Running Sands Part 34

"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 s.h.i.+ning table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made them forget for a s.p.a.ce 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, un.o.bscured by any vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his gla.s.ses 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 cla.s.s that their cla.s.s 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 G.o.d!--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 compet.i.tion 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 appet.i.te 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 s.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d!"

"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 G.o.d, when, after centuries of no attention to marriage, the church quickly a.s.sumed of it the control and made of it a public ceremony. It will be more bad when the police a.s.sume 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 relations.h.i.+p 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.