THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  'You must pull yourself together,' I commanded. She went on crying. People at other tables were staring at us. I felt all of them were in the secret. 'We've got to look at this coolly.' I waited until her sobs had quietened. 'Listen, Rosie-if either of us loses our heads we shall get nowhere.'

  'Ow, Jim! You do still love me, don't you?'

  'Of course I do. Now, who else knows about it?'

  'You're sure you love me?'

  _'Of course_ I love you,' I told her fiercely. 'Who else knows about it?'

  'No one. Not a soul.'

  'Not even Lady Tip?' She shook her head vigorously. 'You must keep absolutely quiet about it for a bit. Not a word to my parents.'

  'You'll stand by me, won't you, Jim?' she asked pathetically.

  'Of course I shall.' I had no option.

  Rosie had to go back to help with the dinner. I hurried to the flat, desperate to put everything before David Mellors.

  'I haven't done my gynae yet,' he confessed unhelpfully.

  'But there must be other perfectly good reasons for a girl stopping her periods, surely?'

  He frowned at the eggs and bacon he was frying for himself in the grimy kitchen at the back. 'There must be. There's more than one reason for everything in medicine. Though they say in the hospital, if any female outside a nursery or a nunnery stops menstruating, she's pregnant until proved otherwise.'

  I sat down on a hard kitchen chair. David forked over the sizzling bacon. The smell made me feel sick.

  'Didn't you take precautions?' he asked.

  'Of course I took precautions.'

  'What sort?'

  'I…well, I pulled out.'

  He said impassively, _'Coitus interruptus,_ the poor man's french letter.'

  'That's safe enough, surely?' I protested.

  'Obviously, it wasn't.'

  'You're not being very sympathetic.'

  'Sorry, boy.'

  I sat staring at the pock-marked linoleum of the floor in silence. David slipped his meal on to a plate with a fish slice, sat at the scrubbed wooden table and began to eat. 'If she is pregnant, can I do anything about it?' I asked.

  'You could find a witch in a back street with a knitting-needle, I suppose.'

  'I could end up in the dock, though, couldn't I?'

  'I suppose you might: You'd have to take the gamble. Mind, there's plenty of girls who come into casualty for the gynae department to finish off what they've started themselves, or someone else has. The police ask questions, but nobody tells them much. Do you want anything to eat?'

  'No, no…but if I don't want to run that sort of risk, what can I do?'

  'You can let her go ahead and have it. There's plenty of unmarried mothers in Mary's. Sister keeps a store of wedding rings and issues them out.'

  'But you don't understand. The very idea of a person like Rosie producing a child which I've fathered utterly nauseates me.'

  'You might grow very fond of her. I've seen that happen before. Down where I live, there's plenty of chaps who wouldn't think in a blue moon of getting themselves hitched up before they put the girl in pod.'

  'You're not trying to tell _me _that I should actually marry her, are you?'

  'That's something I'd never tell anyone.'

  There was another silence. David went on eating. 'Of course, you're trying to tell me something rather different,' I said. 'That I've an overpowering moral obligation to marry her. Well, that's unnecessary. I'm already aware of it.'

  'Was I saying that? Well, if you did marry her, you might not be doing too badly. She's a pretty thing. Whether she'd make a good wife is a toss up with any woman, but it generally works out all right.'

  'But she's an ignoramus.'

  David wiped a slice of white bread in his mixture of egg yolk, scarlet ketchup and fat. 'It's not the biological function of women to be brainy, no more than for the birds of the air to ride bicycles.'

  'Now you sound like Almroth Wright.' I got up to leave the kitchen. At the door I turned round. 'She's common.'_

  David made no reply.

  _He that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward,_ wrote Samuel Pepys on October 7, 1660, _it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head._ I fulfilled Pepys' ludicrous picture.

  Archie declared that of course I must marry her. To his mind, one of the bourgeoisie-even the _nouvelle bourgeoisie_-leaving a servant girl with a bun in the oven had no alternative but make an honest woman of her. My father was refreshingly cheerful and encouraging. He said it happened every day, and she was a lucky girl knowing who the father was. My mother implored with tears that I gave the child a name. Sir Edward was back home, and would of course know all about it. He sent through my father a message to call, but I stayed away, not wishing to meet the eye of Lady Tip. As for Elizabeth, I prayed the affair was too shocking to be allowed her ears.

