“You need not apologise, sir. This is no occasion for mincing matters. Yes, I am penniless, homeless, wretchedly unhappy, and weary of life. But I am worse than that. I am bad. I am utterly base and degraded. Look at me,” she added, fixing her eyes boldly, even defiantly, upon mine. “Examine me. I am a rare specimen. Very probably you have never seen my like before, and never will again. I am an example of—” she paused and laughed; and there was something in her laughter that made me shudder—“of total depravity,” she concluded. Then suddenly her manner changed, and she became very grave. “Would you entertain a leper in your house, sir? Yet I have been told that I am a moral leper. I have been told that the corruption-spot upon me reaches in to the core. And I think my informant put it very moderately. If you suspected the crimes I have been guilty of, the worse crimes that I have meditated, and only failed to commit because of material obstacles that I could not overcome, you would not harbour me in your house for a single minute. You would feel that my presence was a contamination: that I polluted the chair I sit in, the floor under my feet. The glass I just drank from—you would shatter it into bits, that no innocent man or woman might ever put lips to it again. There! can't you see now that I am beyond help, beyond hope? What have I to live for? I am an incumbrance upon the face of the earth, and hateful to myself into the bargain. Why keep me here an hour? Let us rescind our compromise.* Let me go at once.”
* It is possible that here and elsewhere Dr. Benary, in
reporting conversations from memory, puts into the mouths of
his interlocutors words and phrases from his own vocabulary,
at the same time, without doubt, giving the substance and
the spirit of their remarks correctly. “Let us rescind our
compromise,” at any rate, falling from the lips of a woman,
has, to say the least, an unrealistic sound.—-Editor.
She rose, and stood restive, as if expecting a dismissal.
“No, no; you must stay out your hour, at all events,” I insisted. “Sit down again. I am sure you are not so black as you paint yourself; and in any case, guilt confessed and repented of is more than half atoned for.”
“That is not so, to begin with,” she retorted; “that is the shallowest, hollowest sort of cant. It may pass with people who know guilt only by hearsay, but is ridiculous to those who, like myself, have a knowledge of the subject at first hand.
“Guilt, crime, is atoned for only when it is undone, and all its consequences are obliterated. And now, speaking from my first-hand knowledge of the subject, I will tell you two things—first, all the confession and repentance in the world cannot undo a crime once done, nor obliterate its consequences; secondly, nothing can. You are a physician; I take it, therefore, you are familiar with the first principles of science: with what they call, I think, the Law of the Persistence of Force, the Law of the Conservation of Energy. If you understand that law, you will not dispute this simple application of it: a crime once done can never be undone; its consequences are ineradicable and eternal. Well and good. It is a puerility, in the face of the Law of the Persistence of Force, to talk of atonement. Atonement could come to pass only by means of a miracle—a suspension of Nature, and the interposition of a Supernatural Power. And that is where the Christians, with their dogma of vicarious atonement, are more rational than all the Rationalists from a to zed. So much for atonement. And now, as to repentance—who said that I repented? Repentance! Remorse! I will give you another piece of information, also speaking from firsthand knowledge. Repentance and Remorse are unmeaning sounds. There are no realities, no things, to correspond with them. I do not repent. No man or woman, from the beginning of time, has ever yet repented, in your sense of the word. We regret the losses that our crimes entail upon us: yes. We suffer because our crimes find us out, because retribution overtakes us: yes. But repent? We do not repent. Most of us pretend to. But I will be frank; I will not pretend.
“I suffer because the punishment which, by my crimes, I have brought down upon myself, is greater than I can bear; I suffer, too, because the last purpose I had left to live for, which was also a criminal purpose, has been defeated. But I do not repent. I will not pretend to repent.”
“Be all which as it may, I will repeat what I said before: I do not believe that you are so black as you paint yourself. You, young, beautiful, intelligent—no, no. But even if you were ten times blacker, it would make no difference to me. For, look you, since you have introduced a question of science, and favoured me with a scientific generalisation, I will pursue the question a little further, and cap your generalisation with another: namely, good, bad, or indifferent, we are not our own creators; we do not make ourselves; we are the resultants of our Heredity and our Environment; and our actions, whether criminal or the reverse, are determined not by free-will, but by necessity. I will not enlarge upon that generalisation; I will leave its corollaries for your own imagination to perceive. But in view of it, I will say again: even if you were ten times blacker, it would make no difference to me. You are no more to blame for the colour of your soul than for the colour of your hair.”
“You are very magnanimous,” she said bitterly, “and your doctrine would sound well in a criminal court.”
“Think of me as scornfully as you will,” I returned, “I am very sincerely anxious to befriend you.”