A Question of Guilt

'Why was my sister given a room where a woman had just died?' Nancy demanded.

'There was no other. The sanatorium is always full. To get a bed is as great a privilege as in the most fashionable hotel.'

'There was no need that she should have known about it.'

Eliot shrugged. 'Less need to deceive her. She would have learned from another patient by breakfast. They think nothing of it, and soon neither will she. She'll make a joke of it. They develop the humour of the cannon's mouth. Why not? They are all soldiers fighting the same enemy-the tubercule bacillus. The patients give battle, not us. We are powerless. We can only provide the most promising battlefield and lay the most intelligent strategy.'

Nancy began to complain indignantly, 'But my sister is here for treatment-'

'Treatment? There is only one treatment for phthisis.' He threw open the long window. 'Fresh air. That's what your father is paying for. Paying thousands of dollars for air. If he sat and thought about it, he'd fancy himself mad or us brazen swindlers.'

'Dr Beckett, your attitude is unattractive in a medical man, to whose care is committed a young lady with a disease which her family know-quite as well as you do-as dangerous to her life.'

Eliot looked disconcerted. 'I'm sorry to give that impression,' he said with unexpected awkwardness. 'Were I not driven by compassion for those who are sick, and for those who must bear with them, do you imagine I should be here?'

She was sitting straight, legs crossed under her long skirt, showing her ankles. Eliot seemed to regard her for the first time as an object worth his interest. 'I could instead be turning guineas from the imaginary illnesses of London society ladies and the very real excesses of London gentlemen. Though I pity them too, but in a different way.'

'How long must my sister be up here? The rest of the summer? The rest of the year?'

'We never mention time in the mountains. It does not exist. The length of our patient's sentence means nothing, compared to their escaping as cured. Pining over the calendar puts up the temperature, and is _streng verboten.'_

'Doing nothing but breathing the air?' asked Nancy tartly.

'They live in it, night and day. Sleeping tucked-up on the balcony, covered with rubber sheets against the rain, guarded by iron screens from the winds. Miss Grange will be allowed exercise in strict moderation. No indulgence in exciting games and recreations, which includes the most popular game of all, _les affaires de coeur._ Our patients are thrown on each other's company as though aboard a liner at sea, and fever fires the passions like sea breezes. Are you shocked?'

'That patients remain human? Hardly.'

'Perhaps the urge to flirt is an expression of _spes pthisica,'_ Eliot reflected. 'The strange hope which our patients never lose. If I could but rid myself of this cough, they say, I should be healthy enough to climb the Matterhorn or swim the English Channel. 'The consumption is a flattering disease, cozening men into hope of long life at the last gasp.' An English clergyman called Thomas Fuller noticed that, almost three hundred years ago.'

'My sister is hopeful.'

'Hers is not displaced. She is a slight case. But she must surrender herself to us, as utterly as a novice to her faith.'

'Surely there's some drug to speed her release?'

'Creosote? Guaiacol wafers? Koch's tuberculin, the very hair of the deadly dog?' Eliot recited scathingly. 'I've tried tuberculin, but it grows the bacilli like a wasps' nest in the sunshine.'

She looked at him steadily. 'There is a drug which will cure phthisis, Dr Beckett.'

'It's name would be a priceless extension of my education.'

'Do you know of Munyon's Homoeopathic Remedies, of New York?' Eliot shook his head violently. 'It's a company on 6th Avenue. It does business all over the world. Among my father's interests is the manufacture of medicines. After my sister fell ill, he heard from Professor Munyon that their general manager-a homoeopathic physician, trained in Michigan-had discovered a cure for phthisis.'

'What's his name?'

'Dr Crippen. For the past five years, he's been representing the firm in London. I intend travelling there as soon as my sister is settled, to beg a sample off him. My father says the formula is secret, lest it be stolen by a rival firm before plans are ripe to sell it. I know the name-Tuberculozyne.'

Eliot responded to this revelation only by saying, 'The carriage must be back now.'

Nancy remembered her coat in the waiting-room. She reached for the lidded cup on its ledge, asking its use.

'For spit.' Eliot opened it. Inside, now swum in the fluid three round blobs like small oysters. Nancy's stomach turned over. 'The nummular sputum of phthisis,' he explained. 'Round and flat, like coins. If the spit dries on the floor or a handkerchief, the bacilli waft away and look for another little nook of lung to settle into. It's the first rule up here, everyone spits into disinfectant. Doing otherwise is a social error far worse than eating peas off your knife. For patients who go out, or whose offerings we value for a lengthy look, we provide a neat pocket spitoon in blue glass with a screw cap.'

The gravel was empty. The sky was almost dark. Lights burned behind the balconies. 'Come and see the view,' Eliot invited unceremoneously.

From the white fence, an escarpment fell two hundred feet to the village of Champette.

'We sell the purest sort of air,' he told her, 'better than those nests of sanitoria at St Moritz or Arosa or Davos, half way to Heaven already. We're under fifteen hundred metres, where the atmosphere is more humid and the construction costs less. The clinic is owned by a joint stock company, you know, quoted on the Zurich stock exchange. Phthisis is good business.' Nancy shivered in her overcoat. Eliot was apparently impervious to the night chill. 'I think sanatoria above the tree-line, beside the regions of eternal snow, are frightening. They have to send the corpses down by sled…but you'd rather not speak of such things.'

'Maybe I'll acquire your patients' hardihood, and joke about it?'

'Troops under fire prefer to scoff than tremble. Where are you staying, Miss Grange?'

'The Grand.' Nancy tried distinguishing its lights below. 'What's it like?'

'I've never entered it, in twelve months. I catch the dance music ascending sometimes-the valleys are enormous ear-trumpets, you can hear the cow-bells from the pasturage far down. Such a Swiss sound, as dismal as bell-buoys on rocks. I would not care for the company the hotel provided.'

'Then why come to practise here, Dr Beckett? Your patients are all rich. And the company of rich people seems to affect you like that of Corsican brigands.'

'I'm learning about tuberculosis on the rich, that I might apply my knowledge to the poor,' he answered simply. 'The labouring classes are the worst sufferers, and unfortunately can't cure themselves by seeking a change of climate. They lie in bed in their only room, spitting their germs over the family which shares it, like a cloud of deadly gas. Every single workman who develops phthisis probably gives it to a dozen more. That's not just tragic. It's uneconomical. Which should strike forcibly such a man as your father.'

'Your tenderness towards the poor is admirable, Dr Beckett. Your envy of the rich is not.'

Her remark seemed to jolt him. 'The only people I envy are those cleverer than myself. I'm unlike you. I know both rich and poor. I'm sorry for the rich. They live an uninteresting, artificial life, because they are more frightened of the real world even than of losing their money.'

'Might I suggest that you are too self-opinionated, Dr Beckett? An intelligent rich girl suffers equally with a poor one, that she cannot go to college and learn about the real world.'

Eliot smiled. 'Have I misjudged you, Miss Grange? I hope during your enforced stay you will afford me opportunity to rectify my mistake.'