Leave me, o love, which reachest but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust,
Whatever fades, but fading pleasures brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be;
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light
That doth both shine and give us sight to see.
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
Town seemed remarkably empty and uninteresting. Yet a lot of things were going on. Harriet saw her agent and publisher, signed a contract for serial rights, heard the inner history of the quarrel between Lord Gobbersleigh, the newspaper proprietor, and Mr. Adrian Cloot, the reviewer, entered warmly into the triangular dispute raging among Gargantua Colour-Talkies Ltd., Mr. Garrick Drury, the actor, and Mrs. Snell-Wilmington, author of Passion-flower Pie, and into the details of Miss Sugar Toobin’s monstrous libel action against the Daily Headline, and was, of course, passionately interested to learn that Jacqueline Squills had made a malicious exposé of her second divorced husband’s habits and character in her new novel, Gas-Filled Bulbs.
Yet, somehow, these distractions failed to keep her amused. To make matters worse, her new mystery novel had got somehow stuck. She had five suspects, neatly confined in an old water-mill with no means of entrance or egress except by a plank bridge, and all provided with motives and alibis for a pleasantly original kind of murder. There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with the thing. But the permutations and combinations of the five people’s relationships were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that; human problems were not like that; what you really got was two hundred or so people running like rabbits in and out of a college, doing their work, living their lives, and actuated all the time by motives unfathomable even to themselves, and then, in the midst of it all—not a plain, understandable murder, but an unmeaning and inexplicable lunacy.
How could one, in any case, understand other people’s motives and feelings, when one’s own remained mysterious? Why did one look forward with irritation to the receipt of a letter on April 1st, and then feel alarmed and affronted when it did not arrive by the first post? Very likely the letter had been sent to Oxford. There was no possible urgency about it, since one knew what it would contain and how it had to be answered; but it was annoying to sit about, expecting it.
Ring. Enter secretary with telegram (this was probably it). Wordy and unnecessary cable from American magazine representative to say she was shortly arriving in England and very anxious to talk to Miss Harriet Vane about a story for their publication. Cordially. What on earth did these people want to talk about? You did not write stories by talking about them.
Ring. Second post. Letter with Italian stamp. (Slight delay in sorting, no doubt.) Oh, thank you, Miss Bracey. Imbecile, writing very bad English, was eager to translate Miss Vane’s works into Italian. Could Miss Vane inform the writer of what books she had composed? Translators were all like that—no English, no sense, no backing. Harriet said briefly what she thought of them, told Miss Bracey to refer the matter to the agent and returned to her dictation.
“Wilfrid stared at the handkerchief. What was it doing there in Winchester’s bedroom? With a curious feeling of …”
Telephone. Hold on a moment, please. (It couldn’t very well be that; it would be ridiculous to put through an expensive foreign call.) Hullo! Yes. Speaking. Oh?
She might have known it. There was a kind of mild determination about Reggie Pomfret. Would Miss Vane, could Miss Vane put up with his company for dinner and the new show at the Palladium? That night? the next night? Any night? That very night? Mr. Pomfret was inarticulate with pleasure. Thank you. Ring off. Where were we, Miss Bracey?
“With a curious feeling of—Oh, yes, Wilfrid. Very distressing for Wilfrid to find his young woman’s handkerchief in the murdered man’s bedroom. Agonizing. A curious feeling of—What should you feel like under the circumstances, Miss Bracey?”
“I should think the laundry had made a mistake, I expect.”
“Oh, Miss Bracey! Well—we’d better say it was a lace handkerchief. Winchester couldn’t have mistaken a lace handkerchief for one of his own, whatever the laundry sent him.”
“But would Ada have used a lace handkerchief, Miss Vane? Because she’s been made rather a boyish, out-door person. And it’s not as if she was in evening dress, because it was so important she should turn up in a tweed costume.”
“That’s true. Well—Well; better make the handkerchief small, but not lace. Plain but good. Turn back to the description of the handkerchief …Oh, dear! No, I’ll answer it. Yes? Yes? YES! … No, I’m afraid I can’t possibly. No, really. Oh? Well, you had better ask my agents. Yes, that’s right. Good-bye …Some club wanting a debate on ‘Should Genius Marry?’ The question’s not likely to concern any of their members personally, so why do they bother? …Yes, Miss Bracey? Oh, yes, Wilfrid. Bother Wilfrid! I’m taking quite a dislike to the man.”
