‘I take it, Harriet, that you have no new answer to give me?’
‘No, Peter. I’m sorry, but I can’t say anything else.’
‘All right. Don’t worry. I’ll try not to be a nuisance. But if you could put up with me occasionally, as you have done to-night, I should be very grateful to you.’
‘I don’t think that would be at all fair to you.’
‘If that’s the only reason, I am the best judge of that.’ Then, with a return to his habitual self-mockery: ‘Old habits die hard. I will not promise to reform altogether. I shall, with your permission, continue to propose to you, at decently regulated intervals – as a birthday treat, and on Guy Fawkes Day and on the Anniversary of the King’s Accession. But consider it, if you will, as a pure formality. You need not pay the slightest attention to it.’
‘Peter, it’s foolish to go on like this.’
‘And, of course, on the Feast of All Fools.’
‘It would be better to forget all about it – I hoped you had.’
‘I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done, but it has not yet gone on strike altogether.’
The taxi drew up, and the driver peered round inquiringly. Wimsey handed her out and waited gravely while she disentangled her latch-key. Then he took it from her, opened the door for her, said good night and was gone.
Mounting the stone staircase, she knew that, as far as this situation was concerned, her flight had been useless. She was back in the old net of indecision and distress. In him, it appeared to have worked some kind of change; but it had certainly not made him any easier to deal with.
He had kept his promise, and troubled her very little. He had been out of Town a good deal, hard at work upon cases, some of which trickled through into newspaper columns, while others appeared to settle themselves in discreet obscurity. For six months he had himself been out of the country, offering no explanation except ‘business.’ One summer, he had been involved in an odd affair, which had led him to take a post in an Advertising Agency. He had found office life entertaining; but the thing had come to a strange and painful conclusion.
There had been an evening when he had turned up to keep a previously-made dinner appointment, but had obviously been unfit either to eat or talk. Eventually he had confessed to a splitting headache and a temperature and suffered himself to be personally conducted home. She had been sufficiently alarmed not to leave him till he was safely in his own flat and in the capable hands of Bunter. The latter had been reassuring: the trouble was nothing but reaction – of frequent occurrence at the end of a trying case, but soon over. A day or two later, the patient had rung up, apologised, and made a fresh appointment, at which he had displayed a quite remarkable effervescence of spirits.
On no other occasion had Harriet ever passed his threshold. Nor had he ever violated the seclusion of Mecklenburg Square. Two or three times, courtesy had moved her to invite him in; but he had always made some excuse, and she understood that he was determined to leave her that place, at least, free from any awkward associations. It was clear that he had no fatuous intention of making himself more valued by withdrawal: he had rather the air of trying to make amends for something. He renewed his offer of marriage on an average of once in three months, but in such a way as to afford no excuse for any outbreak of temperament on either side. One First of April, the question had arrived from Paris in a single Latin sentence, starting off dispiritedly, ‘Num . . . ?’ – a particle which notoriously ‘expects the answer No.’ Harriet, rummaging the Grammar book for ‘polite negatives,’ replied, still more briefly, ‘Benigne.’
Looking back upon her visit to Oxford, Harriet found that it had had an unsettling effect. She had begun to take Wimsey for granted, as one might take dynamite for granted in a munitions factory. But the discovery that the mere sound of his name still had the power to provoke such explosions in herself – that she could so passionately resent, at one and the same time, either praise or blame of him on other people’s lips – awakened a misgiving that dynamite was perhaps still dynamite, however harmless it might come to look through long custom.
On the mantelpiece of her sitting-room stood a note, in Peter’s small and rather difficult writing. It informed her that he had been called away by Chief-Inspector Parker, who was in difficulties over a murder in the north of England. He must therefore regretfully cancel their appointment for that week. Could she oblige him by making use of the tickets, of which he had no time to dispose otherwise?
