Gaudy Night (56 page)

“It’s no use being impertinent. I suppose that to a person with your past history, that kind of thing is merely amusing. But you must try to conduct yourself with a little more decency. The way you look at him is a disgrace. You pretend to be the merest acquaintance of his and call him by his title in public and his Christian name in private. You take him up to your room at night—”

“Really, Miss Hillyard, I can’t allow—”

“I’ve seen you. Twice. He was there tonight. You let him kiss your hands and make love to you—”

“So that was you, spying about under the beeches.”

“How dare you use such a word?”

“How dare you say such a thing?”

“It’s no affair of mine how you behave in Bloomsbury. But if you bring your lovers here—”

“You know very well that he is not my lover. And you know very well why he came to my room tonight.”

“I can guess.”

“And I know very well why you came there.”

“I came there? I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do. And you know that he came to see the damage you did in my room.”

“I never went into your room.”

“You didn’t go into my room and smash up my chessmen?”

Miss Hillyard’s dark eyes flickered.

“Certainly I did not. I told you I hadn’t been anywhere near your room tonight.”

“Then,” said Harriet, “you told a lie.”

She was too angry to be frightened, though it did cross her mind that if the furious white-faced woman attacked her, it might be difficult to summon assistance on this isolated staircase, and she thought of the dog-collar. “I know it’s a lie,” said Harriet, “because there’s a piece of broken ivory on the carpet under your writing-table and another stuck on the sole of your right shoe. I saw it, coming upstairs.”

She was prepared for anything after that, but to her surprise, Miss Hillyard staggered a little, sat down suddenly, and said, “Oh, my God!”

“If you had nothing to do with smashing those chessmen,” went on Harriet, “or with the other pranks that have been played in this College, you’d better explain those pieces of ivory.”

(Am I a fool, she thought, showing my hand like this? But if I didn’t, what would become of the evidence?)

Miss Hillyard, in a bewildered way, pulled off her slipper and looked at the sliver of white that clung to the heel, embedded in a little patch of damp gravel.

“Give it to me,” said Harriet, and took slipper and all.

She had expected an outburst of denial, but Miss Hillyard said, faintly: “That’s evidence... incontrovertible....”

Harriet thanked Heaven, with grim amusement, for the scholarly habit; at least, one did not have to argue about what was or was not evidence. “I did go into your room. I went there to say to you what I said just now. But you weren’t there. And when I saw the mess on the floor I thought—I was afraid you’d think—”

“I did think.”

“What did he think?”

“Lord Peter? I don’t know what he thought. But he’ll probably think something now.”

“You’ve no evidence that I did it,” said Miss Hillyard, with sudden spirit. “Only that I was in the room. It was done when I got there. I saw it, I went to look at it. You can tell your lover that I saw it and was glad to see it. But he’ll tell you that’s no proof that I did it.”

“Look here, Miss Hillyard,” said Harriet, divided between anger, suspicion and a dreadful kind of pity, “You must understand, once and for all, that he is not my lover. Do you really imagine that if he were, we should—” here her sense of the ludicrous overcame her and made it difficult to control her voice—“we should come and misbehave ourselves in the greatest possible discomfort at Shrewsbury? Even if I had no respect for the College—where would be the point of it? With all the world and all the time there is at our disposal, why on earth should we come and play the fool down here? It would be silly. And if you really were down there in the quad just now, you must know that people who are lovers don’t treat each other like that. At least,” she added rather unkindly, “if you knew anything about it at all, you’d know that. We’re very old friends, and I owe him a great deal—”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the tutor roughly. “You know you’re in love with the man.”

“By God!” said Harriet, suddenly enlightened, “if I’m not, I know who is.”

“You’ve no right to say that!”

“It’s true, all the same, said Harriet. “Oh, damn! I suppose it’s no good my saying I’m frightfully sorry.” (Dynamite in a powder factory? Yes, indeed, Miss Edwards, you saw it before anybody else. Biologically interesting!) “This kind of thing is the devil and all.”

(“That’s the devil of a complication,” Peter had said. He’d seen it, of course. Must have. Too much experience not to. Probably happened scores of times—scores of women—all over Europe. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! And was that a random accusation, or had Miss Hillyard been delving into the past and digging up Viennese singers?)

