Wyndham Smith. S. Fowler Wright
at a hint of vivacity, a difference of animation which lit the cold, sad beauty of her face, and subtly separated it from the equally regular profiles of other women who sat above or below her. The moment of interest, of admiration—it was no longer than that—was of the ego of Wyndham Smith, and was countered by the protest of the Colpeck brain, which had been taught to view her with a faint disfavour, being the strongest emotion it was accustomed to experience, and which also knew the vague suspicion, and the definite taboo, which divided her from the expected destiny of the women of her generation.
The Colpeck brain, had it concentrated upon her sufficiently, hearing the toneless assent she gave to the verdict of common death might have thought that there were few among the five millions of mankind—to be exact, no more than forty-four others—who would be so certain to cast their votes in the same scale.
For at the time of her birth the settled peace of the world had been stirred and shocked by the discovery of a monstrous crime. A woman who could not have been very far from her fiftieth year, and who had borne in her youth the three children allowed by law, had actually contributed three further children to the nurseries of the race.
It was a monstrosity against which no precautions were taken, since at this period any initiative of criminality had long left the world. It was discovered only by, unlikely accident, shortly after the birth of the third—being, actually, the woman’s sixth—child. It stirred the emotions of men at once to horror and fear, as it would have seemed unlikely that they would ever be moved again, like the last ripple of a tide that was settling to eternal quiet. The woman’s death was quickly agreed, as a warning, however needless, to other lawless impulses which might linger among mankind.
The deaths of three children were decreed with a more urgent necessity, for ancient wisdom had taught that it is among the later children whom a woman bears that there will be found the firebrands who scorch their kind. Indeed, it was only after the establishment of the custom of limiting children that the world could be observed to approach steadily to the placid harbour in which it was anchored now.
But here a difficulty arose. The fourth and fifth children, having been registered and branded in the usual routine of the common nursery, were identified and eliminated without difficulty. But the mother had unfortunately had some hours of warning before the discovery of her criminality had been finally demonstrated, during which she had contrived to change her just-born child with some other, so that, after the most exhaustive investigation, there had still remained forty-five girl-children of whom it was impossible to say with certainty that any one might not be the sixth offspring of the woman’s most lawless blood. Faced with this position, the wisdom of the race, putting passion aside, had preferred the lesser evil, and had offered her pardon if she would identify the issue of her iniquity. But this, with an unrepentant obstinacy, she had declined to do; and when every resort of ingenuity had been exhausted in the endeavour to discover the secret which she concealed (or which, indeed, it is a more probable supposition was no longer hers, owing to the method she had employed for mixing the children), she was reluctantly executed.
After the first sound and natural impulse to destroy the forty-five infants among whom the one unfit for life had been inextricably mingled had been debated, it was weakly resolved, and may be regarded as indicative of the decadence of a failing world, to let them live, under some disabilities of education and other experiences, with the condition that they should not be allowed, on reaching the age of maturity, to contribute to the usual quota of babies, so that the disturbing element might not take evil root in the generation to come.
But, in spite—unless it were because?—of the disabilities they had experienced, when, on the commencement of their twentieth year, they had been intellectually graded by the usual perfect and impartial method, it was found that they were of a most unusual average intelligence, so that though the one already mentioned was actually ranked among the first hundred of the five millions of mankind, the suspicion which this circumstance must have fixed upon her was mitigated by the fact that several others, all of whom could not be of abnormal ancestry, were almost equally eminent.
To the first proposal of universal euthanasia there were few who had responded with a more ready affirmative than had Vinetta (a name which, individual and with no following numerals, proclaimed her, in spite of the recognition of her intellectual status, as outcast among her kind), which is not surprising in consideration of the life of watchful repression which had been hers since, as a child of three, she had overheard the remark of a female keeper: “That’s the one, if you ask me; the little misborn girl.”
From that hour she had moved and spoken in cautious dread lest some development of character, even some trick of gesture, might betray her, as having been that of the mother whom, with a growing confidence, she believed to have been her own. For who could say that the doom which had been suspended before might not still fall upon her, if her development should appear to supply sufficient evidence of the parent from whom she came? Her own destruction, and the release of her companions from disabilities which were not justly theirs, might have been considered measures of an equal and obvious equity.
So she had moved, watchful, imitative, among the tepid emotions of aimless, emulationless, dreadless surrounding lives, till the hints of her unwary childhood were forgotten or negatived by the restraints and repressions of later years. Saved from sourness or malignity of temper by a nature which would have been buoyant, joyous, adventurous, in more normal circumstances, her thoughts were yet darkened by the bitter knowledge of her mother’s murder, and by a mental aloofness, half hatred and half contempt, towards the civilization which she had entered through no legal door.
Of all the millions who were united in passive recognition of the fact that their uncoloured lives had drifted into a calm that was worse than wreck, she may have been the only woman whose heart beat hard at times with a rebellion she dared not show. She assented at once to the Colpeck project, not as thinking it a gesture by which the Creator must take rebuke, but rather as one which He would accept with the same willingness as herself, and with entire approval of the self-judgment by which the human race had saved Him the trouble of staging their appropriate end.
When Wyndham Smith had proposed his second objection to the resolution, her heart had leaped to a sudden hope, which might, in a different environment, have given birth to incautious words. But she was saved from that by the custom which discouraged unpondered speech, and by the repressions of two decades.
The quick hope had died as she had silently recognized the absence of response among those around her, and then—at last had leaped again to the flame of wild audacity of which she saw that she must not give the faintest sign. Inwardly she congratulated herself on the wisdom of her earlier silence, for it was clear that the resolution would only have been accepted in the form in which it was finally passed with the certain confidence that one man alone would elect to live—even if he would do so after considering the solitude which would be before him, with the discomforts which his isolation would inevitably involve.
She did not dare to look up the table to Wyndham Smith, lest their eyes should meet and her glance betray to others the emotions she must not show. She sat passive, with downcast eyes, striving to isolate herself in her own thoughts, and as she reflected thus there came a doubt, and a quietening fear.
Welcome as the proposal had been, gladly as she would have accepted the adventure of living in the old dangerous, doubtful ways, she did not like the direction from which it came. She had a special aversion, not to this Colpeck alone, but to the whole Colpeck clan. It was a Colpeck who had been active in the investigation which had exposed her mother’s escapade, and another Colpeck who had proposed the verdict by which she died. It was peculiarly the Colpeck policies, the Colpeck attitude, which had brought her race to this point from which it sought escape by the road of death. Passion towards an individual, either of hate or love, she had been taught to regard as a vulgar criminality such as had long ceased to degrade her kind. But she knew herself to have many criminal impulses which she dared not show. Her existence was an impropriety in itself. She had the lawless mind, the unnatural emotions of a sixth child: she had the blood of one who had played the outlaw among her kind.
Now she thought to make secret approach to the one man who refused the wisdom of all his race, and, in doing this, to flout their will, even