A Question of Guilt

7

'It'll be over there. Number 272. On the corner of Oxford Circus, opposite Peter Robinson's the drapers.'

'But I'm breathless!'

'Come on! While the bobby's holding up the traffic.'

'You treat the fair sex quite horribly.'

'All Englishmen do. We expect our women to ride like express trains and dance like butterflies, to organize our domestics with the efficiency of General Kitchener, to comfort us with the tenderness of Hйloise, and to laugh at our jokes like a music-hall audience.'

It was four in the afternoon of Friday, September 17, 1909. When they had reached England the previous morning, the sun gave the cliffs of Dover the sheen of an iceberg. Now the weather had changed to a malignant misty drizzle, which soaked its way through garments with the persistence of mites through cheese, and steadily cleansed the stagnant chimney-smoke of its soot for deposit on starched collars and elaborate hats.

Eliot seemed to Nancy patriotically proud of this perversity in the weather. She held an umbrella, the other hand gathering her skirt from the slimy roadway as he seized her elbow.

The London traffic was its most chaotic of the century, horsepower competing with horse. The nimble two-wheeled hansoms, the roomier four-wheeled 'growlers', the smart coupй 'fly' hired from the livery stable (seven-and-sixpence one horse, twelve-and-sixpence two), were being jostled from the streets by the taximeter motor-cabs, far faster despite the 20 miles per hour speed limit. The horse-drawn omnibuses were being ignored for the scarlet motor ones of the London General Omnibus Company, to be stopped anywhere, the 'garden seats' on the open tops advertised as freely patronized by ladies.

Stage-coaches to Hampton Court or the races churned amid excursion motors carrying a guide for the 'trippers'. Motor cars, electric or petrol, were hireable at five pounds a day. Everywhere dodged the enthusiastic, sporty cyclist. With its electric tramways and the underground 'Tube', Eliot told Nancy imposingly, London was the most convenient of cities for getting about-so long as you had no necessity to cross the road.

Still flagrantly grasping her arm, Eliot hurried Nancy along the far pavement. Number 272 was on the sweep of Oxford Circus, a doorway between a furrier's and a trunk-maker's. The lobby inside had mustard-painted stone walls, a wooden staircase going up, an iron one spiraling into the black basement. It did not seem to Nancy likely headquarters for a man with the cure of the disease which terrified the world.

Eliot ran his eyes down a painted list of firms with offices above.

'No Munyon's. And I looked them up in Kelly's Directory this morning.' He peered at the lowest line. 'That's freshly painted. Perhaps they've moved?'

He took her elbow again to a shop he had noticed on the corner, marked with gold letters OTTOMAN TOBACCONISTS.

'You can find everything about any district from a tobacconist. Its craving is common to all classes of the world, but it's so uncomplicated an article to purchase everyone stops to justify their visit with a gossip.'

The shop was tiny and aromatic. A wall of drawers like a druggist's were labelled _Raparee, Navy Plug, Havana Perfectos._ On the counter were glass boxes of round or oval cigarettes, a blue jar marked _High Dry Toast Snuff._ A black boy in turban and curly-toed slippers stood in eternal plaster deference. The Oriental atmosphere stopped with the proprietor, a wizened, pale Cockney with gold-rimmed glasses.

'Munyons?' he repeated in a thin voice. 'They've gorn.' He drew a finger across his scrawny throat. 'Gorn bust.'

Eliot and Nancy exchanged frowns. 'Do you know a Dr Crippen?'

'Know 'im, sir? I'll say. The Doctor,' he specified with respectful familiarity. 'Such a nice polite gentleman. Never smoked, mind you-said it upset 'is heart and digestion. Never took drink, neither, except for a glass of beer what you and I'd 'ardly notice, sir. Used to come in and buy Turkish cigarettes for Miss Le Neve.'

'Who might she be?' asked Nancy.

The tobacconist looked startled. 'Ain't you one of them Yankees? Funny, so was the Doctor. Though o' course you'd 'ardly think it, 'e spoke quite like an English gentleman. You one of 'is family?' Nancy shook her head hastily. 'Miss Le Neve was 'is typist, pretty young thing, always neat, luverly dark 'air. Mind, when the doctor's business went through the sieve, you could 'ave knocked me dahn wiv a fewer. Always seemed flush wiv the bees and 'oney, the doctor. Money,' he explained, responding to Nancy's blank look.

'My business with Dr Crippen is urgent,' Eliot stated. 'Where can I find him?'

'Search me, sir. 'E used to talk of an orfice what he 'ad in Shaftesbury Avenue, opposite the Palace Theatre. P'raps 'e's gorn 'ome to roost?'

'Could you describe him?' Eliot asked.

The atmosphere chilled. 'You the rozzers?'

