It was in '94, when even the electro-motor was not in general use, and the
petrol-driven machine was slowly convincing Paris and New York of its
magnificent possibilities. Saxham used a smart, well-horsed, hired
brougham for day-visits, and for night work a motor-tricycle. There were
no stables to the house in Chilworth Street. He left the motor-tricycle at
the place where he had bought it second-hand. The machine was cleaned and
kept in order, and brought to his door by one of the employes at a certain
hour, for a fixed weekly sum paid to the proprietor of the establishment,
Bough by name, an Englishman born in the Transvaal, who had quite
recently, or so he gave out, emigrated from South Africa, and set up in
London as a cycle-seller and repairer, though there were not many cycles
at the shop. Heavy packing-cases and crates were always being delivered
there, and always being despatched from thence, via Cape Town and Port
Elizabeth and Delagoa Bay to the Transvaal, Bough being agent, or so he
said, for several South African firms engaged in the transport of
agricultural machines. Bough had a wife, a large-eyed, delicate-looking,
pretty little woman, who seemed afraid of the big, muscular, tanned fellow
of thirty-eight or so, with the odd light eyes, and the smooth manner, and
the ready smile, and the short, expert, hairy, cruel-looking hands. He had
seen life, had Bough, at the goldfields and at the diamond-mines, and as a
trooper through the Zulu and Matabele campaigns, and he was ready to talk
about what he had seen. Still there were reservations about Bough, and
mysteries. The Doctor suspected him of being brutal to his wife, and would
not have been surprised any morning upon receiving the news of the man's
arrest as one of a gang of forgers, or coiners, or burglars. But he lived
and let live, and whatever else the big Afrikander may have been, he was
an excellent workman at his trade.
One evening Bough rode round on the motor-tricycle himself, and mentioned
casually that his wife was ailing. The Doctor, in the act of mounting the
machine, put a brief question or two, registered the replies in the
automatic sub-memory he kept for business, and told the man to send her
round at ten o'clock upon the following morning.
She came, punctual to the hour, and was shown into Owen's
consulting-room--a little woman with beautiful, melancholy eyes and a
pretty figure. Illiterate, common, affected, and vain to a degree,
hideously misusing the English language in that low, dulcet voice of hers,
ludicrous in her application of the debatable aspirate to words in the
spelling of which it has no part.
Rather an absurd little person, Mrs. Bough. Yet, a tragic little person,
in Saxham's eyes at least, by the time she had made her errand plain.
He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him. Cultured, highly-bred
women had made such appeals to him before, and without shame. How should
this little vulgar creature be expected to have more conscience than they?
They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more prettily. They
spoke of their frail physical health and their husbands' great anxiety,
and quoted the long-ago expressed opinion of ancient family physicians,
who possibly turned uneasily in their decent graves. But the gist of the
whole was, that they did not want children, and Dr. Saxham had such a
great and justly-earned reputation in skilful and delicate operations ...
and, in short, would he not be compliant and oblige? They would pay
anything. Money was positively no object.
How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, rising
professional men, who are hampered by honourable debts which threaten to
impede and drag them down; who are possessed of high ideals and moral
scruples, which, not being essentially, fundamentally embedded and
ingrained in the conscience of the man, may possibly be argued away; who
have not implanted in their souls and hearts the high reverence for
motherhood and the deep tenderness for helpless infancy that distinguished
Owen Saxham!
He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. He began as he
had begun with every one of them--the delicate, titled aristocrats, the
ambitious Society beauties, the popular actresses, the women who envied
these and read about them in the illustrated interviews published in the
fashion-papers, and sighed to be interviewed also--to not one of these had
he weighed out one drachm less of the bitter salutary medicine that he now
administered to Mrs. Bough.
He invariably began with the personal peril and the inevitable risk.
Strange how they ignored it, blinded themselves to it, thrust it, the
grinning, threatening Death's-head, on one side. Of course, he talked like
that! It was most candid of him, and most conscientious. But if they were
willing to take the risk--and antiseptic surgery had made such _huge_
strides in these days that the risk was a mere nothing.... Besides, there
was not really need for anything like an operation, was there? He could
prescribe the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything would
then be all right.
