A Question of Guilt

2

On a May morning in 1909, two young women of surpassing beauty were travelling in a grey-upholstered first-class compartment on the express which followed the littoral from Geneva to Lausanne.

From the fertile meadows in _La Cфte,_ cows belled like circus animals looked up with tolerant curiosity. The sprouting hayfields were speckled by yellow, mauve and white flowers, the houses with top-heavy roofs clustered at every cross-roads all looked brand new. The only cloud was the belch of the engine, shredded in a breeze which broke the surface of Lake Geneva into glittering ripples decorated with white paddle-steamers and yachts. There is always winter somewhere in Switzerland, but it had lurked to its lair in the mountains.

'I guess I'm a total fraud.'

Jane Grange was twenty-one in a week's time, fair, fresh-faced, blue-eyed, everyone called her 'Baby'. Her sister Nancy was almost two years older. Both wore the 'neo-directoire' fashion, which had reached New York from Paris the previous fall. Baby had a grey scarlet-lined travelling-coat over a narrow ankle-length pink merino dress, her wide-brimmed felt hat with a panache of pink-dyed ostrich feathers. Nancy wore a green cape, a navy-blue serge jacket with tight skirt, a hat equally large with crimson muslin roses and big-dotted veil. The sisters had renounced petticoats, and Baby even wore the latest 'fish-net' stockings.

'Maybe they'll take one look at you and send you right back home to New York,' Nancy agreed.

'Then I should feel an even bigger fraud, shouldn't I? Making all that fuss, coming all this way, for absolutely nothing. How should I ever live it down?'

'It wouldn't be embarrassing at all. Everyone would be so glad to see you back.'

'Yes, I guess so,' said Baby animatedly. 'We'd have the most wonderful party in the world. Why, I can still hold my ball, can't I? It wouldn't be too late. We can use the same invitations, I never threw them away.' She looked through the window, over the coast road across the lake. Excitement flickered from her face. Both knew there was no chance of being turned away. 'Is that Mont Blanc?'

'It's Mont Salиve. They call it the cab-drivers' Mont Blanc. Tourists get bilked, taking an afternoon trip. That's so, Maria-Thйrиse?'

Mademoiselle Maria-Thйrиse Lascalle sat in a long black alpaca coat and black straw bonnet, clutching a large black handbag as though expecting to be robbed. Like many middle-aged Frenchwomen, consecutive mourning for remote relations allowed economy in dress. She had been engaged in Paris through familiarity with English and with Switzerland. Her English had become worse and her taciturnity greater during the journey, but ladies travelling without a maid could neither attract respect not keep their own. She said she knew nothing about the taxicabs.

'Oh, all mountains look the same to me,' Baby dismissed the skyline pettishly.

Across the buttoned-cloth seats lay their rolled tartan rugs spined with a cluster of parasols and umbrellas, a pair of gold-clasped alligator dressing-cases, Nancy's handbag of gold-threaded tapestry, Baby's of mink trimmed with its tails. Baby slowly turned the pages of the _Illustrated London News,_ the only magazine available in English. She was perplexed at the ceremonious, punctillious heartland of the world's greatest empire, a country which had previously crossed neither of their thoughts. Nancy looked up from Elinor Glyn's _Three Weeks,_ which she had bought in the Boulevard St-Michel, and which was banned in Boston.

'Did you take your temperature this morning?'

Baby gasped, hand to mouth. 'I forgot.'

'Oh, darling! It's the first thing they'll ask.'

'Does it matter?' Baby asked frivolously. 'They'll probably want to make a fresh start. And I've been so good at taking it. Well, quite good, I guess. It's not the nicest part of your toilet.'

'How do you feel now?'

'Fine! I could swim the lake.'

'You sweated last night.'

'It was hot last night in Geneva. Don't say it like that, darling. You sound as if you are accusing me of being naughty.'

'I'm sorry. I don't want you to do anything foolhardy, that's all.'

They changed at Lausanne. Nancy and Baby lunched at the station buffet, which they heard were the best places to eat in Switzerland. Maria-Thйrиse arranged transfer of their dozen pieces of baggage, and was given a franc for a casse-croыte._

The next train was short, without corridors, the first-class compartments lined with shiny black leather. The stubby engine with a conical smokestack, like American ones, panted out billows of black as they climbed among fields with more cows, stopping at every station, some no more than a white hut and a signboard, the waiting passengers a man or two in blue blouse and beret smoking a long, thin, crooked cigar, a woman in a shawl with a milk churn or a crate of live geese.

