Chapter XXI: The Man and His God 333 (5)

"No," he smiled. "No. There, there!" He patted her head. "It's all right. Good-night, dearest."

"Good-night?" There was a question in the words as she repeated them, but she retreated, albeit slowly, down the ladder. "Good-night, Jim."

"Good-night, dear," he responded cheerily, "and--I do love you, you know."

She answered from below:

"Yes, Jim."

"You do know it, don't you, dear heart?"

"Yes, Jim."

He heard her draw the bedclothes about her. When he awoke in the morning, she slept, but he would not breakfast until she was ready to breakfast with him, and so he sat, hungry, and waited for the hour that she devoted to her toilette. Then they went to the saloon, and afterwards to the deck, together.

Neither on that day nor on the day following was Muriel alone with von Klausen. Indeed, she was not alone with him again until they touched, at ten o'clock of a bright morning, at Plymouth, where the grateful green and yellow hills rose from the blue water, and the town nestled in a long white belt behind a chain of grim, grey men-of-war. The tender had stood by, and, now that some of the high stacks of mail-bags, which had been filling the stern decks since dawn, were transferred, an endless procession of slouching porters out of uniform carried, one brick to each man for each trip, large bricks of silver down the gangways and deposited them in piles of five, well forward on the tender. Jim had gone to the writing-room to scribble a note that might catch a fast boat from England to his agent at the mine, and Muriel was left beside the rail to talk with the Austrian.

"It has been a delightful voyage, has it not?" he asked, in that precise English to which she had now grown accustomed.

"I dare say," answered Muriel. "I don't know. You forget that I have had no others with which to compare it."

"But you have not been bored?"

"No."

"It has surely been pleasant, for I have by it had the opportunity to meet you and your brave husband."

"My husband, I know, would say as much of it because he has met you."

The Austrian bowed.

"Nor have I failed," he said, "to tell him how much the entire company aboard seem to admire his charming wife."

Muriel was resting her elbows on the rail; her glance was fixed upon the distant town.

"He told me," she responded, "that you thought my eyes about the second best within your experience. I hope your experience has been wide."

Von Klausen flushed.

"My experience," he said, gravely, "has, I regret to tell you, been that of most young men."

"Oh!" said Muriel. Her tone showed dislike of all that this implied, but she recalled that Jim had had no such experiences as those to which von Klausen plainly referred, and she suddenly felt, somehow, that this difference between the men did not altogether advance Stainton.

"Nevertheless, dear lady," the Austrian was going on, "the eyes that I thought as beautiful as yours--I did not say more beautiful--were eyes that have long since been shut."

Muriel was now more piqued than before. Had the man been comparing her to a dead fiancee to whom he, living, remained faithful?

"Were they Austrian eyes?" she asked, her own eyes full of obtrusive indifference.

"No; they were Italian. Had you come to Europe three years ago, you would have seen them when you went to the Louvre. They were the eyes that have been given to the Mona Lisa."

Muriel and he were standing apart from the crowd of passengers that watched the unloading of the silver. The girl turned to her companion. Her glance was interested enough now, and she saw at once that his was serious.

"There is something that I have been wanting to tell you," she began, before she was well aware that she spoke--"something that I don't know exactly how to say, or whether I ought to say it at all."

Von Klausen was openly concerned.

"If you are in doubt," he replied, "perhaps it would be better if you first thought more about it."

But his opposition, though totally the reverse to what she had expected, clinched her resolve.

"No," she said. "I ought to tell you about it. Now that I have started I know I ought. It's--it's about that time in the fog."

Von Klausen's colour mounted. Then, politely, he pretended to forget the incident.

"Yes, don't you remember? You must remember."

"I remember. It was a very sudden fog."

"Well," she said, "it was about what happened then. I must speak to you--I must explain about that." She was holding tightly to the rail.

Von Klausen saw her wrists tremble. He made little of the subject.

