The last Sunday in September was warm. The coals sat on their sticks and paper unlit in the well-blacked grate. A small iron kettle boiled on a gas-ring in the hearth. A brown teapot with a broken spout, a pair of large white cups and the milk-bottle, stood on a dented tin tray thrust among papers and books strewn across a crimson chenille cloth on the table. A loud-ticking, circular metal alarm clock, between a pair of pied Staffordshire spaniels on the narrow iron mantelpiece, indicated four o'clock.
The room had the easygoing student air of a man with no one to impress. A black iron bed with a bright patchwork quilt stood against one wall, a worn horsehair sofa faced a chintz-covered, wing-backed armchair across a bearskin hearth rug. The bookcase was inadequate, its contents spilling haphazardly on the floor. The concession to decoration was a tawny picture, which a close look interpreted as barges in the Thames estuary at sunrise.
The pair of tall first-floor windows looked on an ill-cut lawn with rusty croquet-hoops, surrounded by thick laurels, berberis and box. The house was one of the squat grey-brick villas, which with turretted and battlemented Gothic dwellings lined the Camden Road. Outside the everlasting clank of electric trams merged with the nightly bellowing and baaing from the vast Metropolitan Cattle Market across the railway lines.
Nancy sat on the sofa in a plain charcoal dress, intently darning Eliot's sock with a wooden mushroom.
'Would you like a slice of Dundee cake? Fresh yesterday from the Aerated Bread Company.'
'Fine.'
Eliot fetched a basin of lump sugar from a tall cupboard containing files, more books, shoes, ties and spare bedding. 'Another tune?'
'I guess my appetite's sated for Offenbach, Strauss and-may I say so?-your Sir Arthur Sullivan. Why not play yourself?'
'The piano is to me an instrument as mysterious as the ouija board,' he apologised. 'I simply enjoy watching the rippling keys as the music unwinds.'
The pianola stood in the corner, the rolls which Eliot hired from the Music Roll Exchange in Oxford Street shared the cupboard. 'My conscience disallows keeping a servant, but I've no objection to hiring a ghost as my musical valet. By the way, there's a couple of fellows coming. Did I mention it?'
Nancy looked up sharply from her darning. 'I don't want to be found here.'
'They find more shocking things in the world to worry them than a chap alone with a girl.'
She put down the sock. 'Do you know the only real disagreeableness of revolutionaries? To be entirely insensitive about the feelings of others.'
Eliot grinned. 'I'm sorry, my dear. But honestly, they'll take no more notice of you than of Emma.'
She was the maid-of-all-work, with crumpled stockings and lank hair, raised in an orphanage. Eliot thought her barely fit to look on the outside of the asylum door. The only other occupant of No 502 Camden Road was Frau Ebert, the German housekeeper. When Nancy asked after the householder, Eliot seemed uneasy and explained that Herr Lamsdorff was a bachelor of utmost respectability from Hamburg, who had paid London the compliment of living there, but was obliged to be often abroad on his business as furrier.
'Don't go,' he implored. 'They're nothing to be frightened of. And we've so little time.'
Nancy was returning to Switzerland the following Wednesday. She was staying only two weeks instead of four. Baby's daily cable to the Savoy the previous Friday had complained of 'feeling a bit cheap.' Nancy at once wired Dr Pasquier. He replied that the temperature was a little raised. There was no cause for concern. Miss Grange was obviously fretting for her sister.
'But I'll be back in London, dearest, sure I will, once Baby's settled,' Nancy promised, as Eliot poured kettle into pot.
He made no reply. He knew the fragility of their friendship. It was like the solid ice bridges which formed across Swiss gullies in winter, and in summer might never have been there.
To Nancy, it was a freakish, unthinkable adventure. Once started, she gave herself to making the most of it. They spent all day and much of the night in each other's company-she insisted primly on leaving for the Savoy at midnight, though he assured her the hotel was worldly enough not to imagine the world full of Cinderellas. Eliot showed her with equal pride Buckingham Palace, St Paul's, and his own ancient hospital of St Bartholomew's in Smithfield. At the Tate Gallery, he had objected angrily to Luke Fildes' _The Doctor._ 'Grossly sentimental,' he exclaimed. 'Look at that miserable working-class couple, cowed while the magician meditates over their unconscious child-they couldn't even afford a bed for the poor thing. Medical care is as much a _right_ of the people as pure drinking water. _That_ doctor clearly hasn't the slightest notion of what's wrong with his patient, anyway.'
