Chapter I

“_’Tis but a little piece of Childhood thrown away._”--John Ford.

She wandered about the wards at the Infants’ Hospital, a privileged person, ignored, tolerated, looked on askance by the properly caparisoned, properly certificated, properly trained nurses. She was not a nurse, she was not even a probationer, except by courtesy; she was the daughter of the founder of the Hospital, Dr. Emeric Favarger. She spent many hours there, lounging about, asking irrelevant questions of the nurses and the visiting doctors, getting into the way as only a privileged person can do. She was no good, she could not even amuse a baby, or keep it quiet for a moment until expert assistance arrived. She was there, it was understood, because she liked it; because the grey-green walls and absence of decoration were soothing to her, and the rows of white cots, to the number of thirty, each with its frontal brass denoting the name and style of its god-parent and pecuniary backer that lined both sides of the room. Her own name, Adelaide Favarger, figured over one little bed, and she was used to take up its puling occupant now and again. She would linger, casting her liquid glances at its chance, constantly varied, occupant lying there, with some at least of the creases of ill-nurture and previous ill-usage smoothed out and eased by the bands of merciful sleep.

She was twenty-five years of age, unmarried, motherless, the only daughter of Dr. Favarger. He was old, and had grown excessively rich, and had found himself able long since to retire from the activities of the profession. He still had his room in the Hospital, lectured there twice a week, and saw foreign doctors, departmental authorities, philanthropists and other persons who were interested in this particular new departure. This he had inaugurated himself, hoping to see it lead to Eugenical cultivation of the uncounted progeny of the struggling, uninstructed masses. At home, in the immense wool-gathering house he rented in Portland Place, he had a room the door of which was kept always closed. Behind this he was understood to be engaged in “experiments.” He entered it, never from the house, but by a door that gave on a mews at the back. As people said, anything--all sorts of things--might be going on in that house and never be heard of. It was known that Dr. Favarger bred and kept there countless cats; he wrote and commented learnedly on their habits in the monthlies. He was a man who might have been asked out to dinner every night in the year if he had chosen to let himself figure in the list of Society’s possible guests. But that he had always refused to do, and his daughter shared his self-imposed solitude. She was not the kind of girl whom hostesses asked out alone, or at a moment’s notice, to fill up a gap. She had no cordiality, no entrain, no “go.” She was attractive but not charming, the image of her father, whose hooked beaky nose she had inherited, together with passionate, regretful eyes that her dead mother had left her.

But no restraint was put upon her exercise of hospitality in Portland Place. She could ask any one she liked to dinner and she availed herself constantly of the privilege--but the proportion of male guests who put their knees under the old mahogany dining-table and drank her father’s old port, which was almost famous, was far in excess of the female. But Adelaide did not object to this proportion. Still, sly, silent with an air of biding her time, at eighteen; by the time she was twenty-five, the passion in her eyes was tremendous; she glowed in her dark setting, a meagre Circe who gathered the ready-made beasts about her, and shook no deterrent wand at them.

These were her evenings, smoke of cigars, fumes of liqueurs, conversations of veiled indecency under the guise of scientific discussion, which were led by her father; the cynical, heartless old man, holding forth indifferently, from sheer love of talking, to the audiences of queer, inferior, second-rate men that his daughter provided for him nightly. And for her days, they were mostly spent within the four walls of the abode of sanitation and physical purity that represented the outcome of both their theories of life. Adelaide had no sense of humour, but the cruel old man was apt to say that his daughter was the only microbe in the establishment--that miracle of asepticism. He gave her plenty of pocket-money, gibed at her to her friends before her face, but allowed her to do exactly as she liked, and with no consideration for her extreme youth and the life she had to live when he was gone, fared contemptuously towards the grave of known finality that awaited him. He had done his best for the world in the establishment of a higher ideal of infant feeding and early physical culture.

