‘A lawyer, a colleague of mine and myself. But that doesn’t prove that I have any principles. I’m quite capable of getting killed for the fun of the thing. Who isn’t?’
‘I know,’ said the Dean. ‘It’s funny that we get so solemn about murders and executions and mind so little about taking risks in motoring and swimming and climbing mountains and so on. I suppose we do prefer to die for the fun of the thing.’
‘The social principle seems to be,’ suggested Miss Pyke, ‘that we should die for our fun and not other people’s.’
‘Of course I admit,’ said Miss Barton, rather angrily, ‘that murder must be prevented and murderers kept from doing further harm. But they ought not to be punished and they certainly ought not to be killed.’
‘I suppose they ought to be kept in hospitals at vast expense, along with other unfit specimens,’ said Miss Edwards. ‘Speaking as a biologist, I must say I think public money might be better employed. What with the number of imbeciles and physical wrecks we allow to go about and propagate their species, we shall end by devitalising whole nations.’
‘Miss Schuster-Slatt would advocate sterilisation,’ said the Dean.
‘They’re trying it in Germany, I believe,’ said Miss Edwards.
‘Together,’ said Miss Hillyard, ‘with the relegation of woman to her proper place in the home.’
‘But they execute people there quite a lot,’ said Wimsey, ‘so Miss Barton can’t take over their organisation lock, stock and barrel.’
Miss Barton uttered a loud protest against any such suggestion, and returned to her contention that her social principles were opposed to violence of every description.
‘Bosh!’ said Miss Edwards. ‘You can’t carry through any principle without doing violence to somebody. Either directly or indirectly. Every time you disturb the balance of nature you let in violence. And if you leave nature alone you get violence in any case. I quite agree that murderers shouldn’t be hanged – it’s wasteful and unkind. But I don’t agree that they should be comfortably fed and housed while decent people go short. Economically speaking, they should be used for laboratory experiments.’
‘To assist the further preservation of the unfit?’ asked Wimsey, drily.
‘To assist in establishing scientific facts,’ replied Miss Edwards, more drily still.
‘Shake hands,’ said Wimsey. ‘Now we have found common ground to stand on. Establish the facts, no matter what comes of it.’
‘On that ground, Lord Peter,’ said the Warden, ‘your inquisitiveness becomes a principle. And a very dangerous one.’
‘But the fact that A killed B isn’t necessarily the whole of the truth,’ persisted Miss Barton. ‘A’s provocation and state of health are facts, too.’
‘Nobody surely disputes that,’ said Miss Pyke. ‘But one can scarcely ask the investigator to go beyond his job. If we mayn’t establish any conclusion for fear somebody should make an injudicious use of it, we are back in the days of Galileo. There would be an end to discovery.’
‘Well,’ said the Dean. ‘I wish we could stop discovering things like poison-gas.’
‘There can be no objection to the making of discoveries,’ said Miss Hillyard; ‘but is it always expedient to publish them? In the case of Galileo, the Church—’
‘You’ll never get any scientist to agree there,’ broke in Miss Edwards. ‘To suppress a fact is to publish a falsehood.’
For a few minutes Harriet lost the thread of the discussion, which now became general. That it had been deliberately pushed to this point, she could see; but what Peter wanted to make of it, she had no idea. Yet he was obviously interested. His eyes, under their half-closed lids, were alert. He was like a cat waiting at a mouse-hole. Or was she half-consciously connecting him with his own blazon? ‘Sable: three mice courant argent; a crescent for difference. The crest, a domestick catt. . . .’
‘Of course,’ said Miss Hillyard, in a hard, sarcastic voice, ‘if you think private loyalties should come before loyalty to one’s job. . . .’
(‘Couched as to spring, proper.’) That was what he had been waiting for, then. One could almost see the silken fur ripple.
