THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  'Semmelweiss was another man who saw the range of mountains which everyone overlooked?'

  'Most definitely,' agreed Colebrook.

  We had reached the front door. 'What's my wife's outlook?'

  He considered this for a moment. 'Her infection may well localize itself as a pelvic abscess, which can be drained surgically. But it will be a long and debilitating illness, there's no getting away from that. And one which may well leave her sterile for the rest of her life.'

  'I wouldn't mind. I don't want any more children.'

  Colebrook raised his heavy eyebrows but said only, 'I expect you've informed her relatives?'

  'My wife has none. She comes from a home for destitute children. She's completely anonymous. She's a particle unconnected to anyone in the world except me. The circumstances of my marriage were singular, don't you think?'

  'A little unusual, perhaps,' said Colebrook guardedly.

  'She was a housemaid. Why do you imagine I married her? Because I got her with child. And on to her death bed.'

  'You must not simply accept that she is going to die,' he told me severely.

  'Of course she will.' I was anguished not through love but through guilt, which are intertwined often enough.

  'I'm going to give her a blood transfusion in the morning. I've already got a donor. It will reinforce her own white scavenger cells, in the best Almroth Wright tradition.'

  Transfusion was then a complicated operation, done directly with a syringe and yards of bright red rubber tubing, the donor lying on the bed next to the chalk-white desperately ill woman. I suggested. 'Couldn't you try Ehrlich's arsenicals? Sir Edward once said something about your using them.'

  'I was chasing a hare. We thought they increased the ability of the blood to kill streptococci, when injected for the entirely different purpose of killing the germs of syphilis. But they don't. We're giving streptococcal antiserum, naturally. Otherwise, we must rely on the skills of the nurses, as in any other severe infection. But your wife has a sound constitution.'

  'Then what about "Prontosil"?'

  'The answer's simple. I haven't got any.'

  'But I have.'

  His eyebrows rose again. 'How?'

  'I stole them. From Domagk. Twenty tablets.'

  Colebrook shook his head. 'I'm afraid that's out of the question, Elgar. I couldn't give any maternity patient an untested new drug.'

  'But it has been tested. One of those papers alongside Domagk's was specifically on its use in puerperal fever. From Professor Max Heinkel's clinic in Jena. Isn't that good enough?'

  'No, it is not good enough,' objected Colebrook forthrightly. 'I have been through those papers most carefully, and a lot of the experimental and clinical work in Germany was most slipshod. As far as Domagk's lab work goes, mice are not men. Surely you remember well enough The Lion's axiom-"experimental infections in animals have no relevance to natural infections in humans".'

  I thought he was procrastinating only from blind loyalty to Wright and to Wright's hate of chemical remedies and chemists. 'I can have the "Prontosil" here in half an hour,' I counter-attacked. 'Or are you going to let my wife die?'

  'Please, Elgar! You should not put things like that. You are a scientist, you surely realize that emotion is a dangerous ingredient in the making of clinical decisions.'

  'But why not try it, in God's name?' I pursued arguing, through rising anger against Wright and his self-satisfied bigotism. 'Surely, it can't do any harm.'

  'How can you claim that?'

  'There was nothing to suggest ill-effects in any single one of those German papers.'

  'The cases reported were few. And the enthusiastic research worker forgets his fatalities.'

  'Isn't it worth taking the risk, just for once, that the Germans should not be bigger liars than we are?'

  'Do please try and contain your language, Elgar.' Colebrook was embarrassed, annoyed and impatient with me all at once. 'I don't believe any German scientist would be deliberately misleading, even in these days of Dr Goebbels. But supposing I did give "Prontosil" to your wife? And supposing she did die? You might well blame me. Or you might well blame yourself for insisting on it. Which would be the worse for you.'

  'I do insist on it. I'll sign a paper, indemnifying you.'

  Colebrook said nothing for some moments. 'Very well,' he announced resignedly. 'Fetch the drug. The paper won't be necessary.'

