A Question of Guilt

12

'Well, you made a bit of a fool of yourself,' said Major Beckett.

'I misjudged the revolutionary passion of Englishmen,' Eliot told his father. 'It boils, but only as porridge boils. It plops sedately, then cools to a stodgy mass. Perhaps stodginess is our national genius? The French and Italians are like pans of fat, igniting and burning out the kitchen every so often.'

Major Beckett frowned. He was a tall, spare, man who wore his frock coat and starched collar and cuffs like a uniform. His son had developed a clever way of speaking, which he enjoyed in women and distrusted in men. He supposed those who played politics needed to wrap their opinions like Christmas presents, or their hearers would discern them no more intelligent than those of the man beside them on the omnibus. 'You did very badly.'

'Obviously, sir, as I lost my deposit. When I was canvassing with my red rosette, every working man in Holloway swore to support me. In the end, they chose the Liberal against the Conservative. They knew where they stood with both parties. They don't trust Socialism, because it's new-fangled. No one is more conservative than the British lower classes.'

It was noon on Monday, January 24, 1910. They sat in the smoking room of the Imperial Club at the corner of Pall Mall and St James's Street, a cavern hewn from mahogany and leather. Eliot sipped his sherry, his father being old-fashioned took madeira. To soldier away half a life in India made a man confident of election to the club. A factotum to a nobleman invited the sneering mutterings which could provoke blackballing. Colonel Beckett has risked it. He believed that the agent of a duke enjoyed a standing above that of a lord or even earl, like duke's servants taking precedence below stairs when their masters were guests at country houses.

'Had it occurred to you Eliot, the working men might have given their vote were you one of them, and not of a higher social station?'

'Should I have sported a cloth cap, like Keir Hardie?'

'I'm not suggesting you played the hypocrite.'

'Why not, sir? We're a nation of hypocrites. We created an Empire rather brutally. We stand appalled at foreign accusations of drawing economic and political strength from enslaved nations. We say we're only bringing them the advantages of Christianity and drains.'

'I suppose you politicos have faith in your ideals as a salesman in his samples, however shoddy.' Feeling his political antagonism had displaced paternal affection, the major added, 'It must have been a bitter disappointment for you.'

'The blackest of my life. And wasted work always torments me, whether it's an experiment which fails, or a patient who dies. I spent the wettest winter that London has known, tramping the Holloway streets from the hour men leave for work before daylight to the hour they return well after dark. I spoke every night in cold halls smelling of damp clothes and unwashed flesh, only quarter-filled with people who were either indifferent or hostile and generally stupid. I hope the carnival didn't embarrass you? I got a good deal into the newspapers, who seemed to find a medical man as a socialist an interesting freak. What did the Duke think?'

'His Grace was quite amused. He is not particularly interested in electioneering. He knows that the important issues in the country are all decided by a dozen or so men like himself. I excused you by suggesting you'd grow out of it.'

'It's a poor fighter who throws in the towel after a pummelling in the first round.'

'Or a wise one? Your profession passes well in society today. Doctors have been knighted, and of course Lister is in the House of Lords. Look at Dawson, the Duke's doctor. On the Duke's recommendation he's now the King's doctor, and set for his knighthood. The Duke has a soft spot for you, Eliot. And you're damned clever. Give up this politicking, set up your brass plate in Harley Street. A word from the Duke could bring you the patients which could bring you a fortune.'

'I don't want a fortune.'

'You will when you're married. Your wife will see to that.'

'The marriage bed is for me an article of furniture as elusive as a seat in the House of Commons.'

The major raised his eyebrows, but seemed diffident about pursuing this remark. 'You mustn't starve yourself of the normal pleasures for a young man. I recall my own time as a subaltern…mind, London was a rougher place in the seventies, with the Middlesex and the Oxford music-halls going strong. There were houses in the Haymarket and Covent Garden where a young serving officer, deprived by duty of feminine company, might take a year's compensation in a single night.'

'I'm going to the music-hall tomorrow night,' said Eliot, looking amused. 'One of the turns is a lady of my acquaintance. I move in theatrical circles, you see.'

His father was curious. 'What's her name?'

'Belle Elmore.'

'Never heard of her.'

'She is the wife of a confrиre. A funny little man called Dr Crippen, who lives round the corner.'

'Of course, I've taken little interest in such things for years.'

'How's mother?'

'She has bred a new begonia.'

Mention of Mrs Beckett was an understood signal that one or the other had suffered enough serious conversation.

When Eliot opened his front door with a latch-key, Emma appeared from the basement to say there were 'gen'men upstairs'. He found Ruston impatiently pacing the carpet, Wince on the sofa smoking his pipe and reading his Times._

'Where have you been?' Ruston greeted him.

