‘I expect he does.’
‘And the way he pulls Matron’s leg. Impudent young monkey, she calls him, but she can’t help laughing at his ways. Oh, dear! there’s Number Seventeen ringing again. I expect she wants a bed-pan. You know your way out, don’t you?’
Harriet departed; feeling that it might be rather an onerous position to be aunt to Lord Saint-George.
‘Of course,’ said the Dean, ‘if anything should happen in vacation—’
‘I rather doubt if it will,’ said Harriet. ‘Not a big enough audience. A public scandal is the thing aimed at, I imagine. But if another episode should occur, it will narrow the field.’
‘Yes; most of the S.C.R. will be away. Next term, what with the Warden, Miss Lydgate and myself definitely clear of suspicion, we ought to be able to patrol the place better. What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve been rather thinking of coming back to Oxford altogether for a time, to do some work. This place gets you. It’s so completely uncommercial. I think I’m getting a little shrill in my mind. I need a mellowing.’
‘Why not work for a B.Litt.?’
‘That would be rather fun. I’m afraid they wouldn’t accept Lefanu, would they? It would have to be somebody duller. I should enjoy a little dullness. One would have to go on writing novels for bread and butter, but I’d like an academic and meaty egg to my tea for a change.’
‘Well, I hope you’ll come back for part of next term, anyway. You can’t leave Miss Lydgate now till those proofs are in the printer’s hands.’
‘I’m almost afraid to set her loose this vac. She is dissatisfied with her chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins; she feels she may have attacked him from the wrong angle altogether.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘I’m afraid it’s Oh, yes! . . . Well, I’ll cope with that, anyway. And the rest – well, we shall see what happens.’
Harriet left Oxford just after lunch. As she was putting her suit-case in the car, Padgett came up to her.
‘Excuse me, miss, but the Dean thinks you would like to see this, miss. In Miss de Vine’s fireplace it was found this morning, miss.’
Harriet looked at the half-burnt sheet of crumpled newspaper. Letters had been cut out from the advertising columns.
‘Is Miss de Vine still in College?’
‘She left by the 10.10, miss.’
‘I’ll keep this, Padgett, thank you. Does Miss de Vine usually read the Daily Trumpet?’
‘I shouldn’t think so, miss. It would be more likely the Times or Telegraph. But you could easy find out.’
‘Of course, anybody might have dropped this in the fireplace. It proves nothing. But I’m very glad to have seen it. Good afternoon, Padgett.’
‘Good afternoon, miss.’
11
Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades, but fading pleasures brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all they might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Town seemed remarkably empty and uninteresting. Yet a lot of things were going on. Harriet saw her agent and publisher, signed a contract for serial rights, heard the inner history of the quarrel between Lord Gobbersleigh the newspaper proprietor and Mr. Adrian Cloot the reviewer, entered warmly into the triangular dispute raging among Gargantua Colour-Talkies Ltd., Mr. Garrick Drury the actor and Mrs. Snell-Wilmington author of Passion-flower Pie, and into the details of Miss Sugar Toobin’s monstrous libel action against the Daily Headline, and was, of course, passionately interested to learn that Jacqueline Squills had made a malicious exposé of her second divorced husband’s habits and character in her new novel Gas-Filled Bulbs.
Yet, somehow, these distractions failed to keep her amused. To make matters worse, her new mystery novel had got somehow stuck. She had five suspects, neatly confined in an old water-mill with no means of entrance or egress except by a plank bridge, and all provided with motives and alibis for a pleasantly original kind of murder. There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with the thing. But the permutations and combinations of the five people’s relationships were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that; human problems were not like that; what you really got was two hundred or so people running like rabbits in and out of a college, doing their work, living their lives, and actuated all the time by motives unfathomable even to themselves, and then, in the midst of it all – not a plain, understandable murder, but an unmeaning and inexplicable lunacy.
