Strong Poison

by Dorothy L. Sayers

“So pleased,” shouted Madame Kropotky through the clamour. “Sit by me. Vanya will get you something to drink. It is beautiful, yes? That is Stanislas—such a genius—his new work on the Piccadilly Tube Station—great, n’est-ce pas ? Five days he was continually travelling upon the escalator to absorb the tone-values.”

  “Colossal!” yelled Wimsey.

  “So—you think? Ah! you can appreciate! You understand it is really for the big orchestra. On the piano it is nothing. It needs the brass, the effects, the timpani—b’rrrrrrr! So! But one seizes the form, the outline! Ah! it finishes! Superb! Magnificent!”

  The enormous clatter ceased. The pianist mopped his face and glared haggardly round. The violinist put down its instrument and stood up, revealing itself, by its legs, to be female. The room exploded into conversation. Madame Kropotky leapt over her seated guests and embraced the perspiring Stanislas on both cheeks. The frying-pan was lifted from the stove in a fusillade of spitting fat, a shriek went up for ‘Vanya!’ and presently a cadaverous face was pushed down to Wimsey’s, and a deep guttural voice barked at him: “What will you drink?” while simultaneously a plate of kippers came hovering perilously over his shoulder.

  “Thanks,” said Wimsey, “I have just dined—just dined ,” he roared despairingly, “full up, complet !”

  Marjorie came to the rescue with a shriller voice and more determined refusal.

  “Take those dreadful things away, Vanya. They make me sick. Give us some tea, tea, tea!”

  “Tea!” echoed the cadaverous man, “they want tea! What do you think of Stanislas’ tone-poem? Strong, modern, eh? The soul of rebellion in the crowd—the clash, the revolt at the heart of the machinery. It gives the bourgeois something to think of, oh, yes!”

  “Bah!” said a voice in Wimsey’s ear, as the cadaverous man turned away, “it is nothing. Bourgeois music. Programme music. Pretty!—You should hear Vrilovitch’s ‘Ecstasy on the letter Z.’ That pure vibration with no antiquated pattern in it. Stanislas—he thinks much of himself, but it is old as the hills—you can sense the resolution at the back of all his discords. Mere harmony in camouflage. Nothing in it. But he takes them all in because he has red hair and reveals his bony structure.”

  The speaker certainly did not err along these lines, for he was as bald and round as a billiard-ball. Wimsey replied soothingly:

  “Well, what can you do with the wretched and antiquated instruments of our orchestra? A diatonic scale, bah! Thirteen miserable, bourgeois semitones, pooh! To express the infinite complexity of modern emotion, you need a scale of thirty-two notes to the octave.”

  “But why cling to the octave?” said the fat man. “Till you can cast away the octave and its sentimental associations, you walk in fetters of convention.”

  “That’s the spirit!” said Wimsey. “I would dispense with all definite notes. After all, the cat does not need them for his midnight melodies, powerful and expressive as they are. The love-hunger of the stallion takes no account of octave or interval in giving forth the cry of passion. It is only man, trammelled by a stultifying convention—Oh, hullo, Marjorie, sorry—what is it?”

  “Come and talk to Ryland Vaughan,” said Marjorie. “I have told him you are a tremendous admirer of Philip Boyes’ books. Have you read them?”

  “Some of them. But I think I’m getting light-headed.”

  “You’ll feel worse in an hour or so. So you’d better come now.” She steered him to a remote spot near the gas-oven, where an extremely elongated man was sitting curled up on a floor cushion, eating caviare out of a jar with a pickle-fork. He greeted Wimsey with a sort of lugubrious enthusiasm.

  “Hell of a place,” he said, “hell of a business altogether. This stove’s too hot. Have a drink. What the devil else can one do? I come here, because Philip used to come here. Habit, you know. I hate it, but there’s nowhere else to go.”

  “You knew him very well, of course,” said Wimsey, seating himself in a waste paper basket, and wishing he was wearing a bathing-suit.

  “I was his only real friend,” said Ryland Vaughan, mournfully. “All the rest only cared to pick his brains. Apes! parrots! all the bloody lot of them.”

  “I’ve read his books and thought them very fine,” said Wimsey, with some sincerity. “But he seemed to me an unhappy soul.”