Pasture turned to rocky grass, the cows were replaced by goats. Baby complained she was cold and had Maria-Thйrиse unwrap the tartan rug. They went through tunnels, quickly pulling the windows tight against the acrid smoke. They looked down the valleys at bright torrents, trickles in summer, now fed by the melting snow and fierce enough to shift the boulders. The train circled the waist of a mountain, its piercing whistle echoing off the rock, and they unexpectedly found themselves in the terminus of Champette.

The station was a sturdily-roofed shed. Across the cobbled square, a four-storey stone building bore in gold letters, _Hotel Grand Palais de Champette._ Nancy decided the grandeur was relative to the village-half the size of Oyster Bay, the setting of their Long Island house. Nancy sent Maria-Thйrиse with the hotel concierge and luggage-cart. She must accompany Baby to her journey's end. A closed carriage with a pair of horses was waiting. A man in gold-braided grey uniform supervised stowing the luggage, settled the sisters on the leather upholstery, and solemnly tucking a rug round them climbed with the driver on the box.

Baby was flushed and tired, but grew livelier as they jogged up a narrow, paved road that twisted through a steep, dark pine forest. 'It's like fairyland,' she exclaimed. 'In fairyland there's always a forest like this, with a turretted castle in the middle containing a beautiful princess.'

Their castle was on a broad ledge of the mountain, a long, thin building facing south. Each of its seven storeys had a dozen tall, shutterless windows looking on deep balconies edged with white-painted iron railings. A broad gravel forecourt ran to a wooden fence guarding the drop to the village below. From the flagpole in the middle, the red cross on a white ground snapped loudly in the mountain breeze.

They stopped under a glass canopy, covering a flight of steps. Sweeping off his cap, the man in uniform opened the plate-glass double-doors which protected from draughts a square, white lobby transfixed by four slender pillars. Electric bulbs hung in clusters of curly brass, the floor was covered with coconut matting. A tall, stooping man in a brown suit broke his conversation with a woman in a yellow pullover, both inspecting the newcomers with solemn curiosity. The lobby smelt of carbolic, with eau de Cologne which disguised it no more successfully than it generally succeeded with human sweat.

From a desk to their left, a young man in a frock coat approached with eager servility.

'Miss Grange?' Nancy noticed a wide, deep scar running from the angle of his jaw and disappearing into his wing collar. 'Welcome to the Clinique Laлnnec.'

He left them in a white-painted room with an expensive tapestry sofa and so many chairs that they indicated its use for waiting. It was dark, looking north over a small garden at the mountainside. A maid in black bombasine with lace apron and starched cap brought a large silver tray with teapot, kettle on spirit-lamp, buttered toast on a dish warmed with hot water, cream gateaux and the delicate spicy biscuits which Voltaire called _pets de nonne,_ nun's farts.

'They must think we're English,' said Nancy.

'What do you suppose this is?' Baby had been looking around inquisitively. She picked from a ledge in the corner a white-enamelled metal cup with a lid like a German tankard. She opened it with her thumb, wrinkling her nose. 'It's got carbolic slopping about. Do you suppose it's to fumigate the atmosphere?'

She lost interest in it, and stared in silence through the window at the Alps, Europe's last savage land, barely scratched by the roads and houses of the busily civilizing Swiss, and which killed with equal contempt intruders seeking amusement, excitement, health, or life.

The disease had struck Baby like a bullet-wound. She was hurrying from her bedroom in their father's house on Fifth Avenue and 68th Street when something warm and salty gushed in her mouth. She spat into her wash-basin a demi-tasse of bright blood, and instantly she knew that she was seriously ill. When the shock and confusion, the family alarm, the urgent traffic of doctors had subsided, Baby treated her sickness with the persevering frivolity which she applied to the world. It was an affectation which she discovered in childhood won her easy attraction, and which she preserved as her defiance against a life which often frightened her. High-spirited friends at her bedside were divided in thinking her extremely brave or extremely stupid.

They left New York in April, in brass and mahogany comfort aboard the French Line's Bretagne, for Le Havre. Their father had impatiently wanted them aboard the brand-new four-funnelled Lusitania, with prototype steam-turbines, which could cross the Atlantic in four and a half days. Even John Grange could not bribe Cunard to divert the liner from her passage to Liverpool-which she continued to ply until torpedoed off Ireland by the U-20 six years later.

