Gaudy Night (41 page)

“But you don’t know what a difficult place it is to police. And it’s ghastly waiting for the outbreak. And suppose we don’t catch her and something horrible happens.”

“I agree, the other and I think the better, way is to do what we can to frighten this lunatic into keeping quiet while we dig out the motive behind the whole thing. I’m sure it’s not mere blind malignity; there’s a method in it.”

“Isn’t the motive only too painfully obvious?”

He stared pensively at her, and then said:

“You remind me of a charming old tutor, now dead, whose particular subject of research was the relations of the Papacy to the Church in England between certain dates which I do not precisely recall. At one time, a special subject on these lines was set for the History School, and undergraduates taking that subject were naturally sent to the old boy for coaching and did very well. But it was noticed that no man from his own college ever entered for that particular special—the reason being that the tutor’s honesty was such that he would earnestly dissuade his pupils from taking his own subject for fear lest his encouragement might influence their decision.”

“What a charming old gentleman! I’m flattered by the comparison, but I don’t see the point.”

“Don’t you? Isn’t it a fact that, having more or less made up your mind to a spot of celibacy you are eagerly peopling the cloister with bogies? If you want to do without personal relationships, then do without them. Don’t stampede yourself into them by imagining that you’ve got to have them or qualify for a Freudian casebook.”

“We’re not talking about me and my feelings. We’re talking about this beastly case in College.”

“But you can’t keep your feelings out of the case. It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena—that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort.”

“That’s rather obvious.”

“Well, let’s have a look at the obvious. The biggest crime of these blasted psychologists is to have obscured the obvious. They’re like a man packing for the week-end and turning everything out of his drawers and cupboards till he can’t find his pyjamas and toothbrush. Take a few obvious points to start with. You and Miss de Vine met at Shrewsbury for the first time at the Gaudy, and the first letter was put into your sleeve at that time; the people attacked are nearly all dons or scholars; a few days after your tea-party with young Pomfret, Jukes goes to prison; all the letters received by post come either on a Monday or a Thursday; all the communications are in English except the Harpy quotation; the dress found on the dummy was never seen in College: do all those facts taken together suggest nothing to you beyond a general notion of sex repression?”

“They suggest a lot of things separately, but I can’t make anything of them taken together.”

“You are usually better than that at a synthesis. I wish you could clear this personal preoccupation out of your mind. My dear, what are you afraid of? The two great dangers of the celibate life are a forced choice and a vacant mind. Energies bombinating in a vacuum breed chimaeras. But
you
are in no danger. If you want to set up your everlasting rest, you are far more likely to find it in the life of the mind than the life of the heart.”

“
You
say that?”

“I say that. It is
your
needs we are considering, you know; not anybody else’s. That is my opinion as an honest scholar, viewing the question academically and on its merits.”

She had the old sensation of being outwitted. She grasped again at the main theme of the discussion:

“Then you think we can solve the problem by straight detection, without calling in a mental specialist?”

“I think it can be solved by a little straight and unprejudiced reasoning.”

“Peter. I seem to be behaving very stupidly. But the reason why I want to—to get clear of people and feelings and go back to the intellectual side is that that is the only side of life I haven’t betrayed and made a mess of.”

“I know that,” he said, more gently. “And it’s upsetting to think that it may betray you in its turn. But why should you think that? Even if much learning makes one person mad it need not make everybody mad. All these women are beginning to look abnormal to you because you don’t know which one to suspect, but actually, even you don’t suspect more than one.”

“No; but I’m beginning to feel that almost any one of them might be capable of it.”

“That, I fancy, is where your fears are distorting your judgment. If every frustrate person is heading straight for the asylum, I know at least one danger to Society who ought to be shut up.”

“Damn you, Peter. Will you keep to the point!”

“Meaning: what steps ought we to take? Will you give me tonight to think it over? If you will trust me to deal with it, I fancy I see one or two lines that might be followed up with profit.”

“I would rather trust you than anybody.”

