Gaudy Night (40 page)

“Oh, I thought I’d look the old place up,” said Peter, when the introductions were completed all round. “I’ve got a nephew here and all that. What are you doing? Tutor? Fellow? Lecturer?”——

“Oh, I coach people. A dog’s life, a dog’s life. Dear me! A lot of water has flowed under Folly Bridge since we last met. But I’d have known your voice anywhere. The moment I heard those arrogant, off-hand, go-to-blazes tones I said ‘Wimsey of Balliol.’ Wasn’t I right?”

Wimsey shipped the pole and sat down.

“Have pity, old son, have pity! Let the dead bury their dead.”

“You know,” said Mr. Peake to the world at large, “when we were up together—shocking long time ago that is—never mind! If anyone got landed with a country cousin or an American visitor who asked, as these people will, ‘What is this thing called the Oxford manner?’ we used to take ’em round and show ’em Wimsey of Balliol. He fitted in very handily between St. John’s Gardens and the Martyrs’ Memorial.”

“But suppose he wasn’t there, or wouldn’t perform?”

“That catastrophe never occurred. One never failed to find Wimsey of Balliol planted in the centre of the quad and laying down the law with exquisite insolence to somebody.”

Wimsey put his head between his hands.

“We were accustomed to lay bets,” went on Mr. Peake, who seemed to have preserved an undergraduate taste in humour, owing, no doubt, to continuous contact with First-Year mentality, “upon what they would say about him afterwards. The Americans mostly said, ‘My, but isn’t he just the perfect English aristocrat!’ but some of them said, ‘Does he need that glass in his eye or is it just part of the costoom?’”

Harriet laughed, thinking of Miss Schuster-Slatt.

“My dear—” said Mrs. Peake, who seemed to have a kindly nature.

“The country cousins,” said Mr. Peake remorselessly, “invariably became speechless and had to be revived with coffee and ices at Buol’s.”

“Don’t mind me,” said Peter, whose face was invisible, except for the tip of a crimson ear.

“But you’re wearing very well, Wimsey,” pursued Mr. Peake, benevolently. “Kept your waist-line. Still good for a sprint between the wickets. Can’t say I’m much use now, except for the Parents’ Match, eh, Jim? That’s what marriage does for a man—makes him fat and lazy. But you haven’t changed. Not an atom. Not a hair. Absolutely unmistakable. And you’re quite right about these louts on the river. I’m sick and tired of being barged into and getting their beastly punts over my bows. They don’t even know enough to apologise. Think it’s dashed funny. Stupid oafs. And gramophones bawling in your ears. And look at ’em! Just look at ’em! Enough to make you sick. Like the monkey-house at the Zoo!”

“Noble and nude and antique?” suggested Harriet.

“I don’t mean that. I mean the pole-climbing. Watch that girl—hand over hand, up she goes! And turning round to shove as if she was trying to clear a drain. She’ll be in if she isn’t careful.”

“She’s dressed for it,” said Wimsey.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Mr. Peake, confidentially. “That’s the real reason for the costume. They
expect
to fall in. It’s all right to come out with those beautiful creases down your flannels, but if you do go in it makes it all the funnier.”

“How true that is. Well, we’re blocking the river. We’d better be getting on. I’ll look you up one day, if Mrs. Peake will allow me. So long.”

The punts parted company.

“Dear me, said Peter, when they were out of earshot; “it’s pleasant to meet old friends. And very salutary.”

“Yes; but don’t you find it depressing when they go on making the same joke they were making about a hundred years ago?”

“Devilish depressing. It’s the one great drawback to living in this place. It keeps you young. Too young.”

“It’s rather pathetic, isn’t it?”

The river was wider here, and by way of answer he bent his knees to the stroke, making the punt curtsey and the water run chuckling under the bows. “Would you have your youth back if you could, Harriet?”

“Not for the world.”

