Part 31

“Of course, I do not believe in absolute good or absolute evil, although I do believe in relative good and relative evil. Take tenderness and pity, in some of their results at least. Our friend Z——, on the contrary, sees all as accident, or blind chance and without much if any real or effective pity or amelioration, a state that I cannot reason myself into. Quite adversely, I think there is something that helps life along or out of its difficulties. I know that you will not agree with me; still, I believe it, and while I do not think there is any direct and immediate response, such as the Christian Scientists and the New Thought devotees would have us believe, I know there is a response at times, or at least I think there is, and I think I can prove it. Take dreams, for instance, which, as Freud has demonstrated, are nature’s way of permitting a man to sleep in the presence of some mental worry that would tend to keep him awake, or if he had fallen asleep, and stood in danger to wake him.”

I waived that as a point, but then he referred to medicine and surgery and all the mechanical developments as well as the ameliorative efforts of life, such as laws relating to child labor, workingmen’s compensation and hours, compulsory safety devices and the like, as specific proofs of a desire on the part of nature, working through man, to make life easier for man, a wish on her part to provide him, slowly and stumblingly, mayhap, with things helpful to him in his condition here. Without interrupting him, I allowed him to call to mind the Protestant Reformation, how it had ended once and for all the iniquities of the Inquisition; the rise of Christianity, and how, temporarily at least, it had modified if not entirely ended the brutalities of Paganism. Anesthetics, and how they had served to ameliorate pain. I could have pointed out that life itself was living on life and always had been, and that as yet no substitute for the flesh of helpless animals had been furnished man as food. (He could not hear my thoughts.) The automobile, he went on, had already practically eliminated the long sufferings of the horse; our anti-slavery rebellion and humane opposition in other countries had once and for all put an end to human slavery; also he called to mind the growth of humane societies of one kind and another, that ministered to many tortured animals. And humane laws were being constantly passed and enforced to better if not entirely cure inhuman conditions.

I confess I was interested, if not convinced. In spite of life itself existing on life, there was too much in what he said to permit any one to pass over it indifferently. But there came to my mind just the same all the many instances of crass accident and brutish mischance which are neither prevented nor cured by anything—the thousands who are annually killed in railroad accidents and industrial plants, despite protective mechanisms and fortifying laws compelling their use; the thousands who die yearly from epidemics of influenza, smallpox, yellow fever, cholera and widespread dissemination of cancer, consumption and related ills. These I mentioned. He admitted the force of the point but insisted that man, impelled by nature, not only for his own immediate protection but by reason of a sympathy aroused through pain endured by him, was moved to kindly action. Besides if nature loved brutality and inhumanity and suffering why should any atom of it wish to escape pain, and why in those atoms should it generate sympathy and tears and rejoicing at escape from suffering by man, why sorrow and horror at the accidental or intentional infliction of disaster on man by nature or man?

After a time, he volunteered: “Let me give you a concrete instance. It has always interested me and it seems to prove that there is something to what I say. It concerns a girl I know, a very homely one, who lost her mind. At the beginning of her mental trouble her father called me in to see what, if anything, could be done. The parents of this girl were Catholics. He was a successful contractor and politician, the father of three children; he provided very well for them materially but could do little for them mentally. He was not the intellectual but the religious type. The mother was a cheerful, good-natured and conventional woman, and had only the welfare of her children and her husband at heart. When I first came to know this family—I was a young medical man then—this girl was thirteen or fourteen, the youngest of the three children. Of these three children, and for that matter of the entire family, I saw that this girl was decidedly the most interesting psychically and emotionally. She was intense and receptive, but inclined to be morbid; and for a very good reason. She was not good-looking, not in any way attractive physically. Worse, she had too good a mind, too keen a perception, not to know how severe a deprivation that was likely to prove and to resent it. As I came to know through later investigations—all the little neglects and petty deprivations which, owing to her lack of looks and the exceeding and of course superior charms of her sister and brother, were throughout her infancy and youth thrust upon her. Her mouth was not sweet—too large; her eyes unsatisfactory as to setting, not as to wistfulness; her nose and chin were unfortunately large, and above her left eye was a birthmark, a livid scar as large as a penny. In addition her complexion was sallow and muddy, and she was not possessed of a truly graceful figure; far from it. After she had reached fifteen or sixteen, she walked, entirely by reason of mental depression, I am sure, with a slow and sagging and moody gait; something within, I suppose, always whispering to her that hope was useless, that there was no good in trying, that she had been mercilessly and irretrievably handicapped to begin with.

