Gaudy Night (36 page)

“Well, said the Dean in her ear, “we
are
having a night!”

“Who’s with Miss Newland?”

“Miss Edwards. I’ve warned her not to let the child say anything if she can help it. And I’ve muzzled that nice policeman. Accident, my dear, accident. It’s quite all right. We’ve taken your cue. You kept your head wonderfully. Miss Stevens lost hers a bit, though. Started to cry and talk about suicide. I soon shut
her
up.”

“Damn!” said Harriet. “What did she want to do that for?”

“What indeed? You’d think she
wanted
to make a scandal.”

“Somebody obviously does.”

“You don’t think Miss Stevens—? She did her bit with the rescue-work, you know.”

“Yes, I know. All right, Dean. I don’t think. I won’t try to think. I thought she and Miss Edwards would have that boat over between them.”

“Don’t let’s discuss it now. Thank Heaven the worst hasn’t happened. The girl’s safe and that’s all that matters. What we’ve got to do now is to put the best face on it.”

It was nearly five in the morning when the rescuers, weary and bandaged, sat once again in the Warden’s house. Everybody was praising everybody else.

“It was so clever of Miss Vane,” said the Dean, “to realise that the wretched child would go up to that particular place. What a mercy that we arrived just when we did.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” said Harriet. “We may have done more harm than good. Do you realise that it was only when she saw us coming that she made up her mind to do it?”

“Do you mean she mightn’t have done it at all if we hadn’t gone after her?”

“Difficult to say. She was putting it off, I think. What really sent her in was that shout from the other boat. Who shouted, by the way?”

“I shouted,” said Miss Stevens. “I looked over my shoulder and saw her. So I shouted.”

“What was she doing when you saw her?”

“Standing up in the canoe.”

“No she wasn’t,” said Miss Edwards. “I looked round when you shouted, and she was just getting to her feet then.”

“You’re quite mistaken,” contradicted Miss Stevens. “I say she was landing up when I saw her, and I shouted to stop her. You couldn’t have seen past me.”

“I saw perfectly plainly,” said Miss Edwards. “Miss Vane is quite right. It was when she heard the shout that she got up.”

“I know what I saw,” said the Bursar, obstinately.

“It’s a pity you didn’t take somebody to cox,” said the Dean. “Nobody can see clearly what’s going on behind her back.”

“It is hardly necessary to argue about it,” said the Warden, a little sharply “The tragedy has been prevented, and that is all that matters. I am exceedingly grateful to everybody.”

“I resent the suggestion,” said Miss Stevens, “that I drove the unfortunate girl to destroy herself. And as for saying that we ought not to have gone in search of her—”

“I never said that,” said Harriet, wearily. “I only said that
if
we had not gone it
might
not have happened. But of course we had to go.”

“What does Newland say herself?” demanded the Dean.

“Says, why couldn’t we leave her alone?” replied Miss Edwards. “I told her not to be an inconsiderate little ass.”

“Poor child!” said Miss Shaw.

“If I were you,” said Miss Edwards, “I shouldn’t be too soft with these people. Bracing up is what does them good. You let them talk too much about themselves—”

“But she didn’t talk to me,” said Miss Shaw. “I tried very hard to make her.”

“They’d talk much more if you’d only leave them alone.”

“I think we’d better all go to bed,” said Miss Martin.

“What a night,” said Harriet, as she rolled, dog-weary, between the sheets. “What a gaudy night!” Her memory, thrashing round her brain like a cat in a sack, brought up the images of Mr. Pomfret and the pro-Proctor. They seemed to belong to another existence.

My sad hurt it shall releeve,
When my thoughts I shall disclose,
For thou canst not chuse but greeve,
When I shall recount my woes:
There is nothing to that friend,
To whose close uncranied breast,
We our secret thoughts may send,
And there safely let it rest;
And thy faithfull counsell may
My distressed case assist,
Sad affliction else may sway
Me a woman as it list.

—MICHAEL DRAYTON

“You must see,” said Harriet, “that it’s impossible to go on like this. You’ve got to call in expert help and risk the consequences. Any scandal is better than a suicide and an inquest.”

