Richard Gordon - A QUESTION OF GUILT

'I ain't a slaughterman, doctor.' Bill sat on the spoke-backed kitchen chair beside Eliot's deal table. 'A slaughterman can touch two 'undred pahnds a year. I'm only a boilerman.' He grinned. '"Poupart's Piccadilly Potted Meat. Londoners Love It".'

Eliot remembered the newspaper advertisements of clerics, army officers, goggled aviators, mortar-boarded schoolmasters and other persons of authority and energy, mouthing forkfuls of its slippery slices like famished Children of Israel savouring manna.

'What do Poupart's pay you?' It was a question the patients grew to expect from Eliot.

'Depends.' Bill looked sly. 'I gets paid by the meat wot comes aht of the boiler. And the sacks of meal wot I finish wiv, from grinding the marrow-bones. I can make meself a good ten bob a day, a'cause my governor don't use just wot comes from the slaughter-ahses, 'e buys cheap bits and bones left over by the butchers, even from the big ahses in the West End.'

'I suppose if it's all boiled, it kills the germs,' said Eliot resignedly. 'I'd like to take a look round the Market one day, Bill. A doctor should know the working conditions of his patients. Most know as little as of those in a young ladies' seminary.'

'Come on a Monday morning,' he invited with pride. 'It's the best day. There's two thasand bullocks an' ten thasand sheep sold on Mondays, so they say.'

'Perhaps I'll come tomorrow.'

From a glass bell on an upturned orange-box Eliot took two slimy green squares on a strip of cheesecloth. Crippen peered curiously through his gold-rimmed glasses.

'Mould,' Eliot explained. 'Which ruins leftover bread-and-cheese and last Sunday's cold mutton. It's a fungus named penicillium. It was first mentioned in that famous book by Mordecai Cooke, _Fungi, their Nature, Influence and Uses._ That was published fifty years ago.' Crippen looked vague. Eliot might have been talking of the Vulgate. 'It's a tangle of filaments, a lacework as familiar through my microscope as the tramway map of London.'

Eliot pressed the mould on Bill's pus-riddled forearms, covered it with a square of oiled silk and secured it firmly with bandages. 'Now pass a specimen of your water in this jam-jar, Bill. Boils can be associated with diabetes, can't they, Dr Crippen?'

'Undoubtedly,' said Crippen, to whom the connection was clearly as novel as between water and ice to a South Sea Islander.

Bill left, cap on head and pipe in mouth, wearing the expression of awe shot with distrust of any Cockney finding himself the object of learned attention. Eliot washed his hands with yellow soap in a tin basin on another upturned crate. He told Crippen, 'I'm not running this surgery to cure Holloway's aches and pains, but to show what must be done. This is the most generous city in the world-you've only to look at _Fry's Guide to London Charities,_ there's two thousand hospitals, asylums, dispensaries, homes, orphanages. Not to mention Bible, tract and missionary societies. All with a total income of _twelve million_ pounds a year. The British aren't mean. They're class-ridden. They'd share their last crust with a beggar, but if he demanded half as a human right they'd rather toss it down the sewer.'

Eliot wiped his hands on a towel hanging from a nail. 'Oh, I know there're plenty of medical clubs, but they have to compete with the burial clubs, and the Cockney prefers the prospect of a good funeral to that of postponing it.'

Crippen seemed unstirred by social injustice. He enquired, 'Were you free for dinner tomorrow?'

Eliot excused himself promptly. 'Tomorrow's the Lords' vote on the Budget. I'll be in Parliament Square to see any fun. Please apologize to Mrs Crippen.'

'I shall not be with Belle. You remember Miss Le Neve, my typist? We have been acquainted since '03, when I was consulting physician to the Drouet Institute, and she came to us straight from Pitman's College, only seventeen. We often have dinner together at Frascati's in Oxford Street. They have a nice winter garden with beautiful music, and you can get a good little table d'hфte for five shillings.' Eliot felt admiration at such dalliance in the ogreish shadow of Belle. 'I'm sure that Ethel would enjoy the company of a medical man so cultivated as yourself, quite as much as I do.'