"When you were frightened, and I took your hand to reassure you? Dear lady, I trust that you have not supposed that I acted on my presumption----"

"You're kind to put it that way," she interrupted. "You're generous. But I want to be honest. I have to be honest, because I want you to understand--because you must understand--just why I behaved as I did, and you wouldn't understand--you couldn't--if I weren't honest with you. Captain von Klausen, you didn't take my hand, and you know it. I took yours."

He raised the disputed hand; he raised it in protest.

"Mrs. Stainton, I assure you that it was I who----"

"No, it wasn't. And I wasn't frightened by the fog, either. You must remember that, from the way I spoke; I showed I didn't even realise what a fog means at sea. So how could I be afraid of it? You did know and you had just said that you were afraid of fogs. I took your hand. I did it before I thought----"

"Yes, yes, dear Mrs. Stainton"--he was painfully anxious to end all this--"before you thought. It was nothing but a kindly----"

"Before I thought," she pursued, determinedly, her dark eyes steady on his. "You had told me of that awful experience of yours in the Bosphorus and of the effect it had on you. No wonder it did have such an effect. I am not blaming you for that. Only, I saw that you needed help and comfort. I was sorry for you. That was all: I was just sorry. I did it without thinking. I didn't know I had done it at all till it was all over. You see," she concluded, "I just couldn't, now, bear to have you misunderstand."

Carefully analysed, it might seem a contradictory explanation, but it was no sooner free of her lips than she felt that her soul was free of this thing which she had sought to explain.

Von Klausen was quite as much relieved as Muriel. He accepted it as she wished him to accept it.

"Never for a moment did I misunderstand," said he.

"Then," added Muriel, "you will understand why I haven't mentioned it to my husband----"

"Your husband?" The Austrian was all amazement. "Why should you?"

"Because," said Muriel, compressing her full lips and assuming her full height, "I always tell Jim everything."

If the shadow of a smile passed beneath his military moustache, she could not be sure of it.

"Everything?" said he. "But you have said that this was nothing."

"Exactly, and--don't you see?--that is one of the reasons why I haven't told it. You will--you will please not refer to it to him, Captain von Klausen, because----"

"Refer to it?" Von Klausen squared his shoulders. "To him? Never!"

His assertion was vehement.

"There is no reason why you shouldn't," Muriel replied; "only, as I say, I haven't told him, and the only real reason that I didn't tell him was because to do so I should have to tell him, too, that you had been afraid; and that isn't my secret: it's yours."

The Austrian's boyish face was now very grave.

"I thank you," he said. "For your thought of me I thank you, and the more I thank you because, by keeping my secret, you made it _ours_."

"Oh, but I don't mean----" said Muriel.

She did not finish, for she saw Stainton come from the writing-room and stride rapidly toward them. He had written his letter and despatched it.

Although the three stood shoulder to shoulder in the customs-shed at Cherbourg later in the day and occupied the same first-class compartment in the fast express through the rolling Norman country to Paris, Muriel and von Klausen were not then given an opportunity to conclude their conversation. The Austrian bade the Staintons good-bye in the swirl of porters and chauffeurs at the Gare St. Lazare, and Muriel took it for granted that the interruption must be final.

XI

DR. BOUSSINGAULT

Muriel awoke in their apartments at the Chatham the next morning to find herself decidedly out of sorts. Well as she had borne the voyage, she no sooner put her feet from her one of the two little canopied beds to the floor than she felt again the motion of the ship, and there was a return of the nausea that she attributed to the trouble which silently weighed upon her. She crawled back to the bed.

"I can't get up," she said.

Stainton was worried. He fluttered about her. He wanted to ring for servants to bring half-a-dozen things that Muriel would not accept. He wanted the smallest details of her symptoms. He wanted to send for a doctor.

"Go away," Muriel pleaded. "Please go away."

"But, dearie----"

"I wish I were back in New York."

Stainton, though he now feared the sea, was ready to undertake the return trip on the morrow.

"No, no," moaned Muriel. "Of course, now we are here, we must see things. But I won't have a doctor, Jim. Can't you see how it is with me? I shall be all right in an hour."

"All right, dearie; all right. I shall sit here by you."

"Please don't. I'm horrid when I'm sick."

"Not to me," said Jim.

"But I am. I look so horrid."

"I don't see it."

"Oh, you're good, Jim. But I want to be alone, just as you did when you were seasick. Go into the sitting-room. Please. I'll call you if I need you."

He went into their sitting-room, a room that shone with green and gilt, and looked out, across a narrow street, at the grey houses of uniform height and listened to the shrill street-sounds of Paris. He was lonely.

Somebody knocked at the door opening on the hall.

"Come in," he called. "I mean: _entrez_!"

A servant advanced, bearing a tray.

Jim saw that there was a card on the tray. He took it up and read the name of Paul Achille Boussingault. He did not remember ever having heard the name.

"_Pour moi?_" asked Jim.

"Yes, sir," said the servant, in a wholly unaccented English.

"Hum," said Jim. "Now I wonder what _he_ wants. Very well, show him up."

He hurried to the bedroom.

"Dear," he enquired, "tell me quick: how do you pronounce B-o-u-double s-i-n-g-a-u-l-t?"

Muriel did not lift the covers that concealed her face.

"Go away," she said.

"I am going, only, dearie----"

"Go away--_please_!"

Jim re-entered the sitting-room. Was it Bou-sing-go? He had his doubts about that French _in_. If he remembered rightly, it was a kind of _an_, and the _n_ ended somewhere in the nose. And who was M. Boussingault, anyhow?

"M. le docteur Boo-san-go," announced the servant.

"Wait. How was that?" asked Jim, and then found himself face to face with his visitor.

His visitor was a stocky man, of not more than five feet five or six inches in height, inclined to pugginess. He had a leathery complexion, and the point of his thin Van Dyck beard was in a straight line from the sharper point in which his close-clipped bristling hair ended above his nose. It was black hair, and it retreated precipitately on both sides. He looked at Jim through eyeglasses bearing a gold chain and bound together by a straight bar, which gave the effect of a continuous scowl to his heavy brows. He bowed deeply.

"M. James Stainton?" he enquired.

"Yes," said Jim. "Good-morning."

"Good-morning, monsieur. I have the honour to present the compliments of my brother, M. Henri Duperre Boussingault, and to ask that you will be so very good as me to command in the case I can be of any the slightest service to you and madame during your visit to Paris."

Stainton was at a loss.

"Your brother?" said he.

"M. Henri Boussingault," repeated the visitor. "He has to me written from Lyon to attend well to the appearance of your name among the distinguished arrivals in the _Daily Mail_."

The mention of Lyons aided Stainton's memory. He recalled now that the name of Henri Boussingault had appeared among those of the Lyonnaise syndicate that was interested in the purchase of the mine.

"Oh, yes," he said, and his broad teeth showed in a smile. "To be sure. This is very kind of you. Won't you sit down?"

Paul Achille Boussingault arranged his coat-tails and sat down with a grunt that apparently always accompanied this action on his part. His knees were far apart, and his feet scarcely touched the parquet floor. He was dressed completely in black, with the ribbon of an order fastened in the lapel of his frock-coat. His collar was low and round and upright, its junction with the shirt concealed by a small, prim black tie.

Stainton took a chair opposite him.

"Won't you have a cigar?" he asked.

"But thanks," said the visitor. "A cigarette only, if you do not object?" He produced a yellow packet of _Marylands_, and offered it to Jim.

"Thank you," said Stainton, lighting the cigarette. He did not like it, because, being an American, he did not care for American tobacco; but he tried to appear to like it. He wondered what he should talk about. "I shall be glad to make use of your kind offer."

"You will honour me," said the Frenchman.

"Um. And are you, too, interested in mining investments?"

The visitor dismissed mines and mining to his brother with a wave of his short hand. Stainton noticed that his fingers, though not long, were well shaped and tapering, in contradistinction to the spatulate thumbs, and that he wore a diamond set in a ring of thick gold.

"Those there are the avocation of my brother. I take no part in these affairs of the bourse. You will me forgive if I say, monsieur, that I have no traffic with such abominations of our society modern. I am a man of science."

"A doctor?" asked Jim.

"Of medicine."

For a moment Stainton revolved the idea of taking the visitor to see Muriel, but he divined Muriel's attitude toward such an action and banished the thought. Her indisposition was, of course, but natural and passing.

"What," asked Jim, "ought we to see first in Paris? We are strangers here, you know."

The doctor flung out his short arms. He indulged in an apostrophe to Paris that reminded Stainton of some of the orations he had read as having been delivered in the councils of the First Republic. Boussingault's English was frequently cast in a French mould and sometimes so fused that it was mere alloyage; but he never paused for a word, and he spoke with a fervour that was almost vehemence. There were moments when Jim wondered if the Frenchman suspected him of some slur on Paris and conceived it a duty to defend the city. What Jim must see was, in brief, everything.

Nevertheless, so soon as the apostrophe ended, Boussingault appeared to forget all about it. His sharp eyes travelled over the hotel sitting-room, and his mind occupied itself therewith as devotedly as it had just been giving itself to the Gallic metropolis.

"Ah, you Americans," he sighed; "how you love the luxury!"

"Perhaps we do," said Jim, recalling certain negotiations that he had 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."

He was quite sure that he was sincere in his attitude. They were sightseers, and he had always been told that Montmartre was one of the sights of Paris. They had seen everything else. They had seen Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the markets, the Palais de Justice, the Chambre des Deputes, the tomb of Napoleon--everything. They had enjoyed the Jardins des Tuileries and the pictures and sculpture of the Luxembourg Museum, and they had walked through the weary miles of painted canvases in the Louvre, where Muriel lingered before the spot at which the Mona Lisa had long hung. They had even permitted themselves the horrors of the Morgue. Why should Stainton not complete his knowledge of Paris, and why should he not, like most other Americans, take his wife, however young she was, to Montmartre with him? Jim had once said to Holt that he had, all his life long, kept himself clean. The curiosities of his youth had remained unsatisfied.

The strongest impulses are not infrequently those of which one is entirely unconscious. At Aiken, Stainton had yielded himself with the extravagance of the young man of twenty-five, which he thought he was, to the demands of the situation in which he found himself. At sea there had necessarily been a quieter period; but this had ended with the arrival of the Staintons in Paris. The tension of sightseeing had, alone, sufficed to wear them out, and now (though he persuaded himself that this was but the inevitable development of the novel into the commonplace) he began to fear that the high tide of his emotion might be sinking to the low level of habit and affection, that what was true of himself was also true of Muriel, and he drew the inference that another sort of sightseeing would be good for them both.

So they went to Montmartre.

At the advice of their chauffeur, they commenced with the Bal Tabarin. From the motor-car that had hauled them up the long hills of dark and tortuous streets, they stepped into a blaze of yellow light, under which half a dozen men hurried to them. One held the door of the cab; another, as if it were his sole business in life, wielded a folded newspaper as a shield to protect Muriel's gown from contamination by the motor's muddy tires; two pointed to the scintillating doorway, and two more chattered enquiries that Jim could in no wise interpret.

He knew, however, that there was one answer to every question: he doled out a handful of francs, in true American fashion, and then handed a purple and white bill to his wife.

Curiously text-book French though it was, Muriel's French had proved really intelligible; she had rapidly acquired the power of comprehending a full third of the French addressed to her, and all this struck Stainton, who loved to follow the lips that were his, speaking a language that was not his and of which he was nearly ignorant, as a proof of her superiority. Therefore she now preceded him to the ticket window and made their purchase. A moment later a large man in a frock coat was ushering them, among capped and aproned maids that begged permission to check wraps, up to the double stairway at the end of the big ballroom and into a box twenty feet above the floor.

They sat down, conscious of themselves, and ordered a bottle of Ayala, presently served to them in goblets to play the role of wine-glasses--for one drinks champagne from goblets in Montmartre--and looked down at the dancers on the floor below. From its balcony at the other end of the hall a brass band was sending forth a whirlwind of quadrille music, and in the centre of the ballroom eight women danced the can-can. They were large women, some of them rather fat, and none of them rather young. They wore wide straw hats and simple tailored shirtwaists and dark skirts of a cut almost severe; but in sharp contrast to this exterior, when they danced, they displayed incredible yards and yards of lace petticoat and stockings that outshone the rainbow.

"What do you think of it?" asked Stainton.

Muriel condemned the Bal Tabarin as she had condemned Boussingault.

"I think it's horrid," she replied. "Aren't they ugly?" But she did not take her eyes from the dancers.

All about the dancing-floor, except in that large circular clearing for the performers, were little tables where men and women sat and drank beer and smoked cigarettes. Along one side was a long bar at which both sexes were served. Everyone gave casual heed to the dancing; everyone applauded when he was pleased and hissed when he was not. Now and then a young woman would rush to a neighbouring table, seize upon a man and guide him madly about one corner of the floor in time to the music, and now and then it would be a young man that seized upon a woman, at which the patrons, if they paid any attention at all to it, smiled good-naturedly. At one of the most conspicuous tables were a couple kissing above their foaming beer-mugs, and nobody seemed to notice them. Clearly, this was a world where one did as one pleased, and, so long as one did not trespass upon the individuality of another, none objected.

"Something new, isn't it?" asked Jim, rather dubiously.

"It's unbelievable," said Muriel, her face flushed.

"Shall we go?"

"No--we might as well wait a little while--until we've finished our champagne."

The quadrille ended. There were ten minutes during which the visitors to the place waltzed rapidly, with feet lifting high, about the floor. Down the centre two young girls were swaying together in a form of waltzing that neither of the Americans had ever seen before. A man and a woman, dancing, would embrace violently at every recurrence of a certain refrain.

Muriel slipped her hand along the rail of the box. Stainton, whose eyes were fixed on the dancers, started at her touch.

"Hold my hand," said Muriel.

He took her hand in his, lowering it from the view of the spectators.

"No," commanded Muriel: "on the rail, please."

"Certainly, but isn't that rather----"

"It seems to be the custom, Jim."

So he held her hand before them all, and soon found himself liking this.

A troupe of girls ran upon the floor and, to the music, began a performance in tumbling. The hair of one was loosened, the ribbon that held it fell at her slippered feet, and two men, from near-by tables, leaped upon it and struggled laughingly for possession of the trophy.

The Staintons were intent upon this when they heard a low laugh behind them. They looked about: three women with bright cheeks were peeping through the swinging doors of the box. Involuntarily, Jim smiled, and, since a smile in Montmartre passes current for an invitation, the foremost of the girls entered, shutting out her companions.

"_Vous etes Americains?_" she enquired.

Stainton's French went as far as that. He nodded.

"_Du nord ou du sud?_"

Jim was accustomed to thinking that there was but one real America.

"The United States," said he.

"Ver' well," laughed the girl in an English prettily accented. "Your good 'ealth, sar--and the good 'ealth of mademoiselle."

She raised from the table Jim's goblet of champagne and drank a little. It was evident that her English was now exhausted.

Jim, frankly puzzled, looked at Muriel.

"What shall we do?" he wondered.

He thought that Muriel would resent the intrusion, but Muriel did not seem to resent it.

"It appears to be the custom," said Muriel again. "I suppose that we had better ask her to sit down and have some champagne."

"Very well," said Stainton, none too willingly. "You ask her, then: the French verb 'to sit' always was too much for me."

Muriel offered the invitation; the visitor laughingly accepted; another bottle was ordered and, while Jim, unable to understand what was being said, leaned over the rail and looked at the dancers, his wife and the vermilion-lipped intruder engaged in an encounter of small-talk that Muriel began by enjoying as an improvement at once of her French and her knowledge of the world.

The visitor, however, so managed the conversation that, though she did give Muriel her address in a little street off the Boulevard Clichy, it was she who was gathering information. She was extremely polite, but extremely inquisitive.

"You have been long in Paris, is it not?" she asked.

"No, not long; only two weeks," said Muriel.

"But in France--no?"

"We came direct to Paris."

"But you speak French well, mademoiselle."

The compliment pleased Muriel to the extent that she missed the title applied to her.

"My knowledge of French is very small," she replied. "I studied the language in America."

"In America? Truly? One would never suppose."

"We had a French nun for teacher."

"Yes, yes. And monsieur your sweetheart, he does not speak French--no?"

Muriel started.

"Monsieur," she said, a little stiffly, "is my husband."

But the visitor, far from feeling reprimanded, was openly delighted.

"Your husband?" she echoed. "Very good. He is handsome, your husband."

"I think so," said Muriel.

"And it is always good," pursued the guest, "that the husband be much older than the wife, is it not?"

Instantly Muriel relapsed. She could not know that the girl spoke sincerely. She was among strangers, and, like most of us, instinctively suspected all whose native tongue was not her own.

"He is not much older!" she retorted.

"Oh--but yes. And it is well. It is so that it is most often arranged in France."

"No doubt--but our marriages are not 'arranged' for us in America. We choose for ourselves."

The visitor seemed surprised. She raised her long, high brows and looked from Stainton to Muriel.

"How then," she enquired, "you choose for yourself a man so much older?"

"I say he is _not_ much older, not any older," said Muriel, despising herself for having fallen into such a discussion, yet unable, in an alien language, to disentangle herself.

"But madame is a mere girl," said the visitor, seeking only to be polite.

"And my husband is young also," declared Muriel.

Something in the tone of this repetition convinced the French girl that the subject was not further to be pursued. She essayed another tack.

"And the babies?" she asked. "Is it that you brought with you the babies?"

Muriel's cheeks warmed again, and she looked away.

"We have no children," she responded, shortly.

"No children?" The visitor plainly considered this unbelievable. "You have no little babies? Then, why to marry?"

"No."

"Not one?"

"We have none."

"But how unhappy, how unfortunate for monsieur! Perhaps soon----"

"We have been married only a short time."

"Ah!" The French girl seemed to rest upon that as the sole reasonable explanation. "Then," she said with a note of encouragement in her tone, "it is not without hope. After a while you will have the babies."

Muriel was angry. She looked to Jim for rescue; but Jim was still leaning over the rail, engrossed in the spectacle presented by the dancers.

"I do not want any children," said Muriel, suddenly.

"No children? You wish no children?" gasped her inquisitor. "You choose to marry, and yet you want no children? But why then did madame marry?"

Muriel rose.

"For reasons that you cannot understand," she said. "We must go now," she added; and she touched Jim's arm. "Come," she said to him; "let's go, Jim."

Stainton turned slowly.

"What's the hurry?" he asked.

"It must be after one o'clock," said Muriel.

"But we are in Montmartre."

"Yes--and we have still a great deal of it to see before daylight, I believe."

Jim rose.

"All right," he said.

The girl put out her hand.

"_S'il vous plait, monsieur_," she said: "_la petite monnaie_."

Stainton had tried to take the extended hand to bid its owner good-night, but he noticed, before she began to speak, that it was turned palm upward.

"What's this?" he enquired of Muriel.

"My cab-fare," said the visitor in French, and Muriel, vaguely appreciating the fact that here was another custom of the country, translated.

"Give her a five-franc piece," she said. "Something of the sort is evidently expected."

"So I have to pay her for the privilege of buying her champagne?" laughed Jim. "Ask her what I _am_ paying for. I am curious about this."

"No," said Muriel.

"Do," urged Stainton.

But the girl appeared now to comprehend. She was not embarrassed.

"In brief," she explained, "for my time."