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 but 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 honour 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 tune 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 him 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 favour 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 pocket-book. “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-finger-tip to little-finger-tip, 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 moustache. 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 Honourable 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.