'The Imperial Club.' Ruston looked outraged. 'Surely a fellow may lunch with his own father? I could hardly have invited him to the Holloway Socialist Workers' Club.' He tossed his wide-brimmed hat on the iron bed. 'Why have I this pleasure? After my resounding failure at the polls, I imagined you'd want no more to do with me.'

Ruston made an impatient gesture. 'Elections are a farce, and the result in Holloway proved as much. The political parties of this country are as irrelevant as a literary tea-drinking society. All talk, gentility and selfishness. We shall achieve nothing without force.'

'And patience.' Wince turned a page of the paper.

'I'm giving you a chance to prove what you're made of,' Rushton said.

'Such courage as I have is at the disposal of the cause,' Eliot told him.

'We don't want your courage,' Ruston asserted. 'We want your respectability. A doctor will provide cover. We plan to achieve all we hope in one sharp blow.'

'What? Assassinate Mr Asquith?' Eliot asked derisively.

'The German Emperor.'

'Oh, that's quite ridiculous.'

'That is for others to decide, not you.'

Eliot felt a strengthening of his feeling that Ruston was mentally unsound. 'Have the practical difficulties occurred to your friends? That we are in Holloway and he in Potsdam? That he is surrounded by a bodyguard who would esteem it a privilege dying to the last man?'

'Emperor William has been on the German throne almost 22 years. Do you know how many times he has visited this country? Eleven! As the King's nephew he's popular here, even if his country isn't.'

'If you shoot Kaiser Bill on his next trip, it won't prevent war, but provoke it.'

'That's the 'ole idea,' said Wince, still reading the paper.

Ruston had been striding the room while talking. He stopped, hands in the pockets of his tweed trousers. 'We know our Prussians. They've constructed the most wonderful military machine, which they're itching to get moving like the proud possessor of a brand-new Rolls-Royce. The Kaiser killed in Britain! Think of the excuse it gives the hotheads in Berlin. Once von Moltke's General Staff have started the engine and released the brake, nothing can stop it.'

Eliot sat abruptly next to Wince, who was relighting his pipe. 'And what use will a war be to the English working-man? Apart from ending his miseries by permitting him to be killed in it.'

'War brings revolution. The country's seething as it is. Look at the trade unions-gaining half-a-million members a year. Look at the wave of strikes. They're startling the old fuddy-duddy union leaders, scaring the bosses and terrifying the Government out of its wits. The election meant nothing, nothing. Both parties were the bosses' party. The workers are impatient for power. They're scornful of compromise. They're impatient to tear down the plywood barriers in their way.'

'Tonypandy,' added Wince lugubriously. 'The 'ole of the South Wales' coalfield's out. The workers 'ave rejected the advice of their own leaders, 'oo are acting a bunch o' cowards.'

'The bosses are using the one weapon they know and love,' Ruston continued forcefully. 'Starvation! I hope they'll succeed. They'll have the whole working class up in arms.'

There was silence broken by the bubbling of Wince's pipe. 'I disagree with you', said Eliot.

'You are not entitled to disagree with me. About anything.' Ruston picked up his umbrella and Irish hat. 'I only want to be reassured I can rely on you when the time comes?'

'I gave you my loyalty five years ago. I'm not the man to withdraw it the first time it's tested.'

They left Eliot with his legs stretched out, staring at the neglected fire. He had joined the British Revolutionary Movement while a medical student at St Bartholomew's. Like other young men, he wanted to see the world changed not in his lifetime but before he was thirty. He stirred uneasily on the sofa. If Ruston was not mad, he lived among political lunatics isolated from the real world like the inhabitants of H G Wells's _Country of the Blind,_ which he had just read in a magazine. In the cold, misty afternoon he was sweating. He was afraid of no one, but the prospect of helping murder a fellow-human, whether emperor or helpless cripple, terrified him. Had his father met the Kaiser, he would have courteously invited him to sherry at the Imperial Club rather than blowing his head off.

It was growing dark. Eliot threw coal on the fire and lit the gas. He wrote distractedly for a while, then threw down his pen and reached among the music-rolls for Beethoven's Sonata No. 14, the Moonlight. He sat on the sofa, staring into the flames. The music induced a dreaminess which he felt wickedly voluptuous. He pulled out his watch and sighed. In half an hour he must leave for the Metropolitan Music Hall, three or four miles away across Regent's Park in the Edgware Road.

Crippen had called at the surgery the previous Friday with a pressing invitation to share his box. Belle had a fortnight's engagement, an agonized week had been passed turning over her wardrobe. Eliot readily accepted. Watching Belle on the stage promised the fascination of watching Blondin cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope. He had picked up his hat and Burberry for the theatre when the doorbell jangled loudly. He wondered if Ruston had returned with a plot to kill the Czar as well. There was a timid tap at his door. He threw it open to reveal Nancy.

