“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 breastpocket. “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 lightheartedness 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 greatgrandchildren, 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!’ ”