The Weight of the Evidence (6 page)

‘They are ampitious.’ Sir David slightly inclined his head, as one might do when saying something compassionate about the perennial strangeness and oddity of children. ‘All professors are ampitious – ampitious to become professors somewhere else.’ He paused and appeared to decide that, to reach the intellect of his hearers, this must be expanded and illustrated. ‘Professors at Leeds or Sheffield or Hull are ampitious to be professors at Nesfield; and professors at Nesfield are ampitious to be professors at Leeds or Sheffield or Hull.’

‘Ambition’, said Appleby solemnly, ‘should be made of sterner stuff.’

Sir David looked momentarily so disconcerted that it was plain his acquaintance had not the habit of offering him little jokes. Then he put out a kindly hand and patted Appleby on the shoulder, thereby indicating that even if he had said something foolish he should not altogether lose heart. ‘It iss the prave music of a distant drum,’ he said. ‘They are anxious to get away, and so they work at things which are too hard for them, as it iss very easy for professors to do. They worry pecause their prains lack certain microscopic neural tracks which would make them a little cleverer than they are. How foolish it iss.’ And Sir David shook his head slowly and charitably, comfortably convinced that his own neural tracks were just as he would desire them. ‘So that iss the first thing about professors; they worry and have preakdowns.’

Hobhouse licked his pencil, marked a heavy full stop, and then unflinchingly pointed the lead at Sir David Evans’ nose. ‘This Mr Pluckrose,’ he said, ‘–did he have a breakdown?’

This time the Vice-Chancellor seemed to welcome interrogation. ‘Pluckrose certainly had a preakdown. Otherwise, look you, why should he have had a preakup?’

‘A breakup?’ said Appleby, involuntarily chiming in on the questioning.

‘First Pluckrose had a preakdown. And then he proke up altogether and did it.’

‘Did it?’ Hobhouse had put down his notebook and was looking thoroughly blank.

‘Killed himself,’ said Sir David – and shut his mouth and jerked up his chin.

It was almost as if Appleby and his colleague ought to take up their hats and retire as men sated and resolved. But Appleby had at least one question to ask. ‘Then’, he said, ‘it isn’t mysterious after all?’

The effect of this was to cause Sir David Evans to move abruptly across the room as if in search of something. But the sunbeam was now high overhead and inaccessible, so he had to content himself with simply sitting down again at his desk. ‘You mistake me,’ he said patiently. ‘What iss mysterious iss that he should choose that way.’

‘Ah.’ Appleby nodded understandingly. ‘It does take some explaining, sir.’

‘And yet I think I haf an idea.’ Sir David looked with penetration at his visitors, as if sizing up their ability to do Advanced Work. ‘You haf heard of the Oedipus Complex?’

‘Yes.’

‘And of the Electra Complex?’

‘Yes.’

‘And of the Sisyphus Complex?’

This time Appleby shook his head. ‘I don’t think I have.’

‘Good!’ Sir David was delighted. ‘That is very good. Up to now there has not peen such a thing, look you. I haf just discovered it. Pluckrose suffered from the Sisyphus Complex.’

Hobhouse groaned. This, on top of Galileo and the Law of Falling Bodies, was too much. Forgetful of the respect ever due to the upper classes, Hobhouse was suddenly aggressive. ‘And how could Pluckrose have suffered from something you’ve just invented? It doesn’t make sense.’

For a moment benevolence removed itself from the features of Sir David Evans and severity held sway instead. And then again he smiled, pardoning not only impertinence but bad logic as well. ‘I haf distinguished the condition and given it a name. Surely you haf heard of Sisyphus?’

Appleby decided that this exercise might as well be his. ‘Sisyphus was an avaricious king who was punished in the lower world, where he had to roll uphill a huge stone which kept on tumbling down again.’

‘Exactly! The stone was beyond Sisyphus’ weight. It was something he worked away at, but which he had not the necessary power to cope with. So it iss with the professors who do work too hard for them and haf preakdowns. They pecome conscious of their impotence and develop the Sisyphus Complex.’ Sir David was evidently highly pleased. ‘And so it was with Pluckrose, to be sure.’

Appleby stared at him. ‘But you can hardly mean–?’

The Vice-Chancellor raised a finger. ‘Things to remember about myths,’ he said.

Hobhouse put his notebook in his pocket. Sir David ignored this act of insubordination.

