Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'If you let me send you for monkey-gland treatment to Professor Voronoff in Monte Carlo.'

'We're not going to Monte.'

'Oh, Eliot! You know London's absolutely empty after Christmas.'

'Don't be cross.' He grinned, dropping his hand. 'There's something worth staying to enjoy. I'm to be made a lord.' She drew in her breath. 'And our eldest son shall become a lord. And his eldest son, and so on for ever and ever. Dawson told me, while we were waiting for the King to die. Oh, we're two real professionals, Dawson and I. He's to be a viscount. The only medical man to reach it. It's the age we live in, isn't it? Ever since MacDonald's Socialist cabinet appeared in their knee-breeches at Buckingham Palace. Or does it prove again that a doctor's reputation depends on the distinction of those dying in his care?'

Nancy kissed him. 'So I'm to be a lady twice over? Well! How do I live it down in the States?'

'You'll be the envy of New York. Americans are crazy on titles. Have you seen the rapture of a bishop from the mid-West called "My lord" at a London dinner party?'

She was sitting upright. 'Everyone will say you did it through my money.'

'I'll tell them that first. No doctor hides the truth. Dawson wants me with him and Lloyd George in Germany next September, to meet Herr Hitler.'

'Surely he's not for those awful Nazis? 'she exclaimed.

'Only on the keep-fit level. He thinks our unemployed should have compulsory physical jerks. Dawson fancies himself as a politician. Well, I did once. We fail, because we imagine everyone's mind as disinfected of emotion as a doctor's. Hitler will make a dreadful fool of him.'

Eliot pulled off the heavy silk-lined tail coat he had been wearing almost twenty-four hours. Nancy asked, 'What was the end like?'

'Imperceptible. Lang appeared in his cassock to say some prayers. Does it better a man in Heaven, being seen off by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or by the chaplain of Pentonville jail? As I watched the King die, I found myself thinking quite ridiculously about our old friend Crippen. Though the prison chaplain doesn't say prayers,' Eliot recalled, 'he reads the burial service. Which is rather kicking a man when he's down, don't you think?'

'The chaplain's farewell would stand a man better in Hell, where presumably Crippen went.'

'Thank God the poor little fellow didn't hear the authorities bury him, no more than subsequently feeling them hang him.'

'If he swallowed your dose.'

'I'm sure of it. I heard from Campion, the prison medical officer.' Eliot drew his white shirt over his head. 'I'd not be attending His Majesty tonight-nor entering the House of Lords next month-without that nasty little murder twenty-six years ago in Hilldrop Crescent.'

'If Charlotte Corday hadn't murdered Marat in his bath, Napoleon would be remembered only as a competent artillery officer. I do wish you'd forget that Crippen episode.'

'Who could? When Paul Martinetti died in Algiers a dozen years ago, _The Times_ said only, 'Crippen Case Recalled.' Yet he was famous on the halls before you and I knew him. It's as hard as Leigh Hunt being only remembered as Shelley's friend. And I really think Crippen didn't murder her.'

'You thought so then because we were terribly romantic.'

'We were terrible hypocrites.'

'I certainly wasn't bogus! I honestly wanted to devote my life to the sick.'

'There isn't room for more than one Florence Nightingale in the century, my dear. Anyway, she was a dreadful woman. She saved the lives of the rabble by driving good men to their graves.' He unstrapped his wristwatch. 'You needn't look twice at the time tomorrow. His new Majesty King Edward VIII has put the clock back at Sandringham. His first act on accession. Is that significant?'

Nancy slipped under the bedclothes. 'And no one in England knows about Wallis Simpson?'

'No one. No one common, I mean.'

'She'll be the next Queen.'

_'Pourquoi pas?_ Edward's the first British monarch to fly. Why not the first to wed a twice-divorced American? God, I'm dead beat. Quite suddenly, my inner supply of adrenalin's given out. It'll be getting light in half an hour. Just think of those poor blighters of reporters, shivering the night away inspecting the decorative ironwork of the gates at the end of the drive.'