By tea-time, Wilfrid was behaving so tiresomely that Harriet put him away in a rage and sallied out to attend a literary cocktail party. The room in which it was held was exceedingly hot and crowded, and all the assembled authors were discussing (a) publishers, (b) agents, (c) their own sales, (d) other people’s sales, and (e) the extraordinary behavior of the Book of the Moment selectors in awarding their ephemeral crown to Tasker Hepplewater’s Mock Turtle. “I finished this book,” one distinguished adjudicator had said, “with the tears running down my face.” The author of Serpent’s Fang confided to Harriet over a petite saucisse and a glass of sherry that they must have been tears of pure boredom; but the author of Dust and Shiver said, No—they were probably tears of merriment, called forth by the unintentional humor of the book; had she ever met Hepplewater? A very angry young woman, whose book had been passed over, declared that the whole thing was a notorious farce. The Book of the Moment was selected from each publisher’s list in turn, so that her own Ariadne Adams was automatically excluded from benefit, owing to the mere fact that her publisher’s imprint had been honored in the previous January. She had, however, received private assurance that the critic of the Morning Star had sobbed like a child over the last hundred pages of Ariadne, and would probably make it his Book of the Fortnight, if only the publisher could be persuaded to take advertising space in the paper. The author of The Squeezed Lemon agreed that advertising was at the bottom of it: had they heard how the Daily Flashlight had tried to blackmail Humphrey Quint into advertising with them? And how, on his refusal, they had said darkly, “Well, you know what will happen, Mr. Quint?” And how no single Quint book had received so much as a review from the Flashlight ever since? And how Quint had advertised that fact in the Morning Star and sent up his net sales 50 per cent in consequence? Well, by some fantastic figure, anyhow. But the author of Primrose Dalliance said that with the Book of the Moment crowd, what counted was Personal Pull—surely they remembered that Hepplewater had married Walton Strawberry’s latest wife’s sister. The author of Jocund Day agreed about the Pull, but thought that in this instance it was political, because there was some powerful anti-Fascist propaganda in Mock Turtle and it was well known that you could always get old Sneep Fortescue with a good smack at the Blackshirts.
“But what’s Mock Turtle about?” inquired Harriet.
On this point the authors were for the most part vague; but a young man who wrote humorous magazine stories, and could therefore afford to be wide-minded about novels, said he had read it and thought it rather interesting, only a bit long. It was about a swimming instructor at a watering-place, who had contracted such an unfortunate anti-nudity complex through watching so many bathing-beauties that it completely inhibited all his natural emotions. So he got a job on a whaler and fell in love at first sight with an Eskimo, because she was such a beautiful bundle of garments. So he married her and brought her back to live in a suburb, where she fell in love with a vegetarian nudist. So then the husband went slightly mad and contracted a complex about giant turtles, and spent all his spare time staring into the turtle-tank at the Aquarium, and watching the strange, slow monsters swimming significantly round in their encasing shells. But of course a lot of things came into it—it was one of those books that reflect the author’s reactions to Things in General. Altogether, significant was, he thought, the word to describe it.
Harriet began to feel that there might be something to be said even for the plot of Death ’twixt Wind and Water. It was, at least, significant of nothing in particular.
Harriet went back, irritated, to Mecklenburg Square. As she entered the house, she could hear her telephone ringing apoplectically on the first floor. She ran upstairs hastily—one never knew with telephone calls. As she thrust her key into the lock, the telephone stopped dead.
“Damn!” said Harriet. There was an envelope lying inside the door. It contained press cuttings. One referred to her as Miss Vines and said she had taken her degree at Cambridge; a second compared her work unfavorably with that of an American thriller-writer; a third was a belated review of her last book, which gave away the plot; a fourth attributed somebody else’s thriller to her and stated that she “adopted a sporting outlook on life” (whatever that might mean). “This,” said Harriet, much put out, “is one of those days! April the First, indeed! And now I’ve got to dine with this dashed undergraduate, and be made to feel the burden of incalculable age.”
To her surprise, however, she enjoyed both the dinner and the show. There was a refreshing lack of complication about Reggie Pomfret. He knew nothing about literary jealousies; he had no views about the comparative importance of personal and professional loyalties; he laughed heartily at obvious jokes; he did not expose your nerve-centers or his own; he did not use words with double meanings; he did not challenge you to attack him and then suddenly roll himself into an armadillo-like ball, presenting a smooth, defensive surface of ironical quotations; he had no overtones of any kind; he was a good-natured, not very clever, young man, eager to give pleasure to someone who had shown him a kindness. Harriet found him quite extraordinarily restful.
“Will you come up for a moment and have a drink or anything?” said Harriet, on her own doorstep.
“Thanks awfully,” said Mr. Pomfret, “if it isn’t too late.”
He instructed the taxi to wait and galumphed happily up. Harriet opened the door of the flat and switched the light on. Mr. Pomfret stooped courteously to pick up the letter lying on the mat.
“Oh, thank you,” said Harriet.
She preceded him into the sitting-room and let him remove her cloak for her. A moment or two later, she became aware that she was still holding the letter in her hand and that her guest and she were still standing.
“I beg your pardon. Do sit down.”
“Please—” said Mr. Pomfret, with a gesture that indicated, “Read it and don’t mind me.”
“It’s nothing,” said Harriet, tossing the envelope on the table. “I know what’s in it. What will you have? Will you help yourself?”
Mr. Pomfret surveyed such refreshments as offered themselves and asked what he might mix for her. The drink question being settled, there was a pause.
“Er—by the way,” said Mr. Pomfret, “is Miss Cattermole all right? I haven’t seen very much of her since—since that night when I made your acquaintance, you know. Last time we met she said she was working rather hard.”
“Oh, yes. I believe she is. She’s got Mods next term.”
“Oh, poor girl! She has a great admiration for you.”
“Has she? I don’t know why. I seem to remember ticking her off rather brutally.”
“Well, you were fairly firm with me. But I agree with Miss Cattermole. Absolutely. I mean, we agree about having a great admiration for you.”