“For Heaven’s sake,” said Miss Hillyard, “go away!”

“I think I’d better,” said Harriet.

She did not know how to deal with the situation at all. She could no longer feel outraged or angry. She was not alarmed. She was not jealous. She was only sorry, and quite incapable of expressing any sympathy which would not be an insult. She realised that she was still clutching Miss Hillyard’s slipper. Had she better give it back? It was evidence—of something. But of what? The whole business of the Poltergeist seemed to have retreated over the horizon, leaving behind it the tormented shell of a woman staring blindly into vacancy under the cruel harshness of the electric light. Harriet picked up the other fragment of ivory from under the writing table—the little spearhead from a red pawn.

Well, whatever one’s personal feelings, evidence was evidence. Peter—she remembered that Peter had said he would ring up from the Mitre. She went downstairs with the slipper in her hand, and in the New Quad ran into Mrs. Padgett, who was just coming to look for her.

The call was switched through to the box in Queen Elizabeth.

“It’s not so bad after all,” said Peter’s voice. “It’s only the Grand Panjandrum wanting a conference at his private house. Sort of Pleasant Sunday Afternoon in Wild Warwickshire. It may mean London or Rome after that but we’ll hope not. At any rate, it’ll do if I’m there by half-past eleven, so I’ll pop round and see you about nine.”

“Please do. Something’s happened. Not alarming, but upsetting. I can’t tell you on the ’phone.”

He again promised to come, and said good-night. Harriet, after locking the slipper and the piece of ivory carefully away, went to the Bursar, and was accommodated with a bed in the Infirmary.

Thus she there wayted until eventyde,
Yet living creature none she saw appeare.
And now sad shadows gan the world to hyde
From mortall vew, and wrap in darkenes dreare;
Yet nould she d’off her weary armes, for feare
Of secret daunger, ne let sleepe oppresse
Her heavy eyes with nature’s burdein deare,
But drew her self aside in sickemesse, And her wel-pointed wepons did about her dresse.

—EDMUND SPENSER

Harriet left word at the Lodge that she would wait for Lord Peter Wimsey in the Fellows’ Garden. She had breakfasted early, thus avoiding Miss Hillyard, who passed through the New Quad like an angry shadow while she was talking to Padgett.

She had first met Peter at a moment when every physical feeling had been battered out of her by the brutality of circumstance; by this accident she had been aware of him from the beginning as a mind and spirit localised in a body. Never—not even in those later dizzying moments on the river—had she considered him primarily as a male animal, or calculated the promise implicit in the veiled eyes, the long, flexible mouth, the curiously vital hands. Nor, since of her he had always asked and never demanded, had she felt in him any domination but that of intellect. But now, as he advanced towards her along the flower-bordered path, she saw him with new eyes—the eyes of women who had seen him before they knew him—saw him, as they saw him, dynamically. Miss Hillyard, Miss Edwards, Miss de Vine, the Dean even, each in her own way had recognised the same thing: six centuries of possessiveness, fastened under the yoke of urbanity. She herself, seeing it impudent and uncontrolled in the nephew, had known it instantly for what it was; it astonished her that in the older man she should have been blind to it so long and should still retain so strong a defence against it. And she wondered whether it was only accident that had sealed her eyes till it was too late for realisation to bring disaster.

She sat still where she was till he stood looking down at her.

“Well?” he said, lightly, “how doth my lady? What, sweeting, all amort?.. Yes, something has happened; I see it has. What is it, domina?” Though the tone was half-jesting, nothing could have reassured her like that era we, academic title. She said, as though she were reciting a lesson:

“When you left last night, Miss Hillyard met me in the New Quad. She asked me to come up to her room because she wanted to speak to me. On the way up, I saw there was a little piece of white ivory stuck on the heel of her slipper. She—made some rather unpleasant accusations; she had misunderstood the position—”

“That can and shall be put right. Did you say anything about the slipper?”

“I’m afraid I did. There was another bit of ivory on the floor. I accused her of having gone into my room, and she denied it till I showed her the evidence. Then she admitted it; but she said the damage was already done when she got there.”

“Did you believe her?”

“I might have done... if... if she hadn’t shown me a motive.”

