She sat still where she was till he stood looking down at her.
‘Well?’ he said, lightly, ‘how doth my lady? What, sweeting, all amort? . . . Yes, something has happened; I see it has What is it, domina?’
Though the tone was half-jesting, nothing could have reassured her like that grave, academic title. She said, as though she were reciting a lesson.
‘When you left last night, Miss Hillyard met me in the New Quad. She asked me to come up to her room because she wanted to speak to me. On the way up, I saw there was a little piece of white ivory stuck on the heel of her slipper. She – made some rather unpleasant accusations; she had misunderstood the position—’
‘That can and shall be put right. Did you say anything about the slipper?’
‘I’m afraid I did. There was another bit of ivory on the floor. I accused her of having gone into my room, and she denied it till I showed her the evidence. Then she admitted it; but she said the, damage was already done when she got there.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘I might have done . . . if . . . if she hadn’t shown me a motive.’
‘I see. All right. You needn’t tell me.’
She looked up for the first time into a face as bleak as winter, and faltered.
‘I brought the slipper away with me. I wish I hadn’t.’
‘Are you going to be afraid of the facts?’ he said. ‘And you a scholar?’
‘I don’t think I did it in malice. I hope not. But I was bitterly unkind to her.’
‘Happily,’ said he, ‘a fact is a fact, and your state of mind won’t alter it by a hair’s breadth. Let’s go now and have the truth at all hazards.’
She led him up to her room, where the morning sun cast a long rectangle of brilliance across the ruin on the floor. From the chest near the door she took out the slipper and handed it to him. He lay down flat, squinting sideways along the carpet in the place where neither he nor she had trodden the night before. His hand went to his pocket and he smiled up sideways into her troubled face.
‘If all the pens that ever poets held had had the feeling of their masters’ thoughts, they could not write as much solid fact as you can hold in a pair of callipers.’ He measured the heel of the slipper in both directions, and then turned his attention to the pile of the carpet. ‘She stood here, heels together, looking.’ The callipers twinkled over the sunlit rectangle. ‘And here is the heel that stamped and trampled and ground beauty to dust. One was a French heel and one was a Cuban heel – isn’t that what the footwear specialists call them?’ He sat up and tapped the sole of the slipper lightly with the callipers. ‘Who goes there? France – Pass, France, and all’s well.’
‘Oh, I’m glad,’ said Harriet, fervently. ‘I’m glad.’
‘Yes. Meanness isn’t one of your accomplishment, is it?’ He turned his eyes to the carpet again, this time to a place near the edge.
‘Look! now that the sun’s out you can see it. Here’s where Cuban Heel wiped her soles before she left. There are very few flies on Cuban Heel. Well, that saves us a back-breaking search all over the College for the dust of kings and queens.’ He picked the sliver of ivory from the French heel, put the slipper in his pocket and stood up. ‘This had better go back to its owner, furnished with a certificate of innocence.’
‘Give it to me. I must take it.’
‘No, you will not. If anybody has to face unpleasantness, it shan’t be you this time.’
‘But Peter – you won’t—’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I wont. Trust me for that.’
Harriet was left staring at the broken chessmen. Presently she went out into the corridor, found a dustpan and brush in a scout’s pantry and returned with them to sweep up the debris. As she was replacing the brush and pan in the pantry, she ran into one of the students from the annexe.
‘By the way, Miss Swift,’ said Harriet, ‘you didn’t happen to hear any noise in my room like glass being smashed last night did you? Some time during or after Hall?’
‘No, I didn’t, Miss Vane. I was in my own room all evening. But wait a moment. Miss Ward came along about half-past nine to do some Morphology with me and’ – the girl’s mouth dimpled into laughter – ‘she asked if you were a secret toffee-eater, because it sounded as though you were smashing up toffee with the poker. Has the College Ghost been visiting you?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Harriet. ‘Thank you; that’s very helpful. I must see Miss Ward.’
