Gaudy Night (5 page)

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 not 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, Phoebe 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 resume 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 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 in 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 and do it again, if he hadn’t been stopped.”

“That’s an unanswerable argument for stopping them,” said Phoebe, “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 Dean. “Planck’s constant, or whatever they call 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 realty rather reserved, in spite of that deceptive manner.”

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

“Shy?” said Harriet. “Well, hardly. Nervy, perhaps—that blessed word covers a lot. But he doesn’t exactly seem to call for pity.”

“Why should he?” said Miss Barton. “In a very pitiful world, I don’t see much need to pity a young man who has everything he can possibly want.” He must be a remarkable person if he has that,” said Miss de Vine, with a gravity that her eyes belied.

“And he’s not so young as all that,” said Harriet. “He’s forty-five.” (This was Miss Barton’s age.)

“I think it’s rather an impertinence to pity people,” said the Dean.

“Hear, hear!” said Harriet. “Nobody likes being pitied. Most of us enjoy self-pity, but that’s another thing.”

“Caustic,” said Miss de Vine, “but painfully true.”

“But what I should like to know,” pursued Miss Barton, refusing to be diverted, “is whether this dilettante gentleman does anything, outside his hobbies of detecting crimes and collecting books, and, I believe playing cricket in his off-time?”

Harriet, who had been congratulating herself upon the way in which she was keeping her temper, was seized with irritation.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Does it matter? Why should he do anything else?” Catching murderers isn’t a soft job, or a sheltered job. It takes a lot of time and energy, and you may very easily get injured or killed. I dare say he does it for fun, but at any rate, he does do it. Scores of people must have as much reason to thank him as I have. You can’t call that nothing.”

“I absolutely agree,” said the Dean. “I think one ought to be very grateful to people who do dirty jobs for nothing, whatever their reason is.”

Miss Fortescue applauded this. “The drains in my weekend cottage got stopped up last Sunday, and a most helpful neighbour came and unstopped them. He got quite filthy in the process and I apologised profusely, but he said I owed him no thanks, because he was inquisitive and liked drains. He may not have been telling the truth, but even if he was, I certainly had nothing to grumble about.”

“Talking of drains,” said the Bursar—

The conversation took a less personal and more anecdotal turn (for there is no chance assembly of people who cannot make lively conversation about drains), and after a little time, Miss Barton retired to bed. The Dean breathed a sigh of relief.

“I hope you didn’t mind too much,” she said. “Miss Barton is the most terribly downright person, and she was determined to get all that off her chest. She is a splendid person, but hasn’t very much sense of humour. She can’t bear anything to be done except from the very loftiest motives.”

Harriet apologised for having spoken so vehemently.

“I thought you took it all wonderfully well. And your Lord Peter sounds a most interesting person. But I don’t see why you should be forced to discuss him, poor man”

“If you ask me,” observed the Bursar, “we discuss everything a great deal too much in this university. We argue about this and that and why and wherefore, instead of getting the thing done.”

“But oughtn’t we to ask what things we want done,” objected the Dean. Harriet grinned at Betty Armstrong, hearing the familiar academic wrangle begin. Before ten minutes had passed, somebody had introduced the word “values.” An hour later they were still at it. Finally the Bursar was heard to quote:

“God made the integers; all else is the work of man.”

“Oh, bother!” cried the Dean. “Do let’s keep mathematics out of it. And physics. I cannot cope with them.”

“Who mentioned Planck’s constant a little time ago?”

“I did, and I’m sorry for it. I call it a revolting little object.” The Dean’s emphatic tones reduced everybody to laughter, and, midnight striking, the party broke up.