“Thank you, Harriet. Shall we now resume our interrupted holiday? Oh, my lost youth. Here are the ducks coming up for the remains of our sandwiches. Twenty-three years ago I fed these identical ducks with these identical sandwiches.”

“Ten years ago, I too fed them to bursting-point.”

“And ten and twenty years hence the same ducks and the same undergraduates will share the same ritual feast, and the ducks will bite the undergraduates’ fingers as they have just bitten mine. How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.... Be off, cullies that’s the lot.”

He tossed the last crumbs of bread into the water, rolled over among the cushions and lay watching the ripples with half-shut eyes.... A punt went past, full of silent, sun-stupefied people, with a plop and a tinkle alternately as the pole entered and left the water; then a noisy party with a gramophone bawling “Love in Bloom”; then a young man in spectacles, by himself in a canoe, and paddling as though for dear life; then another punt, paddled at a funeral pace by a whispering man and girl; then a hot and energetic party of girls in an outrigger; then another canoe, driven swiftly by two Canadian undergraduates kneeling to their work; then a very small canoe, punted dangerously by a giggling girl in a bathing-dress, with a jeering young man crouched in the bows, costumed, and obviously prepared, for the inevitable plunge; then a very sedate and fully-clothed party in a punt—mixed undergraduates being polite to a female don; then a bunch of both sexes and all ages in an inrigger with another gramophone whining “Love in Bloom”—the Town at play; then a succession of shrill cries which announced the arrival of a hilarious party teaching a novice to punt; then, in ludicrous contrast, a very stout man in a blue suit and linen hat, solemnly propelling himself all alone in a two-pair tub, and a slim, singleted youth shooting contemptuously past him in a pair-oar skiff; then three punts side by side, in which everybody seemed to be asleep except those actually responsible for pole and paddle. One of these passed within a paddle’s length of Harriet: a tousle-headed, rather paunchy young man lay with his knees cocked up, his mouth slightly open and his face flushed with the heat; a girl sprawled against his shoulder, while the man opposite, his hat over his face and his hands clasped over his chest with the thumbs beneath his braces, had also given up all interest in the outer world. The fourth passenger, a woman, was eating chocolates. The punter had a crumpled cotton frock and bare legs, much bitten. Harriet was reminded of a third-class railway compartment in an excursion train on a hot day; it was fatal to sleep in public; and how tempting to throw something at the paunchy, youth. At that moment, the chocolate-eater screwed her remaining lollipops tightly in the bag and did throw it at the paunchy youth. It caught him in the midriff, and he woke with a loud snort. Harriet took a cigarette from her case and turned to ask her companion for a match. He was asleep.

It was a neat and noiseless kind of sleep; the posture might be described as the half-hedgehog, and offered neither mouth nor stomach as a target for missiles. But asleep he undoubtedly was. And here was Miss Harriet Vane, gone suddenly sympathetic, afraid to move for fear of waking him and savagely resenting the approach of a boatload of idiots whose gramophone was playing (for a change) “Love in Bloom.”

“How wonderful,” says the poet, “is Death, Death and his brother Sleep!” And, having asked whether Ianthe will wake again and being assured that she will, he proceeds to weave many beautiful thoughts about Ianthe’s sleep. From this we may fairly deduce that he (like Henry who kneeled in silence by her couch) felt tenderly towards Ianthe. For another person’s sleep is the acid test of our own sentiments. Unless we are savages, we react kindly to death, whether of friend or enemy. It does not exasperate us; it does not tempt us to throw things at it; we do not find it funny. Death is the ultimate weakness, and we dare not insult it. But sleep is only an illusion of weakness and, unless it appeals to our protective instincts, is likely to arouse in us a nasty, bullying spirit. From a height of conscious superiority we look down on the sleeper, thus exposing himself in all his frailty, and indulge in derisive comment upon his appearance, his manners and (if the occasion is a public one) the absurdity of the position in which he has placed his companion, if he has one, and particularly if we are that companion.