Nancy thought the painting lifelike and touching. They did not take tea with Miss Nightingale, but stared across the street at her house in Mayfair.
Nancy found Eliot hardly a pleasure-going young man. He took her to Pinero's Mid-Channel at the St James's Theatre, in the cheap pit when she was accustomed to the front stalls. They had 'dinner from the joint' at small, busy restaurants for eightpence, or tried Appendrodt's German eating-houses, or Slater's tea rooms, or splashed a florin on a dozen oysters at Sweeting's in Cheapside. That Nancy expected anything but a life of unexciting domesticity with him seemed beyond Eliot's contemplation. That she had never been happier, she realised then and for the rest of her life.
'Who exactly are these people coming?' She took her cup of tea. She did not care for tea, but he showed no inclination to buy coffee.
'Political friends of mine. But don't expect wild-eyed men in kulak blouses with whiskers like a burst horsehair sofa and a bomb in their attachй cases. Mr Wince would pass for a prosperous and earnestly churchgoing cheesemonger. Mr Ruston was born upper-middle-class and will die upper-middle-class, a succession as certain in this country as the Crown passing from father to son.'
He sat at the table, stirring his tea, long legs stretched out. 'Fellows like Ruston embrace the proletariat like a wild gipsy mistress. They become horribly bloodthirsty. For their principles, they'd cut their mother's throat or dynamite their grandchildren's nursery. But they'd die before blowing on their tea or drinking their soup from the tip of the spoon. Ruston keeps a cook and would be deeply affronted if anyone hesitated in accepting his cheque. He'd never contemplate taking the five-shilling seaside excursion or living off bread-and-jam. Such people become equally boring to the class they own and the class they ape.'
Nancy smiled. 'You draw an unflattering self-portrait.'
Eliot was surprised. 'I don't find the middle-class distasteful. No more than I find the patient distasteful, rather than his disease. I operate on society intellectually, as I operate on a case. I wouldn't rush the barricades, no more than cut my throat if my patient failed to recover. Damn-!' Gesturing with political fervour, he spilt his tea over his papers. Mopping with a yellow silk handkerchief, he consoled himself, 'The chapter needed rewriting, anyway.'
'Why won't you ever let me read your book?' she complained.
'Wait. A woman who would cuddle a new-born baby would be disgusted by the sight of it being formed in the womb. You're privileged to learn my views from my conversation,' he told her blandly. 'The State has the same duty towards the health of its people as parents towards their infants. If I call my book _The Health of Nations,_ I hope to startle people out of their prejudices like Adam Smith. Though as usual, they'll draw them over their heads like cowls.'
The doorbell jangled. Emma showed up a tall, hollow-cheeked, fair-haired unsmiling man younger than Eliot, in a brown tweed suit with a yellow waistcoat, like a stockbroker off to the races. The other was short and fat, twenty years older, in shiny blue serge, with a pink face, sparse hair, a clipped moustache and steel-rimmed glasses askew a snouty nose. The young man had a fat manilla envelope and an Irish tweed hat, both of which he tossed on the table with an unconcern indicating familiarity with the room. Young Ruston glared aggressively at Nancy. Wince seemed amused. She continued darning the sock. 'Miss Grange is from America,' Eliot introduced her. The name meant nothing to either visitor. 'She is the soul of discretion.'
Both refused tea, sitting beside Nancy on the sofa. Ruston talked most, in a stockbroker's voice. Wince's was high-pitched, and he dropped his aitches. Both men stole glances at her.
'You couldn't have returned at a better moment,' Ruston told Eliot earnestly. 'You must have followed from the London papers the rough ride of Lloyd George's budget? He unveiled it last April, while the country shook in its shoes. From the outrage of the upper class over the new land tax, you'd imagine our fiery little Welshman about to plunder the land like Hengist and Horsa in one.'