'It wasn't Crippen who led you here, my darling,' said Nancy sleepily. 'It was accident-the next compartment to mine being empty in the wagon-lit from Basle to Calais.'

'Accident!' he exclaimed. 'I knew perfectly well at the time you'd engineered it.'

'Well! You've waited long enough to tell me.'

'No woman cares to believe that she contributed to her own seduction, no more than any child cares to stop believing in Father Christmas.' He yawned. 'This place depresses me. I've ordered the Bugatti at the door by eleven.'

On a May morning in 1909, two young women of surpassing beauty were travelling in a grey-upholstered first-class compartment on the express which followed the littoral from Geneva to Lausanne.

From the fertile meadows in _La Cфte,_ cows belled like circus animals looked up with tolerant curiosity. The sprouting hayfields were speckled by yellow, mauve and white flowers, the houses with top-heavy roofs clustered at every cross-roads all looked brand new. The only cloud was the belch of the engine, shredded in a breeze which broke the surface of Lake Geneva into glittering ripples decorated with white paddle-steamers and yachts. There is always winter somewhere in Switzerland, but it had lurked to its lair in the mountains.

'I guess I'm a total fraud.'

Jane Grange was twenty-one in a week's time, fair, fresh-faced, blue-eyed, everyone called her 'Baby'. Her sister Nancy was almost two years older. Both wore the 'neo-directoire' fashion, which had reached New York from Paris the previous fall. Baby had a grey scarlet-lined travelling-coat over a narrow ankle-length pink merino dress, her wide-brimmed felt hat with a panache of pink-dyed ostrich feathers. Nancy wore a green cape, a navy-blue serge jacket with tight skirt, a hat equally large with crimson muslin roses and big-dotted veil. The sisters had renounced petticoats, and Baby even wore the latest 'fish-net' stockings.

'Maybe they'll take one look at you and send you right back home to New York,' Nancy agreed.

'Then I should feel an even bigger fraud, shouldn't I? Making all that fuss, coming all this way, for absolutely nothing. How should I ever live it down?'

'It wouldn't be embarrassing at all. Everyone would be so glad to see you back.'

'Yes, I guess so,' said Baby animatedly. 'We'd have the most wonderful party in the world. Why, I can still hold my ball, can't I? It wouldn't be too late. We can use the same invitations, I never threw them away.' She looked through the window, over the coast road across the lake. Excitement flickered from her face. Both knew there was no chance of being turned away. 'Is that Mont Blanc?'

'It's Mont Salиve. They call it the cab-drivers' Mont Blanc. Tourists get bilked, taking an afternoon trip. That's so, Maria-Thйrиse?'

Mademoiselle Maria-Thйrиse Lascalle sat in a long black alpaca coat and black straw bonnet, clutching a large black handbag as though expecting to be robbed. Like many middle-aged Frenchwomen, consecutive mourning for remote relations allowed economy in dress. She had been engaged in Paris through familiarity with English and with Switzerland. Her English had become worse and her taciturnity greater during the journey, but ladies travelling without a maid could neither attract respect not keep their own. She said she knew nothing about the taxicabs.

'Oh, all mountains look the same to me,' Baby dismissed the skyline pettishly.

Across the buttoned-cloth seats lay their rolled tartan rugs spined with a cluster of parasols and umbrellas, a pair of gold-clasped alligator dressing-cases, Nancy's handbag of gold-threaded tapestry, Baby's of mink trimmed with its tails. Baby slowly turned the pages of the _Illustrated London News,_ the only magazine available in English. She was perplexed at the ceremonious, punctillious heartland of the world's greatest empire, a country which had previously crossed neither of their thoughts. Nancy looked up from Elinor Glyn's _Three Weeks,_ which she had bought in the Boulevard St-Michel, and which was banned in Boston.