THE LAST WORD OF SCIENCE
SIR BERNARD VANBRUGH knew that he had failed to shake his daughter’s
resolution.
He did not believe that Hero would marry Lord Alistair Stuart while he
forbade her to. But what he feared was that she would refuse to give
him up. He was getting on in years, he had not spared himself, and
sooner or later Hero must be free. In the meanwhile he saw before him
the prospect of her celibacy, a state abhorrent to his feelings whether
as father or as physician.
In his own mind he had a husband chosen for Hero--an engineer; one of
that class to whom the future seems to be assigned; sane, strong, and
self-reliant; a water-drinker, like himself; a man of orderly life and
wholesome instincts; an ideal father, for whom what science calls the
mechanism of life was really mechanism, and nothing more; a man in
whose eyes poetry-books and prayer-books were alike contemptible; one
who found no weakness in himself, and tolerated none in others.
Vanbrugh compared the husband whom he had chosen for his daughter
with the husband she had chosen for herself, and was bewildered and
impatient.
In those days a certain obscure writer of Jewish blood, who had tried,
and failed, to write poems, plays, and novels, had taken vengeance on
his more successful brethren by publishing a malignant libel in which
he pried with some pruriency into their private lives, and proved for
his own consolation that genius is a form of vice, if not a positive
crime. Some scraps of scientific language picked out of the works of
Professor Lombroso had served to disguise the critic’s rancour, and
the mixture had proved more palatable to the public than the author’s
literary efforts. The sentiment coarsely vented in this work was that
which inspired Sir Bernard Vanbrugh when he thought of Lord Alistair as
a husband for his only child.
From the envy and more or less feigned Pharisaism of the libeller
Vanbrugh’s mind, of course, was free. He had liked Lord Alistair, and
been interested by him. In the life that he had led hitherto he had
been harmless in the scientist’s view, or, at all events, not harmful
enough to call for harsh measures. But now everything was changed. If
by the lifting of a finger Sir Bernard could have terminated the young
man’s existence, and with it the spell which he had flung over Hero,
he would have lifted the finger without an instant’s hesitation or an
instant’s remorse.
And yet he judged better of Lord Alistair than of some of those
splendid types of healthy manhood whom the modern world goes forth
to worship, as they practise foul play against each other for a few
pounds upon the football field. For he decided to appeal from Hero to
her betrothed. He was going to ask the young man to give up voluntarily
the prize within his grasp; and somehow he did not think that he should
ask in vain.
He left the house about the time Lord Alistair usually came round, and
met him strolling up the road.
“My daughter is at home,” he said, in answer to Stuart’s inquiry. “But
before you see her I should like to speak to you. Is there anywhere
where we can go and have a quiet talk?”
The request was ominous enough in itself, and the physician’s manner
made it more so. Alistair’s heart sank as he answered:
“I expect the club would be the best place. We should not find anyone
in the card-room at this hour.”
He turned and walked silently side by side with the arbiter of his
happiness, past the crowd that bustled in front of the Plage, and up
the short street that conducted them to the club door.
As he went a great despondency settled on him. Without knowing what
Sir Bernard meant to say to him, he felt that there was little that he
could say for himself. What account of himself could he give that would
be considered satisfactory by the father of an only daughter? It was
only his mother who had encouraged him to lift his eyes to Hero. He
ought to have asked his mother to plead his cause with Hero’s father.
Even in his most buoyant moments during the past few weeks he had never
felt quite sure of his happiness. A sense of unreality came upon him
ever and anon; he had felt like a man dreaming a delicious dream, and
dreading the awakening he knows must come.
Now the awakening had come, and could not be put off.
He found himself seated in the deserted card-room facing Hero’s father
across a small green table, on which two packs of used cards and three
or four scoring-blocks awaited the return of the bridge-players.
The sight of the soiled packs affected him painfully. He knew that
this economy was due to the exorbitant French tax, but yet it struck
upon him as a note of squalor. The cards themselves were small and
badly made, like most things made by Governments. He drew one of the
packs towards him, and began shuffling it nervously while he waited for
Vanbrugh to speak.
Vanbrugh noted the action with a physician’s eye.
“I expect you have guessed what I want to speak to you about,” he said
quietly.
Alistair lifted his eyes from the cards and stole a glance at his
questioner, a glance not free from the cunning of his Pictish blood.
But he said nothing.
“My daughter tells me that you have asked her to become your wife.”
For a moment Alistair made no response. Keeping his head down he cut
four cards in rapid succession--a club, a spade, a diamond, and then
another diamond. He took it as a bad omen.