‘Efery man has his myth, mark you. Long ago the myths provided opjective equivalents’ – Sir David paused and considerately repeated this hard phrase – ‘provided opjective equivalents of efery possible human situation. Sooner or later efery educated man discovers his own myth. Pluckrose discovered that his myth was that of Sisyphus. Never would he get the stone to the top of the hill. Always – crash! – it would fall pack again. Pluckrose was haunted by the myth and then there was a preakdown and he proke up. In his death he concretized the myth which now opsessed him. Up he went with his great stone. And down it came and crushed him.’ Sir David Evans, delivering himself of this remarkable psychological analysis with great power and conviction, almost deliquesced in kindly feeling. He bore the late Pluckrose no grudge on account of the quaint absurdity of his proceedings.

‘But,’ said Appleby, ‘Sisyphus wasn’t crushed. He just had to go on trying.’

‘Nefer mind, nefer mind! It is near enough. Here always is the great stone hanging over him, threatening destruction. It iss in his dreams, consider you. Always the great weight, ready to come crashing down. And always–’

‘Do you mean he
arranged
it?’ Hobhouse was bewildered and shocked to the point of positive interruption. ‘Do you mean that he arranged for this meteorite to come tumbling down and then went and
sat
under it?’

‘Always Sisyphus is in his dreams. The great stone is there in his dreams, and in his waking dreams. It pecomes a muscular fact, pressing on him. He walks with his shoulders pent. Any mass – a puilding, a pus – terrifies him. The timing haunts him. He is opsessed.’ Sir David had quite ceased to be the rugged but benevolent philosopher and had become a frank little Welshman of the bardic and excitable sort. He was, in fact, well-launched upon a piece of bad poetry. ‘He is opsessed. And then, walking over the moors one day – he finds the meteorite. A thing, look you, sent from hefen! He hurries away. But he has met his myth and he returns, again and again, compelled. The thing has grown a fetish. He comes to know efery contour of it by heart. Now in his dreams there is a real stone: here a well-known jagged edge; there a smooth knob like a pig pludgeon. And at last he acts: he tries to move the stone! He pushes, heaves, levers. The stone stirs, moves, falls pack again into its place. Now he is caught. He has pecome Sisyphus indeed. Then, one dark night–’

‘Then, one dark night, he goes mad.’ Appleby interrupted civilly. ‘The theory, I take it, requires that?’

‘To be sure.’ The Vice-Chancellor nodded, slightly resentful of this short-cut to his climax. ‘It iss a thing to remember about professors. They go mad. And Pluckrose iss compelled to raise the stone – up, up as far as it will go. Into his car, into the hoist, up and up to the tower. He will palance it on the window-sill, where it can pe seen from the court. And next day he will pe able to point and say: “
Ha-ha!
”’

At this juncture Sir David threw back his beautiful mane of hair and laughed so loudly that Hobhouse jumped. The interview was becoming dream-shaped and monstrous, like something in Kafka. And the last sunbeam had disappeared, so that Hume and Hartley and Locke were growing shadowy and insubstantial.

‘“
Ha-ha!
” he will say; “see how high Sisyphus has raised his stone after all. None ever raised it higher, look you!”’ Sir David was now craning his neck up at his own ceiling, and involuntarily Appleby and Hobhouse found themselves doing the same. ‘It is perilously palanced; he will give it just one more push–’ Sir David thrust his arms outward and upward. ‘Just one more inch, when –
crash!
’ And Sir David’s arms fell dramatically to his sides.

They stared at him, astonished. ‘You mean’ – Appleby had to strive for words – ‘that he had an accident while contriving some insane piece of exhibitionism; that he came tumbling down with the meteorite and was crushed; that he didn’t commit suicide after all?’

Sir David Evans looked momentarily surprised, as if he had failed to notice the position at which he had arrived. But then he nodded emphatically. ‘Just so. It iss death by misadventure. And during a preakdown such as professors have.’ He paused and looked about the room, now filling with dusk. ‘Where are the reporters? They must be told what we have discovered, mark you. And who is the City coroner now? I must write to him. It will not do to have mistakes.’ He raised a finger – a finger which was now wholly minatory and threatening. ‘You will inquire. You will infestigate. But there will be no mistakes, look you, no mistakes!’

‘Damocles,’ said Appleby as they walked down the corridor.

‘Huh?’ Hobhouse at the moment appeared to find inarticulate sounds of most service to him.

‘If Sisyphus, why not Damocles? It’s true he had nothing to do with stones or meteorites. But they suspended a sword over his head by a single horse-hair and expected him to take his ease under it. I think somebody might bring Damocles into the story. The Damocles Complex.’

