“Well, girls! Didn’t I tell you he was just the perfect English aristocrat?” At which point the much-tried Wimsey lay down among the tea-cups and became hysterical.
“Peter,” said Harriet, when he had finished crowing like a cock, “your unconquerable sweetness of disposition is very shaming. I lose my temper with that harmless woman. Have some more tea.”
“I think,” said his lordship, mournfully, “I had better stop being the perfect English aristocrat and become the great detective after all. Fate seems to be turning my one-day romance into a roaring farce. If that is the dossier, let me have it. We’ll see,” he added with a faint chuckle, “what kind of a detective you make when you’re left to yourself.”
Harriet handed him the loose-leaf book and an envelope containing the various anonymous documents, all endorsed, where possible, with the date and manner of publication. He examined the documents first, separately and carefully, without manifesting surprise, disgust, or, indeed, any emotion beyond meditative interest. He then put them all back in the envelope, filled and lit a pipe, curled himself up among the cushions and devoted his attention to her manuscript. He read slowly, turning back every now and again to verify a date or a detail. At the end of the first few pages he looked up to remark:
“I’ll say one thing for the writing of detective fiction: you know how to put your story together; how to arrange the evidence.”
“Thank you,” said Harriet drily; “praise from Sir Hubert is praise indeed.” He read on.
His next observation was:
“I see you have eliminated all the servants in the Scouts’ Wing on the strength of one locked door.”
“I’m not so simple-minded as that. When you come to the Chapel episode, you’ll find that it eliminates them all, for another reason.”
“I beg your pardon; I was committing the fatal error of theorizing ahead of my data.”
Accepting rebuke, he relapsed into silence, while she studied his half-averted face. Considered generally, as a facade, it was by this time tolerably familiar to her, but now she saw details, magnified as it were by some glass in her own mind. The flat setting and fine scroll-work of the ear, and the height of the skull above it. The glitter of close-cropped hair where the neck-muscles lifted to meet the head. A minute sickle-shaped scar on the left temple. The faint laughter-lines at the corner of the eye and the droop of the lid at its outer end. The gleam of gold down on the cheekbone. The wide spring of the nostril. An almost imperceptible beading of sweat on the upper lip and a tiny muscle that twitched the sensitive corner of the mouth, the slight sun-reddening of the fair skin and its sudden whiteness below the base of the throat The little hollow above the points of the collarbone.
He looked up; and she was instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water. Through the confusion of her darkened eyes and drumming ears some enormous bulk seemed to stoop over her. Then the mist cleared. His eyes were riveted upon the manuscript again, but he breathed as though he had been running.
So, thought Harriet, it has happened. But it happened long ago. The only new thing that has happened is that now I have got to admit it to myself. I have known it for some time. But does he know it? He has very little excuse after this, for not knowing it. Apparently he refuses to see it, and that may be new. If so, it ought to be easier to do what I meant to do.
She stared out resolutely across the dimpling water. But she was conscious of his every movement, of every page he turned, of every breath he drew. She seemed to be separately conscious of every bone in his body. At length he spoke, and she wondered how she could ever have mistaken another man’s voice for his.
“Well, Harriet, it’s not a pretty problem.”
“It’s not. And it simply mustn’t go on, Peter. We can’t have any more people frightened into the river. Publicity or no publicity, it’s got to be stopped. Otherwise, even if nobody else gets hurt, we shall all go mad.”
“That’s the devil of it.”
“Tell me what we are to do, Peter.”
She had once again lost all consciousness of him except as the familiar intelligence that lived and moved so curiously behind an oddly amusing set of features.
“Well-there are two possibilities. You can plant spies all over the place and wait to pounce on this person when the next outbreak occurs.”
“But you don’t know what a difficult place it is to police. And it’s ghastly waiting for the outbreak. And suppose we don’t catch her and something horrible happens.”
“I agree, the other and I think the better, way is to do what we can to frighten this lunatic into keeping quiet while we dig out the motive behind the whole thing. I’m sure it’s not mere blind malignity; there’s a method in it.”
“Isn’t the motive only too painfully obvious?”
He stared pensively at her, and then said:
“You remind me of a charming old tutor, now dead, whose particular subject of research was the relations of the Papacy to the Church in England between certain dates which I do not precisely recall. At one time, a special subject on these lines was set for the History School, and undergraduates taking that subject were naturally sent to the old boy for coaching and did very well. But it was noticed that no man from his own college ever entered for that particular special-the reason being that the tutor’s honesty was such that he would earnestly dissuade his pupils from taking his own subject for fear lest his encouragement might influence their decision.”
“What a charming old gentleman! I’m flattered by the comparison, but I don’t see the point.”
“Don’t you? Isn’t it a fact that, having more or less made up your mind to a spot of celibacy you are eagerly peopling the cloister with bogies? If you want to do without personal relationships, then do without them. Don’t stampede yourself into them by imagining that you’ve got to have them or qualify for a Freudian casebook.”
“We’re not talking about me and my feelings. We’re talking about this beastly case in College.”
“But you can’t keep your feelings out of the case. It’s no use saying vaguely that sex is at the bottom of all these phenomena-that’s about as helpful as saying that human nature is at the bottom of them. Sex isn’t a separate thing functioning away all by itself. It’s usually found attached to a person of some sort.”
“That’s rather obvious.”
“Well, let’s have a look at the obvious. The biggest crime of these blasted psychologists is to have obscured the obvious. They’re like a man packing for the week-end and turning everything out of his drawers and cupboards till he can’t find his pyjamas and toothbrush. Take a few obvious points to start with. You and Miss de Vine met at Shrewsbury for the first time at the Gaudy, and the first letter was put into your sleeve at that time; the people attacked are nearly all dons or scholars; a few days after your tea-party with young Pomfret, Jukes goes to prison; all the letters received by post come either on a Monday or a Thursday; all the communications are in English except the Harpy quotation; the dress found on the dummy was never seen in College: do all those facts taken together suggest nothing to you beyond a general notion of sex repression?”
“They suggest a lot of things separately, but I can’t make anything of them taken together.”
“You are usually better than that at a synthesis. I wish you could clear this personal preoccupation out of your mind. My dear, what are you afraid of? The two great dangers of the celibate life are a forced choice and a vacant mind. Energies bombinating in a vacuum breed chimaeras. But you are in no danger. If you want to set up your everlasting rest, you are far more likely to find it in the life of the mind than the life of the heart.”