A Question of Guilt

4

Eliot was a shy young man. Reared among the rich but never of them, he had no graces to soften his resentment when thrust among them socially. The patients were easy. He had the bluff, kindly, infinitely confident and uncontradictable manner which carried the English doctor into the heart of the English family, in a nation which venerated commonsense as much as it distrusted cleverness. Their relatives he generally found boring and petulant. Nancy intrigued him. She was neither pretentious nor patronizing. She answered him back with intelligence instead of arrogance. But he distrusted his ability for small talk, he knew the likelihood of seeming rude and provoking anger. He avoided her. Rich people anyway frightened him. He had viewed too intimately their power.

When the July sun glared from the gravel forecourt and shortened the shadow of the flagpole, Baby was allowed up for lunch.

The dining-room shared the first upstairs floor with the patients' lounge, which had a grand piano, a gramophone with a horn, crettone-covered furniture and scattered small tables with magazines in half-a-dozen languages. They ate between white walls on white chairs off linen fresh every meal. Even the food seemed white-minced chicken, cream sauces, potato soup, Gruyere cheese, served by maids in white dresses whose scarred neck or limp displayed their own escape from the disease which would eventually kill many of their patrons.

Baby's day repeated itself to the minute. The monotony was deliberate. Energy of body and mind were preserved for the cure. At eight, Nurse Dove took her temperature. The morning she divided between novels from the sanatorium library and laboriously creating a spray of red roses on an embroidery frame-the clinic employed a sharp-nosed Parisienne to instruct their lady patients, the gentlemen enjoyed instead fifteen minutes' pounding from a Swedish masseur. There was an English breakfast and an English tea, with hot toast and Swiss cherry jam. On Sundays, her dinner-tray was decorated with a vase of bright wild flowers, which the previous week she was mystified to find replaced by the Stars and Stripes. It was July the Fourth, and all national days were monitored by _la direction,_ as all birthdays were marked by a huge cream cake and a bottle of champagne with the clinic's compliments.

'I've still got _rвles _at my apex, but they don't signify much,' Baby told Nancy brightly. 'And dullness of my infraclavicular fossa, here.'

She tapped below her right collar-bone. She wore a white silk blouse and a white flannel skirt secured with huge gold safety-pins, white stockings and white kid boots. A broad-brimmed straw hat was secured on her piled fair hair with a wide ribbon of Cambridge blue. She wore the same outfit the year before, for tennis parties at Oyster Bay.

She was on the steamer chair with an open parasol, which she twirled gently over her shoulder. The balcony had a parquet floor and a white ceiling with 62 squares boxing a leaf design, which she counted everlastingly. It was afternoon rest time for everyone in the sanatorium.

'And I've cog-wheel respiration,' Baby continued. 'Can you imagine? Dr Becket says it sounds like a cogwheel jerking round, right there in my chest. But no bronchial breathing,' she ended proudly. 'And that's awfully good, you know.'

'You are becoming well educated.' Nancy smiled, sitting on a chair beside her.

'Oh, we all know quite as much as the doctors. And my temperature this morning was nearly normal! Wonderful, isn't it? Everyone's crazy about their temperature. The thermometer's our clock, isn't it? It measures how much longer we've got to spend up here.'

'I had a cable from papa this morning.' Mails were disregarded. Every morning, Nancy handed a telegram to the guard of the departing train, which the Geneva post office transmitted to New York to arrive on her father's breakfast table. She tried hard to vary her messages, generally as unexcitingly repetitive as military communiquйs from a long-drawn siege. 'He's making the trip.'

'The angel! When?'

'When he can. You know how it is with Papa.'

'Oh, business!' Baby wrinkled her nose. 'Sometimes I wonder if he thinks we're just a part of it. Look at my nails! Aren't they awful? Real parrots' beaks, as Dr Pasquier said. I'm going to send for the best manicurist in New York the moment I step off the boat.'

Loud knocking came on Baby's left. The balconies were divided by screens of folding white-painted iron panels, six feet high with a decorative scroll on the top. 'Darling, can I visit?' said a girl's eager voice.

