Scientific Romance

by Brian Stableford

  And Clarence and Olive answered humbly and reverently, “If grace be given us, we will.”

  *

  Brother Eustace, physiologist to the phalanstery, looked very grave and sad indeed as he passed from the Mothers’ Room into the Conversazione in search of the hierarch. “A child is born into the phalanstery,” he said, gloomily; but his face conveyed at once a far deeper meaning than his mere words could carry to the ear.

  The hierarch rose hastily and glanced into his dark keen eyes with an inquiring look. “Not something amiss?” he said eagerly, with an infinite tenderness in his fatherly voice. “Don’t tell me that, Eustace. Not . . . oh, not a child that the phalanstery must not for its own sake permit to live! Oh, Eustace, not, I hope, idiotic! And I gave my consent, too; I gave my consent for pretty gentle little Olive’s sake! Heaven grant I was not too much moved by her prettiness and her delicacy, for I love her, Eustace, I love her like a daughter.”

  “So we love all the children of the phalanstery, Cyriac, we who are elder brothers,” said the physiologist gravely, half smiling to himself nevertheless at his quaint expression of old-world feeling on the part even of the very hierarch, whose bounden duty it was to advise and persuade a higher rule of conduct and thought than such antique phraseology implied. “No, not idiotic; not quite as bad as that, Cyriac; not absolutely a hopeless case, but still, very serious and distressing for all that. The dear little baby has its feet turned inward. She’ll be a cripple for life, I fear, and no help for it.”

  Tears rose unchecked into the hierarch’s soft gray eyes. “Its feet turned inward,” he muttered sadly, half to himself. “Feet turned inward! Oh, how terrible! This will be a frightful blow to Clarence and to Olive. Poor young things; their first-born, too. Oh, Eustace, what an awful thought that, with all the care and precaution we take to keep all causes of misery away from the precincts of the phalanstery, such trials as this must needs come upon us by the blind workings of the unconscious Cosmos! It is terrible, too terrible.”

  “And yet it isn’t all loss,” the physiologist answered earnestly. “It isn’t all loss, Cyriac, heart-rending as the necessity seems to us. I sometimes think that if we hadn’t these occasional distressful objects on which to expend our sympathy and our sorrow, we in our happy little communities might grow too smug, and comfortable, and material, and earthy. But things like this bring tears to our eyes, and we are the better for them in the end, depend upon it, we are the better for them. They try our fortitude, our devotion to principle, our obedience to the highest and hardest law.

  “Every time some poor little waif like this is born into our midst, we feel the strain of old prephalansteric emotions and fallacies of feeling dragging us steadily and cruelly down. Our first impulse is to pity the poor mother, to pity the poor child, and in our mistaken kindness to let an unhappy life go on indefinitely to its own misery and the preventable distress of all around it. We have to make an effort, a struggle, before the higher and more abstract pity conquers the lower and more concrete one. But in the end we are all the better for it; and each such struggle and each such victory, Cyriac, paves the way for the final and truest morality when we shall do right instinctively and naturally, without any impulse on any side to do any wrong at all.”

  “You speak wisely, Eustace,” the hierarch answered, with a sad shake of his head, “and I wish I could feel like you. I ought to but I can’t. Your functions make you able to look more dispassionately upon these things than I can. I’m afraid there’s a great deal of the old Adam lingering wrongfully in me yet. And I’m still more afraid that there’s a great deal of the old Eve lingering even more strongly in all our mothers. It’ll be a long time, I doubt me, before they’ll ever consent without a struggle to the painless extinction of necessarily unhappy and imperfect lives. A long time; a very long time. Does Clarence know of this yet?”

  “Yes, I have told him. His grief is terrible. You had better go and console him as best you can.”

  “I will, I will. And poor Olive! Poor Olive! It wrings my heart to think of her. Of course she won’t be told of it, if you can help it, for the probationary four decades?”

  “No, not if we can help it; but I don’t know how it can ever be kept from her. She will see Clarence, and Clarence will certainly tell her.”

