Damaged Goods
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Upton Sinclair >> Damaged Goods
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Thus he was always haunted by memories, some of which made him
cheerful and some of which made him mildly sad. He soon got used
to the idea, and did not find it awkward, except when he had to
suppress the impulse to tell Henriette something which Lizette
had said, or some funny incident which had happened in the home
of the little family. Sometimes he found himself thinking that
it was a shame to have to suppress these impulses. There must be
something wrong, he thought, with a social system which made it
necessary for him to hide a thing which was so obvious and so
sensible. Here he was, a man twenty-six years of age; he could
not have afforded to marry earlier, nor could he, as he thought,
have been expected to lead a continent life. And he had really
loved Lizette; she was really a good girl. Yet, if Henriette had
got any idea of it, she would have been horrified and indignant--
she might even have broken off the engagement.
And then, too, there was Henriette's father, a personage of great
dignity and importance. M. Loches was a deputy of the French
Parliament, from a district in the provinces. He was a man of
upright life, and a man who made a great deal of that upright
life--keeping it on a pedestal where everyone might observe it.
It was impossible to imagine M. Loches in an undignified or
compromising situation--such as the younger man found himself
facing in the matter of Lizette.
The more he thought about it the more nervous and anxious George
became. Then it was decided it would be necessary for him to
break with the girl, and be "good" until the time of his
marriage. Dear little soft-eyed Lizette--he did not dare to face
her personally; he could never bear to say good-by, he felt.
Instead, he went to the father, who as a man could be expected to
understand the situation. George was embarrassed and not a
little nervous about it; for although he had never misrepresented
his attitude to the family, one could never feel entirely free
from the possibility of blackmail in such cases. However,
Lizette's father behaved decently, and was duly grateful for the
moderate sum of money which George handed him in parting. He
promised to break the news gently to Lizette, and George went
away with his mind made up that he would never see her again.
This resolution he kept, and he considered himself very virtuous
in doing it. But the truth was that he had grown used to
intimacy with a woman, and was restless without it. And that, he
told himself, was why he yielded to the shameful temptation the
night of that fatal supper party.
He paid for the misadventure liberally in remorse. He felt that
he had been a wretch, that he had disgraced himself forever, that
he had proved himself unworthy of the pure girl he was to marry.
So keen was his feeling that it was several days before he could
bring himself to see Henriette again; and when he went, it was
with a mind filled with a brand-new set of resolutions. It was
the last time that he would ever fall into error. He would be a
new man from then on. He thanked God that there was no chance of
his sin being known, that he might have an opportunity to prove
his new determination.
So intense were his feelings that he could not help betraying a
part of them to Henriette. They sat in the garden one soft
summer evening, with Henriette's mother occupied with her
crocheting at a decorous distance. George, in reverent and
humble mood, began to drop vague hints that he was really
unworthy of his bride-to-be. He said that he had not always been
as good as he should have been; he said that her purity and
sweetness had awakened in him new ideals; so that he felt his old
life had been full of blunders. Henriette, of course, had but
the vaguest of ideas as to what the blunders of a tender and
generous young man like George might be. So she only loved him
the more for his humility, and was flattered to have such a fine
effect upon him, to awaken in him such moods of exaltation. When
he told her that all men were bad, and that no man was worthy of
such a beautiful love, she was quite ravished, and wiped away
tears from her eyes.
It would have been a shame to spoil such a heavenly mood by
telling the real truth. Instead, George contented himself with
telling of the new resolutions he had formed. After all, they
were the things which really mattered; for Henriette was going to
live with his future, not with his past.
It seemed to George a most wonderful thing, this innocence of a
young girl, which enabled her to move through a world of
wickedness with unpolluted mind. It was a touching thing; and
also, as a prudent young man could not help realizing, a most
convenient thing. He realized the importance of preserving it,
and thought that if he ever had a daughter, he would protect her
as rigidly as Henriette had been protected. He made haste to shy
off from the subject of his "badness" and to turn the
conversation with what seemed a clever jest.
"If I am going to be so good," he said, "don't forget that you
will have to be good also!"
"I will try," said Henriette, who was still serious.