‘Of course, I don’t say that one should be disloyal to one’s job for private reasons,’ said Miss Lydgate. ‘But surely, if one takes on personal responsibilities, one owes a duty in that direction. If one’s job interferes with them perhaps one should give up the job.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Miss Hillyard. ‘But then, my private responsibilities are few, and possibly I have no right to speak. What is your opinion, Mrs. Goodwin?’
There was a most unpleasant pause.
‘If you mean that personally,’ said the Secretary, getting up and facing the Tutor, ‘I am so far of your opinion that I have asked Dr. Baring to accept my resignation. Not because of any of the monstrous allegations that have been made about me, but because I realise that under the circumstances I can’t do my work as well as I ought. But you are all very much mistaken if you think I am at the bottom of the trouble in this college. I’m going now, and you can say what you like about me – but may I say that anybody with a passion for facts will do better to collect them from unprejudiced sources. Miss Barton at least will admit that mental health is a fact like another.’
Into the horrified silence that followed, Peter dropped three words like lumps of ice.
‘Please don’t go.’
Mrs. Goodwin stopped short with her hand on the door.
‘It would be a great pity,’ said the Warden, ‘to take anything personally that is said in a general discussion. I feel sure Miss Hillyard meant nothing of that kind. Naturally, some people have better opportunities than others for seeing both sides of a question. In your own line of work, Lord Peter, such conflicts of loyalty must frequently occur.’
‘Oh, yes. I once thought I had the agreeable choice between hanging my brother or my sister. Fortunately, it came to nothing.’
‘But supposing it had come to something?’ demanded Miss Barton, pinning the argumentum ad hominem with a kind of relish.
‘Oh, well— What does the ideal detective do then, Miss Vane?’
‘Profesional etiquette,’ said Harriet, ‘would suggest an extorted confession, followed by poison for two in the library.’
‘You see how easy it is, when you stick to the rules,’ said Wimsey. ‘Miss Vane feels no compunction. She wipes me out with a firm hand, rather than damage my reputation. But the question isn’t always so simple. How about the artist of genius who has to choose between letting his family starve and painting pot-boilers to keep them?’
‘He’s no business to have a wife and family,’ said Miss Hillyard.
‘Poor devil! Then he has the further interesting choice between repressions and immorality. Mrs. Goodwin, I gather, would object to the repressions and some people might object to the immorality.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Miss Pyke. ‘You have hypothesised a wife and family. Well – he could stop painting. That, if he really is a genius, would be a loss to the world. But he mustn’t paint bad pictures – that would be really immoral.’
‘Why?’ asked Miss Edwards. ‘What do a few bad pictures matter, more or less?’
‘Of course they matter,’ said Miss Shaw. She knew a good deal about painting. ‘A bad picture by a good painter is a betrayal of truth – his own truth.’
‘That’s only a relative kind of truth,’ objected Miss Edwards.
The Dean and Miss Burrows fell headlong upon this remark, and Harriet, seeing the argument in danger of getting out of hand, thought it time to retrieve the ball and send it back. She knew now what was wanted, though not why it was wanted.
‘If you can’t agree about painters, make it someone else. Make it a scientist.’
‘I’ve no objection to scientific pot-boilers,’ said Miss Edwards. ‘I mean, a popular book isn’t necessarily unscientific.’
‘So long,’ said Wimsey, ‘as it doesn’t falsify the facts. B
ut it might be a different kind of thing. To take a concrete instance – somebody wrote a novel called The Search—’
‘C. P. Snow,’ said Miss Burrows. ‘It’s funny you should mention that. It was the book that the—’
‘I know,’ said Peter. ‘That’s possibly why it was in my mind.’
‘I never read the book,’ said the Warden.
‘Oh, I did,’ said the Dean. ‘It’s about a man who starts out to be a scientist and gets on very well till, just as he’s going to be appointed to an important executive post, he finds he’s made a careless error in a scientific paper. He didn’t check his assistant’s results, or something. Somebody finds out, and he doesn’t get the job. So he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all.’
‘Obviously not,’ said Miss Edwards. ‘He only cared about the post.’
