A Question of Guilt

5

'The whole thing's a frightful bore,' said Lady Sarah Pledge. 'Like sitting for one's photograph in Bond Street. When I was presented at Court last year, I seemed to spend the entire summer wearing ball gowns in the afternoon and standing in horribly uncomfortable poses while little men kept disappearing under baize cloths like parrots.'

'I heard it's a witches' cavern, flashes of lightning, everything crackling and sizzling like green wood in the stove.' Baby was zestful-particularly as everyone told her it did not hurt in the slightest. 'Gee, I could do with some coffee,' she complained.

Patients for x-ray went breakfastless, to prevent bubbles in the stomach, Nurse Dove explained.

The pair sat with Nancy in the waiting-room of the x-ray laboratory, next to the patients' writing room with its four identical ormolu-scrolled imitation Louis Quatorze desks, refurbished daily with spotless blotters and thick white stationery. Like all rooms unlet to patients, it faced the profitless north. The last door of the ground floor corridor lay just beyond. It opened on a secret flight of steps to the basement-white-tiled, like the kitchen with its _chef de cuisine_ who could have earned as much in a luxury hotel.

In the basement the bodies were stored, and sometimes anatomized, if Dr Pasquier assessed them more interesting dead than alive and the relatives could be persuaded to agree. The mortuary was reached by a broad corridor running the building's length, equally unknown to the patients. Bodies were brought down the lifts at night on rubber-wheeled trolleys by stealthy porters. Nobody seemed to die in the Clinique Laлnnec, they simply disappeared. There was a death every two or three days.

The x-ray waiting room was cramped. It had red plush chairs and offered worn copies of _Punch _and _Gil Bias, _its starkness brightened by a framed Toulouse-Lautrec poster of Jane Avril shaking a calf at the Jardin de Paris, which Nancy thought vulgar. Opposite waited a pale, thin young Frenchman with an old-fashioned imperial, whose loose blue suit insinuated severe loss of weight. Another spitoon stood on its shelf. It was past ten, the morning after Nancy dined with Eliot. They had arrived early, but appointments were meaningless where time did not exist.

'You're not scared Dr Beckett's going to electrocute me?' Baby looked slyly at her sister.

'What a bitter man he is,' interrupted Lady Sarah, who knew nothing of the dinner. 'Talking to him's like biting an unripe lemon.'

'Surely Englishmen are all scared of showing their emotions?' suggested Nancy charitably.

'I suppose so,' Lady Sarah agreed. 'That would reduce them to appearing like ordinary members of the human race.'

A nurse summoned through an inner door the Frenchman, who returned after fifteen minutes, bowing politely. Next was Lady Sarah, who reappeared smiling. 'Just a quick glance, not a prolonged scrutiny, which means good news.' She was experienced in the Rontgen rays.

Nancy accompanied Baby. The cramped room was filled with grotesque machinery on stout wooden tables, gleaming brass festooned with white dials sprouting black wires. In the middle was a tight-stretched canvas on stout wooden legs, reminding Nancy of a circus acrobat's trampoline. Below was an electric bulb the size of a goldfish bowl, another was suspended above by wires and pulleys. It was a room of perpetual night, the windows blacked with paint, the light from a cluster of electric bulbs in shades like glass tulips. It had the dry, pungent smell which Nancy had noticed gusting from subway stations, making her wonder what it was like down there.

Eliot had shed his Norfolk jacket for a long red apron, and wore heavy gauntlets. 'This useful little invention we owe to William Rцntgen from the Rhineland.' He had the pride of a man showing off a motor-car. 'He was a dreamy sort of fellow, but one November afternoon while experimenting with cathode rays, he noticed they produced a gleam on a sensitive platino-cyanide plate across the room-_with solid objects in between._ You see? A scientist does not need genius, he needs luck.' Eliot's manner gave no indication to Nancy that they had ever met outside the sanatorium. 'This is the latest coil set, with mercury interrupter, which produces excellent snapshots.'

The nurse was helping Baby undo a pink-and-white striped blouse, with blue tie in white Starched collar. Nancy's eyes met a metal cabinet bearing two grey glass plates transilluminated by powerful electric bulbs. 'That's a lady's knee.' Eliot indicated with the finger of his gauntlet. 'You see the flat head of the tibia bone? The great hinge of the femur rolling on it, and the fibula tucked coyly behind like a shy child in a family photo? The mist all round is the flesh which excites any gentleman privileged to set eyes on it. The other disapositive is a pelvis, a female one. A man's is shaped like a pudding-basin, a woman's like a flat washbasin. Another human, perhaps a succession of them, must butt its way through that hole in the middle, to join us in this world with an eagerness which must often seem misplaced.'

