A Question of Guilt

10

Arrival of the fast liners from Europe always had impact on the social, political and artistic life of New York. The Olympic-700 feet long, gorgeous inside with carved mahogany, marble and gold leaf, 'the Hotel Cecil afloat'-arrived at Pier 92 in the sparkling sunshine of early October. She was the pride of the White Star Line, who could boast in their sailing notices LARGEST LINERS IN THE WORLD BUILDING, because of her even bigger sister-ship on the stocks at Harland amp; Wolff in Belfast, the unsinkable Titanic. As the passenger-list had no actors or authors, statesmen or sportsmen, the newspapers concentrated on the pair of Grange sisters, one of whom was dead.

The world relishes tragedies in wealthy families, who deserve to pay for being rich. _The Evening Sun_ and _Evening Mail_ described Nancy coming ashore grief-stricken, though the eyes behind her motor-veil were long ago dry in the headwinds of her journey.

Crossing the grey, misty face of Europe from the poplar-spiked fields of northern France she felt like a worm crawling through a dank garden. By the perversity of human mind, her uppermost concern was her inability to buy mourning. She would return to Campette shockingly disregardful in attire to the tragedy. The red cross flag outside the sanatorium was stiff in a cold wind, winter beginning repossession of its rightful land. The first person she saw was Monsieur Mittot, the undertaker.

As the grey-uniformed coachman helped Nancy from the carriage with customary sweep of hat, Monsieur Mittot came briskly through the double doors in his black overcoat. He stopped short on the step. Their eyes met. They had a new relationship, joined in grisly intimacy. Nancy felt shocked this man had laid hands on Baby, seen her naked. She stared at him, frightened at what he represented. The fat undertaker for once looked abashed. He raised his bowler hat an inch, nervously wiped his moustache with his finger-tips and hurried towards the village path, muttering chillingly. _'A vфtre service, mademoiselle.'_

Dr. Pasquier recounted, as solemnly as a priest's prayers, Baby's final illness. The rise of temperature was not thought alarming. Patients might take a chill in the clinic as in their own homes, a little catarrh need not flash urgent messages across the breadth of Europe. Headache was a common enough symptom in young ladies, surely? The bacillus had suddenly switched its attack from besieging the lung to overrunning the whole body. When Dr Pasquier himself was summoned, Baby was already in coma, her temperature had soared to 41 degrees, her breathing was snatched, the tache cйrйbrale red streak on her skin proclaimed involvement of the brain.

A silently-formed tubercule in the meningeal envelope of the brain, Dr Pasquier explained, had caused internal haemorrhage by eating through an artery. They had applied ice-bags. They had performed the operation of lumbar puncture, to inspect the blood-tinged spinal fluid. Within the hour, she had succumbed. Nothing could have been done.

'Were Dr Beckett still here, might he have saved her?'

'Dr McCorquodale is a practitioner of excellent qualifications, who enjoys my complete confidence.'

He took her to the basement to view Baby's body, covered by a sheet, in a room like a butcher's refrigerator. Nancy was amazed how small she looked. Dr Pasquier withdrew the covering from her face. She was a dusky colour, her chin held up with a bandage, her eyes open the fraction of an inch, unevenly.

'Her hair,' murmured Nancy. 'It still keeps it's colour.'

The man with the scarred neck was hovering in the lobby. He made a deep bow and presented a long white envelope. It was her sister's bill.

The Olympic first class was full of Americans, lively, flirtatious, drunken, lustful, home from an extravagant summer in Europe. The word went about that she had a corpse down below, and people avoided her as though she was a witch. She was met at the pier by Mr Franklyn, a red, round man in gleaming top hat and astrakhan collar, one of her father's lawyers. She embraced her father in his first-floor study at Fifth Avenue. He was with Mr Bryan, his middle-aged private secretary who wore a pince-nez.

'What happened?'