  The hierarch whistled gently to himself. “It’s a sad case,” he said, ruefully, “a very sad case; and yet I don’t see how we can possibly prevent it.”

  He walked slowly and deliberately into the little ante-room where Clarence was seated on a sofa, his head between his hands, rocking himself to and fro in his mute misery, or stopping to groan now and then in faint feeble inarticulate fashion. Rhoda, one of the elder sisters, held the unconscious baby sleeping in her arms, and the hierarch took it from her like a man accustomed to infants, and looked ruefully at the poor distorted little feet. Yes, Eustace was evidently quite right. There could be no hope of ever putting those wee twisted ankles back straight and firm into their proper lace again like other people’s.

  He sat down beside Clarence on the sofa, and with a commiserating gesture removed the young man’s hands from his poor white face. “My dear, dear friend,” he said softly, “what comfort or consolation can we try to give you that is not a cruel mockery? None, none, none. We can only sympathize with you and Olive; and perhaps, after all, the truest sympathy is silence.”

  Clarence answered nothing for a moment, but buried his face once more in his hands and burst into tears. The men of the phalanstery were less careful to conceal their emotions than we old-time folks in these early centuries. “Oh, dear hierarch,” he said, after a long sob, “it is too hard a sacrifice, too hard, too terrible. I don’t feel it for the baby’s sake; for her ’tis better so; she will be freed from a life of misery and dependence; but for my own sake, and oh, above all, or dear Olive’s. It will kill her, hierarch; I feel sure it will kill her!”

  The elder brother passed his hand with a troubled gesture across his forehead. “But what else can we do, dear Clarence?” he asked pathetically. “What else can we do? Would you have us bring up the dear child to lead a lingering life of misfortune, to distress the eyes of all around her, to feel herself a useless encumbrance in the midst of so many mutually helpful and serviceable and happy people? How keenly she would realize her own isolation in the joyous busy laboring community of our phalansteries! How terribly she would brood over her own misfortune when surrounded by such a world of hearty, healthy, sound-limbed, useful persons! Would it not be a wicked and a cruel act to bring her up to an old age of unhappiness and imperfection? You have been in Australia, my boy, where we sent you on that plant-hunting expedition, and you have seen cripples with your own eyes, no doubt, which I have never done—thank Heaven!—I who have never gone beyond the limits of the most civilized Euramerican countries. You have seen cripples, in those semi-civilized old colonial societies, which have lagged after us so slowly in the path of progress, and would you like your own daughter to grow up to such a life as that, Clarence? Would you like her, I ask you, to grow up to such a life as that?”

  Clarence clenched his right hand tightly over his left arm and answered with a groan: “No, hierarch; not even for Olive’s sake could I wish for such an act of irrational injustice. You have trained us up to know the good from the evil, and for no personal gratification of our deepest emotions, I hope and trust, shall we ever betray your teaching or depart from your principles. I know what it is; I saw just such a cripple once, at a great town in the heart of Central Australia—a child of eight years old, limping along lamely on her heels by her mother’s side: a sickening sight; to think of it even now turns the blood in one’s arteries, and I could never wish Olive’s baby to grow up to be a thing like that. But oh, I wish to heaven it might have been otherwise; I wish to heaven this trial might have been spared us both.

  “Oh hierarch, dear hierarch, the sacrifice is one that no good man or woman would want selfishly to forgo; yet for all that, our hearts,
our hearts are human still; and though we may reason and act upon our reasoning, the human feeling in us—relic of the idolatrous days or whatever you like to call it—it will not choose to be so put down, and stifled. It will out, hierarch, it will out for all that, in real, hot human tears. Oh, dear, dear kind father and brother, it will kill Olive; I know it will kill her!”

  “Olive is a good girl,” the hierarch answered slowly. “A good girl, well brought up, and with sound principles. She will not flinch from doing her duty, I know, Clarence; but her emotional nature is a very delicate one, and we have reason indeed to fear the shock to her nervous system. That she will do right bravely, I don’t doubt; the only danger is lest the effort to do right should cost her too dear. Whatever can be done to spare her shall be done, Clarence. It is a sad misfortune for the whole phalanstery, such a child being born to us as this, and we all sympathize with you; we sympathize with you more deeply than words can say.”

