Still life. Miss Scarlet is struck again by the Colonel’s ability to turn her into an arrangement: to be inspected by that banal gaze is instantly to become a tableau, a wax figure, a mediocre artist’s gilt-framed still life (the staring fishhead, the glossy green grapes each with its careful highlight). She feels, in that pause of inspection, that she has achieved the condition of utter banality. It is a condition more extreme than death, for to die is to continue to exist in the body; but she has ceased to exist in the body, she is impalpable, the cells of her flesh have dissolved in the solvent of a trite imagination. Despite her revulsion for the vulgar Colonel, Miss Scarlet is grateful to him for permitting her to savor this annihilation.
Research. David has not yet told Jacob of his morning’s research. In anticipation of Jacob’s visit, David spent the morning at the library, searching for facts about the history of the game. After two hours of failure, he was in the Fine Arts section sullenly and half curiously turning the pages of an illustrated book about British board games when he made his triumphant discovery. Clue was not an American game at all. It was a British game exported to the USA in 1949 and sold in the States by Parker Brothers, who had introduced small changes in design. The British game was called Cluedo, a bewildering name that David decided was intended to allude to another British board game, Ludo. The book showed a color photograph of the board, which was strikingly like the Clue board with one notable difference: the rooms were without furniture. Other differences between the two versions emerged: the mansion of Cluedo was owned by Dr. Black, not the embarrassing Mr. Boddy of Clue; the colored border running around the ground plan of the mansion was light red, not green; the backs of the cards bore no illustration. The suspects were the same, except that Mr. Green was the Reverend Green: Jacob would enjoy that, he would spin some wild theory to account for the change from Reverend to Mister when the game crossed the Atlantic. The British murder weapons were the same, but three of them had different names: the Wrench was called the Spanner, the Knife was called the Dagger, and the Lead Pipe was called Lead Piping. David is so eager to reveal the results of his research to Jacob, who will know how to appreciate each detail, that the thought of an obstacle is intolerable to him, and he suddenly imagines Marian seizing Susan by the hair and plunging the Knife into her throat. He is shocked at the thought, and glances guiltily at Susan, startled to see her staring directly at him.
Feminine stratagems. The Colonel reflects that Miss Scarlet is the kind of woman who, by primness of temperament and propriety of upbringing, cannot confess to herself a crude desire for sexual adventure, and in particular a desire for sexual adventure with a coarse womanizer like Colonel Mustard. It is therefore necessary for her to disguise from herself the fact of her craving, while at the same time arranging for its satisfaction. This problem she has solved instinctively and brilliantly by the tactic of striking scornful attitudes whenever she finds herself in the Colonel’s presence. Her attitudes serve the double purpose of affirming her sense of decorum and drawing continual sexual attention to herself. She has in effect pursued him relentlessly through deliberate demonstrations of indifference. Miss Scarlet, the Colonel surmises, can permit herself to be seduced only if she persuades herself that she feels contempt for her seducer, thereby removing responsibility from herself while inviting his attentions through disdainful poses tinged with erotic display. The little game, rich in nuances, holds specific but limited charms for the Colonel. It is always of course a pleasure to observe the unfolding of feminine stratagems however transparent, but the Colonel cannot find indefinitely stimulating the two-dimensional role created for him by the charming Miss Scarlet. From the very beginning she has produced in him an odd and distinctly unpleasant sense of constriction. In her continual flight from herself, her relentless assumption of attitudes, her striving to become nothing but an object, she diminishes him: he becomes a cartoon villain in her gallery of pornography (The Disdainful Maiden and The Aging Lecher). Her provocative little pose, on the velvet window seat, in the mauve light, appears to be an invitation to pleasure, but in fact it is an invitation to death: its intention is to confirm the Colonel’s mediocrity, to divest him of imagination and thereby turn him to stone. It is to evade this divestiture that the Colonel prolongs his refusal.
Words. The nine names of the rooms, in black capital letters, constitute eleven words: the seven single-name rooms and the two double-name rooms, BILLIARD ROOM and DINING ROOM. Five additional words appear in the center of the board: beneath the word CLUE, in large white capital letters with black shadows, appears the word THE, in small black capital letters, and beneath the word THE appear the words GREAT DETECTIVE GAME. When we observe the board so that the word CLUE is right-side up, then we see, in the lower left-hand corner of the playing board, in the green border that runs around all nine rooms, the words © 1949 JOHN WADDINGTON, LTD. In the same green border, in the lower right, we see four lines of print: PARKER BROTHERS, INC./SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS/NEW YORK SAN FRANCISCO CHICAGO/MADE IN U.S.A. Still other words appear on the board. The four rooms with secret passages all contain words: in a corner of the STUDY are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/KITCHEN/(ONE MOVE), in a corner of the LOUNGE are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/CONSERVATORY/(ONE MOVE), in a corner of the KITCHEN are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/STUDY/(ONE MOVE), and in a corner of the CONSERVATORY are the words SECRET PASSAGE/TO/LOUNGE/(ONE MOVE). Finally, six of the yellow squares adjacent to the green border contain the word START, with the name of a different suspect under each one: MISS SCARLET, COL. MUSTARD, MRS. WHITE, MR. GREEN, MRS. PEACOCK, PROF. PLUM. If we consider the date 1949 to be a single word, the abbreviations U.S.A., LTD, and INC. to be single words, and combinations such as NEW YORK, PARKER BROTHERS, and MR. GREEN each to be two words, and if we ignore the symbol ©, then on the Clue board we find seventy-five words.