Baby whispered, 'Lady Sarah Pledge. She's the daughter of an earl, and the only thing she's crazy about in the whole world is fox-hunting. She's moved into the next room. We're already as close as an Indian hug. Oh, sure,' she called. 'My sister's here.'

Lady Sarah pushed aside the screen. She was Baby's age, unnaturally slender, her eyes large and grey, her skin waxy like a lily petal. She wore a cream silk blouse and a crimson-striped cotton skirt.

'She's got a pneumothorax,' Baby introduced her.

'They pump air into one's chest through a needle,' Lady Sarah explained light-heartedly. 'It collapses down one's lung to a little lump, so's it can heal better. You need only one lung to breathe, you know. My room still stinks of that fumigating stuff.' She added to Nancy, 'The Russian count snuffed it two days ago. Absolutely torrential haemorrhage, according to Nurse Dove, though she does so exaggerate in her relish about such things.'

Nancy felt her stomach tighten. It was the Russian she heard coughing the day they arrived. She could not assume the inmates' easygoing mockery of death. For that, death must intrude into every day's action and thought. It was the relationship of marriage.

'I've news for you, old thing,' Lady Sarah continued. 'They're going to see through us. The Rцntgen rays.' Baby was excited. She was always eager for a new experience, and anything breaking the sanatorium's monotony was a gala. 'I heard from Nurse Dove. It's quite weird down there, one sees the diapositives with one's skeleton looking like something out of a ghost story.'

She broke off, coughing, her sharp shoulders shaking, her skin taking a tinge of blue. She covered her mouth with her hands, turning her back on the others in obeyance of sanatorium etiquette. As the paroxysm subsided, she took from her skirt pocket a round blue bottle, into which she spat slimy green mucus.

'What a bore,' she wheezed. It was the condemnation of the English for any annoyance, from a late train to a mortal illness.

Nurse Dove shortly fussed Baby back to bed. Cards, recitals, amateur concerts in the lounge filled the evenings, but Baby had to wait like a child impatient to stay up for adult enjoyments. That evening was hot, the red cross flag dangling lifeless from the masthead. The carriage was waiting on the gravel, a white linen cover to cool the roof, the horse in a straw hat with holes for its ears. At the foot of the steps, Dr Beckett in his tweed jacket and poet's tie was chatting to the blue-bloused driver.

'I gather my sister is to be examined by the Rцntgen rays?' said Nancy.

'Yes. We shall look inside to see what's going on, rather than imagining it from tapping and listening. Why should physicians be blind men?'

'Are the rays dangerous?'

'Not in the right hands.'

'Do you expect to find anything disconcerting?'

'If I knew what I should see, it would not be worth the trouble of the examination.' The concierge opened the carriage door. Eliot added, 'You must find life at Champette dreadfully tedious.'

'Not at all. I'm learning French. My maid helps with the pronunciation, though I suspect she has a vile Parisien accent. I'm also learning watercolouring from the wife of a British major. Every Monday, I go into Lausanne. All excitements in life are relative, aren't they?'

'You can't spend all your time swotting French.'

'I am blessed with plenty of books, and plenty of friends who must be written to.'

'Are you making new ones?'

'I prefer not making friends under duress.'

'I'll come and dine with you tomorrow night.' Nancy looked shocked, 'I'll pay my own bill, naturally.'

'You may invite yourself to dine in the hotel restaurant, Dr Beckett, but not in my company.'

'Oh, come,' he disposed of the objection. 'If you saw me sitting on one side of the room with my inevitable _potage de legumes,_ you'd invite me to join you, surely? I shall be there at eight.'

He helped her into the carriage, shut the door and strode into the building.

Nancy was outraged. No man in New York dared break into her company, no more than into her father's banks. She was puzzled. She had heard that all Englishmen were desperately punctillious, so terrified of 'doing the wrong thing', even if it was wearing the wrong hat.

The carriage had not rattled down the winding road before she was smiling at Eliot's self-invitation. He was as gauche as a raw college boy, but she was bored, and she was lonely. Anyway, Champette was a social desert island where no civilized rules applied.