Nancy disagreed. 'You may not enjoy every party, Dr Beckett, but it's less fun not being invited.' She thought him unnecessarily sardonic that morning. Perhaps he wanted to prove himself immune to low-cut evening gowns?

Baby was examined by the skiagraph, standing against an oblong glass suspended by pullies, her breasts flattened like two cakes of dough on a cook's board.

'Please excuse my gloves, Miss Grange,' Eliot said waggishly, adjusting her position. 'They prevent Rцntgen ray dermatitis, which would rot my hands away. Even scientific magic can turn against its sorcerer's apprentice. Now breathe as though diving into fifty feet of water. May your sister see your insides?'

The nurse clicked out the electric light, save a glowing ruby in the corner. Sparks and crackles came from the high-tension coil. Nancy found herself looking through Baby's chest. For a second her head swam, she feared she might faint, but Eliot was saying calmly, 'Those twin domes at the bottom are the diaphragm, the shelf that stops the organs of chest and belly becoming mixed like salami. Everyone thought it drew air into the lungs by contracting inwards towards that long shadow of the backbone. Like the iris of your eye, in a strong light. Professor Rцntgen's rays show it moves up and down like a plunger. The most welcome advances in medicine prove that our most strongly-held preconceptions are utterly wrong. Deep breath.'

Nancy was intrigued by the dark shadows of ribs and spine, the trademark of the gravedigger, which no human could observe without the passing qualm of one day becoming reduced to it. In the middle, a dark shape reminded her of a squid, puffing and shrinking regularly among the seaweed, in the oceanographic institute on Long Island. 'There's always something mystical about the human heart,' Eliot remarked. 'Though it's just a lump of muscle, no more the seat of tender emotions than the biceps.' In silence, his gloved finger briefly indicated the top of Baby's right lung, but Nancy could discern nothing. The lights went on, the screen faded.

'It's no worse than a fitting at the dressmakers,' Baby declared. 'Am I nearer to going home?'

'We shall call for a little more of your patience,' Eliot told her kindly. 'But patience is not painful either, is it?'

'I'm sure I'm a total fraud.' She was only half-flippant. 'My temperature's the effect of my highly-strung nervous system. Everybody tells me I'm like that. Don't they Nancy?'

Eliot sent her for a late breakfast. A second one was served in mid-morning, to match the habits of the Germans.

He led Nancy through a second door into another small white room, tiled half-way up. Below windows of frosted glass ran a long wooden laboratory bench, stained with red, blue and green dyes, at the end of a small square sink with a tap like a swan's neck. On the bench stood a brass microscope with two eyepieces, scattered round it three-inch oblongs of glass, sheets of closely-written foolscap and a pencil, as though engrossing work had been interrupted. In the middle of the room, a stout zinc-topped table was crammed with glass-stoppered bottles of light coloured liquids.

Eliot picked from the bench a wet glass x-ray plate. 'Lady Sarah Pledge.' He held it against the light. 'You see, on the left the chest is empty, the lung deliberately collapsed like a tennis-ball. On the right…you observe that cavity? Round and fuzzy-edged, like a full moon through the cloud. She has the disease on both sides. A girl can live without one lung, but not without two.'

Nancy asked, 'Why must this devil take only young lives?'

'Would you like to look upon the devil's face?' He indicated the microscope. 'Focus the fine-adjustment screw. You see those little red rods?'

She drew a sharp breath. 'Thick as a snowstorm.'

_'Mycobacterium tuberculosis,_ the germ which preoccupies us all here. Discovered by Robert Koch, a _Kreisphysicus_ in the Black Forest. A country doctor, bored with rough journeys and loutish patients who turned to the intellectual delights of the microscope. That was seventeen years ago, and there are plenty of doctors who won't believe him. They put it down to anything from heredity to bad drains. It's not everybody who cares to shuffle their fixed ideas like a pack of cards, even to play a more exciting game.'

Taking her elbow, he turned her towards a white bookshelf, on which squat bottles were arranged like the pickles and preserves at a grocer's. 'Now see the devil's handiwork.'

The bottle contained clear fluid with a cone of grey sponge. 'He turns the lung into cheese. A patch dies, suffers caseation, breaks down to a cavity which fills with pus. I could load these shelves a hundred times with specimens like this, if I troubled to cut them from every corpse.' Eliot replaced the bottle. 'The art of treating phthisis is unhappily often the art of treating the dying. Well, that's a sound subject for any doctor to learn.'

'You know who will die and who will not?' asked Nancy, alarmed for Baby.