“How nice of you,” said Harriet, inattentively.
“Yes, really. Rather. I’ll never forget the way you tackled that fellow Jukes. Did you see he got himself into trouble only a week or so later?”
“Yes. I’m not surprised.”
“No. A most unpleasant wart. Thoroughly scaly.”
“He always was.”
“Well, here’s to a long stretch for comrade Jukes. Not a bad show tonight, don’t you think?”
Harriet pulled herself together. She was all at once tired of Mr. Pomfret and wished he would go; but it was monstrous of her not to behave politely to him. She exerted herself to talk with bright interest of the entertainment to which he had kindly taken her and succeeded so well that it was nearly fifteen minutes before Mr. Pomfret remembered his waiting taxi, and took himself off in high spirits.
Harriet took up the letter. Now that she was free to open it, she did not want to. It had spoilt the evening for her.
Dear Harriet,
I send in my demand notes with the brutal regularity of the income-tax commissioners; and probably you say when you see the envelopes, ‘Oh, God! I know what this is.’ The only difference is that, some time or other, one has to take notice of the income-tax.
Will you marry me?—It’s beginning to look like one of those lines in a farce—merely boring till it’s said often enough; and after that, you get a bigger laugh every time it comes.
I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on—but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable and unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.
Well, that’s over. Don’t worry about it.
My nephew (whom you seem, by the way, to have stimulated to the most extraordinary diligence) is cheering my exile by dark hints that you are involved in some disagreeable and dangerous job of work at Oxford about which he is in honor bound to say nothing. I hope he is mistaken. But I know that, if you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should. Whatever it is, you have my best wishes for it.
I am not my own master at the moment, and do not know where I shall be sent next or when I shall be back—soon, I trust. In the meantime may I hope to hear from time to time that all is well with you?
Yours, more than my own,
PETER WIMSEY
After reading that letter, Harriet knew that she could not rest till it was answered. The bitter unhappiness of its opening paragraphs was readily explained by the last two. He probably thought—he could not possibly help thinking—that she had known him all these years, only to confide in the end, not in him, but in a boy less than half his age and his own nephew, whom she had known only a couple of weeks and had little reason to trust. He had made no comment and asked no questions—that made it worse. More generously still, he had not only refrained from offers of help and advice which she might have resented; he had deliberately acknowledged that she had the right to run her own risks. “Do be careful of yourself; “I hate to think of your being exposed to unpleasantness”; “If only I could be there to protect you”; any such phrase would express the normal male reaction. Not one man in ten thousand would say to the woman he loved, or to any woman: “Disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should.” That was an admission of equality, and she had not expected it of him. If he conceived of marriage along those lines, then the whole problem would have to be reviewed in that new light; but that seemed scarcely possible. To take such a line and stick to it, he would have to be, not a man but a miracle. But the business about Saint-George must be cleared up immediately. She wrote quickly, without stopping to think too much.
Dear Peter,
No. I can’t see my way to it. But thank you all the same. About the Oxford business—I would have told you all about it long ago, only that it is not my secret. I wouldn’t have told your nephew, only that he had stumbled on part of it and I had to trust him with the rest to keep from making unintentional mischief. I wish I could tell you; I should be very glad of your help; if ever I get leave to, I will. It is rather disagreeable but not dangerous, I hope. Thank you for not telling me to run away and play—that’s the best compliment you ever paid me.
I hope your case, or whatever it is, is getting on all right. It must be a tough one to take so long.
Harriet
Lord Peter Wimsey read this letter while seated upon the terrace of an hotel overlooking the Pincian Gardens, which were bathed in brilliant sunshine. It astonished him so much that he was reading it for the fourth time, when he became aware that the person standing beside him was not the waiter.
“My dear Count! I beg your pardon. What manners! My head was in the clouds. Do me the favor to sit down and join me. Servitore!”
“I beg you will not apologize. It is my fault for interrupting you. But fearing that last night might have somewhat entangled the situation—”
“It is foolish to talk so long and so late. Grown men behave like tired children who are allowed to sit up till midnight. I admit that we were all very fractious, myself not least.”
“You are always the soul of amiability. That is why I thought that a word with you alone—We are both reasonable men.”
“Count, Count, I hope you have not come to persuade me to anything. I should find it too difficult to refuse you.” Wimsey folded the letter away in his pocketbook. “The sun is shining, and I am in the mood to make mistakes through overconfidence.”
“Then, I must take advantage of the good moment.” The Count set his elbows on the table and leaned forward, thumb-tip to thumb-tip and little-fingertip to little-fingertip, smiling, irresistible. Forty minutes later, he took his leave, still smiling, having ceded, without noticing it, rather more than he had gained, and told in ten words more than he had learned in a thousand.
But of this interlude Harriet naturally knew nothing. On the evening of the same day, she was dining alone, a little depressed, at Romano’s. She had nearly finished, when she saw a man, just leaving the restaurant, who was sketching a vague gesture of recognition. He was in the forties, going a little bald, with a smooth, vacant face and a dark mustache. For a moment she could not place him; then something about his languid walk and impeccable tailoring brought back an afternoon at Lord’s. She smiled at him, and he came up to her table.