“I see. All right. You needn’t tell me.”

She looked up for the first time into a face as bleak as winter, and faltered:

“I brought the slipper away with me. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Are you going to be afraid of the facts?” he said. “And you a scholar?”

“I don’t think I did it in malice. I hope not. But I was bitterly unkind to her.”

“Happily,” said he, “a fact is a fact, and your state of mind won’t alter it by a hair’s breadth. Let’s go now and have the truth at all hazards.”

She led him up to her room, where the morning sun cast a long rectangle of brilliance across the ruin on the floor. From the chest near the door she took out the slipper and handed it to him. He lay down flat, squinting sideways along the carpet in the place where neither he nor she had trodden the night before. His hand went to his pocket, and he smiled up sideways into her troubled face.

“If all the pens that ever poets held had had the feeling of their masters’ thoughts, they could not recite as much solid fact as you can hold in a pair of callipers.” He measured the heel of the slipper in both directions, and then turned his attention to the pile of the carpet. “She stood here, heels together, looking.” The callipers twinkled over the sunlit rectangle. “And here is the heel that stamped and trampled and ground beauty to dust. One was a French heel and one was a Cuban heel—isn’t that what the footwear specialists call them?” He sat up and tapped the sole of the slipper lightly with the callipers. “Who goes there? France—Pass, France, and all’s well.”

“Oh, I’m glad,” said Harriet, fervently. “I’m glad.”

“Yes. Meanness isn’t one of your accomplishments, is it?” He turned his eyes to the carpet again, this time to a place near the edge.

“Look! now that the sun’s out you can see it. Here’s where Cuban Heel wiped her soles before she left. There are very few flies on Cuban Heel. Well, that saves us a back-breaking search all over the college for the dust of kings and queens.” He picked the sliver of ivory from the French heel, put the supper in his pocket and stood up. “This had better go back to its owner, furnished with a certificate of innocence.”

“Give it to me. I must take it.”

“No, you will not. If anybody has to face unpleasantness, it shan’t be you this time.”

“But, Peter—you won’t—”

“No,” he said, “I won’t. Trust me for that.”

Harriet was left staring at the broken chessman. Presently she went out into the corridor, found a dustpan and brush in a scout’s pantry and returned with them to sweep up the debris. As she was replacing the brush and pan in the pantry, she ran into one of the students from the Annexe.

“By the way. Miss Swift,” said Harriet, “you didn’t happen to hear any noise in my room like glass being smashed last night, did you? Some time during or after Hall?”

“No, I didn’t. Miss Vane. I was in my own room all evening. But wait a moment. Miss Ward came along about half past nine to do some Morphology with me and”—the girl’s mouth dimpled into laughter—“she asked if you were a secret toffee-eater, because it sounded as though you were smashing up toffee with the poker. Has the College Ghost been visiting you?”

“I’m afraid so,” said Harriet. “Thank you; that’s very helpful. I must see Miss Ward.”

Miss Ward, however, could help no farther than by fixing the time a little more definitely as “certainly not later than half-past nine.”

Harriet thanked her, and went out. Her very bones seemed to ache with restlessness—or perhaps it was with having slept badly in an unfamiliar bed and with a disturbed mind. The sun had scattered diamonds among the wet grass of the quadrangle, and the breeze was shaking the rain in a heavy spatter of drops from the beeches. Students came and went. Somebody had left a scarlet cushion out all night in the rain; it was sodden and mournful looking; its owner came and picked it up, with an air between laughter and disgust; she threw it on a bench to dry in the sunshine.

To do nothing was intolerable. To be spoken to by any member of the Senior Common Room would be still more intolerable. She was penned in the Old Quad, for she was sensitive to the mere neighbourhood of the New Quad as a person that has been vaccinated is sensitive to everything that lies on the sore side of his body. Without particular aim or intention, she skirted the tennis-court and turned in at the Library entrance. She had intended to go upstairs but, seeing the door of Miss de Vine’s set stand open, she altered her mind; she could borrow a book from there. The little lobby was empty, but in the sitting-room a scout was giving the writing-table a Sunday morning flick with the duster. Harriet remembered that Miss de Vine was in town, and that she was to be warned when she returned.