Harriet pinched her lips over that last cautious sentence. Ever since one frightful occasion, during the first year of their acquaintance, when he had ventured to send her a Christmas present and she, in an access of mortified pride, had returned it to him with a stinging rebuke, he had been careful never to offer anything that could possibly be looked upon as a material gift. Had he been wiped out of existence at any moment, there was nothing among her possessions to remind her of him. She now took up the tickets and hesitated over them. She could give them away, or she could go herself and take a friend. On the whole, she thought she would rather not sit through the performance with a kind of Banquo’s ghost disputing possession of the next stall with somebody else. She put the tickets in an envelope, dispatched them to the married couple who had taken her to Ascot, and then tore the note across and deposited it in the waste-paper basket. Having thus disposed of Banquo, she breathed more freely, and turned to deal with the day’s next nuisance.
This was the revision of three of her books for a new edition. The re-reading of one’s own works is usually a dismal matter; and when she had completed her task she felt thoroughly jaded and displeased with herself. The books were all right, as far as they went; as intellectual exercises, they were even brilliant. But there was something lacking about them; they read now to her as though they had been written with a mental reservation, a determination to keep her own opinions and personality out of view. She considered with distaste a clever and superficial discussion between two of the characters about married life. She could have made a much better thing of that, if she had not been afraid of giving herself away. What hampered her was this sense of being in the middle of things, too close to things, pressed upon and bullied by reality. If she could succeed in standing aside from herself she would achieve self-confidence and a better control. That was the great possession in which – with all his limitations – the scholar could account himself blessed: the single eye, directed to the object, not dimmed nor distracted by private motes and beams. “Private, indeed?” muttered Harriet to herself, as she smacked her proofs irritably into brown paper.
‘You not alone, when you are still alone,
O God, from you that I could private be!’
She was exceedingly glad that she had got rid of the theatre tickets.
So that when Wimsey eventually got back from his expedition north, she went to meet him in a belligerent spirit. He had asked her to dine with him. this time, at the Egotists’ Club – an unusual venue. It was a Saturday night, and they had the room to themselves. She mentioned her Oxford visit and took the opportunity to recite to him a list of promising scholars, distinguished in their studies and subsequently extinguished by matrimony. He agreed mildly that such things did happen, far too often, and instanced a very brilliant painter who, urged on by a socially ambitious wife, had now become a slick machine for the production of Academy portraits.
‘Sometimes, of course,’ he went on dispassionately, ‘the partner is merely jealous or selfish. But half the time it’s sheer stupidity. They don’t mean it. It’s surprisin’ how few people ever mean anything definite from one year’s end to the other.’
‘I don’t think they could help it, whatever they meant. It’s the pressure of other people’s personalities that does the mischief.’
‘Yes. Best intentions no security. They never are, of course. You may say you won’t interfere with another person’s soul, bu
t you do – merely by existing. The snag about it is the practical difficulty, so to speak, of not existing. I mean, here we all are, you know, and what are we to do about it?’
‘Well, I suppose some people feel themselves called to make personal relationships their life-work. If so, it’s all right for them. But what about the others?’
‘Tiresome, isn’t it?’ he said, with a gleam of amusement that annoyed her. ‘Do you think they ought to cut out human contacts altogether? It’s not easy. There’s always the butcher or the baker or the landlady or somebody one has to wrestle with. Or should the people with brains sit tight and let the people with hearts look after them?’
‘They frequently do.’
‘So they do.’ For the fifth time he summoned the waiter to pick up Harriet’s napkin for her. ‘Why do geniuses make bad husbands, and all that? But what are you going to do about the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?’
‘I’m sorry I keep on dropping things; this silk’s so slippery. Well, that’s just the problem, isn’t it? I’m beginning to believe they’ve got to choose.’
‘Not compromise?’
‘I don’t think the compromise works.’
‘That I should live to hear any person of English blood blaspheme against compromise!’
‘Oh, I’m not all English. I’ve got some bits of Scotch and Irish tucked away somewhere.’