“Hullo—ullo! Hope I’m not bargin’ in. How’s all the doings and all that?”
“Very well, thanks.”
“That’s grand. Thought I must just ooze over and pass the time of day. Or night. Only I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me, and might think I was bein’ a nuisance.”
“Of course I remember you. You’re Mr. Arbuthnot—the Honorable Frederick Arbuthnot—and you’re a friend of Peter Wimsey’s, and I met you at the Eton and Harrow match two years ago, and you’re married and have two children. How are they?”
“Fair to middlin’, thanks. What a brain you’ve got! Yes, ghastly hot afternoon that was, too. Can’t think why harmless women should be dragged along to be bored while a lot of little boys play off their Old School Ties. (That’s meant for a joke.) You were frightfully well-behaved, I remember.”
Harriet said sedately that she always enjoyed a good cricket match.
“Do you? I thought it was politeness. It’s pretty slow work, if you ask me. But I was never any good at it myself. It’s all right for old Peter. He can always work himself into a stew thinking how much better he’d have done it himself.”
Harriet offered him coffee.
“I didn’t know anybody ever got into a stew at Lord’s. I thought it wasn’t done.”
“Well, the atmosphere doesn’t exactly remind one of the Cup Final; but mild old gentlemen do sometimes break out into a spot of tut-tuttery. How about a brandy? Waiter, two liqueur brandies. Are you writing any more books?”
Suppressing the rage that this question always rouses in a professional writer, Harriet admitted that she was.
“It must be splendid to be able to write,” said Mr. Arbuthnot. “I often think I could spin a good yarn myself if I had the brains. About the odd things that happen, you know. Queer deals, and that kind of thing.”
A dim recollection of something Wimsey had once said lit up the labyrinth of Harriet’s mind. Money. That was the connection between the two men. Mr. Arbuthnot, moron as he might be in other respects, had a flair for money. He knew what that mysterious commodity was going to do; it was the one thing he did know, and he only knew that by instinct. When things were preparing to go up or down, they rang a little warning bell in what Freddy Arbuthnot called his mind, and he acted on the warning without being able to explain why. Peter had money, and Freddy understood money; that must be the common interest and bond of mutual confidence that explained an otherwise inexplicable friendship. She admired the strange nexus of interests that unites the male half of mankind into a close honeycomb of cells, each touching the other on one side only, and yet constituting a tough and closely adhering fabric.
“Funny kind of story popped up the other day,” went on Mr. Arbuthnot. “Mysterious business. Couldn’t make head or tail of it. It would have amused old Peter. How is old Peter, by the way?”
“I haven’t seen him for some time. He’s in Rome. I don’t know what he’s doing there, but I suppose he’s on a case of some kind.”
“No. I expect he’s left his country for his country’s good. It’s usually that. I hope they manage to keep things quiet. The exchanges are a bit nervy.”
Mr. Arbuthnot looked almost intelligent.
“What’s Peter got to do with the exchange?”
“Nothing. But if anything blows up, it’s bound to affect the exchange.”
“This is Greek to me. What is Peter’s job out there?”
“Foreign Office. Didn’t you know?”
“I hadn’t the slightest idea. He’s not permanently attached there, is he?”
“In Rome, do you mean?”
“To the Foreign Office.”
“No; but they sometimes push him out when they think he’s wanted. He gets on with people.”
“I see. I wonder why he never mentioned it.”
“Oh, everybody knows; it’s not a secret. He probably thought it wouldn’t interest you.” Mr. Arbuthnot balanced his spoon across his coffee-cup in an abstracted way. “I’m damned fond of old Peter,” was his next, rather irrelevant, contribution. “He’s a dashed good sort. Last time I saw him, I thought he seemed a bit under the weather …Well, I’d better be toddling.”
He got up, a little abruptly, and said good-night.
Harriet thought how humiliating it was to have one’s ignorance exposed.
Ten days before the beginning of term, Harriet could bear London no longer. The final touch was put to her disgust by the sight of an advance notice of Death ’twixt Wind and Water, embodying an exceptionally fulsome blurb. She developed an acute homesickness for Oxford and for the Study of Le Fanu—a book which would never have any advertising value, but of which some scholar might some day moderately observe, “Miss Vane has handled her subject with insight and accuracy.” She rang up the Bursar, discovered that she could be accommodated at Shrewsbury, and fled back to Academe.
College was empty, but for herself, the Bursar and Treasurer, and Miss Barton, who vanished daily into the Radcliffe Camera and was only seen at meals. The Warden was up, but remained in her own house.
April was running out, chilly and fickle, but with the promise of good things to come; and the city wore the withdrawn and secretive beauty that wraps her about in vacation. No clamor of young voices echoed along her ancient stones; the tumult of flying bicycles was stilled in the narrow strait of the Turl; in Radcliffe Square the Camera slept like a cat in the sunshine, disturbed only by the occasional visit of a slow-footed don; even in the High, the roar of car and charabanc seemed minished and brought low, for the holiday season was not yet; punts and canoes, new-fettled for the summer term, began to put forth upon the Cherwell like the varnished buds upon the horse-chestnut tree, but as yet there was no press of traffic upon the shining reaches; the mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time’s flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.