Eliot rang the compliment on the counter of cynicism. After some persuasion, he agreed. It might be amusing to observe Crippen without Belle. Frascati's made a change from the Caledonian Road. Crippen was so pathetically pleased, his watery eyes seemed likely to spill over. As he turned to leave, Crippen reached for a thick green book beside the bell-jar on the orange-box. 'Walsham and Spencer, _Theory and Practice of Surgery,'_ he murmured reverently.

Crippen turned the pages. _'Trephining the Skull…Rhinoplasty…Fracture of the Shaft of the Femur…Strangulated Hernia,'_ he read aloud. 'Do you know, I've still my surgical instruments? I keep the case at home, behind the books. Belle doesn't like to look at them. She calls them a hoodoo. She had an operation once,' he disclosed quietly. 'An ovariotomy, in New York…oh, over ten years ago. They left behind the womb and the Fallopian tubes, so the scar's not too ugly.'

He took the other volume from the orange-box. 'Gray's Anatomy, Fifteenth Edition by Pickering Pick, FRCS, of St George's Hospital,' he read out, as though the title page of the Bible. 'Such a wonderful book. I came across it while studying operations here in England, back in '83.'

'Borrow it if you wish,' Eliot invited handsomely.

'May I? I shall find nothing more satisfying than renewing my knowledge of the human body,' Crippen told him gratefully. 'I'll keep it from the rain under my waterproof. I've only a little walk to catch the Underground at Camden Road Station. I really called to ask if you'd be interested in a little proposition?' Eliot stared, unbelieving after Crippen's last feeler. 'I hold the patent of a remedy called "Ohrshob-"'

'Called what?' _

'The German for "ear" with "shob" from "absorb". A good name, I think? It's an ear salve, for deafness. If you could dispose of a gross among your patients, I'd be most liberal with the commission-'

Eliot clapped him on the shoulder. He felt no anger nor contempt for this threadbare physician. Only sorrow and amusement. He later reflected this attitude brought the failure of his early life and the success of his later one. 'My patients could never afford your remedies. Might I suggest an alternative? Spare them a mite yourself.'

Crippen seemed neither offended nor unresponsive. 'I shall draw a cheque, Dr Beckett. Frascati's at eight tomorrow.'

The door jangled, and he stepped into the rain.

It was still raining hard at six the next morning, when Eliot arrived at the Cattle Market. It was almost an hour before sunrise. The Market was vast, 70 acres, 50 years old, a monument to the practicality which illuminated the Victorians' life as gloriously as their religion.

A 100-foot high, white stone clocktower, surmounted by a gold dragon wind-vane, dominated as majestically as the campinale in Florence a crushed cloister of shops and offices, the post office and telegraph station. Around massed rows of iron-railed stalls for the 750, 000 cattle which lowed their way through every year. Along the edges stretched the sheep and bullock lairs, low buildings with slate-and-glass roofs split for healthy ventilation, open-fronted with slim iron pillars, a three-foot deep cobbled gully along the back for hosing away each morning's dung. Victorian expedience incorporated a pub at each corner, identical Italianate four-storey square buildings, the Lion, the Lamb, the Bull and the _White Horse,_ open all night.

Eliot had sent a boy to Bill Edmonton at Poupart's meat works, saying to meet him in the White Horse-Bill certainly could not read a note. Eliot bought him three-ha'penn'oth of porter, but insisted leaving the warm gaslight before Bill became hopelessly drunk. They entered a broad gate in the blue-painted ten-foot railings. Under the naphtha flares, the sight struck Eliot as a brownish, choppy sea, with mooing for the sound of waves. Whistling and clanking of trains came from the huge triangular Great Northern goods depot against the Regent's Park Canal, where truckloads of cattle and sheep from the Midland shires and Yorkshire moors were shunted about all night.