'Got ter pay for the navy,' piped Wince mockingly. 'The floating bulwark o' the island, eh? A keel for a keel, one in the eye for the Kaiser.'
'But the House of Lords is set to reject the budget?' Eliot stood on the bearskin, hands in pockets, looking solemn.
'Exactly what Lloyd George wants,' Ruston told him. 'There'll be an election on the issue before the Christmas decorations are cleared away, mark my words.'
'Which'll do yer a bit o' good,' added Wince. 'The Liberals'll win, with the chance o' some Labour members bein' swept into Parliament by the tide.'
'You and I, Eliot, know the election's like a sham battle on the stage at Drury Lane. Our object is to burn down the theatre and roast the people in it,' remarked Ruston.
Nancy continued darning. Following the convolutions of British politics was wearying. She had met several lords in New York. They seemed kindly, perfectly mannered young men, who claimed an ignorance of politics as profound as of road-sweeping. Eliot had explained that the rejection of a Liberal budget by the House of Lords would be an event in British politics comparable with the inauguration of Jefferson Davis.
'It'll encourage the Holloway Labour Party, finding their Parliamentary candidate real flesh and blood. They've no more notion where Switzerland is than Swahililand,' Rushton said contemptuously. 'I've found a shop for your people's clinic.' Eliot's face brightened. 'An abandoned greengrocers, a bit rotten inside, but I expect a practical fellow like you can fix it. There's a quarter's rent due, five pounds. I couldn't advance it. You know how difficult things are.'
'For earning without spending, Switzerland's as useful as a polar expedition.'
Ruston nodded towards the manilla envelope. 'Need I emphasize those papers are for no eyes but your own?'
'Wot yer doin' in London, love?' Wince had been rudely staring at Nancy from hair to toe.
Eliot replied for her, 'Searching vainly for a Dr Crippen. Inventor of a remedy to cure her sick sister.'
'Dr Crippen?' Wince equally rudely lit without Nancy's permission the large curly pipe he had been filling steadily with dark tobacco from a rubber pouch. 'Oh, I know Dr Crippen. Lives up Camden Road, 'illdrop Crescent, I b'lieve. Leastways I knows Mrs Crippen better. She's a theatrical. Belle Elmore's 'er name on the boards.' He struck a vesta. 'Music 'all. Not that I've seen 'er on the posters. P'raps she tours the provinces? Short, flashy lady, bright fair 'air, peroxides it, I've no doubt. She ain't no spring chicken,' he meditated, puffing a cloud of smoke. 'But she's an 'andsome woman, I'll give 'er that. A proper Tartar in the shops along Brecknock Road, beating dahn the prices till yer'd think she'd a family ter feed on a fathing. Funny thing-' He nodded at Nancy. 'She's an American, just like you.'
To Eliot's eager questions he replied, 'Crippen? A little bloke, mild as milk. Got a practice at the Yale Tooth Specialists, Albion 'ouse in Oxford Street. I knows that, a'cause 'e gave me one of 'is cards last week in Lipton's the grocers. Said if I'd trouble with me teeth 'e'd fix me in no time.' Wince laughed. 'Got an eye for business, that doctor.'
The pair shortly left. Wince shook Nancy's hand heartily in a fog of tobacco smoke. Ruston's farewell was an intensely suspicious glance.
Eliot decided against ringing doorbells along Hilldrop Crescent that evening, when the householders would be settling to their suppers. He met Nancy at the Savoy Hotel the following morning. Their excitement was rekindled in the chase. It was tantalizing, fitting a face to the name exchanged the afternoon they met. They walked east along the Strand-the busiest street in London, connecting mercenary City to leisurely West End. At the foot of John Rennie's granite Waterloo Bridge, they turned north towards the crescent of the Aldwych and the new avenue of Kingsway, with the electric trams speeding tunnelled underneath.
Oxford Street that morning featured a regular entertainment upon the London pavements. They jumped to a crash of glass. A thin young woman in black, with a swirling feather boa and a fashionable hat as though a church bell had dropped on her, was vigorously breaking the window of a gentleman's hatter's with a small hammer. People shouted in alarm and rage. A red-faced workman in cap and spotted choker stood hands in pocket swearing hoarsely. Two shirtsleeved shop-assistants appeared horrified in the doorway. A small man in frock-coat and top hat tried to grab her, but jumped as she lunged with her hammer. Everyone shouted for the police.