Miss Ward, however, could help no further than by fixing the time a little more definitely as ‘certainly not later than half-past nine.’
Harriet thanked her, and went out. Her very bones seemed to ache with restlessness – or perhaps it was with having slept badly in an unfamiliar bed and with a disturbed mind. The sun had scattered diamonds among the wet grass of the quadrangle, and the breeze was shaking the rain in a heavy spatter of drops from the beeches. Students came and went. Somebody had left a scarlet cushion out all night in the rain; it was sodden and mournful-looking; its owner came and picked it up, with an air between laughter and disgust; she threw it on a bench to dry in the sunshine.
To do nothing was intolerable. To be spoken to by any member of the Senior Common Room would be still more intolerable. She was penned in the Old Quad, for she was sensitive to the mere neighbourhood of the New Quad as a person that has been vaccinated is sensitive to everything that lies on the sore side of his body. Without particular aim or intention, she skirted the tennis-court and turned in at the Library entrance. She had intended to go upstairs but, seeing the door of Miss de Vine’s set stand open, she altered her mind; she could borrow a book from there. The little lobby was empty, but in the sitting-room a scout was giving the writing-table a Sunday-morning flick with the duster. Harriet remembered that Miss de Vine was in Town, and that she was to be warned when she returned.
‘What time does Miss de Vine get back to-night? Do you know, Nellie?’
‘I think she gets in by the 9.39, miss.’
Harriet nodded, took a book from the shelves at random, and went to sit on the steps of the loggia, where there was a deck-chair. The morning, she told herself, was getting on. If Peter had to get to his destination by 11.30, it was time he went. She vividly remembered waiting in a nursing-home while a friend underwent an operation; there had been a smell of ether, and, in the waiting-room, a large black Wedgwood jar, filled with delphiniums.
She read a page without knowing what was in it, and looked up at an approaching footstep into the face of Miss Hillyard.
‘Lord Peter,’ said Miss Hillyard, without preface, ‘asked me to give you this address. He was obliged to leave quickly to keep his appointment.’
Harriet took the paper and said, ‘Thank you.’
Miss Hillyard went on resolutely. ‘When I spoke to you last night I was under a misapprehension. I had not fully realised the difficulty of your position. I am afraid I have unwittingly made it harder for you, and I apologise.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Harriet, taking refuge in formula. ‘I am sorry too. I was rather upset last night and said a great deal more than I should. This wretched business has made everything so uncomfortable.’
‘Indeed it has,’ said Miss Hillyard, in a more natural voice. ‘We are all feeling rather overwrought. I wish we could get at the truth of it. I understand that you now accept my account of my movements last night.’
‘Absolutely. It was inexcusable of me not to have verified my data.’
‘Appearances can be very misleading,’ said Miss Hillyard.
There was a pause.
‘Well,’ said Harriet at last, ‘I hope we may forget all this.’ She knew as she spoke that one thing at least had been said which could never be forgotten: she would have given a great deal to recall it.
‘I shall do my best,’ replied Miss Hillyard. ‘Perhaps I am too much inclined to judge harshly of matters outside my experience.’
‘It is very kind of you to say that,?
?? said Harriet. ‘Please believe that I don’t take a very self-satisfied view of myself either.’
‘Very likely not. I have noticed that the people who get opportunities always seem to choose the wrong ones. But it’s no affair of mine. Good morning.’
She went as abruptly as she had come. Harriet glanced at the book on her knee and discovered that she was reading The Anatomy of Melancholy.
‘Fleat Heraclitus an rideat Democritus? In attempting to speak of these Symptoms, shall I laugh with Democritus or weep with Heraclitus? they are so ridiculous and absurd on the one side, so lamentable and tragical on the other.’
Harriet got the car out in the afternoon and took Miss Lydgate and the Dean for a picnic in the neighbourhood of Hinksey. When she got back, in time for supper, she found an urgent message at the Lodge, asking her to ring up Lord Saint-George at the House as soon as she got back. His voice, when he answered the call, sounded agitated.