They grasped each other. For a minute, they were unable to speak.

'Why didn't you write or cable you were coming, dearest?' Eliot asked, still incredulous as they stood holding hands, staring at each other and laughing.

'Oh, I don't know…I wasn't sure I could go through with it, until I'd actually rung your doorbell.'

'You took a gamble. You might have found me living with another woman.'

'I didn't think you'd possibly find another to suit you. If you had, I'd have bowed out happily. After me, she would need to be a paragon.'

'How long are you staying?'

'I don't know.'

'Where?'

'I'm installed at the Savoy.'

'Move in here.'

'All right.'

Startled by the impulsiveness of invitation and acceptance, Eliot said, 'But your father. He wouldn't care for it at all.'

'I'll write I'm in clean lodgings for single ladies. He'll accept that. He accepted me walking the East Side slums this winter, climbing across tenement roofs with no more protection than a nurse's uniform.'

'You have made your life complicated.'

'Being in love with someone always brings complications. Otherwise, wouldn't there be empty shelves in the circulating libraries?'

'Now we're going to the music hall.'

'What?'_

He took her arm, as he had when firmly piloting her round London. 'I'm committed. I never chuck up my obligations to my friends.'

'Surely you could find somewhere more romantic?' she protested.

'Tonight's a memorable theatrical occasion. Come on.'

They hurried downstairs. Ruston, Wince and the Kaiser vanished from Eliot's mind.

They laughed all the way in the hansom. The attraction was Belle, Eliot explained, sparkling in the footlights after three years in the domestic dark. The reason for her revival was apparent in half a dozen ladies wearing long fur coats and elaborate hats, standing in a line with top-hatted gentlemen outside the brilliantly lit music hall facade. Placards declared OFFICIAL PICKET, MANAGEMENT UNFAIR TO ARTISTES, PLAYERS NOT PAUPERS. Eliot's preoccupation with the oppressed masses overlooked that they included the music-hall performers.

There was a national music-hall strike. Like all strikes, its causes seemed to outsiders mystifyingly trivial. An arbitrator had awarded the artistes matinee pay at one-seventh of the evening performance rate in one-show-a-night houses, one-twelfth in two-show-a-night houses. 'Barring' an artiste for a fortnight, from appearing again within a mile radius, was to be abolished for those earning under Ј40 a week. The music-hall managers rejected it. A National Alliance of artistes held a mass meeting in The Surrey Theatre, Will Crooks MP in the chair rousing them to 'Stand up and stand firm.'

The managers determined on strike-breaking. 'The names are not those of artistes as well known as those which it is customary to find in the bill,' Era wrote of the music-halls which stayed open. Hence Belle's chance, Eliot realized. Hence the picket-line evoking curiosity and amusement from the public as it pressed leaflets on them with the cheerfulness actors and actresses can never submerge in their activities, even attending each others' funerals.

Crippen was waiting in the foyer. He had a new grey frock coat with a bright orange tie and a lilac waistcoat. He was delighted to see Nancy. How gratifying for Belle to be viewed by a fellow-countrywoman on her great night. 'Haven't you noticed Belle's strong resemblance to Marie Lloyd?' he asked, leading them up the red-carpeted stairs to a two-guinea box. 'Do you know why she took the name 'Belle Elmore'? Because Marie Lloyd first appeared at the Royal Eagle calling herself 'Bella Delmere,'' he told them proudly.

They sat on red-plush chairs. The quack doctor leaves threadbare gentility to bask in the tarnished sun of his wife, Eliot thought. Ethel le Neve inhabited the real world, which the audience had entered the theatre to forget.

Nancy sat squeezing Eliot's hand. Before Baby's illness she was a regular New York theatregoer, always in a large party, all beautifully dressed, awarer of affording pleasure to the ordinary men and their wives peering at them through opera-glasses from the cheaper seats. It was a social gathering, Nancy could barely remember the plays. She supposed this theatre of faded plush and scratched gilt resembled that her friends' fathers recalled fondly, 'The Rialto' on Broadway south of 42nd Street.

The 'Met' was large, a 4000-seater, fifty years old, built over the White Lion pub, which had a reputation among Cockneys for sing-songs and knees-ups. The performers were in competition with its generous furnishing of bars. The West End theatres seemed as formal as visiting relatives on a Sunday afternoon. The flickering displays in the picture houses as lacklustre as a dance of ghosts. The music-hall was like a Bank Holiday outing, when everyone expected to enjoy themselves.

