Part 53 (1/2)

As I swung the door open, I saw a young man pacing up and down the laboratory nervously, too preoccupied even to notice the slight noise I had made.

He paused in his nervous walk and faced Kennedy, his back to me.

”Kennedy,” he said huskily, ”I wouldn't care if there was insanity in her family--for, my G.o.d!--the tragedy of it all now--I love her!”

He turned, following Kennedy's eyes in my direction, and I saw on his face the most haggard, haunting look of anxiety that I had ever seen on a young person.

Instantly I recognized from the pictures I had seen in the newspapers young Quincy Atherton, the last of this famous line of the family, who had attracted a great deal of attention several months previously by what the newspapers had called his search through society for a ”eugenics bride,” to infuse new blood into the Atherton stock.

”You need have no fear that Mr. Jameson will be like the other newspaper men,” rea.s.sured Craig, as he introduced us, mindful of the prejudice which the unpleasant notoriety of Atherton's marriage had already engendered in his mind.

I recalled that when I had first heard of Atherton's ”eugenic marriage,” I had instinctively felt a prejudice against the very idea of such cold, calculating, materialistic, scientific mating, as if one of the last fixed points were disappearing in the chaos of the social and s.e.x upheaval.

Now, I saw that one great fact of life must always remain. We might ride in hydroaeroplanes, delve into the very soul by psycha.n.a.lysis, perhaps even run our machines by the internal forces of radium--even marry according to Galton or Mendel. But there would always be love, deep pa.s.sionate love of the man for the woman, love which all the discoveries of science might perhaps direct a little less blindly, but the consuming flame of which not all the coldness of science could ever quench. No tampering with the roots of human nature could ever change the roots.

I must say that I rather liked young Atherton. He had a frank, open face, the most prominent feature of which was his somewhat aristocratic nose. Otherwise he impressed one as being the victim of heredity in faults, if at all serious, against which he was struggling heroically.

It was a most pathetic story which he told, a story of how his family had degenerated from the strong stock of his ancestors until he was the last of the line. He told of his education, how he had fallen, a rather wild youth bent in the footsteps of his father who had been a notoriously good clubfellow, under the influence of a college professor, Dr. Crafts, a cla.s.smate of his father's, of how the professor had carefully and persistently fostered in him an idea that had completely changed him.

”Crafts always said it was a case of eugenics against euthenics,”

remarked Atherton, ”of birth against environment. He would tell me over and over that birth gave me the clay, and it wasn't such bad clay after all, but that environment would shape the vessel.”

Then Atherton launched into a description of how he had striven to find a girl who had the strong qualities his family germ plasm seemed to have lost, mainly, I gathered, resistance to a taint much like manic depressive insanity. And as he talked, it was borne in on me that, after all, contrary to my first prejudice, there was nothing very romantic indeed about disregarding the plain teachings of science on the subject of marriage and one's children.

In his search for a bride, Dr. Crafts, who had founded a sort of Eugenics Bureau, had come to advise him. Others may have looked up their brides in Bradstreet's, or at least the Social Register. Atherton had gone higher, had been overjoyed to find that a girl he had met in the West, Eugenia Gilman, measured up to what his friend told him were the latest teachings of science. He had been overjoyed because, long before Crafts had told him, he had found out that he loved her deeply.

”And now,” he went on, half choking with emotion, ”she is apparently suffering from just the same sort of depression as I myself might suffer from if the recessive trait became active.”

”What do you mean, for instance?” asked Craig.

”Well, for one thing, she has the delusion that my relatives are persecuting her.”

”Persecuting her?” repeated Craig, stifling the remark that that was not in itself a new thing in this or any other family. ”How?”

”Oh, making her feel that, after all, it is Atherton family rather than Gilman health that counts--little remarks that when our baby is born, they hope it will resemble Quincy rather than Eugenia, and all that sort of thing, only worse and more cutting, until the thing has begun to prey on her mind.”

”I see,” remarked Kennedy thoughtfully. ”But don't you think this is a case for a--a doctor, rather than a detective?”

Atherton glanced up quickly. ”Kennedy,” he answered slowly, ”where millions of dollars are involved, no one can guess to what lengths the human mind will go--no one, except you.”

”Then you have suspicions of something worse?”

”Y-yes--but nothing definite. Now, take this case. If I should die childless, after my wife, the Atherton estate would descend to my nearest relative, Burroughs Atherton, a cousin.”

”Unless you willed it to--”

”I have already drawn a will,” he interrupted, ”and in case I survive Eugenia and die childless, the money goes to the founding of a larger Eugenics Bureau, to prevent in the future, as much as possible, tragedies such as this of which I find myself a part. If the case is reversed, Eugenia will get her third and the remainder will go to the Bureau or the Foundation, as I call the new venture. But,” and here young Atherton leaned forward and fixed his large eyes keenly on us, ”Burroughs might break the will. He might show that I was of unsound mind, or that Eugenia was, too.”

”Are there no other relatives?”