absolutely everyone used the sponge, it was as safe as a brick wall. It was so much more satisfying than the disgustingly messy manner of men diverting the stream of life at the final moment into the air like a public fountain. She had been fitted with the sponge by a respectable doctor in a tail coat, who practised downtown in Washington Square, who Nancy told her father she was consulting for a sore throat.
Eliot said nothing, but gripped her hand tightly. Then he announced cheerfully, 'We've work to do,' and stood up.
They easily found the offices in Shaftesbury Avenue, but Munyon's had not leased rooms there since 1905. A grey woman in black bombazine with a pince-nez, supervising a cramped room of busy, bent-backed young typists, remembered Dr Crippen. He had left Munyon's to become consulting physician to the Drouet Institute for the Deaf at Marble Arch.
'The Drouet Institute!' Eliot groaned loudly, outside in Shaftesbury Avenue. 'The devilish invention of a drunken Parisian doctor. Lead plasters, impregnated with turpentine, camphor, Spanish fly-stick them behind your ears, and you'll hear like a hare. He advertised in all the newspapers and on the sides of the buses. It was nothing but a cruel swindle on the deaf. They spent their shilling on rubbish, rather than having a proper aural examination from a doctor who'd demand guineas which they hadn't got.'
Eliot continued warmly, taking her elbow across the road, A murderous swindle. Some poor man died from a brain abscess and the coroner's remarks put the Institute out of business. The patient deserved a statue. He saved the world more unnecessary suffering than most physicians. Not a handsome credential for your Dr Crippen, is it?'
Nancy that afternoon had become abruptly less interested in Dr Crippen.
8
The last Sunday in September was warm. The coals sat on their sticks and paper unlit in the well-blacked grate. A small iron kettle boiled on a gas-ring in the hearth. A brown teapot with a broken spout, a pair of large white cups and the milk-bottle, stood on a dented tin tray thrust among papers and books strewn across a crimson chenille cloth on the table. A loud-ticking, circular metal alarm clock, between a pair of pied Staffordshire spaniels on the narrow iron mantelpiece, indicated four o'clock.
The room had the easygoing student air of a man with no one to impress. A black iron bed with a bright patchwork quilt stood against one wall, a worn horsehair sofa faced a chintz-covered, wing-backed armchair across a bearskin hearth rug. The bookcase was inadequate, its contents spilling haphazardly on the floor. The concession to decoration was a tawny picture, which a close look interpreted as barges in the Thames estuary at sunrise.
The pair of tall first-floor windows looked on an ill-cut lawn with rusty croquet-hoops, surrounded by thick laurels, berberis and box. The house was one of the squat grey-brick villas, which with turretted and battlemented Gothic dwellings lined the Camden Road. Outside the everlasting clank of electric trams merged with the nightly bellowing and baaing from the vast Metropolitan Cattle Market across the railway lines.
Nancy sat on the sofa in a plain charcoal dress, intently darning Eliot's sock with a wooden mushroom.
'Would you like a slice of Dundee cake? Fresh yesterday from the Aerated Bread Company.'
'Fine.'
Eliot fetched a basin of lump sugar from a tall cupboard containing files, more books, shoes, ties and spare bedding. 'Another tune?'
'I guess my appetite's sated for Offenbach, Strauss and-may I say so?-your Sir Arthur Sullivan. Why not play yourself?'
'The piano is to me an instrument as mysterious as the ouija board,' he apologised. 'I simply enjoy watching the rippling keys as the music unwinds.'
The pianola stood in the corner, the rolls which Eliot hired from the Music Roll Exchange in Oxford Street shared the cupboard. 'My conscience disallows keeping a servant, but I've no objection to hiring a ghost as my musical valet. By the way, there's a couple of fellows coming. Did I mention it?'
Nancy looked up sharply from her darning. 'I don't want to be found here.'
'They find more shocking things in the world to worry them than a chap alone with a girl.'
She put down the sock. 'Do you know the only real disagreeableness of revolutionaries? To be entirely insensitive about the feelings of others.'
Eliot grinned. 'I'm sorry, my dear. But honestly, they'll take no more notice of you than of Emma.'
She was the maid-of-all-work, with crumpled stockings and lank hair, raised in an orphanage. Eliot thought her barely fit to look on the outside of the asylum door. The only other occupant of No 502 Camden Road was Frau Ebert, the German housekeeper. When Nancy asked after the householder, Eliot seemed uneasy and explained that Herr Lamsdorff was a bachelor of utmost respectability from Hamburg, who had paid London the compliment of living there, but was obliged to be often abroad on his business as furrier.
'Don't go,' he implored. 'They're nothing to be frightened of. And we've so little time.'
Nancy was returning to Switzerland the following Wednesday. She was staying only two weeks instead of four. Baby's daily cable to the Savoy the previous Friday had complained of 'feeling a bit cheap.' Nancy at once wired Dr Pasquier. He replied that the temperature was a little raised. There was no cause for concern. Miss Grange was obviously fretting for her sister.
'But I'll be back in London, dearest, sure I will, once Baby's settled,' Nancy promised, as Eliot poured kettle into pot.
He made no reply. He knew the fragility of their friendship. It was like the solid ice bridges which formed across Swiss gullies in winter, and in summer might never have been there.
To Nancy, it was a freakish, unthinkable adventure. Once started, she gave herself to making the most of it. They spent all day and much of the night in each other's company-she insisted primly on leaving for the Savoy at midnight, though he assured her the hotel was worldly enough not to imagine the world full of Cinderellas. Eliot showed her with equal pride Buckingham Palace, St Paul's, and his own ancient hospital of St Bartholomew's in Smithfield. At the Tate Gallery, he had objected angrily to Luke Fildes' _The Doctor._ 'Grossly sentimental,' he exclaimed. 'Look at that miserable working-class couple, cowed while the magician meditates over their unconscious child-they couldn't even afford a bed for the poor thing. Medical care is as much a _right_ of the people as pure drinking water. _That_ doctor clearly hasn't the slightest notion of what's wrong with his patient, anyway.'
Nancy thought the painting lifelike and touching. They did not take tea with Miss Nightingale, but stared across the street at her house in Mayfair.
Nancy found Eliot hardly a pleasure-going young man. He took her to Pinero's
'Who exactly are these people coming?' She took her cup of tea. She did not care for tea, but he showed no inclination to buy coffee.
'Political friends of mine. But don't expect wild-eyed men in kulak blouses with whiskers like a burst horsehair sofa and a bomb in their attachй cases. Mr Wince would pass for a prosperous and earnestly churchgoing cheesemonger. Mr Ruston was born upper-middle-class and will die upper-middle-class, a succession as certain in this country as the Crown passing from father to son.'
He sat at the table, stirring his tea, long legs stretched out. 'Fellows like Ruston embrace the proletariat like a wild gipsy mistress. They become horribly bloodthirsty. For their principles, they'd cut their mother's throat or dynamite their grandchildren's nursery. But they'd die before blowing on their tea or drinking their soup from the tip of the spoon. Ruston keeps a cook and would be deeply affronted if anyone hesitated in accepting his cheque. He'd never contemplate taking the five-shilling seaside excursion or living off bread-and-jam. Such people become equally boring to the class they own and the class they ape.'
Nancy smiled. 'You draw an unflattering self-portrait.'