“Has she told you anything more?” he asked.
“Only that she had given you her consent.” Vanbrugh hesitated; he found
it harder than he had expected to tell this young man the truth about
himself.
“You will understand naturally,” he began again, “that Hero is my chief
interest in life. Her happiness is dearer to me than anything else in
the world.”
“And to me, too,” Alistair put in swiftly, raising his head and looking
Sir Bernard in the face.
“That is what I hoped you would say,” Sir Bernard answered gravely. “I
want to discuss the matter with you from that point of view.”
Alistair lowered his head again.
“I am not good enough for her--you need not tell me that. But if she
loves me?” He spoke in low tones, which only just reached the father’s
ears.
“You must let me speak plainly, Lord Alistair, as plainly as I spoke to
your brother when he came to me with the same request.”
“Trent! Did he come to you on my behalf?” cried Alistair in
astonishment.
“He came on his own. He has known Hero longer than you have.”
It took Alistair a moment or two to grasp the situation.
“Did you refuse Trent?” he exclaimed.
“Yes.” In his own mind Vanbrugh was beginning to doubt the wisdom of
that refusal. Had he not been over cautious? His objection to the Duke
of Trent had been more or less hypothetical: the Duke himself was
sound; it was possible that he might not transmit the family taint. He
might have done well to consider the danger of leaving his daughter to
follow her own fancy. When there were so few perfect husbands, and so
many undesirables, it would have been wiser, perhaps, to close with one
who had so much in his favour.
“Why, in the name of Heaven, did you object to him?”
“Partly because he was your brother. I told him I could not let my
daughter marry a man of diseased stock.”
The words stunned Alistair. He had been prepared to have his own
misdeeds brought up against him; to be told, perhaps, that it was too
late for him to reform; or at least that he must give proofs that the
reformation was thorough and lasting, before he could be trusted with
Hero. But this was cutting away the very foundations.
“I never heard of such a thing!” he stammered, letting the cards fall
from his fingers. “Do you condemn us for the sins of our ancestors?”
“It is not I who condemn you. Nature does that, and I am only her
student and interpreter.”
Alistair put his hand to his head.
“And is that the latest gospel of science?” he said bitterly. “The
fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on
edge.”
“It is not a very recent gospel, and you are not quoting from a
scientific work,” Sir Bernard reminded him. “All that science does is
to add the corollary that those who have eaten sour grapes ought not to
become fathers.”
Alistair made no answer for a time. He sat toying with the cards,
cutting them at random and speculating vaguely as to who were the
Argine and the Hogier after whom certain picture cards were named. It
struck him that men were like cards; the gods must have created them of
different values for their own amusement, and be playing some Olympian
game among themselves, in the chances of which it was his, Alistair’s,
destiny to fall a loser of the trick.
Sir Bernard watched him with a pity he did not try to quench. He liked
this young man very much--so much that he could have wished for his
sake that Nature was less inexorable.
“How merciless science is!” Alistair observed presently.
“Science is not so merciless as the old religion,” the scientist was
not sorry to respond. “At least, it does not reproach you for what
you cannot help. Its sentence is not pronounced vindictively, like
a bad-tempered judge denouncing crimes which he himself was never
tempted to commit. And when it forbids you to pass on your evil
inheritance to the unborn, it is acting, not without mercy for you, but
with greater mercy for them.”
And then, while Alistair remained quiet, listening dully without the
power of resistance, the other went on to draw the picture of tainted
life passing from generation to generation, the terrible theme of
the dramatists from Æschylus to Ibsen, figured by superstition as a
curse from the gods, traced by science to the cruel thoughtlessness
of men. He described the great army of the victims, as he himself
had reviewed it in his medical practice. In addition to those whose
misfortunes were the subject of public notice and public charity,
there were the innumerable secret sufferers, the cause and meaning of
whose sufferings was most often unknown to themselves. There were the
drunkards, the gamblers, the adulterers, with whom the world dealt so
much more harshly than with its cripples and consumptives. There were
the neuropaths and hysterical subjects, little better than maniacs,
yet struggling to keep their place among the sane, endowed with the
gift of reason, held responsible as reasonable beings, and yet tortured
with the consciousness that their infirmity betrayed them at every
moment into conduct which only madness could excuse. He touched on
the terrible case of those who go through life with the dark shadow
of paralysis hanging over them, never knowing at what day or hour it
will strike them down. And all these evils, and the lesser ones, as
they are called, though it may be doubted if they are really lesser,
the infirmities of temper, of idleness, of defective memory--in short,
every human frailty and affliction, except the insignificant damage of
war and accident and pestilence--truly insignificant in comparison--he
traced to the one cause. And in a world of healthy, rational men
there would be no war and no pestilence, and very few accidents. So
that true religion and true science, the religion of Humanity and the
science of Nature, were at one in denouncing as the greatest of all
crimes--indeed, the only real crime--the bringing of unhealthy children
into the world.
