Gaudy Night Page 4

‘Oh, she’s Treasurer at Brontë College. Finance was really her line, you know. She had a real genius for figures.’

  ‘And what became of that woman – what’s her name? Peabody? Freebody? – you know – the one who always said solemnly that her great ambition in life was to become Bursar of Shrewsbury?’

  ‘Oh, my dear! She went absolutely potty on some new kind of religion and joined an extraordinary sect somewhere or other where they go about in loin-cloths and have agapemones of nuts and grape-fruit. That is, if you mean Brodribb?’

  ‘Brodribb – I knew it was something like Peabody. Fancy her of all people! So intensely practical and subfusc.’

  ‘Reaction. I expect. Repressed emotional instincts and all that. She was frightfully sentimental inside, you know.’

  ‘I know. She wormed round rather. Had a sort of a G.P. for Miss Shaw. Perhaps we were all rather inhibited in those days.’

  ‘Well, the present generation doesn’t suffer from that, I’m told. No inhibitions of any kind.’

  ‘Oh, come, Phœbe. We had a good bit of liberty. Not like before Women’s Degrees. We weren’t monastic.’

  ‘No, but we were born long enough before the War to feel a few restrictions. We inherited some sense of responsibility. And Brodribb came from a fearfully rigid sort of household – Positivists, or Unitarians or Presbyterians or something. The present lot are the real war-time generation, you know.’

  ‘So they are. Well, I don’t know that I’ve any right to throw stones at Brodribb.’

  ‘Oh, my dear! That’s entirely different. One thing’s natural; the others – I don’t know, but it seems to me like complete degeneration of the grey matter. She even wrote a book.’

  ‘About agapemones?’

  ‘Yes. And the Higher Wisdom. And Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax.’

  ‘Oh, lord! Yes – that’s pretty awful, isn’t it? I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar.’

  ‘It’s a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I’m afraid. But which of them causes the other, or whether they’re both symptoms of something else, I don’t know. What with Trimmer’s mental healing, and Henderson going nudist—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Fact. There she is, at the next table. That’s why she’s so brown.’

  ‘And her frock so badly cut. If you can’t be naked, be as ill-dressed as possible, I suppose.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder whether a little normal, hearty wickedness wouldn’t be good for a great many of us.’

  At this moment, Miss Mollison, from three places away on the same side of the table, leaned across her neighbours and screamed something.

  ‘What?’ screamed Phœbe.

  Miss Mollison leaned still farther, compressing Dorothy Collins, Betty Armstrong and Mary Stokes almost to suffocation.

  ‘I hope Miss Vane isn’t telling you anything too blood-curdling!’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet loudly. ‘Mrs. Bancroft is curdling my blood.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Telling me the life-histories of our year.’

  ‘Oh!’ screamed Miss Mollison, disconcerted. The service of a dish of lamb and green peas intervened and broke up the formation, and her neighbours breathed again. But to Harriet’s intense horror, the question and reply seemed to have opened up an avenue for a dark, determined woman with large spectacles and rigidly groomed hair, who sat opposite to her, and who now bent over and said, in piercingly American accents:

  ‘I don’t suppose you remember me, Miss Vane? I was only in college for one term, but I would know you anywhere. I’m always recommending your books to my friends in America who are keen to study the British detective story, because I think they are just terribly good.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ said Harriet, feebly.

  ‘And we have a very dear mutooal acquaintance,’ went on the spectacled lady.

  Heavens! thought Harriet. What social nuisance is going to be dragged out of obscurity now? And who is this frightful female?

  ‘Really?’ she said, aloud, trying to gain time while she ransacked her memory. ‘Who’s that Miss—’

  ‘Schuster-Slatt,’ prompted Phœbe’s voice in her ear.

  ‘Schuster-Slatt.’ (Of course. Arrived in Harriet’s first summer term. Supposed to read Law. Left after one term because the conditions at Shrewsbury were too restrictive of liberty. Joined the Home Students, and passed mercifully out of one’s life.)

  ‘How clever of you to know my name. Yes, well, you’ll be surprised when I tell you, but in my work I see so many of your British aristocracy.’