How could one, in any case, understand other people’s motives and feelings, when one’s own remained mysterious? Why did one look forward with irritation to the receipt of a letter on April 1st, and then feel alarmed and affronted when it did not arrive by the first post? Very likely the letter had been sent to Oxford. There was no possible urgency about it, since one knew what it would contain and how it had to be answered; but it was annoying to sit about, expecting it.
Ring. Enter secretary with telegram (this was probably it). Wordy and unnecessary cable from American magazine representative to say she was shortly arriving in England and very anxious to talk to Miss Harriet Vane about a story for their publication. Cordially. What on earth did these people want to talk about? You did not write stories by talking about them.
Ring. Second post. Letter with Italian stamp. (Slight delay in sorting, no doubt.) Oh, thank you, Miss Bracey. Imbecile, writing very bad English, was eager to translate Miss Vane’s works into Italian. Could Miss Vane inform the writer of what books she had composed? Translators were all like that – no English, no sense, no backing. Harriet said briefly what she thought of them, told Miss Bracey to refer the matter to the agent and returned to her dictation.
‘Wilfrid stared at the handkerchief. What was it doing there in Winchester’s bedroom? With a curious feeling of . . .’
Telephone. Hold on a moment, please. (It couldn’t very well be that; it would be ridiculous to put through an expensive foreign call.) Hullo! Yes. Speaking. Oh?
She might have known it. There was a kind of mild determination about Reggie Pomfret. Would Miss Vane, could Miss Vane put up with his company for dinner and the new show at the Palladium? That night? The next night? Any night? That very night? Mr. Pomfret was inarticulate with pleasure. Thank you. Ring off. Where were we, Miss Bracey?
‘With a curious feeling of— Oh, yes, Wilfrid. Very distressing for Wilfrid to find his young woman’s handkerchief in the murdered man’s bedroom. Agonising. A curious feeling of— What should you feel like under the circumstances. Miss Bracey?’
‘I should think the laundry had made a mistake, I expect.’
‘Oh, Miss Bracey! Well – we’ll better say it was a lace handkerchief. Winchester couldn’t have mistaken a lace handkerchief for one of his own, whatever the laundry sent him.’
‘But would Ada have used a lace handkerchief, Miss Vane? Because she’s been made rather a boyish, out-door person. And it’s not as if she was in evening dress, because it was so important she should turn up in a tweed costume.’
‘That’s true. Well – well, better make the handkerchief small, but not lace. Plain but good. Turn back to the description of the handkerchief . . . Oh, dear! No, I’ll answer it Yes? Yes? Yes! . . . No, I’m afraid I can’t possibly. No, really. Oh? Well, you had better ask my agents. Yes, that’s right. Good-bye . . . Some club wanting a debate on ‘Should Genius Marry?’ The question’s not likely to concern any of their members personally, so why do they bother? . . . Yes, Miss Bracey? Oh, yes, Wilfrid. Bother Wilfrid! I’m taking quite a dislike to the man.’
By tea-time, Wilfrid was behaving so tiresomely that Harriet put him away in a rage and sallied out
to attend a literary cocktail party. The room in which it was held was exceedingly hot and crowded, and all the assembled authors were discussing (a) publishers (b) agents, (c) their own sales (d) other people’s sales, and (e) the extraordinary behaviour of the Book at the Moment selectors in awarding their ephemeral crown to Tasker Hepplewater’s Mock Turtle. ‘I finished this book,’ one distinguished adjudicator had said, ‘with tears running down my face.’ The author of Serpent’s Fang confided to Harriet over a petite saucisse and a glass of sherry that they must have been tears of pure boredom; but the author of Dust and Shiver said, No – they were probably tears of merriment, called forth by the unintentional humour of the book; had she ever met Hepplewater? A very angry young woman, whose book had been passed over, declared that the whole thing was a notorious farce. The Book of the Moment was selected from each publisher’s list in turn, so that her own Ariadne Adams was automatically excluded from benefit, owing to the mere fact that her publisher’s imprint had been honoured in the previous January. She had, however, received private assurance that the critic of the Morning Star had sobbed like a child over the last hundred pages of Ariadne, and would probably make it his Book of the Fortnight, if only the publisher could be persuaded to take advertising space in the paper. The author of The Squeezed Lemon agreed that advertising was at the bottom of it: had they heard how the Daily Flashlight had tried to blackmail Humphrey Quint into advertising with them? And how, on his refusal, they had said darkly, ‘Well, you know what will happen, Mr. Quint?’ And how no single Quint book had received so much as a review from the Flashlight ever since? And how Quint had advertised that fact in the Morning Star and sent up his net sales 50 per cent in consequence? Well, by some fantastic figure anyhow. But the author of Primrose Dalliance said that with the Book of the Moment crowd, what counted was Personal Pull – surely they remembered that Hepplewater had married Walton Strawberry’s latest wife’s sister. The author of Jocund Day agreed about the Pull, but thought that in this instance it was political, because there was some powerful anti-Fascist propaganda in Mock Turtle and it was well known that you could always get old Sneep Fortescue with a good smack at the Blackshirts.