“On the other hand, as chance would have it, her sister and brother had been almost especially favored by nature. Celeste Ryan was bright, vivacious, colorful. She was possessed of a graceful body, a beautiful face, clear, large and blue eyes, light glossy hair, and a love for life. She could sing and dance. She was sought after and courted by all sorts of men and boys. I myself, as a young man, used to wish that I could interest her in myself, and often went to the house on her account. Her brother also was smart, well-favored, careful as to his clothes, vain, and interested in and fascinating to girls of a certain degree of mind. He and his sister liked to dance, to attend parties, to play and disport themselves wherever young people were gathered.

“And for the greater part of Marguerite’s youth, or until her sister and brother were married, this house was a centre for all the casual and playful goings-on of youth. Girls and boys, all interested in Celeste and her brother, came and went—girls to see the good-looking brother, boys to flirt with and dance attendance upon the really charming Celeste. In winter there was skating; in summer automobiling, trips to the beach, camping even. In most of these affairs, so long as it was humanly possible, the favorless sister was included; but, as we all know, especially where thoughtless and aggressive youth is concerned, such little courtesies are not always humanly possible. Youth will be served. In the main it is too intent upon the sorting and mating process, each for himself, to give the slightest heed or care for another. Væ Victis.

“To make matters worse, and possibly because her several deficiencies early acquainted her with the fact that all boys and girls found her sister and brother so much more attractive, Marguerite grew reticent and recessive—so much so that when I first saw her she was already slipping about with the air of one who appeared to feel that she was not as ingratiating and acceptable as she might be, even though, as I saw, her mother and father sought to make her feel that she was. Her father, a stodgy and silent man, too involved in the absurdities of politics and religion and the difficulties of his position to give very much attention to the intricacies and subtleties of his children’s personalities, never did guess the real pain that was Marguerite’s. He was a narrow and determined religionist, one who saw in religious abstention, a guarded and reserved life, the only keys to peace and salvation. In fact before he died an altar was built in his house and mass was read there for his especial spiritual benefit every morning. What he thought of the gayeties of his two eldest children at this time I do not know, but since these were harmless and in both cases led to happy and enduring marriages, he had nothing to quarrel with. As for his youngest child, I doubt if he ever sensed in any way the moods and torturous broodings that were hers, the horrors that attend the disappointed love life. He had not been disappointed in his love life, and was therefore not able to understand. He was not sensitive enough to have suffered greatly if he had been, I am sure. But his wife, a soft, pliable, affectionate, gracious woman, early sensed that her daughter must pay heavily for her looks, and in consequence sought in every way to woo her into an unruffled complacence with life and herself.

“But how little the arts of man can do toward making up for the niggardliness of nature! I am certain that always, from her earliest years, this ugly girl loved her considerate mother and was grateful to her; but she was a girl of insight, if not hard practical sense or fortitude, and loved life too much to be content with the love of her mother only. She realized all too keenly the crass, if accidental, injustice which had been done her by nature and was unhappy, terribly so. To be sure, she tried to interest herself in books, the theatre, going about with a homely girl or two like herself. But before her ever must have been the spectacle of the happiness of others, their dreams and their fulfilments. Indeed, for the greater part of these years, and for several years after, until both her sister and brother had married and gone away, she was very much alone, and, as I reasoned it out afterwards, imagining and dreaming about all the things she would like to be and do. But without any power to compel them. Finally she took to reading persistently, to attending theatres, lectures and what not—to establish some contact, I presume, with the gay life scenes she saw about her. But I fancy that these were not of much help, for life may not be lived by proxy. And besides, her father, if not her mother, resented a too liberal thought life. He believed that his faith and its teachings were the only proper solution to life.

“One of the things that interested me in connection with this case—and this I gathered as chief medical counsel of the family between Marguerite’s fifteenth and twenty-fifth year—was that because of the lack of beauty that so tortured her in her youth she had come to take refuge in books, and then, because of these, the facts which they revealed in regard to a mere worthwhile life than she could have, to draw away from all religion as worthless, or at least not very important as a relief from pain. And yet there must have been many things in these books which tortured her quite as much as reality, for she selected, as her father once told me afterward—not her mother, who could read little or nothing—only such books as she should not read; books, I presume, that painted life as she wished it to be for herself. They were by Anatole France, George Moore, de Maupassant and Dostoyevsky. Also she went to plays her father disapproved of and brooded in libraries. And she followed, as she herself explained to me, one lecturer and another, one personality and another, more, I am sure, because by this method she hoped to contact, although she never seemed to, men who were interesting to her, than because she was interested in the things they themselves set forth.

