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.'