Gaudy Night (57 page)

“What time does Miss de Vine get back tonight? Do you know, Nellie?”

“I think she gets in by the 9:39, miss.”

Harriet nodded, took a book from the shelves at random, and went to sit on the steps of the loggia, where there was a deck-chair. The morning, she told herself, was getting on. If Peter had to get to his destination by 11:30, it was time he went. She vividly remembered waiting in a nursing-home while a friend underwent an operation; there had been a smell of ether, and in the waiting-room, a large black Wedgwood jar, filled with delphiniums. She read a page without knowing what was in it, and looked up at an approaching footstep into the face of Miss Hillyard.

“Lord Peter,” said Miss Hillyard, without preface, “asked me to give you this address. He was obliged to leave quickly to keep his appointment.” Harriet took the paper and said, “Thank you.”

Miss Hillyard went on resolutely: “When I spoke to you last night I was under a misapprehension. I had not fully realised the difficulty of your position. I am afraid I have unwittingly made it harder for you, and I apologise.”

“That’s all right,” said Harriet, taking refuge in formula. “I am sorry too. I was rather upset last night and said a great deal more than I should. This wretched business has made everything so uncomfortable.”

“Indeed it has,” said Miss Hillyard, in a more natural voice. “We are all feeling rather overwrought. I wish we could get at the truth of it. I understand that you now accept my account of my movements last night.”

“Absolutely. It was inexcusable of me not to have verified my data.”

“Appearances can be very misleading,” said Miss Hillyard.

There was a pause.

“Well,” said Harriet at last, “I hope we may forget all this.” She knew as she spoke that one thing at least had been said which could never be forgotten: she would have given a great deal to recall it.

“I shall do my best,” replied Miss Hillyard. “Perhaps I am too much inclined to judge harshly of matters outside my experience.”

“It is very kind of you to say that,” said Harriet. “Please believe that I don’t take a very self-satisfied view of myself either.”

“Very likely not. I have noticed that the people who get opportunities always seem to choose the wrong ones. But it’s no affair of mine. Good morning.”

She went as abruptly as she had come. Harriet glanced at the book on her knee and discovered that she was reading
The Anatomy of Melancholy.

“
Fleat Heraclitus an rideat Democritus?
in attempting to speak of these Symptoms, shall I laugh with
Democritus
or weep with
Heraclitus?
they are so ridiculous and absurd on the one side, so lamentable and tragical on the other.”

Harriet got the car out in the afternoon and took Miss Lydgate and the Dean for a picnic in the neighbourhood of Hinksey. When she got back, in time for supper, she found an urgent message at the Lodge, asking her to ring up Lord Saint-George at the House as soon as she got back. His voice, when he answered the call, sounded agitated.

“Oh, look here! I can’t get hold of Uncle Peter—he’s vanished again, curse him! I say, I saw your ghost this afternoon, and I do think you ought to be careful.”.

“Where did you see her? When?”

“About half-past two—walking over Magdalen Bridge in broad daylight. I’d been lunching with some chaps out Iffley way, and we were just pulling over to put one of ’em down at Magdalen, when I spotted her. She was walking along, muttering to herself, and looking awfully queer. Sort of clutching with her hands and rolling her eyes about. She spotted me, too. Couldn’t mistake her. A friend of mine was driving and I tried to catch his attention, but he was pulling round behind a bus and I couldn’t make him understand. Anyhow, when we stopped at Magdalen gate, I hopped out and ran back, but I couldn’t find her anywhere. Seemed to have faded out. I bet she knew I was on to her and made tracks. I was scared. Thought she looked up to anything. So I rang up your place and found you were out and then I rang up the Mitre and that wasn’t any good either, so I’ve been sitting here all evening in a devil of a stew. First I thought I’d leave a note, and then I thought I’d better tell you myself. Rather devoted of me, don’t you think? I cut a supper-party so as not to miss you.”

“That was frightfully kind of you,” said Harriet. “What was the ghost dressed in?”

“Oh—one of those sort of dark-blue frocks with spriggy bits on it and a hat with a brim. Sort of thing most of your dons wear in the afternoon. Neat, not gaudy. Not smart. Just ordinary. It was the eyes I recognised. Made me feel all goose flesh. Honest. That woman’s not safe, I’ll swear she isn’t.”

