Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Nicholas Blake
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1. “We Can Wait”
2. Cockroaches and Crusaders
3. The Spooky Treasure Hunt
4. When Did You Last See Your Brother?
5. “Only the Soldered Mouth Can Tell”
6. The Missing Plagiarist
7. The Concupiscent Poet
8. The Superimposed Redhead
9. “A Funeral in My Brain”
10. Confessions and Blackmail
11. The Cup and the Lip
12. “Yesterday Is Mystery”
13. “Danaë, in a Brazen Tower”
14. By Hand
15. Go Go Go!
More from Vintage Classic Crime
Copyright
About the Book
Private detective and poet Nigel Strangeways is staying at Cabot University, an Ivy League university near Boston, while he undertakes some research. There he encounters the Ahlberg brothers – Chester, Assistant Senior Tutor in the Business School, Mark, who lectures in the English Faculty and their half-brother, Josiah, a professor of Classics. When one of the brothers is found murdered, the local police request Nigel’s help in catching the killer, but little does Nigel know just how close he is to the murderer.
About the Author
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.
Also by Nicholas Blake
A Question of Proof
Thou Shell of Death
There’s Trouble Brewing
The Beast Must Die
The Widow’s Cruise
Malice in Wonderland
The Case of the Abominable Snowman
The Smiler with the Knife
Minute for Murder
Head of a Traveller
The Dreadful Hollow
The Whisper in the Gloom
End of Chapter
The Worm of Death
The Sad Variety
To my friends at Harvard, with apologies for resisting the temptation to put them into the book
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth . . .
—Emily Dickinson
1 “We Can Wait”
“WHAT ON EARTH is a ‘No Station’?” asked Nigel, reading a huge overhead sign as they drove into the city.
“It’s a station where there are no trains, no platforms, no need to come or go,” Charles Reilly said from the back. “A thoroughly un-American nonactivity.”
“And no birds sing,” added Sukie, trying hard to catch up.
Chester Ahlberg, who was driving, glanced at Nigel. “It’s an abbreviation for North Station.”
Reilly snorted. “There you go, leaking the mystery out of everything! And anyway, if that’s your explanation, why don’t you put a period after No? When I think of the tedious way you Americans dot every i in the course of your alleged conversation, yet you can’t spare one little dot for the purpose of—”
“He’s off again,” sighed Sukie.
“How long have we hired you as our resident poet?” Chester’s brother, Mark, asked Reilly.
“You will benefit by my presence for one whole academic year, and not a day less.”
“My God!” Leaning across Sukie, Mark prodded the elderly Irish poet. “Why aren’t you at Mass, anyway?”
“I was. So now I can enjoy myself. Which is more than you’d have a right to do, you guilt-ridden, transcendentalist, undenominational sons of Puritans.”
“Will you listen to him,” said Sukie. “Charles dear heart, we’re here to show Mr. Strangeways the sights, not to expose him to your fey Irish prattle.”
“There’s no sights for the next thirty miles but eateries disguised as Nantucket whalers, pizza houses, gas stations and all-night doughnut-frying establishments. Now if only, among all these acres of advertisements, you could find one little, little touch of glamour! I don’t hope for sin—that’d be asking too much, you have to have souls before you can sin, and there’s no sign of them growing in this man’s country.”
“You Papists talk about sin as if you’d invented and patented it,” protested Mark. “Over here, we take it seriously.”
“Some of us do,” his brother said. There was at this, Nigel noticed, a slight congealing of the atmosphere as when several people want to change the conversation but no one can think how to do so. On the back seat, Sukie took Mark’s hand.
“I disagree,” said Nigel presently.
“What?” Chester asked.
Nigel, always a compulsive reader, had just noticed, writ large on the wall of a funeral parlor, the legend
DRIVE CAREFULLY. WE CAN WAIT.
“You disagree?” asked Chester, who seemed puzzled.
“Drive carefully. We can wait,” proclaimed Nigel in sinister tones. The effect ran counter to the injunction: Chester jerked the wheel and all but rammed a Cadillac which was passing them in the left-hand lane.
“Ches-ter!” cried Sukie.