  Hell! thought Harriet. Miss Schuster-Slatt’s strident tones dominated even the surrounding uproar.

  ‘Your marvellous Lord Peter. He was so kind to me, and terribly interested when I told him I was at college with you. I think he’s just a lovely man.’

  ‘He has very nice manners,’ said Harriet. But the implication was too subtle. Miss Schuster-Slatt proceeded:

  ‘He was just wonderful to me when I told him all about my work.’ (I wonder what it is, thought Harriet.) ‘And of course I wanted to hear all about his thrilling detective cases, but he was much too modest to say anything. Do tell me, Miss Vane, does he wear that cute little eyeglass because of his sight, or is it part of an old English tradition?’

  ‘I have never had the impertinence to ask him,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Now isn’t that just like your British reticence!’ exclaimed Miss Schuster-Slatt; when Mary Stokes struck in with:

  ‘Oh, Harriet, do tell us about Lord Peter! He must be perfectly charming, if he’s at all like his photographs. Of course you know him very well, don’t you?’

  ‘I worked with him over one case.’

  ‘It must have been frightfully exciting. Do tell us what he’s like.’

  ‘Seeing,’ said Harriet, in angry and desperate tones, ‘seeing that he got me out of prison and probably saved me from being hanged, I am naturally bound to find him delightful.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Mary Stokes, flushing scarlet, and shrinking from Harriet’s furious eyes as if she had received a blow. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t think—’

  ‘Well, there,’ said Miss Schuster-Slatt, ‘I’m afraid I’ve been very, very tactless. My mother always said to me, “Sadie, you’re the most tactless girl I ever had the bad luck to meet.” But I am enthusiastic. I get carried away. I don’t stop to think. I’m just the same with my work. I don’t consider my own feelings; I don’t consider other people’s feelings. I just wade right in and ask for what I want, and I mostly get it.’

  After which, Miss Schuster-Slatt, with more sensitive feeling than one might have credited her with, carried the conversation triumphantly away to the subject of her own work, which turned out to have something to do with the sterilisation of the unfit, and the encouragement of matrimony among the intelligentsia.

  Harriet, meanwhile, sat miserably wondering what devil possessed her to display every disagreeable trait in her character at the mere mention of Wimsey’s name. He had done her no harm; he had only saved her from a shameful death and offered her an unswerving personal devotion; and for neither benefit had he ever claimed or expected her gratitude. It was not pretty that her only return should be a snarl of resentment. The fact is, thought Harriet, I have got a bad inferiority complex; unfortunately, the fact that I know it doesn’t help me to get rid of it. I could have liked him so much if I could have met him on an equal footing. . . .

  The Warden rapped upon the table. A welcome silence fell upon the Hall. A speaker was rising to propose the toast of the University.

  She spoke gravely, unrolling the great scroll of history, pleading for the Humanities, proclaiming the Pax Academica to a world terrified with unrest. ‘Oxford has been called the home of lost causes: if the love of learning for its own sake is a lost cause everywhere else in the world, let us see to it that here, at least, it finds its abiding home.’ Magnificent thought Harriet, but it is n
ot war. And then, her imagination weaving in and out of the spoken words, she saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd collection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain – defenders in the central keep of Man-soul, their personal differences forgotten in face of a common foe. To be true to one’s calling, whatever follies one might commit in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace. How could one feel fettered, being the freeman of so great a city, or humiliated, where all enjoyed equal citizenship? The eminent professor who rose to reply spoke of a diversity of gifts but the same spirit. The note, once struck, vibrated on the lips of every speaker and the ear of every hearer. Nor was the Warden’s review of the Academic year out of key with it: appointments, degrees, fellowships – all these were the domestic details of the discipline without which the community could not function. In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realise that one was a citizen of no mean city. It might be an old and an old-fashioned city, with inconvenient buildings and narrow streets where the passers-by squabbled foolishly about the right of way; but her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.

  Leaving the Hall in this rather exalted mood, Harriet found herself invited to take coffee with the Dean.