‘But,’ said Miss Chilperic, ‘if it was only a mistake—’
‘The point about it,’ said Wimsey, ‘is what an elderly scientist says to him. He tells him: “The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalise false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.” Words to that effect. I may not be quoting quite correctly.’
‘Well, that’s true, of course. Nothing could possibly excuse deliberate falsification.’
‘There’s no sense in deliberate falsification, anyhow,’ said the Bursar. ‘What could anybody gain by it?’
‘It has been done,’ said Miss Hillyard, ‘frequently. To get the better of an argument. Or out of ambition.’
‘Ambition to be what?’ cried Miss Lydgate. ‘What satisfaction could one possibly get out of a reputation one knew one didn’t deserve? It would be horrible.’
Her innocent indignation upset everybody’s gravity.
‘How about the Forged Decretals . . . Chatterton . . . Ossian . . . Henry Ireland . . . those Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets the other day . . .’
‘I know,’ said Miss Lydgate, perplexed. ‘I know people do it. But why? They must be mad.’
‘In the same novel,’ said the Dean, ‘somebody deliberately falsifies a result – later on, I mean – in order to get a job. And the man who made the original mistake finds it out. But he says nothing, because the other man is very badly off and has a wife and family to keep.’
‘These wives and families!’ said Peter.
‘Does the author approve?’ inquired the Warden.
‘Well,’ said the Dean, ‘the book ends there, so I suppose he does.’
‘But does anybody here approve? A false statement is published and the man who could correct it lets it go, out of charitable considerations. Would anybody here do that? There’s your test case, Miss Barton, with no personalities attached.’
‘Of course one couldn’t do that,’ said Miss Barton. ‘Not for ten wives and fifty children.’
‘Not for Solomon and all his wives and concubines? I congratulate you, Miss Barton, on striking such a fine, unfeminine note. Will nobody say a word for the women and children?’
(‘I knew he was going to be mischievous,’ thought Harriet.)
‘You’d like to hear it, wouldn’t you?’ said Miss Hillyard.
‘You’ve got us in a cleft stick,’ said the Dean. ‘If we say it, you can point out that womanlinesss unfits us for learning; and if we don’t, you can point out that learning makes us unwomanly.’
‘Since I can make myself offensive either way,’ said Wimsey, ‘you have nothing to gain by not telling the truth.’
‘The truth is,’ said Mrs. Goodwin, ‘that nobody could possibly defend the indefensible.’
‘It sounds, anyway, like a manufactured case,’ said Miss Allison, briskly. ‘It could seldom happen; and if it did—’
‘Oh, it happens,’ said Miss de Vine. ‘It has happened. It happened to me. I don’t mind telling you – without names, of course. When I was at Flamborough College, examining for the professorial theses in York University, there was a man who sent in a very interesting paper on a historical subject. It was a most persuasive piece of argument; only I happened to know that the whole contention was quite untrue, because a letter that absolutely contradicted it was actually in existence in a certain very obscure library in a foreign town. I’d come across it when I was reading up something else. That wouldn’t have mattered, of course. But the internal evidence showed that the man must have had access to that library. So I had to make an inquiry, and I found that he really had been there and must have seen the letter and deliberately suppressed it.’
‘But how could you be so sure he had seen the letter?’ asked Miss Lydgate anxiously. ‘He might carelessly have overlooked it. That would be a very different matter.’
‘He not only had seen it,’ replied Miss de Vine; ‘he stole it. We made him admit as much. He had come upon that letter when his thesis was nearly complete, and he had no time to rewrite it. And it was a great blow to him apart from that, because he had grown enamoured of his own theory and couldn’t bear to give it up.’
‘That’s the mark of an unsound scholar, I’m afraid,’ said Miss Lydgate in a mournful tone, as one speaks of an incurable cancer.
‘But here is the curious thing,’ went on Miss de Vine. ‘He was unscrupulous enough to let the false conclusion stand; but he was too good a historian to destroy the letter. He kept it.’
