She crossed over to the table, cut herself a slice of cake and glanced casually out of the farther window.
Lord Saint-George stood, with a careless air of owning the place, at the corner of the Library Wing, watching a game of tennis being played between two bare-backed students and two young men whose shirts kept on escaping from their belts. Growing tired of this, he sauntered past the windows towards Queen Elizabeth, his eye roving over a group of Shrewsburians a-sprawl under the beeches, like that of a young Sultan inspecting a rather unpromising consignment of Circassian slaves.
‘Supercilious little beast!’ thought Harriet; and wondered if he was looking for her. If he was, he could wait, or ask properly at the Lodge.
‘Oho!’ said the Dean. ‘So that’s how the milk got into the coconut!’
From the door of the Library Wing there issued slowly Miss de Vine, and behind her, grave and deferential, Lord Peter Wimsey. They skirted the tennis court in earnest conversation. Lord Saint-George, viewing them from afar, advanced to meet them. They joined forces on the path. They stood for a little time talking. They moved away towards the Lodge.
‘Dear me!’ said the Dean. ‘Abduction of Helen de Vine by Paris and Hector.’
‘No, no,’ said Miss Pyke. ‘Paris was the brother of Hector, not his nephew. I do not think he had any uncles.’
‘Talking of uncles,’ said the Dean, ‘is it true, Miss Hillyard, that Richard III – I thought she was here.’
‘She was here,’ said Harriet.
‘Helen is being returned to us,’ said the Dean. ‘The siege of Troy is postponed.’
The trio were returning again up the path. Half-way along Miss de Vine took leave of the two men and returned towards her own room.
At that moment, the watchers in the S.C.R. were petrified to behold a portent. Miss Hillyard emerged from the foot of the Hall stair, bore down upon the uncle and nephew, addressed them, cut Lord Peter neatly off from his convoy and towed him firmly away towards the New Quad.
‘Glory alleluia!’ said the Dean. ‘Hadn’t you better go out and rescue your young friend? He’s been deserted again.’
‘You could offer him a cup of tea,’ suggested Miss Pyke. ‘It would be an agreeable diversion for us.’
‘I’m surprised at you, Miss Pyke,’ said Miss Barton. ‘No man is safe from women like you.’
‘Now, where have I heard that sentiment before?’ said the Dean.
‘In one of the Poison-letters,’ said Harriet.
‘If you’re suggesting—’ began Miss Barton.
‘I’m only suggesting,’ said the Dean, ‘that it’s a bit of a cliché.’
‘I meant it for a joke,’ retorted Miss Barton, angrily. ‘Some people have no sense of humour.’
She went out, and slammed the door. Lord Saint-George had wandered back and was sitting in the loggia leading up to the Library. He rose politely as Miss Barton stalked past him on the way to her room, and made some remark, to which the Fellow replied briefly, but with a smile.
‘Insinuating men, these Wimseys,’ said the Dean. ‘Vamping the S.C.R. right and left.’
Harriet laughed, but in Saint-George’s quick, appraising glance at Miss Barton she had again seen his uncle look for a moment out of his eyes. These family resemblances were unnerving. She curled herself into the window-seat and watched for nearly ten minutes, The viscount sat still, smoking a cigarette, and looking entirely at his ease. Miss Lydgate, Miss Burrows and Miss Shaw came in and began to pour out tea. The tennis-party finished the set and moved away. Then, from the left, came a quick, light step along the gravel walk.
‘Hullo!’ said Harriet to the owner of the step.
‘Hullo!’ said Peter. ‘Fancy seeing you here!’ He grinned. ‘Come and talk to Gerald. He’s in the loggia.’
‘I see him quite plainly,’ said Harriet. ‘His profile has been much admired.’
‘As a good adopted aunt, why didn’t you go and be kind to the poor lad?’
‘I never was one to interfere. I keep myself to myself.’
‘Well, come now.’
Harriet got down from the window-seat and joined Wimsey outside.
‘I brought him here,’ said Peter, ‘to see if he could make any identifications. But he doesn’t seem able to.’