"You will have to try hard," he persisted. "You will find that
you have a very jealous husband."
"Will I?" said Henriette, beaming with happiness--for when a
woman is very much in love she doesn't in the least object to the
man's being jealous.
"Yes, indeed," smiled George. "I'll always be watching you."
"Watching me?" echoed the girl with a surprised look.
And immediately he felt ashamed of himself for his jest. There
could be no need to watch Henriette, and it was bad taste even to
joke about it at such a time. That was one of the ideas which he
had brought with him from his world of evil.
The truth was, however, that George would always be a suspicious
husband; nothing could ever change that fact, for there was
something in his own conscience which he could not get out, and
which would make it impossible for him to be at ease as a married
man. It was the memory of something which had happened earlier
in his life before he met Lizette. There had been one earlier
experience, with the wife of his dearest friend. She had been
much younger than her husband, and had betrayed an interest in
George, who had yielded to the temptation. For several years the
intrigue continued, and George considered it a good solution of a
young man's problem. There had been no danger of contamination,
for he knew that his friend was a man of pure and rigid morals, a
jealous man who watched his wife, and did not permit her to
contract those new relations which are always dangerous. As for
George, he helped in this worthy work, keeping the woman in
terror of some disease. He told her that almost all men were
infected, for he hoped by this means to keep her from deceiving
him.
I am aware that this may seem a dreadful story. As I do not want
anyone to think too ill of George Dupont, I ought, perhaps, to
point out that people feel differently about these matters in
France. In judging the unfortunate young man, we must judge him
by the customs of his own country, and not by ours. In France,
they are accustomed to what is called the MARIAGE DE CONVENANCE.
The young girl is not permitted to go about and make her own
friends and decide which one of them she prefers for her husband;
on the contrary, she is strictly guarded, her training often is
of a religious nature, and her marriage is a matter of business,
to be considered and decided by her parents and those of the
young man. Now, whatever we may think right, it is humanly
certain that where marriages are made in that way, the need of
men and women for sympathy and for passionate interest will often
lead to the forming of irregular relationships after marriage.
It is not possible to present statistics as to the number of such
irregular relationships in Parisian society; but in the books
which he read and in the plays which he saw, George found
everything to encourage him to think that it was a romantic and
delightful thing to keep up a secret intrigue with the wife of
his best friend.
It should also, perhaps, be pointed out that we are here telling
the truth, and the whole truth, about George Dupont; and that it
is not customary to tell this about men, either in real life or
in novels. There is a great deal of concealment in the world
about matters of sex; and in such matters the truth-telling man
is apt to suffer in reputation in comparison with the truth-
concealing one.
Nor had George really been altogether callous about the thing.
It had happened that his best friend had died in his arms; and
this had so affected the guilty pair that they had felt their
relationship was no longer possible. She had withdrawn to nurse
her grief alone, and George had been so deeply affected that he
had avoided affairs and entanglements with women until his
meeting with Lizette.
All this was now in the far distant past, but it had made a
deeper impression upon George than he perhaps realized, and it
was now working in his mind and marring his happiness. Here was
a girl who loved him with a noble and unselfish and whole-hearted
love--and yet he would never be able to trust her as she
deserved, but would always have suspicions lurking in the back of
his mind. He would be unable to have his friends intimate in his
home, because of the memory of what he had once done to a friend.
It was a subtle kind of punishment. But so it is that Nature
often finds ways of punishing us, without our even being aware of
it.
That was all for the future, however. At present, George was
happy. He put his black sin behind him, feeling that he had
obtained absolution by his confession to Henriette. Day by day,
as he realized his good fortune, his round face beamed with more
and yet more joy.
He went for a little trip to Henriette's home in the country. It
was a simple village, and they took walks in the country, and
stopped to refresh themselves at a farmhouse occupied by one of
M. Loches' tenants. Here was a rosy and buxom peasant woman,
with a nursing child in her arms. She was destined a couple of
years later to be the foster-mother of Henriette's little girl
and to play an important part in her life. But the pair had no
idea of that at present. They simply saw a proud and happy
mother, and Henriette played with the baby, giving vent to
childish delight. Then suddenly she looked up and saw that
George was watching her, and as she read his thoughts a beautiful
blush suffused her cheeks.
