A Question of Guilt

3

'What a pretty little room.' Baby clasped her hands, eyes shining, 'Nancy, it's like the one we used to share at Oyster Bay when we were kids'.

It was a nasty little room.

It was a white cube, smaller than Nancy's bathroom on Fifth Avenue. The wardrobe was narrow, the white dressing-table had a plain oval mirror, the square washbasin in one corner had stout brass taps and a white slop-pail under it. The bed was in the middle, white-painted iron with a white coverlet, on large wheels with brakes. From the ceiling hung an electric bulb in a shade like a saucer, the floor was covered with more coconut matting. On the bedside commode was a nightlight with a squat candle, and another of the lidded cups. On the capacious balcony stood a long chair with folded blankets, as aboard transatlantic liners. It was one of the sanatorium's best rooms, on the ground floor, looking across the gravel forecourt with the flapping flag. It cost 25 Swiss francs a week.

'But it's freezing,' complained Baby. The shadows of the conifers opposite were pointing long fingers towards the creeping dusk. Nancy laid her hand on the cold radiator.

_'Bitte? Die Zentralheizung ist zu warm.'_ The fat nurse who had accompanied them shook her finger severely. 'Dr Pasquier want good hygiene.'

'What's that smell?' Baby's nose wrinkled.

_'Rдuchern Ameisensдure.' _The nurse waved her hand. 'Formalin.'

They were interrupted by another white-clad nurse, young, sandy, fresh-faced, bustling, chattering cheerfully, 'So here's the new arrivals? I'm Nurse Dove. I'm from London. Thank you, Frдulein,' she dismissed her companion, sweeping up Baby's travelling-coat and hanging it in the wardrobe. 'We'll soon get you settled in comfy. These are my rooms, along this bit of the corridor, but the Frдulein's in charge of everybody. You're from America, aren't you?' She started busily turning down the bed. 'Fancy that. Mind, we've quite a few Americans here. It's a long way to come, but it's wonderful these days with the steamships, isn't it? As I always say, there's no place like Switzerland for getting you back in the pink if you've a touched lung.' She closed the windows and drew the curtains. 'You don't want to get into bed as though in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, do you?'

'Whose is this?' Baby picked from the dressing table a silver-backed brush, long fair hairs choking the bristles, inscribed on the back, _To Louisa from Mummy and Daddy on Her Twenty-first Birthday._

'Oh, dear me, that belonged to the young English lady. I must have missed clearing it out yesterday with the rest of her things.'

'She's gone home to England?' Baby sounded excited.

'I wish I could say as much.' Nurse Dove pounded and smoothed the pillows. 'No, the poor lady died. She was a bad case, right from the start. Dr Beckett couldn't do a thing for her, she just went steadily downhill. Still, that's exceptional, the san does most people the world of good. The room's been thoroughly fumigated with formic acid,' she added consolingly.

'She died?' Baby gasped. 'Here? Yesterday?'

'Folk are born and folk die, that's the way of the world.' Nurse Dove checked the candle in the night-light. 'They're the only two things every soul must go through, and I don't suppose we realise that either has happened to us. What's the point, making your whole life miserable by thinking about your departure from it?'

'Don't leave me here, don't leave me.' Baby started crying, clutching Nancy fiercely.

'You'll be all right, darling, you'll be fine, you're hardly ill at all, are you?'

'There's a lot that has a good cry when they first come in,' said Nurse Dove sympathetically. 'But believe me, in a day or two everything will seem so natural, you'll look upon it as your home from home. After all, there's all of us with nothing else to do except make you better. Put your sister to bed,' she said to Nancy. 'I'll see the porter about the luggage, and order her supper. There's always something nice.'

They sat on the bed, Baby shaking in Nancy's arms, continually muttering, 'Don't leave me, don't leave me…I'm so frightened, so frightened.'

'I know you are, darling.' Nancy stroked her hair. 'You've been so brave, right from the start. Putting on a show, as though it was all some awful inconvenience, like pouring rain when we'd planned a tennis party.'

Baby tried not to think of the golden-haired pale English miss, eaten by disease to a skin-bag of bones. 'You are wonderful, being so strict darling, saving me from myself. Now a pack of strangers have suddenly become the most important persons in my life. Don't you see? The doctors, the nurses, they're above you. Even above father.'

'Screw up your courage, darling.'

'It's flattering to know I have some. That's the mood everyone gets married in, isn't it?' she said, a trace of usual gaiety. 'They live happily ever after, only because they don't care losing their own good opinion of their bravery.'

Nurse Dove entered with the alligator dressing case.

'Not getting undressed yet?' She spoke as to a wayward child. 'You have brought a lot of luggage, but everybody does. It'll have to go in the storeroom, I'm afraid. What pretty things you've got.' She held up Baby's nightdress with the air of an experienced shopgirl at the counter.

'Go now, Nancy,' Baby commanded. 'I'm feeling stronger. I might not in a little while.'