  She accepted, after ascertaining that Mary Stokes was bound for bed by doctor’s orders and had therefore no claim upon her company. She therefore made her way along to the New Quad and tapped upon Miss Martin’s door. Gathered together in the sitting-room she found Betty Armstrong, Phœbe Tucker, Miss de Vine, Miss Stevens the Bursar, another of the Fellows who answered to the name of Barton, and a couple of old students a few years senior to herself. The Dean, who was dispensing coffee, hailed her arrival cheerfully.

  ‘Come along! Here’s coffee that is coffee. Can nothing be done about the Hall coffee, Steve?’

  ‘Yes, if you’ll start a coffee-fund,’ replied the Bursar. ‘I don’t know if you’ve ever worked out the finance of really first-class coffee for two hundred people.’

  ‘I know,’ said the Dean. ‘It’s so trying to be grovellingly poor. I think I’d better mention it to Flackett. You remember Flackett, the rich one, who was always rather odd. She was in your year, Miss Fortescue. She has been following me round, trying to present the College with a tankful of tropical fish. Said she thought it would brighten the Science Lecture-Room.’

  ‘If it would brighten some of the lectures,’ said Miss Fortescue, ‘it might be a good thing. Miss Hillyard’s Constitutional Developments were a bit gruesome in our day.’

  ‘Oh, my dear! Those Constitutional Developments! Dear me, yes – they still go on. She starts every year with about thirty students and ends up with two or three earnest black men, who take every word down solemnly in note-books. Exactly the same lectures; I don’t think even fish would help them. Anyway, I said, “It’s very good of you, Miss Flackett, but I really don’t think they’d thrive. It would mean putting in a special heating system, wouldn’t it? And it would make extra work for the gardeners.” She looked so disappointed, poor thing; so I said she’d better consult the Bursar.’

  ‘All right,’ said Miss Stevens, ‘I’ll tackle Flackett, and suggest the endowment of a coffee-fund.’

  ‘Much more useful than tropical fish,’ agreed the Dean. ‘I’m afraid we do turn out some oddities. And yet, you know, I believe Flackett is extremely sound upon the life-history of the liver-fluke. Would anybody like a Benedictine with the coffee? Come along, Miss Vane. Alcohol loosens the tongue, and we want to hear all about your latest mysteries.’

  Harriet obliged with a brief résumé of the plot she was working on.

  ‘Forgive me, Miss Vane, for speaking frankly,’ said Miss Barton, leaning earnestly forward, ‘but after your own terrible experience, I wonder that you care about writing that kind of book.’

  The Dean looked a little shocked.

  ‘Well,’ said Harriet, ‘for one thing, writers can’t pick and choose until they’ve made money. If you’ve made your name for one kind of book and then switch over to another, your sales are apt to go down, and that’s the brutal fact.’ She paused. ‘I know what you’re thinking – that anybody with proper sensitive feeling would rather scrub floors for a living. But I should scrub floors very badly, and I write detective stories rather well. I don’t see why proper feeling should prevent me from doing my proper job.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Miss de Vine.

  ‘But surely,’ persisted Miss Barton, ‘you must feel that terrible crimes and the sufferings of innocent suspects ought to be taken seriously, and not just made into an intellectual game.’

  ‘I do take them seriously in real life. Everybody must. But should you say that anybody who had tragic experience of sex, for example, should never write an artificial drawing-room comedy?’

  ‘But isn’t that different?’ said Miss Barton, frowning. ‘There is a lighter side to love; whereas there’s no lighter side to murder.’

  ‘Perhaps not, in the sense of a comic side. But there is a purely intellectual side to the detection.’

  ‘You did investigate a case in real life, didn’t you? How did you feel about that?’

  ‘It was very interesting.’

  ‘And, in the light of what you knew, did you like the idea of sending a man to the dock and the gallows?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s quite fair to ask Miss Vane that,’ said the Dean. ‘Miss Barton,’ she added, a little apologetically, to Harriet, ‘is interested in the sociological aspects of crime, and very eager for the reform of the penal code.’