“Sorry. What did you say?”
Nigel explained that he had quoted the undertaker’s slogan.
“Well, what do you know? I never noticed that before, and I must have driven this route a hundred times.” Chester’s voice was light; but his knuckles were still white on the wheel. “I guess that’s pretty interesting. I get your point, Mr. Strangeways: you were indicating that there are some interesting sights in this section. Now, if you look to the right you’ll catch a view of the naval yards. And a little farther on—”
Chester Ahlberg was quite in command again, driving efficiently at the exact 50 mph limit allowed, under the bright blue sky of the New England fall. Nigel meditated upon the pleasure afforded by riding in another man’s car, in a strange country, all responsibilities left at home. A womb-like sensation, highly agreeable; the more so because the womb was, as it were, transparent, and one could see what was going on outside without having to make real contact with it. Which went for his companions too, amicable persons in their different ways, whom he could enjoy but need not become involved with. Chester Ahlberg might prove a little boring; and Charles Reilly, whose mental age—like that of most poets—seemed to oscillate wildly between nine and ninety, certainly would be at times. But Mark and his fiancée (but was Sukie his fiancée?) offered plenty of entertaining variety. And yes, thought Nigel, I like them all.
“Does the grass never turn green here?” Reilly asked in his barbed Dublin manner, gazing with distaste at the glum, brownish stuff that covered the earth, among boulders and conifers, on either side of the highway. His companions set upon him.
This was nice too—the ready acceptance of the stranger. Of course, Reilly had been here since the beginning of the semester and had eased his way in. But Nigel had met the same engaging response from the day he wrote to Ezekiel Edwardes, an old acquaintance from undergraduate days at Oxford, now Master of Hawthorne House, saying he wanted to do a bit of research in the famous library of Cabot University. Ezekiel had at once invited him to occupy a spare suite in the House for as long as he wished, had met him at the airport a week ago, and had introduced him to the resident faculty.
Chester Ahlberg, assistant senior tutor at Hawthorne, taught in the Business School; Mark on the English faculty. Their half brother, whom Nigel had not yet met, was a full professor of Classics, attached to the House but living outside. There was a strong Ahlberg connection with Hawthorne House, the father—a millionaire financier—having built and given it to the university, of which he had been an alumnus. Susannah Tate (“Sukie” to all), a graduate student at the neighboring women’s college, was working for a Ph.D., the subject of her thesis being Emily Dickinson. Hence the expedition to Amherst this afternoon.
On the back seat, Mark and Sukie were wrangling amicably about the presidential election.
“Sure LBJ will sweep the country. So then what? He’s a politician. He’ll go just as far with desegregation as he’s pushed.”
“You’re dead wrong. He went along with Kennedy on that, always. And he’ll get further than Kennedy, because he is a politician; he can handle Congress.”
“Okay, maybe he can, but do you think the South’s impressed by a few blasts of hot air from Washington? Look at the way Wallace has been dragging his feet.”
“Sukie wants to lead a crusade into Alabama and have another Civil War,” said Chester.
“Oh, nuts. All I want is for state legislatures to be told where they get off if they go on acting like—like Belgian slave drivers in the Congo.”
“All!” jeered Mark. “Anyway, the South isn’t all—”
“Now listen, Mark. Is there any other civilized country in the world that would allow a gang of murderous morons like the KKK to terrorize people, and to get back into power after it’d been totally discredited once?”
“You know, children,” said Charles Reilly, “this is something I like about the States. You do take politics seriously. Same as Ireland. I mean, ordinary intelligent people do, not politicians, God help us—to them it’s a game, a rough, tough, sophisticated game, like poetry is to poets.”
“That’s a very interesting point of view,” said Chester, his eyes on the road ahead. “But don’t you take poetry seriously?”
“Oh, it’s not a point of view, it’s the trut’. And will I tell you another thing?”
“Tell on,” said Mark.
“I talked to a fella when I was reading down at Charlottesville—a good liberal Southerner. Oh, they do have them there, Sukie. He said he and many of his students think liberal but can’t get their feelings in line with their intelligence: they’ve inherited this long tradition from their forefathers, living among slaves and then emancipated Negroes. It’s atavistic. They know it’s wrong, out of date, but, you see, they can’t help themselves, can’t smooth out their inner conflict.”