‘You’d think,’ said Miss Pyke, ‘it would be as painful as biting on a sore tooth.’
‘Perhaps he had some idea of rediscovering it some-day,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘and setting himself right with his conscience. I don’t know, and I don’t think he knew very well himself.’
‘What happened to him?’ asked Harriet.
‘Well, that was the end of him, of course. He lost the professorship, naturally, and they took away his M.A. degree as well. A pity, because he was brilliant in his own way – and very good-looking, if that has anything to do with it.’
‘Poor man!’ said Miss Lydgate. ‘He must have needed the post very badly.’
‘It meant a good deal to him financially. He was married and not well off. I don’t know what became of him. That was about six years ago. He dropped out completely. One was sorry about it, but there it was.’
‘You couldn’t possibly have done anything else,’ said Miss Edwards.
‘Of course not. A man as undependable as that is not only useless, but dangerous. He might do anything.’
‘You’d think it would be a lesson to him,’ said Miss Hillyard. ‘It didn’t pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about – but in the end it left him worse off.’
‘But that,’ said Peter, ‘was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.’
‘It seems to me,’ began Miss Chilperic, timidly – and then stopped.
‘Yes?’ said Peter.
‘Well,’ said Miss Chilperic, ‘oughtn’t the women and children to have a point of view? I mean – suppose the wife knew that her husband had done a thing like that for her, what would she feel about it?’
‘That’s a very important point,’ said Harriet. ‘You’d think she’d feel too ghastly for words.’
‘It depends,’ said the Dean. ‘I don’t believe nine women out of ten would care a dash.’
‘That’s a monstrous thing to say,’ cried Miss Hillyard.
‘You think a wife might feel sensitive about her husband’s honour – even if it was sacrificed on her account?’ said Miss Stevens. ‘Well – I don’t know.’
‘I should think,’ said Miss Chilperic, stammering a little in her earnestness, ‘she would feel like a man who – I mean, wouldn’t it be like living on somebody’s immoral earnings?’
‘There,’ said Peter, ‘if I may say so, I think you are exaggerating. The man who does that – if he isn’t too far gone to have any feel
ings at all – is hit by other considerations, some of which have nothing whatever to do with ethics. But it is extremely interesting that you should make the comparison.’ He looked at Miss Chilperic so intently that she blushed.
‘Perhaps that was rather a stupid thing to say.’
‘No. But if it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort – and very different from the kind that is being made at the moment.’
Miss Chilperic looked so much alarmed at the idea of fostering social revolution that only the opportune entry of two Common-Room scouts to remove the coffee-cups and relieve her of the necessity of replying seemed to have saved her from sinking through the floor.
‘Well,’ said Harriet, ‘I agree absolutely with Miss Chilperic. If anybody did a dishonourable thing and then said he did it for one’s own sake, it would be the last insult. How could one ever feel the same to him again?’
‘Indeed,’ said Miss Pyke, ‘it must surely vitiate the whole relationship.’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ cried the Dean. ‘How many women care two hoots about anybody’s intellectual integrity? Only over-educated women like us. So long as the man didn’t forge a cheque or rob the till or do something socially degrading, most women would think he was perfectly justified. Ask Mrs. Bones the Butcher’s Wife or Miss Tape the Tailor’s Daughter how much they would worry about suppressing a fact in a mouldy old historical thesis.’
‘They’d back up their husbands in any case,’ said Miss Allison. ‘My man, right or wrong, they’d say. Even if he did rob the till.’
‘Of course they would,’ said Miss Hillyard. ‘That’s what the man wants. He wouldn’t say thank you for a critic on the hearth.’
‘He must have the womanly woman, you think?’ said Harriet. ‘What is it, Annie? My coffee-cup? Here you are . . . Somebody who will say, “The greater the sin the greater the sacrifice – and consequently the greater devotion.” Poor Miss Schuster-Slatt! . . . I suppose it is comforting to be told that one is loved whatever one does.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Peter, in his reediest, wood-wind voice: