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
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.'
Before the mirror in her hotel room that evening, Nancy vindicated herself mentally while Maria-Thйrиse silently dressed her hair. In New York, she knew sufficient young men for the companionship of a different one every week. All those Bobbies, Ollies, Charlies, Clarries-everyone's name that season seemed to end with 'ie'-with their automobiles and long fur coats, their games and their hunting, their private jokes and private language composed of the latest slang from the track, the ring, even the underworld. Everyone she knew talked intently about one another, and never of anything else.
Some were vastly rich, some almost penniless. It was impossible to say in New York, when a young man would spend a thousand dollars equally carelessly if it was his last. Most of them were pleasing, or tried hard to please. Any of them would have married her, some had asked. It never crossed Nancy's mind to accept them. Her friends whispered their terror of marriage, of placing themselves overnight in ultimate intimacy with a man who was largely unknown. Nancy was more scared of being bored.
Dr Beckett had an overpowering attraction. He was the sort of man she had always imagined herself attracted to. Indulging seriously in this fancy meant forcing herself through social railings, which kept common people from a life which nobody doubted as the most delightful and fulfilling a young woman might enjoy. Or was she caged, an animal artificially kept alive in a zoo? She concluded she was right to snub Eliot. Her father was already distraught over Baby. It would be too much, coming home engaged to a penniless doctor of no family and few graces, a foreigner who wore atrocious clothes. Then she admitted that Eliot differed from the men she knew as red meat from water-ice.
Her introspection was broken by cries through the tall open windows. She looked across the hotel garden with its neatly-raked gravel and string of red and blue fairylights between the cherry and plum trees. Two men were running towards the path climbing the cliff, waiters in their shirt sleeves, an unthinkably irregular sight in the well- ordered Grand Hotel.
_'C'est un accident, mademoiselle,'_ exclaimed Maria-Thйrиse. Nancy immediately thought of Eliot, which annoyed her again. Taking her wrap, she went down to the garden. Through the back gate came half-a-dozen men with the hotel proprietor, followed by a blue-uniformed gendarme shouting at others to keep their distance. They bore one of the hotel's green shutters, on which lay Lady Sarah Pledge.
Nancy stopped, horrified. The party hurried past. The face was smashed and glistening with blood. The skull was crushed, pale brain exuding over her ear. One arm was twisted like a half-snapped twig. She wore the morning's white dress, she had lost her shoes, the skirt rose above her right knee to show her pink garter, until one of the bearers with sensitive delicacy smoothed it down to her feet.
6
'Of course it wasn't an accident,' Eliot said. 'You couldn't fall from that point without putting your mind seriously to it. Dr Pasquier's influence in Champette being even stronger than an English nobleman's, the Swiss authorities must say what they're told. It was all a matter of being buried in consecrated ground. Though to the _raison d'кtre_ of any funeral, it doesn't matter if they're buried in a rubbish-heap.'
'She must have known more of her condition than she let on,' said Nancy.
'Most of them do.'
'Yet she used to complain only that it stopped her hunting.'
'Suicide's unusual in phthisical cases,' Eliot remarked thoughtfully. 'They're a tough army, who won't surrender. Remember, _spes phthisica.'_
It was ten days later, a hot August morning, the red cross flag flapping languidly when a breeze could stir itself, the sunlight brilliant on the blue and white striped awnings of the balconies. They were alone in the laboratory. Eliot
