Chapter V

The next day, as Trench came down into the hall, Edith was waiting for him.

“You haven’t seen my plants, Dr. Trench. Can you spare the time?”

She led the way to the conservatory, where, in a shady nook, the cypripediums stood in a bank of feathery moss, like green-robed girls awaiting bloom and bridal. On the way back, Edith stopped beside a wonderful begonia rex. “I learned something interesting about the epidermis of begonia. In case of injury, it has a quite exceptional power of restitution. Some guardian angel seems to weave the pattern again.”

“That is very interesting.”

“Isn’t it! When you said ‘exquisite mechanisms,’ of course you didn’t mean _only_ mechanisms.”

“I’m not a botanist, my dear young graduate.”

“Well, you are the inspiration of a college girl; so you’d better answer my question.”

“What question?”

“Is it only photochemistry that makes the begonia restore itself?”

“I presume so. But who cares?”

“I care,” she cried. “If it’s only chemistry in a leaf, you’ll say it’s only chemistry in me.” She glanced at the scar on her hand.

Trench smiled gravely. “I shall not say anything that I’m not compelled to say.”

“But if life is only chemistry, there is no heaven. Oh, if Bobbie—” She could not go on.

“We love Bobbie,” said Trench, and the child’s father could not have said it more gently. “But love would always stay the passing moment, and nature will not have it so. I say ‘nature,’ regretting that it is necessary to use any word.”

“Dr. Trench—is it possible that you look forward to absolute extinction?”

“Yes. Certainly.”

She pressed the scar as if it burned again.

“I have thought of you as the person who opened my eyes to the glory of God’s world. I can’t get used to the change in a minute. Won’t you sit down—here on this long wicker affair where Bobbie loves to read fairy-tales?”

Trench did not comply. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that we can’t agree about life, unless we agree that it consists of vain repetitions.”

“Surely not vain—oh, surely not. You must have practiced a hundred times on dead throats, to have saved Bobbie’s living one.”

“This is a good place to stop, Miss Bridgman. I’m glad to leave you cheerful.”

“Cheerful about what?”

“About the dead throats of other people’s nephews!”

She did not flinch. “If I am hard-hearted,” she said with dignity, “I am willing to be told so.”

Trench sat down. He knew perfectly well that he was a fool to do it, but he had long felt that it would come to this; he was doomed to confess.

“Very well, Miss Bridgman. Let us continue to speak of vain repetitions. There are sunrises, for instance. They are an old story, and I dare say that they tell you the old, old story of Jesus and his love. But to me they are impersonal, and I am glad of it.”

“What bitter words! I fear that I have done you no good by asking questions. I have—intruded.”

“You are welcome,” said certain vocal chords huskily, contracting against their will.

“If I am really to be one of your friends,” she smiled, “I must learn more. I think I’ll go back to the University and prove that life is a good deal more than photochemistry. If you’ll come here in June, I’ll tell you the result. Come when the first cypripedium opens. This year it was on the twenty-eighth.”

“I’ll be here, June 28, 1914.”

“Thank you. And now I want to ask your advice about some social service.”

“Please do not.”

“But I feel so selfish. I am as useless as a cypripedium.”

“You are more beautiful than any cypripedium, but beauty is a sex fancy, like religion. And of course you are useless. Use is another fancy.”

“Thank you almost to death, Dr. Trench. And what about yourself?”

“I’m an atom. And being an atom I don’t believe in the reformation of the world by young-lady power.”

“You sound brutal, my friend, but I can’t forget Bobbie or our little woodland Mildred. How is she?”

“She is beyond the fear of brutality.”

“What—our little one! Oh, was it necessary to take our little flower-girl? She told me that she wanted those flowers when she died.”

“I saw her die, Miss Bridgman. I saw that operation. Her mother came out of the ether badly.”

“Ether?”

“The ether we call religion. It is what deadens everybody.”

“Can you speak so, Dr. Trench? Can you ridicule all this splendid collective effort that is beginning in the churches?”

“I do not ridicule a clinical picture. I see no difference between the parents of illegitimates and the parents of slaughtered legitimates. One group say they couldn’t help it, and they couldn’t. The others croon a song called Precious Jewels, and breed again. For such people to organise committees of fifteen is not collective effort, but collective insanity.”

It staggered her, of course. She was too deeply shocked to speak.

Trench softened his voice to a professional tone. “Gentlemen, the work of saving sick babies is growing magnificently. The Welfare Association is caring for three thousand a year, and the death-rate is only thirty in the thousand. Very low, gentlemen.”