Harriet, thus cozened into playing Phoebe to the sleeping Endymion, had plenty of opportunity to examine herself. After careful consideration, she decided that what she most needed was a box of matches. Peter had used matches to light his pipe: where were they? He had gone to sleep on the whole outfit, confound him! But his blazer was beside him on the cushions; had anybody ever known a man to carry only
one
box of matches in his pockets?

To take possession of the blazer was ticklish work, for the punt rocked at every movement and she had to lift the garment over his knees; but his sleep was the deep sleep of physical fatigue, and she crawled back in triumph without having wakened him. With a curious sense of guilt she ransacked his pockets, finding three boxes of matches, a book and a corkscrew. With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue. The spine was untitled, and as she turned back the worn calf cover the first thing she saw was the engraved book-plate with its achievement of arms: the three silver mice on a field sable and the “domestick Catt” couched menacingly on the helmet-wreath. Two armed Saracens supported the shield, beneath which ran the mocking and arrogant motto: “As my Whimsy takes me.” She turned on to the title-page.
Religio Medici.
Well!... Well? Was that so very unexpected?

Why did he travel about with that? Did he fill in the spare moments of detection and diplomacy with musing upon the “strange and mystical” transmigrations of silkworms and the “legerdemain of changelings”? or with considering how “we vainly accuse the fury of guns and the new inventions of death”? “Certainly there is no happiness within this circle of flesh; nor is it in the opticks of these eyes to behold felicity. The first day of our jubilee is death.” She had no wish to suppose that he could find any personal application for that; she would rather have him secure and happy in order that she might resent his happy security. She flicked the pages over hurriedly. “When I am from him, I am dead till I be with him. United souls are not satisfied with embraces, but desire to be truly each other; which being impossible, these desires are infinite, and must proceed without a possibility of satisfaction.” That was a most uncomfortable passage, whichever way you looked at it. She turned back to the first page and began to read steadily, with critical attention to grammar and style, so as to occupy the upper current of her mind without prying too closely into what might be going on beneath the surface.

The sun moved down the sky and the shadows lengthened upon the water There were fewer craft on the river now; the tea-parties were hurrying home to dinner and the supper parties had not yet put out. Endymion had the air of being settled for the night; it was really time to harden her heart and pull up the poles. She put off decision from moment to moment, till a loud shriek and a bump at her end of the punt came to spare her the trouble. The incompetent novice had returned with her crew and, having left her pole in the middle of the river had let her craft drift across their stem. Harriet pushed the intruders off with more vigour than sympathy and turned to find her host sitting up and grinning rather sheepishly.

“Have I been asleep?”

“Getting on for two hours,” said Harriet, with a pleased chuckle.

“Good lord, what disgusting behaviour! I’m frightfully sorry. Why didn’t you give me a shout? What time is it? My poor girl, you’ll get no dinner tonight if we don’t hurry up. Look here, I do apologise most abjectly.”

“It doesn’t matter a bit. You were awfully tired.”

“That’s no excuse.” He was on his feet now, extricating the punt-poles from the mud. “We might make it by double punting—if you’ll forgive the infernal cheek of asking you to work to make up for my soul-destroying sloth.”

“I’d love to punt. But, Peter!” She suddenly liked him enormously. “What’s the hurry? I mean, is the Master expecting you, or anything?”

“No; I’ve removed myself to the Mitre. I can’t use the Master’s Lodgings as a hotel; besides, they’ve got people coming in.”

“Then couldn’t we get something to eat somewhere along the river and make a day of it? I mean, if you feel like it. Or must you have a proper dinner?”

“My dear, I would gladly eat husks for having behaved like a hog. Or thistles. Preferably thistles. You are a most forgiving woman.”

“Well, give me the pole. I’ll stay up in the bows and you can do the steering.”

“And watch you bring the pole up in three.”

“I promise to do that.”

She was conscious, nevertheless, of Wimsey of Balliol’s critical eye upon her handling of the heavy pole. For either you look graceful or you look ghastly; there is no middle way in punting. They set their course towards Iffley.