As for George, he turned away and went out under the blue sky in
a kind of ecstasy. Life seemed very wonderful to him just then;
he had found its supreme happiness, which was love. He was
really getting quite mad about Henriette, he told himself. He
could hardly believe that the day was coming when he would be
able to clasp her in his arms.
But in the blue sky of George's happiness there was one little
cloud of storm. As often happens with storm-clouds, it was so
small that at first he paid no attention to it at all.
He noted upon his body one day a tiny ulcer. At first he treated
it with salve purchased from an apothecary. Then after a week or
two, when this had no effect, he began to feel uncomfortable. He
remembered suddenly he had heard about the symptoms of an
unmentionable, dreadful disease, and a vague terror took
possession of him.
For days he tried to put it to one side. The idea was nonsense,
it was absurd in connection with a woman so respectable! But the
thought would not be put away, and finally he went to a school
friend, who was a man of the world, and got him to talk on the
subject. Of course, George had to be careful, so that his friend
should not suspect that he had any special purpose in mind.
The friend was willing to talk. It was a vile disease, he said;
but one was foolish to bother about it, because it was so rare.
There were other diseases which fellows got, which nearly every
fellow had, and to which none of them paid any attention. But
one seldom met anyone who had the red plague that George dreaded.
"And yet," he added, "according to the books, it isn't so
uncommon. I suppose the truth is that people hide it. A chap
naturally wouldn't tell, when he knew it would damn him for
life."
George had a sick sensation inside of him. "Is it as bad as
that?" he asked.
"Of course," said the other, "Should you want to have anything to
do with a person who had it? Should you be willing to room with
him or travel with him? You wouldn't even want to shake hands
with him!"
"No, I suppose not," said George, feebly.
"I remember," continued the other, "an old fellow who used to
live out in the country near me. He was not so very old, either,
but he looked it. He had to be pushed around in a wheel-chair.
People said he had locomotor ataxia, but that really meant
syphilis. We boys used to poke all kinds of fun at him because
one windy day his hat and his wig were blown off together, and we
discovered that he was as bald as an egg. We used to make jokes
about his automobile, as we called it. It had a little handle in
front, instead of a steering-wheel, and a man behind to push,
instead of an engine."
"How horrible!" remarked George with genuine feeling.
"I remember the poor devil had a paralysis soon after," continued
the friend, quite carelessly. "He could not steer any more, and
also he lost his voice. When you met him he would look at you as
it he thought he was talking, but all he could say was
'Ga-ga-ga'."
George went away from this conversation in a cold sweat. He told
himself over and over again that he was a fool, but still he
could not get the hellish idea out of his mind. He found himself
brooding over it all day and lying awake at night, haunted by
images of himself in a wheel-chair, and without any hair on his
head. He realized that the sensible thing would be for him to go
to a doctor and make certain about his condition; but he could
not bring himself to face the ordeal--he was ashamed to admit to
a doctor that he had laid himself open to such a taint.
He began to lose the radiant expression from his round and rosy
face. He had less appetite, and his moods of depression became
so frequent that he could not hide then even from Henriette. She
asked him once or twice if there were not something the matter
with him, and he laughed--a forced and hurried laugh--and told
her that he had sat up too late the night before, worrying over
the matter of his examinations. Oh, what a cruel thing it was
that a man who stood in the very gateway of such a garden of
delight should be tormented and made miserable by this loathsome
idea!
The disturbing symptom still continued, and so at last George
purchased a medical book, dealing with the subject of the
disease. Then, indeed, he opened up a chamber of horrors; he
made up his mind an abiding place of ghastly images. In the book
there were pictures of things so awful that he turned white, and
trembled like a leaf, and had to close the volume and hide it in
the bottom of his trunk. But he could not banish the pictures
from his mind. Worst of all, he could not forget the description
of the first symptom of the disease, which seemed to correspond
exactly with his own. So at last he made up his mind he must
ascertain definitely the truth about his condition.
