Dorothy Sayers - Gaudy Night

“Yes,” said Harriet; “but actually there isn’t one that I, for example, don’t know the meaning of. I believe, when you get even the primmest people under an anaesthetic, they are liable to bring the strangest vocabulary out of the subconscious-in fact, the primmer the coarser.”

“True. Did you notice that there wasn’t a single spelling mistake in the whole bunch of messages?”

“I noticed that. It probably points to a fairly well educated person; though the converse isn’t necessarily true. I mean, educated people often put in mistakes on purpose, so that spelling mistakes don’t prove much. But an absence of mistakes is a more difficult thing to manage, if it doesn’t come natural. I’m not putting this very clearly.”

“Yes, you are. A good speller could pretend to be a bad one; but a bad speller can’t pretend to be a good one, any more than I could pretend to be a mathematician.”

“She could use a dictionary.”

“But then she would have to know enough to be dictionary-conscious-as the new slang would call it. Isn’t our poison-pen rather silly to get all her spelling right?”

“I don’t know. The educated person often fakes bad spelling rather badly, misspells easy words and gets quite difficult ones right. It’s not so hard to tell when people are putting it on. I think it’s probably cleverer to make no pretence about it.”

“I see. Does this tend to exclude the scouts?… But probably they spell better than we do. They so often are better educated. And I’m sure they dress better. But that’s rather off the point. Stop me when I dither.”

“You’re not dithering,” said Harriet. “Everything you say is perfectly true. At present I don’t see how anybody is to be excluded.”

“And what,” demanded the Dean, “becomes of the mutilated newspapers.”

“This won’t do,” said Harriet; “you’re being a great deal too sharp about this. That’s just one of the things I was wondering about.”

“Well, we’ve been into that,” said the Dean, in a tone of satisfaction. “We’ve checked up on all the S.C.R. and J.C.R. papers ever since this business came to our notice-that is, more or less, since the beginning of this term. Before anything goes to be pulped, the whole lot are checked up with the list and examined to see that nothing has been cut out.”

“Who has been doing that?”

“My secretary, Mrs. Goodwin. I don’t think you’ve met her yet. She lives in College during term. Such a nice girl-or woman, rather. She was left a widow, you know, very hard up, and she’s got a little boy of ten at a prep. school. When her husband died-he was a schoolmaster-she set to work to train as a secretary and really did splendidly. She’s simply invaluable to me, and most careful and reliable.”

“Was she here at Gaudy?”

“Of course she was. She-good gracious! You surely don’t think-my dear, that’s absurd! The most straightforward and sane person. And she’s very grateful to the College for having found her the job, and she certainly wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing it.”

“All the same, she’s got to go on the list of possibles. How long has she been here?”

“Let me see. Nearly two years. Nothing at all happened till the Gaudy, you know, and she’d been here a year before that.”

“But the S.C.R. and the scouts who live in College have been here still longer, most of them. We can’t make exceptions along those lines. How about the other secretaries?”

“The Warden’s secretary-Miss Parsons-lives at the Warden’s Lodgings. The Bursar’s and the Treasurer’s secretaries both live out, so they can be crossed off.”

“Miss Parsons been here long?”

“Four years.”

Harriet noted down the names of Mrs. Goodwin and Miss Parsons.

“I think,” she said, “for Mrs. Goodwin’s own sake we’d better have a second check on those newspapers. Not that it really matters; because, if the poison-pen knows that the papers are being checked, she won’t use those papers. And I suppose she must know, because of the care taken to collect them.”

“Very likely. That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?”

“How about people’s private newspapers?”

“Well, naturally, we couldn’t check them. We’ve kept an eye on the waste-paper baskets as well as we can. Nothing is ever destroyed, you know. It’s all thriftily collected in sacks and sent to the paper-makers or whoever it is that gives pence for old papers. The worthy Padgett is instructed to examine the sacks-but it’s a terrific job. And then, of course, since there are fires in all the rooms, why should anybody leave evidence in the W.P.B.?”

“How about the gowns that were burnt in the quad? That must have taken some doing. Surely more than one person would have been needed to work that.”

“We don’t know whether that was part of the same business or not. About ten or a dozen people had left their gowns in various places-as they do, you know-before Sunday supper. Some were in the Queen Elizabeth portico and some at the foot of the Hall stairs and so on. People bring them over and dump them, ready for evening Chapel.” (Harriet nodded; Sunday evening Chapel was held at a quarter to eight and was compulsory; being also a kind of College Meeting for the giving-out of notices.) “Well, when the bell started, these people couldn’t find their gowns and so couldn’t go in to Chapel. Everybody thought it was just a rag. But in the middle of the night somebody saw a blaze in the quad, and it turned out to be a merry little bonfire of bombazine. The gowns had all been soaked in petrol and they went up beautifully.”

“Where did the petrol come from?”

“It was a can Mullins keeps for his motor-cycle. You remember Mullins-the Jowett Lodge porter. His machine lies in a little outhouse in the Lodge garden. He didn’t lock it up-why should he? He does now, but that doesn’t help. Anybody could have gone and fetched it. He and his wife heard nothing, having retired to their virtuous rest. The bonfire happened bang in the middle of the Old Quad and burnt a nasty patch in the turf. Lots of people rushed out when the flare went up, and whoever did it probably mingled with the crowd. The victims were four M.A. gowns, two scholars’ gowns and the rest commoners’ gowns; but I don’t suppose there was any selection; they just happened to be lying about.”

“I wonder where they were put in the interval between supper and the bonfire. Anybody carrying a whole bunch of gowns round College would be a bit conspicuous.”

“No; it was at the end of November, and it would be pretty dark. They could easily have been bundled into a lecture room to be left till called for. There wasn’t a proper organized search over College, you see. The poor victims who were left gownless thought somebody was having a joke; they were very angry, but not very efficient. Most of them rushed round to accuse their friends.”

“Yes; I don’t suppose we can get much out of that episode at this time of day. Well-I suppose I’d better go and wash-and-brush-up for Hall.”

Hall was an embarrassed meal at the High Table. The conversation was valiantly kept to matters of academic and world interest. The undergraduates babbled noisily and cheerfully; the shadow that rested upon the college did not seem to have affected their spirits. Harriet’s eye roamed over them.

“Is that Miss Cattermole at the table on the right? In a green frock, with a badly made-up face?”

“That’s the young lady,” replied the Dean. “How did you know?”

“I remember seeing her at Gaudy. Where is the all-conquering Miss Flaxman?”

“I don’t see her. She may not be dining in Hall. Lots of them prefer to boil an egg in their rooms, so as to avoid the bother of changing. Slack little beasts. And that’s Miss Hudson, in a red jumper, at the middle table. Black hair and horn rims.”