Lord Saint-George greeted Harriet enthusiastically.
‘There was another female went past me,’ he said, turning to Peter. ‘Grey hair badly bobbed. Earnest manner. Dressed in sackcloth. Institutional touch about her. I got speech of her.’
‘Miss Barton,’ said Harriet.
‘Right sort of eyes; wrong sort of voice. I don’t think it’s her. It might be the one that collared you, Uncle. She had a kind of a lean and hungry look.’
‘H’m!’ said Peter. ‘How about the first one?’
‘I’d like to see her without her glasses.’
‘If you mean Miss de Vine,’ said Harriet, ‘I doubt whether she could see very far without them.’
‘That’s a point,’ said Peter, thoughtfully.
‘I’m sorry to be so vague and all that,’ said Lord Saint-George. ‘But it’s not easy to identify a hoarse whisper and a pair of eyes seen once by moonlight.’
‘No,’ said Peter, ‘it needs a good deal of practice.’
‘Practice be blowed,’ retorted his nephew. ‘I’m not going to make a practice of it.’
‘It’s not a bad sport,’ said Peter, ‘You might take it up till you can start games again.’
‘How’s the shoulder getting on?’ inquired Harriet.
‘Oh, not too bad, thanks. The massage bloke is working wonders with it. I can lift the old arm shoulder-high now. It’s quite serviceable – for some things.’
By the way of demonstration he threw the damaged arm around Harriet’s shoulders, and kissed her rapidly and expertly before she could dodge him.
‘Children, children!’ cried his uncle, plaintively, ‘remember where you are.’
‘It’s all right for me,’ said Lord Saint-George. ‘I’m an adopted nephew. Isn’t that right, Aunt Harriet?’
‘Not bang underneath the windows of the S.C.R.,’ said Harriet.
‘Come round the corner, then,’ said the viscount, impenitently, ‘and I’ll do it again. As Uncle Peter says, these things need a good deal of practice.’
He was impudently set upon tormenting his uncle, and Harriet felt extremely angry with him. However, to show annoyance was to play into his hands. She smiled upon him pityingly and uttered the Brasenose porter’s classic rebuke:
‘It’s no good you making a noise, gentlemen. The Dean ain’t a-coming down to-night.’
This actually silenced him for the moment. She turned to Peter, who said:
‘Have you any commissions in Town?’
‘Why, are you going back?’
‘I’m running up to-night and on to York in the morning. I expect to get back on Thursday.’
‘York?’
‘Yes; I want to see a man there – about a dog, and all that.’
‘Oh, I see. Well – if you wouldn’t be out of your way to call at my flat, you might take up a few chapters of manuscript to my secretary. I’d rather trust you than the post. Could you manage it?’
‘With very great pleasure,’ said Wimsey, formally.
She ran up to her room to get the papers, and from the window observed that the Wimsey family was having the matter out with itself. When she came down with the parcel she found the nephew waiting at the door of Tudor, rather red in the face.
‘Please, I am to apologise.’
‘I should think so,’ said Harriet, severely. ‘I can’t be disgraced like this in my own quad. Frankly, I can’t afford it.’
‘I’m most frightfully sorry,’ said Lord Saint-George. ‘It was rotten of me. Honestly, I wasn’t thinking of anything except getting Uncle Peter’s goat. And if it’s any satisfaction to you,’ he added, ruefully, ‘I got it’
‘Well, be decent to him; he’s very decent to
you.’
‘I will be good,’ said Peter’s nephew, taking the parcel from her, and they proceeded amicably together till Peter rejoined them at the Lodge.
‘Damn that boy!’ said Wimsey, when he had sent Saint-George ahead to start up the car.
‘Oh, Peter, don’t worry about every little thing so dreadfully. What does it matter? He only wanted to tease you.’
‘It’s a pity he can’t find some other way to do it. I seem to be a perfect mill-stone tied round your neck, and the sooner I clear out the better.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ said Harriet, irritated. ‘If you’re going to be morbid about it, it certainly would be better for you if you did clear out. I’ve told you so before.’