He began to think over plans for seeing a doctor. He had heard
somewhere a story about a young fellow who had fallen into the
hands of a quack, and been ruined forever. So he decided that he
would consult only the best authority.
He got the names of the best-known works on the subject from a
bookstore, and found that the author of one of these books was
practicing in Paris as a specialist. Two or three days elapsed
before he was able to get up the courage to call on this doctor.
And oh, the shame and horror of sitting in his waiting-room with
the other people, none of whom dared to look each other in the
eyes! They must all be afflicted, George thought, and he glanced
at them furtively, looking for the various symptoms of which he
had read. Or were there, perhaps, some like himself--merely
victims of a foolish error, coming to have the hag of dread
pulled from off their backs?
And then suddenly, while he was speculating, there stood the
doctor, signaling to him. His turn had come!
CHAPTER II
The doctor was a man about forty years of age, robust, with every
appearance of a strong character. In the buttonhole of the frock
coat he wore was a red rosette, the decoration of some order.
Confused and nervous as George was, he got a vague impression of
the physician's richly furnished office, with its bronzes,
marbles and tapestries.
The doctor signaled to the young man to be seated in the chair
before his desk. George complied, and then, as he wiped away the
perspiration from his forehead, stammered out a few words,
explaining his errand. Of course, he said, it could not be true,
but it was a man's duty not to take any chances in such a matter.
"I have not been a man of loose life," he added; "I have not
taken so many chances as other men."
The doctor cut him short with the brief remark that one chance
was all that was necessary. Instead of discussing such
questions, he would make an examination. "We do not say
positively in these cases until we have made a blood test. That
is the one way to avoid the possibility of mistake."
A drop of blood was squeezed out of George's finger on to a
little glass plate. The doctor retired to an adjoining room, and
the victim sat alone in the office, deriving no enjoyment from
the works of art which surrounded him, but feeling like a
prisoner who sits in the dock with his life at stake while the
jury deliberates.
The doctor returned, calm and impassive, and seated himself in
his office-chair.
"Well, doctor?" asked George. He was trembling with terror.
"Well," was the reply, "there is no doubt whatever."
George wiped his forehead. He could not credit the words. "No
doubt whatever? In what sense?"
"In the bad sense," said the other.
He began to write a prescription, without seeming to notice how
George turned page with terror. "Come," he said, after a
silence, "you must have known the truth pretty well."
"No, no, sir!" exclaimed George.
"Well," said the other, "you have syphilis."
George was utterly stunned. "My God!" he exclaimed.
The doctor, having finished his prescription, looked up and
observed his condition. "Don't trouble yourself, sir. Out of
every seven men you meet upon the street, in society, or at the
theater, there is at least one who has been in your condition.
One out of seven--fifteen per cent!"
George was staring before him. He spoke low, as if to himself.
"I know what I am going to do."
"And I know also," said the doctor, with a smile. "There is your
prescription. You are going to take it to the drugstore and have
it put up."
George took the prescription, mechanically, but whispered, "No,
sir."
"Yes, sir, you are going to do as everybody else does."
"No, because my situation is not that of everybody else. I know
what I am going to do."
Said the doctor: "Five times out of ten, in the chair where you
are sitting, people talk like that, perfectly sincerely. Each
one believes himself more unhappy than all the others; but after
thinking it over, and listening to me, they understand that this
disease is a companion with whom one can live. Just as in every
household, one gets along at the cost of mutual concessions,
that's all. Come, sir, I tell you again, there is nothing about
it that is not perfectly ordinary, perfectly natural, perfectly
common; it is an accident which can happen to any one. It is a
great mistake that people speak if this as the 'French Disease,'
for there is none which is more universal. Under the picture of
this disease, addressing myself to those who follow the oldest
profession in the world, I would write the famous phrase: 'Here
is your master. It is, it was, or it must be.'"
George was putting the prescription into the outside pocket of
his coat, stupidly, as if he did not know what he was doing.
"But, sir," he exclaimed, "I should have been spared!"
"Why?" inquired the other. "Because you are a man of position,
because you are rich? Look around you, sir. See these works of
art in my room. Do you imagine that such things have been
presented to me by chimney-sweeps?"
