“That’s only a relative kind of truth,” objected Miss Edwards.
The Dean and Miss Burrows fell headlong upon this remark, and Harriet, seeing the argument in danger of getting out of hand, thought it time to retrieve the ball and send it back. She knew now what was wanted, though not why it was wanted.
“If you can’t agree about painters, make it someone else. Make it a scientist.”
“I’ve no objection to scientific pot-boilers,” said Miss Edwards. “I mean, a popular book isn’t necessarily unscientific.”
“So long,” said Wimsey, “as it doesn’t falsify the facts. But it might be a different kind of thing. To take a concrete instance-somebody wrote a novel called The Search-”
“C. P. Snow,” said Miss Burrows. “It’s funny you should mention that. It was the book that the-”
“I know,” said Peter. “That’s possibly why it was in my mind.”
“I never read the book,” said the Warden.
“Oh, I did,” said the Dean. “It’s about a man who starts out to be a scientist and gets on very well till, just as he’s going to be appointed to an important executive post, he finds he’s made a careless error in a scientific paper. He didn’t check his assistant’s results, or something. Somebody finds out, and he doesn’t get the job. So he decides he doesn’t really care about science after all.”
“Obviously not,” said Miss Edwards. “He only cared about the post.”
“But,” said Miss Chilperic, “if it was only a mistake-”
“The point about it,” said Wimsey, “is what an elderly scientist says to him. He tells him: ‘The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit.’ Words to that effect. I may not be quoting quite correctly.”
“Well, that’s true, of course. Nothing could possibly excuse deliberate falsification.”
“There’s no sense in deliberate falsification, anyhow,” said the Bursar. “What could anybody gain by it?”
“It has been done”, said Miss Hillyard, “frequently. To get the better of an argument. Or out of ambition.”
“Ambition to be what?” cried Miss Lydgate. “What satisfaction could one possibly get out of a reputation one knew one didn’t deserve? It would be horrible.”
Her innocent indignation upset everybody’s gravity.
“How about the Forged Decretals… Chatterton… Ossian… Henry Ireland… those Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets the other day…?”
“I know,” said Miss Lydgate, perplexed. “I know people do it. But why? They must be mad.”
“In the same novel,” said the Dean, “somebody deliberately falsifies a result-later on, I mean-in order to get a job. And the man who made the original mistake finds it out. But he says nothing, because the other man is very badly off and has a wife and family to keep.”
“These wives and families!” said Peter.
“Does the author approve?” inquired the Warden…
“Well,” said the Dean, “the book ends there, so I suppose he does.”
“But does anybody here approve? A false statement is published and the man who could correct it lets it go, out of charitable considerations. Would anybody here do that? There’s your test case, Miss Barton, with no personalities attached.”
“Of course one couldn’t do that,” said Miss Barton. “Not for ten wives and fifty children.”
“Not for Solomon and all his wives and concubines? I congratulate you, Miss Barton, on striking such a fine, unfeminine note. Will nobody say a word for the women and children?”
(“I knew he was going to be mischievous,” thought Harriet.)
“You’d like to hear it, wouldn’t you?” said Miss Hillyard.
“You’ve got us in a cleft stick,” said the Dean. “If we say it, you can point out that womanliness unfits us for learning; and if we don’t, you can point out that learning makes us unwomanly.”
“Since I can make myself offensive either way,” said Wimsey, “you have nothing to gain by not telling the truth.”
“The truth is,” said Mrs. Goodwin, “that nobody could possibly defend the indefensible.”
“It sounds, anyway, like a manufactured case,” said Miss Allison, briskly. “It could very seldom happen; and if it did-”
“Oh, it happens,” said Miss de Vine. “It has happened. It happened to me. I don’t mind telling you-without names, of course When I was at Flamborough College, examining for the professorial theses in York University there was a man who sent in a very interesting paper on a historical subject. It was a most persuasive piece of argument; only I happened to know that the whole contention was quite untrue, because a letter that absolutely contradicted it was actually in existence in a certain very obscure library in a foreign town. I’d come across it when I was reading up something else. That wouldn’t have mattered, of course. But the internal evidence showed that the man must have had access to that library. So I had to make an inquiry, and I found that he really had been there and must have seen the letter and deliberately suppressed it.”
“But how could you be so sure he had seen the letter?” asked Miss Lydgate anxiously. “He might carelessly have overlooked it. That would be a very different matter.”
“He not only had seen it,” replied Miss de Vine; “he stole it. We made him admit as much. He had come upon that letter when his thesis was nearly complete, and he had no time to re-write it. And it was a great blow to him apart from that, because he had grown enamoured of his own theory and couldn’t bear to give it up.”
“That’s the mark of an unsound scholar, I’m afraid,” said Miss Lydgate in a mournful tone, as one speaks of an incurable cancer.
“But here is the curious thing,” went on Miss de Vine. “He was unscrupulous enough to let the false conclusion stand; but he was too good a historian to destroy the letter. He kept it.”
“You’d think,” said Miss Pyke, “it would be as painful as biting on a sore tooth.”
“Perhaps he had some idea of rediscovering it some day,” said Miss de Vine, “and setting himself right with his conscience. I don’t know, and I don’t think he knew very well himself.”
“What happened to him?” asked Harriet.
“Well, that was the end of him of course. He lost the professorship, naturally, and they took away his M.A. degree as well. A pity, because he was brilliant in his own way-and very good-looking, if that has anything to do with it.”
“Poor man!” said Miss Lydgate. “He must have needed the post very badly.”
“It meant a good deal to him financially. He was married and not well off. I don’t know what became of him. That was about six years ago. He dropped out completely. One was sorry about it, but there it was.”
“You couldn’t possibly have done anything else,” said Miss Edwards.
“Of course not. A man as undependable as that is not only useless, but dangerous. He might do anything.”
“You’d think it would be a lesson to him,” said Miss Hillyard. “It didn’t pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about-but in the end it left him worse off.”
“But that,” said Peter, “was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.”
“It seems to me,” began Miss Chilperic, timidly-and then stopped.
“Yes?” said Peter.
“Well,” said Miss Chilperic, “oughtn’t the women and children to have a point of view? I mean-suppose the wife knew that her husband had done a thing like that for her, what would she feel about it?”
“That’s a very important point,” said Harriet. “You’d think she’d feel too ghastly for words.”