Peter had come back to his place and was sitting with his head in his hands. She went over and shook him furiously by the shoulder, and as he looked up, spat in his face. ‘You! you dirty traitor! You rotten little white-faced rat! It’s men like you that make women like this. You don’t know how to do anything but talk. What do you know about life with your title and your money and your clothes and motor-cars? You’ve never done a hand’s turn of honest work. You can buy all the women you want. Wives and mothers may rot and die for all you care, while you chatter about duty and honour. Nobody would sacrifice anything for you – why should they? That woman’s making a fool of you and you can’t see it. If she marries you for your money she’ll make a worse fool of you, and you’ll deserve it. You’re fit for nothing but to keep your hands white and father other men’s children. . . . What are you going to do now, all of you? Run away and squeal to the magistrate because I made fools of you all? You daren’t. You’re afraid to come out into the light. You’re afraid for your precious college and your precious selves. I’m not afraid. I did nothing but stand up for my own flesh and blood. Damn you! I can laugh at you all! You daren’t touch me. You’re afraid of me. I had a husband and I loved him – and you were jealous of me and you killed him. Oh, God! You killed him among you, and we never had a happy moment again.’
She suddenly burst out crying – half dreadful and half grotesque, with her cap crooked and her hands twisting her apron into a knot.
‘For Heaven’s sake,’ muttered the Dean, desperately, ‘can’t this be stopped?’
Here Miss Barton got up.
‘Come, Annie,’ she said, briskly. ‘We are all very sorry for you, but you mustn’t behave in this foolish and hysterical way. What would the children think if they saw you now? You had better come and lie down quietly and take some aspirin. Bursar! will you please help me out with her?’
Miss Stevens, galvanised, got up and took Annie’s other arm, and all three went out together. The Warden turned to Peter, who stood mechanically wiping his face with his handkerchief and looking at nobody.
‘I apologise for allowing this scene to take place. I ought to have known better. You were perfectly right.’
‘Of course he was right!’ cried Harriet. Her head was throbbing like an engine. ‘He’s always right. He said it was dangerous to care for anybody. He said love was a brute and a devil. You’re honest, Peter, aren’t you? Damned honest – Oh, God! let me get out of here. I’m going to be sick.’
She stumbled blindly against him as he held the door open for her, and he had to steer her with a firm hand to the cloakroom door. When he came back, the Warden had risen, and the dons with her. They looked stupefied with the shock of seeing so many feelings stripped naked in public.
‘Of course, Miss de Vine,’ the Warden was saying, ‘no sane person could possibly think of blaming you.’
‘Thank you, Warden,’ said Miss de Vine. ‘Nobody, perhaps, but myself.’
‘Lord Peter,’ said the Warden, ‘a little later on, when we are all feeling more ourselves, I think we should all like to say—’
‘Please don’t,’ said he. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’
The Warden went out, and the rest followed her like mutes at a funeral, leaving only Miss de Vine, sitting solitary beneath the window. Peter shut the door after them and came up to her. He was still passing his handkerchief across his mouth. Becoming aware of this, he tossed the linen into the waste-paper basket.
‘I do blame myself,’ said Miss de Vine less to him than to herself. ‘Most bitterly. Not for my original action, which was unavoidable, but for the sequel. Nothing you can say to me could make me feel more responsible than I do already.’
‘I can have nothing to say,’ said he. ‘Like you and every member of this Common Room, I admit the principle and the consequences must follow.’
‘That won’t do,’ said the Fellow, bluntly. ‘One ought to take some thought for other people. Miss Lydgate would have done what I did in the first place; but she would have made it her business to see what became of that unhappy man and his wife.’
‘Miss Lydgate is a very great and a very rare person. But she could not prevent other people from suffering for her principles. That seems to be what principles are for, somehow. . . . I don’t claim, you know,’ he added, with something of his familiar diffidence, ‘to be a Christian or anything of that kind. But there’s one thing in the Bible that seems to me to be a mere statement of brutal fact – I mean, about bringing not peace but a sword.’
Miss de Vine looked up at him curiously.
‘How much are you going to suffer for this?’
‘God knows,’ he said. ‘That’s my look out. Perhaps not at all. In any case, you know, I’m with you – every time.’
When Harriet emerged from the cloakroom, she found Miss de Vine alone.
‘Thank Heaven, they’ve gone,’ said Harriet. ‘I’m afraid I made an exhibition of myself. It was rather – shattering, wasn’t it? What’s happened to Peter?’
‘He’s gone,’ said Miss de Vine.
She hesitated, and then said:
‘Miss Vane – I’ve no wish to pry impertinently into your affairs. Stop me if I’m saying too much. But we have talked a good deal about facing the facts. Isn’t it time you faced the facts about the man?’
‘I have been facing one fact for some time,’ said Harriet, staring out with unseeing eyes into the quad, ‘and that is, that if I once gave way to Peter, I should go up like straw.’
‘That,’ said Miss de Vine drily, ‘is moderately obvious. How often has he used that weapon against you?’
‘Never,’ said Harriet, remembering the moments when he might have used it. ‘Never.’