‘That proves you’re English. No other race ever boasts of being mongrel. I’m quite offensively English myself, because I’m one-sixteenth French, besides all the usual nationalities. So that compromise is in my blood. However. Should you catalogue me as a heart or a brain?’
‘Nobody,’ said Harriet, ‘could deny your brain.’
‘Who denies it? And you may deny my heart, but I’m damned if you shall deny its existence.’
‘You argue like an Elizabethan wit – two meanings under one word.’
‘It was your word. You will have to deny something, if you intend to be like Cæsar’s sacrifice.’
‘Cæsar’s . . .?’
‘A beast without a heart. Has your napkin gone again?’
‘No – it’s my bag this time. It’s just under your left foot.’
‘Oh!’ He looked round, but the waiter had vanished, ‘Well,’ he went on, without moving, ‘it is the heart’s office to wait upon the brain, but in view of—’
‘Please don’t trouble,’ said Harriet, ‘it doesn’t matter in the least.’
‘In view of the fact that I’ve got two cracked ribs, I’d better not try; because if I once got down I should probably never get up again.’
‘Good gracious!’ said Harriet. ‘I thought you seemed a little stiff in your manner. Why on earth didn’t you say so before, instead of sitting there like a martyr and inveigling me into misjudging you?’
‘I don’t seem able to do anything right,’ he said plaintively.
‘How did you manage to do it?’
‘Fell off a wall in the most inartistic manner. I was in a bit of a hurry; there was a very plain-looking bloke on the other side with a gun. It wasn’t so much the wall, as the wheelbarrow at the bottom. And it isn’t really so much the ribs as the sticking-plaster. It’s strapped as tight as hell and itches infernally.’
‘How beastly for you. I’m so sorry. What became of the bloke with the gun?’
‘Ah! I’m afraid personal complications won’t trouble him any longer.’
‘If luck had been the other way, I suppose they wouldn’t have troubled you any longer?’
‘Probably not. And then I shouldn’t have troubled you any longer. If my mind had been where my heart was, I might have welcomed that settlement. But my mind being momentarily on my job, I ran away with the greatest rapidity, so as to live to finish the case.’
‘We’ll, I’m glad of that, Peter.’
‘Are you? That shows how hard it is for even the most powerful brain to be completely heartless. Let me see. It is not my day for asking you to marry me, and a few yards of sticking-plaster are hardly enough to make it a special occasion. But we’ll have coffee in the lounge, if you don’t mind, because this chair is getting as hard as the wheelbarrow, and seems to be catching me in several of the same places.’
He got up cautiously. The waiter arrived and restored Harriet’s bag, together with some letters which she had taken from the postman as she left the house and thrust into the outer pocket of the bag without reading. Wimsey steered his guest into the lounge, established her in a chair and lowered himself with a grimace into one corner of a low couch.
‘Rather a long way down, isn’t it?’
‘It’s all right when you get there. Sorry to be always presenting myself in such a decrepit state. I do it on purpose, of course, to attract attention and awaken sympathy; but I’m afraid the manœuvre’s getting rather obvious. Would you like a liqueur with the coffee or a brandy? Two old brandies, James.’
‘Very good, my lord. This was found under the table in the dining-room, madam.’
‘More of your scattered belongings?’ said Wimsey, as she took the post-card; then, seeing her flush and frown of disgust. ‘What it is?’
‘Nothing,’ said Harriet, pushing the ugly scrawl into her bag.
He looked at her.
‘Do you often get that kind of thing?’
‘What kind of thing?’
‘Anonymous dirt.’
‘Not very often now. I got one at Oxford. But they used to come by every post. Don’t worry; I’m used to it. I only wish I’d looked at it before I got here. It’s horrible of me to have dropped it about your club for the servants to read.’
‘Careless little devil, aren’t you? May I see it?’
‘No, Peter; please.’
‘Give it to me.’
She handed it to him without looking up. ‘Ask your boy friend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup. What did you give him to get you off?’ it inquired, disagreeably.