An unhurried officer appeared through the traffic.
'Now then.' His voice was father to naughty daughter, who had broken the china.
'Arrest me.' Hers was Ellen Terry in the sleepwalking scene of Macbeth._
'Right you are. None of that there!' the policeman added fearsomely to a middle-aged woman in a black bonnet, who tried to slap the saboteur. 'Come along 'o me to Bow Street.'
She thrust out her wrists. 'Handcuff me.'
'Don't be barmy,' said the policeman.
'A suffragette,' observed Eliot, with his usual calmness towards extravagancies in human behaviour. The pair disappeared, the policeman holding the hammer like some item of regalia. The shop-assistants hastened to shutter the window and sweep the glass. 'They use a toffee-hammer, you know, the sort that crack the slabs in sweet-shops. Does America breed such vigorous ladies?'
'Well, there was Susan B Anthony. She died about three years back.'
'Susan B Anthony.' Eliot quoted reflectively, ''Men, their rights and nothing more. Women, their rights and nothing less.' They only got started here because Mr Gladstone didn't believe in women. Neither did Mr Disraeli, but he didn't believe in admitting it. Queen Victoria found them particularly objectionable.'
'Surely, with Queen Victoria there was no room left in the country for a woman's movement?'
'Exactly. It must be most awkward, trying to be gooder than God in Heaven. But even a lost cause is worth believing in. Not that I've sympathy for martyrs. None at all. It's a form of political activity needing neither intelligence nor experience.'
'Poor Joan of Arc. She really should have known better.'
Eliot smiled. 'Here's Albion House-No 60.'
It was an impressive four-storey cream-painted building, its tall paired windows above narrow balconies flanked by Doric columns and plaster heads. Opposite was Mudie's Select Circulating Library, which diverted and edified a million housewives. They walked up brown-painted stairs covered with patterned red linoleum. A door on the third floor announced from its frosted glass panel-
_Dr Gilbert Mervyn Rylance_
_Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen_
_The Yale Tooth Specialists._
Eliot pressed the bell.
The door was opened instantly by a peaky man about forty, in a worn blue serge suit and celluloid collar. 'Dr Crippen?'
'No, his dental mechanic, sir. Are you a patient?'
'A professional colleague.'
The door opened with a deferential sweep.
The room overlooked Oxford Street. It had expensive green-striped paper, green plush curtains and a thick Turkey carpet. The walls presented a pair of scarlet-sealed framed diplomas, and an etching of Sir Edward Poynter's four delicious nudes-one with a poorly foot-consulting Aesculapius.
At a green-baize covered table with telephone, typewriter, and pair of spikes bristling with paper, sat a good-looking woman in her mid-twenties, short, slim, pale, with big grey eyes, a longish straight nose and flat eyebrows. Her light brown hair was pinned high, she wore a navy serge dress. Eliot recognized her as Miss Le Neve from the tobacconist's description. He thought her mouth as sensual as a Hogarthian slut's.
With a subdued, deliberate air she apologized that Dr Crippen was at his other practice, Aural Remedies round the corner at Craven House. He saw dental patients at ten-thirty. Eliot and Nancy sat on wooden chairs, whose ragged copies of _John Bull_ and _Tit-Bits_ betokened the uneasy wait for terrors beyond a further glass-panelled door.
Dr Crippen appeared in a black frock coat befitting his profession, with a bright blue shirt and a blue-spotted yellow tie in his high starched collar. A tiepin of chiseled glass the size of a schoolboy's marble optimistically passed for a diamond. His shoes were patent leather frosted with cracks, he threw out his feet as he walked, putting Eliot in mind of some music-hall comedian. He spoke quietly, with the tatters of a mid-Western accent, generously showing teeth which were a shining credit to the establishment. Eliot noticed that the bulging eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses were grey, like his typist's.
