“I need not take up your time by going over all the details of this rather confusing case. I will first set out the salient points as they presented themselves to me when I came to Oxford last Sunday week, so as to show you the basis upon which I founded my working theory. I will then formulate that theory, and adduce the supporting evidence which I hope and think you will consider conclusive. I may say that practically all the data necessary to the formation of the theory are contained in the very valuable digest of the events prepared for me by Miss Vane and handed to me on my arrival. The rest of the proof was merely what the police call routine work.”
(This, thought Harriet, is suiting your style to your company with a vengeance. She looked round. The Common Room had the hushed air of a congregation settling down to a sermon, but she could feel the nervous tension everywhere. They did not know what they might be going to hear.) “The first point to strike an outsider,” went on Peter, “is the fact that these demonstrations began at the Gaudy. I may say that that was the first bad mistake the perpetrator made. By the way, it will save time and trouble if I refer to the perpetrator in the time-honoured way as X. If X had waited till term began, we should have had a much wider field for suspicion. I therefore asked myself what it was that so greatly excited X at the Gaudy that she could not wait for a more suitable time to begin.
“It seemed unlikely that any of the Old Students present could have roused X’s animosity, because the demonstrations continued in the following term. But they did not continue during the Long Vacation. So my attention was immediately directed to any person who entered the College for the first time at Gaudy and was in residence the following term. Only one person answered these requirements, and that was Miss de Vine.”
The first stir went round the table, like the wind running over a cornfield. “The first two communications came into the hands of Miss Vane. One of them, which amounted to an accusation of murder, was slipped into the sleeve of her gown and might, by a misleading coincidence, have been held to apply to her. But Miss Martin may remember that she placed Miss Vane’s gown in the Senior Common Room side by side with that of Miss de Vine. I Believe that X, misreading ‘H. D. Vane’ as ‘H. de Vine’ put the note in the wrong gown. This belief is, of course, not susceptible of proof; but the possibility is suggestive. The error, if it was one, distracted attention at the start from the central object of the campaign.”
Nothing altered in the level voice as he lifted the old infamy into view only to cast it in the next breath into oblivion, but the hand that had held hers tightened for a moment and relaxed. She found herself watching the hand as it moved now among the sheaf of papers.
“The second communication, picked up accidentally by Miss Vane in the quad, was destroyed like the other; but from the description I gather that it was a drawing similar to this.” He slipped out a paper from under the clip and passed it to the Warden. “It represents a punishment inflicted by a naked female figure upon another, which is clothed in academical dress and epicene. This appears to be the symbolic key to the situation. In the Michaelmas Term, other drawings of a similar kind appear, together with the motif of the hanging of some academical character-a motif which is repeated in the incident of the dummy found later on suspended in the Chapel. There were also communications of a vaguely obscene and threatening sort which need not be particularly considered. The most interesting and important one, perhaps, is the message addressed to (I think) Miss Hillyard. ‘No man is safe from women like you’; and the other, sent to Miss Flaxman, demanding that she should leave another student’s fiancé alone. These suggested that the basis of X’s grievance was sexual jealousy of the ordinary kind-a suggestion which, again, I believe to be entirely erroneous and to have obscured the issue in a quite fantastic manner.
“We next come (passing over the episode of the bonfire of gowns in the quad) to the more serious matter of Miss Lydgate’s manuscript. I do not think it is a coincidence that the portions most heavily disfigured and obliterated were those in which Miss Lydgate attacked the conclusions of other scholars, and those scholars, men. If I am right, we see that X is a person capable of reading, and to some extent understanding, a work of scholarship. Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must over-ride all personal considerations; and also the burning of Miss Barton’s book in which she attacks the Nazi doctrine that woman’s place in the State should be confined to the ‘womanly’ occupations of Kinder, Kirche, Kuche.
“In addition to these personal attacks upon individuals, we get the affair of the bonfire and the sporadic outbursts of obscenity upon the walls. When we come to the disfigurement of the Library, we get the generalized attack in a more spectacular form. The object of the campaign begins to show itself more clearly. The grievance felt by X, starting from a single person, has extended itself to the entire College, and the intention is to provoke a public scandal, which may bring the whole body into disrepute.”
Here for the first time the speaker lifted his gaze from the bowl of marigolds, let it travel slowly round the table, and brought it to rest upon the Warden’s intent face.
“Will you let me say, here and now, that the one thing which frustrated the whole attack from first to last was the remarkable solidarity and public spirit displayed by your college as a body. I think that was the last obstacle that X expected to encounter in a community of women. Nothing but the very great loyalty of the Senior Common Room to the College and the respect of the students for the Senior Common Room stood between you and a most unpleasant publicity. It is the merest presumption in me to tell you what you already know far better than I do; but I say it, not only for my own satisfaction, but because this particular kind of loyalty forms at once the psychological excuse for the attack and the only possible defence against it.”
“Thank you,” said the Warden. “I feel sure that everybody here will know how to appreciate that.”
“We come next,” resumed Wimsey, his eyes once more on the marigolds, “to the incident of the dummy in the Chapel. This merely repeats the theme of the early drawings, but with a greater eye to dramatic effect. Its evidential importance lies in the ‘Harpy’ quotation pinned to the dummy; the mysterious appearance of a black figured frock which nobody could identify; the subsequent conviction of the ex-porter Jukes for theft; and the finding of the mutilated newspaper in Miss de Vine’s room, which closed that sequence of events. I will take up those points later.
“It was about this time that Miss Vane made the acquaintance of my nephew Saint-George, and he mentioned to her that, under circumstances into which we need not, perhaps, inquire, he had met a mysterious woman one night in your Fellows’ Garden, and that she had told him two things. One: that Shrewsbury College was a place where they murdered beautiful boys like him and ate their hearts out; secondly: that ‘the other had fair hair, too.’”
This piece of information was new to most of the Senior Common Room, and caused a mild sensation.
“Here we have the ‘murder-motif’ emphasized, with a little detail about the victim. He is a man, fair, handsome and comparatively young. My nephew then said he would not undertake to recognize the woman again; but on a subsequent occasion he saw and did recognize her.”
Once again the tremor passed round the table.