“In connection with all this I can tell you of only one love incident which befell her. Somewhere around the time when she was twenty-one or -two she came in contact with a young teacher, himself not very attractive or promising and whose prospects, as her father saw them, were not very much. But since she was not pretty and rather lonely and he seemed to find companionship, and mayhap solace in her, no great objection was made to him. In fact as time went on, and she and the teacher became more and more intimate, both she and her parents assumed that in the course of time they would most certainly marry. For instance, at the end of his school-teaching year here in New York, and although he left the city he kept up a long correspondence with her. In addition, he spent at least some of his vacation near New York, at times returning and going about with her and seeming to feel that she was of some value to him in some way.

“How much of this was due to the fact that she was provided with spending money of her own and could take him here and there, to places to which he could not possibly have afforded to go alone I cannot say. None the less, it was assumed, because of their companionship and the fact that she would have some money of her own after marriage, that he would propose. But he did not. Instead, he came year after year, visited about with her, took up her time, as the family saw it (her worthless time!), and then departed for his duties elsewhere as free as when he had come. Finally this having irritated if not infuriated the several members of her family, they took her to task about it, saying that she was a fool for trifling with him. But she, although perhaps depressed by all this, was still not willing to give him up; he was her one hope. Her explanation to the family was that because he was poor he was too proud to marry until he had established himself. Thus several more years came and went, and he returned or wrote, but still he did not propose. And then of a sudden he stopped writing entirely for a time, and still later on wrote that he had fallen in love and was about to be married.

“This blow appeared to be the crowning one in her life. For in the face of the opposition, and to a certain degree contempt, of her father, who was a practical and fairly successful man, she had devoted herself to this man who was neither successful nor very attractive for almost seven years. And then after so long a period, in which apparently he had used her to make life a little easier for himself, even he had walked away and left her for another. She fell to brooding more and more to herself, reading not so much now, as I personally know, as just thinking. She walked a great deal, as her father told me, and then later began to interest herself, or so she pretended, in a course of history and philosophy at one of the great universities of the city. But as suddenly, thereafter, she appeared to swing between exaggerated periods of study or play or lecture-listening and a form of recessive despair, under the influence of which she retired to her room and stayed there for days, wishing neither to see nor hear from any one—not even to eat. On the other hand again, she turned abruptly to shopping, dressmaking and the niceties which concerned her personal appearance; although even in this latter phase there were times when she did nothing at all, seemed to relax toward her old listlessness and sense of inconsequence and remained in her room to brood.

“About this time, as I was told afterwards, her mother died and, her sister and brother having married, she was left in charge of the house and of her father. It was soon evident that she had no particular qualifications for or interest in housekeeping, and a maiden sister of her father came to look after things. This did not necessarily darken the scene, but it did not seem to lighten it any. She liked this aunt well enough, although they had very little in common mentally. Marguerite went on as before. Parallel with all this, however, had run certain things which I have forgotten to mention. Her father had been growing more and more narrowly religious. As a matter of fact he had never had any sympathy for the shrewd mental development toward which her lack of beauty had driven her. Before she was twenty-three as I have already explained, her father had noted that she was indifferent to her church duties. She had to be urged to go to mass on Sunday, to confession and communion once a month. Also as he told me afterward, as something to be deplored, her reading had caused her to believe that her faith was by no means infallible, its ritual important; there were bigger and more interesting things in life. This had caused her father not only to mistrust but to detest the character of her reading, as well as her tendencies in general. From having some sympathy with her at first, as did her mother always, as the ugly duckling of the family, he had come to have a cold and stand-offish feeling. She was, as he saw it, an unnatural child. She did not obey him in respect to religion. He began, as I have hinted, to look into her books, those in the English tongue at least, and from a casual inspection came to feel that they were not fit books for any one to read. They were irreligious, immoral. They pictured life as it actually was, scenes and needs and gayeties and conflicts, which, whether they existed or not, were not supposed to exist; and most certainly they were not to be introduced into his home, her own starved disposition to the contrary notwithstanding. They conflicted with the natural chill and peace of his religion and temperament. He forbade her to read such stuff, to bring such books into his home. When he found some of them later he burned them. He also began to urge the claims of his religion more and more upon her.