‘God, what muck!’ said he, bitterly. ‘So that’s what I’m letting you in for. I might have known it. I could hardly hope that it wasn’t so. But you said nothing, so I allowed myself to be selfish.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s just part of the consequences. You can’t do anything about it.’
‘I might have the consideration not to expose you to it. Heaven knows you’ve tried hard enough to get rid of me. In fact, I think you’ve used every possible lever to dislodge me, except that one.’
‘Well, I knew you would hate it so. I didn’t want to hurt you.’
‘Didn’t want to hurt me?’
She realised that this, to him, must sound completely lunatic.
‘I mean that, Peter. I know I’ve said about every damnable thing to you that I could think of. But I have my limits.’ A sudden wave of anger surged up in her. ‘My God, do you really think that of me? Do you suppose there’s no meanness I wouldn’t stoop to?’
‘You’d have been perfectly justified in telling me that I was making things more difficult for you by hanging round.’
‘Should I? Did you expect me to tell you that you were compromising my reputation, when I had none to compromise? To point out that you’d saved me from the gallows, thank you very much, but left me in the pillory? To say, my name’s mud, but kindly treat it as lilies? I’m not quite such a hypocrite as that.’
‘I see. The plain truth is, that I am doing nothing but make life a little bitterer for you. It was generous of you not to say so.’
‘Why did you insist on seeing that thing?’
‘Because,’ he said, striking a match and holding the flame to a corner of the post-card, ‘while I am quite ready to take flight from plug-uglies with guns, I prefer to look other kinds of trouble in the face.’ He dropped the burning paper on to the tray and crushed the ashes together, and she was again reminded of the message she had found in her sleeve. ‘You have nothing to reproach yourself with – you didn’t tell me this; I found it out for myself. I will admit defeat and say
good-bye. Shall I?’
The club waiter set down the brandies. Harriet, with her eyes on her own hands, sat plaiting her fingers together. Peter watched her for some minutes, and then said gently:
‘Don’t look so tragic about it. The coffee’s getting cold. After all, you know, I have the consolation that “not you but Fate has vanquished me.” I shall emerge with my vanity intact, and that’s something.’
‘Peter, I’m afraid I’m not very consistent. I came here tonight with the firm intention of telling you to chuck it. But I’d rather fight my own battles. I – I –,’ she looked up and went on quaveringly, ‘I’m damned if I’ll have you wiped out by plug-uglies or anonymous-letter writers!’
He sat up sharply, so that his exclamation of pleasure turned halfway into an anguished grunt.
‘Oh, curse this sticking-plaster! . . . Harriet, you have got guts, haven’t you? Give me your hand, and we’ll fight on until we drop. Here! none of that. You can’t cry in this club. It’s never been done, and if you disgrace me like this, I shall get into a row with the Committee. They’ll probably close the Ladies’ Rooms altogether.’
‘I’m sorry, Peter.’
‘And don’t put sugar in my coffee.’
Later in the evening, having lent a strong arm to extricate him, swearing loudly, from the difficult depths of the couch, and dispatched him to such rest as he might reasonably look for between the pains of love and sticking-plaster, she had leisure to reflect that if fate had vanquished either of them it was not Peter Wimsey. He knew too well the wrestler’s trick of letting the adversary’s own strength defeat itself. Yet she knew with certainty that if, when he had said, ‘Shall I go?’ she had replied with firm kindness, ‘I’m sorry, but I think it would be better,’ there would have been the desired end of the matter.
‘I wish,’ she said to the friend of the European trip, ‘he would take a firm line of some kind.’
‘But he has,’ replied the friend, who was a clear-headed person. ‘He knows what he wants. The trouble is that you don’t. I know it isn’t pleasant putting an end to things, but I don’t see why he should do all your dirty work for you, particularly as he doesn’t want it done. As for anonymous letters, it seems to me quite ridiculous to pay any attention to them.’