“No, no!” Sukie exclaimed. “We know all that. But do you want us to wait politely till the South gets its emotions in phase with its intelligence? While human beings get lynched and bombed and treated like dirt there? There’s a war on—a war of liberation?—or there should be, only all the fighting’s done by the other side.”
“A Maud Gonne come to judgment,” murmured Reilly.
“Don’t say that, Charles. She was hell on wheels, wasn’t she? And I’ve got to marry this girl,” protested Mark.
“This is a great girl, Mark my boy. If I had your age and my looks, I’d have stolen her from you.”
And he probably would, thought Nigel, glancing round at Reilly’s shock of red hair, his rosy face, brilliant blue eyes and sensual lips. Nigel had noticed, too, how serious had been Reilly’s contribution to this fairly naïve political exchange: with his Irish empathy, he had adapted himself to what seemed to Nigel a basic rule of American conversation—one may be serious or frivolous, but never both in the same paragraph.
“Well, here we are,” said Mark, “approaching the town of Amherst, the historical birthplace of America’s greatest poetess or poet. It’s behind a tall, tall hedge, I seem to remember.”
“What is?” asked Chester.
“The birthplace, you dope.” Sukie laughed. “Drive recklessly; we can’t wait.”
They entered the hilly town, its elegant frame houses spaced out among trees and sloping lawns. Presently Mark cried, “Left! You turn left here!”
Chester, who had overshot the crossing, did a hurried U-turn; and was instantly halted by a policeman on a motorcycle who had been following him. The officer poked his head in at the driver’s window, and pointed silently to a notice at the roadside, which, in large letters, forbade U-turns.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Chester. “Now look, you don’t want to give me a ticket. I’m really awfully sorry, I didn’t see the notice. I am so sorry; you see, I overshot the intersection—”
The officer, after walking very slowly round the car to examine its registration plates, gave Chester a ticket. When the sordid procedure was over, Mark asked the man:
“Can you please tell us just where in this law-abiding town is located the birthplace of the great American poetess, Emily Dickinson?”
The man looked at him suspiciously, but could not think up any valid reason for bringing a further charge. He had to content himself with a piercing stare at Mark and a “never heard of her.”
“Sure, they’re all scared blue of the police over here,” Reilly murmured to Nigel. “Now, did you ever hear anyone so apologetic?”
“That’s because they’re uncultured Irishmen and tote firearms,” said Mark, who had overheard him. “Hey, don’t look so worried, Chester. It might have happened to anyone. Come on, forget your persecution mania.”
“I do not have persecution mania. I am persecuted. That is quite different.”
“Have it your own way, brother.”
After they had cruised around awhile, Mark found the house. They walked up the sloping lawn toward it.
“Are you quite sure it’s empty?” asked Chester apprehensively. “We don’t want to go bursting in on—”
“Take it easy,” Mark reassured him. “We’re pilgrims. Pilgrims rate special treatment.”
“Of course it is,” Sukie, who had scampered ahead, called over her shoulder. In a clear, toneless voice she chanted
“There’s been a death in the
opposite house
As lately as to-day.
I know it by the numb look
Such houses have alway.
“Just get a load of that numb look, will you?”
Empty it certainly was and securely locked, as Mark proved by trying each of the ground-floor windows in turn.
“D’you think that’s the door she hid behind when her parents were having company?” asked Sukie, peering in. “It all looks so swept and garnished. Sort of impersonal.”
“It’s her poems she inhabits,” Mark said gently. “And do you remember?—one Sunday she refused to go to church, whatever her father said, and they couldn’t find her anywhere, and when they got back, there she was in the cellar in a rocking chair, rocking away. Do you know her work well, Mr. Strangeways?”
“She was one of my favorites, in Oxford, in the twenties.”
“A terrible hit-or-miss lady she was,” said Charles Reilly. “Morbid too. She’s a one got more kick out of corpses than anything. And she’d no respect for God at all at all. ‘Papa up there’ indeed!—the pert little madam.”
