Round and round, like a squirrel in a cage, till at last Harriet had to say firmly to 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 schoolgirl 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.
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 pick 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 circumstance, 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 recognize 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.
She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses.
On the following night, a strange and sinister thing happened.
Harriet had gone, by appointment, to dine with her Somerville friend, and to meet a distinguished writer on the mid-Victorian period, from whom she expected to gain some useful information about Le Fanu. She was sitting in the friend’s room, where about half a dozen people were gathered to do honour to the distinguished writer, when the telephone rang.
“Oh, Miss Vane,” said her hostess. “Somebody wants you from Shrewsbury.”