“Of course,” said the Dean, “if anything should happen in vacation-”

“I rather doubt if it will,” said Harriet. “Not a big enough audience. A public scandal is the thing aimed at, I imagine. But if another episode should occur, it will narrow the field.”

“Yes; most of the S.C.R. will be away. Next term, what with the Warden, Miss Lydgate and myself definitely clear of suspicion, we ought to be able to patrol the place better. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been rather thinking of coming back to Oxford altogether for a time, to do some work. This place gets you. It’s so completely uncommercial. I think I’m getting a little shrill in my mind. I need mellowing.”

“Why not work for a B.Litt?”

“That would be rather fun. I’m afraid they wouldn’t accept Le Fanu, would they? It would have to be somebody duller. I should enjoy a little dullness. One would have to go on writing novels for bread and butter, but I’d like an academic and meaty egg to my tea for a change.”

“Well, I hope you’ll come back for part of next term, anyway. You can’t leave Miss Lydgate now till those proofs are in the printer’s hands.”

“I’m almost afraid to set her loose this vac. She is dissatisfied with her chapter on Gerard Manley Hopkins; she feels she may have attacked him from the wrong angle altogether.”

“Oh, no!”

“I’m afraid it’s Oh, yes!… Well, I’ll cope with that, anyway. And the rest-well, we shall see what happens.”

Harriet left Oxford just after lunch. As she was putting her suit-case in the car, Padgett came up to her.

“Excuse me, miss, but the Dean thinks you would like to see this, miss. In Miss de Vine’s fireplace it was found this morning, miss.”

Harriet looked at the half-burnt sheet of crumpled newspaper. Letters had been cut out from the advertising columns.

“Is Miss de Vine still in College?”

“She left by the 10.10, miss.”

“I’ll keep this, Padgett, thank you. Does Miss de Vine usually read the Daily Trumpet?”

“I shouldn’t think so, miss. It would be more likely the Times or Telegraph. But you could easy find out.”

“Of course, anybody might have dropped this in the fireplace. It proves nothing. But I’m very glad to have seen it. Good morning, Padgett.”

“Good morning, miss.”

11

Town seemed remarkably empty and uninteresting. Yet a lot of things were going on. Harriet saw her agent and publisher, signed a contract for serial rights, heard the inner history of the quarrel between Lord Gobbersleigh, the newspaper proprietor and Mr. Adrian Cloot, the reviewer, entered warmly into the triangular dispute raging among Gargantua Colour-Talkies Ltd., Mr. Garrick Drury, the actor, and Mrs. Snell-Wilmington, author of Passionflower Pie, and into the details of Miss Sugar Toobin’s monstrous libel action against the Daily Headline, and was, of course, passionately interested to learn that Jacqueline Squills had made a malicious expose of her second divorced husband’s habits and character in her new novel, Gas-Filled Bulbs. Yet, somehow, these distractions failed to keep her amused.

To make matters worse, her new mystery novel had got somehow stuck. She had five suspects, neatly confined in an old water-mill with no means of entrance or egress except by a plank bridge, and all provided with motives and alibis for a pleasantly original kind of murder. There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with the thing. But the permutations and combinations of the five people’s relationships were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that; human problems were not like that; what you really got was two hundred or so people running like rabbits in and out of a college, doing their work, living their lives, and actuated all the time by motives unfathomable even to themselves, and then in the midst of it all-not a plain, understandable murder, but an unmeaning and inexplicable lunacy.

How could one, in any case, understand other people’s motives and feelings, when one’s own remained mysterious? Why did one look forward with irritation to the receipt of a letter on April 1st, and then feel alarmed and affronted when it did not arrive by the first post? Very likely the letter had been sent to Oxford. There was no possible urgency about it, since one knew what it would contain and how it had to be answered; but it was annoying to sit about, expecting it.

Ring. Enter secretary with telegram (this was probably it). Wordy and unnecessary cable from American magazine representative to say she was shortly arriving in England and very anxious to talk to Miss Harriet Vane about a story for their publication. Cordially. What on earth did these people want to talk about? You did not write stories by talking about them. Ring. Second post. Letter with Italian stamp. (Slight delay in sorting, no doubt.) Oh, thank you, Miss Bracey. Imbecile, writing very bad English, was eager to translate Miss Vane’s works into Italian. Could Miss Vane inform the writer of what books she had composed? Translators were all like that-no English, no sense, no backing. Harriet said briefly what she thought of them, told Miss Bracey to refer the matter to the agent and returned to her dictation.

