Dear Peter,
No. I can’t see my way to it. But thank you all the same. About the Oxford business – I would have told you all about it long ago, only that it is not my secret. I wouldn’t have told your nephew, only that he had stumbled on part of it and I had to trust him with the rest to keep him from making unintentional mischief: I wish I could tell you; I should be very glad of your help; if ever I get leave to, I will. It is rather disagreeable but not dangerous, I hope. Thank you for not telling me to run away and play – that’s the best compliment you ever paid me.
I hope your case, or whatever it is, is getting on all right. It must be a tough one to take so long.
Harriet.
Lord Peter Wimsey read this letter while seated upon the terrace of an hotel overlooking the Pincian Gardens, which were bathed in brilliant sunshine. It astonished him so much that he was reading it for the fourth time, when he became aware that the person standing beside him was not the waiter.
‘My dear Count! I beg your pardon. What manners! My head was in the clouds. Do me the favour to sit down and join me. Servitore!’
‘I beg you will not apologise. It is my fault for interrupting you. But fearing that last night might have somewhat entangled the situation—’
‘It is foolish to talk so long and so late. Grown men behave like tired children who are allowed to sit up till midnight. I admit that we were all very fractious, myself not least.’
‘You are always the soul of amiability. That is why I thought that a word with you alone— We are both reasonable men.’
‘Count, Count, I hope you have not come to persuade me to anything. I should find it too difficult to refuse you.’ Wimsey folded the letter away in his pocket-book. ‘The sun is shining, and I am in the mood to make mistakes through over-confidence.’
‘Then, I must take advantage of the good moment.’ The Count set his elbows on the table and leaned forward, thumb-tip to thumb-tip and little finger-tip to little finger-tip, smiling, irresistible. Forty minutes later, he took his leave, still smiling, having ceded, without noticing it, rather more than he had gained, and told in ten words more than he had learned in a thousand.
But of this interlude Harriet naturally knew nothing. On the evening of the same day, she was dining alone, a little depressed, at Romano’s. She had nearly finished, when she saw a man, just leaving the restaurant, who was sketching a vague gesture of recognition. He was in the forties, going a little bald, with a smooth, vacant face and a dark moustache. For a moment she could not place him; then something about his languid walk and impeccable tailoring brought back an afternoon at Lord’s. She smiled at him, and he came up to her table.
‘Hullo–ullo! Hope I’m not bargin’ in. How’s all the doings and all that?’
‘Very well, thanks.’
‘That’s grand. Thought I must just ooze over and pass the time of day. Or night. Only I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me, and might think I was bein’ a nuisance.’
‘Of course I remember you. You’re Mr. Arbuthnot – the Honourable Frederick Arbuthnot – and you’re a friend of Peter Wimsey’s, and I met you at the Eton and Harrow match two years ago, and you’re married and have two children. How are they?’
‘Fair to middlin’, thanks. What a brain you’ve got! Yes, ghastly hot afternoon that was, too. Can’t think why harmless women should be dragged along to be bored while a lot of little boys play off their Old School Ties. (That’s meant for a joke.) You were frightfully well-behaved, I remember.’
Harriet said sedately that she always enjoyed a good cricket match.
‘Do you? I thought it was politeness. It’s pretty slow work, if you ask me. But I was never any good at it myself. It’s all right for old Peter. He can always work himself into a stew thinking how much better he’d have done it himself.’
Harriet offered him coffee.
‘I didn’t know anybody ever got into a stew at Lord’s. I thought it wasn’t done.’
‘Well, the atmosphere doesn’t exactly remind one of the Cup Final; but mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery. How about a brandy? Waiter, two liqueur brandies. Are you writing any more books?’
Suppressing the rage that this question always rouses in a professional writer, Harriet admitted that she was.
‘It must be splendid to be able to write,’ said Mr. Arbuthnot. ‘I often think I could spin a good yarn myself if I had the brains. About the odd things that happen, you know. Queer deals, and that kind of thing.’
A dim recollection of something Wimsey had once said lit up the labyrinth of Harriet’s mind. Money. That was the connection between the two men. Mr. Arbuthnot, moron as he might be in other respects, had a flair for money. He knew what that mysterious commodity was going to do; it was the one thing he did know, and he only knew that by instinct. When things were preparing to go up or down, they rang a little warning bell in what Freddy Arbuthnot called his mind, and he acted on the warning without being able to explain why. Peter had money, and Freddy understood money; that must be the common interest and bond of mutual confidence that explained an otherwise inexplicable friendship. She admired the strange nexus of interests that unites the male half of mankind into a close honeycomb of cells, each touching the other on one side only, and yet constituting a tough and closely adhering fabric.
‘Funny kind of story popped up the other day,’ went on Mr. Arbuthnot. ‘Mysterious business. Couldn’t make head or tail of it. It would have amused old Peter. How is old Peter, by the way?’
