Damaged Goods Part 5

The other answered, "Go to your father-in-law and tell him frankly the truth."

"But," cried the young man, wildly, "there will be no question then of three or four years' delay. He will refuse his consent altogether."

"If that is the case," said the doctor, "don't tell him anything."

"But I have to give him a reason, or I don't know what he will do. He is the sort of man to give himself to the worst violence, and again my fiancee would be lost to me. Listen, doctor. From everything I have said to you, you may perhaps think I am a mercenary man. It is true that I want to get along in the world, that is only natural. But Henriette has such qualities; she is so much better than I, that I love her, really, as people love in novels. My greatest grief--it is not to give up the practice I have bought--although, indeed, it would be a bitter blow to me; my greatest grief would be to lose Henriette. If you could only see her, if you only knew her--then you would understand. I have her picture here--"

The young fellow took out his card-case. And offered a photograph to the doctor, who gently refused it. The other blushed with embarra.s.sment.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "I am ridiculous. That happens to me, sometimes. Only, put yourself in my place--I love her so!" His voice broke.

"My dear boy," said the doctor, feelingly, "that is exactly why you ought not to marry her."

"But," he cried, "if I back out without saying anything they will guess the truth, and I shall be dishonored."

"One is not dishonored because one is ill."

"But with such a disease! People are so stupid. I myself, yesterday--I should have laughed at anyone who had got into such a plight; I should have avoided him, I should have despised him!" And suddenly George broke down again. "Oh!" he cried, "if I were the only one to suffer; but she--she is in love with me. I swear it to you! She is so good; and she will be so unhappy!"

The doctor answered, "She would be unhappier later on."

"It will be a scandal!" George exclaimed.

"You will avoid one far greater," the other replied.

Suddenly George set his lips with resolution. He rose from his seat. He took several twenty-franc pieces from his pocket and laid them quietly upon the doctor's desk--paying the fee in cash, so that he would not have to give his name and address. He took up his gloves, his cane and his hat, and rose.

"I will think it over," he said. "I thank you, Doctor. I will come back next week as you have told me. That is--probably I will."

He was about to leave.

The doctor rose, and he spoke in a voice of furious anger. "No," he said, "I shan't see you next week, and you won't even think it over. You came here knowing what you had; you came to ask advice of me, with the intention of paying no heed to it, unless it conformed to your wishes.

A superficial honesty has driven you to take that chance in order to satisfy your conscience. You wanted to have somebody upon whom you could put off, bye and bye, the consequences of an act whose culpability you understand! No, don't protest! Many of those who come here think and act as you think, and as you wish to act; but the marriage made against my will has generally been the source of such calamities that now I am always afraid of not having been persuasive enough, and it even seems to me that I am a little to blame for these misfortunes. I should have been able to prevent them; they would not have happened if those who are the authors of them knew what I know and had seen what I have seen. Swear to me, sir, that you are going to break off that marriage!"

George was greatly embarra.s.sed, and unwilling to reply. "I cannot swear to you at all, Doctor; I can only tell you again that I will think it over."

"That WHAT over?"

"What you have told me."

"What I have told you is true! You cannot bring any new objections; and I have answered those which you have presented to me; therefore, your mind ought to be made up."

Groping for a reply, George hesitated. He could not deny that he had made inquiry about these matters before he had come to the doctor. But he said that he was not al all certain that he had this disease. The doctor declared it, and perhaps it was true, but the most learned physicians were sometimes deceived.

He remembered something he had read in one of the medical books. "Dr.

Ricord maintains that after a certain period the disease is no longer contagious. He has proven his contentions by examples. Today you produce new examples to show that he is wrong! Now, I want to do what's right, but surely I have the right to think it over. And when I think it over, I realize that all the evils with which you threaten me are only probable evils. In spite of your desire to terrify me, you have been forced to admit that possibly my marriage would not have any troublesome consequence for my wife."

The doctor found difficulty in restraining himself. But he said, "Go on.

I will answer you afterwards."

And George blundered ahead in his desperation. "Your remedies are powerful, you tell me; and for the calamities of which you speak to befall me, I would have to be among the rare exceptions--also my wife would have to be among the number of those rare exceptions. If a mathematician were to apply the law of chance to these facts, the result of his operation would show but slight chance of a catastrophe, as compared with the absolute certainty of a series of misfortunes, sufferings, troubles, tears, and perhaps tragic accidents which the breaking of my engagement would cause. So I say that the mathematician--who is, even more than you, a man of science, a man of a more infallible science--the mathematician would conclude that wisdom was not with you doctors, but with me."

"You believe it, sir!" exclaimed the other. "But you deceive yourself."

And he continued, driving home his point with a finger which seemed to George to pierce his very soul. "Twenty cases identical with your own have been patiently observed, from the beginning to the end. Nineteen times the woman was infected by her husband; you hear me, sir, nineteen times out of twenty! You believe that the disease is without danger, and you take to yourself the right to expose your wife to what you call the chance of your being one of those exceptions, for whom our remedies are without effect. Very well; it is necessary that you should know the disease which your wife, without being consulted, will run a chance of contracting. Take that book, sir; it is the work of my teacher. Read it yourself. Here, I have marked the pa.s.sage."

