"Who are "people"? The boys in your family know of it--if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard--the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom--and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a "dose"; and a man"s not supposed to be worthy the respect of his fellows until he"s had his "dose"--the sensible thing is to get several, till he can"t get any more. They think it"s "no worse than a bad cold"; that"s the idea they get from the "clap-doctors," and the women of the street who educate our sons in s.e.x matters."
"Oh, spare me, spare me!" cried Mrs. Tuis. "I beg you not to force these horrible details upon me!"
"That is what is going on among our boys," I said. "The Castleman boys, the Chilton boys! It"s going on in every fraternity house, every "prep school" dormitory in America. And the parents refuse to know, just as you do!"
"But what could I possibly do, Mrs. Abbott?"
"I don"t know, Mrs. Tuis. What _I_ am going to do is to teach the young girls."
She whispered, aghast, "You would rob the young girls of their innocence. Why, with their souls full of these ideas their faces would soon be as hard--oh, you horrify me!"
"My daughter"s face is not hard," I said. "And I taught her. Stop and think, Mrs. Tuis--ten thousand blind children every year! A hundred thousand women under the surgeon"s knife! Millions of women going to pieces with slowly creeping diseases of which they never hear the names!
I say, let us cry this from the housetops, until every woman knows--and until every man knows that she knows, and that unless he can prove that he is clean he will lose her! That is the remedy, Mrs. Tuis!"
Poor dear lady! I got up and went away, leaving her there, with clenched hands and trembling lips. I suppose I seemed to her like the mad women who were just then rising up to horrify the respectability of England--a phenomenon of Nature too portentous to be comprehended, or even to be contemplated, by a gentlewoman of the South!
20. There came in due course a couple of letters from Douglas van Tuiver. The one to Aunt Varina, which was shown to me, was vague and cautious--as if the writer were uncertain how much this worthy lady knew. He merely mentioned that Sylvia was to be spared every particle of "painful knowledge." He would wait in great anxiety, but he would not come, because any change in his plans might set her to questioning.
The letter to Dr. Perrin was not shown to me; but I judged that it must have contained more strenuous injunctions. Or had Aunt Varina by any chance got up the courage to warn the young doctor against me? His hints, at any rate, became more pointed. He desired me to realize how awkward it would be for him, if Sylvia were to learn the truth; it would be impossible to convince Mr. van Tuiver that this knowledge had not come from the physician in charge.
"But, Dr. Perrin," I objected, "it was I who brought the information to you! And Mr. van Tuiver knows that I am a radical woman; he would not expect me to be ignorant of such matters."
"Mrs. Abbott," was the response, "it is a grave matter to destroy the possibility of happiness of a young married couple."
However I might dispute his theories, in practice I was doing what he asked. But each day I was finding the task more difficult; each day it became more apparent that Sylvia was ceasing to believe me. I realized at last, with a sickening kind of fright, that she knew I was hiding something from her. Because she knew me, and knew that I would not do such a thing lightly, she was terrified. She would lie there, gazing at me, with a dumb fear in her eyes--and I would go on a.s.severating blindly, like an unsuccessful actor before a jeering audience.
A dozen times she made an effort to break through the barricade of falsehood; and a dozen times I drove her back, all but crying to her, "No, No! Don"t ask me!" Until at last, late one night, she caught my hand and clung to it in a grip I could not break. "Mary! Mary! You must tell me the _truth!_"
"Dear girl--" I began.
"Listen!" she cried. "I know you are deceiving me! I know why--because I"ll make myself ill. But it won"t do any longer; it"s preying on me, Mary--I"ve taken to imagining things. So you must tell me the truth!"
I sat, avoiding her eyes, beaten; and in the pause I could feel her hands shaking. "Mary, what is it? Is my baby going to die?"
"No, dear, indeed no!" I cried.
"Then what?"
"Sylvia," I began, as quietly as I could, "the truth is not as bad as you imagine--"
"Tell me what it is!"
"But it is bad, Sylvia. And you must be brave. You must be, for your baby"s sake."
"Make haste!" she cried.
"The baby," I said, "may be blind."
"Blind!" There we sat, gazing into each other"s eyes, like two statues of women. But the grasp of her hand tightened, until even my big fist was hurt. "Blind!" she whispered again.
"Sylvia," I rushed on, "it isn"t so bad as it might be! Think--if you had lost her altogether!"
"_Blind!_"
"You will have her always; and you can do things for her--take care of her. They do wonders for the blind nowadays--and you have the means; to do everything. Really, you know, blind children are not unhappy--some of them are happier than other children, I think. They haven"t so much to miss. Think--"
"Wait, wait," she whispered; and again there was silence, and I clung to her cold hands.
"Sylvia," I said, at last, "you have a newly-born infant to nurse, and its very life depends upon your health now. You cannot let yourself grieve."
"No," she responded. "No. But, Mary, what caused this?"
So there was the end of my spell of truth-telling. "I don"t know, dear.
n.o.body knows. There might be a thousand things--"
"Was it born blind?"
"No."
"Then was it the doctor"s fault?"
"No, it was n.o.body"s fault. Think of the thousands and tens of thousands of babies that become blind! It"s a dreadful accident that happens." So I went on--possessed with a dread that had been with me for days, that had kept me awake for hours in the night: Had I, in any of my talks with Sylvia about venereal disease, mentioned blindness in infants as one of the consequences? I could not rememher; but now was the time I would find out!
She lay there, immovable, like a woman who had died in grief; until at last I flung my arms about her and whispered, "Sylvia! Sylvia! Please cry!"
"I can"t cry!" she whispered, and her voice sounded hard.
So, after a s.p.a.ce, I said, "Then, dear, I think I will have to make you laugh."
"Laugh, Mary?"
"Yes-I will tell you about the quarrel between Aunt Varina and myself.
You know what times we"ve been having-how I shocked the poor lady?"
She was looking at me, but her eyes were not seeing me. "Yes, Mary," she said, in the same dead tone.
"Well, that was a game we made for you. It was very funny!"
"Funny?"
"Yes! Because I really did shock her-though we started out just to give you something else to think about!"
And then suddenly I saw the healing tears begin to come. She could not weep for her own grief-but she could weep because of what she knew we two had had to suffer for her!
21. I went out and told the others what I had done; and Mrs. Tuis rushed in to her niece and they wept in each other"s arms, and Mrs. Tuis explained all the mysteries of life by her formula, "the will of the Lord."
Later on came Dr. Perrin, and it was touching to see how Sylvia treated him. She had, it appeared, conceived the idea that the calamity must be due to some blunder on his part, and then she had reflected that he was young, and that chance had thrown upon him a responsibility for which he had not bargained. He must be reproaching himself bitterly, so she had to persuade him that it was really not so bad as we were making it-that a blind child was a great joy to a mother"s soul-in some ways even a greater joy than a perfectly sound child, because it appealed so to her protective instinct! I had called Sylvia a shameless payer of compliments, and now I went away by myself and wept.