The sisters had violent quarrels. Why shouldn't she stay up to dance, play tombola, join in the ship's concert? Baby demanded. When she would spend weeks, perhaps months, in a gloomy Swiss clinic? Baby gave in, but the row sent up her temperature, which crushed Nancy with guilt. They had another quarrel in Paris. They were staying a night at the Crillon, but Baby spat more blood. Nancy summoned the hotel doctor, who called a professor with a Legion d'Honeur rosette in his buttonhole. Baby demanded to return home. 'As you wish, mademoiselle.' The professor shrugged. 'But your family will welcome you as a corpse.'

Baby sulked in bed for three weeks, propped with pillows, gazing through the long windows at the fiacres, motor taxis, touring cars and limousines, the carts, drays and bicycles, the motor-buses which were ousting the three-horse omnibuses, all swirling round the Obelisk from Luxor in the middle of the Place de la Concorde.

A luxury hotel is a better place to be ill than a hospital. The service is to be commanded, not begged. The outside world intrudes instead of being regarded as irrelevant, and the day's hours remain in the possession of the patient. Baby declared the food disgusting, she wanted Quaker Oats, scrambled eggs, tomato ketchup. She had nothing to read, no _Life, McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal._ Nancy had before carried no responsibility weightier than arranging her father's dinner-parties. She now never flinched from managing her sister, however unsisterly it made her feel. The relationship between the sick and those who minister to them is often more complex and infuriating than marriage.

The door of the Clinique Laлnnec's waiting-room opened without a knock. A tall, handsome young man with a thick moustache strode in. He wore a pair of khaki drill trousers, like a British officer in India, a Norfolk jacket of grey tweed, a soft turned-down collar and a floppy, crimson bow tie as favoured by minor poets. Under his arm was a cardboard box-file.

'Miss Janet Grange?' he said to Baby. 'And you must be the sister who's accompanying her across the face of the earth?' he added to Nancy. 'I'm Dr Eliot Beckett. I'm English. _Monsieur le directeur_ will be along once he's finished in the operating theatre.'

The sisters sat straight on the sofa, still in their hats. They had enjoyed the tea. Eliot lazily sat in an armchair opposite, long legs crossed, file on his knee, 'I had a letter from Dr Hull in New York. You coughed blood, Miss Grange. When did the blow fall?'

'A Tuesday morning in the middle of March.' Baby was practised in her story. 'I was going to a final fitting at my dressmaker's. You see, it was to be my twenty-first birthday, we were having a wonderful ball, absolutely everyone in New York was invited.'

She saw the doctor smile. 'I mean, not actually everyone in New York, that would be four million people, wouldn't it? But everyone who mattered in New York. Oh, it was to be a heavenly evening.' Baby's eyes shone, it could have been held tomorrow. 'They'd already started decorating the ballroom, there were to be two orchestras, Viennese and a negro band-_how_ I had to persuade father! The chef from Delmonico's was taking charge of our kitchens…' She stopped. 'The invitations had all gone out,' she ended quietly. 'You can imagine, it was very embarrassing.'

'I congratulate you on your sense of social obligation, Miss Grange. Giving thought to the effect of their illness upon others is an unusual quality among invalids. But why trail to Switzerland? The air is just as pure in the Appalachians as in the Alps.'

Nancy replied, 'My father knew the fame of Switzerland in curing the disease.'

'No expense spared? You father's very rich? I could never ask an English lady that without risking a snubbing like an express hitting the buffers. In America, you're rightly proud to achieve the world's heart's desire. What's your father's business?'

'He is a banker.' Nancy was irritated. The doctor talked as though on their social level.

Eliot uncapped his fountain-pen. For ten minutes he questioned Baby about her health-her weight, her sleep, the life she led, the friends she made. Did she sweat at night? Was she afflicted by catarrhs? Had any of her family suffered from phthisis? It was the first time he had named the disease. 'I heard my grandmother died of a cough.'

'Can you remember what the doctor called it?'

'She had no doctor,' Nancy interrupted. 'She died in a slum on the East Side. She'd been in the United States less than a year.'

'So? All has been amassed by your father's single-minded efforts? That's something deserving of congratulations, quite as much as writing _Huckleberry Finn._ I doubt if your grandmother suffered from consumption. She had recently arrived, and the vigilance of your immigration officers is feared across Europe.'

The door reopened, admitting a tall thin man with scanty fair hair brushed from a domed brow above a pale face of hollows and furrows. He wore a long white coat, buttoned from his wing-collar to the ends of striped trousers above brightly polished black shoes and lavender spats. He bowed, introducing himself as Dr Pasquier, director of the clinic, speaking briskly with a strong French accent.