He affably invited them through the inner door. Another to the right, painted _Dr Rylance, _emitted a steady, chilling gurgle of softly-running water. A door marked 'No 91' faced them. Number 58 to their left led into a small ochre-washed room, its decorations oilcloth depictions in vivid scarlet, blue and yellow of a man with his head sliced across, a vast ear with its exposed inner workings of linked little bones, and the complete set of human teeth in a shining ring, like a grotesque galaxy.
A wooden cabinet stood in the corner, beside a marble-topped washstand on which Eliot recognized a conical measuring-glass and a medicine drop-bottle, ear speculas like confectioners' icing-cones, an angled metal tongue-depressor and a U-shaped spring for looking up noses. He saw no bowl nor bottle of disinfectant, nor even soap and water. The metal ear-syringe struck him as large enough to stop a fire. Crippen politely invited Nancy to sit in his dental chair. There was nowhere else.
'So you're from New York, Miss Grange? Well, well! I hail from Coldwater, Michigan, myself. Though I've practiced all over the States-Detroit two years, Santiago, Salt Lake City, St Louis, Philadelphia, up in Toronto.' He asked Eliot, 'You practice in London?'
'I practice nowhere at the moment, though I live near you, by the cattle market.'
'You do? Cora-my wife-so often complains of the noise from the bullock lairs at night, and the sheep driven through the streets from the country. She's from New York as well,' he informed Nancy, adding proudly, 'She's on the stage, you know. Belle Elmore. You'll have heard of her.'
'Dr Crippen, I have a sister in Switzerland sick with the phthisis.' Nancy was impatient. Looking at him steadily, she explained, 'I've come to you because I hear you've a preparation called Tuberculozyne.'
'How strange you should mention it. Why, I was prescribing it only the other day. The patient suffered from scrufulous laryngitis, complicated by catarrhal pharyngitis and chronic rhinitis.' Eliot noticed a glibness with impressive, if meaningless, medical terms. 'She is now well on the way to recovery, I'm glad to say.'
'I want some,' Nancy demanded.
'Very unfortunately, that was my last sample.'
'As one medical man to another, what is Tuberculozyne?' Eliot asked bluntly.
'I can't keep these formulas in my head,' he lamented. 'It has a basis of morphia. I perfected it from the prescription of a homoeopathic doctor I knew-he practises in Michigan, at Kalamazoo. I was trained at the Homoeopathic Medical School in Cleveland, Ohio, you know. Back in '84. Though I studied in London a while. The Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Insane. London's the greatest medical centre in the whole world, isn't it? Now my line's ear, nose and throat. I possess a diploma in the subject from the New York City Ophthalmic Hospital,' he ended in self-assertion. Eliot countered it by mentioning the Drouet Institute.
'Yes, I am a little deaf myself,' Crippen replied without concern. Eliot had noticed he inclined his head to hear. 'Now I must ask your pardon. I have patients waiting.'
The doorbell had been ringing repeatedly. Eliot's grudging acceptance that this was truth, not an excuse to be rid of them, was strengthened by Crippen continuing genially. 'But say, doctor-if you and the good lady are free, why not step across and take pot luck tonight? No 39 Hilldrop Crescent. That's off the main road, towards Holloway Jail. My wife would just love to meet a fellow-countrywoman. Eight o'clock?'
'Yes,' said Eliot shortly.
'You must be crazy,' said Nancy as they descended the stairs.
'I want to find more about Tuberculozyne. If it's got morphia, it could be dangerous rather than merely useless,' he told her sternly.
She sighed. 'Well I guess our Dr Crippen's just a fraud.'
'One so transparent, it amounts to shining honesty. You must be disappointed for Baby?'
'Not really. I believed what you said about him all along. I had to see with my own eyes. There's my father to convince.'
They reached busy Oxford Street.
'Besides, his wife sounds worth the trouble of meeting,' Eliot suggested.
'I bet he's henpecked.'
'Perhaps he enjoys it? Sometimes the male dominance in marriage is pleasurably reversed. He becomes passive, like the well-bred Englishwoman in sexual intercourse. Man-masochist mated to woman-sadist. There's a streak of both within all of us, like surliness and good humour, one or the other coming to the surface.'
'Oh, Eliot! I do wish you wouldn't speak to me as though I was a lecture room.'