venture. But,” and here
young Atherton leaned forward and fixed his large eyes keenly on us,
“Burroughs might break the will. He might show that I was of unsound
mind, or that Eugenia was, too.”
“Are there no other relatives?”
“Burroughs is the nearest,” he replied, then added frankly, “I have a
second cousin, a young lady named Edith Atherton, with whom both
Burroughs and I used to be very friendly.”
It was evident from the way he spoke that he had thought a great deal
about Edith Atherton, and still thought well of her.
“Your wife thinks it is Burroughs who is persecuting her?” asked
Kennedy.
Atherton shrugged his shoulders.
“Does she get along badly with Edith? She knows her I presume?”
“Of course. The fact is that since the death of her mother, Edith has
been living with us. She is a splendid girl, and all alone in the world
now, and I had hopes that in New York she might meet some one and marry
well.”
Kennedy was looking squarely at Atherton, wondering whether he might
ask a question without seeming impertinent. Atherton caught the look,
read it, and answered quite frankly, “To tell the truth, I suppose I
might have married Edith, before I met Eugenia, if Professor Crafts had
not dissuaded me. But it wouldn’t have been real love—nor wise. You
know,” he went on more frankly, now that the first hesitation was over
and he realized that if he were to gain anything at all by Kennedy’s
services, there must be the utmost candor between them, “you know
cousins may marry if the stocks are known to be strong. But if there is
a defect, it is almost sure to be intensified. And so I—I gave up the
idea—never had it, in fact, so strongly as to propose to her. And when
I met Eugenia all the Athertons on the family tree couldn’t have bucked
up against the combination.”
He was deadly in earnest as he arose from the chair into which he had
dropped after I came in.
“Oh, it’s terrible—this haunting fear, this obsession that I have had,
that, in spite of all I have tried to do, some one, somehow, will
defeat me. Then comes the situation, just at a time when Eugenia and I
feel that we have won against Fate, and she in particular needs all the
consideration and care in the world—and—and I am defeated.”
Atherton was again pacing the laboratory.
“I have my car waiting outside,” he pleaded. “I wish you would go with
me to see Eugenia—now.”
It was impossible to resist him. Kennedy rose and I followed, not
without a trace of misgiving.
The Atherton mansion was one of the old houses of the city, a somber
stone dwelling with a garden about it on a downtown square, on which
business was already encroaching. We were admitted by a servant who
seemed to walk over the polished floors with stealthy step as if there
was something sacred about even the Atherton silence. As we waited in a
high-ceilinged drawing-room with exquisite old tapestries on the walls,
I could not help feeling myself the influence of wealth and birth that
seemed to cry out from every object of art in the house.
On the longer wall of the room, I saw a group of paintings. One, I
noted especially, must have been Atherton’s ancestor, the founder of
the line. There was the same nose in Atherton, for instance, a striking
instance of heredity. I studied the face carefully. There was every
element of strength in it, and I thought instinctively that, whatever
might have been the effects of in-breeding and bad alliances, there
must still be some of that strength left in the present descendant of
the house of Atherton. The more I thought about the house, the
portrait, the whole case, the more unable was I to get out of my head a
feeling that though I had not been in such a position before, I had at
least read or heard something of which it vaguely reminded me.
Eugenia Atherton was reclining listlessly in her room in a deep leather
easy chair, when Atherton took us up at last. She did not rise to greet
us, but I noted that she was attired in what Kennedy once called, as we
strolled up the Avenue, “the expensive sloppiness of the present
styles.” In her case the looseness with which her clothes hung was
exaggerated by the lack of energy with which she wore them.
She had been a beautiful girl, I knew. In fact, one could see that she
must have been. Now, however, she showed marks of change. Her eyes were
large, and protruding, not with the fire of passion which is often
associated with large eyes, but dully, set in a puffy face, a trifle
florid. Her hands seemed, when she moved them, to shake with an
involuntary tremor, and in spite of the fact that one almost could feel
that her heart and lungs were speeding with energy, she had lost weight
and no longer had the full, rounded figure of health. Her manner showed
severe mental disturbance, indifference, depression, a distressing
deterioration. All her attractive Western breeziness was gone. One felt
the tragedy of it only too keenly.
“I have asked Professor Kennedy, a specialist, to call, my dear,” said
Atherton gently, without mentioning what the specialty was.
“Another one?” she queried languorously.
There was a colorless indifference in the tone which was almost tragic.
She said the words slowly and deliberately, as though even her mind
worked that way.
From the first, I saw that Kennedy had been observing Eugenia Atherton
keenly. And in the role of specialist in nervous diseases he was
enabled to do what otherwise would have been difficult to accomplish.
Gradually, from observing her mental condition of indifference which
made conversation extremely difficult as well as profitless, he began
to consider her physical condition. I knew him well enough to gather
from his manner alone as he went on that what had seemed at the start
to be merely a curious case, because it concerned the Athertons, was
looming up in his mind as unusual in itself, and was interesting him
because it baffled him.
Craig had just discovered that her pulse was abnormally high, and that
consequently she had a high temperature, and was sweating profusely.
“Would you mind turning your head, Mrs. Atherton?” he asked.
She turned slowly, half way, her eyes fixed vacantly on the floor until
we could see the once striking profile.
“No, all the way around, if you please,” added Kennedy.
She offered no objection, not the slightest resistance. As she turned
her head as far as she could, Kennedy quickly placed his forefinger and
thumb gently on her throat, the once beautiful throat, now with skin
harsh and rough. Softly he moved his fingers just a fraction of an inch
over the so-called “Adam’s apple” and around it for a little distance.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now around to the other side.”
He made no other remark as he repeated the process, but I fancied I
could tell that he had had an instant suspicion of something the moment
he touched her throat.
He rose abstractedly, bowed, and we started to leave the room,
uncertain whether she knew or cared. Quincy had fixed his eyes silently
on Craig, as if imploring him to speak, but I knew how unlikely that
was until he had confirmed his suspicion to the last slightest detail.
We were passing through a dressing room in the suite when we met a tall
young woman, whose face I instantly recognized, not because I had ever
seen it before, but because she had the Atherton nose so prominently
developed.
“My cousin, Edith,” introduced Quincy.
We bowed and stood for a moment chatting. There seemed to be no reason
why we should leave the suite, since Mrs. Atherton paid so little
attention to us even when we had been in the same room. Yet a slight
movement in her room told me that in spite of her lethargy she seemed
to know that we were there and to recognize who had joined us.
Edith Atherton was a noticeable woman, a woman of temperament, not
beautiful exactly, but with a stateliness about her, an aloofness. The
more I studied her face, with its thin sensitive lips and commanding,
almost imperious eyes, the more there seemed to be something peculiar
about her. She was dressed very simply in black, but it was the
simplicity that costs. One thing was quite evident—her pride in the
family of Atherton.
And as we talked, it seemed to be that she, much more than Eugenia in
her former blooming health, was a part of the somber house. There came
over me again the impression I had received before that I had read or
heard something like this case before.
She did not linger long, but continued her stately way into the room
where Eugenia sat. And at once it flashed over me what my impression,
indefinable, half formed, was. I could not help thinking, as I saw her
pass, of the lady Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”