Whereon Queen Freydis expressed frank indignation, because the child would by this plan be rescued from all, and the woman from much, sorrow. Could even a small madman in bottle-green and silver suppose that the Queen of Antan, after centuries of thriving malevolence, was thus to be beguiled into flagrant philanthropy?
But it was not, in the long run, philanthropy, you insisted. It was depressing to have to argue about anything in this gray, vague, gleaming, endless place, wherein you seemed only to whisper: and you were, privately, a little taken aback by the unaccustomed need to prove an action, not amply precedented and for the general good, but the precise contrary. Aloud,—though not actually aloud, but in the dim speech one uses in Antan,—you contended that when a man thus rid himself of his wife he did harm and worked great mischief, because the spectacle made all beholders unhappy. Women of course had obvious reasons for uneasiness lest the example be followed generally: and men were roused to veritable frenzies of pious reprovings when they saw the thing they had so often thought of doing accomplished by somebody else.
Did married men, then, at heart always desire to murder their wives? was what Freydis wondered. No, you did not say that: not always; some wives let weeks go by without provoking that desire. And to appearances, most men became in the end more or less reconciled to having their wives about. Still, let us not go wholly by appearances. Let us be logical! Whom does any man most dislike?
Freydis had settled down, with faint golden shimmerings, upon a couch that was covered with gray cushions, and she meditated. What person does any man most dislike? Why, Freydis estimated, the person who most frequently annoys him, the person with whom he finds himself embroiled in the most bitter quarrels, the person whose imperfections are to him most glaringly apparent, and, in fine, the person who most often and most poignantly makes him uncomfortable.
Just so, you assented: and in the life of any possible married man, who was that person? The question was rhetorical. You did not have to answer it, any more than did most husbands. None the less, you esteemed it a question which no married man had failed to consider, if gingerly and as if from afar, with the mere tail of his mental eye, in unacknowledged reveries. It was perhaps the memory of these cloistered considerations which made married men acutely uncomfortable when any other man disposed of his wife without all this half-hearted paltering with the just half-pleasant notion that some day she would go so far as to make justifiable—A gesture showed what, as plainly as one could show anything in this vague endlessness of grays and gleamings. No, madame might depend upon it, to assist any gentleman in permanently disposing of his wife was not, in the long run, philanthropy. It really did make the majority of other husbands uncomfortable, whether through envy or though a conscience-stricken recalling of unacknowledged reveries, you did not pretend to say.
All that might be true enough, Freydis admitted, from her dim nook among the gray cushions, without alluring her into the charitable act of preventing a child’s enduring the sorrows and fatigues of living.
Ah, but here again, madame must not reason so carelessly, nor be misled by specious first appearances. Let us, instead, be logical! The child, knowing nothing, would not know what it was escaping: and it would not be grateful, it would derive no æsthetic pleasure from the impressive ceremony of giving by the old ritual, it would even resent the moment’s physical pain. But the beholders of the deed, and all that heard of it, would be acutely uncomfortable, since the father that secured for his child immunity from trouble and annoyance, did harm and worked great mischief by setting an example which aroused people to those frenzies evocable by no other prodigy than a display of common-sense.
For people would turn from this proof of paternal affection, to the world from which the child was being removed: and people would be unhappy, because, with all their natural human propensity for fault-finding tugging them toward denunciation, nobody would be able to deny the common-sense of rescuing a child from discomforts and calamities. What professional perjurer anywhere, madame, whether in prison or politics or the pulpit, could muster the effrontery to declare life other than a long series of discomforts diversified only by disasters? What dignity was possible in an arena we entered in the manner of urine and left in the shape of ordure? What father endowed with any real religious faith could, after the most cursory glancing over of the sufferings he had got gratis in this life and had laboriously earned in the next,—could then appraise without conscience-stricken remorse the dilemma in which he had placed his offspring?
Well, to see thus revealed the one sure way of rescuing the child from this disastrous position, and to know himself too much a poltroon to follow the example of which his judgment and all his better instincts approved, was a situation that, madame, must make every considerate parent actually and deeply miserable, through self-contempt. In one manner alone might every man be made really miserable,—by preventing him from admiring himself any longer.
For people would look, too, toward the nearest police officer and toward the cowardice in their own hearts: and these commingled considerations would prevent many fathers from doing their plain duty. They would send many and it might be the hapless majority of fathers to bed that night with clean hands, with the pallid hands of self-convicted dastards: and self-contempt would make these fathers always unhappy. No, here again, madame might depend upon it that to assist a gentleman in this giving, by the old ritual, of his offspring was not, in the long run, and whatever the deed might seem to a first glance, philanthropy. It did some good: one could not deny that: but, after all, the child was absolutely the only person who profited, and through the benefits conferred upon the child was furthered the greatest ill and discomfort for the greatest number, who, here as in every other case, replied to any display of common-sense with frenzies that did harm and everywhither splutteringly worked mischief.