John Grange was small and white-haired, with the birdlike quickness which Baby had inherited. He did deals in everything. For a meat-packer with no cash to pay a wage-bill in Buenos Aires, John Grange could raise a loan on a cargo of whale-oil in Amsterdam. If a German wanted to build a railway in Turkey, John Grange could funnel him the savings of America's Middle West. He could sink a gold mine in Canada by bankrupting a hundred farmers in South Africa, if Baltimore was sitting out a steel strike he knew how to snap up the markets for Sheffield. He neither smoked nor drank, and lived off mint tea, meat broth and raw vegetables. He was terrified of open spaces, travelled in an automobile with drawn curtains and lived in shuttered rooms with the electric light at noon.

'The funeral's on Thursday,' he announced, when Nancy had repeated everything transmitted in long, anguished cables. 'Tomorrow's for folk to pay their respects. There'll be a book to sign, with velum pages.' The coffin would be displayed in the blackhung ballroom where Baby had last danced. 'What do you intend to do, now you're home?' he asked later, when he could direct his thoughts from his dead daughter to his living one. 'When you can decently appear out of mourning, that is.'

'What I did before I left, I guess.'

'You don't sound very enthusiastic.' Nancy said nothing. 'A million women in New York would give an arm to lead your life. Now Baby's gone, you mean twice as much to me. Baby was a great credit. She shone in company. She was sought in society. The boys were proud to know her, the girls fought for invitations to her parties. Baby went everywhere she should be seen, met everyone she had to know. She'd have made a fine marriage.'

'I don't care to play the social game.'

'For a woman in your position, it's a matter of duty.'

'For a woman in any position, it's a matter of taste. I don't care to play bridge.'

'You will play it, even if you don't care for it. I've got to have my daughter prominent in society. I've got to have her marry with position, money, family. That's as worthwhile achievement for a woman as making a million dollars is in a man.'

'But papa! Do you need me as a decoration? A doll created by dressmakers and milliners and dancing-teachers? When everyone in New York knows and respects John Grange?'

'That's what I want.'

There was another silence. 'Very well, papa,' Nancy said obediently.

'Did you see that fellow Crippen?'

'He's nothing but a quack.'

'But he's a real doctor. I had it from Professor Munyon himself.'

'He's a quack, and so is Professor Munyon.'

'Pretty free with your accusations, aren't you? How can you tell who's a quack and who isn't? That takes a doctor to know.'

'It was a doctor who told me.'

'Doctors have a lot of professional jealousy.'

'This was a doctor whose opinion I'd trust utterly.'

'Who was he?'

'He's English. He was at the clinic, looking after Baby. She must have written about Dr Beckett?'

'How'd he know Crippen?'

'We met him together. Dr Beckett had returned to London.'

'You'd corresponded with him?' her father asked suspiciously.

'I had become friendly with him.'

'Don't go wasting yourself on doctors. I can hire any doctor in the world I like, and fire him the moment I feel like it.'

'Very well, papa,' Nancy said again.

Baby's prominence in New York society was increased as the centre of its most fashionable funeral that fall. For the rest of October, the compass of Nancy's mind swung too violently to plot a steady course through life. The isolated monotony of Switzerland seemed a more natural existence than the gay gregariousness of New York because it had been endured for a purpose, like monasticism or a prison sentence. To have mixed as a social equal with the unmannered and pretentious Crippens now disgusted her. Mr Ruston and Mr Wince made her tremble at a brush with evil. But she knew that Eliot was right-'The upper classes have a far leaner time of it than a costermonger, who can revel in the unstinted enjoyment of his bodily functions.' Now Eliot must be as dead as Baby.

In the middle of November, Eliot wrote to her. Nancy was alarmed, because Mr Bryan saw every envelope entering the house and would report the unfamiliar handwriting to her father. The letter began, _Dear Nancy,_ and after a sympathetic half-page about Baby described cheerfully his free surgery in the greengrocer's shop.

_The municipal elections have just ended, _he informed her. _With only two of the nine women town councillors in England re-elected. You see how the suffragettes' campaign is self-defeating? Violence is a useless political weapon, unless cloaked in subtlety. They say we are in for a wet winter, the weather is filthy today, the Thames rising by the hour. I pray it will not drown the entire House of Lords before their opportunity to reject the People's budget. Then shall be my chance. Who knows, that you must put 'M.P.' after my name, should you choose to write?_

It ended, _Yours sincerely, Eliot._ Nancy thought it as unromantic as a prescription.