“Oh, Charles!” protested Sukie.
“Oh, she’d a great turn of phrase. Like a precocious child. But sure she was no artist,” Charles persisted.
Sukie’s eyes flashed. “That’s ridiculous. D’you know what she said?—‘Art is a house which tries to be haunted.’”
“Did she now? Did she say that now?” Charles ruminated. “That’s good. I like it. That’s very good indeed. Very well, I’ll not say a word more against her.”
Nigel sat them down for a photograph on the front steps. Peering into the magnifying view finder, he saw the four of them, tiny and sharp, in brilliant color. Reading from left to right: Chester, Mark, Sukie, Charles. Chester, with his small neat face and small neat body, a tentative smile on the one, gray-green English tweeds on the other. Mark, larger, not so tidy, corduroy trousers and a blue sports jacket, smiling broadly out of a round face. The streamlined figure of Sukie, gray eyes, black hair, vivid as a cardinal bird in her scarlet skirt and white sweater. Charles Reilly, pushing out his sensual lips as if to shape a wisecrack or a line of verse.
“A historic photograph,” said Nigel, happily unaware how the future would take up his innocent words.
They walked to the Amherst cemetery and found the family graves of the Dickinsons. Some misguided culture lover had twined the railings around them with artificial morning-glories.
Mark shook his head. “Will you look at this! It’s nauseating! It’s uncouth. It’s a scandal. If there’s one thing Emily couldn’t have tolerated, it’s artificial flowers.”
Sukie wasted no words. She began stripping the offensive floral tribute from the railings.
“Oh, now, Sukie—” Chester looked uneasily round—“I don’t think you should do that. It’s sacrilegious; and they don’t belong to you.”
“Don’t be so stuffy, Chester. They’re a desecration. Aren’t they, Charles?”
“Whoever strung them up had a right to do it. And you’ve a right to remove them.”
“Oh glory!—now he’s getting gnomic.” Sukie swathed the string of flowers round and round Mark’s neck. “Now rid me of them. Under that tree will do.” Her lithe body swung forward to Nigel. “Tell me you approve.”
“I approve.”
Her gray eyes were in no hurry to withdraw from his. Mark had disappeared with his trophy behind a yew tree.
“There’s Edward Dickinson. Papa below. Poor Papa. So upright. Such a good citizen. So totally incapable of communication,” Sukie pointed out.
“Like some other fathers,” said Chester, a rueful quirk on his mouth.
“He just wanted them all to stay at home—for ever and ever.” Sukie sighed, “And here they all are. Safe in their alabaster chambers. If he could have imagined the journeys Emily took from her little room over there—”
“But I thought she never—” began Chester.
“Spiritual journeys, poop.”
“Right away to the outermost circumference,” said Mark, who had just returned.
“‘The Outer—from the Inner Derives its Magnitude,’” Sukie quoted.
“And that reminds me—where and how soon are we going to eat?” said Reilly. “My inner, my inner is yelling for dinner.”
“Oh, Charles, really!”
“You must learn to pronounce my name the correct way. Char-luss.”
“Well, it is about lunchtime. Let’s go to the Yankee Pedlar,” said Chester. “It’s pretty nice.”
“Yes, we must show Charles—Char-luss—a genuine old colonial inn. It’s cute. The waitresses wear eighteenth-century Puritan dress, and you can drink from yards of ale, and they serve you dishes—”
“Now wait a minute, my angel Susannah.” Charles interrupted. “Wait while the elders get a word in. I do not expect food, in the civilized sense of the word, over here. All I ask is bare sustenance. As your distinguished poet put it, American meals are a general mess of imprecision of feeding.”
Mark groaned. His brother looked bemused. Nigel found Sukie’s eyes on him again, with the candid, rather ingenuous gaze of the American woman.
“The only things the Irish can cook are potatoes and soda bread,” Chester was saying—a nervous attempt to get into the lighthearted mood of the others.