The corridor outside was empty. Electric bulbs in dish-like shades supplemented the fading light. Nancy felt relieved and guilty. As the door of the white room shut, the sisters' lives were divided. She had abandoned to professionals the responsibility and irksomeness of controlling a capricious patient on a tiresome journey. Now she faced an indefinite stay in a remote Swiss hotel with no company except an ill-tempered lady's maid, an existence to which she had afforded neither planning nor even speculation.

Nancy stopped. Behind another white door, somebody barely two yards away started coughing. It was a cough she had never heard before. Repeated but not paroxysmal, long and rumbling, a wet, sticky uncomplaining cough, which made her imagine a sack emptied of squashed and rotten potatoes. It lasted near a quarter of a minute before ending in a sigh, a hissing intake of breath, then the sharp noise of a metal closing on metal, which puzzled her. Nancy shivered. Gripping her skirt, she hurried along the corridor.

A slim woman in a long black serge skirt and white blouse was leaving the examination room. Her face was a crimson scaly mask, the tip of her nose blunted like a boxer's, her eyelids drawn down to show their gleaming pink lining, tightly stretched skin tugging her lips and revealing her gums in a smile as gruesome as a skeleton's.

Eliot was seeing the patient out. 'Miss Grange, is your sister comfortable? You're leaving for your hotel? I'll order the carriage.'

He sat Nancy on the hard chair, took the ebonite-handled telephone from its cradle, whirred the handle of the wooden box beneath, and spoke briefly in French.

'Unhappily, all three of the clinic's carriages are at the station or the village, so you must wait a while.' Eliot leant with his back to the radiator, hands clasped over beige shirt-front. He seemed slightly more affable.

'That poor woman has the disease in her face?' Nancy asked.

'Yes, you are right. The disease. It's the only one existing up here. The guests all have it, the servants have all shaken it off. Did you notice the scar on the receptionist's neck? The cunning tubercule bacillus has as many manifestations as the Devil. It can swell the neck glands like a string of blind boils. It can inflame the joints like rheumatism and gout, or hoarsen the voice like an everlasting cold. She had _lupus vulgarus.'_ He nodded towards the door. 'Though some still dispute it, I reckon it a _tuberculosis cutis.'_

'Why was my sister given a room where a woman had just died?' Nancy demanded.

'There was no other. The sanatorium is always full. To get a bed is as great a privilege as in the most fashionable hotel.'

'There was no need that she should have known about it.'

Eliot shrugged. 'Less need to deceive her. She would have learned from another patient by breakfast. They think nothing of it, and soon neither will she. She'll make a joke of it. They develop the humour of the cannon's mouth. Why not? They are all soldiers fighting the same enemy-the tubercule bacillus. The patients give battle, not us. We are powerless. We can only provide the most promising battlefield and lay the most intelligent strategy.'

Nancy began to complain indignantly, 'But my sister is here for treatment-'

'Treatment? There is only one treatment for phthisis.' He threw open the long window. 'Fresh air. That's what your father is paying for. Paying thousands of dollars for air. If he sat and thought about it, he'd fancy himself mad or us brazen swindlers.'

'Dr Beckett, your attitude is unattractive in a medical man, to whose care is committed a young lady with a disease which her family know-quite as well as you do-as dangerous to her life.'

Eliot looked disconcerted. 'I'm sorry to give that impression,' he said with unexpected awkwardness. 'Were I not driven by compassion for those who are sick, and for those who must bear with them, do you imagine I should be here?'

She was sitting straight, legs crossed under her long skirt, showing her ankles. Eliot seemed to regard her for the first time as an object worth his interest. 'I could instead be turning guineas from the imaginary illnesses of London society ladies and the very real excesses of London gentlemen. Though I pity them too, but in a different way.'

'How long must my sister be up here? The rest of the summer? The rest of the year?'

'We never mention time in the mountains. It does not exist. The length of our patient's sentence means nothing, compared to their escaping as cured. Pining over the calendar puts up the temperature, and is _streng verboten.'_

'Doing nothing but breathing the air?' asked Nancy tartly.

'They live in it, night and day. Sleeping tucked-up on the balcony, covered with rubber sheets against the rain, guarded by iron screens from the winds. Miss Grange will be allowed exercise in strict moderation. No indulgence in exciting games and recreations, which includes the most popular game of all, _les affaires de coeur._ Our patients are thrown on each other's company as though aboard a liner at sea, and fever fires the passions like sea breezes. Are you shocked?'

'That patients remain human? Hardly.'

'Perhaps the urge to flirt is an expression of _spes pthisica,'_ Eliot reflected. 'The strange hope which our patients never lose. If I could but rid myself of this cough, they say, I should be healthy enough to climb the Matterhorn or swim the English Channel. 'The consumption is a flattering disease, cozening men into hope of long life at the last gasp.' An English clergyman called Thomas Fuller noticed that, almost three hundred years ago.'

'My sister is hopeful.'

'Hers is not displaced. She is a slight case. But she must surrender herself to us, as utterly as a novice to her faith.'