“I think you are right,” said the Warden.

Only Miss Lydgate, the Dean and Miss Edwards sat with Dr. Baring in the Warden’s sitting-room. The brave pretence at confidence had been given up. In the Senior Common Room, members averted their eyes from one another and set a guard upon their lips. They were no longer angry and suspicious. They were afraid.

“The girl’s parents are not likely to keep quiet about it,” went on Harriet, remorselessly. “If she had succeeded in drowning herself, we should have the police and the reporters in at this moment. Next time, the attempt may come off.”

“Next time—” began Miss Lydgate.

“There will be a next time,” said Harriet. “And it may not be suicide; it may be open murder. I told you at the beginning that I did not think the measures adequate. I now say that I refuse to take any further share in the responsibility. I have tried, and I have failed, every time.”

“What could the police do?” asked Miss Edwards. “We did have them in once-about those thefts, you remember, Warden. They made a great deal of fuss and arrested the wrong person. It was a very troublesome business.”

“I don’t think the police are the right people at all,” said the Dean. “Your idea was a firm of private detectives, wasn’t it?”

She turned to Harriet.

“Yes; but if anybody else has anything better to suggest—”

Nobody had any very helpful suggestion. The discussion went on. In the end:

“Miss Vane,” said the Warden, “I think your idea is the best. Will you get into communication with these people?”

“Very well Warden. I will ring up the head of the firm.”

“You will use discretion.”

“Of course,” said Harriet. She was becoming a little impatient; the time for discretion seemed to her to be past. “If we call people in, we shall have to give them a free hand, you know,” she added.

This was obviously an unpalatable reminder, though its force had to be admitted. Harriet could foresee endless hampering restrictions placed upon the investigators, and felt the difficulties that went with a divided authority. The police were answerable to nobody but themselves, but paid private detectives were compelled to do more or less as they were told. She looked at Dr. Baring, and wondered whether Miss Climpson or any other underlings was capable of asserting herself against that formidable personality.

“And now,” said the Dean, as she and Harriet crossed the quad together, “I’ve got to go and tackle the Newlands. I’m not looking forward to it. They’ll be terribly upset, poor things. He’s a very minor civil servant, and their daughter’s career means everything to them. Quite apart from the personal side of it, it’ll be a frightful blow if this ruins her Schools. They’re very poor and hard-working, and so proud of her—”

Miss Martin made a little despairing gesture, squared her shoulders and went to face her task.

Miss Hillyard, in her gown, was making for one of the lecture-rooms. She looked hollow-eyed and desperate, Harriet thought. Her glance shot from side to side, as though she were pursued.

From an open window on the-ground floor of Queen Elizabeth came the voice of Miss Shaw, giving a coaching:

“You might have quoted also from the essay
De la Vanité.
You remember the passage.
Je me suis couché mille fois chez moi, imaginant qu’on me trahirait et assomeroit cette nuit-là
—his morbid preoccupation with the idea of death and his—”

The academic machine was grinding on. At the entrance leading to their offices, the Bursar and Treasurer stood together, their hands full of papers. They seemed to be discussing some question of finance. Their glances were secretive and mutually hostile; they looked like sullen dogs, chained together and forced into a grumbling amity by the reprimand of their master. Miss Pyke came down her staircase and passed them without a word. Still without a word she passed Harriet and turned along the plinth. Her head was held high and defiantly. Harriet went in and along to Miss Lydgate’s room Miss Lydgate, as she knew, was lecturing; she could use her telephone undisturbed. She put her call through to London.

A quarter of an hour later, she hung up the receiver with a sinking heart. Why she should be surprised to learn that Miss Climpson was absent from Town “engaged on a case” she could not have said. It seemed vaguely monstrous that this should be so; but it was so. Would she like to speak to anyone else? Harriet had asked for Miss Murchison, the only other member of the firm who was personally known to her. Miss Murchison had left a year ago to be married. Harriet felt this as almost a personal affront. She did not like to pour all the details of the Shrewsbury affair into the ears of a complete stranger. She said she would write, rang off, and sat feeling curiously helpless.