  But Rosie died. At ten o'clock on the night of Monday, March 11, 1935. Colebrook gave her the 'Prontosil', a tablet every four hours. But her blood and her body were already overwhelmed by the infection before he started.

  Rosie's death was a shock to the Harley Street house. I had told no one that she was so ill. I had the impression that above and below stairs I was held to blame for it. I felt penitent, but it was penitence only through my suffering no true feeling of grief. I am not heartless, and the bell which tolls for all mankind can never make pleasant music. But I did not know her very well. I had been strongly attracted to Rosie through 'the hot, spicy smell of dirty petticoats'. I had married her because my upbringing left me with a raw sensitivity to the opinions of the world, to be driven rather than pushing. In short, not through honour but through cowardice.

  Only my parents and myself went with her to Kensal Green. But poor Rosie had one valuable legacy. On the Saturday before her death her temperature steadied, she sat up with her face suffused pink from the dye and said she felt much better. She lived long enough for Colebrook to set aside his doubts and even Sir Almroth Wright's principles. He searched Germany and France for sulphonamide, dosed his own mice, and issued his own paper on the sulphonamide treatment of puerperal fever in the _Lancet _in June, 1936. A year after that, the mortality at Queen Charlotte's for the disease which killed my wife had dropped from thirty-three in a hundred to under five.

  There was still Clare.

  I put my problem to Colebrook. The evening of the funeral I went to his home in Chiswick Mall, which was bright with daffodils from his week-end house at Farnham in Surrey-which he had characteristically bought near Sir Almroth Wright's.

  'Puerperal fever is a triple tragedy,' he told me solemnly. 'Though I've no children of my own, I do my best to sort out the domestic problems of bereaved husbands. They've sometimes two or three small ones to manage somehow or other, and often enough financial troubles into the bargain. Do you want to keep the child?'

  'No.'

  'Adoption may not be easy.' he remarked doubtfully. 'A lot of people these days can't run to the luxury.'

  'She'll have to be put in a home, like her mother.' As he said nothing, I asked, 'Am I abnormal? I don't feel particularly attached to the child.'

  'I have seen too much of the relationships between husbands and wives and their newborn babies to find any variation whatever abnormal. Do you know of anyone who might take her?'

  'Not a soul.'

  The Lady Almoner at Charlotte's is of course an expert on this subject. Though I'm afraid she can't perform miracles any more than I can in the wards.'

  Mrs Packer saved her. She called the next morning at Arundel College. 'Jim, I have something terribly important to say,' she began earnestly as I went down from my lab to the hall. 'Can we sit down?'

  I took her across to the refreshment room at Euston Station, where Clare's fate was decided.

  'My husband's a solicitor, you know, and doing as well as anyone can these times,' she explained. 'As I expect you noticed at your wedding, he's…well, he's older than I am. I mean, Jim, we'd love to have her, and we can afford to look after her, and we've a new house at Hendon which is really very nice, and of course whenever you want to come and see her-'

  'There's one condition.'

  She swallowed, her Adam's apple bouncing in her thin neck like a ping-pong ball. 'Anything you say, Jim.'

  'Clare must never have the faintest idea who her father and mother were.'

  She looked flustered. 'Of course, we'd try if you really want us to. But these
things do tend to slip out, and everyone in Sir Edward's house knows-'

  'You must give me your promise. Your solemn promise.'

  'I promise. At least, I promise I'll do my best.'

  She did very well. Clare today-and Mrs Packer's is the only false name I have used in this narrative-became a bright young MP in the 1960s, but left politics to become Professor of Sociology at a university situated…shall we say, between St Louis and Oklahoma City. She is married for a second time, to an American professor who smokes a pipe, wears tweeds and goes fishing. Perhaps he wanted her to complete his English milieu. She has had three children, without even running a temperature. I was once about to be introduced to her at a party in the House of Commons, but I left in tears.