‘But what’s Mock Turtle about?’ inquired Harriet.
On this point the authors were for the most part vague; but a young man who wrote humorous magazines stories, and could therefore afford to be wide-minded about novels, said he had read it and thought it rather interesting, only a bit long. It was about a swimming instructor at a watering place, who had contracted such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing-beauties that it completely inhibited all his natural emotions. So he got a job on a whaler and fell in love at first sight with an Eskimo, because she was such a beautiful bundle of garments. So he married her and brought her back to live in a suburb, where she fell in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband went slightly mad and contracted a complex about giant turtles, and spent all his spare time staring into the turtle-tank at the Aquarium, and watching the strange, slow monsters swimming significantly round in their encasing shells. But of course a lot of things came into it – it was one of those books that reflect the author’s reactions to Things in General. Altogether, significant was, he thought, the word to describe it.
Harriet began to feel that there might be something to be said even for the plot of Death ’twixt Wind and Water. It was, at least, significant of nothing in particular.
Harriet went back, irritated to Mecklenburg Square. As she entered the house, she could hear her telephone ringing apoplectically on the first floor. She ran upstairs hastily – one never knew with telephone calls. As she thrust her key into the lock, the telephone stopped dead.
‘Damn!’ said Harriet. There was an envelope lying inside the door. It contained press cuttings. One referred to her as Miss Vines and said she had taken her degree at Cambridge; a second compared her work unfavourably with that of an American thriller-writer; a third was a belated review of her last book, which give away the plot; a fourth attributed somebody else’s thriller to her and stated that she ‘adopted a sporting outlook on life’ (whatever that might mean). ‘This,’ said Harriet, much put out, ‘is one of those days! April the First, indeed! And now I’ve got to dine with this dashed undergraduate, and be made to feel the burden of incalculable age.’
To her surprised, however, she enjoyed both the dinner and the show. There was a refreshing lack of complication about Reggie Pomfret. He knew nothing about literary jealousies; he had no views about the comparative importance of personal and professional loyalties; he laughed heartily at obvious jokes; he did not expose your nerve-centres or his own; he did not use words with double meanings; he did not challenge you to attack him and then suddenly roll himself into an armadillo-like ball, presenting a smooth, defensive surface of ironical quotations; he had no overtones of any kind; he was a good-natured, not very clever, young man, eager to give pleasure to some one who had shown him a kindness. Harriet found him quite extraordinarily restful.
‘Will you come up for a moment and have a drink or anything?’ said Harriet, on her own doorstep.
‘Thanks awfully.’ said Mr. Pomfret, ‘if it isn’t too late.’
He instructed the taxi to wait and galumphed happily up. Harriet opened the door of the flat and switched the light on. Mr. Pomfret stooped courteously to pick up the letter lying on the mat.
‘Oh, thank you,’ said Harriet.