The songs and sketches went to the audiences' hearts, because they exhalted, lampooned or consoled their everyday joys and pains. All of them felt the relationship with lodger or landlord, mother-in-law or pawnbroker, what it was like to be stoney broke or rolling drunk. Everyone ate kippers and went to the seaside, knew husbands who were henpecked, or roving or cuckolds. Everyone knew they peopled the greatest country on earth, and that all foreigners were ridiculous, particularly as unable to speak English. When the Great Macdermott had his audiences at the London Pavillion thundering back, 'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do!' it was a threat which deserved Britain's enemies taking seriously.

Moustached and brilliantined, the conductor rose amid his stiffshirted orchestra, bowing deeply to the whistling and clapping. After a perfunctory overture, the electric candles of the chandeliers dimmed, the red curtain rose on a man in furs outside a stage-property igloo, with six seals who tossed brightly-coloured balls to each other, played tunes on a rack of rubber-bulbed motor-horns, climbed ladders, performed acrobatics and jumped into a glass water-tank.

Nancy was puzzled. She had steeled herself for an evening of blue jokes and girls with slashed skirts, like the burlesque shows in the Bowery, where she was no more likely to find herself than at a boxing-match. Nothing could be more respectable than performing seals. Crippen sat engrossed, hand limp on the plush edge of the box. Eliot fancied he had seen the same act as a carousing medical student, but perhaps it had been performing dogs.

The seals were followed by Weldon Atherstone, the monologuist, with top-hat, tails and ebony cane. Perfect tailoring was his trademark, like the black half-moons of George Robey's eyebrows, or Albert Chevalier's suit of Cockney costermonger's button-covered 'pearlies'. He did Fagin in the condemned cell from _Oliver Twist,_ the music-hall falling as silent as a church.

'The black stage, the cross-beam, the rope…' Atherstone's low voice seemed to ooze from him. 'All the hideous apparatus of…death.'

Violent applause. Only forty years ago, Eliot reflected, this audience in its ancestors' shoes waited excitedly through the night for the morning's execution outside Newgate Jail. Calls of 'Blackleg!' came from half-a-dozen voices-planted by the strike committee he suspected. Next appeared a pair of Chinese wire-walkers in kimonos and plate-like hats. Then the orchestra struck up Yankee Doodle. Belle had not seen the pinnacles of New York for thirteen years, but an American act was thought so smart on the London stage, some natives changed their accent to Brooklyn and their costume to Wild West.

Eliot saw Crippen's hand tighten on the plush.

Belle's waist was so pinched between bursting bosom and spreading hips, it looked to Eliot in danger of exploding like the bound-up barrel of some ancient siege-artillery pressed back to service. The skirt of her green silk gown foaming with lace trailed a yard behind her. Her hair was in bright blonde curls, as tight as the head of a cauliflower. Her heavy face was vivid with greasepaint, dusted with powder like an apple-dumpling with flour.

She stood between two vases of artificial red roses, holding a mirror edged with gold tassels, which she flashed along the stalls. Fixing on a sallow-faced man with a limp moustache, she started to sing, _Who'll be My Sweetheart Tonight?._

The thin notes fell into the auditorium like shot sparrows. 'Blackleg!' and 'Scab!' came from the same seats, whistling and hissing from the gallery. Belle interpreted the noise as shouts of approval and hoots of delight. She favoured her audience with repartee-not the daggered Cockney wit of Bessie Bellwood, the rabbit-skinner's daughter who lived with the Duke of Manchester, but 'Oh, you naughty boy!' and 'Wouldn't you like me to hold your hand?' Expression and utterance had the mawkish combination of ardent promise and coy chastity in equal proportions.

The conductor was looking nervously over his shoulder. Belle stopped. The house was in uproar. She nervously exchanged a word with him, smiled bravely and began _Something to Warm your Feet On._ Ha'pennies started to fly across the footlights. The strikers had come well armed. Coinage was augmented by eggs, one cracking against Belle's skirt. She burst into tears, rushing from the stage still clutching her mirror. The curtain fell. The noise coalesced to a chant, 'We want our money back!' Three rough-clothed men had quit the frustrating remoteness of the gallery to climb over the footlights. A rousing roll came on the drums.

'Stand up,' Eliot hissed at Nancy.

'Why?'

'The National Anthem. Always played after a show.'

Everyone in the house, even the intruders on the stage, stood stiffly while the orchestra on their own feet played _God Save the King._ The conductor cautiously signalled for another drum-roll and repeated the verse. The tension had gone. A heavily-moustached man in evening dress appeared gingerly through the curtain to announce hastily that money would be returned at the box-office.

'Belle's talents aren't suited to these audiences,' said Crippen. 'She was born for opera.'

His face was pink, his bland expression blighted with disappointment and shame. The evening had done Ethel good, Eliot thought.