  “Nobody understood him,” said Vaughan. “They called him difficult—who wouldn’t be difficult with so much to fight against? They sucked the blood out of him, and his damned thieves of publishers took every blasted coin they could lay their hands on. And then that bitch of a woman poisoned him. My God, what a life!”

  “Yes, but what made her do it—if she did do it?”

  “Oh, she did it all right. Sheer, beastly spite and jealousy, that’s all there was to it. Just because she couldn’t write anything but tripe herself. Harriet Vane’s got the bug all these damned women have got—fancy they can do things. They hate a man and they hate his work. You’d think it would have been enough for her to help and look after a genius like Phil, wouldn’t you? Why, damn it, he used to ask her advice about his work, her advice, good lord!”

  “Did he take it?”

  “Take it? She wouldn’t give it. Told him she never gave opinions on other authors’ work. Other authors! The impudence of it! Of course she was out of things among us all, but why couldn’t she realise the difference between her mind and his? Of course it was hopeless from the start for Philip to get entangled with that kind of woman. Genius must be served, not argued with. I warned him at the time, but he was infatuated. And then, to want to marry her—”

  “Why did he?” asked Wimsey.

  “Remains of parsonical upbringing, I suppose. It was really pitiful. Besides, I think that fellow Urquhart did a lot of mischief. Sleek family lawyer—d’you know him?”

  “No.”

  “He got hold of him—put up to it by the family, I imagine. I saw the influence creeping over Phil long before the real trouble began. Perhaps it’s a good thing he’s dead. It would have been ghastly to watch him turn conventional and settle down.”

  “When did this cousin start getting hold of him, then?”

  “Oh—about two years ago—a little more, perhaps. Asked him to dinner and that sort of thing. The minute I saw him I knew he was out to ruin Philip, body and soul. What he wanted—what Phil wanted, I mean—was freedom and room to turn about in, but what with the woman and the cousin and the father in the background—oh, well! It’s no use crying about it now. His work is left, and that’s the best part of him. He’s left me that to look after, at least. Harriet Vane didn’t get her finger in that pie, after all.”

  “I’m sure it’s absolutely safe in your hands,” said Wimsey.

  “But when one thinks what there might have been,” said Vaughan, turning his blood-shot eyes miserably on Lord Peter, “it’s enough to make one cut one’s throat, isn’t it?”

  Wimsey expressed agreement.

  “By the way,” he said, “you were with him all that last day, till he went to his cousin’s. You don’t think he had anything on him in the way of—poison or anything? I don’t want to seem unkind—but he was unhappy—it would be rotten to think that he—”

  “No,” said Vaughan, “no. That I’ll swear he never did. He would have told me—he trusted me in those last days. I shared all his thoughts. He was miserably hurt by that damned woman, but he wouldn’t have gone without telling me or saying good-bye. And besides—he wouldn’t have chosen that way. Why should he? I could have given him—”

  He checked himself, and glanced at Wimsey, but, seeing nothing in his face beyond sympathetic attention, went on:

  “I remember talking to him about drugs. Hyoscine—veronal—all that sort of thing. He said, ‘If ever I want to go out, Ryland, you’ll show me the way.’ And I would have—if he’d really wanted it. But arsenic! Philip, who loved beauty so much—do you think he would have chosen arsenic?—the suburban poisoner’s outfit? That’s absolutely impossible.”

/>   “It’s not an agreeable sort of thing to take, certainly,” said Wimsey.

  “Look here,” said Vaughan, hoarsely and impressively—he had been putting a constant succession of brandies on top of the caviare, and was beginning to lose his reserve—“Look here! See this!” He pulled a small bottle from his breast pocket. “That’s waiting, till I’ve finished editing Phil’s books. It’s a comfort to have it there to look at, you know. Peaceful. Go out through the ivory gate—that’s classical—they brought me up on the classics. These people would laugh at a fellow, but you needn’t tell them I said it—funny, the way it sticks—‘tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore, ulterioris amore’—what’s that bit about the souls thronging thick as leaves in Vallombrosa—no, that’s Milton—‘amorioris ultore—ultoriore’—damn it—poor Phil!” Here Mr. Vaughan burst into tears and patted the little bottle.