He led them through a second door, into an identical white room with fearsome furniture-flat leather couch half hidden by a white curtain on a brass rail, a white table with large bottles of coloured fluids and heavy china pots, an enamelled basin on a tripod, a tray with a white cloth bearing small shiny instruments of menacingly probing shape. A nurse was waiting, ugly and fat, in white dress, stockings and shoes, her flowing white cap with a red cross on the forehead. Nancy noticed another lidded cup on its shelf.

Eliot wordlessly offered Nancy a hard wooden chair. Removing her hat, Baby was placed in the centre on a padded leather seat with no arms, its straight narrow back reaching above her head. The nurse inserted a thermometer under her tongue. They waited three minutes. Dr Pasquier pulled a pince-nez dangling from his lapel, its black ribbon hissing from spring-loaded drum.

'Mademoiselle has a fever of thirty-eight degrees,' he announced, as politely as paying a compliment.

'A hundred point four Farenheit,' Eliot translated. 'Even figures speak a different language here in the mountains.'

'What was it this morning, mademoiselle?'

'I didn't take it.' Baby looked guiltily at Nancy.

'Mademoiselle will please remove her upper garments.'

Repetition had made Baby a deft and stylish undresser. Nancy suspected that she revelled in performing the forbidden with impunity, as though an artist's model rather than a doctor's specimen. The embroidered, lace-trimmed white silk camisole slipped from her shoulders, she unlaced and discarded the heavy cotton brassiиre criss-crossed with ribbons, bought with her divided stays from Bloomingdale's. Dr. Pasquier was saying, 'Everyone is liable to be seeded with the bacillus. If the soil is fertile, a tubercule will sprout. Many are lucky, and it falls upon stony ground. Has mademoiselle been obliged to mix with many others, in a school or college? '

Nancy replied, 'Our mother died at my sister's birth. We were schooled at home, and my father thought further education unnecessary.'

'Has your sister performed charity work among the poor?'

'Never.' She glanced at Eliot. She had taken a dislike to this abrasive English doctor. He was writing busily on his box-file.

Hands loose on her lap, thick blonde hair piled high, Baby sat with self-conscious submissiveness. Her skin was white to the wrists, her breasts smooth as lard were decorated with large nipples the colour of fresh salmon. Under the fair hairs of her armpits lay a glistening patch, the tears of her fever.

Dr Pasquier surprised her by taking both hands. 'Ungues adunci,' he murmured. 'Clubbed fingers. You see, mademoiselle? The nails are unusually convex from base to tip, they curve over the finger's end like a parrot's beak. No one noticed it?' Baby shook her head. 'Well, up here we have sharper eyes' for such things than doctors who must treat an assembly of diseases.''

'Will they get better?' asked Baby in alarm. 'Or shall I be deformed for life?'

'They progress with the state of mademoiselle's health,' he answered vaguely. He felt her neck. 'No enlarged glands,' he announced in his complimentary voice.

Eliot stood close beside him. Both gazed solemnly at Baby's chest, the bony bird-cage of whispering lungs and ticking heart, from life to death unnoticed by its possessors as the whirling of the earth's globe beneath their feet, upon which the attention of the Clinique Laлnnec was obsessively fixed and from which its income was drawn.

'The right apex,' said Eliot. 'Diminished movement.'

Baby licked her lips several times. Head cocked, Dr Pasquier lay a finger flat under her collar-bone and percussed. Nancy suddenly saw the elderly Italian in the carefully-kept old suit who came every month to tune their pianos. Dr Pasquier produced an ebonite stethoscope, like a vase for a single rose, listening to Baby's chest with eyebrows raised and lips pursed, as if savouring some excellent wine. Baby could think only of her nails turning into parrots' beaks.

'Thank you.' Dr Pasquier bowed from the hips, as though Baby had just afforded him a dance.

'There is diminished breathing.' He looked rapidly from one sister to the other. 'With rвles-abnormal sounds-not found by your American doctors. But as I mentioned, we have sharper eyes and ears because we hunt but one animal in the jungle of sickness. There is…shall I say, a suspicion…? of a moist patch at the very top of the right lung. We may be wrong. We must examine the sputum she coughs up, to see if the tubercule bacillus lurks therein. We shall look inside with Rцntgen rays-we have every modern convenience here, you see. Meanwhile, mademoiselle is advised to enjoy our hospitality for a while.'

'How long?' Baby still sat half-naked. 'I've just got to be back in New York by the middle of summer.'

'I assure mademoiselle that we are equally eager to lose her company.' Dr Pasquier bowed again. 'That day will be expedited by her not fretting about it. You will please excuse me. Dr Beckett will see you comfortably installed.'