'Of course I'm not the police,' Eliot told him impatiently. 'I'm a fellow doctor.'

The shopman's narrowed eyes relaxed. 'Well, 'e's 'ardly bigger than Little Tich, when 'e ain't dancing on the tips of 'is boots.' Everyone in London knew the music-hall comic with boots as long as himself. 'About forty-odd, I'd say, pink as a shrimp. Sandy 'air, bit bald, moustache. Dressed neat, even smart. Wears glasses like mine. 'E's one of them people you 'ardly takes notice of, even when they're speaking to you.'

'Do you know where he lives?' enquired Nancy.

'Not the faintest, madam. I don't even know if 'e's got a trouble and strife.' She assumed this meant a wife. 'P'raps 'e's gorn 'ome to America?'

'Well? What do we do now?' she asked Eliot is disappointment, on the pavement outside.

'What everyone does when stymied in England. Have a cup of tea.'

'Yes, lets! My friends are always talking about Rumpelmayer's.'

'Rumpelmayer's? Ridiculously extravagant. Here's a Lyons teashop.'

It was crowded with shoppers, men in bowlers and top hats, women in broad-brimmed, flowered or feathered milinary, glistening umbrellas at their sides, parcels round their feet. The customers sat on cane-seated chairs at marble-topped tables, while white-aproned, lace-capped waitresses served the teapots, the plates of buttered toast and the cream pastries from stout wooden trays.

Eliot searched for a place. 'The weather's too miserable for tea.' He grasped her arm again.

'Where are we going?' She sounded alarmed as he marched her round the corner.

'For a glass of English beer and a whet of German sausage.'

The sign bore a golden crown over a Tudor rose. Eliot pushed open the door with a panel of green-tinted glass embossed, _Rose amp; Crown Ales Beers Stouts Wines From The Wood._ 'It's a saloon!' she objected forcefully.

'Perfectly respectable women pub it these days,' he assured her airily. 'There's nothing to fear, if you avoid the awful claret and hock.'

She protested, 'Were I seen inside a place like this in New York, it would be in all the papers.'

'What devilish delights accrue by sinking from the upper classes,' he teased her.

The bar was small, its dark panelling splashed with brightly polished brass, a partition with decorative frosted glass separating it from the noisy public bar next door. A red-faced man in a curly bowler hat and canvas gaiters, who smelt of oats, sat against the wall with a thin one smoking a pipe of pungent shag. The appearance of so beautiful and well-dressed a female raised their startled eyes from half-finished glasses of beer, which they were contemplating with the placid melancholy of the British enjoying themselves.

Eliot sat her at a small round table in a corner of the sawdust-covered floor. He brought from the bar a plate with sliced sausage, a brandy-and-soda and a glass of beer. She winced as she sipped it. 'Two penn'oth of half and half,' he explained. 'Ale mixed with porter.'

'At home, we wouldn't use this to drench horses.'

'It sustains the working classes as faith the Church.'

'I was educated that drink was an immutable evil. In the hands of the masses, naturally.'

'How can a fellow-countryman of Falstaff contemplate a thought so mean? Oh, I suppose it makes a few beat their wives and gives a few more hobnail livers. One of your first failures as a doctor is making people do what's good for them. Everyone knows that cigars, pipes and cigarettes stunt the growth and rot the lungs, but who renounces a single whiff? Mankind is hell-bent on its own destruction. The German mind-doctors call it 'Thanatos'. The death instinct, as much part of us as our bones.'

'That's nonsense,' she told him spiritedly. 'Everyone at the sanatorium submissively watched the wasted months and years pass by, in a desperate quest for life.'

'The human mind doesn't know itself. No more than the complacent lady of the house knows what happens in the darkened attic bedrooms of her servants.'

'Baby has not the slightest desire to die.'

Eliot looked uncomfortable. In the cheerfulness of London he had overlooked the ailing sister.

'We'll hunt the Crippen,' he said, to cover the gaffe. 'Though I suspect his miracle cure as valueless as Mother Seigel's Syrup-advertised as indiscriminately effective against scurvy, syphilis, piles, gout, blackheads and pimples. Or Hanress' Electric Corset at five-and-sixpence, for the relief of hysteria and dyspepsia and the healthy development of the female chest. People never spend money so recklessly as on their sweethearts, their dogs or their health.'

'My father believes in Dr Crippen's Tuberculozyne,' she said firmly.

'A man shrewd enough to make a million dollars is generally a bigger fool over his health than a navvy. Because he can't submit to the notion of doctors knowing more than he does. He's prey to a quack like the worm to the goose.'