'Yes, even those who are going to take so long over it they never notice the fact. The end's a rush-when their lungs are as useless as a pair of paper bags, when they're so wasted even the worms will go starving. There's no dignity about death. No more than a dog run down by a cart. You know why your sister's lucky? The bacillus ate into an artery, the red danger-flag was hoisted early. Time will heal her. She should be grateful for that fact, not resent it.'

'When I've been to London, and seen Dr Crippen-'

'Go to London and see the Astronomer Royal, if you like, he'll be as much use.'

'I know you think Dr Crippen's a quack, I know you're mad at me. But my father keeps cabling. He's getting very impatient.'

'May I invite myself again to dinner?'

'No.'

'Why?'

'Because you are taking advantage of me, Dr Beckett. I am here friendless and unoccupied. You press you company on me.'

'I thought you seemed fond of it. But I suppose my company would never do among your set in America.'

She looked away. 'You're being unfair.'

'I'm a realist, like all doctors.' He changed the subject by lifting from the laboratory bench a shallow china dish, half-filled with green lumps in a yellow fluid. 'This has a better chance against phthisis than any tricks from your Dr Crippen.'

'What is it?'

'Mouldy bread. I often ride round the estate with my father, gathering the duke's rents. I get to know the humble families, with whom of course the duke is as unacquainted personally as those of Hottentots. I was fascinated with their folk-remedies. They brew foxglove tea for dropsy, just like the Shropshire country people Dr William Withering was sharp enough to notice a century ago. Now of course that drug's been extracted and prescribed as the heart tonic, digitalis.'

He spoke with warmth. Nancy felt disconcerted that he cared more for his profession than for her, and instantly felt irritated at herself.

'There's an old country rhyme about the foxglove leaf, he told her. _'The rapid pulse it can abate, The hectic flush can moderate._ You see? The cleverest man can always learn from the ignorant.'

Eliot took a pinch of the slimy green bread. 'They put this on septic wounds and boils, centuries before anyone had ever heard of germs. There's something in the mould which kills bacteria, I'm sure of it. Perhaps I can extract the chemical, and invent a wonderful machine to blow it into the cavities? Meanwhile, we must do with fresh air. I'm afraid that I'm keeping you from your sister,' he dismissed her. 'And I have a morning's work to do.'

Before the mirror in her hotel room that evening, Nancy vindicated herself mentally while Maria-Thйrиse silently dressed her hair. In New York, she knew sufficient young men for the companionship of a different one every week. All those Bobbies, Ollies, Charlies, Clarries-everyone's name that season seemed to end with 'ie'-with their automobiles and long fur coats, their games and their hunting, their private jokes and private language composed of the latest slang from the track, the ring, even the underworld. Everyone she knew talked intently about one another, and never of anything else.

Some were vastly rich, some almost penniless. It was impossible to say in New York, when a young man would spend a thousand dollars equally carelessly if it was his last. Most of them were pleasing, or tried hard to please. Any of them would have married her, some had asked. It never crossed Nancy's mind to accept them. Her friends whispered their terror of marriage, of placing themselves overnight in ultimate intimacy with a man who was largely unknown. Nancy was more scared of being bored.

Dr Beckett had an overpowering attraction. He was the sort of man she had always imagined herself attracted to. Indulging seriously in this fancy meant forcing herself through social railings, which kept common people from a life which nobody doubted as the most delightful and fulfilling a young woman might enjoy. Or was she caged, an animal artificially kept alive in a zoo? She concluded she was right to snub Eliot. Her father was already distraught over Baby. It would be too much, coming home engaged to a penniless doctor of no family and few graces, a foreigner who wore atrocious clothes. Then she admitted that Eliot differed from the men she knew as red meat from water-ice.

Her introspection was broken by cries through the tall open windows. She looked across the hotel garden with its neatly-raked gravel and string of red and blue fairylights between the cherry and plum trees. Two men were running towards the path climbing the cliff, waiters in their shirt sleeves, an unthinkably irregular sight in the well-ordered Grand Hotel.

_'C'est un accident, mademoiselle,'_ exclaimed Maria-Thйrиse. Nancy immediately thought of Eliot, which annoyed her again. Taking her wrap, she went down to the garden. Through the back gate came half-a-dozen men with the hotel proprietor, followed by a blue-uniformed gendarme shouting at others to keep their distance. They bore one of the hotel's green shutters, on which lay Lady Sarah Pledge.

Nancy stopped, horrified. The party hurried past. The face was smashed and glistening with blood. The skull was crushed, pale brain exuding over her ear. One arm was twisted like a half-snapped twig. She wore the morning's white dress, she had lost her shoes, the skirt rose above her right knee to show her pink garter, until one of the bearers with sensitive delicacy smoothed it down to her feet.