“Reduced by this calamity and her financial dependence, which had always remained complete, she hid her books away and read them only outside or in the privacy of her locked room—but she read them. The subsequent discovery by him that she was still doing this, and his rage, caused her to think of leaving home. But she was without training, without any place to go, really. If she should go she would have to prepare herself for it by teaching, perhaps, and this she now decided to take up.

“About this time she began to develop those characteristics or aberrations which brought me into the case. As I have said, she began to manifest a most exaggerated and extraordinary interest in her facial appearance and physical well-being, an interest not at all borne out rationally by her looks. Much to her father’s and his sister’s astonishment, she began to paint and primp in front of her mirror nearly all day long. Lip sticks, rouge, eyebrow pencils, perfumes, rings, pins, combs, and what not else, were suddenly introduced—very expensive and disconcerting lingerie, for one thing.

“The family had always maintained a charge account at at least two of the larger stores of the city, and to these she had recently repaired, as it was discovered afterwards, and indulged herself, without a by-your-leave, in all these things. High-heeled slippers, bright-colored silk stockings, hats, blouses, gloves, furs, to say nothing of accentuated and even shocking street costumes, began to arrive in bundles. Since the father was out most of the day and the elderly aunt busy with household affairs, nothing much of all this was noted, until later she began to adorn herself in this finery and to walk the streets in it. And then the due bills, sixty days late; most disturbing but not to be avoided. And so came the storm.

“The father and aunt, who had been wondering where these things were coming from, became very active and opposed. For previous to this, especially in the period of her greatest depression, Marguerite had apparently dressed with no thought of anything, save a kind of resigned willingness to remain inconspicuous, as much as to say: ‘What difference does it make. No one is interested in me.’ Now, however, all this had gone—quite. She had supplied herself with hats so wide and ‘fancy’ or ‘fixy,’ as her father said, that they were a disgrace. And clothing so noticeable or ‘loud’—I forget his exact word—that any one anywhere would be ashamed of her. There were, as I myself saw when I was eventually called in as specialist in the case, too many flowers, too much lace, too many rings, pins and belts and gewgaws connected with all this, which neither he nor his sister was ever quite able to persuade her to lay aside. And the colors! Unless she were almost forcibly restrained, these were likely to be terrifying, even laughter-provoking, especially to those accustomed to think of unobtrusiveness as the first criterion of taste—a green or red or light blue broad-trimmed hat, for instance, with no such color of costume to harmonize with it. And, whether it became her or not, a white or tan or green dress in summertime, or one with too much red or too many bright colors in winter. And very tight, worn with a dashing manner, mayhap. Even high-heeled slippers and thin lacy dresses in bitter windy weather. And the perfumes with which she saturated herself were, as her father said, impossible—of a high rate of velocity, I presume.

“So arrayed, then, she would go forth, whenever she could contrive it, to attend a theatre, a lecture, a moving picture, or to walk the streets. And yet, strangely enough, and this was as curious a phase of the case as any, she never appeared to wish to thrust her personal charms, such as they were, on any one. On the contrary, as it developed, there had generated in her the sudden hallucination that she possessed so powerful and self-troubling a fascination for men that she was in danger of bewildering them, enticing them against themselves to their moral destruction, as well as bringing untold annoyance upon herself. A single glance, one look at her lovely face, and presto! they were enslaved. She needed but to walk, and lo! beauty—her beauty, dazzling, searing, destroying—was implied by every motion, gesture. No man, be he what he might, could withstand it. He turned, he stared, he dreamed, he followed her and sought to force his attention on her. Her father explained to me that when he met her on the street one day he was shocked to the point of collapse. A daughter of his so dressed, and on the street! With the assistance of the maiden sister a number of modifications was at once brought about. All charge accounts were cancelled. Dealers were informed that no purchases of hers would be honored unless with the previous consent of her father. The worst of her sartorial offenses were unobtrusively removed from her room and burnt or given away, and plainer and more becoming things substituted.

“But now, suddenly, there developed a new and equally interesting stage of the case. Debarred from dressing as she would, she began to imagine, as these two discovered, that she was being followed and admired and addressed and annoyed by men, and that at her very door. Eager and dangerous admirers lurked about the place. As the maiden aunt once informed me, having wormed her way into Marguerite’s confidence, she had been told that men ‘were wild’ about her and that go where she would, and conduct herself however modestly and inconspicuously, still they were inflamed.