  It happened on Saturday, November 3, at Marylebone Registry Office. In a red dress and with a little bunch of brownish chrysanthemums, Rosie was blooming and bulging-dispelling my hopes to the last moment that Nature might put an end to my predicament. We had a social difficulty. She was a waif; reared in a home in Clapham. Mrs Packer volunteered to 'give her away', and appeared with a husband in a bowler and fringe of moustache, looking like Strube's Little Man from the _Daily Express._ The Registrar had a cold, which I caught. Archie was my best man, and gave me Ј100.

  Sir Edward had charitably taken his family to the country. We had our wedding-breakfast in the basement. My mother made a superb cake. My father made a speech and got drunk. There was confetti, as we took a taxi to the pair of furnished rooms I had found in Coram's Fields, round the back of the College and not far from Doughty Street, where Dickens used to live.

  I completely forget how those days of early marriage felt. I forgot whether I loved Rosie, or had any particular sensation about her. I recall only an odd awareness of possessing her totally, her plump body, her cotton petticoats, the prayer book she had kept from the orphanage, her umbrella. It was all mine. She cooked for me every night, my mother having relentlessly instructed her. I cannot remember a word that we exchanged, nor what we did to pass the time. The unborn baby dominated us. Because of the baby, Rosie rested in the afternoons, never went out in the wet, never looked a cripple in the face. Because of the baby, we shared the thin-mattressed double bed every night without the solace of each other.

  The baby was to be born in Queen Charlotte's. We were delighted to have within reach so famous a maternity hospital, which had taken the name of George the Third's Queen, who had fifteen children. In the mid-eighteenth century it was providing free lying-in for married mothers, with a diet of brown and white caudle, and infant baptism by the chaplain, which was compulsory. Colebrook worked in the research laboratory attached to the isolation block, which had shed its old walls for new in the suburb of Chiswick, above an elbow of the Thames to the west. I did not see him after my marriage until the end of February, when he appeared one morning in the hall of Arundel, removing hat and damp raincoat and dropping his bag all in one movement as usual. 'I hear your wife's having a baby in Charlotte's,' he greeted me. 'When's she due?'

  'In about a week's time.'

  'I'm sure everything will go splendidly.' I wondered if he was doing any mental arithmetic. 'Here's something which might interest you, as you speak German.' He handed me a rolled-up journal from his mackintosh pocket. 'I got it this morning from a colleague in Breslau-he must have thought it important, posting it off in a hurry. Take a look at it while I'm in my meeting. There would seem to be something brewing in the Rhineland.'

  I unrolled it standing in the hall. It was the last edition of the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift,_ the German Medical weekly, published in Leipzig the previous Friday. The issue contained special supplements on tuberculosis and medicine in sport. I was wondering why Colebrook should have recommended it, my eye running down the list of main contents on the cover. The first was _Aus den Forschungslabatorien
der I G Farbenindustrie A G Werk Elberfeld_-From the Research Laboratories of I G Farben Elberfeld. Underneath came, _Ein Beitrang zur Chemotherapie der bakteriellen Infektionen_-A Contribution to the Chemotherapy of Bacterial Infections. The author of this modest title was Professor Gerhard Domagk. The following article I translated as Prontosil in Streptococcal Disease. I wondered what 'Prontosil' was. It was written by Professor Klee, and I remembered from Domagk's letter to Dr Dieffenbach that Klee had been testing out 'Streptozon' in Wuppertal. I turned over the pages, starting to translate Domagk's paper, lips moving and finger running along the lines. They seemed to have re-christened 'Streptozon', as 'Prontosil'. But undoubtedly it was the same sulphonamide drug which had saved my hand. The world was at last learning what I had heard from a part-time prostitute in a Cologne slum the night they burnt down the Reichstag.

  18

  I had no chance to discuss the German discovery with Colebrook before we met in the hall of Queen Charlotte's in Marylebone Road on the early evening of Monday, March 6, 1935. He had just come through the door, bag in hand and mackintosh flapping. He greeted me, 'Hello, Elgar-had your baby?'

  'Yes, this morning. Everything seems fine.'

  'Congratulations. Boy or girl?'