‘Then what are you afraid of? Yourself?’
‘Isn’t this afternoon warning enough?’
‘Perhaps. You have had the luck to come up against a very unselfish and a very honest man. He has done what you asked him without caring what it costs him and without shirking the issue. He hasn’t tried to disguise the facts or bias your judgment. You admit that, at any rate.’
‘I suppose he realised how I should feel about it?’
‘Realised it?’ said Miss de Vine, with a touch of irritation. ‘My dear girl, give him the credit for the brains he’s got. They are very good ones. He is painfully sensitive and far more intelligent than is good for him. But I really don’t think you can go on like this. You won’t break his patience or his control or his spirit; but you may break his health. He looks like a person pushed to the last verge of endurance.’
‘He’s been rushing about and working very hard,’ said Harriet, defensively. ‘I shouldn’t be at all a comfortable person for him to live with. I’ve got a devilish temper.’
‘Well, that’s his risk, if he likes to take it. He doesn’t seem to lack courage.’
‘I should only make his life a misery.’
‘Very well. If you are determined that you’re not fit to black his boots, tell him so and send him away.’
‘I’ve been trying to send Peter away for five years. It doesn’t have that effect on him.’
‘If you had really tried, you could have sent him away in five minutes. . . . Forgive me. I don’t suppose you’ve had a very easy time with yourself. But it can’t have been easy for him, either – looking on at it, and quite powerless to interfere.’
‘Yes. I almost wish he had interfered, instead of being so horribly intelligent. It would be quite a relief to be ridden over rough-shod for a change.’
‘He will never do that. That’s his weakness. He’ll never make up your mind for you. You’ll have to make your own decisions. You needn’t be afraid of losing your independence; he will always force it back on you. If you ever find any kind of repose with him, it can only be the repose of very delicate balance.’
‘That’s what he says himself. If you were me, should you like to marry a man like that?’
‘Frankly,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘I should no
t. I would not do it for any consideration. A marriage of two independent and equally irritable intelligences seems to me reckless to the point of insanity. You can hurt one another so dreadfully.’
‘I know. And I don’t think I can stand being hurt any more.’
‘Then,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘I suggest that you stop hurting other people. Face the facts and state a conclusion. Bring a scholar’s mind to the problem and have done with it.’
‘I believe you’re quite right,’ said Harriet. ‘I will. And that reminds me. Miss Lydgate’s History of Prosody was marked PRESS with her own hand this morning. I fled with it and seized on a student to take it down to the printers. I’m almost positive I heard a faint voice crying from the window about a footnote on page 97 – but I pretended not to hear.’
‘Well,’ said Miss de Vine, laughing, ‘thank goodness, that piece of scholarship has achieved a result at last!’
23
The last refuge and surest remedy, to be put in practice in the utmost place, when no other means will take effect, is, to let them go together and enjoy one another; potissima cura est ut heros amasia sua potiatur, saith Guianerius. . . . Æsculapius himself, to this malady, cannot invent a better remedy, quam ut amanti cedat amatum . . . than that a Lover have his desire.
ROBERT BURTON
There was no word from Peter in the morning. The Warden issued a brief and discreet announcement to the College that the offender had been traced and the trouble ended. The Senior Common Room, recovering a little from its shock, went quietly about the business of the term. They were all normal again. They had never been anything else. Now that the distorting-glass of suspicion was removed, they were kindly, intelligent human beings – not seeing, perhaps, very much farther beyond their own interests than the ordinary man beyond his job or the ordinary woman beyond her own household – but as understandable and pleasant as daily bread.
Harriet, having got Miss Lydgate’s proofs off her mind, and feeling that she could not brace herself to deal with Wilfrid, took her notes on Lefanu, and went down to put in a little solid work at the Camera.
Shortly before noon, a hand touched her shoulder.
‘They told me you were here,’ said Peter. ‘Can you spare a moment? We can go up on the roof.’
Harriet put down her pen and followed him across the circular chamber with its desks full of silent readers.
‘I understand,’ he said, pushing open the swing-door that leads to the winding staircase, ‘that the problem is being medically dealt with.’
‘Oh, yes. When the academic mind has really grasped a hypothesis – which may take a little time – it copes with great thoroughness and efficiency. Nothing will be overlooked.’
They climbed in silence, and came out at length through the little turret upon the gallery of the Camera. The previous day’s rain had passed and left the sun shining upon a shining city. Stepping cautiously over the slatted flooring towards the south-east segment of the circle, they were a little surprised to come upon Miss Cattermole and Mr. Pomfret, who were seated side by side upon a stone projection and rose as they approached, in a flutter, like daws disturbed from a belfry.
‘Don’t move,’ said Wimsey, graciously. ‘Plenty of room for all of us.’
‘It’s quite all right, sir,’ said Mr. Pomfret, ‘We were just going. Really. I’ve got a lecture at twelve.’
‘Dear me!’ said Harriet, watching them disappear into the turret. But Peter had already lost interest in Mr. Pomfret and his affairs. He was leaning with his elbows on the parapet, looking down into Cat Street. Harriet joined him.