“Nor I. Not for anything you could give me. Perhaps that’s an exaggeration. For one thing you could give me I might want twenty years of my life back. But not the same twenty years. And if I went back to my twenties, I shouldn’t be wanting the same thing.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” said Harriet, suddenly reminded of Mr. Pomfret and the pro-Proctor.

“The vivid recollection of my own follies... Harriet! Are you going to tell me that all young men in their twenties are not fools?” He stood, trailing the pole, and looking down at her; his raised eyebrows lent his face a touch of caricature.

“Well, well, well.... I hope it is not Saint-George, by the way. That would be a most unfortunate domestic complication.”

“No, not Saint-George.”

“I thought not; his follies are less ingenuous. But somebody. Well, I refuse to be alarmed, since you have sent him about his business.”

“I like the rapidity of your deductions.”

“You are incurably honest. If you had done anything drastic you would have told me so in your letter. You would have said ‘Dear Peter, I have a case to submit to you; but before doing so I think it only right to inform you that I am engaged to Mr. Jones of Jesus.’ Should you not?”

“Probably. Should you have investigated the case all the same?”

“Why not? A case is a case. What is the bottom like in the Old River?”

“Foul. You’re pulled back two strokes for every stroke you make.”

“Then we will stick to the New Cut. Well, Mr. Jones of Jesus has my sincere sympathy. I hope his troubles will not affect his class.”

“He is only in his Second year.”

“Then he has time to get over it I should like to meet him. He is probably the best friend I have in the world.”

Harriet said nothing. Peter’s intelligence could always make rings round her own more slowly-moving wits. It was quite true that the spontaneous affections of Reggie Pomfret had, somehow, made it easier to believe that Peter’s own feelings might be something more than an artist’s tenderness for his own achievement. But it was indecent of Peter to reach that conclusion so rapidly. She resented the way in which he walked in and out of her mind as if it was his own flat.

“Good God!” said Peter, suddenly. He peered with an air of alarm into the dark green water. A string of oily bubbles floated slowly to the surface, showing where the pole had struck a patch of mud; and at the same moment their nostrils were assaulted by a loathsome stench of decay.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve struck something horrible. Can’t you smell it? It’s scandalous the way corpses pursue me about. Honestly, Harriet...”

“My dear idiot, it’s only the Corporation garbage dump.”

His eye followed her pointing hand to the farther bank, where a cloud of flies circled about a horrid mound of putrefaction.

“Well, of all the—! What the devil do they mean by doing a thing like that?” He passed a wet hand across his forehead. “For a moment I really thought I
had
run across Mr. Jones of Jesus. I was beginning to be sorry I had spoken so light-heartedly about the poor chap. Here! Let’s get out of this!” He drove the punt vigorously forward.

“The Isis for me. There is
no
romance left on this river.”

Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour’s slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot beat quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men’s oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia. Can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon’s minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it.

—THOMAS DEKKER

“You will find the tea-basket,” said Wimsey, “behind you in the bows.” They had put in under the dappled shade of an overhanging willow a little down the left bank of the Isis. Here there was less crowd, and what there was could pass at a distance. Here, if anywhere, they might hope for comparative peace. It was, therefore, with more than ordinary irritation that Harriet, with the thermos yet in her hand, observed a heavily-laden punt approaching.

“Miss Schuster-Slatt and her party. Oh, God, and she says she knows you.”

The poles were firmly driven in at either end of the boat; escape was impossible. Ineluctable the American contingent advanced upon them. They were alongside. Miss Schuster-Slatt was crying out excitedly. It was Harriet’s turn to blush for her friends. With incredible coyness Miss Schuster-Slatt apologised for her intrusion, effected introductions, was sure they were terribly in the way, reminded Lord Peter of their former encounter, recognised that he was far too pleasantly occupied to wish to be bothered with her, poured out a flood of alarming enthusiasm about the Propagation of the Fit, again drew strident attention to her own tactlessness, informed Lord Peter that Harriet was a lovely person and just too sympathetic, and favoured each of them with an advance copy of her new questionnaire. Wimsey listened and replied with imperturbable urbanity, while Harriet, wishing that the Isis would flood its banks and drown them all, envied his self-command. When at length Miss Schuster-Slatt removed herself and her party, the treacherous water wafted back her shrill voice from afar:

“Well, girls! Didn’t I tell you he was just the perfect English aristocrat?”

