Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night

One can scarcely call in the police-it you’d seen some of the letters you’d realize that the less publicity the better, and you know how things get about. I dare say you noticed there was a wretched newspaper paragraph about that bonfire in the quad last November. We never discovered who did that, by the way; we thought, naturally, it was a stupid practical joke; but we are now beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t all part of the same campaign.

So if you could possibly snatch time to give us the benefit of your experience, we should be exceedingly grateful. There must he some way of coping-this sort of persecution simply CAN’T GO ON. But it’s an awfully difficult job to pin anything down in a place like this, with 150 students and all doors open everywhere night and day.

I am afraid this is rather an incoherent letter, but I’m feeling that put about, with Opening looming ahead and all the entrance and scholarship papers blowing about me like leaves in Vallombrosa! Hoping very much to see you next Thursday,

Yours very sincerely,

LETITIA MARTIN

Here was a pretty thing! Just the kind of thing to do the worst possible damage to University women-not only in Oxford, but everywhere. In any community, of course, one always ran the risk of harbouring somebody undesirable; but parents obviously would not care to send their young innocents to places where psychological oddities flourished unchecked. Even if the poison campaign led to no open disaster (and you never knew what people might be driven to under Persecution) a washing of dirty linen in public was not calculated to do Shrewsbury any good. Because, though nine-tenths of the mud might be thrown at random, the remaining tenth might quite easily be, as it usually was, dredged from the bottom of the well of truth, and would stick.

Who should know that better than herself? She smiled wryly over the Dean’s letter. “The benefit of your experience”; yes, indeed. The words had, of course, been written in the most perfect innocence, and with no suspicion that they could make the galled jade wince. Miss Martin herself would never dream of writing abusive letters to a person who had been acquitted of murder, and it had undoubtedly never occurred to her that to ask the notorious Miss Vane for advice about how to deal with that kind of thing was to talk of rope in the house of the hanged. This was merely an instance of that kind of unworldly tactlessness to which learned and cloistered women were prone. The Dean would be horrified to know that Harriet was the last person who should, in charity, have been approached in the matter; and that, even in Oxford itself, in Shrewsbury College itself-

In Shrewsbury College itself: and at the Gaudy. That was the point. The letter she had found in her sleeve had been put there in Shrewsbury College and at the Gaudy. Not only that; there had been the drawing she had picked up in the quad. Was either, or were both of these, part only of her own miserable quarrel with the world? Or were they rather to be connected with the subsequent outbreak in the college itself? It seemed unlikely that Shrewsbury should have to harbour two dirty-minded lunatics in such quick succession. But if the two lunatics were one and the same lunatic, then the implication was an alarming one, and she herself must, at all costs, interfere at least so far as to tell what she knew. There did come moments when all personal feelings had to be set aside in the interests of public service; and this looked like being one of them.

Reluctantly, she reached for the telephone and put a call through to Oxford. While she waited for it, she thought the matter over in this new light. The Dean had given no details about the poison letters, except that they suggested a grudge against the S.C.R. and that the culprit appeared to belong to the college. It was natural enough to attribute destructive ragging to the undergraduates; but then, the Dean did not know what Harriet knew. The warped and repressed mind is apt enough to turn and wound itself. “Soured virginity”-“unnatural life” -“semi-demented spinsters” -“starved appetites and oppressed impulses” -“unwholesome atmosphere”-she could think of whole sets of epithets, ready-minted for circulation. Was this what lived in the tower set on the hill? Would it turn out to be like Lady Athaliah’s tower in Frolic Wind, the home of frustration and perversion and madness? “If the eye be single, the whole body is full of light”-but was it physically possible to have the single eye? “What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?” For them, stereoscopic vision was probably a necessity; as for whom was it not? (This was a foolish play on words, but it meant something.) Well, then, what about this business of choosing one way of life? Must one, after all, seek a compromise, merely to preserve one’s sanity? Then one was doomed for ever to this miserable inner warfare, with confused noise and garments rolled in blood-and, she reflected drearily with the usual war aftermath of a debased coinage, a lowered efficiency and unstable conditions of government.

At this point the Oxford call came through, with the Dean’s voice sounding full of agitation. Harriet, after hurriedly disclaiming all pretence to detective ability in real life, expressed concern and sympathy and then asked the question that, to her, was of prime importance.

“How are the letter’s written?”

“That’s just the difficulty. They’re mostly done by pasting together bits out of newspapers. So, you see, there’s no handwriting to identify.”

That seemed to settle it; there were not two anonymous correspondents, but only one. Very well, then:

“Are they merely obscene, or are they abusive or threatening too?”

“All three. Calling people names that poor Miss Lydgate didn’t know existed-the worst she knows being Restoration Drama-and threatening everything from public exposure to the gallows.”

Then the tower was Lady Athaliah’s tower.

“Are they sent to anybody besides the S.C.R.?”

“It’s difficult to say, because people don’t always come and tell you things. But I believe one or two of the students here have had them.”

“And they come sometimes by post and sometimes to the Lodge?”

“Yes. And they are beginning to come out on the walls now, and lately they’ve been pushed under people’s doors at night. So it looks as though it must be somebody in college.”

“When did you get the first one?”

“The first one I definitely know about was sent to Miss de Vine last Michaelmas Term. That was her first term here, and of course, she thought it must be somebody who had a personal grudge against her. But several people got them shortly afterwards, so we decided it couldn’t be that. We’d never had anything of that sort happening before, so just at present we’re inclined to check up on the First Year students.”

The one set of people that it can’t possibly be, thought Harriet. She only said however:

“It doesn’t do to take too much for granted. People may go on quite all right for a time, till something sets them off. The whole difficulty with these things is that the person generally behaves quite normally in other respects. It might be anybody.”

“That’s true. I suppose it might even be one of ourselves. That’s what’s so horrible. Yes, I know-elderly virgins, and all that. It’s awful to know that at any minute one may be sitting cheek by jowl with somebody who feels like that. Do you think the poor creature knows that she does it herself? I’ve been waking up with nightmares, wondering whether I didn’t perhaps go round in my sleep, spitting at people. And, my dear! I’m so terrified about next week! Poor Lord Oakapple, coming to open the Library, with venomous asps simply dripping poison over his boots! Suppose they send him something!”