“It’s very good of you to warn me,” said Harriet again. “I’ll try and find out who it could have been. And I’ll take precautions.”

“Please do,” said Lord Saint-George. “I mean, Uncle Peter’s getting the wind up horribly. Gone clean off his oats. Of course I know he’s a fidgety old ass and I’ve been doing my best to soothe the troubled beast and all that, but I’m beginning to think he’s got some excuse. For goodness’ sake, Aunt Harriet, do something about it. I can’t afford to have a valuable uncle destroyed under my eyes. He’s getting like the Lord of Burleigh, you know—walking up and pacing down and so on—and the responsibility is very wearing.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Harriet. “You’d better come and dine in College tomorrow and see if you can spot the lady. It’s no good this evening, because so many people don’t turn up to Sunday supper.”

“Right-ho!” said the viscount. “That’s a dashed good idea. I’d get a dashed good birthday-present out of Uncle Peter if I solved his problem for him. So long and take care of yourself.”

“I ought to have thought of that before,” said Harriet, retailing this piece of news to the Dean; “but I never imagined he’d recognise the woman like that after only seeing her once.”

The Dean, to whom the whole story of Lord Saint-George’s ghostly encounter had come as a novelty, was inclined to be sceptical.

“Personally, I wouldn’t undertake to identify anybody after one glimpse in the dark—and I certainly wouldn’t trust a young harum-scarum like that. The only person here I know of with a navy sprigged foulard is Miss Lydgate, and I absolutely refuse to believe
that!
But ask the young man to dinner by all means. I’m all for excitement, and he’s even more ornamental than the other one.”

It was borne in upon Harriet that things were coming to a crisis. “Take precautions.” A nice fool she would look, going about with a dog-collar round her neck. Nor would it be any defence against pokers and such things.... The wind must be in the south-west, for the heavy boom of Tom tolling his hundred-and-one came clearly to her ears as she crossed the Old Quad.

“Not later than half-past nine,” Miss Ward had said. If the peril had ceased to walk by night, it was still abroad of an evening.

She went upstairs and locked the door of her room before opening a drawer and taking out the heavy strap of brass and leather. There was something about the description of that woman walking wild-eyed over Magdalen Bridge and “clutching with her hands” that was very unpleasant to think of. She could feel Peter’s grip on her throat now like a band of iron, and could hear him saying serenely, like a textbook:

“
That
is the dangerous spot. Compression of the big blood-vessels
there
will cause almost instant unconsciousness. And then, you see, you’re done for—”

And at the momentary pressure of his thumbs the fire had swum in her eyes.

She turned with a start as something rattled the door-handle. Probably the passage-window was open and the wind blowing in. She was getting ridiculously nervous. The buckle was stiff to her fingers. (Is thy servant a dog that she should do this thing?) When she saw herself in the glass, she laughed. “An arum-lily quality that is in itself an invitation to violence.” Her own face, in the drowned evening light, surprised her-softened and startled and drained of colour, with eyes that looked unnaturally large under the heavy black brows, and lips a little parted. It was like the head of someone who had been guillotined; the dark band cut it off from the body like the stroke of the headsman’s steel.

She wondered whether her lover had seen it like that, through that hot unhappy year when she had tried to believe that there was happiness in surrender. Poor Philip—tormented by his own vanities, never loving her till he had killed her feeling for him, and yet perilously clutching her as he went down into the slough of death. It was not to Philip she had submitted, so much as to a theory of living. The young were always theoretical; only the middle-aged could realise the deadliness of principles. To subdue one’s self to one’s own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one’s self to other people’s ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.

