Gaudy Night (39 page)

“I didn’t know this, Peter. I’ve just discovered that I’ve been too selfish even to try and know anything. But it isn’t like you to sound so dreadfully discouraged. You look—”

“Spare me, Harriet. Don’t say I’m getting to look my age. That won’t do. An eternal childishness is my one diplomatic asset.”

“You only look as though you hadn’t slept for weeks.”

“I’m not sure that I have, now you mention it. I thought—at one point we all thought—something might be going to happen. All the old, filthy uproar. I got as far as saying to Bunter one night: ‘It’s coming; it’s here; back to the Army again, sergeant.’... But in the end, you know, it made a noise like a hoop and rolled away—for the moment.”

“Thanks to the comic cross-talk?”

“Oh, no. Great Scott, no. Mine was a very trivial affair. Slight frontier skirmish. Don’t get it into your head that I’m the man who saved the Empire.”

“Then who did?”

“Dunno. Nobody knows. Nobody ever does know, for certain. The old bus wobbles one way, and you think, ‘That’s done it!’ and then it wobbles the other way and you think, ‘All serene’; and then, one day, it wobbles over too far and you’re in the soup and can’t remember how you got there.”

“That’s what we’re all afraid of, inside ourselves.”

“Yes. It terrifies me. It’s a relief to get back and find you here—and all this going on as it used to do. Here’s where the real things are done, Harriet—if only those bunglers out there will keep quiet and let it go on. God! how I loathe haste and violence and all that ghastly, slippery cleverness. Unsound, unscholarly, insincere—nothing but propaganda and special pleading and ‘what do we get out of this?’ No time, no peace, no silence; nothing but conferences and newspapers and public speeches till one can’t hear ones self think.... If only one could root one’s self in here among the grass and stones and do something worth doing, even if it was only restoring a lost breathing for the love of the job and nothing else.”

She was astonished to hear him speak with so much passion.

“But, Peter, you’re saying exactly what I’ve been feeling all this time. But can it be done?”

“No; it can’t be done. Though there are moments when one comes back and thinks it might.”

“‘Ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.’”

“Yes,” said he bitterly, “and it goes on: ‘But they said: we will not walk therein.’ Rest? I had forgotten there was such a word.”

“So had I.”

They sat silent for a few minutes. Wimsey offered her his cigarette-case and struck a match for them both.

“Peter, it’s queer we should sit here and talk like this. Do you remember that horrible time at Wilvercombe when we could find nothing to throw at one another but cheap wit and spiteful remarks? At least, I was spiteful: you never were.”

“It was the watering-place atmosphere,” said Wimsey. “One is always vulgar at watering-places. It is the one haunting terror of my life that some day some perfectly irresistible peach of a problem will blossom out at Brighton or Blackpool, and that I shall be weak-minded enough to go and meddle with it.” The laughter had come back to his voice and his eyes were tranquil. “Thank Heaven, it’s extremely difficult to be cheap in Oxford-after one’s second year, at any rate. Which reminds me that I haven’t yet properly thanked you for being so kind to Saint-George.”

“Have you seen him yet?”

“No; I have threatened to descend on him on Monday, and show him a damned disinheriting countenance. He has gone off somewhere today with a party of friends. I know what that means. He’s getting thoroughly spoilt.”

“Well, Peter, you can’t wonder. He’s terribly good-looking.”

“He’s a precocious little monkey,” said his uncle, without enthusiasm. “Though I can’t blame him for that; it runs in the blood. But it’s characteristic of his impudence that he should have gate-crashed your acquaintance, after you had firmly refused to meet any of my people.”

“I found him for myself, you see, Peter.”

“Literally, or so he says. I gather that he nearly knocked you down, damaged your property and generally made a nuisance of himself, and that you instantly concluded he must be some relation to me.”

“That’s—If he said that, you know better than to believe it. But I couldn’t very well miss the likeness.”

“Yet people have been known to speak slightingly of my personal appearance! I congratulate you on a perception worthy of Sherlock Holmes at his keenest.”

It amused and touched her to discover this childish streak of vanity in him. But she knew that he would see through her at once if she tried to pander to it by saying anything more flattering than the truth.