He had done well by his daughter, he had fulfilled his duty as he considered it towards her mind and body. He had given her the best of educations. She had been to school by the sea as a child, as a girl to college. She had insisted on being highly trained and educated up to the nadir of her powers, and had her views cut and dried at sixteen. Carefully concentrating herself, with feverish intentness on efficiency, she had managed to do well in the tripos at Oxford, but her friends said that she had been screwed up to the required pitch by her imperious vanity. The girls of her year who had come out below her in Honours used to laugh when they met her afterwards in the street; for them she was the crank who had outstripped them, peering as her habit was, under the hoods of perambulators, on her way to lectures on Eugenics and Baby-Culture. They had heard all about her desire, nay, her fixed determination, to marry and worthily contribute to the World-Force, in the usual manner. At Somerville Hall, she had made no secret of her intention to bear an Eugenical child, or two, having first selected its father carefully, from a physiological point of view. Oh, yes, she had talked of nothing else at tea parties and walks, and had bored them so that when she left she had made no harvest of life-friends. They had tossed their learned young heads, and quite expected, some day, to hear of Adelaide Favarger, in spite of her big talk, as the feeble hang-dog mother, if a mother at all, of one puny infant, begotten of nerves and hysteria, by the usual self-selecting father. That is, if any man chose her, and this, in spite of her wealth, they were inclined to doubt.

She wasn’t a girl who appealed to the men that marry. They felt that, and they were right.

For men, looking at Adelaide Favarger with the instinctive and unconscious cunning of the male, that makes in the long run so surely for what Adelaide herself would have called the World Purpose, were likely to pass her by, as sexually ineligible for motherhood. Socially, too, she did not appear apt to satisfy their own particular standards of comfort and pleasure. Though, indubitably, Adelaide would be rich, they feared to take a wife out of the dreary, ill-managed, ill-cleaned house in Portland Place, full of unprobed corners and flights of stairs that seemed to drop you into plumbless depths of scullerydom and basement. The hall and dining-room were full of valuable mahogany furniture whose dull unpolished surfaces reflected nothing, the drawing-room was spread with rich yellow damask, that draped the sofas and chairs, and hung as curtains to mask as much scanty light as was willing to filter in through the tall windows that no normal housemaid could reach up to clean. No one did clean them. The curtains soared out of sight into the dusty ceilings and the chance hand, essaying to draw them further apart, shook out a dusty flavour that nipped the nostrils and was forthwith obliged to desist.

Adelaide’s dinners, and she gave a great many of them, were ill cooked, scrambling and depressing. But the wine, Dr. Favarger’s own province, was excellent. He himself would have none of it. As soon as the sweets were put on, it was the old Doctor’s custom to rise, to stuff his creased napkin into the middle of his plate, and to leave the room without comment. It was always the same. He did not as a rule appear again: he disliked the kind of man that his daughter was apt to invite, and he had no desire to control her in the matter. The men were rather sorry to see him go, he was lazy, cynical and fascinating.

There was one of Adelaide’s men whom he perhaps did not dislike. Yet, although he would not sit out the dinner even for him, the only time that Wald Ensor dined with Adelaide he stayed until the coffee and cigarettes were put on. Perhaps it was because he had himself introduced his daughter to the amiable young man at the Children’s Hospital. Ensor came to inquire after a child, whom he had kindly been instrumental in bringing in. It was dying of malnutrition. Its slum mother, stupid, underfed and wretched, but not vile, could not nourish it properly even if she would.

The image of the tall, handsome young fellow with the perishing child in his arms had never left Adelaide; she had fallen in love with Wald Ensor, and with Adelaide, to fall in love was to ask to dinner.

Ensor came. He was excessively fascinating to Adelaide, because he was so different from her other young men and especially from the second-rate Chelsea artist whom she had asked to make a fourth, and whom she already considered a survival from her old days of bad taste. Ensor’s manner was perfection. He was shyish, grave, intent, and self-contained, talked prettily to her father about his hospital and his cats and respectfully to herself about the subjects in which a young lady should be interested. Adelaide was not interested, but she instinctively forebore to disabuse him.

She was too young, too reckless, too much unversed in strategy, to conceal the trend of her feelings and directing, as she did, all her conversation and her eyes towards Ensor, she seriously alienated the liking of her late friend, ally and limner, Mr. Wallace Marks, R.I.B.

He bided his time, however, and as long as Dr. Favarger presided over his own table, he listened in a frankly bored manner which contrasted with Wald Ensor’s polite attention to talk which he only half-approved, coming from the lips of this savage irresponsible old savant, the indifferent natural guardian of a young girl’s delicate morals.

“There is something,” the old hook-nosed man was saying, “something to be said for the woman who ill-treats her children.”

Adelaide protested conventionally. “Nothing!” she said.

“My daughter,” said her father spitefully, without looking in her direction, “wishes to impress you with the fact of her well-known love for babies. She does not, however, really care for them a bit. She has never considered these matters scientifically in her life, although she’s always hanging round the Hospital, and hindering my young assistants. If she had a child, she’d neglect it. Cruelty--masked by Philanthropy! Look for it deep--it’s there!” His nose appeared cold, sharp and ferreting. He did not smile. Ensor shuddered.