  ‘I am,’ said Miss Barton. ‘Our attitude to the whole thing seems to me completely savage and brutal. I have met so many murderers when visiting prisons; and most of them are very harmless, stupid people, poor creatures, when they aren’t definitely pathological.’

  ‘You might feel differently about it,’ said Harriet, ‘if you’d happened to meet the victims. They are often still stupider and more harmless than the murderers. But they don’t make a public appearance. Even the jury needn’t see the body unless they like. But I saw the body in that Wilvercombe case – I found it; and it was beastlier than anything you can imagine.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you must be right about that,’ said the Dean. ‘The description in the papers was more than enough for me.’

  ‘And,’ went on Harriet to Miss Barton, ‘you don’t see the murderers actively engaged in murdering. You see them when they’re caught and caged and looking pathetic. But the Wilvercombe man was a cunning, avaricious brute, and quite ready to go on and do it again, if he hadn’t been stopped.’

  ‘That’s an unanswerable argument for stopping them,’ said Phœbe, ‘whatever the law does with them afterwards.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Miss Stevens, ‘isn’t it a little cold-blooded to catch murderers as an intellectual exercise? It’s all right for the police – it’s their duty.’

  ‘In law,’ said Harriet, ‘it is every citizen’s obligation – though most people don’t know that.’

  ‘And this man Wimsey,’ said Miss Barton, ‘who seems to make a hobby of it – does he look upon it as a duty or as an intellectual exercise?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Harriet, ‘but, you know, it was just as well for me that he did make a hobby of it. The police were wrong in my case – I don’t blame them, but they were – so I’m glad it wasn’t left to them.’

  ‘I call that a perfectly noble speech,’ said the Dean. ‘If anyone had accused me of doing something I hadn’t done, I should be foaming at the mouth.’

  ‘But it’s my job to weigh evidence,’ said Harriet, ‘and I can’t help seeing the strength of the police case. It’s a matter of a + b, you know. Only there happened to be an unknown factor.’

  ‘Like that thing that keeps cropping up in the new kind of physics,’ said the Dean. ‘Planck’s constant, or whatever they cal
l it.’

  ‘Surely,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘whatever comes of it, and whatever anybody feels about it, the important thing is to get at the facts.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet; ‘that’s the point. I mean, the fact is that I didn’t do the murder, so that my feelings are quite irrelevant. If I had done it, I should probably have thought myself thoroughly justified, and been deeply indignant about the way I was treated. As it is, I still think that to inflict the agonies of poisoning on anybody is unpardonable. The particular trouble I got let in for was as much sheer accident as falling off a roof.’

  ‘I really ought to apologise for having brought the subject up at all,’ said Miss Barton. ‘It’s very good of you to discuss it so frankly.’

  ‘I don’t mind – now. It would have been different just after it happened. But that awful business down at Wilvercombe shed rather a new light on the matter – showed it up from the other side.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said the Dean, ‘Lord Peter – what is he like?’

  ‘To look at, do you mean? or to work with?’

  ‘Well, one knows more or less what he looks like. Fair and Mayfair. I meant, to talk to.’

  ‘Rather amusing. He does a good deal of the talking himself, if it comes to that.’

  ‘A little merry and bright, when you’re feeling off-colour?’

  ‘I met him once at a dog-show,’ put in Miss Armstrong unexpectedly. ‘He was giving a perfect imitation of the silly-ass-about-town.’

  ‘Then he was either frightfully bored or detecting something,’ said Harriet, laughing. ‘I know that frivolous mood, and it’s mostly camouflage – but one doesn’t always know for what.’

  ‘There must be something behind it,’ said Miss Barton, ‘because he’s obviously very intelligent. But is it only intelligence, or is there any genuine feeling?’

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Harriet, gazing thoughtfully into her empty coffee-cup, ‘accuse him of any lack of feeling. I’ve seen him very much upset, for instance, over convicting a sympathetic criminal. But he is really rather reserved, in spite of that deceptive manner.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s shy,’ suggested Phœbe Tucker, kindly. ‘People who talk a lot often are. I think they are very much to be pitied.’