Lord Saint-George, finding his elders dilatory, blew a cheerful ‘hi-tiddley-hi-ti, pom, pom’ on the horn.
‘Damn and blast!’ said Peter. He took gate and path at a bound, pushed his nephew angrily out of the driving-seat, jerked the door of the Daimler to noisily and shot off up the road with a bellowing roar. Harriet, finding herself unexpectedly possessed of a magnificent fit of bad temper, went back, determined to extract the last ounce of enjoyment out of it; an exercise in which she was greatly helped by the discovery that the little episode on the loggia had greatly intrigued the Senior Common Room, and by learning from Miss Allison, after Hall, that Miss Hillyard, when she heard of it, had made some very unpleasant observations, which it was only right that Miss Vane should know about.
Oh, God! thought Harriet, alone in her room, what have I done, more than thousands of other people, except have the rotten luck to be tried for my life and have the whole miserable business dragged out into daylight? . . . Anybody would think I’d been punished enough. . . . But nobody can forget it for a moment. . . . I can’t forget it. . . . Peter can’t forget it. . . . If Peter wasn’t a fool he’d chuck it. . . . He must see how hopeless it all is. . . . Does he think I like to see him suffering vicarious agonies? . . . Does he really suppose I could ever marry him for the pleasure of seeing him suffer agonies? . . . Can’t he see that the only thing for me to do is to keep out of it all? . . . What the devil possessed me to bring him to Oxford? . . . Yes – and I thought it would be so nice to retire to Oxford . . . to have ‘unpleasant observations’ made about me by Miss Hillyard, who’s half potty, if you ask me. . . . Somebody’s potty, anyhow . . . that seems to be what happens to one if one keeps out of the way of love and marriage and all the rest of the muddle. . . . Well if Peter fancies I’m going to ‘accept the protection of his name’ and be grateful, he’s damn well mistaken. . . . A nice, miserable business that’d be for him. . . . It’s a nice, miserable business for him, too, if he really wants me – if he does – and can’t have what he wants because I had the rotten luck to be tried for a murder I didn’t do. . . . It looks as if he was going to get hell either way. . . . Well, let him get hell, it’s his look-out. . . . It’s a pity he saved me from being hanged – he probably wishes by now he’d left me alone. . . . I suppose any decently grateful person would give him what he wants. . . .. But it wouldn’t be much gratitude to make him miserable. . . . We should both be perfectly miserable, because neither of us could ever forget. . . . I very nearly did forget the other day on the river. . . . And I had forgotten this afternoon, only he remembered it first. . . . Damn that impudent little beast! how horribly cruel the young can be to the middle-aged! . . . I wasn’t frightfully kind myself. . . . And I did know what I was doing. . . . It’s a good thing Peter’s gone . . . but I wish he hadn’t gone and left me in this ghastly place where people go off their heads and write horrible letters. . . .. ‘When I am from him I am dead till I be with him.’ . . . No, it won’t do to feel like that. . . . I won’t get mixed up with that kind of thing again. . . . I’ll stay out of it. . . . I’ll stay here . . . where people go queer in their heads. . . . Oh, God, what have I done, that I should be such a misery to myself and other people? Nothing more than thousands of women . . .
Round and round, like a squirrel in a cage, till at last Harriet had to say firmly too herself: This won’t do, or I shall go potty myself. I’d better keep my mind on the job. What’s taken Peter to York? Miss de Vine? If I hadn’t lost my temper I might have found out, instead of wasting time in quarrelling. I wonder if he’s made any notes on the dossier.
She took up the loose-leaf book, which was still wrapped in its paper and string and sealed all over with the Wimsey crest. ‘As my Whimsy takes me’ – Peter’s whimsies had taken him into a certain amount of trouble. She broke the seals impatiently; but the result was disappointing. He had marked nothing – presumably he had copied out anything he wanted. She turned the pages, trying to piece some sort of solution together, but too tired to think coherently. And then – yes; here was his writing, sure enough, but not on a page of the dossier. This was the unfinished sonnet – and of all the idiotic things to do, to leave half-finished sonnets mixed up with one’s detective work for other people to see! A school-girl trick, enough to make anybody blush. Particularly since, from what she remembered of the sonnet, its sentiments had become remarkably inappropriate to the state of her feelings.