'Surely there's some drug to speed her release?'

'Creosote? Guaiacol wafers? Koch's tuberculin, the very hair of the deadly dog?' Eliot recited scathingly. 'I've tried tuberculin, but it grows the bacilli like a wasps' nest in the sunshine.'

She looked at him steadily. 'There is a drug which will cure phthisis, Dr Beckett.'

'It's name would be a priceless extension of my education.'

'Do you know of Munyon's Homoeopathic Remedies, of New York?' Eliot shook his head violently. 'It's a company on 6th Avenue. It does business all over the world. Among my father's interests is the manufacture of medicines. After my sister fell ill, he heard from Professor Munyon that their general manager-a homoeopathic physician, trained in Michigan-had discovered a cure for phthisis.'

'What's his name?'

'Dr Crippen. For the past five years, he's been representing the firm in London. I intend travelling there as soon as my sister is settled, to beg a sample off him. My father says the formula is secret, lest it be stolen by a rival firm before plans are ripe to sell it. I know the name-Tuberculozyne.'

Eliot responded to this revelation only by saying, 'The carriage must be back now.'

Nancy remembered her coat in the waiting-room. She reached for the lidded cup on its ledge, asking its use.

'For spit.' Eliot opened it. Inside, now swum in the fluid three round blobs like small oysters. Nancy's stomach turned over. 'The nummular sputum of phthisis,' he explained. 'Round and flat, like coins. If the spit dries on the floor or a handkerchief, the bacilli waft away and look for another little nook of lung to settle into. It's the first rule up here, everyone spits into disinfectant. Doing otherwise is a social error far worse than eating peas off your knife. For patients who go out, or whose offerings we value for a lengthy look, we provide a neat pocket spitoon in blue glass with a screw cap.'

The gravel was empty. The sky was almost dark. Lights burned behind the balconies. 'Come and see the view,' Eliot invited unceremoneously.

From the white fence, an escarpment fell two hundred feet to the village of Champette.

'We sell the purest sort of air,' he told her, 'better than those nests of sanitoria at St Moritz or Arosa or Davos, half way to Heaven already. We're under fifteen hundred metres, where the atmosphere is more humid and the construction costs less. The clinic is owned by a joint stock company, you know, quoted on the Zurich stock exchange. Phthisis is good business.' Nancy shivered in her overcoat. Eliot was apparently impervious to the night chill. 'I think sanatoria above the tree-line, beside the regions of eternal snow, are frightening. They have to send the corpses down by sled…but you'd rather not speak of such things.'

'Maybe I'll acquire your patients' hardihood, and joke about it?'

'Troops under fire prefer to scoff than tremble. Where are you staying, Miss Grange?'

'The Grand.' Nancy tried distinguishing its lights below. 'What's it like?'

'I've never entered it, in twelve months. I catch the dance music ascending sometimes-the valleys are enormous ear-trumpets, you can hear the cow-bells from the pasturage far down. Such a Swiss sound, as dismal as bell-buoys on rocks. I would not care for the company the hotel provided.'

'Then why come to practise here, Dr Beckett? Your patients are all rich. And the company of rich people seems to affect you like that of Corsican brigands.'

'I'm learning about tuberculosis on the rich, that I might apply my knowledge to the poor,' he answered simply. 'The labouring classes are the worst sufferers, and unfortunately can't cure themselves by seeking a change of climate. They lie in bed in their only room, spitting their germs over the family which shares it, like a cloud of deadly gas. Every single workman who develops phthisis probably gives it to a dozen more. That's not just tragic. It's uneconomical. Which should strike forcibly such a man as your father.'

'Your tenderness towards the poor is admirable, Dr Beckett. Your envy of the rich is not.'

Her remark seemed to jolt him. 'The only people I envy are those cleverer than myself. I'm unlike you. I know both rich and poor. I'm sorry for the rich. They live an uninteresting, artificial life, because they are more frightened of the real world even than of losing their money.'

'Might I suggest that you are too self-opinionated, Dr Beckett? An intelligent rich girl suffers equally with a poor one, that she cannot go to college and learn about the real world.'

Eliot smiled. 'Have I misjudged you, Miss Grange? I hope during your enforced stay you will afford me opportunity to rectify my mistake.'

They heard the jingle of the coach, its lights flickering through the trees before it crunched on the gravel.

'When may I visit my sister?'

'Whenever you wish. We'll keep her in bed for a bit, until we see what tricks her temperature's playing. Remember, the disease is catching. Don't stand in the way of her cough.'

'Why don't you catch it?'

'We and the nurses seem immune. Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose.' He added off-handedly, 'I finish here with the end of summer. I've work waiting in London. What was the name of that American doctor?'

'Dr Crippen.'

'I could look him up for you. He's probably a quack. Your rushing to England would be worse than a fool's errand. It would raise your sister's hopes cruelly.'

Nancy had stepped into the coach. Eliot shut the door and turned to the sanatorium entrance, without glancing back.