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 whathewants. 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 Frenchin. If he remembered rightly, it was a kind ofan, and thenended somewhere in the nose. And who was M. Boussingault, anyhow?
"M. le docteur Boo-sàn-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 Duperré Boussingault, and to ask that you will be sovery 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 theDaily 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 ofMarylands, 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'sbureau; "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 eatensole à 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 apetit bleufrom Boussingault, postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing with finespencerian 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 ofpetit déjeunerin 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, whenhe had put her into ataxi-mètreto 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—ofit. 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 thegarçonsto 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: "Isay 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 unfitsthem!"
Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that thetalk 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 ofcanard sauvagethat 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 thepropriétairesand those lackeys of thepropriétaires, the generals of the armies. Thepropriétairewants 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; hewants 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,médecin!"
"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, thesepropriétaires; but what they would say is servants andfilles de joieto 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 achild 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 aprix fixecharged 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 istoomany."
"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 andsuitablephysique. 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 degeneratechild 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 seductivefilleand 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 hegrunted 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—wehave 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."
Alone in theirtaxi-mètre, 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 ahorridman!" 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 youseehim? 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 thathe 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."
"HowcouldI?"
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 Députés, 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 rôle 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 cutalmost 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, leapedupon 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 êtes Américains?" 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 isnotmuch older, not any older," said Muriel, despising herself for having fallen into such adiscussion, 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 plaît, 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 Iampaying 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."
"You pay her," Muriel grudgingly translated, "for her time. But," she concluded, "I wouldn't pay her much, Jim."
"So that's it!" chuckled Stainton. "Oh, well, I don't want to seem stingy after all this discussion of it."
He handed her a ten-franc louis.
The girl's eyes caught the unexpected glint of gold.
"Oh, la-la-la!" she gurgled, and, with what seemed one movement, she pocketed the money; drank to Jim's health; flung her arms about him with a sounding kiss on his mouth, and ran giggling through the folding-doors.
Stainton, tingling with a strange excitement and looking decidedly foolish, gazed at his wife.
"What do you think of that?" he choked.
Muriel stood before him trembling, her black eyes ablaze.
"Howdaredyou?" she demanded.
"I?" Jim was still bewildered. "What on earth didIdo?"
"And before my very eyes!" said Muriel.
"But, my dear,Ididn't do anything. It was the girl——"
"You permitted it."
"I hadn't time to forbid. Besides, it would have been absurd to forbid. And she meant it as a compliment."
"Not to you. Don't flatter yourself, Jim."
"Well, at any rate, my dear, it is merely another custom of the quarter that we are in. Really, I scarcely think you should object."
"It was the money that she liked, Jim. I think that, as for you, you couldn't have been more absurd even if you had forbidden her."
He quieted her as best he could. They would go, he said, to L'Abbaye, of which their chauffeur had spoken to them; and to L'Abbaye, that most gilded and most brilliant of all the night palaces of Montmartre, they went.
They climbed the crowded stairs and paused for a moment in the doorway, while Jim began to divest himself of his overcoat. Muriel, ahead, was looking into the elaborate room.
Pale green and white it was and loud with laughter and music, with the popping of many corks and the chatter of persons that seemed to have no mission theresave the common mission of enjoyment. In the centre was a cleared space, and there, among handsomely appointed tables, the white waistcoated men and radiantly-gowned women loudly applauding, two Spanish girls in bright costumes were dancing the sensuous mattchiche.
Muriel saw that, at one of the tables nearest the dancers, was a young man who applauded more enthusiastically than any of his neighbours. She saw that the girls observed this and liked it. She saw one girl, with an especially violent embrace, seize her partner, hold her tight for an instant, release her, and then, dashing to the young man, extend her arms, to which the young man sprang amid the tolerant laughter of his companions. Muriel saw the Spanish girl and the young man continue the dance.
Quickly she wheeled to her husband.
"I don't want to go in here," she said.
"What?" Jim was utterly dumfounded.
She caught the lapels of his coat and held him, with his back to the room, in the position that he had thus far maintained.
"I say that I don't want to go in. Take me away. Here, these are the stairs. I'm tired. It's vulgar. I'm not well."
She released her hold of him and started to descend alone. He was forced to follow with hardly the chance to get his coat and hat.
In the motor-car she grasped his face in her hot hands and fell, between sobs, to kissing him.
"I love you!—I love you!" she cried.
The young man with the Spanish dancer was Franz von Klausen.
When she awoke it was with a confused memory of a troubled night through which, as she dozed, she had known that Jim was often out of his bed, often walking up and down. She thought that she had once been worried lest he take cold, for he had been barefooted and without his dressing gown. She thought that she had sleepily asked him to be more careful, to return to rest. She thought that he had made a rather quick reply, bidding her sleep and not bother.