She instructed Maria-Thйrиse to press her pink chiffon gown, not worn since leaving New York. For a woman to dress up without a man to impress was like cooking a splendid dinner to eat herself. Most of her jewellery was in New York. Nancy selected the next evening from her crocodile jewel-case a triple string of pearls which had cost twenty thousand dollars, and two single black pearl ear-rings worth twelve hundred and fifty. She came downstairs slowly, one white gloved hand gathering her skirt, the other gently waving her grey ostrich-feather fan.

In the hall were two English couples-a major and a solicitor with pallid, scrawny wives who Nancy found indistinguishable-just returned with wild flowers from walking. There was the jolly family from Lyons on whom she practised her French, and the solemn one from Frankfurt who practiced their English to her. They stared like the urchins on the New York sidewalks watching the gorgeous rich gather for a ball. The frock-coated receptionist craned across his counter. The concierge amid a pile of luggage involuntarily whipped off his cap. She wondered if Dr Beckett would be wearing his usual shooting-jacket.

Eliot appeared in a long black cape like a cavalry officer's, its deep collar secured by a chain. He handed it to the concierge with a wide-brimmed velour hat and a small square lantern. He wore a dinner jacket of unmatchable London cut, diamond studs in his shirt front, his tie as symmetrical as a butterfly. She was amused at his startled look. The dress was cut low across her bosom, in the latest American fashion.

'May I congratulate you on your gown, Miss Grange? It must quite overawe this nation of _petits bourgeois,_ as if the snow had miraculously melted and revealed the magnificent peak of the Matterhorn.'

'I imagined you looked at a chest with the emotions of a watchmaker at a watch, Dr Beckett.'

'Even one of that unimaginative profession is moved by a Fabergй clock. Is this the Gibson Girl silhouette we read is all the rage in America?'

'I thought everyone knew that the Outdoor Girl had replaced the Gibson Girl?' she corrected him. 'Because of the automobile, you know. Women have taken to driving them. We apply freshly cut cucumber to soothe the suntan and smooth the dreaded automobile wrinkles. But really, Dr Beckett-would my dress shock a nation which stands idly by while fathers shoot apples off their son's heads?'

'Perhaps only the expense would. Which I suppose is necessary, to keep up with The Four Hundred'?'

'Only vulgar people talk about "The Four Hundred", Dr Beckett. It was nothing but the capacity of Mrs Astor's ballroom. Are you retaining your carriage?'

'I walked. It's a splendid evening. I always take the path down the cliff to the village. They've marked the stones at every turn with white paint. I've brought an acetylene, so I shan't break my neck in the dark.'

Two white-jacketed commis threw open the glass doors of the hotel restaurant.

'I hear that in American society, a lady considers a dress allowance of five thousand dollars a year as reducing her to rags?' Eliot resumed. 'All the families in Champette could be kept comfortably on that. And I hear that two hundred million dollars worth of diamonds are suspended from the necks, bosoms and stomachs of the New York females. You could run the whole of Switzerland on that. I assume your father is a millionaire?'

'Oh, there's seven thousand millionaires in America, Dr Beckett. There are millionaires, then there are multimillionaires, and then Pittsburg millionaires.'

They sat at a corner table. Eliot was amused to notice everyone forget their food to stare at them. They seemed a rich and smart young couple, more likely to be encountered at some fashionable hotel on the Quai du Mont-Blanc in Geneva.

'Isn't the definition of a millionaire the ability to live off the income of your income?' Eliot asked.

'In New York, it is only spending the income of a million dollars, whether you have either. Do you know, the Granges don't even possess a two-ton bath-tub carved from solid marble, like the Astors?'

'How much wiser to watch the smart set outdoing each other with displays of wealth. That only ruins the millionaires and makes millionaires of the tradesmen.'

'It doesn't prevent my father being villified in the newspapers as a ruthless man.'

'That can be a compliment. It takes the same resolution to throw a man into a river as to leap in and pull him out of it. Why did you allow me to intrude on you tonight?'

'Surely it's a social distinction to sit at table with a well-born Englishman? In New York, noblemen charge to provide that honour for eager hostesses.'