“I recognised the voice before I looked at him at all. And he has your hands; I shouldn’t think anybody has ever spoken slightingly about those.”

“Confound it, Harriet! My one really shameful weakness. My most jealously guarded bit of personal conceit. Dragged into the light of day and remorselessly exposed. I am idiotically proud of having inherited the Wimsey hands. My brother and my sister both missed them, but they go back in the family portraits for three hundred years.” His face clouded for a moment. “I wonder all the strength hasn’t been bred out of them by this time; our sands are running down fast. Harriet, will you come with me one day to Denver and see the place before the new civilisation grows in on it like the jungle? I don’t want to go all Galsworthy about it. They’ll tell you I don’t care a damn for the whole outfit, and I don’t know that I do. But I was born there, and I shall be sorry if I live to see the land sold for ribbon-building and the Hall turned over to a Hollywood Colour-Talkie king.”

“Lord Saint-George wouldn’t do that, would he?”

“I don’t know, Harriet. Why shouldn’t he? Our kind of show is dead and done for. What the hell good does it do anybody these days? But he may care more than he thinks he does.”

“You care, don’t you, Peter?”

“It’s very easy for me to care, because I’m not called upon to do a hand’s turn in the matter. I am the usual middle-aged prig, with an admirable talent for binding heavy burdens and laying them on other men’s shoulders. Don’t think I envy my nephew his job. I’d rather live at peace and lay my bones in the earth. Only I have a cursed hankering after certain musty old values, which I’m coward enough to deny, like my namesake of the Gospels. I never go home if I can help it, and I avoid coming here; the cocks crow too long and too loudly.”

“Peter, I’d no idea you felt like that. I’d like to see your home.”

“Would you? Then we’ll go, one of these days. I won’t inflict the family on you, though I think you’d like my mother. But we’ll choose a time when they’re all away—except a dozen or so harmless dukes in the family vault. All embalmed, poor devils, to linger on dustily to the Day of Judgment. Typical isn’t it, of a family tradition that it won’t even let you rot.”

Harriet could find nothing to say to him. She had fought him for five years and found out nothing but his strength; now, within half an hour, he had exposed all his weaknesses, one after the other. And she could not in honesty say: “Why didn’t you tell me before?” because she knew perfectly well what the answer ought to be. Fortunately, he did not seem to expect any comment

“Great Scott!” was his next remark, “look at the time! You’ve let me maunder on, and we’ve never said a word about your problem.”

“I’ve been only too thankful to forget it for a bit.”

“I dare say you have,” he said, looking thoughtfully at her. “Listen Harriet, couldn’t we make today a holiday? You’ve had enough of this blasted business. Come and be bothered with me for a change. It’ll be a relief for you—like getting a nice go of rheumatism in exchange for toothache. Equally damnable, but different. I’ve got to go to this lunch-party, but it needn’t take too long. How about a punt at 3: o’clock from Magdalen Bridge?”

“There’ll be an awful crowd on the river. The Cherwell’s not what it was, especially on a Sunday. More like Bank Holiday at Margate, with gramophones and bathing-dresses and everybody barging into everybody else.”

“Never mind. Let’s go and do our bit of barging along with the happy populace. Unless you’d rather come in the car and fly with me to the world’s end. But the roads will be worse than the river. And if we find a quiet spot, either I shall make a pest of myself or else we shall start on the infernal problem. There’s safety in publicity.”

“Very well, Peter. We’ll do exactly as you like.”

“Then we’ll say Magdalen Bridge at three. Trust me, I’m not shirking the problem. If we can’t see our way through it together, we’ll find somebody who can. There are no seas innavigable nor lands unhabitable.”

He got up and held out a hand.

“Peter, what a rock you are! The shadow of a great rock in a weary land. My dear, what are you thinking about? One doesn’t shake hands at Oxford.”

“The elephant never forgets.” He kissed her fingers gently. “I have brought my formal cosmopolitan courtesy with me. My God, talk of courtesy—I’m going to be late for lunch.” He snatched up cap and gown and was gone before she had time even to think of seeing him down to the Lodge.

“But it’s just as well,” she thought, watching him run across the quad like an undergraduate, “he hasn’t too much time as it is. Bless the man, if he hasn’t taken my gown instead of his own! Oh, well, it doesn’t matter. We’re much of a height and mine’s pretty wide on the shoulders, so it’s exactly the same thing.”

