'The doctor's one of the nicest men I ever met,' asserted Mrs Jackson warmly.
'And now the poor King too has gone to his rest,' sighed Ethel.
As this seemed to raise death from a personal to general subject, Eliot mentioned his interest in the house.
'Yes, the doctor did give notice, for sure,' Ethel said. 'But now we're thinking of staying till September. It's so difficult, finding somewhere nice. And the doctor's getting a bit more cheery now. A few days in Boulogne did him the world of good, even though somebody stole his luggage going across. Would you believe it! It was his leather hatbox, one moment it was there, the next it had vanished. I told him to inform the French police, but he said they'd never lift a finger to help an Englishman. If you're looking for a place, why not ask the house agents we pay the rent to? They're Lown amp; Sons, 12 Ashbrook Road, at the bottom of Highgate Hill.'
Eliot thanked her. 'They haven't wasted much time, dividing the spoils,' he remarked, as they walked back to Camden Road.
'Do you suppose he'll marry her?'
'Oh, yes. He's dreadfully sentimental.'
They left Camden Road two days later, a moonlight flit with a couple of cabs, one full of Nancy's luggage. Lown and Sons had found them a furnished terraced house opposite the Postmen's Office with the Royal Arms over the gate, in the road running east from Hilldrop Crescent to Kentish Town railway station. Nancy immediately engaged two servant girls and a cook. Eliot knew Ruston could find him any morning at the surgery, but had grown a shell of indifference. He did not somehow feel the sort who ended up on Hackney Marshes.
'This ghastly plot has disillusioned me about anything done in the name of 'The People',' he confessed to Nancy, in their new living-room with the green-striped wallpaper and plants in brass-pots. 'Who are 'The People'? The humans I treat every day in the surgery. Not very worldly, not lettered, full of prejudice and superstitions, stupid but shrewd. Often noble-a man will crack a joke rather than infect his family with his terror of coming death. Our democracy is the benevolent management of their organized misapprehensions, that's all. They need leadership for their own survival, not the survival of their leaders. But Ruston talks about, 'The People' in the arrogant abstract, and seeks an easy ride to political power on their backs. I'll always support the underdog, but not one only ambitious to be the top dog.'
At seven in the evening of Wednesday, May 18, the Hohenzollen anchored off Sheerness. She had been escorted from Flushing by the cruiser Kцnisberg and the despatch-boat _Sleiper, _by four British destroyers from the Shivering Sands buoy. The Kaiser travelled with Dr Neider his personal physician, Count Eulenburg his Master of Ceremonies, General von Plessen and Vice-Admiral von Muller, and Baron von Reischach his Master of Horse. Reading this roll-call in _The Times,_ Eliot wondered if all six would shortly be shot in fragments into the Kentish air. The newspaper mentioned to his discouragement that Scotland Yard had received a hundred anonymous warnings of assassination attempts against the Kaiser, which they took as malicious hoaxes.
On Friday, Eliot's paper told him the Kaiser would leave Sheerness at ten, to be met at noon by King George at Victoria station. Eliot walked down Brecknock Road for his usual morning's work. At eleven, he abandoned the struggle. Nancy had returned from her rounds. He left her the patients, found a cab in York Road and directed the driver to Victoria.
The crowd in the triangular station forecourt would reassure the Kaiser that his popularity exceeded that of his country-if he arrived, Eliot thought. The newspapers had laid cosy emphasis on the rulers of Prussia and Britain being cousins for the first time since George II and Frederick-William I. Eliot pushed his way towards the scarlet-tunicked guardsmen, their officers with black crepe armbands, drawn behind the cordon of policemen. He nervously imagined the stir among the officials in gleaming top hats and morning coats beyond. He already heard the whisper through the crowd which swelled into the horrified cry, 'The Kaiser-killed!' He saw himself tortured with remorse, agonized with fear for Nancy, awaiting the knock on the door for policemen to bundle him into the black Maria, to join Ruston and Wince in the dock of the Old Bailey, and with luck breaking stones on Dartmoor for the rest of his natural life.
King George arrived in a landau, with an escort of Household Cavalry. He entered the station. Ten minutes later he reappeared with the Kaiser in a black overcoat. Eliot cheered so loudly that people started looking at him.
The funeral was the spectacle Eliot had promised Nancy. The silent crowds were so thick in St James's that fainting ladies were succoured on the pavement by vinegar-soaked sponges suspended from the balconies of White's club, ladies not being allowed inside in any condition. The Kaiser rode on King George's right, immediately after the gun-carriage. Behind the monarchs of Europe and Mr Theodore Roosevelt, King Edward's favourite terrier Caesar was led by a gillie in Highland dress, a white Scottie interloper joining them in Piccadilly all the way to Paddington Station, where the coffin was slid into the white-domed mortuary saloon of the Royal train, last used for Queen Victoria, on No 2 platform for Windsor.
The Kaiser left after the weekend. His farewell lunch at Buckingham Palace continued with earnest talk to his host in Victoria Station waiting-room, though twice informed his train was ready to leave. Next morning's Times reported his arrival at Port Victoria, a few naval buildings and a coastguard station, the rail terminal against a jetty over the river Medway. He changed aboard the Hohenzollen into Admiral's uniform to receive officers of the Royal Navy, and at 6 on the morning of Tuesday May 24, he left British shores. The Kaiser never saw them again.
At item at the bottom of the account caught Eliot's eye.
RAILWAYMEN IMPRISONED
_George Horace Clem, aged 35, and Henry Teacher, 42, both of Holloway, London, labourers employed by the Great Northern Railway, were each sentenced to 3 months detention by the Chatham magistrates on Saturday for drunken and disorderly conduct. They were arrested outside a Chatham public-house on the night of Friday, where they were shouting abuse about the German Emperor. The chairman said their conduct was despicable towards a personage of such importance._
Eliot rubbed his chin. It looked as if the assassination scheme had been hatched, to produce only a dead chick. On his way to the surgery, he stopped at a small shop in Brecknock Road, which combined a subscription library with selling stationery, newspapers, sweets and books. He bought a school atlas, opening it in the shop. 'Port Victoria,' he murmured. 'I wonder-'
The mouth of the River Medway was a mile across. The railway from Sheerness, which Wince had indicated on his Ordnance Survey map, ran across the Isle of Sheppey on its east. The separate railway from Port Victoria traversed the Isle of Grain on its west, joining a different main line far away at Gravesend on the south bank of the Thames. Both the railway terminals of Sheerness and of Port Victoria were the same distance by Admiral's launch for a yacht anchored in mid-river. Wince had chosen one terminal, but the Kaiser another.
Eliot laughed aloud, startling the half-dozen customers. 'Saved by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway!' he announced mystifyingly.
He tucked the atlas under his arm and strode jubilantly along the pavement. So much for the military genius of the British Revolutionary Movement, he thought. It could draw a blueprint of Utopia, but could not even start a fight in a public-house. That it would fail disastrously once it stopped talking and started acting he had always suspected. Perhaps that was the reassurance which drew him to it.