Mornings in Bodley, drowsing among the worn browns and tarnished gilding of Duke Humphrey, snuffing the faint, musty odor of slowly perishing leather, hearing only the discreet tippety-tap of Agag-feet along the padded floor; long afternoons, taking an outrigger up the Cher, feeling the rough kiss of the sculls on unaccustomed palms, listening to the rhythmical and satisfying ker-klunk of the rowlocks, watching the play of muscle on the Bursar’s sturdy shoulders at stroke, as the sharp spring wind flattened the thin silk shirt against them; or, if the day were warmer, flicking swiftly in a canoe under Magdalen walls and so by the twisting race at King’s Mill by Mesopotamia to Parson’s Pleasure; then back, with mind relaxed and body stretched and vigorous, to make toast by the fire; and then, at night, the lit lamp and the drawn curtain, with the flutter of the turned page and soft scrape of pen on paper the only sounds to break the utter silence between quarter and quarter chime. Now and again, Harriet took out the dossier of the poison-pen and looked it over; yet, viewed by that solitary lamp, even the ugly, printed scrawls looked harmless and impersonal, and the whole dismal problem less important than the determining of a first edition date or the settlement of a disputed reading.
In that melodious silence, something came back to her that had lain dumb and dead ever since the old, innocent undergraduate days. The singing voice, stifled long ago by the pressure of the struggle for existence, and throttled into dumbness by that queer, unhappy contact with physical passion, began to stammer a few uncertain notes. Great golden phrases, rising from nothing and leading to nothing, swam up out of her dreaming mind like the huge, sluggish carp in the cool waters of Mercury. One day she climbed up Shotover and sat looking over the spires of the city, deep-down, fathom-drowned, striking from the round bowl of the river-basin, improbably remote and lovely as the towers of Tirnan-Og beneath the green sea-rollers. She held on her knee the looseleaf notebook that contained her notes upon the Shrewsbury scandal; but her heart was not in that sordid inquiry. A detached pentameter, echoing out of nowhere, was beating in her ears—seven marching feet—a pentameter and a half:—
To that still center where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis—
Had she made it or remembered it? It sounded familiar, but in her heart she knew certainly that it was her own, and seemed familiar only because it was inevitable and right.
She opened the notebook at another page and wrote the words down. She felt like the man in the Punch story: “Nice little barf-room, Liza—what shall we do with it?” Blank verse? …No … it was part of the octave of a sonnet … it had the feel of a sonnet. But what a rhyme-sound! Curled? furled? … she fumbled over rhyme and meter, like an unpracticed musician fingering the keys of a disused instrument.
Then, with many false starts and blank feet, returning and filling and erasing painfully as she went, she began to write again, knowing with a deep inner certainty that somehow, after long and bitter wandering, she was once more in her own place.
Here, then, at home …
the center, the middle sea, the heart of the labyrinth …
Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest, Stay we our steps—course—flight—hands folded and wings furled.
Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest, Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled; Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled, Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west, Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best, From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, To that still center where the spinning world Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Yes; there was something there, though the meter halted monotonously, lacking a free stress-shift, and the chime “dizzying-spinning” was unsatisfactory. The lines swayed and lurched in her clumsy hands, uncontrollable. Still, such as it was, she had an octave.
And there it seemed to end. She had reached the full close, and had nothing more to say. She could find no turn for the sestet to take, no epigram, no change of mood. She put down a tentative line or two and crossed them out. If the right twist would not come of itself, it was useless to manufacture it. She had her image—the world sleeping like a great top on its everlasting spindle—and anything added to that would be mere verse-making. Something might come of it some day. In the meanwhile she had got her mood on to paper—and this is the release that all writers, even the feeblest, seek for as men seek for love; and, having found it, they doze off happily into dreams and trouble their hearts no further.
She shut up the notebook, scandal and sonnet together, and began to make her way slowly down the steep path. Halfway down, she met a small party coming up: two small, flaxen-haired girls in charge of a woman whose face seemed at first only vaguely familiar. Then, as they came close, she realized that it was Annie, looking strange without her cap and apron, taking the children for a walk.
As in duty bound, Harriet greeted them and asked where they were living now.
“We’ve found a very nice place in Headington, madam, thank you. I’m stopping there myself for my holiday. These are my little girls. This one’s Beatrice and this is Carola. Say how do you do to Miss Vane.”
Harriet shook hands gravely with the children and asked their ages and how they were getting on.
“It’s nice for you having them so close.”
“Yes, madam. I don’t know what I should do without them.” The look of quick pride and joy was almost fiercely possessive. Harriet got a glimpse of a fundamental passion that she had, as it were, forgotten when she made her reckoning; it blazed across the serenity of her sonnet-mood like an ominous meteor.
“They’re all I have—now that I’ve lost their father.”
“Oh, dear, yes,” said Harriet, a little uncomfortably. “Has he—how long ago was that, Annie?”
“Three years, madam. He was driven to it. They said he did what he ought not, and it preyed on his mind. But I didn’t care. He never did any harm to anybody, and a man’s first duty is to his wife and family, isn’t it? I’d have starved with him gladly, and worked my fingers to the bone to keep the children. But he couldn’t get over it. It’s a cruel world for anyone with his way to make and so much competition.”