She smiled a little. “I love to hear you speak that way.”

“Of course.”

“Doctor, you evidently think me securely etherised. If you think my throat needs an operation before it can tell the truth, I’m ready.”

Trench looked at her—young, beautiful, beloved—and would have turned back. But he heard within him that echo of anguish—“May she never see her baby lying like that.” He seemed once more to be in that lonely cabin on that deadly night. At last he spoke.

“Mrs. Potter told her husband that she would never bear another child, but she has one already. In speaking of it to you, I don’t wish to be dogmatic or cocksure, but I do wish to be impersonal and honest. And it seems to me that every child born should be considered a unit in infantry sent out against appalling odds. By using the lives of infants man has overrun the earth. He thins out his own numbers for the greater security of the survivors—and is the only animal who does so. I don’t call man the most cruel of all the animals, for he doesn’t know what he is doing; he is born callous, and the chemical impulses that drive him give off a religious vapour that deludes him. Still there is the fact—comfort at the expense of infanticide, whether bloodless or armed. And the standard of comfort has risen so high that a great war is probably at hand. The barometer of the birthrate is falling rapidly, but not because we pity children. We are more considerate of cows, grain, and mothers, because we’ve got to have cleverer sons to exterminate our enemies. What is going on is the unobserved, scientific extermination of every stupid enemy. The Welfare Association is merely a group of opium-eaters, who don’t know that they save weak children because any one of them may have a brain that will exterminate thousands. I do not blame them. I am in the same business.”

“Horrible!”

“Exactly. If mothers understood the situation, there would be no children. But it will take a great war to make them see the point, and then they’ll forget it.”

Edith was silent.

“Now and then,” continued Trench gravely, “an animal has emerged who understood it. I conceive Jesus to have been such an animal.”

“It hurts.”

“I thought it would. Shall I stop?”

“No! This is your confessional!”

“Jesus saw life as it is, and desired its speedy extinction. The mechanism of his agony made him dream of relief. It manufactured an idyllic future life—a perfectly impossible cycle of nutrition without reproduction. He declined myrrh and hyssop, but he offered paradise to the crucified thief, and the uncrucified thieves have been using that drug ever since.”

Edith grew pale.

Trench waited a minute till he saw the blood return to her face. “Animal indifference still keeps us going, and women protect themselves. They take this twilight sleep, this belief in a future life for defeated young. Women believe in heaven, and that is why they marry.”

“Doctor—I’m strangling!”

“Steady! The blind instinct comes first. With Christ, heaven was an afterthought of mercy. With men and women, it is an afterthought of the reproductive instinct. The operation is over, and you are coming out of the ether. Steady—don’t struggle.”

But Edith clutched at her throat.

“Oh, base and cruel! And this is your unspeakable philosophy. I don’t believe there is a thinker in the world who would subscribe to it. I’ll find out. I’ll get the arguments. Here and now I declare war on you.”

But suddenly her voice softened. “In spite of all your dreadful pessimism, you’ve got to advise me. I’ve sent the Welfare Association a check, but that is nothing. It is too impersonal. I want my love for Bobbie to take some better form. I want to be personal—like you.”

Trench burst into bitter laughter as he rose. “‘Personal like me’ is simply stunning. But I can’t advise you. Personal effort is a gross illusion, as if one child set out to stop a war. But waste your sweetness where you will.”

Edith caught her breath. His scorn had stung her into a bold thought. “I won’t be laughed at, Dr. Trench. I’ve stood my operation and live to tell the tale, but if you laugh at me I’ll make you smart.”

“You can’t.”

“Think again, Dr. Trench. You like to be impersonal. But what about impersonal passion?”

Trench stopped short in his tracks. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Don’t you know men who have it? Did it never occur to you that impersonal could be used in that sense? There are wretched girls in Chicago who have been loved impersonally enough.”

Trench ought to have expected some such retort, and might have been expected to meet it readily. But such was not the case. It struck him like an angina, crushing the breath out of him. It disorganised all his old adaptations. In this world it makes a difference who says a thing, and this fact was coming home to Trench as he stood with parted and paling lips. But he recovered from that dismay, and the real Trench spoke.

“I understand you at last. If you can be a personal friend to any girl who stands within that danger, go to her.”

“Where shall I go?”

Trench thought a moment, his face set like marble. “Go to Ischl’s clothing factory.”