'Of course I'm not the police,' Eliot told him impatiently. 'I'm a fellow doctor.'
The shopman's narrowed eyes relaxed. 'Well, 'e's 'ardly bigger than Little Tich, when 'e ain't dancing on the tips of 'is boots.' Everyone in London knew the music-hall comic with boots as long as himself. 'About forty-odd, I'd say, pink as a shrimp. Sandy 'air, bit bald, moustache. Dressed neat, even smart. Wears glasses like mine. 'E's one of them people you 'ardly takes notice of, even when they're speaking to you.'
'Do you know where he lives?' enquired Nancy.
'Not the faintest, madam. I don't even know if 'e's got a trouble and strife.' She assumed this meant a wife. 'P'raps 'e's gorn 'ome to America?'
'Well? What do we do now?' she asked Eliot is disappointment, on the pavement outside.
'What everyone does when stymied in England. Have a cup of tea.'
'Yes, lets! My friends are always talking about Rumpelmayer's.'
'Rumpelmayer's? Ridiculously extravagant. Here's a Lyons teashop.'
It was crowded with shoppers, men in bowlers and top hats, women in broad-brimmed, flowered or feathered milinary, glistening umbrellas at their sides, parcels round their feet. The customers sat on cane-seated chairs at marble-topped tables, while white-aproned, lace-capped waitresses served the teapots, the plates of buttered toast and the cream pastries from stout wooden trays.
Eliot searched for a place. 'The weather's too miserable for tea.' He grasped her arm again.
'Where are we going?' She sounded alarmed as he marched her round the corner.
'For a glass of English beer and a whet of German sausage.'
The sign bore a golden crown over a Tudor rose. Eliot pushed open the door with a panel of green-tinted glass embossed, _Rose amp; Crown Ales Beers Stouts Wines From The Wood._ 'It's a saloon!' she objected forcefully.
'Perfectly respectable women pub it these days,' he assured her airily. 'There's nothing to fear, if you avoid the awful claret and hock.'
She protested, 'Were I seen inside a place like this in New York, it would be in all the papers.'
'What devilish delights accrue by sinking from the upper classes,' he teased her.
The bar was small, its dark panelling splashed with brightly polished brass, a partition with decorative frosted glass separating it from the noisy public bar next door. A red-faced man in a curly bowler hat and canvas gaiters, who smelt of oats, sat against the wall with a thin one smoking a pipe of pungent shag. The appearance of so beautiful and well-dressed a female raised their startled eyes from half-finished glasses of beer, which they were contemplating with the placid melancholy of the British enjoying themselves.
Eliot sat her at a small round table in a corner of the sawdust-covered floor. He brought from the bar a plate with sliced sausage, a brandy-and-soda and a glass of beer. She winced as she sipped it. 'Two penn'oth of half and half,' he explained. 'Ale mixed with porter.'
'At home, we wouldn't use this to drench horses.'
'It sustains the working classes as faith the Church.'
'I was educated that drink was an immutable evil. In the hands of the masses, naturally.'
'How can a fellow-countryman of Falstaff contemplate a thought so mean? Oh, I suppose it makes a few beat their wives and gives a few more hobnail livers. One of your first failures as a doctor is making people do what's good for them. Everyone knows that cigars, pipes and cigarettes stunt the growth and rot the lungs, but who renounces a single whiff? Mankind is hell-bent on its own destruction. The German mind-doctors call it 'Thanatos'. The death instinct, as much part of us as our bones.'
'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