“Yes, indeed,” said Harriet. The elder child, Beatrice, was looking up at her mother with eyes that were too intelligent for her eight years. It would be better to get off the subject of the husband’s wrongs and iniquities, whatever they might be. She murmured that the children must be a great comfort.
“Yes, madam. There’s nothing like having children of your own. They make life worth living. Beatrice here is her father’s living image, aren’t you, darling? I was sorry not to have a boy; but now I’m glad. It’s difficult to bring up boys without a father.”
“And what are Beatrice and Carola going to be when they grow up?”
“I hope they’ll be good girls, madam, and good wives and mothers—that’s what I’ll bring them up to be.”
“I want to ride a motorcycle when I’m bigger,” said Beatrice, shaking her curls assertively.
“Oh, no, darling. What things they say, don’t they, madam?”
“Yes, I do,” said Beatrice. “I’m going to have a motorcycle and keep a garage.”
“Nonsense,” said her mother, a little sharply. “You mustn’t talk so. That’s a boy’s job.”
“But lots of girls do boys’ jobs nowadays,” said Harriet.
“But they ought not, madam. It isn’t fair. The boys have hard enough work to get jobs of their own. Please don’t put such things into her head, madam. You’ll never get a husband, Beatrice, if you mess about in a garage, getting all ugly and dirty.”
“I don’t want one,” said Beatrice, firmly. “I’d rather have a motorcycle.”
Annie looked annoyed; but laughed when Harriet laughed.
“She’ll find out some day, won’t she, madam?”
“Very likely she will,” said Harriet. If the woman took the view that any husband was better than none at all, it was useless to argue. And she had rather got into the habit of shying at all discussion that turned upon men and marriage. She said good-afternoon pleasantly and strode on, a little shaken in her mood, but not unduly so. Either one liked discussing these matters or one did not. And when there were ugly phantoms lurking in the corners of one’s mind, skeletons that one dared not show to anybody, even to Peter—
Well, of course not to Peter; he was the last person. And he, at any rate, had no niche in the gray stones of Oxford. He stood for London, for the swift, rattling, chattering, excitable and devilishly upsetting world of strain and uproar. Here, at the still center (yes, that line was definitely good), he had no place. For a whole week, she had scarcely given him a thought.
And then the dons began to arrive, full of their vacation activities and ready to take up the burden of the most exacting, yet most lovable term of the academic year. Harriet watched them come, wondering which of those cheerful and determined faces concealed a secret. Miss de Vine had been consulting a library in some ancient Flemish town, where was preserved a remarkable family correspondence dealing with trade conditions between England and Flanders under Elizabeth. Her mind was full of statistics about wool and pepper, and it was difficult to get her to think back to what she had done on the last day of the Hilary Term. She had undoubtedly burnt some old papers—there might have been newspapers among them—certainly she never read the Daily Trumpet—she could throw no light on the mutilated newspaper found in the fireplace.
Miss Lydgate—as Harriet had expected—had contrived in a few short weeks to make havoc of her proofs. She was apologetic. She had spent a most interesting long weekend with Professor Somebody, who was a great authority upon Greek quantitative measures; and he had discovered several passages that contained inaccuracies and thrown an entirely fresh light upon the argument of Chapter Seven. Harriet groaned dismally.
Miss Shaw had taken five of her students for a reading-party, had seen four new plays and bought a rather exciting summer outfit. Miss Pyke had spent an enthralling time assisting the curator of a local museum to put together the fragments of three figured pots and a quantity of burial-urns that had been dug up in a field in Essex. Miss Hillyard was really glad to be back in Oxford; she had had to spend a month at her sister’s house while the sister was having a baby; looking after her brother-in-law seemed to have soured her temper. The Dean, on the other hand, had been helping to get a niece married and had found the whole business full of humor. “One of the bridesmaids went to the wrong church and only turned up when it was all over, and there were at least two hundred of us squeezed into a room that would only hold fifty, and I only got half a glass of champagne and no wedding-cake, my tummy was flapping against my spine; and the bridegroom lost his hat at the last moment, and, my dear! would you believe it? people still give plated biscuit-barrels!” Miss Chilperic had gone with her fiancé and his sister to a number of interesting places to study medieval domestic sculpture. Miss Burrows had spent most of her time playing golf. There arrived also a reinforcement in the person of Miss Edwards, the Science tutor, just returned from taking a term’s leave. She was a young and active woman, square in face and shoulder, with bobbed hair and a stand-no-nonsense manner. The only member missing from the Senior Common Room was Mrs. Goodwin, whose small son (a most unfortunate child) had come out with measles immediately upon his return to school and again required his mother’s nursing.
“Of course she can’t help it,” said the Dean, “but it’s a very great nuisance, just at the beginning of the Summer Term. If I’d only known, I could have come back earlier.”
“I don’t see,” observed Miss Hillyard, grimly, “what else you can expect, if you give jobs to widows with children. You have to be prepared for these perpetual interruptions. And for some reason, these domestic preoccupations always have to be put before the work.”
“Well,” said the Dean, “one must put work aside in a case of serious illness.”
“But all children get measles.”