“Well, you may have something there,” Charles replied pacifically. All three of them, Nigel noticed, treated Chester with a sort of compunction, as though he were a foreigner for whom special allowances should be made. And he seemed an especially complicated man, for, though evidently a good driver, twice on the road there he had done a foolish thing. Was Chester Ahlberg accident-prone? Nigel wondered. Hardly. The accident-prone show it in their driving even when there’s not another car in sight, snatching their gear changes, overbraking, doing nothing rhythmically. . . . Well, Americans were perhaps different all around. He didn’t understand them fully so far.
An hour later in the bar of the colonial-type restaurant, they were digging gobbets out of a huge round cheese, each vowing every gobbet must be his last or there would be no appetite left for dinner. Charles and Nigel were drinking Scotch and water, Chester and Sukie martinis, Mark was on his third bourbon.
“Why do they wear those goddam mobcaps?” inquired Mark truculently.
“Atmosphere, my love,” said Sukie.
“Don’t they know that in the late seventeenth century ‘mob’ was a cant word for a strumpet, drab, or whore?” Mark pursued.
“I expect they’re comfortable,” said Nigel soothingly.
“I don’t like being served by waitresses wearing whores’ caps—not in a fine old typical Puritan-type joint. I must find out if they are aware of the etymology of their goddam caps. Waitress!”
“Mark! You mustn’t!” hissed Sukie.
“Madam,” said Mark to the waitress, “could you enlighten our English friend here? He wonders are those caps you wear as comfortable as they are attractive.”
“Oh, yes, sir, they sure are.”
“I’m exceedingly obliged to you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Sukie flashed an angry look at Mark, but said no more. Yes, he is a clown, thought Nigel; an intelligent clown, who is wild not far beneath his academic surface, and could be dangerous. A rich man’s son. A bit spoiled? Old New England family. Inbred? Kicking over the ancestral repressions?
Summoned into the restaurant, they chose their food.
Charles Reilly turned to Chester. “Now’s the time to ask you—in this fine respectable place—What do you actually do in the Business School? Just what goes on there now?”
“There are courses in economics, management, salesmanship, commercial history, theory of exchange, the ethical aspect of business—all that kind of thing.”
“Well, that’s fascinating,” commented Charles, without undue enthusiasm. “But come, Chester, can you teach people to be successful businessmen? Sure, it sounds to me like those courses in creative writing you have over here: if you want to be a creative writer, you’d best stay at home and start writing creatively.”
“Like Emily Dickinson,” said Sukie.
“Oh, that’s quite different. Business and writing are not a bit alike. A writer has to be alone, I guess. But a business nowadays is a team, hopefully at least.” A mildly fanatic gleam had appeared in Chester’s eye. “Take a problem we’re tackling in one of my seminars as of now. The students are divided into two teams; each team has the assignment to put on the market a new and novel deodorant. One man is in charge of production, one handles labor relations, another the area marketing angle, another the costing, and so on; and of course they all get together on the basic factor in the promotional context.”
“And what might that be?” Charles Reilly purred.
“Why, the image of the product, of course.”
There was an awed silence, broken at last by Sukie:
“Chester, you’re letting your steak get cold.”
“It’s like one of those war games H. G. Wells invented,” said Nigel. “Or a house party to choose Foreign Office candidates.”
“The logistical aspect presents an ever-increasing complexity. But we’re handing that over more and more to computers,” Chester said, prodding his steak with his fork.
“Are you now?” said Charles. “I wish you’d find one to write my poetry for me.”
Mark leaned back with a satisfied sigh. “What I can’t figure out, Ches old fellow, is why you go on teaching. With all this know-how lodged in your massive brain, you could become a captain of industry, a Napoleon of commerce.”
A shuttered look came over Chester’s face.
“I mean it, I’m not ribbing you. Look at father.”
Chester frowned. “He was the last of the individualists. It’s all teamwork now, from the white-coated men in the laboratory to the board room of the giant syndicate—”
“‘From Greenland’s icy mountains to India’s coral strand,’” bellowed Mark. “Say what you like, Ches, if I was father I’d stake you to a couple of million and take a side bet that you’d become another Rockefeller.”
Chester blushed, looking secretive, and changed the subject to his forthcoming trip to Britain, where he was being consulted by the authorities of a new university about setting up a Business School there.