There, eastward, within a stone’s throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls’, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres; and Queen’s with her dome of green copper; and, as the eye turned southward, Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers; the Schools and the battlemented front of University; Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary’s. Westward again, Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower; Brasenose close at hand; St. Aldate’s and Carfax beyond; spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills.
Towery City, and branchy between towers,
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lack-charmèd,
rock-racked, river-rounded,
The dapple-eared lily below.
‘Harriet,’ said Peter; ‘I want to ask your forgiveness for these last five years.’
‘I think,’ said Harriet, ‘it ought to be the other way round.’
‘I think not. When I remember how we first met—’
‘Peter, don’t think about that ghastly time. I was sick of myself, body and soul. I didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘And I chose that time, when I should have thought only of you, to thrust myself upon you, to make demands of you, like a damned arrogant fool – as though I had only to ask and have. Harriet, I ask you to believe that, whatever it looked like, my blundering was nothing worse than vanity and a blind, childish impatience to get my own way.’
She shook her head, finding no words.
‘I had found you,’ he went on, a little more quietly, ‘beyond all hope or expectation, at a time when I thought no woman could ever mean anything to me beyond a little easy sale and exchange of pleasure. And I was so terrified of losing you before I could grasp you that I babbled out all my greed and fear as though, God help me, you had nothing to think of but me and my windy self-importance. As though it mattered. As though the very word of love had been the most crashing insolence a man could offer you.’
‘No, Peter. Never that.’
‘My dear – you showed me what you thought of me when you said you would live with me but not marry me.’
‘Don’t. I am ashamed of that.’
‘Not so bitterly ashamed as I have been. If you knew how I have tried to forget it. I told myself that you were only afraid of the social consequences of marriage. I comforted myself with pretending that it showed you liked me a little. I bolstered up my conceit for months, before I would admit the humiliating truth that I ought to have known from the beginning – that you were sick of my pestering, that you would have thrown yourself to me as one throws a bone to a dog, to stop the brute from yelping.’
‘Peter, that isn’t true. It was myself I was sick of. How could I give you base coin for a marriage-portion?’
‘At least I had the decency to know that I couldn’t take it in settlement of a debt. But I have never dared to tell you what that rebuke meant to me, when at last I saw it for what it was. . . . Harriet; I have nothing much in the way of religion, or even morality, but I do recognise a code of behaviour of sorts. I do know that the worst sin – perhaps the only sin – passion can commit, is to be joyless. It must lie down with laughter or make its bed in hell – there is no middle way. . . . Don’t misunderstand me. I have bought it, often – but never by forced sale or at “stupendous sacrifice.” . . . Don’t, for God’s sake, ever think you owe me anything. If I can’t have the real thing, I can make do with the imitation. But I will not have surrenders or crucifixions. . . . If you have come to feel any kindness for me at all, tell me that you would never make me that offer again.’
‘Not for anything in the world. Not now or at any time since. It isn’t only that I have found a value for myself. But when I made you the offer, it meant nothing to me – now it would mean something.’
‘If you have found your own value,’ he said, ‘that is immeasurably the greatest thing. . . . It has taken me a long time to learn my lesson, Harriet. I have had to pull down brick by brick, the barriers I had built up by my own selfishness and folly. If, in all these years, I have managed to get back to the point at which
I ought to have started, will you tell me so and give me leave to begin again? Once or twice in the last few days I have fancied that you might feel as though this unhappy interval might be wiped out and forgotten.’
‘No; not that. But as though I could be glad to remember it.’
‘Thank you. That is far more than I expected or deserved.’
‘Peter – it’s not fair to let you talk like this. It’s I who ought to apologise. If I owe you nothing else, I owe you my self-respect. And I owe you my life—’
‘Ah!’ said he, smiling. ‘But I have given you that back by letting you risk it. That was the last kick that sent my vanity out of doors.’
‘Peter, I did manage to appreciate that. Mayn’t I be grateful for that?’
‘I don’t want gratitude—’
‘But won’t you take it, now that I want to give it you?’
‘If you feel that way about it, then I have no right to refuse. Let that clear all scores, Harriet. You have given me already far more than you know. You are free now and for ever, as far as I am concerned. You saw yesterday what personal claims might lead to – though I didn’t intend you to see it in quite that brutal way. But if circumstances made me a little more honest than I meant to be, still, I did mean to be honest up to a point.’
‘Yes,’ said Harriet, thoughtfully. ‘I can’t see you burking a fact to support a thesis.’
‘What would be the good? What could I ever have gained by letting you imagine a lie? I set out in a lordly manner to offer you heaven and earth. I find that all I have to give you is Oxford – which was yours already. Look! Go round about her and tell the towers thereof. It has been my humble privilege to clean and polish your property and present her for your inspection upon a silver salver. Enter into your heritage and do not, as is said in another connection, be afraid with any amazement.’
‘Peter dear,’ said Harriet. She turned her back upon the shining city, leaning back against the balustrade, and looking at him. ‘Oh, damn!’