“Yes; but he’s not a very strong child, you know. His father was tubercular, poor man—in fact, that’s what he died of—and if measles should turn to pneumonia, as it so often does, the consequences might be serious.”
“But has it turned to pneumonia?”
“They’re afraid it may. He’s got it very badly. And, as he’s a nervous little creature, he naturally likes to have his mother with him. And in any case, she’d be in quarantine.”
“The longer she stays with him, the longer she’ll be in quarantine.”
“It’s very tiresome of course,” put in Miss Lydgate, mildly. “But if Mrs. Goodwin had isolated herself and come back at the earliest possible moment—as she very bravely offered to do—she would have been suffering a great deal of anxiety.”
“A great many of us have to suffer from anxiety in one way or another,” said Miss Hillyard, sharply. “I have been very anxious about my sister. It is always an anxious business to have a first baby at thirty-five. But if the event had happened to occur in term-time, it would have had to take place without my assistance.”
“It is always difficult to say which duty one should put first,” said Miss Pyke. “Each case must be decided individually. I presume that, in bringing children into the world, one accepts a certain responsibility towards them.”
“I’m not denying it,” said Miss Hillyard. “But if the domestic responsibility is to take precedence of the public responsibility, then the work should be handed over to someone else to do.”
“But the children must be fed and clothed,” said Miss Edwards.
“Quite so. But the mother should not take a resident post.”
“Mrs. Goodwin is an excellent secretary,” said the Dean. “I should be very sorry to lose her. And it’s nice to think that we are able to help her in her very difficult position.”
Miss Hillyard lost patience.
“The fact is, though you will never admit it, that everybody in this place has an inferiority complex about married women and children. For all your talk about careers and independence, you all believe in your hearts that we ought to abase ourselves before any woman who has fulfilled her animal functions.”
“That is absolute nonsense,” said the Bursar.
“It is natural, I suppose, to feel that married women lead a fuller life,” began Miss Lydgate.
“And a more useful one,” retorted Miss Hillyard. “Look at the fuss that’s made over ‘Shrewsbury grandchildren’! Look how delighted you all are when old students get married! As if you were saying Aha! education doesn’t unfit us for real life after all!’ And when a really brilliant scholar throws away all her prospects to marry a curate, you say perfunctorily, ‘What a pity! But of course her own life must come first.’”
“I’ve never said such a thing,” cried the Dean indignantly. “I always say they’re perfect fools to marry.”
“I shouldn’t mind,” said Miss Hillyard, unheeding, “if you said openly that intellectual interests were only a second-best; but you pretend to put them first in theory and are ashamed of them in practice.”
“There’s no need to get so heated about it,” said Miss Barton, breaking in upon the angry protest of Miss Pyke. “After all, some of us may have deliberately chosen not to marry. And, if you will forgive my saying so—”
At this ominous phrase, always the prelude to something quite unforgivable, Harriet and the Dean broke hastily into the discussion.
“Considering that we are devoting our whole lives—”
“Even for a man, it is not always easy to say—”
Their common readiness confounded their good intention. Each broke off and begged the other’s pardon, and Miss Barton went on unchecked:
“It is not altogether wise—or convincing—to show so much animus against married women. It was the same unreasonable prejudice that made you get that scout removed from your staircase—”
“I object,” said Miss Hillyard, with a heightened color, “to this preferential treatment. I do not see why we should put up with slackness on duty because a servant or a secretary happens to be a widow with children. I do not see why Annie should be given a room to herself in the Scouts’ Wing, and charge over a corridor, when servants who have been here for longer than she has have to be content to share a room. I do not—”
“Well,” said Miss Stevens, “I think she is entitled to a little consideration. A woman who has been accustomed to a nice home of her own—”
“Very likely,” said Miss Hillyard. “At any rate, it was not my lack of consideration that led to her precious children being placed in the charge of a common thief.”
“I was always against that,” said the Dean.
“And why did you give in? Because poor Mrs. Jukes was such a nice woman and had a family to keep. She must be considered and rewarded for being fool enough to marry a scoundrel. What’s the good of pretending that you put the interests of the College first, when you hesitate for two whole terms about getting rid of a dishonest porter, because you’re so sorry for his family?”
“There,” said Miss Allison, “I entirely agree with you. The College ought to come first in a case like that.”
“It ought always to come first. Mrs. Goodwin ought to see it, and resign her post if she can’t carry out her duties properly.” She stood up. “Perhaps, however, it is as well that she should be away and stay away. You may remember that, last time she was away, we had no trouble from anonymous letters or monkey-tricks.”
Miss Hillyard put down her coffee-cup and stalked out of the room. Everybody looked uncomfortable.
“Bless my heart!” said the Dean.
“Something very wrong there,” said Miss Edwards, bluntly.
“She’s so prejudiced,” said Miss Lydgate. “I always think it’s a very great pity she never married.”
Miss Lydgate had a way of putting into language that a child could understand things which other people did not say, or said otherwise.
“I should be sorry for the man, I must say,” observed Miss Shaw; “but perhaps I am showing an undue consideration for the male sex. One is almost afraid to open one’s mouth.”
“Poor Mrs. Goodwin!” exclaimed the Bursar. “The very last person!”
