advantages of Christianity and drains.'
'I suppose you politicos have faith in your ideals as a salesman in his samples, however shoddy.' Feeling his political antagonism had displaced paternal affection, the major added, 'It must have been a bitter disappointment for you.'
'The blackest of my life. And wasted work always torments me, whether it's an experiment which fails, or a patient who dies. I spent the wettest winter that London has known, tramping the Holloway streets from the hour men leave for work before daylight to the hour they return well after dark. I spoke every night in cold halls smelling of damp clothes and unwashed flesh, only quarter-filled with people who were either indifferent or hostile and generally stupid. I hope the carnival didn't embarrass you? I got a good deal into the newspapers, who seemed to find a medical man as a socialist an interesting freak. What did the Duke think?'
'His Grace was quite amused. He is not particularly interested in electioneering. He knows that the important issues in the country are all decided by a dozen or so men like himself. I excused you by suggesting you'd grow out of it.'
'It's a poor fighter who throws in the towel after a pummelling in the first round.'
'Or a wise one? Your profession passes well in society today. Doctors have been knighted, and of course Lister is in the House of Lords. Look at Dawson, the Duke's doctor. On the Duke's recommendation he's now the King's doctor, and set for his knighthood. The Duke has a soft spot for you, Eliot. And you're damned clever. Give up this politicking, set up your brass plate in Harley Street. A word from the Duke could bring you the patients which could bring you a fortune.'
'I don't want a fortune.'
'You will when you're married. Your wife will see to that.'
'The marriage bed is for me an article of furniture as elusive as a seat in the House of Commons.'
The major raised his eyebrows, but seemed diffident about pursuing this remark. 'You mustn't starve yourself of the normal pleasures for a young man. I recall my own time as a subaltern…mind, London was a rougher place in the seventies, with the Middlesex and the Oxford music-halls going strong. There were houses in the Haymarket and Covent Garden where a young serving officer, deprived by duty of feminine company, might take a year's compensation in a single night.'
'I'm going to the music-hall tomorrow night,' said Eliot, looking amused. 'One of the turns is a lady of my acquaintance. I move in theatrical circles, you see.'
His father was curious. 'What's her name?'
'Belle Elmore.'
'Never heard of her.'
'She is the wife of a confrиre. A funny little man called Dr Crippen, who lives round the corner.'
'Of course, I've taken little interest in such things for years.'
'How's mother?'
'She has bred a new begonia.'
Mention of Mrs Beckett was an understood signal that one or the other had suffered enough serious conversation.
When Eliot opened his front door with a latch-key, Emma appeared from the basement to say there were 'gen'men upstairs'. He found Ruston impatiently pacing the carpet, Wince on the sofa smoking his pipe and reading his
'Where have you been?' Ruston greeted him.
'The Imperial Club.' Ruston looked outraged. 'Surely a fellow may lunch with his own father? I could hardly have invited him to the Holloway Socialist Workers' Club.' He tossed his wide-brimmed hat on the iron bed. 'Why have I this pleasure? After my resounding failure at the polls, I imagined you'd want no more to do with me.'
Ruston made an impatient gesture. 'Elections are a farce, and the result in Holloway proved as much. The political parties of this country are as irrelevant as a literary tea-drinking society. All talk, gentility and selfishness. We shall achieve nothing without force.'
'And patience.' Wince turned a page of the paper.
'I'm giving you a chance to prove what you're made of,' Rushton said.
'Such courage as I have is at the disposal of the cause,' Eliot told him.
'We don't want your courage,' Ruston asserted. 'We want your respectability. A doctor will provide cover. We plan to achieve all we hope in one sharp blow.'
'What? Assassinate Mr Asquith?' Eliot asked derisively.
'The German Emperor.'
'Oh, that's quite ridiculous.'
'That is for others to decide, not you.'
Eliot felt a strengthening of his feeling that Ruston was mentally unsound. 'Have the practical difficulties occurred to your friends? That we are in Holloway and he in Potsdam? That he is surrounded by a bodyguard who would esteem it a privilege dying to the last man?'
'Emperor William has been on the German throne almost 22 years. Do you know how many times he has visited this country? Eleven! As the King's nephew he's popular here, even if his country isn't.'
'If you shoot Kaiser Bill on his next trip, it won't prevent war, but provoke it.'
'That's the 'ole idea,' said Wince, still reading the paper.
Ruston had been striding the room while talking. He stopped, hands in the pockets of his tweed trousers. 'We know our Prussians. They've constructed the most wonderful military machine, which they're itching to get moving like the proud possessor of a brand-new Rolls-Royce. The Kaiser killed in Britain! Think of the excuse it gives the hotheads in Berlin. Once von Moltke's General Staff have started the engine and released the brake, nothing can stop it.'
Eliot sat abruptly next to Wince, who was relighting his pipe. 'And what use will a war be to the English working-man? Apart from ending his miseries by permitting him to be killed in it.'
'War brings revolution. The country's seething as it is. Look at the trade unions-gaining half-a-million members a year. Look at the wave of strikes. They're startling the old fuddy-duddy union leaders, scaring the bosses and terrifying the Government out of its wits. The election meant nothing, nothing. Both parties were the bosses' party. The workers are impatient for power. They're scornful of compromise. They're impatient to tear down the plywood barriers in their way.'
'Tonypandy,' added Wince lugubriously. 'The 'ole of the South Wales' coalfield's out. The workers 'ave rejected the advice of their own leaders, 'oo are acting a bunch o' cowards.'
'The bosses are using the one weapon they know and love,' Ruston continued forcefully. 'Starvation! I hope they'll succeed. They'll have the whole working class up in arms.'
There was silence broken by the bubbling of Wince's pipe. 'I disagree with you', said Eliot.
'You are not entitled to disagree with me. About anything.' Ruston picked up his umbrella and Irish hat. 'I only want to be reassured I can rely on you when the time comes?'
'I gave you my loyalty five years ago. I'm not the man to withdraw it the first time it's tested.'
They left Eliot with his legs stretched out, staring at the neglected fire. He had joined the British Revolutionary Movement while a medical student at St Bartholomew's. Like other young men, he wanted to see the world changed not in his lifetime but before he was thirty. He stirred uneasily on the sofa. If Ruston was not mad, he lived among political lunatics isolated from the real world like the inhabitants of H G Wells's _Country of the Blind,_ which he had just read in a magazine. In the cold, misty afternoon he was sweating. He was afraid of no one, but the prospect of helping murder a fellow-human, whether emperor or helpless cripple, terrified him. Had his father met the Kaiser, he would have courteously invited him to sherry at the Imperial Club rather than blowing his head off.
It was growing dark. Eliot threw coal on the fire and lit the gas. He wrote distractedly for a while, then threw down his pen and reached among the music-rolls for Beethoven's Sonata No. 14, the Moonlight. He sat on the sofa, staring into the flames. The music induced a dreaminess which he felt wickedly voluptuous. He pulled out his watch and sighed. In half an hour he must leave for the Metropolitan Music Hall, three or four miles away across Regent's Park in the Edgware Road.
Crippen had called at the surgery the previous Friday with a pressing invitation to share his box. Belle had a fortnight's engagement, an agonized week had been passed turning over her wardrobe. Eliot readily accepted.