  Wimsey, whose head and ears were thumping as though he were sitting in an engine-room, got up softly and withdrew. Somebody had begun a Hungarian song and the stove was white-hot. He made signals of distress to Marjorie, who was sitting in a corner with a group of men. One of them appeared to be reading his own poems with his mouth nearly in her ear, and another was sketching something on the back of an envelope, to the accompaniment of yelps of merriment from the rest. The noise they made disconcerted the singer, who stopped in the middle of a bar, and cried angrily:

  “Ach! this noise! these interruptions! they are intolerable! I lose myself! Stop! I begin all over again, from the beginning.”

  Marjorie sprang up, apologising.

  “I’m a brute—I’m not keeping your menagerie in order, Nina—we’re being perfect nuisances. Forgive me, Marya, I’m in a bad temper. I’d better pick up Peter and toddle away. Come and sing to me another day, darling, when I’m feeling better and there is more room for my feelings to expand. Good-night, Nina—we’ve enjoyed it frightfully—and, Boris, that poem’s the best thing you’ve done, only I couldn’t hear it properly. Peter, tell them what a rotten mood I’m in tonight and take me home.”

  “That’s right,” said Wimsey, “nervy, you know—bad effect on the manners and so on.”

  “Manners,” said a bearded gentleman suddenly and loudly, “are for the bourgeois.”

  “Quite right,” said Wimsey. “Beastly bad form, and gives you repressions in the what-not. Come on, Marjorie, or we shall all be getting polite.”

  “I begin again,” said the singer, “from the beginning.”

  “Whew!” said Wimsey, on the staircase.

  “Yes, I know. I think I’m a perfect martyr to put up with it. Anyway, you’ve seen Vaughan. Nice dopey specimen, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think he murdered Philip Boyes, do you? I had to see him to make sure. Where do we go next?”

  “We’ll try Joey Trimbles’. That’s the stronghold of the opposition show.”

  Joey Trimbles occupied a studio over a mews. Here there was the same crowd, the same smoke, more kippers, still more drinks and still more heat and conversation. In addition there was a blaze of electric light, a gramophone, five dogs and a strong smell of oil-paints. Sylvia Marriott was expected..Wimsey found himself involved in a discussion of free love, D. H. Lawrence, the prurience of prudery and the immoral significance of long skirts. In time, however, he was rescued by the arrival of a masculine looking middle-aged woman with a sinister smile and a pack of cards, who proceeded to tell everybody’s fortune. The company gathered around her, and at the same time a girl came in and announced that Sylvia had sprained her ankle and couldn’t come. Everybody said warmly, “Oh, how sickening, poor dear!” and forgot the subject immediately.

  “We’ll scoot off,” said Marjorie. “Never mind about saying goodbye. Nobody marks you. It’s good luck about Sylvia, because she’ll be at home and can’t escape us. I sometimes wish they’d all sprain their ankles. And yet, you know, nearly all those people are doing very good work. Even the Kropotky crowd. I used to enjoy this kind of thing myself, once.”

  “We’re getting old, you and I,” said Wimsey. “Sorry, that’s rude. But do you know, I’m getting on for forty, Marjorie.”

  “You wear well. But you are looking a bit fagged tonight, Peter dear. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing at all but middle-age.”

  “You’ll be settling down if you’re not careful.”

  “Oh, I’ve been settled for years.”

  “With Bunter and the books. I envy you sometimes, Peter.”

  Wimsey said nothing. Marjorie looked at him almost in alarm, and tucked her arm in his.

  “Peter—do please be happy. I mean, you’ve always been the comfortable sort of person that nothing could touch. Don’t alter, will you?”

  That was the second time Wimsey had been asked not to alter himself; the first time, the request had exalted him; this time, it terrified him. As the taxi lurched along the rainy Embankment, he felt for the first time the dull and angry helplessness which is the first warning stroke of the triumph of mutability. Like the poisoned Athulf in the Fool’s Tragedy , he could have cried, “Oh, I am changing, changing, fearfully changing.” Whether his present enterprise failed or succeeded, things would never be the same again. It was not that his heart would be broken by a disastrous love—he had outlived the luxurious agonies of youthful blood, and in this very freedom from illusion he recognised the loss of something. From now on, every hour of light-heartedness would be, not a prerogative but an achievement—one more axe or case bottle or fowling-piece, rescued, Crusoe fashion, from a sinking ship.