  The young man only rocked up and down drearily, and murmured to himself: “It will kill her, it will kill her! My Olive, my Olive, I know it will kill her.”

  *

  They didn’t keep the secret of the baby’s crippled condition from Olive till the four decades were over, or anything like it. The moment she saw Clarence, she guessed at once with a woman’s instinct that something serious had happened, and she didn’t rest till she had found out from him all about it. Rhoda brought her the poor wee mite, carefully wrapped after the phalansteric fashion in a long strip of fine flannel, and Olive unrolled the piece until she came at last upon the poor crippled feet, that looked so soft and tender and dainty and waxen in their very deformity.

  The young mother leant over the child a moment in speechless misery. “Spirit of Humanity,” she whispered at length feebly, “oh give me strength to bear this terrible unutterable trial! It will break my heart. But I will try to bear it.”

  There was something so touching in her attempted resignation that Rhoda, for the first time in her life, felt almost tempted to wish she had been born in the old wicked prephalansteric days, when they would have let the baby grow up to womanhood as a matter of course, and bear its own burden through life as best it might. Presently, Olive raised her head again from the crimson silken pillow. “Clarence,” she said, in a trembling voice, pressing the sleeping baby hard against her breast, “when will it be? How long? Is there no hope, no chance of respite?”

  “Not for a long time yet, dearest Olive,” Clarence answered through his tears. “the phalanstery will be very gentle and patient with us, we know; and brother Eustace will do everything that lies in his power, though he’s afraid he can give us very little hope indeed. In any case, Olive darling, the community waits for four decades before deciding anything; it waits to see whether there is any chance for physiological or surgical relief; it decides nothing hastily or thoughtlessly; it waits for every possible improvement, hoping against hope till hope itself is hopeless. And then, if at the end of the quartet, as I fear will be the case—for we must face the worst, darling, we must face the worst—if at the end of the quartet it seems clear to brother Eustace, and the three assessor physiologists from the neighboring phalansteries, that the dear child would be a cripple for life, we’re still allowed four decades more to prepare ourselves in: four whole decades more, Olive, to take our leave of the darling baby. You’ll have your baby with you for eighty days. And we must wean ourselves from her in that time, darling. But oh, Olive, oh, Rhoda, it’s very hard: very, very, very hard.”

  Olive answered not a word, but lay silently weeping and pressing the baby against her breast, with her large brown eyes fixed vacantly upon the fretted woodwork of the paneled ceiling.

  “You mustn’t do like that, Olive dear,” sister Rhoda said in a half-frightened voice. “You must cry right out, and sob, and not restrain yourself, darling, or else you’ll break your heart with silence and repression. Do cry aloud, there’s a dear girl; do cry aloud and relieve yourself. A good cry would be the best thing on earth for you. And think, dear, how much happier it will really be for the sweet baby to sink asleep so peacefully than to live a long life of conscious inferiority and felt imperfection! What a blessing it is to think you were born in a phalansteric land, where the dear child will be happily and painlessly rid of its poor little unconscious existence, before it has reached the age when it might begin to know its own incurable and inevitable misfortune. Oh, Olive, what a blessing that is, and how thankful we all ought to be that we live in a world where the sweet pet will be saved so much humiliation, and mortification, and misery!”

  At that moment, Olive, looking within into her own wicked rebellious heart, was conscious, with a mingled glow, half shame, half indignation, that so far from appreciating the priceless blessings of her own situation, she would gladly have changed places there and then with any barbaric woman of the old semi-civilized prephalansteric days. We can so little appreciate our own mercies.

  It was very wrong and anti-cosmic, she knew; very wrong, indeed, and the hierarch would have told her so at once; but in her own woman’s soul she felt she would rather be a miserable naked savage in a wattled hut, like those one saw in old books about Africa before the illumination, if only she could keep that one little angel of a crippled baby, than dwell among all the enlightenment, and knowledge and art, and perfected social arrangements of phalansteric England without her child—her dear, helpless, beautiful baby.