Hobhouse looked cautiously behind him, rather as if he expected Sir David Evans to be following them quietly on all fours. ‘I say, what did you make of all that? I suppose his mind broods on that sort of stuff – Sisyphus Complexes and the like.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t. That’s the odd thing. The sort of academic philosopher Evans is or was invariably thinks Freud and what-not a mass of nonsense. It was a sheer fantasy for the benefit of two ignorant policemen. He got quite worked up as he went along, I admit. But it began as a deliberate determination to put a false interpretation on the whole business. Why?’

‘He doesn’t want a scandal.’ Hobhouse shook his head sagely. ‘It’s to be hushed up as an accident. Rather the sort of thing you thought the Duke was after.’

‘But he wasn’t.’

‘Well, Evans is.’

‘I wonder.’

Hobhouse’s reply was again merely an indeterminate noise. They plodded down the long corridor in a dingy twilight which thickened as they moved. A symbol, Appleby thought, of the Pluckrose affair so far. The case was growing more confused without growing more substantial. The elements of it were evasive. As the Vice-Chancellor had justly said, it was mysterious – and yet the mystery was bodiless still, scarcely quick in the mind. It required a little contemplation and less talk. But the university was like a House of Fame or Temple of Rumour in some medieval poem. A Parliament of Prattlers, with the benevolently powerful Sir David Evans as Speaker… Appleby pulled up. ‘The body – will it have gone?’

‘They’re waiting for dark.’

‘Then I think we’ll go back.’

Students were hurrying past in mackintoshes and mufflers; electric lights, sparse, shadeless, and inimical, flicked on with an effect of impatient dismissal. The place was shutting down; sweetness and light were over for the day; the quest of knowledge was off until nine o’clock next morning. Outside the porter’s office women with pails and brooms were gathering; among them and through a faint aroma of dust and soap the porter, unbuttoned but magisterial, was moving with a time-sheet in his hand. Doors banged and the stream of students grew: spotty faces, eager faces, faces already dulled and defeated by the machine, faces full of temper and intelligence. Susan and Harry, Dick and Josephine going home to tea, to swotting over text-books, to a night at the pictures in families or together holding hands; Josephine, Dick, Harry, and Susan unaware of the awareness of the Duke of Nesfield, of the curious behaviour of their Vice-Chancellor, of Galileo’s work on the Law of Falling Bodies. Appleby and Hobhouse threaded their way through, seeking the fallen body of Pluckrose
fue
. So young and fair a congregation. What should they know of death? Beyond this door is the chill April evening air that fills the Wool Court. Open it.

The evening had suddenly clouded so that now it was almost dark. The fountain trickled, invisible – a melancholy sound, a tiny pointless dissipation, a futile ebbing away. Zealous police-craft had rigged up an affair of waterproof canvas over the body, and Pluckrose was a desert traveller defeated within crawling distance of water, an arctic explorer perishing to a drip of icicles. Bringing imagination to the detection of crime. Appleby stumbled, stooped, softly exclaimed, walked on. Hobhouse followed, dubious. From the corridor behind them came a final scamper of feet, a name shouted twice, an answering faint hail. The tower soared and impended; it was impressive at dusk.

‘I don’t know that we can do–’ Hobhouse stopped as Appleby flashed a torch. There was the striped duck and splintered wood of the deck-chair. There was the meteorite, with effort heaved aside. And here was the body. Pluckrose crushed. Like a little old shabby rebel angel, disparted from his brightness, when the faithful host had finished hurling heaven’s hills in battle and gone home to bed.

These persistent mythological associations… Appleby spoke soberly: ‘Could he and the meteorite really have come down together? It’s an idea, after all.’

‘The man was murdered.’ Hobhouse’s voice, harsh suddenly and not to be cheated, came out of the dark. ‘No one would deliberately make such a crazy end.’

‘But perhaps it is true that he was mad? We want a better means of eliminating Evans’ theory.’ Appleby paused and looked down at the body. Pluckrose, a small grey man with untidy eyebrows, looked at once very dead and very surprised. A trick of the last futile messages that had hurried, collided, jammed, run out of fuel, evaporated in a chaos of crushed nerves and glands. One’s own death is surely the most surprising thing in the world – but dead men commonly look vastly indifferent. Appleby snapped off the torch. ‘The Law of Falling Bodies,’ he said.