  That summer of 1935 was King George the Fifth's Silver Jubilee. There were flags and tea-parties in working-class streets, royal processions, military reviews, vibrantly choral services of thanksgiving. In London, St Paul's was floodlit, at Spithead the Fleet was beflagged. Clever fellows who saw it all as a carnival to boost the National Government were quickly lost in the morass of emotion. On June 7, MacDonald departed from No 10 Downing Street, Baldwin returned. On June 27, two and a half million Britons voting in Lord Cecil's Peace Ballot stood against any military measures whatever to repel foreign aggression.

  The following January had Sir Edward Tiplady on the front pages again. The King was suffering a recurrence of his old chest infection. Like Leonard Colebrook with Rosie, the doctors were against ransoming a King's life with an unknown German drug. At half past nine on the night of Monday, January 20, Lord Dawson's medical bulletin said only, The King's life is moving peacefully to its close.' The BBC fell silent, but for the ticking of a clock. The nation dropped its head. At five minutes to midnight the King died. Nobody was sure if his last words were, 'How is the Empire?' or 'Bugger Bognor'.

  19

  'Tonight Hitler sleeps in the Hrad?any Palace in Prague. It is time to redefine our attitudes.'

  Archie said this without a shred of self-consciousness. All men become caricatures of themselves, but he achieved it younger than most. It was three years later, the evening of March 15, 1939, and the four of us were eating dinner in his Belgrave Square home. Since his father's death, he had combined the huge dining-room with the sitting-room in the modern flat-dwelling fashion, redecorating and refurnishing the rest of the place with pleasing, extravagant plainness.

  'The Ides of March are come,' said David Mellors, unusually gloomily.

  'Ay, Chamberlain; but not gone,' added Elizabeth Tiplady, who had left school more recently than the rest of us.

  'So much for Hitler's "last territorial demand in Europe", over the Sudeten Germans,' I said.

  'Do you realize the significance of what's just happened?' Archie demanded of the table in general. 'By now, we're sickeningly used to Hitler invading neighbouring countries. But for the first time he's enlarged the Reich not simply to include expatriate Germans like the Austrians or Sudetens. He's gobbled up a foreign nation, the Czechs. Who knows who's next?'

  'The Poles,' David poured himself more claret-a '34, claimed by Archie to be the best out of ten terrible years.

  'Us?' suggested Elizabeth.

  'What's Chamberlain going to do?' I asked, Archie being a fount of political information more immediate if not always more accurate than the newspapers.

  'Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He's done all he can do already. Did you read what he said in the House this afternoon? That the collapse of Czecho-Slovakia was inevitable. That the Slovakia half of it simply declared itself independent, so we're no longer bound to guarantee its frontiers under the Munich agreement. Fancy falling back on legal niceties with the Gestapo already in Prague! Chamberlain whines about a breach of the Munich spirit, as though Hitler had omitted to send him a Christmas card. The whole business is utterly disgraceful. Poor, old, ill President Hбcha has been horribly let down, just as we let down President Beneљ. No wonder the Tory party's looking sick. If I was a Conservative MP today, I'd vomit over the benches.'

  'What's this we're supposed to be eating?' asked David. 'Stewed pheasant?'

  'It couldn't possibly be. Pheasant shooting ends on February the first,' said Archie severely. For all his socialism, he had the aristocrat's disdain for ignorance of country matters.

  'It's chicken, _I think.'_ Elizabeth struggled to cut it.

  'I don't know the first thing about food,' remarked Archie airily. 'It's a dish which Watson seems to like cooking. I suppose because he finds it one of the easiest.'

  'Do you think Watson appreciates that instead of not having to call you "Sir", he now doesn't have to call you "My Lord"?' I enquired.

  'Oh, this title!' Archie complained. 'Do you realize, politically it's like those concrete overcoats in which gangsters drop their rivals into New York harbour. One simply disappeared without a gurgle. Of course, none of us expected my father to die so suddenly last Christmas. I so much wanted to make some sort of impact on the Commons before being shoved into the Madame Tussaud's of the Lords. When I think of the constituencies I've nursed!' He ended pathetically.