Adelaide made a wry face and Ensor was sorry for her, disproportionately so, for she did not really mind being teased by her parent. The old man continued--

“On the lines I have been mentioning to you, Ensor, even child-murder is excusable, obeying, as it may be said to do, an almost forgotten animal instinct. A cat, say, who by some circumstance or other has been disturbed before parturition and rendered hysterical----”

“Good Lord, a hysterical cat----” ejaculated the bounder.

Dr. Favarger took no notice of him, but continued his sentence--

--“will tear or otherwise destroy the progeny that she foresees herself unable to feed or attend to. So do unhappy servant girls, faced, in their hour of trial, with the problem of the disposal of illegitimate offspring, reserve to themselves the right of destroying what their instinct tells them they will be unable in the future to protect and nourish----”

“Oh, Father,” protested Adelaide again and her tone was sincere. “Think of it! The tender young life, the helpless weakling, bone of one’s bone, flesh of one’s flesh.… Motherhood is so sacred--it should, I think, be subsidized by the State. A capitation fee for every child. Then the mother would have the wherewithal to nourish herself properly and maternal feeling would do the rest.”

Dr. Favarger smiled, a smile without kindness in it. It was his daughter’s smile. She had that too, as well as his nose.

“Even then, she or you would probably have none of these fine feelings at the moment. She has suffered physically; she is irresponsible: mere brutal selfish instinct dominates her. And if she desists, if she does make an attempt to salve it, she has to watch the hapless infant”--he sneered--“through her care, surviving, but as a hopeless idiot.… Of course,” he continued, “I except cases of mere cruelty, such as baby-farming. If a woman kills or ill-treats the child of another, no natural feeling except greed of gain can possibly come into play, not even vanity----”

“Vanity?” said Adelaide.

“Yes, Mother’s vanity, a huge non-negligible factor in these matters. But in most cases it is not necessary to plead it, for nature’s broad back may easily take the blame. And when a woman of our own class, maybe, is brought before the magistrate and fined or imprisoned because she has taken a rod to the ugly duckling, or systematically ill-treated a weakly, ungracious child to the point of extinction, she might plead that she is only doing what a cat or any other perfectly normal animal does when one of her young is not up to sample, and seems obviously degenerate to her keener sense. My cat Philippa, for instance----”

Adelaide sneered. The bounder fidgeted. Ensor preserved his attitude of somewhat strained attention.

--“Had a fine litter of four the other day. I found one of them, to my uninstructed eye, as healthy as the others, on the cold stone floor for three successive mornings before it died. She had thrown it out of the nest, she had refused to feed it, she had just weeded it out. Why? It was unfit to live. And if you study these trials that come up every now and then, and observe carefully the characteristics of the little victims as described by the officers of the S.P.C.C., you will see that in most cases these brutalized children are slow, unprepossessing, unpleasant and sometimes revolting in their habits. They work up through the first few years of infancy, unpetted, neglected, marked down to develop all the successive stages of degeneracy. They are obviously better dead. No pretty, healthy, fetching child--a child like the egregious infant in _Bubbles_, say,--ever appears in court on such a plea. There Mother’s vanity comes in.…”

He would have continued, but Adelaide, whom this conversation neither pleased nor interested, rose. The bounder heaved an audible sigh of relief. Ensor, though he had been interested, even a little charmed by the old man’s manner, could not help deploring that this extremely technical and advanced conversation had not postdated the young girl’s departure.

Old Dr. Favarger left the room with Adelaide. He said to her in the hall, before he hobbled away to his own study and sleeping apartment on the ground floor--

“You have picked up a gentleman for once.”

She walked on as if he had not spoken. She always made a point of not answering her father when he girded at her. His approval of Ensor, though not unpleasing, was absolutely immaterial to her. She loved him, she meant to have him, through the door of marriage or no. She went upstairs to the drawing-room to await the two men, and flung herself down on the great yellow sofa with the black cushions, too nervous even to smoke. She was convinced, albeit for the twentieth time, that she had found the Eugenical father at last.