  How truly the Founder himself had said: “Think you there will be no more tragedies and dramas in the world when we have reformed it, nothing but one dreary dead level of monotonous content? Ay, indeed, there will; for that, fear not; while the heart of man remains, there will be tragedy enough on earth and to spare for a hundred poets to take for their saddest epics.”

  Olive looked up at Rhoda wistfully. “Sister Rhoda,” she said in a timid tone, “it may be very wicked—I feel sure it is—but do you know, I’ve read somewhere in old stories of the unenlightened days that a mother always loved the most afflicted of her children the best. And I can understand it now, sister Rhoda; I can feel it here,” and she put her hand upon her poor still heart. “If only I could keep this one dear crippled baby, I could give up all the world beside—except you, Clarence.”

  “Oh, hush, darling!” Rhoda cried in an awed voice, stooping down half alarmed to kiss her pale forehead. “You mustn’t talk like that, Olive dearest. It’s wicked, it’s undutiful. I know how hard it is not to repine and to rebel, but you mustn’t, Olive, you mustn’t. We must each strive to bear our own burdens (with the help of the community), and not to put any of them off on a poor, helpless, crippled little baby.”

  “But our natures,” Clarence said, wiping his eyes dreamily; “our natures are only half attuned as yet to the necessities of the higher social existence. Of course it’s very wrong and very sad, but we can’t help feeling it, sister Rhoda, though we try our hardest. Remember, it’s not so many generations since our fathers would have reared the child without a thought that they were doing anything wicked—nay, rather, would even have held (so powerful is custom) that it was positively wrong to save it by preventive means from a certain life of predestined misery. Our conscience in this matter isn’t yet fully formed. We feel that it’s right, of course; oh yes, we know the phalanstery has ordered everything for the best; but we can’t help grieving over it; the human heart within us is too unregenerate still to acquiesce without a struggle in the direction of right and reason.”

  Olive again said nothing, but fixed her eyes silently upon the grave, earnest portrait of the Founder over the carved oak mantelpiece, and let the hot tears stream their own way over her cold, white, pallid, bloodless cheek without reproof for many minutes. Her heart was too full for either speech or comfort.

  *

  Eight decades passed away slowly in the Avondale Phalanstery; and day after day seemed more and more terrible to poor, weak, disconsolate Olive. The quiet refinement and delicate surroundings of their placid life seemed t
o make her poignant misery and long anxious term of waiting only the more intense in its sorrow and its awesomeness.

  Every day, the younger sisters turned as of old to their allotted round of pleasant housework; every day the elder sisters, who had earned their leisure, brought in their daily embroidery, or their drawing materials, or their other occupations, and tried to console her, or rather to condole with her, in her great sorrow. She couldn’t complain of any unkindness; on the contrary, all the brothers and sisters were sympathy itself, while Clarence, though he tried hard not to be too idolatrous to her (which is wrong and antisocial, of course) was still overflowing with tenderness and consideration for her in their common grief. But all that seemed merely to make things worse.

  If only somebody had been cruel to her; if only the hierarch would have scolded her, or the elder sisters have shown her any distant coldness, or the other girls have been wanting in sisterly sympathy, she might have got angry or brooded over her wrongs; whereas, now, she could do nothing save cry passively with a vain attempt at resignation. It was nobody’s fault; there was nobody to be angry with, there was nothing to blame except the great impersonal laws and circumstances of the Cosmos, which it would be rank impiety and wickedness to question or gainsay.

  So she endured in silence, loving only to sit with Clarence’s hand in hers, and the dear doomed baby lying peacefully upon the stole in her lap. It was inevitable and there was no use repining; for so profoundly had the phalanstery schooled the minds and nature of those two unhappy young parents (and all their compeers) that, grieve as they might, they never for one moment dreamt of attempting to relax or set aside the fundamental principles of phalansteric society in these matters.