  Archie had always seemed to be nursing a constituency since going down from Cambridge, though the foundlings were never grateful enough to elect him to Parliament. But he did good among them, helping the inadequate and the inarticulate before they were lavished with the bounty of the Welfare State.

  'Can't you shed your title the way people do with their awful christian names?' asked Elizabeth. 'Or sell it to the Americans like all the nicest country houses?'

  'Archie, you really ought to sack Watson,' David advised. 'He'll give you a recurrence of your duodenal ulcer.'

  'I don't eat at home very much. I'm far too busy.' Archie reached towards the cluster of wine bottles. 'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' he repeated. frankly admit, that for a while I simply couldn't take Hitler seriously. I'll admit that I thought him perfectly justified reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936, for instance. But wasn't I one of many, who asked why he shouldn't be allowed to move his soldiers about his own back yard? And after all, he was doing a lot for the unemployed, which nobody was here.'

  'Do you ever hear from your friends there, Jim?' David asked.

  I shook my head. I stopped writing to Gerda when I married Rosie. 'I shouldn't care to provoke a letter returned _Empfдnger unbekannt.'_

  '"Addressee Unknown" has terrifying implications,' Archie commented sombrely. He went on, 'It was Spain which changed my mind about Hitler.'

  'Darling, it was such a pity that you never got there,' Elizabeth told him sympathetically.

  'I couldn't help developing an ulcer.'

  'It must have been terribly frustrating, it all going on and you having to lie on your back in Swanage instead.'

  'I almost enlisted,' he told her irritably. He had recounted the story that evening in the expectation-which he should have known to be perfectly ridiculous, it being Elizabeth-of impressing my young lady. 'I'd got as far as Paris. That's why Spain decided me more than Abyssinia. Because it was possible to get involved onself. After all, two thousand of us in Britain joined the International Brigade. And five hundred of us won't come back. Thank God the whole thing seems almost over.'

  'According to George Orwell, it was all a tremendous fiasco, even for a war,' I observed.

  '"I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain",' he quoted W H Auden, raising his glass. 'Then of course there's the German Jews.'

  'Our Freud which art in Hampstead,' said David.

  We were interrupted by Watson in his tail coat. He had become fatter and even ruder, and I thought in many respects resembled Mussolini. 'All right, is it?'

  'Divine,' Elizabeth said.

  'You haven't cleared away the cocktail things,' Archie told him sternly.

  'I can't do everything, can I?'

  'I don't think any of us want any more.' Archie pushed away the half-eaten dish. 'You may serve the pudding.'

  'There ain't none. I've som
e fruit.'

  'Open a couple of bottles of Cliquot,' Archie commanded. He added as Watson withdrew, 'Do you know what I heard yesterday? When Halifax went to Berchtesgaden a couple of months ago, he was greeted at the front door by Hitler in that usual ridiculous get-up of brown jacket and dress trousers. Our lordly cabinet minister mistook him for the footman. He was within an inch of handing over his hat and stick. Think how the course of history might have been changed!'

  'Hitler would have sent his Air Force to blow us up between the soup and fish, I expect,' said Elizabeth.

  'London may not be so beautiful as Paris or Prague,' said Archie, who had travelled to both. 'But like any Frenchman or any Czech I don't want wakening at dawn to the crash of bombs. That's why I was incredibly relieved by Munich.'

  'Like everyone else,' I said. The iron-crossed wings of Hermann Gцring's Luftwaffe overshadowed Europe. No one had experienced mass aerial bombardment, but after Spain everyone could imagine it. The German Air Force was the atomic bomb of the 1930s.

  'It's Wednesday!' Elizabeth jumped from the table to switch on the radiogram beside the fireplace. 'I mustn't miss Arthur Askey.'

  'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' Archie declared once again. 'I now commit myself to standing up to Hitler, whatever the cost. With Russia, all the better-if Europe hadn't been so neurotically afraid of Communism, Hitler would never have got where he has. If not, alone with France.'