"But, Doctor," cried George, with a moan, "I have never been a
libertine. There was never any one, you understand me, never any
one could have been more careful in his pleasures. If I were to
tell you that in all my life I have only had two mistresses, what
would you answer to that?"
"I would answer, that a single one would have been sufficient to
bring you to me."
"No, sir!" cried George. "It could not have been either of those
women." He went on to tell the doctor about his first mistress,
and then about Lizette. Finally he told about Henriette, how
much he adored her. He could really use such a word--he loved
her most tenderly. She was so good--and he had thought himself
so lucky!
As he went on, he could hardly keep from going to pieces. "I had
everything," he exclaimed, "everything a man needed! All who
knew me envied me. And then I had to let those fellows drag me
off to that miserable supper-party! And now here I am! My
future is ruined, my whole existence poisoned! What is to become
of me? Everybody will avoid me--I shall be a pariah, a leper!"
He paused, and then in sudden wild grief exclaimed, "Come, now!
Would it not be better that I should take myself out of the way?
At least, I should not suffer any more. You see that there could
not be any one more unhappy than myself--not any one, I tell you,
sir, not any one!" Completely overcome, he began to weep in his
handkerchief.
The doctor got up, and went to him. "You must be a man," he
said, "and not cry like a child."
"But sir," cried the young man, with tears running down his
cheeks, "if I had led a wild life, if I had passed my time in
dissipation with chorus girls, then I could understand it. Then
I would say that I had deserved it."
The doctor exclaimed with emphasis, "No, no! You would not say
it. However, it is of no matter--go on."
"I tell you that I would say it. I am honest, and I would say
that I had deserved it. But no, I have worked, I have been a
regular grind. And now, when I think of the shame that is in
store for me, the disgusting things, the frightful catastrophes
to which I am condemned--"
"What is all this you are telling me?" asked the doctor,
laughing.
"Oh, I know, I know!" cried the other, and repeated what his
friend had told him about the man in a wheel-chair. "And they
used to call me handsome Raoul! That was my name--handsome
Raoul!"
"Now, my dear sir," said the doctor, cheerfully, "wipe your eyes
one last time, blow your nose, put your handkerchief into your
pocket, and hear me dry-eyed."
George obeyed mechanically. "But I give you fair warning," he
said, "you are wasting your time."
"I tell you--" began the other.
"I know exactly what you are going to tell me!" cried George.
"Well, in that case, there is nothing more for you to do here--
run along."
"Since I am here," said the patient submissively, "I will hear
you."
"Very well, then. I tell you that if you have the will and the
perseverance, none of the things you fear will happen to you."
"Of course, it is your duty to tell me that."
"I will tell you that there are one hundred thousand like you in
Paris, alert, and seemingly well. Come, take what you were just
saying--wheel-chairs. One doesn't see so many of them."
"No, that's true," said George.
"And besides," added the doctor, "a good many people who ride in
them are not there for the cause you think. There is no more
reason why you should be the victim of a catastrophe than any of
the one hundred thousand. The disease is serious, nothing more."
"You admit that it is a serious disease?" argued George.
"Yes."
"One of the most serious?"
"Yes, but you have the good fortune--"
"The GOOD fortune?"
"Relatively, if you please. You have the good fortune to be
infected with one of the diseases over which we have the most
certain control."
"Yes, yes," exclaimed George, "but the remedies are worse than
the disease."
"You deceive yourself," replied the other.
"You are trying to make me believe that I can be cured?"
"You can be."
"And that I am not condemned?"
"I swear it to you."
"You are not deceiving yourself, you are not deceiving me? Why,
I was told--"
The doctor laughed, contemptuously. "You were told, you were
told! I'll wager that you know the laws of the Chinese
concerning party-walls."
"Yes, naturally," said George. "But I don't see what they have
to do with it."
"Instead of teaching you such things," was the reply, "it would
have been a great deal better to have taught you about the nature
and cause of diseases of this sort. Then you would have known
how to avoid the contagion. Such knowledge should be spread
abroad, for it is the most important knowledge in the world. It
should be found in every newspaper."
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