Now she saw him fully clothed and making stealthily for the door that opened on the hall. The morning light showed his face very grey; perhaps this was because he had not shaved, for clearly he had not shaved; but Muriel also noticed that the lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth seemed deeper than usual. She saw that he held his hat in his hand, that his coat was flung over his arm, and that the glance which he cast toward her, as he sought to determine whether the noise of the turned door knob had roused her, was the glance that might be expected of a thief leaving a room that he had robbed.
Then the thing that had happened came back to her. She closed her eyes and gladly let him go.
On his part, Stainton had guessed that she had sleepily seen him, but he was content because she refrained from questioning him, from any renewal of the enquiries that she had made when this new terror arose. He walked down the stairs, where scrubbing women shifted their pails of water that he might pass and smiled at him as old serving-women are accustomed to smile at the men they see leaving the hotel in the early morning. He knew what they thought, and he sickened at the contrast between their surmise and the truth.
He walked to the grands boulevards. It was too early to go to Boussingault's; he looked at the watch that he had been consulting every fifteen minutes for the past two hours, and he saw that for two hours more it would be too early to go. He stopped at a double row of round tables on the sidewalk outside a corner café. Only one of them was in use, and that by a haggard but nonchalant young man in a high hat and a closely buttoned overcoat that failed to conceal the fact that its owner was still in evening dress. The young man was drinking black coffee, and his hand trembled. Stainton sat at the table farthest from this other customer.
A dirty waiter appeared from the café and shuffled forward, adjusting his apron.
"B'jour, monsieur," the waiter mumbled.
Stainton did not return this salutation.
"Une absinthe au sucre avec de l'eau," he ordered.
He had tasted the stuff only once before, and that was thirty years ago. He had hesitated to order it now, because he feared that the waiter would show a superior wonder at any man's ordering absinthe on the boulevard at eight o'clock in the morning.
The waiter showed no surprise. He brought the tumbler, placed it on the little plate that bore the figures indicating the price of the drink, put the water bottle and the absinthe bottle beside it and held the glass dish full of lumps of dusty sugar. When Jim had served himself after the manner in which he had recently seen Frenchmen, of an afternoon, serving themselves, the waiter withdrew.
The sun emerged from the clouds that so often shroud its early progress toward the zenith on a day of that season in Paris and fell with unkind inquisitiveness upon the young man with the coffee and the old one with the wormwood. The street began to awake with shopgirls painted for their work as they had lately been painted for what they took to be their play, upon clerks going to their banks and offices, upon newsboys shrilly crying the titles of the morning journals. The boys annoyed Jim by the leer with which they accompanied the gesture that thrust the papers beneath his nose; the clerks annoyed him by their knowing smiles; the girls annoyed him most because theywould call one another's attention to him, comment to one another about him, and laugh. Of these people the first two sorts envied him for what they thought he had been doing; the last sort saw in him a good fellow with a heart like their own hearts; but Jim hated them all.
He gulped the remainder of his absinthe and, hailing an open carriage, went for a drive in the Bois. He bade the coachman drive slowly, but, when he returned to the city and was left at the doctor's address, he found himself the first patient in the waiting-room.
WasM. le médecinin? Yes, the grave manservant assured, but he doubted ifM. le médecincould as yet receive monsieur. It was early, andM. le médecinrarely saw any patients before—
Stainton produced his card and a franc. He had not long to wait before the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily bade him enter.
"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are,hein? Did the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend? Sit."
The room was lined by bookcases full of medical and social works and pamphlets in French, German, and English: Freud's "Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehr," Duclaux's "L'Hygiène Sociale," Solis-Cohen's "Therapeutics of Tuberculosis," Ducleaux, Fournier, Havelock Ellis, Forel, Buret, Neisser, Bloch. There were some portraits, there was a chair that looked as if it could be converted with appalling ease into an operating table, there was a large electric battery and there was a flat-topped desk covered with phials and loose leaves from a memorandum book. Boussingault seated himself, grunting, at his desk, his back to the window, and indicated a chair that faced him.
Stainton took the chair. He was still pale, and the corners of his ample mouth were contracted.
"My digestion is all right," he said. "What bothers me is something else. I dare say it's not—not much. I know that these things may be the merely temporary effect of some slight nervous depression, of physical weariness, or—or a great many minor things. Only, you know, one does like to have a physician's assurance."
Boussingault peered through his bar-boundpince-nez. He began to understand.
"Nervous depression," said he: "one does not benefit that by absinthe before thedéjeuner."
Stainton tried to smile.
"That was my first absinthe in thirty years and the second in my life," he said; "but I dare say I am rather redolent of it, for the fact is I took it on an empty stomach."
The doctor leaned across the desk, his hands clasped on its surface.
"M. Stainton," he asked, "you come here to-day as a patient, is it not?"
"Well, I hope that I won't need any treatment, but——"
"But you do not come here to pass the time,hein?"
"No, doctor."
