Eliot was the one who appeared to have recovered first. He met the shock

of his father's death with a defiant energy and will.

He was working now at bacteriology under Sir Martin Crozier. Covered

with a white linen coat, in a white-washed room of inconceivable

cleanness, surrounded by test-tubes and mixing jars, Eliot spent the

best part of the day handling the germs of the deadliest diseases;

making cultures, examining them under the microscope; preparing

vaccines. He went home to the brown velvety, leathery study in his

Welbeck Street flat to write out his notes, or read some monograph on

inoculation; or he dined with a colleague and talked to him about

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bacteria.

At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of

inhuman preoccupation. His dark, serious face detached itself with a

sort of sullen apathy from the social scene. He seemed to have no keen

interests beyond his slides and mixing jars and test-tubes. Women, for

whom his indifference had a perverse fascination, said of him: "Dr.

Fielding isn't interested in people, only in their diseases. And not

really in diseases, only in their germs."

They never suspected that Eliot was passionate, and that a fierce pity

had driven him into his profession. The thought of preventable disease

filled him with fury; he had no tolerance for the society that tolerated

it. He suffered because he had a clearer vision and a profounder sense

of suffering than most persons. Up to the time of his father's death all

Eliot's suffering had been other people's. He couldn't rest till he had

done something to remove the cause of it.

Add to this an insatiable curiosity as to causes, and you have the main

bent of Eliot's mind.

And it seemed to him that there was nobody but Anne who saw that hidden

side of him. _She_ knew that he was sorry for people, and that being

sorry for them had made him what he was, like Jerrold and yet unlike

him. Eliot was attracted to suffering by the same sensitiveness that

made Jerrold avoid everything once associated with it.

And so the very thing that Jerrold couldn't bear to remember was what

drew Eliot closer to Anne. He saw her as Jerrold had seen her, moving,

composed and competent, in his father's room; he saw her stooping over

him to help him, he saw the specks of blood on her white sleeve; and he

thought of her with the more tenderness. From that instant he really

loved her. He wanted Anne as he had never conceived himself wanting any

woman. He could hardly remember his first adolescent feeling for her,

that confused mixture of ignorant desire and fear, so different was it

from the intense, clear passion that possessed him now. At night when

his work was done, he lay in bed, not sleeping, thinking of Anne with

desire that knew itself too well to be afraid. Anne was the one thing

necessary to him beside his work, necessary as a living part of himself.

She could only not come before his work because Eliot's work came before

himself and his own happiness. When he went down every other week-end to

Wyck-on-the-Hill he knew that it was to see Anne.




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