She preceded him into the sitting-room and let him remove her cloak for her. A moment or two later, she became aware that she was still holding the letter in her hand and that her guest and she was still standing.
‘I beg your pardon. Do sit down.’
‘Please—’ said Mr. Pomfret, with a gesture that indicated, ‘Read it and don’t mind me.’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Harriet, tossing the envelope on the table. ‘I know what’s in it. What will you have? Will you help yourself?’
Mr. Pomfret surveyed such refreshments as offered themselves and asked what he might mix for her. The drink question being settled, there was a pause.
‘Er – by the way,’ said Mr. Pomfret, ‘is Miss Cattermole all right? I haven’t seen very much of her since – since that night when I made your acquaintance, you know. Last time we met she said she was working rather hard.’
‘Oh, yes. I believe she is. She’s got Mods next term.’
‘Oh, poor girl! She has a great admiration for you.’
‘Has she? I don’t know why. I seem to remember ticking her off rather brutally.’
‘Well, you were fairly firm with me. But I agree with Miss Cattermole. Absolutely, I mean, we agree about having a great admiration for you.’
‘How nice of you,’ said Harriet, inattentively.
‘Yes, really. Rather. I’ll never forget the way you tackled that fellow Jukes. Did you see he got himself into trouble only a week or so later?’
‘Yes. I’m not surprised.’
‘No. A most unpleasant wart. Thoroughly scaly.’
‘He always was.’
‘Well, here’s to a long stretch for comrade Jukes. Not a bad show to-night, don’t you think?’
Harriet pulled herself together. She was all at once tired of Mr. Pomfret and wished he would go; but it was monstrous of her not to behave politely to him. She exerted herself to talk with bright interest of the entertainment to which he had kindly taken her and succeeded so well that it was nearly fifteen minutes before Mr. Pomfret remembered his waiting taxi, and took himself off in high spirits.
Harriet took up the letter. Now that she was free to open it, she did not want to. It had spoilt the evening for her.
Dear Harriet,
I send in my demand notes with the brutal regularity of the income-tax commissioners; and probably you say when you see the envelopes ‘Oh, God! I know what this is.’ The only difference is that, some time or other, one has to take notice of the income-tax.
Will you marry me? – It’s beginn
ing to look like one of those lines in farce – merely boring till it’s said often enough; and after that, you get a bigger laugh every time it comes.
I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on – but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable but unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.
Well, that’s over. Don’t worry about it.
My nephew (whom you seem, by the way, to have stimulated to the most extraordinary diligence) is cheering my exile by dark hints that you are involved in some disagreeable and dangerous job of work at Oxford about which he is in honour bound to say nothing. I hope he is mistaken. But I know that, if you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should. Whatever it is, you have my best wishes for it.
I am not my own master at the moment, and do not know where I shall be sent next or when I shall be back – soon, I trust. In the meantime may I hope to hear from time to time that all is well with you?
Yours, more than my own,
Peter Wimsey.
After reading that letter, Harriet knew that she could not rest till it was answered. The bitter unhappiness of its opening paragraphs was readily explained by the last two. He probably thought – he could not possibly help thinking – that she had known him all these years, only to confide in the end, not in him, but in a boy less than half his age and his own nephew, whom she had known only a couple of weeks and had little reason to trust. He had made no comment and asked no questions – that made it worse. More generously still, he had not only refrained from offers of help and advice which she might have resented; he had deliberately acknowledged that she had the right to run her own risks. ‘Do be careful of yourself’; ‘I hate to think of your being exposed to unpleasantness’; ‘If only I could be there to protect you’; any such phrase would express the normal male reaction. Not one man in ten thousand would say to the woman he loved, or to any woman: ‘Disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should.’ That was an admission of equality, and she had not expected it of him. If he conceived of marriage along those lines, then the whole problem would have to be reviewed in that new light; but that seemed scarcely possible. To take such a line and stick to it, he would have to be, not a man but a miracle. But the business about Saint-George must be cleared up immediately. She wrote quickly, without stopping to think too much.