* * * * * * *

Wald Ensor, the gentleman according to Dr. Favarger’s acceptance, left sitting after an atrocious dinner, with a man who could not possibly fulfil the Doctor’s conditions, felt extremely uncomfortable. His annoyance grew as his messmate tended to grow familiar in conversation. A wretched artist from Chelsea, self-styled modern, with white hair and a dyed moustache, to whom the host had not vouchsafed a word all dinner! The fine old man had been annoyed by his cockney accent, presumably. He had talked, although she did not listen, psychology with Adelaide, and his pert underbred voice had broken in all the while through Dr. Favarger’s cultivated tones. Now that the host and hostess were gone, this bounder ventured to turn the analytical method on to his hostess herself, and Ensor did not know how to stop him. He fidgeted about on his Spanish leather covered chair, and made various efforts to do so, but in vain.

“Nice girl, very,” the creature went on. “With a face like an old master--one of those Primitives, don’t you know? Lots of drawing about. Pity she’s so morbid.”

Wald Ensor made a gesture of negation.

“Oh, yes, she is. Talks of nothing but Eugenics and so on. Thinks of nothing but the other thing.… It’s only a mask, with these women you know, all that rot about child-bearing and being subsidized by the State and so on. She’s an erotomaniac, that’s what she is--sits about on yellow sofas and asks men to love her. They do that fast enough, she’s very good fun--but they don’t marry her.… Do you know Gertrude? Do you know why they put up with her--she’s the cook--why the dinners here are so confoundedly bad?”--

“No, I don’t, and----” Ensor expostulated. His blood boiled, he didn’t think he could stand it any longer, he wanted to throw his glass in the fellow’s face. He rose.…

The other man, nothing abashed, although their conversation had hardly lasted the canonical few minutes, rose too, saying amiably, “So! Let’s join our hostess.”

He continued amiably as they passed out--

“Cook’s bad, but can’t be parted with, don’t you know? She’s up to games of her own, is the fair Gertrude. They found a baby she’d just had in a dressing-table drawer, so Adelaide told me while she was sitting. Time for confidences, eh? Seen my portrait of her? In the New----”

They were half-way upstairs by this time. The artist opened the drawing-room door and disclosed Adelaide sitting, as he had predicted, on a yellow satin sofa, with her head resting on black satin cushions. There was room for one man beside her. The bounder slipped easily and voluptuously into that place, and Ensor with a spasm of jealous disgust, took an early opportunity of making his adieux, and left them.

He never dined in the house again. He could not bring himself to risk meeting men of that stamp.

Yet he pitied her. He admired her. Her great discontented eyes haunted him. He felt as if a white plaining woman’s hand was outstretched to him from out of a weltering sea of bounderism. Adelaide, a lady, could not really like that sort of man? No, for she liked him. She wrote continually begging him to accept her hospitality--hospitality of all kinds. She began to vary skilfully the form of her invitations, but he still refused all invitations to meals at her house.

At last she suggested that if he could not stand her cook he should take her out to dine at “some low pot house,” so she phrased it. He laughed. For he knew that if he should succumb to her blandishments, he would certainly take her to a decent fairly respectable restaurant: he would not pander to her taste for Bohemianism, but save her from herself and her friends.

As he thought it over after each fresh invitation, a taste for this form of social humanitarianism grew on him. He began to fancy the idea of rescuing this really nice girl and taking her to decent places and showing her how a decent man would behave. The girl was motherless, her father did not pretend to look after her. She had a fine generous character, was large in her ideas, she gave freely, she was kind to her own sex, and would never go back on any one. The disreputable cook, now,--he was sure that in keeping her on, poor Miss Favarger was really undertaking a work of charity. The woman had obviously had what is called a misfortune, she had possibly gone through what is also called a tragedy. Adelaide was obviously not the sort of person who would ever cast a human being out of doors, under any circumstances whatever, especially a woman in the condition in which the cook had presumably found herself. Lazy, preoccupied, indifferent, she made no excuse for her shameful tolerance, and even condescended to discuss the details of it with such worms as Ensor’s fellow guest of a few weeks ago. That was merely an error of taste, the result of her unmothered, unchaperoned state. She was at bottom a really well-bred woman. Ensor, a rover, a man who had knocked about the world and yet preserved his vast shyness and a modicum of innocence, thought he saw clearly that the time and place were out of joint with Adelaide. Her morals were mediæval, with no present parallel except perhaps one that should be found in the milieu of the South Sea Islands.

So he came to invite her to dine with him at Prince’s and even Kettner’s; she had tea with him on the slopes in Kensington Gardens; they walked together in Hyde Park on Sundays, Adelaide protesting vehemently that she hated dressing up and posing as one of the smart set. In vain Ensor assured her that to mingle casually with that select denomination at Church Parade, was not to be within a hundred miles of being “of” it: that to dine at Kettner’s with a man alone was sufficiently unconventional. Adelaide continued to protest, to beg him to take her to his flat, and to discuss sex questions in a loud voice over restaurant dinner tables. She called it Eugenics.