He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the
purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the
gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial
barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should
have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race,
tombs and sepulchres--to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp,
trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical
knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, saying that the thing was
done, that everybody knew it was done, and that it always would be done,
by other men as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist; he
admitted the force of their arguments. Let other men of his great calling
pile up and amass wealth, if they chose, by tampering with the unclean
thing. Owen Saxham would none of it. At this juncture the woman would have
hysterics of the weeping or the scolding kind, or would be convinced of
the righteousness of the forlorn cause he championed, or would pretend the
hysterics or the conviction. Generally she pretended to the latter, and
swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask the rage and hatred in
her haggard eyes, and went to that other man. Then, after a brief absence
accounted for as a "rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her
world, smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to
make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had passed through the Valley of
the Shadow, with only her own rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort
her, she would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to
pegging or chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely she would not emerge at
all, and then her women friends would send wreaths for the coffin and
carriages to the funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their
boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had attended her. For of
course he had bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as
right as rain for that poor dear thing!
Little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pretends to be convinced.
She had cried bitterly in the beginning, as she confessed to Saxham that
she was not really married to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham
had always suspected of being a scoundrel, would certainly go off with
"one of them other women and leave her if she went and 'ad a byby." She
cried even more bitterly afterwards, as she wondered how she ever could 'a
dreamed o' being that wicked! Bough might kill her--that he might!--or go
back to South Africa without her; she never would give in, not now. Never
now--the Doctor might depend upon that, she assured him, drying her
swollen eyes with a cheap lace-edged handkerchief loaded with patchouli.
She was shaken and nervous, and in need of a sedative, and Saxham, having
the drugs at hand, made her up a simple draught, unluckily omitting to
make a memorandum of the prescription in his pocket-book, and gave her the
first dose of it before she went away, profuse in thanks, and carrying the
bottle.
And he saw his waiting patients, and stepped into his waiting brougham,
and, having for once no urgent call upon his professional attention, dined
with Mildred at Pont Street, and was coaxed into promising to take her to
the opening performance of a classic play which was to be revived three
nights later at a fashionable West End theatre. Mildred had set her heart
upon being seen in a box at this particular function, and Saxham had had
some trouble to gratify her wish.
He remembered with startling clearness every remote detail of that night
at the theatre. Mildred had looked exquisitely fair and girlish in her
white dress, with a necklace of pearls he had given her rising and falling
on the lovely virginal bosom, where the lover's eyes dwelt and lingered in
the masterful hunger of his heart. Soon, soon, that hunger of his for
possession would be gratified! It was April, and at the end of July, when
work was growing slack, they would be married. They were going North for
the honeymoon. A wealthy and grateful patient of Saxham's had placed at
his disposal a grey, historic Scotch turret-mansion, standing upon mossy
lawns, with woods of larch and birch and ancient Spanish chestnuts all
about it, looking over the silver Tweed. In the heat and hurry of his
daily round of work, Saxham, who had spent an autumn holiday at this
place, would find himself dreaming about it. The smell of the heather
would spice the air that was no longer hot and sickly with the effluvia of
the city, and the hum of the drowsy black bees, and the cooing of the
wood-pigeons would replace the din of the London traffic, and Mildred's
eyes would be looking into his, and her cool, fragrant lips would be
freely yielded, and her arms would be about his neck, and all those secret
aspirations and yearnings and dreams of wedded joy would be realised at
last.
He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of the South
African night, the great white stars and the vast purple dome they
throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable little gaily-papered
ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, remembering that everything had
ended there. Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate
and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with
scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and horrors to the
sheer brink where Madness waits to hurl the desperate over upon the jagged
rocks below.
He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came down to say good-night at
the door.
"Have you been happy?" he had asked, framing the sweet young face in
tender hands, and looking in the pretty, gentle brown eyes.
"You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how
could I have helped being happy? And He"--she meant the Semitic
actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features
and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with
brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive
hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately,
but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and
possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy--"He was so great!
Don't you agree with me--marvellously great?"
Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had appeared to him a
dreary performance enough, or it would have, had it not been for Mildred
and the dear glamour with which her presence had invested the great
gilded auditorium, with its rows of bored, familiar, notable faces in the
stalls, representing Society, Art, Literature, Music, and Finance; its pit
and gallery crowded with organised bodies of theatre-goers, one party
certain to boo where the other applauded, riot and disorder the inevitable
result, unless by a coincidence rare as snow at Midsummer the rival
associations might be won upon to display a unanimity of approval, upon
which the dramatic Press-critics would rapturously descant in the
newspapers next morning.