I stepped inside but did not shut my eyes at once.
This was indeed old Sir Colin’s operating-theatre, built to his specifications when the Circus had been built in the days of the Crystal Palace. The furnishings were few and gaunt but bathed in warm evening sunlight. This flooded in from tall windows and from a ceiling which seemed to be four skylights sloping up to a reflector in the centre, a reflector casting a pool of greater brightness on the operating-table beneath. I saw benches with what looked like barred hutches and kennels on them and noticed a whiff of animal in the hospital smell. I heard the door click shut behind me, felt Bella breathing on the nape of my neck. Suddenly certain she was naked I half closed my eyes and began trembling. From behind she slid an arm across my chest, and with relief I saw it clothed in the sleeve of her travelling-coat. She pressed me back against her body and I relaxed there, noticing briefly that the chemical odour of the place was unusually strong. I felt as much as heard her murmur in my ear, “Bell will let nobody hurt her wee Candle.”
She put her hand over my mouth and nose, and when I tried to breathe I became unconscious.
10. Without Bella
I heard the faint steady hissing of a gas chandelier. I had a headache, but did not open my eyes because light would hurt them. I knew something horrible had happened, that something essential was taken from me, but I did not want to think of it. Nearby someone sighed and whispered, “Evil. I am evil.”
Bella came to mind. I sat up and a blanket slipped from me.
I was sitting (had been lying) on the sofa in Baxter’s study. I was coatless, my waistcoat unbuttoned, my collar and shoes removed. The sofa was a massive mahogany article upholstered in black horsehair. Baxter sat gloomily watching me at the other end of it. Through the windows (whose curtains were not drawn) I saw a big half moon in a clear night sky, a sky so full of deep blue light that it was starless. I said, “Time?”
“Well after two.”
“Bell?”
“Eloped.”
After a moment I asked how he had found me. He handed over a sheaf of pages scrawled with Bella’s huge shorthand. I gave them back saying my head ached too much to decipher anything. He read them aloud.
“Dear God, I have chloroformed Candle in the operating-theatre. Ask him to live with you when he wakes up, then you can both talk often about, Yours Faithfully, Dearly Beloved Bell Baxter. P.S. I will telegraph to say where I am when I get there.”
I wept. Baxter said, “Come down to the kitchen and eat something.”
Downstairs I sat with my elbows on the kitchen table while Baxter foraged in the larder then placed before me a jug of milk, mug, plate, knife, loaf, cheese, pickles and the cold remains of a roast fowl. He handled the last with a distaste he tried and failed to hide, for he was vegetarian and only got in meat for his servants. While I tackled the food he slowly drank nearly a gallon of the grey syrup which was the main part of his diet, ladling it into a tankard from a glass carboy of the sort used to transport industrial acid. Once when he left the room to satisfy a call of nature I sipped a little out of curiosity, and found it as briny as sea-water.
We sat till dawn in a melancholy silence broken by bursts of talk. I asked him where Bella learned to use chloroform. He said, “When we returned from abroad I knew she would need more than toys to keep her occupied, so I started a small veterinary clinic. I put word about that sick animals brought to our backdoor would be treated free of charge. Bella was my receptionist and assistant, and a fine clinician in both capacities. She liked meeting strangers and mending animals. I taught her to stitch wounds and she did so with the deft passionate steadiness working-class women bring to sewing shirts and middle-class women to frivolous embroidery. Many lives and limbs have been lost, McCandless, by excluding women from the more intricate medical arts.”
I felt too tired and sick to argue the point.
A while after this I asked why he had suddenly made a will the day after Bella and I got engaged. He said, “To provide for her after my death. You won’t get rich for years, McCandless, however hard you work.”
I accused him of planning to kill himself after our marriage. He shrugged and said he would have had nothing to live for after it.
“You selfish fool, Baxter!” I cried angrily. “How could Bell and me enjoy your money if we got it by your suicide? We would have kept it, of course, but it would have made us miserable. This elopement has not been a wholly bad thing if it has saved three of us from that.”
Baxter swung his back toward me and muttered that his death would not have looked like suicide. I thanked him for the warning, said I would watch him closely in future, and that if he ever died in unhappy circumstances I would take appropriate steps. He stared round at me, astonished, and said, “What steps? Will you have me buried on unholy ground?”
I told him sulkily that I would freeze him on ice till I found how to animate him again. For a moment he seemed about to laugh, but checked himself. I said, “You must not die now. If you do all your property will go to Duncan Wedderburn.”
He pointed out that the House of Commons was debating a bill to let married women keep their own property. I told him that bill would never be made law. It would undermine the institution of marriage and most M.P.s were husbands. He sighed and said, “I deserve death as much as any other murderer.”
“Nonsense! Why call yourself that?”
“Don’t pretend to have forgotten. By a straight question you exposed my guilt the first day I showed you to Bella. Excuse me.”
It was then he left to empty his bladder or bowels. Either operation took nearly an hour, and when he returned I said, “Sorry, Baxter, I haven’t the faintest idea why you call yourself a murderer.”
“That little nearly nine-month-old foetus I took living from the drowned woman’s body should have been coddled as my foster child. By recasting its brain in the mother’s body I shortened her life as deliberately as if I stabbed her to death at the age of forty or fifty, but I took the years off the start, not the ending of her life — a much more vicious thing to do. And I did it for the reason that elderly lechers purchase children from bawds. Selfish greed and impatience drove me and THAT!” he shouted, smiting the table so hard with his fist that the heaviest things on it leapt at least an inch in the air, “THAT is why our arts and sciences cannot improve the world, despite what liberal philanthropists say. Our vast new scientific skills are first used by the damnably greedy selfish impatient parts of our nature and nation, the careful kindly social part always comes second. Without Sir Colin’s techniques Bell would now be a normal two-and-a-half-year-old infant. I could enjoy her society for another sixteen or eighteen years before she grew independent of me. But my damnable sexual appetites employed my scientific skills to warp her into a titbit for Duncan Wedderburn! DUNCAN WEDDERBURN!”
He wept and I brooded.