The Beth Book
her danger in suckling the child?' Apparently not! The poor woman must
take her chance, as the child's unfortunate mother had to do when she
married."
"Ah, now you see for yourself, and will become reasonable, it is to be
hoped," he interrupted, rubbing his hands complacently; "for it is
precisely in order to check that particular disease that appointments
like mine are made."
"It is precisely in order to make vice safe for men that such
appointments are made," she answered. "Medical etiquette would not
stop where it does, at the degradation of those unfortunate women, if
you were honestly attempting to put a stop to that disease. You would
have it reported, irrespective of the sex of the sufferer, like any
other disease that is dangerous to the health of the community. It is
not contrary to etiquette to break your peculiar professional secrecy
in the case of a woman, but it would be in the case of a man; so you
punish the women, and let the men go free to spread the evil from one
generation to another as they like. O justice! O consistency! I don't
wonder we have been shunned since we came to Slane. A man in your
position is a mere pander, and right glad am I of what I have suffered
from the scorn and contempt of the people who would not associate with
us. It shows that the right spirit is abroad in the community."
"Pander!" Dan ejaculated. "I am sorry to hear you use such a word,
Beth."
"It is the right word, unfortunately," she answered.
"You oughtn't to know anything about these things," the chaste Daniel
observed, with an air of offended delicacy. "Women can't know enough
to see the matter from the right point of view, and so they make
mischief."
"Ah, you don't appreciate that women have grown out of their
intellectual infancy," Beth said, "and have opinions and a point of
view of their own in social matters, especially where their own sex is
concerned. You are still in the days of old Chavasse, who expatiates
in his 'Advice to a Wife' on the dangers of men marrying unhealthy
women, but says not a word of warning to women on the risk of marrying
unhealthy men. You would keep us blindfolded as we were in his day,
and abandon us to our fate in like manner; but it can't be done any
more, my friend. You can hide nothing from sensible women now that
concerns the good of the community. We know there is no protection for
women against this infamous disease, and no punishment for the men who
spread it; and we consider the fact a disgrace to every medical man
alive."
"You have a nice opinion of the men of your husband's profession!" Dan
observed sarcastically.
"I have the highest opinion of medical men--such medical men as Sir
George Galbraith," she replied. "I have seen something of their
high-mindedness, their courage, their devotion, and their genuine
disinterestedness; and I feel sure that in time their efforts will
leaven the whole mass of callousness and cruelty against which they
have to contend in their profession. The hope of humanity is in the
doctors, and they will not fail us. Like Christ, they will teach as
well as heal."
"Rubbish!" said Dan. "As I've told you before, it isn't our business
to mind the morals of the people. It's for the parsons to fight the
devil."
"But," said Beth, "as I answered you before, you cannot attend to the
health of the community properly without also minding its morals. The
real old devil is disease."
Dan left his seat and walked to the window, where he stood with his
hands in his pockets, looking out for awhile.
"Well, this is enough jawbation for one day, I hope," he said at last,
turning round. "Marrying a woman like you is enough to drive a man to
the devil. I've a jolly good mind to go and get drunk. I declare to
God if I could get drunk overnight and feel all right again in the
morning, I'd be drunk every night. But it can't be done," he added
regretfully. "There are drawbacks to everything."
Beth looked at him imperturbably while he was speaking, then turned
her attention to the fire.
"You know my views now on the subject of vivisection," she said at
last. "If there is any more of it here, I shall leave the house, and
publish the reason. And you also know what I consider I owe myself in
the way of self-respect. You must beguile your creditors by other
means than my personal appearance."
She had spoken all through in the most temperate tone, and now, when
she had finished, she leaned back in her chair and folded her hands
with a sigh, as of one who had finished a hard task and would rest.
Dan looked at her with evident distaste, and considered a little,
searching for something more to say that might move her, some argument
that should persuade or convince; but, as nothing occurred to him, he
left the room, banging the door after him in his ill-conditioned way,
because he knew that the noise would be a racking offence to her
overwrought nerves.
But from that time forward everything he did was an offence to Beth, a
source of irritation. In spite of herself, she detected all the
insincerity of his professions, the mean motives of his acts. Up to
this time she had been more kindly disposed towards him than she
herself knew. All she had wanted was to be able to care for him, to
find some consistency in him, something to respect, and to which she
could pin her faith; but now she knew him for what he was
exactly--shallow, pretentious, plausible, vulgar-minded, without
principle; a man of false pretensions and vain professions; utterly
untrustworthy; saying what would suit himself at the moment, or just
what occurred to him, not what he thought, but what he imagined he was
expected to say. Beth had never heard him condemn a vice or habit
which she did not afterwards find him practising himself. She used to
wonder if he deceived himself, or was only intent on deceiving her;
but from close observation of him at this period, she became
convinced that, for the time being, he entered into whatever part he
was playing, and hence his extreme plausibility. Beth found herself
studying him continually with a curious sort of impersonal interest;
he was a subject that repelled her, but from which, nevertheless, she
could not tear herself away. His hands in particular, his handsome
white hands, had a horrid sort of fascination for her. She had admired
them while she thought of them as the healing hands of the physician,
bringing hope and health; but now she knew them to be the cruel hands
of the vivisector, associated with torture, from which humanity
instinctively shrinks; and when he touched her, her delicate skin
crisped with a shudder. She used to wonder how he could eat with hands
so polluted, and once, at dessert, when he handed her a piece of
orange in his fingers, she was obliged to leave it on her plate, she
could not swallow it.