When he had finished the listener gave him a questioning look.
“But if there are no children?”
Vanbrugh frowned for the first time, and his voice hardened.
“I have lived a hard and abstemious life,” he said; “I have been
stricter with myself than with anyone else. My reward is to have
a child in whom I have never detected a weak spot. I have a right
that she shall make a happy marriage, and receive a woman’s crown of
honour--a happy motherhood.”
Alistair bowed his head again, and scattered the cards from his hand.
“And what is to become of me?”
The mournful question deeply moved Sir Bernard. He was asking this
young man to surrender the sweetest form of earthly happiness; what
could he offer him in exchange?
“Has science nothing else to say to me? You are a physician; if I am
diseased, cannot you cure me?”
Vanbrugh was disconcerted.
“We are only groping our way as yet,” he answered mildly. “Remember
that all knowledge was forbidden by the priesthood for a thousand
years. We are only in the beginning of a better age.”
“The age in which there will be no men like me!” Alistair commented.
“And in the meantime science has no gospel for me.”
“It is your father whom you have to blame,” Sir Bernard said
reluctantly.
Alistair trembled.
“You mean that I ought not to have been born?”
The physician was silent.
“I am a waste product, for which science has no use. O, why not? You
have found beautiful dyes in coal-tar; can you find nothing in me?”
Vanbrugh was a father fighting for his child, a zealot fighting for his
faith. But he was touched by this appeal.
“I have not said that. I have only told you that you ought not to
become a father. It is not your fault if you have received an evil
inheritance, but it will be your fault if you pass it on.”
Alistair hid his face in his hands for a time.
“Be honest with me, Sir Bernard,” he said presently, in a husky voice,
without lifting his head. “You are the priest of science, and I am in
the confessional. You think I ought to commit suicide?”
The scientist was profoundly moved. He held his breath for an instant,
and his forehead grew damp. He found his resolution failing him.
“No,” he said, in faltering tones--“no, don’t think that. I have told
you science is still groping her way. I believe it would be happier for
some of the poor victims of heredity--the hopelessly insane, the deaf
and dumb, and perhaps the criminal and paralytic--if a painless death
were provided for them. But a man with your gifts should find something
worth living for.”
Alistair looked at him earnestly.
“I want to live,” he said simply. “I don’t want to die. I can’t feel
that I have any less right to live than you. Perhaps the criminals and
paralytics can’t feel that either. I never feel unfit; I never knew
that there was anything wrong about me till other people told me so.
When I was a boy the world was a beautiful place to me; it would be
so still if there were no good people in it. It is they who will not
let me live. You are only saying to me in more honest language what
they have been saying to me, what my own mother has been saying to me,
ever since I can remember. I don’t know why I am condemned. Ever since
I was a boy I have loved beautiful things as other men love gold; I
have walked through life with my eyes fixed on the stars, and my feet
tripped up by every ditch. My mother thinks that I am wicked, and
you say that I am diseased. And to me--yes, to me--you all seem blind
people burrowing in the earth and refusing to be happy.”
Vanbrugh shook his head.
“I am not responsible for what others have said to you. In my eyes you
are simply a victim of heredity. I do not want my daughter’s children
to be victims in their turn; that is all. If you love her----”
“I do love her,” Alistair interrupted fiercely. “I thought you
understood. I only want now to know what I can do for her sake. If I
were a Catholic, I would go into a monastery, so as to leave her free.
That is the last word of Christianity for a man like me. The last word
of science is the lethal chamber.”
Sir Bernard had an inspiration.
“Why don’t you go back to Molly Finucane?”
Alistair fell back in his chair as if he had received a blow. He woke
out of his dream. Sir Bernard was right, and his mother had been wrong.
He had no business to unite his wrecked career with such a life as
Hero Vanbrugh’s. Molly Finucane was the true match for him. She was a
scapegoat like himself. The figure of the poor little painted creature
had haunted his memory even during these last days of courtship, and he
had never felt quite satisfied that he had acted honourably in leaving
her.
He rose to his feet.
“Yes,” he said, “I can do that. That will set Hero free. Good-bye, Sir
Bernard. I am going back to London to marry Molly Finucane.”