“Wilfrid stared at the handkerchief. What was it doing there in Winchester ’s bedroom? With a curious feeling of…”

Telephone. Hold on a moment, please. (It couldn’t very well be that; it would be ridiculous to put through an expensive foreign call.) Hullo! Yes. Speaking. Oh?

She might have known it. There was a kind of mild determination about Reggie Pomfret. Would Miss Vane, could Miss Vane put up with his company for dinner and the new show at the Palladium? That night? the next night? Any night? That very night? Mr. Pomfret was inarticulate with pleasure. Thank you. Ring off. Where were we. Miss Bracey?

“With a curious feeling of-Oh, yes, Wilfrid. Very distressing for Wilfrid to find his young woman’s handkerchief in the murdered man’s bedroom. Agonizing. A curious feeling of-What should you feel like under the circumstances, Miss Bracey?”

“I should think the laundry had made a mistake, I expect.”

“Oh, Miss Bracey! Well-we’d better say it was a lace handkerchief. Winchester couldn’t have mistaken a lace handkerchief for one of his own, whatever the laundry sent him.”

“But would Ada have used a lace handkerchief, Miss Vane? Because she’s been made rather a boyish, out-door person. And it’s not as if she was in evening dress, because it was so important she should turn up in a tweed costume.”

“That’s true. Well-well, better make the handkerchief small, but not lace. plain but good. Turn back to the description of the handkerchief… Oh, dear‘ No, I’ll answer it. Yes? Yes? YES!… No, I’m afraid I can’t possibly. No, really-Oh? Well, you had better ask my agents. Yes, that’s right. Goodbye… Some club wanting a debate on ‘Should Genius Marry?’ The question’s not likely to concern any of their members personally, so why do they bother?… Yes, Miss Bracey? Oh, yes, Wilfrid. Bother Wilfrid! I’m taking quite a dislike to the man.”

By tea-time, Wilfrid was behaving so tiresomely that Harriet put him away in a rage and sallied out to attend a literary cocktail party. The room in which it was held was exceedingly hot and crowded, and all the assembled authors were discussing (a) publishers, (b) agents, (c) their own sales, (d) other people’s sales, and (e) the extraordinary behavior of the Book of the Moment selectors in awarding their ephemeral crown to Tasker Hepplewater’s Mock Turtle. “I finished this book,” one distinguished adjudicator had said, “with the tears running down my face.” The author of Serpent’s Fang confided to Harriet over a petite saucisse and a glass of sherry that they must have been tears of pure boredom; but the author of Dusk and Shiver said, No-they were probably tears of merriment, called forth by the unintentional humour of the book; had she ever met Hepplewater? A very angry young woman, whose book had been passed over, declared that the whole thing was a notorious farce. The Book of the Moment was selected from each publisher’s list in turn, so that her own Ariadne Adams was automatically excluded from benefit, owing to the mere fact that her publisher’s imprint had been honoured in the previous January. She had, however, received private assurance that the critic of the Morning Star had sobbed like a child over the last hundred pages of Ariadne, and would probably make it his Book of the Fortnight, if only the publisher could be persuaded to take advertising space in the paper. The author of The Squeezed Lemon agreed that advertising was. at the bottom of it: had they heard how the Daily Flashlight had tried to blackmail Humphrey Quint into advertising with them? And how, on his refusal, they had said darkly, “Well, you know what will happen, Mr. Quint?” And how no single Quint book had received so much as a review from the Flashlight ever since? And how Quint had advertised that fact in the Morning Star and sent up his net sales 50 per cent. in consequence? Well, by some fantastic figure, anyhow. But the author of Primrose Dalliance said that with the Book of the Moment crowd, what counted was Personal Pull-surely they remembered that Hepplewater had married Walton Strawberry’s latest wife’s sister. The author of Jocund Day agreed about the Pull, but thought that in this instance it was political, because there was some powerful anti-Fascist propaganda in Mock Turtle and it was well known that you could always get old Sneep Fortescue with a good smack at the Blackshirts.