'I did not give you permission to penetrate such places. I naturally imagined that you would be a nurse to people of social standing.'
'Women of my own age-those I work among-do things far more evil every day without troubling their fathers at all. Don't you see, papa? I'm your best publicity agent. You're far too hard-headed, not to recognize there are many who do not over-love you.'
'I make enemies with every deal. I don't give a damn. I make as many friends, so long as it's successful.'
'A rich man is disliked by people who know absolutely nothing about him, except that he's rich.'
'That's unreasonable.'
'No more than a man with no coat hating the wind. You can no longer play Mr Vanderbilt and say, 'The public be damned.' When you talk of the public now you mean its newspapers, and they're incapable of damnation. If they tell New York that your daughter tends the sick and the destitute, you will be thought of the kindlier.'
John Grange sipped the mint tea resting on the arm of his leather chair. 'That's not what your life's for. I could hire a hundred clever dicks to make me look the sweetest man in town. Baby understood that. She'd never stray from her proper position.'
'Can't you understand? I would never work with the nurses if it wasn't what I want to do most in the whole world?' He said nothing. 'Oh, papa! I know you want me to be a success in society, to marry the man whom every other girl in New York would long to wed. But surely you love me enough to let me find my own happiness?'
'I love you with all my heart, Nancy, but in this world we must put our tender feelings behind armour-plate if we want to be successful.'
There was a long silence. He rose abruptly, leant over and kissed her. It was the end of an inconclusive interview. Nancy continued at Henry Street. She knew it distressed her father. She knew her response to his distress must shortly end her employment.
He never mentioned her work, but asked searchingly after the invitations she received and accepted. Nancy refused any but the smallest parties where she was unlikely to meet eager suitors. Her set said she was never the same since Baby's death. They shook their heads that she was developing the same oddities as her father.
11
'I'm going to try something entirely new.' Eliot's voice had more enthusiasm than he usually allowed himself the luxury. 'Or more correctly, something extremely old, which nobody has bothered themselves to think about intelligently.'
The patient sitting on the bench was pale, wizened, bright-eyed, sharp-nosed, skinny, growing bent. He wore a coarse woollen pea-jacket with two rows of buttons like a sailor's, a greasy choker, the patched corduroy trousers flopping over his boots held by a broad, brass-buckled belt. Stained cap and stubby clay pipe lay on the bare floor. Though before eight in the morning he reeked of beer.
His sleeves were pushed to the elbows, displaying forearms red, weeping, pitted with yellow pustules down to the wrists. He looked at Eliot with the cheerful scepticism of Cockneys, who throughout London's history have found people trying to sell them second-hand goods or political and religious ideas with comparable passion.
'Wot is it?'
'Mouldy bread.'
'Luv a duck!'
'It's been used for centuries by country people for the best of scientific reasons-it worked. There's always been lightning in the heavens and steam from volcanoes, Bill. But it needed imagination to turn them into electric light and railway engines.'
The old greengrocer's bell clanged as the door opened. Eliot was startled to see Crippen in a drenched bowler and long waterproof coat.
The streets of London were struggling to become light on the blustery, teeming morning of November 19, 1909. The People's Surgery had been open a month. Single-handed, Eliot had scrubbed and sawn, banged in nails, licked with paint the rickety shop in Brecknock Road, which still smelt of rotting cabbage. He had wheeled in a handcart bits of furniture from the pawnbrokers in the Caledonian Road. An old lace curtain from his lodgings discouraged the curiosity of passers-by through the shop window. The second-hand examination couch stood in a small inner room, with the bowls and bottles, the bandages, tow and oiled-silk. His own savings and Ј5 from the Holloway Labour Party could provide only essential dressings. He perceived that he would be offering advice rather than treatment, most common remedies being beyond the pockets of his patients.
It was his first encounter with Crippen since the day Baby died. Eliot congratulated him on being about so early. 'I generally leave home round eight,' Crippen said in his usual quiet, absent-minded way. 'I get my own breakfast, and maybe take Belle up a cup of coffee. I've a long working day. Seven-thirty's my usual home hour.' He shook the raindrops from his bowler, standing among the wooden forms facing the fire, inspected curiously by a dozen waiting patients-porters, slaughtermen, drovers from the Cattle Market, just off work or just out of the pub. 'I just had to see the surgery that everyone in the neighbourhood is talking about.'
'Not all of them kindly. The local doctors are furious at my robbing them of poor people's shillings. I'm expecting them any moment to smash my window with toffee-hammers. They say I'm insane, working for nothing. Or devilish clever, buying votes by free medicine instead of free beer.'
'I so enjoyed your company, I hoped I might meet you and Miss Grange once more.' Crippen seemed to have forgotten Eliot's remark on the stairs. 'I honestly don't recall passing more than a word with other medical men all the twelve years I've been in London. I don't join societies and all that, you know. They're a bit high-falutin' for me.'
'Miss Grange is back in New York,' Eliot told him. Partly to change the subject, partly mischievously, he said with the solemnity of addressing a Harley Street specialist, 'Perhaps you'd give me a second opinion on this case?'
Protesting he was a throat man, Crippen followed the pair into the inner consulting-room.
'You may think it a case of Bockhart's impetigo?' Crippen had never heard about the German physician Max Bockhard, Eliot knew, or the disease he described of pustules bursting from the hair follicles. But flattery of assumed knowledge was a courtesy among doctors so widespread it amounted to professional etiquette. 'Bill Edmonton here works at the slaughterhouse in the Cattle Market across at Copenhagen Fields. He's picked up a staphylococcal infection from handling the meat, which I intend to treat somewhat unorthodoxly.'
'I ain't a slaughterman, doctor.' Bill sat on the spoke-backed kitchen chair beside Eliot's deal table. 'A slaughterman can touch two 'undred pahnds a year. I'm only a boilerman.' He grinned. '"Poupart's Piccadilly Potted Meat. Londoners Love It".'
Eliot remembered the newspaper advertisements of clerics, army officers, goggled aviators, mortar-boarded schoolmasters and other persons of authority and energy, mouthing forkfuls of its slippery slices like famished Children of Israel savouring manna.
'What do Poupart's pay you?' It was a question the patients grew to expect from Eliot.
'Depends.' Bill looked sly. 'I gets paid by the meat wot comes aht of the boiler. And the sacks of meal wot I finish wiv, from grinding the marrow-bones. I can make meself a good ten bob a day, a'cause my governor don't use just wot comes from the slaughter-ahses, 'e buys cheap bits and bones left over by the butchers, even from the big ahses in the West End.'
'I suppose if it's all boiled, it kills the germs,' said Eliot resignedly. 'I'd like to take a look round the Market one day, Bill. A doctor should know the working conditions of his patients. Most know as little as of those in a young ladies' seminary.'
'Come on a Monday morning,' he invited with pride. 'It's the best day. There's two thasand bullocks an' ten thasand sheep sold on Mondays, so they say.'
'Perhaps I'll come tomorrow.'