'That's nonsense,' she told him spiritedly. 'Everyone at the sanatorium submissively watched the wasted months and years pass by, in a desperate quest for life.'
'The human mind doesn't know itself. No more than the complacent lady of the house knows what happens in the darkened attic bedrooms of her servants.'
'Baby has not the slightest desire to die.'
Eliot looked uncomfortable. In the cheerfulness of London he had overlooked the ailing sister.
'We'll hunt the Crippen,' he said, to cover the gaffe. 'Though I suspect his miracle cure as valueless as Mother Seigel's Syrup-advertised as indiscriminately effective against scurvy, syphilis, piles, gout, blackheads and pimples. Or Hanress' Electric Corset at five-and-sixpence, for the relief of hysteria and dyspepsia and the healthy development of the female chest. People never spend money so recklessly as on their sweethearts, their dogs or their health.'
'My father believes in Dr Crippen's Tuberculozyne,' she said firmly.
'A man shrewd enough to make a million dollars is generally a bigger fool over his health than a navvy. Because he can't submit to the notion of doctors knowing more than he does. He's prey to a quack like the worm to the goose.'
Eliot gulped his brandy. 'We'll track Munyon's to Shaftesbury Avenue. It's the new street which cuts through Soho-a rookery of French and Italian cooks, waiters, tailors and cakemakers, but the restaurants are cheap. I'll take you there tonight for dinner,' he informed her.
'I may have other plans.'
'That would be dreadfully foolish of you.'
'Eliot, you bestow contempt as other men flattery.'
'I don't. A doctor is incapable of contempt. The infinite weaknesses of human nature are his sympathetic study. You mistake it for candour. That's the quality a doctor must always direct upon himself, if kindness sometimes deflects it from the patient. Afterwards, you must come and see my lodgings. It's not much of a place, but I've a pianola.'
'You've a nerve,' she told him sharply. 'Asking a lady un-chaperoned to a gentleman's apartment.'
'No one else would know,' he assured her casually. 'No one there would care. I live among people who share my view that conventional morality is a combination of hypocrisy, fright, and a sound feminine instinct for keeping the goods untouched in the shop-window until saleable at the best price.'
'If that's the view of your friends, I've no wish to meet them.'
He was alarmed. She had angry, pink spots on her cheeks. 'Are you inviting me to play the loose woman? Or are you telling me I am one? I've suffered sufficient indignity for one day.'
He grabbed her hand as she rose. 'Nancy, forgive me,' he asked submissively. 'I talk so often for effect, but I have the tragic disability of too often believing what I say. The life I have set for myself, my unconventional ideas, my ideals-I suffer doubts sometimes that they're nothing but a passing irritation with the society I was born into. An ungrateful one, as it reared me so generously.'
She stood staring down at him. He still held her hand.
'Am I Hamlet, or young Lupin Pooter from _The Diary of a Nobody?_ Though I suppose they were both ridiculous, in their own way. I love you, Nancy. I loved you since I walked into the waiting-room at the sanatorium last spring.' He smiled shyly. 'The Rose and Crown gives hardly the most fitting echo to my sentiments. When we came in, I'd no more expectation of uttering them than my dying words. My political ambitions resolved me to stay a bachelor for years. Though _un foyer sans feu, une table sans pain, une maison sans femme_ are all equally joyless, as the Bretons say.'
She sat down slowly. The man in the curly-brimmed bowler had just finished a comic story, and the other was choking with laughter.
'Though perhaps you'd be right getting rid of me,' he said with detachment. 'It's the privilege of intelligent men and women to see the consequences of their passions, even if they often prefer to go blind. God gives us love, according to Tennyson. But love can give us murder, suicide and war. Love demands thinking about quite as much as money or health. But people don't. Even while they're enjoying it, they give it as little thought as their work on a bank holiday.'
She clasped his fingers on the glass-ringed table-top. 'I love you Eliot,' she said quietly. 'I was brought up like every girl I know, in the same prison of conventions. It's scary, suddenly finding yourself outside.'
Eliot reflected she looked like a child. The worldliness which frightened him had vanished.
'Will you come to me?' he asked timidly.
'I must go back to the hotel first. I must bring the sponge.'
She had used the sponge on the silken thread, soaked in quinine, on the express from Basle. She had heard of it in whispers from girls in the corners of drawing-rooms and dinner-tables in New York. Her friends assured her that absolutely everyone used the sponge, it was as safe as a brick wall. It was so much more satisfying than the disgustingly messy manner of men diverting the stream of life at the final moment into the air like a public fountain. She had been fitted with the sponge by a respectable doctor in a tail coat, who practised downtown in Washington Square, who Nancy told her father she was consulting for a sore throat.
Eliot said nothing, but gripped her hand tightly. Then he announced cheerfully, 'We've work to do,' and stood up.
They easily found the offices in Shaftesbury Avenue, but Munyon's had not leased rooms there since 1905. A grey woman in black bombazine with a pince-nez, supervising a cramped room of busy, bent-backed young typists, remembered Dr Crippen. He had left Munyon's to become consulting physician to the Drouet Institute for the Deaf at Marble Arch.
'The Drouet Institute!' Eliot groaned loudly, outside in Shaftesbury Avenue. 'The devilish invention of a drunken Parisian doctor. Lead plasters, impregnated with turpentine, camphor, Spanish fly-stick them behind your ears, and you'll hear like a hare. He advertised in all the newspapers and on the sides of the buses. It was nothing but a cruel swindle on the deaf. They spent their shilling on rubbish, rather than having a proper aural examination from a doctor who'd demand guineas which they hadn't got.'
Eliot continued warmly, taking her elbow across the road, A murderous swindle. Some poor man died from a brain abscess and the coroner's remarks put the Institute out of business. The patient deserved a statue. He saved the world more unnecessary suffering than most physicians. Not a handsome credential for your Dr Crippen, is it?'
Nancy that afternoon had become abruptly less interested in Dr Crippen.
8
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.