Could there ever be any alliance between the intellect and the flesh? It was this business of asking questions and analyzing everything that sterilised and stultified all one’s passions. Experience perhaps had a formula to get over this difficulty: one kept the bitter, tormenting brain on one side of the wall and the languorous sweet body on the other, and never let them meet. So that if you were made that way, you could argue about loyalties in an Oxford common-room and refresh yourself elsewhere with—say—Viennese singers, presenting an unruffled surface on both sides of yourself. Easy for a man, and possible even for a woman, if one avoided foolish accidents like being tried for murder. But to seek to force incompatibles into a compromise was madness; one should neither do it nor be a party to it. If Peter wanted to make the experiment, he must do it without Harriet’s connivance. Six centuries of possessive blood would not be dictated to by a bare forty-five years of over-sensitised intellect. Let the male animal take the female and be content; the busy brain could very well be “left talking” like the hero of
Man and Superman.
In a long monologue, of course; for the female animal could only listen without contributing. Otherwise one would get the sort of couple one had in
Private Lives,
who rolled on the floor and hammered one another when they weren’t making love, because they (obviously) had no conversational resources. A vista of crashing boredom, either way.

The door rattled again, as a reminder that even a little boredom might be welcome by way of change from alarms. On the mantelpiece, a solitary red pawn mocked all security.... How quietly Annie had taken Peter’s warning. Did she take it seriously? Was she looking after herself? She had been her usual refined and self-contained self when she brought in the Common-room coffee that night—perhaps a little brighter-looking than usual. Of course, she had had her afternoon off with Beatie and Carola.... Curious, thought Harriet, this desire to possess children and dictate their tastes, as though they were escaping fragments of one’s self, and not separate individuals. Even if the taste ran to motor-bikes.... Annie was all right. How about Miss de Vine, travelling down from Town in happy ignorance?—With a start, Harriet saw that it was nearly a quarter to ten. The train must be in. Had the Warden remembered about warning Miss de Vine? She ought not to be left to sleep in the ground-floor room without being fore-armed. But the Warden never forgot anything.

Nevertheless, Harriet was uneasy. From her window she could not see whether any lights were on in the Library Wing. She unlocked the door and stepped out (yes—the passage-window was open; nobody but the wind had rattled the handle). A few dim figures were still moving at the far end of the quad as she passed along beside the tennis-court. In the Library Wing, all the ground-floor windows were dark except for the dim glow of the passage tight. Miss Barton, at any rate, was not in her room; nor was Miss de Vine back yet. Or—yes, she must be; for the window-curtains were drawn in her sitting-room, though no light shone as yet behind them.

Harriet went into the building. The door of Miss Burrows’s set stood open, and the lobby was dark. Miss de Vine’s door was shut. She knocked, but there was no answer—and it suddenly struck her as odd that the curtains should be drawn and no light on. She opened the door and pressed down the wall switch in the lobby. Nothing happened. With a growing sense of disquiet, she went on to the sitting-room door and opened that. And then, as her fingers went out to the switch, the fierce clutch took her by the throat.

She had two advantages: she was partly prepared, and the assailant had not expected the dog-collar. She felt and heard the quick gasp in her face as the strong, cruel fingers fumbled on the stiff leather. As they shifted their hold, she had time to remember what she had been taught—to catch and jerk the wrists apart. But as her feet felt for the other’s feet, her high heels slipped on the parquet—and she was falling—they were falling together and she was undermost; they seemed to take years to fall; and au the time a stream of hoarse, filthy abuse was running into her ears. Then the world went black in fire and thunder.

Faces—swimming confusedly through crackling waves of pain—swelling and diminishing anxiously—then resolving themselves into one—Miss Hillyard’s face, enormous and close to her own. Then a voice, agonisingly loud, blaring unintelligibly like a fog-horn. Then, suddenly and quite clearly, like the lighted stage of a theatre, the room, with Miss de Vine, white as marble, on the couch and the Warden bending over her, and in between, on the floor, a white bowl filled with scarlet and the Dean kneeling beside it. Then the fog-horn boomed again, and she heard her own voice, incredibly far off and thin: “Tell Peter,”—Then nothing.

Somebody had a headache—a quite unbearably awful headache. The white bright room in the Infirmary would have been very pleasant, if it hadn’t been for the oppressive neighbourhood of the person with the headache, who was, moreover, groaning very disagreeably. It was an effort to pull one’s self together and find out what the tiresome person wanted. With an effort like that of a hippopotamus climbing out of a swamp, Harriet pulled herself together and discovered that the headache and the groans were her own, and that the Infirmarian had realised what she was about and was coming to lend a hand.