Nancy nearly wrote back. She sat over her thick, cream wavy-edged paper, fountain pen uncapped. It seemed dereliction of duty towards her father. Instead, she accepted the invitation to a dance with Clarrie Burgess.

Clarrie was three years older than her, heir to a railroad fortune. When Nancy had begun accepting the shower of invitations after Baby's funeral, Clarrie's eagerness in courting her, she suspected, indicated society's relish for a fresh face. Within a week, his presents had escalated from flowers and chocolates to a diamond bracelet. The same evening, John Grange called her to his study. He did not mention Eliot's letter, but with the air of offering sound advice to an investor declared that Clarrie Burgess would make her an excellent husband.

'He would not,' said Nancy.

'Why?'

'He has a scented moustache.' Her father was too puzzled to reply.

In the _New York Times_ two mornings later, Nancy found half-a-dozen columns about phthisis. It was as common as drunkenness or lice among the crammed tenement dwellers of the lower East Side. Her knowledge of pulmonary tuberculosis, its progress, its treatment, was singular among the untrained women of New York. The notion of turning this to some use was exciting. It would restore the purpose to her life which had died with Baby.

Everyone had heard of Lillian D Wald's Visiting Nurse Service. The charity attracted the generosity of Nancy's friends as more genteel than the Salvation Army. Nancy telephoned for an appointment at 265 Henry Street. She drove to the lower East Side in a hansom, remembering that in the same squalor her mother and her relatives had met hastened deaths. Was she lucky to have risen from such society? Or wicked to tolerate it at all? As political thought always turned her mind to Eliot, she left the question open.

The Henry Street Settlement was housed in a brownstone, with shutters and window-boxes, a tree outside protected by railings, half a dozen children playing on the front steps, staring and giggling as she banged the big brass knocker. She was taken to a small, square, linoleum-floored semi-basement with faded yellow wallpaper and pair of hanging gas-globes. A roll-topped desk was jammed against a stout cupboard, library shelves along one side were filled with neat piles of pink lint, rolled bandages, basins and heavy metal boxes. In the corner stood a small washstand with basin and pitcher, the middle had a board and a flat-iron. There was a flower vase standing empty, and a mirror in which she felt no one bothered to look. The decorations were photographs of nurses in groups, a sombre picture of President Lincoln and a framed red-and-white card ordaining DO IT WELL.

Two mature women sat on rush-seated chairs, both in blue-and-white check cotton dresses with flared skirts, a black tie and a broad white belt. The one with the centre parting and the bun was Lillian Wald. The other, with the upswept hair, her partner Mary Brewster, wife of a general.

Lillian Wald told her bluntly, 'You're not the first society lady who's come here, filled with good intentions. But unfortunately, even the best intentions aren't good enough. Once they find the nature of our work-and the nature of the folk we work among-they generally find their disgust hard to swallow. Maybe it would be better for both of us if you expressed your desire to help by writing a cheque?'

'However big a cheque, it wouldn't buy me an easy conscience. And I have come to you with the selfishness expected of my set. I want something useful in my life.'

The reply seemed to excite curiosity. 'But why occupy yourself with the sick? Here at the Nurses' Settlement the work's mostly hard, and always unpleasant till you're used to it. Some ladies never get used to it. You could go across to the Travellers' Aid Society on West 54th. You'd do as much good, saving vulnerable young working women arriving in New York from moral corruption.'

'But I'm interested in medical matters. Particularly phthisis. I've just lost a dear sister from the disease. I was so close to her in a Swiss sanitorium, I felt that I had nursed her myself.'

'Oh, I recollect the item in the newspapers,' said Mary Brewster.