It is all very well to take a firm line about things, and rush to the telephone, determined to “do something” without delay; other people do not sit with folded hands waiting upon the convenience even of our highly interesting and influential selves. Harriet laughed at her own annoyance. She had made up her mind to instant action, and now she was furious because a business firm had affairs of its own to attend to. Yet to wait any longer was impossible. The situation was becoming a nightmare. Faces had grown sly and distorted overnight; eyes fearful; the most innocent words charged with suspicion. At any moment some new terror might break bounds and carry all before it. She was suddenly afraid of all these women:
horti conclusi, fontes signati,
they were walled in, sealed down, by walls and seals that shut her out. Sitting there in the clear light of morning, staring at the prosaic telephone on the desk, she knew the ancient dread of Artemis, moon-goddess, virgin-huntress, whose arrows are plagues and death.

It struck her then as a fantastic idea that she should fly for help to another brood of spinsters; even if she succeeded in getting hold of Miss Climpson, how was she to explain matters to that desiccated and elderly virgin? The very sight of some of the poison letters would probably make her sick, and the whole trouble would be beyond her comprehension. In this, Harriet did the lady less than justice; Miss Climpson had seen many strange things in sixty-odd years of boarding-house life, and was as free from repressions and complexes as any human being could very well be. But, in fact, the atmosphere of Shrewsbury was getting on Harriet’s nerves. What she wanted was someone with whom she did not need to mince her words, somebody who would neither show nor feel surprise at any manifestation of human eccentricity, somebody whom she knew and could trust.

There were plenty of people in London—both men and women—to whom the discussion of sexual abnormalities was a commonplace; but most of them were very little to be trusted. They cultivated normality till it stood out of them all over in knobs, like the muscles upon professional strong men, and scarcely looked normal at all. And they talked interminably and loudly. From their bouncing mental health ordinary ill-balanced mortals shrank in alarm. She ran over various names in her mind, but found none that would do.

“The fact is,” said Harriet to the telephone, “I don’t know whether I want a doctor or a detective. But I’ve got to have somebody.”

She wished—and not for the first time—that she could have got hold of Peter Wimsey. Not, of course, that this was the kind of case he could very suitably have investigated himself; but he would probably have known the right person. He at least would be surprised at nothing, shocked at nothing; he had far too wide an experience of the world. And he was completely to be trusted. But he was not there. He had vanished from view at the very moment when the Shrewsbury affair had first come to her notice; it seemed almost pointed. Like Lord Saint-George, she began to feel that Peter really had no right to disappear just when he was wanted. The fact that she had spent five years angrily refusing to contract further obligations towards Peter Wimsey had no weight with her now; she would readily have contracted obligations towards the devil himself, if she could have been sure that the prince of darkness was a gentleman of Peter’s kidney. But Peter was as far beyond reach as Lucifer.

Was he? There was the telephone at her elbow. She could speak to Rome as easily as to London—though at a trifle more expense. It was probably only the financial modesty of the person whose income is all earned by work that made it seem more momentous to ring somebody up across a continent than across a city. At any rate, it could do no harm to fetch Peter’s last letter and find the telephone number of his hotel. She went out quickly, and encountered Miss de Vine.

“Oh!” said the Fellow. “I was coming to look for you. I thought I had better show you this.”

She held out a piece of paper; the sight of the printed letters was odiously familiar:

YOUR TURN’S COMING

“It’s nice to be warned,” said Harriet, with a lightness she did not feel. “Where? when? and how?”

“It fell out of one of the books I’m using,” said Miss de Vine, blinking behind her glasses at the questions, “just now.”

“When did you use the book last?”

“That,” said Miss de Vine, blinking again, “is the odd thing about it. I didn’t. Miss Hillyard borrowed it last night, and Mrs. Goodwin brought it back to me this morning.”

Considering the things Miss Hillyard had said about Mrs. Goodwin, Harriet was faintly surprised that she should have chosen her to run her errands. But in certain circumstances the choice might, of course, be a wise one.

“Are you sure the paper wasn’t there yesterday?”