Ensor did not really enjoy these discussions, the young woman, sitting there, her elbows on the table, her hands propping her hard chin, her burning eyes fixed on him made it almost impossible for him to eat a solid British dinner, and keep his British countenance at the same time.

He could stand any amount of talk of this kind from platforms, or on the stage with the footlights between him and the exponents of the new Feeling, the New World Movement, the new Morality; here, under the shaded red lights, with discreet foreign waiters gliding about the chance commensals; the face to face discussion of such topics outraged his simple sensitiveness and ordinary sense of decency. The only thing that at all saved the situation was the girl’s astonishing absence of self-consciousness. She talked like a boy--a clever, morbid, self-conscious lad just home from college, her sedulous use of slang helped the impression. Yet all the while her eyes belied her and occasionally her voice. Now and then an outrageous note of sex bitterness pierced through her level lazy accents and brought their talk home with a rush from the plane of impersonality. With Adelaide it was when her eyes ceased to look passionate and eager but became sombre and heavy, instead: it was when her sharp grating voice grew soft and mellow and trailing that Ensor feared her most, and such moments were growing more and more frequent as their meetings went on. He stood to his guns, however, he was not one to throw even a graceless woman over.

Had he not been the most retiring, most modest of men he would have realized that Adelaide Favarger was in love with him. He would have disliked--he would have refused to realize it, for it would have forced him to formulate his own feeling for her, and that was a queer mixture of sensual pity, and revolted fascination. There were times when he thought he fully grasped what she wanted of him and was glad of her assumption that his refusal to dine with her in Portland Place represented merely a protest against the inefficiency of her cook. This theory, which at all times and all seasons she put before him, and which she had freely proffered as an explanation of his “snubbing” of her, was a convenience to him, since it effectually masked his reluctance to be the father of her eugenical child.

* * * * * * *

Like her other men friends, Ensor always saw Adelaide Favarger home after their evenings together. Unlike the others, however, he always left her punctiliously on the doorstep, as soon as her front door answered to her key and the cavernous gulf of the hall swallowed her up. No Bianca Capello business for him! She used to tease him about this, she used the romantic illustration, with a point of bitterness. She had now accepted the situation and no longer even asked him to come in. Her “Good-nights” were a miracle of sour brevity and conciseness.

One night in July they had been to the Exhibition together and had sat late listening to the band playing “Tristan.” The out-door performance represented a pale vapid reflection of the original orchestral heat and passion merely, but out there in the murky shadow-thridden radiance, in the dust-fumed air, it was effective. Adelaide had talked less than usual. The summer nights that year were long and clear. When rather late, they returned to it, satiate of romance, great, wide Portland Place seemed to sleep lonely under a Norwegian midnight. Nothing so cold even as a moonbeam shone on its raddled stones and stern house fronts, except where a tree in the garden next to Adelaide’s house hung over her steps on one side and lent it some mystery. There was a big party higher up the street and some stationary taxicabs stood waiting in the middle of the roadway, black, vague, a file of indistinguishable shapes, whence the figure of a man now and then disengaged himself, did something to his vehicle and was absorbed into the mass again. Adelaide had insisted on Ensor’s dismissing their own cab at Oxford Circus, and together they walked across the broad stone-paved expanse. The girl held her exiguous skirts tightly round her thin, airily poised legs. She knew they were fine, she knew she had a beautiful figure.

She gained the broad flat step in front of her door and turned a little sideways to the man who stood waiting for her to effect her entry and bid her a hasty good-bye as usual. He was a little bemused by “Tristan” he was looking dreamily back across the street they had just traversed, his head full of carefully conceived, adroitly moving harmonies.…

“Come in and have a drink?” Adelaide said carelessly, but her voice was rough and throaty.

The demand appeared to startle him. He thought he had cured her of all that. Her request was out of all order and he did not reply at once.…

She faced him but did not meet his eyes.…

“Why won’t you?” she asked peevishly. “Even if you won’t dine? What have I done? Why am I doomed? Cursed.…”

“My dear Miss Favarger!…”

“Miss Favarger be blowed!” She spoke like a school-girl. She caught, as a monkey does, at the lapel of his coat--fumbled at it.…

“For God’s sake,” she said, “don’t insult me so! Come in for a moment!”