After that last scene the days dragged more intolerably than ever; but
happily for Beth there were not many more of them without a break, for
just as it seemed that endurance must end in some desperate act, Mrs.
Kilroy sent her a pressing invitation to go and pay her a long visit
in London; and Beth accepted it, and went with such a sense of relief
as an invalid feels who, after long suffering, finds herself well, and
out in the free fresh air once more.
CHAPTER XLVII
When Beth went to stay with the Kilroys in London, it was a question
whether she might not end by joining the valiant army of those who are
in opposition to everything; but before she had been there a week, she
had practically recovered her balance, and began to look out upon life
once more with dispassionate attention. Her depression when she first
arrived was evident, and the Kilroys were concerned to see her looking
so thin and ill; but, by degrees, she expanded in that genial
atmosphere, and although she said little as a rule, she had begun to
listen and to observe again with her usual vivid interest. She could
not have been better situated for the purpose, for people of all kinds
came to the Kilroys; and in moving among them merely as an onlooker,
she was bound to see and hear enough to take her out of herself. Her
own personality was too distinct, however, for her to remain for long
an onlooker merely. That mesmeric quality in her which, whether it
fascinates or displeases, attracts or repels, marks a distinct
personality which is not to be overlooked, made people ask at once who
she was, in the hope that her acquaintance might be worth
cultivating. For there was a certain air of distinction about her
which made her look like a person with some sort of prestige, whom it
might be useful to know--don't you know.
One afternoon soon after Beth's arrival, Mrs. Kilroy being at home to
visitors, and the rooms already pretty full, Beth noticed among the
callers an old-looking young man whose face seemed familiar to her. He
wore a pointed beard upon his chin, and a small moustache cut away
from his upper lip, and waxed and turned up at the ends. His face was
thin and narrow, his forehead high and bald; what hair he had grew in
a fringe at the back of his head, and was curly, and of a nondescript
brown colour. Had he worn the dress of the Elizabethan period, he
might have passed for a bad attempt to look like Shakespeare; and Beth
thought that that perhaps might be the resemblance which puzzled her.
While she was looking at him a lady was announced, a most
demure-looking little person in a grey costume, and a small,
close-fitting princess bonnet, tied under her chin, and trimmed with a
big Alsatian bow in front. She entered smiling slightly, and she
continued to smile, as if she had set the smile on her lips as she put
the bonnet on her head, to complete her costume. After she had shaken
hands with Angelica, she looked round as if in search of some one
else, and seemed satisfied when she discovered the old-looking young
man of Shakesperian aspect. He was watching her, and their eyes met
with a momentary significance, but they took no further notice of each
other. Most people would have perceived no more in the glance than
showed on the surface:--a lady and gentleman who looked at each other
and then looked away, like indifferent acquaintances or casual
strangers; but Beth's infallible intuition revealed to her an
elaborate precaution in this seeming unconcern. It was clear to her
that the two had expected to meet each other there, and their apparent
insensibility to each other's presence was a pose, which, however,
betrayed to her the intimacy it was affected to conceal. She hated
herself for seeing so much, and burned with blame of Dan for opening
her eyes to behold the inward wickedness beneath the conventional
propriety of the outward demeanour; but therein she was unjust to Dan.
He had opened her eyes sooner than they should have been opened, but
in any case she must have seen for herself eventually. Nothing in life
can be concealed from such a mind. What books could not teach her, she
discovered from people by sympathy, by insight, by intuition; but she
did not come into full possession of her faculties all at once. The
conditions of her life had tended rather to retard than to develop the
best that was in her, and the wonder was that her vision had not been
permanently distorted, so that she could see nothing but evil in all
things--see it, too, till her eyes were accustomed and her soul
corrupted, so that she not only ceased to resent it, but finally
accepted it as the inevitable order to which it is best to accommodate
oneself if one is to get any good out of life. This is the fate of
most young wives situated as Beth had been, the fate she had only
narrowly escaped by help of the strength that came of the brave
self-contained habits she had cultivated in her life of seclusion and