‘I haven’t seen him for some time. He’s in Rome. I don’t know what he’s doing there, but I suppose he’s on a case of some kind.’
‘No. I expect he’s left his country for his country’s good. It’s usually that. I hope they manage to keep things quiet. The exchanges are a bit nervy.’
Mr. Arbuthnot looked almost intelligent.
‘What’s Peter got to do with the exchange?’
‘Nothing. But if anything blows up, it’s bound to affect the exchange.’
‘This is Greek to me. What is Peter’s job out there?’
‘Foreign Office. Didn’t you know?’
‘I hadn’t the slightest idea. He’s not permanently attached there, is he?’
‘In Rome, do you mean?’
‘To the Foreign Office.’
‘No; but they sometimes push him out when they think he’s wanted. He gets on with people.’
‘I see. I wonder why he never mentioned it.’
‘Oh, everybody knows; it’s not a secret. He probably thought it wouldn’t interest you.’ Mr. Arbuthnot balanced his spoon across his coffee-cup in an abstracted way. ‘I’m damned fond of old Peter,’ was his next, rather irrelevant, contribution. ‘He’s a dashed good sort. Last time I saw him, I thought he seemed a bit under the weather . . . Well, I’d better be toddling.’
He got up, a little abruptly, and said good night.
Harriet thought how humiliating it was to have one’s ignorance exposed.
Ten days before the beginning of term, Harriet could bear London no longer. The final touch was put to her disgust by the sight of an advance notice of Death ’twixt Wind and Water, embodying an exceptionally fulsome blurb. She developed an acute homesickness for Oxford and for the Study of Lefanu – a book which would never have any advertising value, but of which some scholar might some day moderately observe, ‘Miss Vane has handled her subject with insight and accuracy.’ She rang up the Bursar, discovered that she could be accommodated at Shrewsbury, and fled back to Academe.
College was empty, but for herself, the Bursar and Treasurer, and Miss Barton, who vanished daily into the Radcliffe Camera and was only seen at meals. The Warden was up, but remained in her own house.
April was running out, chilly and fickle, but with the promise of good things to come; and the city wore the withdrawn and secretive beauty that wraps her about in vacation. No clamour of young voices echoed along her ancient stones; the tumult of flying
bicycles was stilled in the narrow strait of the Turl; in Radcliffe Square the Camera slept like a cat in the sunshine, disturbed only by the occasional visit of a slow-footed don; even in the High, the roar of car and charabanc seemed minished and brought low, for the holiday season was not yet; punts and canoes, new-fettled for the summer term, began to put forth upon the Cherwell like the varnished buds upon the horse-chestnut tree, but as yet there was no press of traffic upon the shining reaches; the mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time’s flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.
Mornings in Bodley, drowsing among the worn browns and tarnished gilding of Duke Humphrey, snuffing the faint, musty odour of slowly perishing leather, hearing only the discreet tippety-tap of Agag-feet along the padded floor; long afternoons, taking an outrigger up the Cher, feeling the rough kiss of the sculls on unaccustomed palms, listening to the rhythmical and satisfying ker-klunk of the rowlocks, watching the play of muscle on the Bursar’s sturdy shoulders at stroke, as the sharp spring wind flattened the thin silk shirt against them; or, if the day were warmer, flicking swiftly in a canoe under Magdalen walls and so by the twisting race at King’s Mill by Mesopotamia to Parson’s Pleasure; then back, with mind relaxed and body stretched and vigorous, to make toast by the fire; and then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the utter silence between quarter and quarter chime. Now and again, Harriet took out the dossier of the poison-pen and looked it over; yet, viewed by that solitary lamp, even the ugly, printed scrawls looked harmless and impersonal, and the whole dismal problem less important than the determining of a first edition date or the settlement of a disputed reading.
In that melodious silence, something came back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days. The singing voice, stifled long ago by the pressure of the struggle for existence, and throttled into dumbness by that queer, unhappy contact with physical passion, began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, rising from nothing and leading to nothing, swam up out of her dreaming mind like the huge, sluggish carp in the cool water of Mercury. One day she climbed up Shotover and sat looking over the spires of the city, deep-down, fathom-drowned, striking from the round bowl of the river-basin, improbably remote and lovely as the towers of Tir-nan-Og beneath the green sea-rollers. She held on her knee the loose-leaf note-book that contained her notes upon the Shrewsbury scandal; but her heart was not in that sordid inquiry. A detached pentameter, echoing out of nowhere, was beating in her ears – seven marching feet – a pentameter and a half:—
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis—
Had she made it or remembered it? It sounded familiar, but in her heart she knew certainly that it was her own, and seemed familiar only because it was inevitable and right.