He held out the open book; but George could not lift a hand to take it.

"You do not wish to read it?" the other continued. "Listen to me."

And in a voice trembling with pa.s.sion, he read: "'I have watched the spectacle of an unfortunate young woman, turned into a veritable monster by means of a syphilitic infection. Her face, or rather let me say what was left of her face, was nothing but a flat surface seamed with scars.'"

George covered his face, exclaiming, "Enough, sir! Have mercy!"

But the other cried, "No, no! I will go to the very end. I have a duty to perform, and I will not be stopped by the sensibility of your nerves."

He went on reading: "'Of the upper lip not a trace was left; the ridge of the upper gums appeared perfectly bare.'" But then at the young man's protests, his resolution failed him. "Come," he said, "I will stop. I am sorry for you--you who accept for another person, for the woman you say you love, the chance of a disease which you cannot even endure to hear described. Now, from whom did that woman get syphilis? It is not I who am speaking, it is the book. 'From a miserable scoundrel who was not afraid to enter into matrimony when he had a secondary eruption.' All that was established later on--'and who, moreover, had thought it best not to let his wife be treated for fear of awakening her suspicions!'"

The doctor closed the book with a bang. "What that man has done, sir, is what you want to do."

George was edging toward the door; he could no longer look the doctor in the eye. "I should deserve all those epithets and still more brutal ones if I should marry, knowing that my marriage would cause such horrors.

But that I do not believe. You and your teachers--you are specialists, and consequently you are driven to attribute everything to the disease you make the subject of your studies. A tragic case, an exceptional case, holds a kind of fascination for you; you think it can never be talked about enough."

"I have heard that argument before," said the doctor, with an effort at patience.

"Let me go on, I beg you," pleaded George. "You have told me that out of every seven men there is one syphilitic. You have told me that there are one hundred thousand in Paris, coming and going, alert, and apparently well."

"It is true," said the doctor, "that there are one hundred thousand who are actually at this moment not visibly under the influence of the disease. But many thousands have pa.s.sed into our hospitals, victims of the most frightful ravages that our poor bodies can support. These--you do not see them, and they do not count for you. But again, if it concerned no one but yourself, you might be able to argue thus. What I declare to you, what I affirm with all the violence of my conviction, is that you have not the right to expose a human creature to such chances--rare, as I know, but terrible, as I know still better. What have you to answer to that?"

"Nothing," stammered George, brought to his knees at last. "You are right about that. I don't know what to think."

"And in forbidding you marriage," continued the doctor, "is it the same as if I forbade it forever? Is it the same as if I told you that you could never be cured? On the contrary, I hold out to you every hope; but I demand of you a delay of three or four years, because it will take me that time to find out if you are among the number of those unfortunate ones whom I pity with all my heart, for whom the disease is without mercy; because during that time you will be dangerous to your wife and to your children. The children I have not yet mentioned to you."

Here the doctor's voice trembled slightly. He spoke with moving eloquence. "Come, sir, you are an honest man; you are too young for such things not to move you; you are not insensible to duty. It is impossible that I shan't be able to find a way to your heart, that I shan't be able to make you obey me. My emotion in speaking to you proves that I appreciate your suffering, that I suffer with you. It is in the name of my sincerity that I implore you. You have admitted it--that you have not the right to expose your wife to such miseries. But it is not only your wife that you strike; you may attack in her your own children. I exclude you for a moment from my thought--you and her. It is in the name of these innocents that I implore you; it is the future, it is the race that I defend. Listen to me, listen to me! Out of the twenty households of which I spoke, only fifteen had children; these fifteen had twenty-eight. Do you know how many out of these twenty-eight survived?

Three, sir! Three out of twenty-eight! Syphilis is above everything a murderer of children. Herod reigns in France, and over all the earth, and begins each year his ma.s.sacre of the innocents; and if it be not blasphemy against the sacredness of life, I say that the most happy are those who have disappeared. Visit our children's hospitals! We know too well the child of syphilitic parents; the type is cla.s.sical; the doctors can pick it out anywhere. Those little old creatures who have the appearance of having already lived, and who have kept the stigmata of all out infirmities, of all our decay. They are the victims of fathers who have married, being ignorant of what you know--things which I should like to go and cry out in the public places."

The doctor paused, and then in a solemn voice continued: "I have told you all, without exaggeration. Think it over. Consider the pros and cons; sum up the possible misfortunes and the certain miseries. But disregard yourself, and consider that there are in one side of the scales the misfortunes of others, and in the other your own. Take care that you are just."

George was at last overcome. "Very well," he said, "I give way. I won't get married. I will invent some excuse; I will get a delay of six months. More than that, I cannot do."

The doctor exclaimed, "I need three years--I need four years!"

"No, Doctor!" persisted George. "You can cure me in less time than that."

The other answered, "No! No! No!"

George caught him by the hand, imploringly. "Yes! Science in all powerful!"

"Science is not G.o.d," was the reply. "There are no longer any miracles."