She got up angrily and went out. Miss Lydgate followed her. Miss Chilperic, who had said nothing, but looked quite alarmed, murmured that she must get along to work. The Common Room slowly cleared, and Harriet was left with the Dean.
“Miss Lydgate has the most terrifying way of hitting the nail on the head,” said Miss Martin; “because it is obviously much more likely that—”
“A great deal more likely,” said Harriet.
Mr. Jenkyn was a youngish and agreeable don whom Harriet had met the previous term at a party in North Oxford—the same party, in fact, which had led to her acquaintance with Mr. Reginald Pomfret. He resided at Magdalen, and was incidentally one of the pro-Proctors. Harriet had happened to say something to him about the Magdalen Mayday ceremony, and he had promised to send her a ticket for the Tower. Being a scientist and a man of scrupulously exact mind, he remembered his promise; and the ticket duly arrived.
None of the Shrewsbury S.C.R. was going. Most of them had been up on May mornings before. Miss de Vine, had not; but though she had been offered tickets, her heart would not stand the stairs. There were students who had received invitations; but they were not students whom Harriet knew. She therefore set off alone, well before sunrise, having made an appointment to meet Miss Edwards when she came down and take an outrigger down to the Isis for a pipe-opener before having breakfast on the river.
The choristers had sung their hymn. The sun had risen, rather red and angry, casting a faint flush over the roofs and spires of the waking city. Harriet leaned over the parapet, looking down upon the heart-breaking beauty of the curved High Street, scarcely disturbed as yet by the roar of petrol-driven traffic. Under her feet, the tower began to swing to the swinging of the bells. The little group of bicyclists and pedestrians far below began to break up and move away. Mr. Jenkyn came up, said a few pleasant words, remarked that he had to hurry off to go bathing with a friend at Parson’s Pleasure; there was no need for her to hurry—could she get down the stairs all right alone?
Harriet laughed and thanked him, and he took leave of her at the stair-head. She moved to the East side of the tower. There lay the river and Magdalen Bridge, with its pack of punts and canoes. Among them, she distinguished the sturdy figure of Miss Edwards, in a bright orange jumper. It was wonderful to stand so above the world, with a sea of sound below and an ocean of air above, all mankind shrunk to the proportions of an ant-heap. True, a cluster of people still lingered upon the tower itself—her companions in this airy hermitage. They too, spell-bound with beauty—
Great Scott! What was that girl trying to do?
Harriet made a dive at the young woman who was just placing one knee on the stonework and drawing herself up between two crenellations of the parapet.
“Here!” she said, “you mustn’t do that. It’s dangerous.”
The girl, a thin, fair, frightened-looking child, desisted at once.
“I only wanted to look over.”
“Well, that’s very silly of you. You might get giddy. You’d better come along down. It would be very unpleasant for the Magdalen authorities if anyone fell over. They might have to stop letting people come up.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t think.”
“Well, you should think. Is anybody with you?”
“No.”
“I’m going down now; you’d better come too.”
“Very well.”
Harriet shepherded the girl down the dark spiral. She had no proof of anything but rash curiosity, but she wondered. The girl spoke with a slightly common accent, and Harriet would have put her down for a shop-assistant, but for the fact that tickets for the Tower were more likely to be restricted to University people and their friends. She might be an undergraduate, come up with a County Scholarship. In any case, one was perhaps attaching too much importance to the incident.
They were passing the bell-chamber now, and the brazen clamor was loud and insistent. It reminded her of a story that Peter Wimsey had told her, years ago now, one day when only a resolute determination to talk on and on had enabled him to prevent a most unfortunate outing from ending in a quarrel. Something about a body in a belfry, and a flood, and the great bells bawling the alarm across three counties.
The noise of the bells died down behind her as she passed, and the recollection with it; but she had paused for a moment in the awkward descent, and the girl, whoever she was, had got ahead of her. When she reached the foot of the stair and came out into clear daylight, she saw the slight figure scurrying off through the passage into the quad. She was doubtful whether to pursue it or not. She followed at a distance, watched it turn downwards up the High, and suddenly found herself almost in the arms of Mr. Pomfret, coming down from Queen’s in a very untidy grey flannel suit, with a towel over his arm.
“Hullo!” said Mr. Pomfret. “You been saluting the sunrise?”
“Yes. Not a very good sunrise, but quite a good salute.”
“I think it’s going to rain,” said Mr. Pomfret. “But I said I would bathe and I am bathing.”
“Much the same here,” said Harriet. “I said I’d scull, and I’m sculling.”
“Aren’t we a pair of heroes?” said Mr. Pomfret. He accompanied her to Magdalen Bridge, was hailed by an irritable friend in a canoe, who said he had been waiting for half an hour, and went off upriver, grumbling that nobody loved him and that he knew it was going to rain.
Harriet joined Miss Edwards, who said, on hearing about the girl:
“Well, you might have got her name, I suppose. But I don’t see what one could do about it. It wasn’t one of our people, I suppose?”
“I didn’t recognize her. And she didn’t seem to recognize me.”
“Then it probably wasn’t. Pity you didn’t get the name, all the same. People oughtn’t to do that kind of thing. Inconsiderate. Will you take bow or stroke?”