“Is your da all that rich?” asked Reilly. “Couldn’t you prevail upon him to set up a foundation for indigent Irish poets?”
“Really, Charles! Why is it you Europeans are always begging?” said Chester, with unusual acerbity. “I mean—”
“What Chester means is that father’ll use his dollars only for making jumbo-size public gestures,” said Mark. “Like donating a fully equipped hospital to his home town, or building a new House at Cabot.”
“Well,” said Sukie, “if I was him, I’d subsidize the desegregation campaign—just buy up a few dozen Southern congressmen: they wouldn’t cost him all that much—”
“Sukie, Sukie, how can you be so cynical at your tender age? Anyway, brother Josiah wouldn’t approve your eating into his patrimony,” grinned Mark.
“Josiah is a phony—a lousy, double-crossing rat. And you know it.” Sukie’s pretty, red mouth was distorted; she positively glared at Mark.
“My girl, you are speaking of the distinguished Homeric scholar? Can I believe my ears? Don’t gorgonize me, pet: I am not his keeper.”
“I should have thought you’d have minded what happened to John, considering—”
“Now look, honey, we’ve had all this before.” Mark lowered his voice and Nigel could not hear what was said.
He turned to Charles Reilly, and they shortly wound up in conversation about W. B. Yeats, whose centenary was to be celebrated the following year. Charles, in his most reductive idiom, started telling several damaging stories about the poet.
“None of you Irish writers seems able to say a kind word about him,” protested Nigel.
“Of course we can’t. Willie Yeats is too big for us. We have to cut him down to our size, I know that. Still and all, he was a bit of a cod. But mind this—he hated fanaticism in politics because he knew the fanatic, the capacity for hatred, in himself.”
Charles fell silent and Nigel heard Chester saying, “. . . tell him to go and talk to Josiah next Thursday then. I’ll have a word with him. But I can’t promise anything, Sukie, you realize that?”
Nigel saw the girl touch Chester’s hand gratefully. It was noticeable that she kept her face turned away from Mark. “A Maud Gonne come to judgment,” Nigel remembered. A strange thought, considering how tiny she would have looked beside that larger-than-life Irish heroine: but there was the fanatic glint in Sukie’s eyes, the humorlessness, and the decisive way she now rose, collected her belongings, said it was time to go home.
2 Cockroaches and Crusaders
NIGEL EYED HIS hostess with mild misgiving. One could never be sure what May Edwardes would say next: her remarks came at one from unpredictable angles, and the spectacle of a person trying to fend off her faster deliveries was as depressing as that of a village batsman failing to deal with a Test-Match bowler. A classical story was still going the rounds in Hawthorne House. May liked the tutors to call her by her Christian name. An observant freshman at one of her parties, noting this, said, “May I get you a drink, May?” “Yes, thank you,” she replied. “I will take some bitter lemon. And please feel quite free to call me Mrs. Edwardes.”
The wife of the Master—it was unwise to address her as the Mistress—of Hawthorne House was a Scotswoman of distinguished family and considerable academic attainment: she kept the latter cunningly masked so as to open the more devastating fire upon unsuspecting strangers. Tonight, unbecomingly clad in coffee-colored silk, she appeared to be in a permissive state of mind.
“I hope you’re comfortable in your rooms, Nigel.”
“Very comfortable, thank you.”
“No trouble with cockroaches?”
“No. Should I?”
“Well, you know Cabot is famous for its cockroaches, and we like to think we have the most plentiful supply here at Hawthorne. Earlier this term, just before you came over, that poor wee Chester found a stage army of them walking round and round his bedroom one night.”
“How very unpleasant. What did he do?”
“Slept on the couch in the sitting room. They come up from the basement in search of diversion, you know, or just a little peace and quiet, maybe.”
Nigel thought it might well be the latter. The hardiest cockroach would surely be intimidated by the whirl of undergraduate life on the subground floor all around the main quadrangle: the boiler rooms, laundry rooms, canteen and locker rooms, television rooms, table-tennis rooms, and the Lord knew what else. By skillful use of this underground complex a student, unless compelled to attend lectures, need never put his foot out of doors once the New England snow had set in.