And then it struck her as strange that it should be the same thing.

Harriet smiled to herself as she went to change for the river. If Peter was keen on keeping up decayed traditions he would find plenty of opportunity by keeping to a pre-War standard of watermanship, manners and dress. Especially dress. A pair of grubby shorts or a faded regulation suit rolled negligently about the waist was the modern version of Cherwell fashions for men; for women, a sun-bathing costume with (for the tender-footed) a pair of gaily-coloured beach-sandals. Harriet shook her head at the sunshine, which was now hot as well as bright. Even for the sake of startling Peter, she was not prepared to offer a display of grilled back and mosquito-bitten legs. She would go seemly and comfortable. The Dean, meeting her under the beeches, gazed with exaggerated surprise at her dazzling display of white linen and pipe-clay.

“If this were twenty years ago I should say you were going on the river.”

“I am. Hand in hand with a statelier past.”

The Dean groaned gently. “I’m afraid you are making yourself conspicuous. That kind of thing is not done. You are clothed, clean and cool. On a Sunday afternoon, too. I am ashamed of you. I hope, at least, the parcel under your arm contains the records of crooners.”

“Not even that,” said Harriet.

Actually, it contained her diary of the Shrewsbury scandal. She had thought that the best thing would be to let Peter take it away and study it for himself. Then he could decide what was best to be done about it.

She was punctual at the bridge, but found Peter there before her. His obsolete politeness in this respect was emphasised by the presence of Miss Flaxman and another Shrewsburian, who were sitting on the raft, apparently waiting for their escort, and looking rather hot and irritable. It amused Harriet to let Wimsey take charge of her parcel, hand her ceremoniously into the punt and arrange the cushions for her, and to know, by his ironical eyes, that he perfectly well understood the reason of her unusual meekness. “Is it your pleasure to go up or down?”

“Well, going up there’s more riot but a better bottom; going down you’re all right as far as the fork, and then you choose between thick mud and the Corporation dump.”

“It appears to be altogether a choice of evils. But you have only to command. My ear is open like a greedy shark to catch the tunings of a voice divine.”

“Great heavens! Where did you find that?”

“That, though you might not believe it, is the crashing conclusion of a sonnet by Keats. True, it is a youthful effort; but there are some things that even youth does not excuse.”

“Let us go down-stream. I need solitude to recover from the shock.” He turned the punt out into the stream and shot the bridge accurately. Then:

“Admirable woman! You have allowed me to spread the tail of vanity before that pair of deserted Ariadnes. Would you now prefer to be independent and take the pole? I admit it is better fun to punt than to be punted, and that a desire to have all the fun is nine-tenths of the law of chivalry.”

“Is it possible that you have a just and generous mind? I will not be outdone in generosity. I will sit like a perfect lady and watch you do the work. It’s nice to see things well done.”

“If you say that, I shall get conceited and do something silly.”

He was, in fact, a pretty punter to watch, easy in action and quite remarkably quick. They picked their way at surprising speed down the crowded and tortuous stream until, in the narrow reach above the ferry, they were checked by another punt, which was clumsily revolving in mid-stream and cramming a couple of canoes rather dangerously against the bank.

“Before you come on this water,” cried Wimsey, thrusting the offenders off with his heel and staring offensively at the youth in charge (a stringy young man, naked to the waist and shrimp-pink with the sun), “you should learn the rule of the river. Those canoes have the right of way. And if you can’t handle a pole better than that, I recommend you to retire up the back-water and stay there till you know what God gave you feet for.”

Whereat a middle-aged man, whose punt was moored a little way further on, turned his head sharply and cried in ringing tones:

“Good lord! Wimsey of Balliol!”

“Well, well, well,” said his lordship, abandoning the pink youth, and ranging up alongside the punt. “Peake of Brasenose, by all that’s holy. What brings you here?”

“Dash it,” said Mr. Peake, “I live here. What brings you here is more to the point. You haven’t met my wife—Lord Peter Wimsey, my dear—the cricket blue, you know. The rest is my family.”

He waved his hand vaguely over a collection of assorted offspring.