But here it was: and in the interval it had taken to itself a sestet and stood, looking a little unbalanced, with her own sprawling hand above and Peter’s deceptively neat script below, like a large top on a small spindle.
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 in dizzying circles hurled
To that still centre where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.
Lay on thy whips, O Love, that me upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.
Having achieved this, the poet appeared to have lost countenance for he had added the comment:
‘A very conceited, metaphysical conclusion!’
So. So there was the turn she had vainly sought for the sestet! Her beautiful, big, peaceful humming-top turned to a whip-top, and sleeping, as it were, upon compulsion. (And, damn him! how dared he picked up her word ‘sleep’ and use it four times in as many lines, and each time in a different foot, as though juggling with the accent-shift were child’s play? And drag out the last half-line with those great, heavy, drugged, drowsy monosyllables, contradicting the sense so as to deny their own contradiction? It was not one of the world’s great sestets, but it was considerably better than her own octave: which was monstrous of it.)
But if she wanted an answer to her questions about Peter, there it was, quite appallingly plain. He did not want to forget, or to be quiet, or to be spared things, or to stay put. All he wanted was some kind of central stability, and he was apparently ready to take anything that came along, so long as it stimulated him to keep that precarious balance. And of course, if he really felt like that, everything he had ever said or done, as far as she was concerned, was perfectly consistent. ‘Mine is only a balance of opposing forces.’ . . . ‘What does it matter if it hurts like hell, so long as it makes a good book?’. . . ‘What is the use of making mistakes if you don’t make use of them?’ . . . ‘Feeling like Judas is part of the job.’ . . . ‘The first thing a principle does is to kill somebody.’ . . . If that was his attitude, it was clearly ridiculous to urge him, in kindly tones, to stand aside for fear he might get a rap over the shins.
He had tried standing aside. ‘I have been running away from myself for twenty years, and it doesn’t work.’ He no longer believed that the Ethiopian could change his skin to rhinoceros hide. Even
in the five years or so that she had known him, Harriet had seen him strip off his protections, layer by layer, till there was uncommonly little left but the naked truth.
That, then, was what he wanted her for. For some reason, obscure to herself and probably also to him, she had the power to force him outside his defences. Perhaps, seeing her struggling in a trap of circumstances, he had walked out deliberately to her assistance. Or perhaps the sight of her struggles had warned him what might happen to him, if he remained in a trap of his own making.
Yet with all this, he seemed willing to let her run back behind the barriers of the mind, provided – yes, he was consistent after all – provided she would make her own way of escape through her work. He was, in fact, offering her the choice between himself and Wilfrid. He did recognise that she had an outlet which he had not.
And that, she supposed, was why he was so morbidly sensitive about his own part in the comedy. His own needs were (as he saw the matter) getting between her and her legitimate way of escape. They involved her in difficulties which he could not share, because she had consistently refused him the right to share them. He had nothing of his nephew’s cheerful readiness to take and have. Careless, selfish little beast, thought Harriet (meaning the viscount), can’t he leave his uncle alone?
. . . It was just conceivable, by the way, that Peter was quite plainly and simply and humanly jealous of his nephew – not, of course, of his relations with Harriet (which would be disgusting and ridiculous), but of the careless young egotism which made those relations possible.
And, after all, Peter had been right. It was difficult to account for Lord Saint-George’s impertinence without allowing people to assume that she was on terms with Peter which would explain that kind of thing. It had undoubtedly made an awkwardness. It was easy to say, ‘Oh, yes. I knew him slightly and went to see him when he was laid up after a motor accident.’ She did not really very much mind if Miss Hillyard supposed that with a person of her dubious reputation all and any liberties might be taken. But she did mind the corollary that might be drawn about Peter. That after five years’ patient friendship he should have acquired only the right to look on while his nephew romped in public went near to making him look a fool. But anything else would not be true. She had placed him in exactly that imbecile position, and she admitted that that was not very pretty conduct.
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