  For the first time, too, he doubted his own power to carry through what he had undertaken. His personal feelings had been involved before this in his investigations, but they had never before clouded his mind. He was fumbling—grasping uncertainly here and there at fugitive and mocking possibilities. He asked questions at random, doubtful of his object, and the shortness of the time, which would once have stimulated, now frightened and confused him.

  “I’m sorry, Marjorie,” he said, rousing himself, “I’m afraid I’m being damned dull. Oxygen-starvation, probably. D’you mind if we have the window down a bit? That’s better. Give me good food and a little air to breathe and I will caper, goat-like, to a dishonourable old age. People will point me out, as I creep, bald and yellow and supported by discreet corsetry, into the night-clubs of my great-grandchildren, and they’ll say, ‘Look, darling! that’s the wicked Lord Peter, celebrated for never having spoken a reasonable word for the last ninety-six years. He was the only aristocrat who escaped the guillotine in the revolution of 1960. We keep him as a pet for the children.’ And I shall wag my head and display my up-to-date dentures and say, ‘Ah, ha! They don’t have the fun we used to have in my young days, the poor, well-regulated creatures!’”

  “There won’t be any night-clubs then for you to creep into, if they’re as disciplined as all that.”

  “Oh, yes—nature will have her revenge. They will slink away from the Government Communal Games to play solitaire in catacombs over a bowl of unsterilised skim-milk. Is this the place?”

  “Yes; I hope there’s someone to let us in at the bottom, if Sylvia’s bust her leg. Yes—I hear footsteps. Oh, it’s you Eiluned; how’s Sylvia?”

  “Pretty all right, only swelled up—the ankle, that is. Coming up?”

  “Is she visible?”

  “Yes, perfectly respectable.”

  “Good, because I’m bringing Lord Peter Wimsey up, too.”

  “Oh,” said the girl. “How do you do? You detect things, don’t you? Have you come for the body or anything?”

  “Lord Peter’s looking into Harriet Vane’s business for her.”

  “Is he? That’s good. Glad somebody’s doing something about it.” She was a short, stout girl with a pugnacious nose and a twinkle. “What do you say it was? I say he did it himself. He was the self-pitying sort, you know. Hullo, Syl—here’s Marjorie, with a bloke who’s going to get Harriet out of jug.”

 
“Produce him instantly!” was the reply from within. The door opened upon a small bed-sitting room, furnished with the severest simplicity, and inhabited by a pale, spectacled young woman in a Morris chair, her bandaged foot stretched out upon a packing-case.

  “I can’t get up, because, as Jenny Wren said, my back’s bad and my leg’s queer. Who’s the champion, Marjorie?”

  Wimsey was introduced, and Eiluned Price immediately inquired, rather truculently: “Can he drink coffee, Marjorie? Or does he require masculine refreshment?”

  “He’s perfectly godly, righteous and sober, and drinks anything but cocoa and fizzy lemonade.”

  “Oh! I only asked because some of your male belongings need stimulating, and we haven’t got the wherewithal, and the pub’s just closing.”

  She stumped over to a cupboard, and Sylvia said:

  “Don’t mind Eiluned; she likes to treat ’em rough. Tell me, Lord Peter, have you found any clues or anything?”

  “I don’t know,” said Wimsey. “I’ve put a few ferrets down a few holes. I hope something may come up the other end.”

  “Have you seen the cousin yet—the Urquhart creature?”

  “Got an appointment with him for tomorrow. Why?”

  “Sylvia’s theory is that he did it,” said Eiluned.

  “That’s interesting. Why?”

  “Female intuition,” said Eiluned, bluntly. “She doesn’t like the way he does his hair.”

  “I only said he was too sleek to be true,” protested Sylvia. “And who else could it have been? I’m sure it wasn’t Ryland Vaughan; he’s an obnoxious ass, but he is genuinely heart-broken about it all.”

  Eiluned sniffed scornfully, and departed to fill a kettle at a tap on the landing.

  “And whatever Eiluned thinks, I can’t believe Phil Boyes did it himself.”

  “Why not?” asked Wimsey.

  “He talked such a lot,” said Sylvia. “And he really had too high an opinion of himself. I don’t think he would have wilfully deprived the world of the privilege of reading his books.”

  “He would,” said Eiluned. “He’d do it out of spite, to make the grownups sorry. No, thanks,” as Wimsey advanced to carry the kettle, “I’m quite capable of carrying six pints of water.”