A Question of Guilt

RAILWAYMEN IMPRISONED

_George Horace Clem, aged 35, and Henry Teacher, 42, both of Holloway, London, labourers employed by the Great Northern Railway, were each sentenced to 3 months detention by the Chatham magistrates on Saturday for drunken and disorderly conduct. They were arrested outside a Chatham public-house on the night of Friday, where they were shouting abuse about the German Emperor. The chairman said their conduct was despicable towards a personage of such importance._

Eliot rubbed his chin. It looked as if the assassination scheme had been hatched, to produce only a dead chick. On his way to the surgery, he stopped at a small shop in Brecknock Road, which combined a subscription library with selling stationery, newspapers, sweets and books. He bought a school atlas, opening it in the shop. 'Port Victoria,' he murmured. 'I wonder-'

The mouth of the River Medway was a mile across. The railway from Sheerness, which Wince had indicated on his Ordnance Survey map, ran across the Isle of Sheppey on its east. The separate railway from Port Victoria traversed the Isle of Grain on its west, joining a different main line far away at Gravesend on the south bank of the Thames. Both the railway terminals of Sheerness and of Port Victoria were the same distance by Admiral's launch for a yacht anchored in mid-river. Wince had chosen one terminal, but the Kaiser another.

Eliot laughed aloud, startling the half-dozen customers. 'Saved by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway!' he announced mystifyingly.

He tucked the atlas under his arm and strode jubilantly along the pavement. So much for the military genius of the British Revolutionary Movement, he thought. It could draw a blueprint of Utopia, but could not even start a fight in a public-house. That it would fail disastrously once it stopped talking and started acting he had always suspected. Perhaps that was the reassurance which drew him to it.

'I'm resigning as socialist parliamentary candidate,' he told Nancy that night. 'I can do far more good in medicine than a dozen MPs in Parliament. Personally, I suspect the Duke has done more for British workers than Marx and Engels and Rosa Luxembourg combined. And your father for American ones. Why, he can create a thousand jobs with half-an-hour's cleverness on Wall Street. Amazing.'

Nancy kissed him.

'Aren't you surprised at me?' he asked.

'No. Only at how long you've taken.'

'They threw the dynamite into the river,' Ruston told Eliot with his sarcastic smile. 'I had the strongest suspicion it was useless, anyway.'

That was seven years later, when they happened to meet as Ruston halted his company at a crossroads beyond Poperinge, the day before he was killed in the third battle of Ypres.