‘Oh, look here! I can’t get hold of Uncle Peter – he’s vanished again, curse him! I say, I saw your ghost this afternoon, and I do think you ought to be careful.’
‘Where did you see her? When?’
‘About half-past two – walking over Magdalen Bridge in broad daylight. I’d been lunching with some chaps out Iffley way, and we were just pulling over to put one of ’em down at Magdalen, when I spotted her. She was walking along, muttering to herself, and looking awfully queer. Sort of clutching with her hands and rolling her eyes about. She spotted me, too. Couldn’t mistake her. A friend of mine was driving and I tried to catch his attention, but he was pulling round behind a bus and I couldn’t make him understand. Anyhow, when we stopped at Magdalen gate, I hopped out and ran back, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. Seemed to have faded out. I bet she knew I was on to her and made tracks. I was scared. Thought she looked up to anything. So I rang up your place and found you were out and then I rang up the Mitre and that wasn’t any good either, so I’ve been sitting here all evening in a devil of a stew. First I thought I’d leave a note, and then I thought I’d better tell you myself. Rather devoted of me, don’t you think? I cut a supper-party so as not to miss you.’
‘That was frightfully kind of you,’ said Harriet. ‘What was the ghost dressed in?’
‘Oh – one of those sort of dark-blue frocks with spriggy bits on it and a hat with a brim. Sort of thing most of your dons wear in the afternoon. Neat, not gaudy. Not smart. Just ordinary. It was the eyes I recognised. Made me feel all goose-flesh. Honest. That woman’s not safe, I’ll swear she isn’t.’
‘It’s very good of you to warn me,’ said Harriet again. ‘I’ll try and find out who it could have been. And I’ll take precautions.’
‘Please do,’ said Lord Staint-George. ‘I mean, Uncle Peter’s getting the wind up horribly. Gone clean off his oats. Of course I know he’s a fidgety old ass and I’ve been doing my best to soothe the troubled breast and all that, but I’m beginning to think he’s got some excuse. For goodness’ sake, Aunt Harriet, do something about it. I can’t afford to have a valuable uncle destroyed under my eyes. He’s getting like the Lord of Burleigh, you know – walking up and pacing down and so on – and the responsibility is very wearing.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Harriet. ‘You’d better come and dine in College to-morrow and see if you can spot the lady. It’s no good this evening, because so many people don’t turn up to Sunday supper.’
‘Right-ho!’ said the viscount. ‘That’s a dashed good idea. I’d get a dashed good birthday-present out of Uncle Peter if I solved his problem for him. So long and take care of yourself.’
‘I ought to have thought of that before,’ said Harriet, retailing this piece of news to the Dean; ‘but I never imagined he’d recognise the woman like that after only seeing her once.’
The Dean, to whom the whole story of Lord Saint-George’s ghostly encounter had come as a novelty, was inclined to be sceptical. ‘Personally, I wouldn’t undertake to identify anybody after one glimpse in the dark – and I certainly wouldn’t trust a young harum-scarum like that. The only person here I know of with a navy sprigged foulard is Miss Lydgate, and I absolutely refuse to believe that! But ask the young man to dinner by all means. I’m all for excitement, and he’s even more ornamental than the other one.’
It was borne in upon Harriet that things were coming to a crisis. ‘Take precautions.’ A nice fool she would look, going about with a dog-collar round her neck. Nor would it be any defence against pokers and such things. . . . The wind must be in the south-west, for the heavy boom of Tom tolling his hundred-and-one came clearly to her ears as she crossed the Old Quad.
‘Not later than half-past nine,’ Miss Ward had said. If the peril had ceased to walk by night, it was still abroad of an evening.