'Only the Russian aristocracy do. And I'm not well-born. You're looking at my dress-studs? A coming-of-age gift from the Duke of Lincoln. Have you admired my clothes? Cut by the Duke's tailor in Savile Row, half-price. To provide a young man with impressive studs and a good tailor shows the grasp on essentials which brought the Duke's family its fortune. My father is the Duke's agent, his man of business, attending to his houses and estates. I was brought up staring through the plate glass dividing one station of life from another. I've seen balls with ladies wearing dresses far richer than yours, one woman made beautiful by fifty miserable, starving, ugly people. I've seen good food transformed into diverting shapes and pretty colours by slaving cooks. I've seen cosseted pheasants beaten into the air by half-starved farm-labourers to be shot. I've seen the cigars, the champagne, the waste. My father saved every penny that I might escape.'

'And a spy never forgives his enemies?'

'The waiter is becoming impatient,' said Eliot, taking the menu.

'You're very fluent in French,' she said admiringly, as he ordered.

'I try not to be. Good linguists are disreputable in England, where only amateurism is trustworthy. We believe, like Aristotle, that a gentleman should be able to play the flute-but not too well.'

'Don't Englishwomen speak French?'

'To their milliners.' He ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon 1900 without bothering to take the wine list from the somelier.

'Why is it called the Clinique Laлnnec?' It had puzzled her since leaving New York.' Is there a Dr Laлnnec?'

'Dr Rene Theopile Hyacinthe Laлnnec,' he explained. 'He invented the stethoscope. He rolled up a quire of paper and listened to the patient's chest. Which saved embarrassment, applying his ear to the breastbones of plump young gentlewomen, and his hair from lice in hospital. He died a hundred years ago. From phthisis.'

'Why can't my sister have a pneumothorax, like Lady Pledge?'

'Her case is not suitable.'

The waiter served their _consommй а la Cйlestine,_ clear soup with scraps of savoury pancake.

'Is there no operation which might allow her to go home the earlier?'

'There's thoracoplasty, collapsing the chest by snipping away the cage of ribs. It's the invention of George Fowler, an American surgeon. I should have needed several months under his tuition before risking performing it. As he died three years ago, that's impossible. '

'Yet you despise the remedy invented by Dr Crippen?' she accused him.

'If it works, I should buy a vat of it. In London, I intend achieving my two ambitions. First, to start a free clinic,' he revealed. 'Fashionable doctors learn their medicine on the poor in hospitals, and expend the knowledge on the rich. I'm reversing the process. Secondly, I'm standing for Parliament. Candidate for Holloway, in London. Labour, of course. There's bound to be an election soon. Our Mr Asquith's ministry has been creaking far too long.'

'Wouldn't you be a little young as a member of Parliament, Dr Beckett?'

'Mr Pitt was a younger one.'

'My father believes that the only value of politicians is the amount necessary to bribe them.'

Eliot fell silent. He was prouder than of his degrees of his selection by a committee mostly of railwaymen and the slaughtermen from the Metropolitan Cattle Market in north London.

He had applauded since schooldays a line from the forgotten Victorian author, Anthony Trollope-'It is the highest and most legitimate pride of an Englishman to have the letters M P written after his name.' He was disappointed the disclosure left Nancy undazzled. His bristliness was a frightened hedgehog's. He wondered if she despised him, as common.

'I'm going to London, and I'm going to find Dr Crippen,' Nancy resumed. 'I must do all I can for my sister.'

'You've already done much. So irresponsible a patient wouldn't have survived the journey without your watchfulness.'

'I know you take me for a woman who satisfies her conscience by dropping a dime every year into the Salvation Army Christmas Kettle. But you know who I admire? Your Miss Florence Nightingale.'

'You could pay a call when you're seeking Dr Crippen,' Eliot suggested lightly. 'She's ninety, but still has people to tea.'

'Hers is a life I would trade for mine.'

'How singularly unfortunate for you, that the United States is not at the moment engaged in a war.'

'You don't take me seriously.'

'I hope you're not cross?'

'I refuse to be. Men never take women seriously. Because men wear vanity as dogs fur. Which makes life less bothersome, because we get exactly what we want by stroking it.'

The five-piece hotel orchestra struck up _Wine, Women and Song._ They could barely hear each other across the table. They talked about trivial things. Both were becoming exhausted trying to impress the other.