She opened the note-book at another page and wrote the words down. She felt like the man in the Punch story: ‘Nice little barf-room, Liza – what shall we do with it?’ Blank verse? . . . No . . . it was part of the octave of a sonnet . . . it had the feel of a sonnet. But what a rhyme-sound! Curled? furled? . . . she fumbled over rhyme and metre, like an unpractised musician fingering the keys of a disused instrument.
Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place.
Here, then, at home . . .
the centre, the middle sea, the heart of the labyrinth . . .
Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,
Stay we our steps – course – flight – hands folded and
wings furled
Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,
Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Yes; there was something there, though the metre halted monotonously, lacking a free stress-shift, and the chime ‘dizzying-spinning’ was unsatisfactory. The lines swayed and lurched in her clumsy hands, uncontrollable. Still, such as it was, she had an octave.
And there it seemed to end. She had reached the full close, and had nothing more to say. She could find no turn for the sestet to take, no epigram, no change of mood. She put down a tentative line or two and crossed them out. If the right twist would not come of itself, it was useless to manufacture it. She had her image – the world sleeping like a great top on its everlasting spindle – and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper – and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their heads no further.
She shut up the note-book, scandal and sonnet together, and began to make her way slowly down the steep path. Half-way down, she met a small party coming up: two small, flaxen-haired girls in charge of a woman whose face seemed at first vaguely familiar. Then, as they came close, she realised that it was Annie, looking strange without her cap and apron, taking the children for a walk.
As in duty bound, Harriet greeted them and asked where they were living now.
‘We’ve found a very nice place in Headington, madam, thank you. I’m stopping there myself for my holiday. These are my little girls. This one’s Beatrice and this is Carola. Say how-do-you-do to Miss Vane.’
Harriet shook hands gravely with the children and asked their ages and how they were getting on.
‘It’s nice for you having them so close.’
‘Yes, madam. I don’t know what I should do without them.’ The look of quick pride and joy was almost fiercely possessive. Harriet got a glimpse of a fundamental passion that she had, as it were, forgotten when she made her reckoning; it blazed across the serenity of her sonnet-mood like an ominous meteor.
‘They’re all I have – now that I’ve lost their father.’
‘Oh, dear, yes,’ said Harriet, a little uncomfortably. ‘Has he – how long ago was that, Annie?’
‘Three years, madam. He was driven to it. They said he did what he ought not, and it preyed on his mind. But I didn’t care. He never did any harm to anybody, and a man’s first duty is to his wife and family, isn’t it? I’d have starved with him gladly, and worked my fingers to the bone to keep the children. But he couldn’t get over it. It’s a cruel world for anyone with his way to make and so much competition.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Harriet. The elder child, Beatrice, was looking up at her mother with eyes that were too intelligent for her eight years. It would be better to get off the subject of the husband’s wrongs and iniquities, whatever they might be. She murmured that the children must be a great comfort.
‘Yes, madam. There’s nothing like having children of your own. They make life worth living. Beatrice here is her father’s living image, aren’t you, darling? I was sorry not to have a boy; but now I’m glad. It’s difficult to bring up boys without a father.’
‘And what are Beatrice and Carola going to be when they grow up?’
‘I hope they’ll be good girls, madam, and good wives and mothers – that’s what I’ll bring them up to be.’
‘I want to ride a motor-cycle when I’m bigger,’ said Beatrice, shaking her curls assertively.
‘Oh, no darling. What things they say, don’t they, madam?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Beatrice. ‘I’m going to have a
motorcycle and keep a garage.’
‘Nonsense,’ said her mother, a little sharply. ‘You mustn’t talk so. That’s a boy’s job.’
‘But lots of girls do boys’ jobs nowadays,’ said Harriet.
‘But they ought not, madam. It isn’t fair. The boys have hard enough work to get jobs of their own. Please don’t put such things into her head madam. You’ll never get a husband, Beatrice, if you mess about in a garage, getting all ugly and dirty.’
‘I don’t want one,’ said Beatrice, firmly. ‘I’d rather have a motor-cycle.’
Annie looked annoyed; but laughed when Harriet laughed.
‘She’ll find out some day, won’t she, madam?’
‘Very likely she will,’ said Harriet. If the woman took the view that any husband was better than none at all, it was useless to argue. And she had rather got into the habit of shying at all discussion that turned upon men and marriage. She said good-afternoon pleasantly and strode on, a little shaken in her mood, but not unduly so. Either one liked discussing these matters or one did not. And when there were ugly phantoms lurking in the corners of one’s mind, skeletons that one dared not show to anybody, even to Peter—
Well, of course not to Peter; he was the last person. And he at any rate, had no niche in the grey stones of Oxford. He stood for London, for the swift, rattling, clattering, excitable and devilishly upsetting world of strain and uproar. Here, at the still centre (yes, that line was definitely good), he had no place. For a whole week, she had scarcely given him a thought.