  'Girl. I'm on my way to see them now.'

  'I say, those papers by Domagk and Co in the _Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift_ are causing something of a sensation in London.' Coli strode along with me. 'They've even got into the newspapers. I wrote to Domagk for more information, but I haven't heard. I expect he's snowed under with similar requests from all over the world. And of course things are getting a little sticky in Germany, they do so seem to be turning in upon themselves. It's as though they were already at war with the rest of us in Europe.'

  'I wondered why they renamed it "Prontosil"?' I had once mentioned to Coli my being one of the earliest cases on 'Streptozon'. 'Or as I suppose the Germans would pronounce it, "Pronto_zeal".'_

  'Oh, I G Farben register any number of trade marks-euphonious labels for drugs as yet unsynthesized.' (The name 'Prontosil' had been registered in 1928 with the intention of sticking it on some new sleeping-draught.) 'You know what someone in my lab suggested? It's an abbreviation _of pronto_ and _silentium.'_ Coli gave his laugh, which could fill a corridor. He was a cheerful man behind his solemn manner and austere tastes. 'I must say, it's strange-to say the least-that Domagk kept completely quiet about his discovery for more than two years.'

  'Wouldn't he want to be absolutely certain it always worked? It would be cruel to raise the world's false hopes.'

  'You're being very Christian. The reason for the delay is simple. I G Farben wanted to be certain they'd got all their patents safely tied up. And they wanted exactly the right moment to market the stuff. I know my German drug industry.'

  Remembering my past discouragement, I felt entitled to complain, 'Perhaps some lives might have been saved had Sir Almroth Wright seen the possibilities.'

  'You can't blame The Lion.' Expectedly, Colebrook came to his defence. 'This is chemotherapy, of course. But a different sort than we've been accustomed to since Ehrlich first coined the word. It's not like the cure of syphilis or malaria or kala azar. The drug is simple, the administration is simple, and the streptococcus is no rare parasite, but flourishing upon all of us.'

  'You mean, it's one of those concepts which stand out like mountains, which nobody sees because we're too busy staring at the toes of our boots?

  'You might put it like that, yes.'

  We parted, as I turned towards the entrance of the ward. The baby had been born at seven o'clock that morning. Rosie had started her pains early on the Sunday, when I had found a taxi at King's Cross Station and taken her into the hospital, waiting in a room with two other husbands. A well-starched midwife had appeared after an hour or so to explain that my wife had 'gone off the boil' and the baby was not expected that day. I gathered that for the first child the labour pains provided a prolonged overture to the drama. When I returned the next morning they had been trying to find me, and I was a father.

  After I left Colebrook, I found Rosie still with the radiance of new motherhood, an expression which can transform the most ordinary girl into a saint, and which I do not believe has ever been accurately caught by painters of the Madonna.

  'What do you think of her?' she asked, squeezing the bundle against her breast.

  'She seems perfectly all right.'

  'She's lovely. Do you still want to call her Clare?'

  'Why not?'

  Rosie wrinkled her nose. 'I dunno…it's a sort of stuck-up name.'

  'I don't think so. St Clare of Assisi founded the order of Poor Clares.'

  'Are you sorry she ain't a boy?' Rosie was looking at me guiltily.

  'Why should I be?'

  'Most men like a boy first.'

  'It's all the same to me.'

  'We'll have a boy next time,' predicted Rosie, smiling and snuggling up the baby again.

  When I returned on the Tuesday evening, Rosie was not in such high spirits, a little tired, but well. On the Wednesday, she was flushed, with a temperature.

  'It's nothing to worry about unduly,' said the starched midwife. 'After all, it's hardly unknown for a mother to run a slight temp during the puerperium. Your wife's got a rather nasty discharge down below, which would account for it. We've already taken a swab for the lab.'

  'Do they know the infecting germ yet?' Her reassurance had made me anxious.

  'They'll have the culture tomorrow. With luck, she'll be on the mend by then.'

  The following evening, a nurse asked me to wait outside the ward door. The midwife appeared with the news, 'I'm afraid your wife's rather poorly, Mr Elgar.' I felt a pang of alarm. 'Her temp's gone up, and she's rather miserable because she's having a rigor or two. The doctor's just been with her, and he thinks the infection is still localized to the birth canal.'

