Gaudy Night (10 page)

“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, but 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 of 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 Caesar’s sacrifice.”

“Caesar’s...?”

“A beat 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 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 the 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.”

“Well, 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 manoeuvre’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 postcard; then, seeing her flush and frown of disgust, “What is it?”

“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 fact 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 postcard, “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 rather 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 half-way 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 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.”

It was easy for the friend to say this, having no vulnerable points in her brisk and hard-working life.

“Peter says I ought to get a secretary and have them weeded out.”

“Well,” said the friend, “that’s a practical suggestion, anyway. But I suppose, since it’s his advice, you’ll find some ingenious reason for not taking it.”

“I’m not as bad as that,” said Harriet; and engaged the secretary.

So matters went on for some months. She made no further effort to discuss the conflicting claims of heart and brain. That line of talk led to a perilous exchange of personalities, in which he, with a livelier wit and better self-control, could always drive her into a corner without exposing himself. It was only by sheer brutal hacking that she could beat down his guard; and she was beginning to be afraid of those impulses to savagery.

She heard no news of Shrewsbury College in the interval, except that one “ay in the Michaelmas Term there was a paragraph in one of the more foolish London dailies about an “Undergraduettes’ Rag,” informing the world that somebody had made a bonfire of gowns in Shrewsbury Quad and that the “Lady Head” was said to be taking disciplinary measures. Women, of course, were always news. Harriet wrote a tart letter to the paper, pointing out that either “undergraduate” or “woman student” would be seemlier English than “undergraduette,” and that the correct method of describing Dr. Baring was “the Warden.” The only result of this was to provoke a correspondence headed “Lady Undergrads,” and a reference to “sweet girl-graduates.”

She informed Wimsey—who happened to be the nearest male person handy for scarifying—that this kind of vulgarity was typical of the average man’s attitude to women’s intellectual interests. He replied that bad manners always made him sick; but was it any worse than headlining foreign monarchs by their Christian names, untitled?

About three weeks before the end of the Easter term, however, Harriet’s attention was again called to college affairs in a way that was more personal and more disquieting.

February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March when she received a letter from the Dean.

My dear Miss Vane,

I am writing to ask you whether you will be able to get up to Oxford for the opening of the New Library Wing by the Chancellor next Thursday. This, as you know, has always been the date for the official opening, though we had hoped that the buildings themselves would be ready for habitation at the beginning of this term. However what with a dispute in the contractors’ firm, and the unfortunate illness of the architect, we got badly held up, so that we shall only just be ready in time. In fact, the interior decoration of the ground floor isn’t finished
yet.—
Still, we couldn’t very well ask Lord Oakapple to change the date, as he is such a busy man; and after all, the Library is the chief thing, and not the Fellows’ sets, however badly they may need a home to go to, poor dears.

We are particularly anxious—I am speaking for Dr. Baring as well as myself—that you should come, if you can manage to find time (though of course you have a lot of engagements). We should be very glad to have your advice about a most unpleasant thing that has been happening here. Not that one expects a detective novelist to be a practical policeman; but I know you have taken part in one real investigation, and I feel sure you know a lot more than we do about tracking down malefactors.

Don’t think we are all getting murdered in our beds! In some ways I’m not sure that a “nice, clean murder” wouldn’t be easier to deal with! The fact is, we are being victimised by a cross between a Poltergeist and a Poison-Pen, and you can imagine how disgusting it is for everybody. It seems that the letters started coming some time ago, but at first nobody took much notice. I suppose everyone gets vulgar anonymous communications from time to time; and though some of the beastly things didn’t come by post, there’s nothing in a place like this to prevent an outsider from dropping them at the Lodge or even inside the College. But wanton destruction of property is a different matter, and the last outbreak has been so abominable that something really must be done about it. Poor Miss Lydgate’s
English Prosody
—you saw that colossal work in progress—has been defaced and mutilated in the most
revolting
manner, and some important manuscript portions completely destroyed, so that they will have to be done all over again. She was almost in tears, poor dear—and the alarming thing is that it now looks as though somebody in college
must
be responsible. We suppose that some student must have a grudge against the S.C.R.—but it must be more than a grudge—it must be a very horrid kind of pettiness.