At which point the much-tried Wimsey lay down among the tea-cups and became hysterical.

“Peter,” said Harriet, when he had finished crowing like a cock, “your unconquerable sweetness of disposition is very shaming. I lose my temper with that harmless woman. Have some more tea.”

“I think,” said his lordship, mournfully, “I had better stop being the perfect English aristocrat and become the great detective after all. Fate seems to be turning my one-day romance into a roaring farce. If that is the dossier, let me have it. We’ll see,” he added with a faint chuckle, “what kind of a detective you make when you’re left to yourself.”

Harriet handed him the loose-leaf book and an envelope containing the various anonymous documents, all endorsed, where possible, with the date and manner of publication. He examined the documents first, separately and carefully, without manifesting surprise, disgust, or, indeed, any emotion beyond meditative interest. He then put them all back in the envelope, filled and lit a pipe, curled himself up among the cushions and devoted his attention to her manuscript. He read slowly, turning back every now and again to verify a date or a detail. At the end of the first few pages he looked up to remark:

“I’ll say one thing for the writing of detective fiction: you know how to put your story together; how to arrange the evidence.”

“Thank you,” said Harriet drily; “praise from Sir Hubert is praise indeed.” He read on.

His next observation was:

“I see you have eliminated all the servants in the Scouts’ Wing on the strength of one locked door.”

“I’m not so simple-minded as that. When you come to the Chapel episode, you’ll find that it eliminates them all, for another reason.”

“I beg your pardon; I was committing the fatal error of theorising ahead of my data.”

Accepting rebuke, he relapsed into silence, while she studied his half-averted face. Considered generally, as a façade, it was by this time tolerably familiar to her, but now she saw details, magnified as it were by some glass in her own mind. The flat setting and fine scroll-work of the ear, and the height of the skull above it. The glitter of close-cropped hair where the neck-muscles lifted to meet the head. A minute sickle-shaped scar on the left temple. The faint laughter-lines at the corner of the eye and the droop of the lid at its outer end. The gleam of gold down on the cheekbone. The wide spring of the nostril. An almost imperceptible beading of sweat on the upper lip and a tiny muscle that twitched the sensitive corner of the mouth, the slight sun-reddening of the fair skin and its sudden whiteness below the base of the throat The little hollow above the points of the collarbone.

He looked up; and she was instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water. Through the confusion of her darkened eyes and drumming ears some enormous bulk seemed to stoop over her. Then the mist cleared. His eyes were riveted upon the manuscript again, but he breathed as though he had been running.

So, thought Harriet, it has happened. But it happened long ago. The only new thing that has happened is that now I have got to admit it to myself. I have known it for some time. But does he know it? He has very little excuse after this, for not knowing it. Apparently he refuses to see it, and that may be new. If so, it ought to be easier to do what I meant to do.

She stared out resolutely across the dimpling water. But she was conscious of his every movement, of every page he turned, of every breath he drew. She seemed to be separately conscious of every bone in his body. At length he spoke, and she wondered how she could ever have mistaken another man’s voice for his.

“Well, Harriet, it’s not a pretty problem.”

“It’s not. And it simply mustn’t go on, Peter. We can’t have any more people frightened into the river. Publicity or no publicity, it’s got to be stopped. Otherwise, even if nobody else gets hurt, we shall all go mad.”

“That’s the devil of it.”

“Tell me what we are to do, Peter.”

She had once again lost all consciousness of him except as the familiar intelligence that lived and moved so curiously behind an oddly amusing set of features.

“Well—there are two possibilities. You can plant spies all over the place and wait to pounce on this person when the next outbreak occurs.”