  I was even more suspicious of her optimism. 'What was the organism? I've had some training in bacteriology.'

  'It's a haemolytic streptococcus,' she said calmly.

  'Oh,' I said. Rosie was seriously ill. Potentially, gravely so. I went into the ward to find her pale, shivering and frightened. I stayed only a few minutes, distrusting too plainly my own reassurances.

  'The doctor wants to move your wife to the hospital isolation block out at Chiswick,' the midwife imparted as I left. 'She'll be better looked after there.'

  'Can Dr Colebrook see her? You know that I'm acquainted with him.'

  'Dr Colebrook sees all the patients in the isolation block.'

  'It's puerperal fever, isn't it?'

  'I don't think we need quite say that. It's a severe infection, but still not a generalized one. Let's hope for the best, shall we? Can we get hold of you if we want to?'

  'I'm at Arundel College all day. At night you'll have to send a policeman, or something.'

  The isolation block in Goldhawk Road at Chiswick had been opened five years. Its forty beds gathered puerperal fever cases from the whole of west London. The patients were nursed in separate cubicles off battleship-grey corridors and the place reeked of antiseptic. Colebrook had instituted nursing with rubber gloves, sterile gowns and face masks, like a surgical operation, but two or three out of every thousand women delivered at Queen Charlotte's still died from childbed fever, and twelve of the forty ill women in the cubicles would not leave them alive.

  With characteristic kindness, Colebrook came from his laboratory to Rosie's cubicle as I was leaving on the Friday afternoon.

  'She doesn't look too well, Coli.'

  'The infection seems to have spread to the peritoneal membrane lining the abdomen,' he said in his solemn way. 'That's not a good sign, I'm afraid. And of course your poor wife is suffering, with the distention and tenderness.'

  We started walking along the corridors towards the door. 'She was very distressed at leaving the baby.'

  'The little girl will be looked after on the ward until she's better. Obvio
usly, we can't allow the babies here, there's too much risk of infection.'

  I frowned. 'Where could this terrible streptococcus have come from?'

  'Perhaps from the midwife's hands. The labour was rather long, and she had a number of vaginal examinations. Perhaps from Mrs Elgar's own nose and throat. Perhaps from the air. We can never say. Though if our precautions of gloves and so on were more widely used, the mortality rate might start to come down at last.'

  We walked a few more steps in silence. I had of course felt concern for Rosie while she was having the child, but only as if she were suffering from some straightforward illness, like influenza. Now I saw she might die, I think for the first time in my life I began to develop fondness for her.

  'For centuries, of course, the disease was a complete mystery,' Colebrook continued. 'It was seen as a visitation of some particular town or parish, which lifted after a month or two and let the women bear children perfectly healthily once more. For which the local ecclesiastic doubtless took all the credit. But in reality, the streptococcus was simply being passed from case to case by the midwife or doctor. That revolutionary idea was mooted at the end of the last century by an Aberdonian obstetrician called Alexander Gordon, who was ostracized for it and had to join the Navy-a hard fate for a midwifery expert. I suppose none of us likes being accused of possessing dirty habits.

  'Didn't a man called Semmelweiss come into it somewhere?'

  We pushed through a pair of frosted glass doors. 'You don't want to go into all this, Elgar. You've enough to upset you, without my lecturing about your troubles.'

  'I'm interested. The doctor I lodged with in Wuppertal kept a photograph of him in his surgery. I remember he had a beautiful moustache, and resembled a Viennese opera singer, or the man on the packet of Gillette razor blades.'

  'Semmelweiss was at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna ninety years ago. There were two obstetric wards there, one used for training medical students the other for training midwives. Five of the students' mothers died of puerperal fever for one of the midwives'. It was ascribed to the poor women's shame at being examined internally by young men. But the students went to the labour ward straight from an obstetrical class in the post mortem room, while the midwives were taught everything from models. Ignaz Semmelweiss put the fever down to "cadaveric particles", made everyone wash their hands in lime water, and knocked down the mortality by two thirds. Mind, it took another fifty years before Louis Pasteur discovered bacteria and showed _how _it worked. Meanwhile, Semmelweiss was sacked, went mad and died from septicaemia contracted at a post mortem.'