Miss Wald became less forbidding. 'I'll accept you as a do-er rather than a do-gooder,' she decided after more questioning. 'I only take trained ladies, you know. It's public health nursing, for the ultimate good of the whole community of New York. I will not bestow nursing care as a charity upon our patients. That is a derogation of human dignity to the recipient, however inflating for the donor. I enrol a few nurses' aides, which you can try for six months. If you last, you can take regular instruction as a public health nurse. That'll be at Teachers College, in Columbia University. I'm starting a training programme there next year.'

Nancy was as delighted with her uniform as with her acceptance-the same check that Lillian Wald wore herself, with dainty buttoned shoes protected by black spats, a black straw skimmer hat, a wide apron for work, the promise in summer of a white muslin cravat. She carried a black leather bag with two handles, accompanying one of the nurses from tenement to tenement, generally over the rooftops. The poorer you were on the lower East Side, the higher up you lived.

Her job was mostly cleaning and cooking. The squalor, filth and decay neither shocked nor deterred her. Nor that one in ten of the adults she saw every day, perhaps one in six of the infants would before long end in an unembellished pine coffin in Potter's Field. The well-fed patients in the clean and comfortable Clinique Laлnnec were equally surely condemned to die, and Eliot had taught her that the only real tragedy in life was death.

The tubercular sufferers sought fresh air as shipwrecked sailors water. Some lived in tents on the roof, through burning summer and winter snow. Nancy consoled herself that many of the East Side immigrants-or their children-would pull themselves from the human mire. And that many others kept their families clean, fed and temperate in such discouraging surroundings. And that many more had left straw-floored European cellars and garrets no better, and the air tainted with political oppression.

Her father had at first objected with unexpected mildness. One evening in late November, he called her to his study. 'Mr Bryan saw this in the Herald.'_

He picked up a newspaper cutting. The column was headed, JOHN GRANGE'S DAUGHTER IN SLUMS. 'You spoke to this reporter, Nancy?'

'I asked Miss Wald's permission. I thought what he wrote would make you proud of me, papa.'

'I am not. Why should my only daughter spend her days in filth? You could be molested, attacked.'

Nancy sat in a straight-back chair opposite. She slowly smoothed her gray satin skirt. 'I should never be. In my uniform, I am like a queen in her robes. I am respected, welcomed and loved.' She reminded him, 'I asked and you gave your permission.'

'I did not give you permission to penetrate such places. I naturally imagined that you would be a nurse to people of social standing.'

'Women of my own age-those I work among-do things far more evil every day without troubling their fathers at all. Don't you see, papa? I'm your best publicity agent. You're far too hard-headed, not to recognize there are many who do not over-love you.'

'I make enemies with every deal. I don't give a damn. I make as many friends, so long as it's successful.'

'A rich man is disliked by people who know absolutely nothing about him, except that he's rich.'

'That's unreasonable.'

'No more than a man with no coat hating the wind. You can no longer play Mr Vanderbilt and say, 'The public be damned.' When you talk of the public now you mean its newspapers, and they're incapable of damnation. If they tell New York that your daughter tends the sick and the destitute, you will be thought of the kindlier.'

John Grange sipped the mint tea resting on the arm of his leather chair. 'That's not what your life's for. I could hire a hundred clever dicks to make me look the sweetest man in town. Baby understood that. She'd never stray from her proper position.'

'Can't you understand? I would never work with the nurses if it wasn't what I want to do most in the whole world?' He said nothing. 'Oh, papa! I know you want me to be a success in society, to marry the man whom every other girl in New York would long to wed. But surely you love me enough to let me find my own happiness?'

'I love you with all my heart, Nancy, but in this world we must put our tender feelings behind armour-plate if we want to be successful.'

There was a long silence. He rose abruptly, leant over and kissed her. It was the end of an inconclusive interview. Nancy continued at Henry Street. She knew it distressed her father. She knew her response to his distress must shortly end her employment.

He never mentioned her work, but asked searchingly after the invitations she received and accepted. Nancy refused any but the smallest parties where she was unlikely to meet eager suitors. Her set said she was never the same since Baby's death. They shook their heads that she was developing the same oddities as her father.