She went upstairs and locked the door of her room before opening a drawer and taking out the heavy strap of brass and leather. There was something about the description of that woman walking wide-eyed over Magdalen Bridge and ‘clutching with her hands’ that was very unpleasant to think of. She could feel Peter’s grip on her throat now like: a band of iron, and could hear him saying serenely, like a textbook:
‘That is the dangerous spot. Compression of the big blood-vessels there will cause almost instant unconsciousness. And then, you see, you’re done for.’
And at the, momentary pressure of his thumbs the fire had swum in her eyes.
She turned with a start as something rattled the door-handle. Probably the passage window was open and the wind blowing in. She was getting ridiculously nervous.
The buckle was stiff to her fingers. (Is thy servant a dog that she should do this thing?) When she saw herself in the glass, she laughed. ‘An arum-lily quality that is in itself an invitation to violence.’ Her own face, in the drowned evening light, surprised her – softened and startled and drained of colour, with eyes that looked unnaturally large under the heavy black brows, and lips a little parted. It was like the head of someone who had been guillotined; the dark band cut it off from the body like the stroke of the headsman’s steel.
She wondered whether her lover had seen it like that, through that hot unhappy year when she had tried to believe that there was happiness in surrender. Poor Philip – tormented by his own vanities, never loving her till he had killed her feelings for him, and yet perilously clutching her as he went down into the slough of death. It was not to Philip she had submitted, so much as to a theory of living. The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadlines of principles. To subdue one’s self to one’s own end might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.
Could there ever be any alliance between the intellect and the flesh? It was this business of asking questions and analysing everything that sterilised and stultified all one’s passions. Experience, perhaps, had a formula to get over this difficulty; one kept the bitter, tormenting brain on one side of the wall and the languorous sweet body on the other, and never let them meet. So that if you were made that way you could argue about loyalties in an Oxford common-room and refresh yourself elsewhere with – say – Viennese singers, presenting an unruffled surface on both sides of yourself. Easy for a man, and possible even for a woman, if one avoided foolish accidents like being tried for murder. But to seek to force incompatibles into a compromise was madness; one should neither do it nor be a party to it. If Peter wanted to make the experiment, he must do it without Harriet’s connivance. Six centuries of possessive blood would not be dictated to by a bare forty-five years of over-sensitised intellect. Let the male animal take the female and be content; the busy brain could very well be ‘left talking’ like the hero of Man and Superman. In a long monologue, of course; for the female animal could only listen without contributing. Otherwise one would get the sort of couple one had in Private Lives, who rolled on the floor and hammered one another when they w
eren’t making love, because they (obviously) had no conventional resources. A vista of crashing boredom, either way.
The door rattled again, as a reminder that even a little boredom might be welcome by way of change from alarms. On the mantelpiece, a solitary red pawn mocked all security . . . How quietly Annie had taken Peter’s warning. Did she take it seriously? Was she looking after herself? She had been her usual refined and self-contained self when she brought in the Common-room coffee that night – perhaps a little brighter looking than usual. Of course, she had had her afternoon off with Beatie and Carola. . . . Curious, thought Harriet, this desire to possess children and dictate their tastes, as though they were escaping fragments of one’s self, and not separate individuals. Even if the taste ran ran to motor bikes. . . . Annie was all right. How about Miss de Vine, travelling down from Town in happy ignorance? – With a start, Harriet saw that it was nearly a quarter to ten. The train must be in. Had the Warden remembered about warning Miss de Vine? She ought not to be left to sleep in that ground-floor room without being forearmed. But the Warden never forgot anything.
Nevertheless, Harriet was uneasy. From her window she could not see whether any lights were on in the Library Wing. She unlocked the door and stepped out (yes – the passage window was open; nobody but the wind had rattled the handle). A few dim figures were still moving at the far end of the quad as she passed along beside the tennis court. In the Library Wing, all the ground-floor windows were dark except for the dim glow of the passage-light. Miss Barton, at any rate, was not in her room; nor was Miss de Vine back yet. Or – yes, she must be; for the window-curtains were drawn in her sitting-room, though no light shone as yet behind them.