"Then," said Boussingault, spreading out his hands and shrugging his shoulders, "tell me why in the so early morning, not sick, you take absinthe for the second time in your life."
He was looking at Stainton in a manner that distinctly added to Jim's nervousness. The American was not a man to quail before most, and he had come here to get this expert's opinion on a vital matter; yet he feared to furnish the only data on which an opinion could, to have use, be founded.
"Well, doctor," he said, trying hard for the easiest words, "you—you met my wife last evening."
Boussingault's bullet head bobbed.
"What then?" he inquired.
"What do you think of her?"
"I think that she is very charming—and, M. Stainton, very young."
It struck Jim that the concluding phrase had been weighted with significance.
"I don't know just how to tell you," he resumed. "I don't like to talk even to my physician of—of certain intimate matters; but"—he glanced at the most conspicuous volumes on the nearest shelf—"from the titles of these books, I think that what I want to see you about falls within the limits of your specialty."
He stopped, gnawing his lower lip, his mind seeking phrases. Before he could find a suitable one, his vis-à-vis, looking him straight in the eyes, had settled the matter:
"My friend, there are but two reasons why one that is no fool should drink absinthe at an hour so greatly early: or he has been guilty of excess and regrets, or he has been unable to be guilty and regrets." He paused, his face thrust half across the desk. "Madame," he demanded, "she is how old?"
Stainton met him bravely now, but in a manner clearly showing his anxiety to protect himself.
"She is nearly nineteen."
"Eighteen,bien. And you?"
Jim drew back. He took a long breath; his fingers held tightly to the arms of his chair.
"Before I married," he said, "only a very short time before I married, I had myself looked over carefullyby one of the most eminent physicians in New York. He assured me that I was in perfect physical condition, that I was not by any means an old man, that, as a matter of fact——"
Boussingault thumped the desk with his forefinger.
"Poof, poof! I do not ask of your heart, your liver, yourbiceps flexor. How many years are you alive?"
"Doctor," said Stainton, "I don't think you quite understand——"
"I understand well what I want to know. Are you married a long time?"
"On the contrary."
"And your age?"
Stainton realised that it must be foolishly feminine longer to fence.
"Fifty," he belligerently declared.
Dr. Boussingault leaned back, spread wide his arms, and smiled.
"Vous voilà!"
"But, doctor, wait a moment. You don't understand——"
"My friend, if you understand these things more well than do I, why is it that you come to me? A man of fifty, he but recently marries a girl of eighteen——"
"But I have lived a careful life!"
"We all do. I have never known a drunkard; all of my drunkards, they are moderate drinkers."
"I drink no more than you."
"I was not speaking literally, monsieur."
"I have lived in the open air," said Jim.
"La-la-la!"
"And I have been abstemious. You understand me now: absolutely abstemious."
It was obvious that Boussingault doubted this, but he made a valiant effort to speak as if he did not.
"If Jacques never has drunk," said he, "brandy will poison him."
Stainton rose.
"I am as sound as a bell," he vowed.
Boussingault did not rise. He only leaned back the farther and smiled the more knowingly.
"Yet you are here," said he.
Stainton took a turn of the room. When he had risen he had meant to leave, but he knew that such a course was folly. When he turned, he showed Boussingault a face distorted by anguish.
"What can I do?" he asked. His voice was low; his deportment was as restrained as he could make it. "She is a girl——"
"Were madame forty-five," said the physician, "you would not have come to consult me."
"Surely it's not fair, doctor. After all my repression—all my life of—of——"
Boussingault rose at last. He came round the deskand, with a touch of genuine affection in the movement, slipped an arm through one of Jim's.
"We every one feel that," said he. "It goes nothing. The pious man, he comes to me and says: 'It is not fair; I have been too good to deserve!' The old roué, he comes to me and says—the same thing. We all some day curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it with regard to no man."
"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."
"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"
"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.
The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm.
"Listen," he said, "listen, my friend, to me. I am Boussingault, but even Boussingault is not Joshua that he can turn back the sun or make him to stand still. If you were the Czar of the Russias or M. Roosevelt, I could not do for you that. You have taken this young girl from her young friends; you give her yourself in their stead, no one but yourself with whom to speak, to share her childish thoughts—you try to live downwards to her years with both your mind and your physique. It is not possible, my friend. But you have not come to a plight so bad. Nature is not cruel. Itis not all worse yet. This is not the end, no. It is the beginning. You but must not try to be too young, and you have perhaps time left to you. It may be, much time. Who knows? You must remember your age and you must live in accord with your age. Now, just now—Poof! It goes nothing. You require more quiet, some rest. Find a reason for to quit madame for a week. Madame Boussingault, my wife, she will pay her respects to Madame Stainton and request that she come to stay with us. Make affairs call you from Paris. Rest. See. I give you this prescription, but it is nothing in itself. It will quiet you, no more. You must yourself rest."