Eliot gulped his brandy. 'We'll track Munyon's to Shaftesbury Avenue. It's the new street which cuts through Soho-a rookery of French and Italian cooks, waiters, tailors and cakemakers, but the restaurants are cheap. I'll take you there tonight for dinner,' he informed her.

'I may have other plans.'

'That would be dreadfully foolish of you.'

'Eliot, you bestow contempt as other men flattery.'

'I don't. A doctor is incapable of contempt. The infinite weaknesses of human nature are his sympathetic study. You mistake it for candour. That's the quality a doctor must always direct upon himself, if kindness sometimes deflects it from the patient. Afterwards, you must come and see my lodgings. It's not much of a place, but I've a pianola.'

'You've a nerve,' she told him sharply. 'Asking a lady un-chaperoned to a gentleman's apartment.'

'No one else would know,' he assured her casually. 'No one there would care. I live among people who share my view that conventional morality is a combination of hypocrisy, fright, and a sound feminine instinct for keeping the goods untouched in the shop-window until saleable at the best price.'

'If that's the view of your friends, I've no wish to meet them.'

He was alarmed. She had angry, pink spots on her cheeks. 'Are you inviting me to play the loose woman? Or are you telling me I am one? I've suffered sufficient indignity for one day.'

He grabbed her hand as she rose. 'Nancy, forgive me,' he asked submissively. 'I talk so often for effect, but I have the tragic disability of too often believing what I say. The life I have set for myself, my unconventional ideas, my ideals-I suffer doubts sometimes that they're nothing but a passing irritation with the society I was born into. An ungrateful one, as it reared me so generously.'

She stood staring down at him. He still held her hand.

'Am I Hamlet, or young Lupin Pooter from _The Diary of a Nobody?_ Though I suppose they were both ridiculous, in their own way. I love you, Nancy. I loved you since I walked into the waiting-room at the sanatorium last spring.' He smiled shyly. 'The Rose and Crown gives hardly the most fitting echo to my sentiments. When we came in, I'd no more expectation of uttering them than my dying words. My political ambitions resolved me to stay a bachelor for years. Though _un foyer sans feu, une table sans pain, une maison sans femme_ are all equally joyless, as the Bretons say.'

She sat down slowly. The man in the curly-brimmed bowler had just finished a comic story, and the other was choking with laughter.

'Though perhaps you'd be right getting rid of me,' he said with detachment. 'It's the privilege of intelligent men and women to see the consequences of their passions, even if they often prefer to go blind. God gives us love, according to Tennyson. But love can give us murder, suicide and war. Love demands thinking about quite as much as money or health. But people don't. Even while they're enjoying it, they give it as little thought as their work on a bank holiday.'

She clasped his fingers on the glass-ringed table-top. 'I love you Eliot,' she said quietly. 'I was brought up like every girl I know, in the same prison of conventions. It's scary, suddenly finding yourself outside.'

Eliot reflected she looked like a child. The worldliness which frightened him had vanished.

'Will you come to me?' he asked timidly.

'I must go back to the hotel first. I must bring the sponge.'

She had used the sponge on the silken thread, soaked in quinine, on the express from Basle. She had heard of it in whispers from girls in the corners of drawing-rooms and dinner-tables in New York. Her friends assured her that absolutely everyone used the sponge, it was as safe as a brick wall. It was so much more satisfying than the disgustingly messy manner of men diverting the stream of life at the final moment into the air like a public fountain. She had been fitted with the sponge by a respectable doctor in a tail coat, who practised downtown in Washington Square, who Nancy told her father she was consulting for a sore throat.

Eliot said nothing, but gripped her hand tightly. Then he announced cheerfully, 'We've work to do,' and stood up.

They easily found the offices in Shaftesbury Avenue, but Munyon's had not leased rooms there since 1905. A grey woman in black bombazine with a pince-nez, supervising a cramped room of busy, bent-backed young typists, remembered Dr Crippen. He had left Munyon's to become consulting physician to the Drouet Institute for the Deaf at Marble Arch.

'The Drouet Institute!' Eliot groaned loudly, outside in Shaftesbury Avenue. 'The devilish invention of a drunken Parisian doctor. Lead plasters, impregnated with turpentine, camphor, Spanish fly-stick them behind your ears, and you'll hear like a hare. He advertised in all the newspapers and on the sides of the buses. It was nothing but a cruel swindle on the deaf. They spent their shilling on rubbish, rather than having a proper aural examination from a doctor who'd demand guineas which they hadn't got.'

Eliot continued warmly, taking her elbow across the road, A murderous swindle. Some poor man died from a brain abscess and the coroner's remarks put the Institute out of business. The patient deserved a statue. He saved the world more unnecessary suffering than most physicians. Not a handsome credential for your Dr Crippen, is it?'

Nancy that afternoon had become abruptly less interested in Dr Crippen.