“I suppose they had walked to meet Chester,” said Nigel thoughtfully.
“I was not aware that cockroaches can fly.”
“No, I mean someone might have put them there—an enemy hath done this thing, May.”
“Oh, come now, Chester is not only his own worst enemy, he’s his only one.”
“So you feel he’s not persecuted, he just has persecution mania? He appears to take the opposite view himself.”
May Edwardes, who had been gazing ruminatively toward the other end of the drawing room, where the person in question was talking with a group of colleagues, laid a hand on Nigel’s sleeve.
“Then he deceives himself. People are persecuted either for their faith or for their eccentricity. Chester, as a typical modern American, has neither the one nor the other.” Her voice took on the slight boom which heralded her cultural pronouncements. The company fell silent. The silence continued. Mrs. Edwardes broke it. She bent forward and eyed Nigel solemnly. “Considering what I’ve heard of your background,” she said, “tell me, do you read detective fiction?”
“Sometimes,” said Nigel.
“I hope you are sound on it.”
“Sound?” asked Nigel.
“As an art form.”
“It’s not an art form. It’s an entertainment.”
May nodded approvingly. “Excellent. I have no use for those who seek to turn the crime novel into an exercise in morbid psychology. Its chief virtue lies in its consistent flouting of reality: but crime novelists today are trying to write variations on Crime and Punishment without possessing a grain of Dostoevsky’s talent. They’ve lost the courage of their own agreeable fantasies, and want to be accepted as serious writers.” This seemed to annoy her.
“Still, novels that are all plot—just clever patterns concealing a vacuum—one does get bored with them. I can understand readers getting sick of blood that’s obviously only red ink.”
“I’d have thought that you at any rate would prefer that kind.” She seemed hurt.
“Now, May, please! I didn’t come to Cabot to—”
But she was in full cry. “Zeke told me you have got yourself mixed up with a number of unsavory cases.”
“And Zeke also told you, my love,” said the Master firmly, coming over to them, “that Nigel’s unsavory past was not to be mentioned in the clean, wholesome atmosphere of Hawthorne House. I cannot have my students distracted from their courses by prurient curiosity about the seamier side of British life.”
“But the methods of a private investigator should be highly instructive—”
“My dear May, the private investigator is out—in fact as well as in fiction. Crimes of violence can only be dealt with now by teams of professionals,” said Nigel.
“So much the worse, if that means we have to rely on our city police here. They’re corrupt to a man.” She sighed.
“I guess we’d best break it up, before you land yourself in court for slander. Nigel, I would like you to know another Ahlberg—this one, Josiah?” The Master, an exceedingly tall man with a skull-like head, who seemed to add interminably to his length, like a snake, when he straightened out, led Nigel to another corner of the drawing room, where a middle-aged man was sprawled in his armchair, smoking a pipe and paying no attention to the rest of the company.
Josiah and Nigel said they were glad to know each other. Josiah had the neat, dry face common among classical scholars: he looked as if he had grown into his skin—every wrinkle was in place. But this appearance of sedateness was contradicted by the fidgety glance of his eyes.
“Well, what do you make of us?” he asked abruptly.
“I’ve not been here a week yet. Too early for generalizations,” Nigel said.
“If you can’t make generalizations in the first few days, you’ll never make them.”
“That’s probably true. But I’m not a journalist.”
“Uh-huh. And I suppose every goddam student in the place has asked you how Cabot compares with Oxford.” Josiah puffed a cloud of smoke over Nigel’s head.
“Quite a few. And they really seem to want to know.”
“That is typical of the American student. He believes that indiscriminately sucking in information is equivalent to acquiring knowledge.” The eyes rolled.
“I find them extremely well mannered.”
“An Ivy League tradition,” Josiah remarked sourly. “And, of course, in the dining hall polite conversation is necessary to palliate the horrors of the food. You realize that our food is shot through tunnels by compressed air from a central kitchen?”
“Have you proof of this?”
“The proof is in the pudding, as they say.” Ahlberg permitted himself a half chuckle. “And the hot air is generated by the President and the Heads of Faculties. But your glass is empty. What are you drinking?”
“Bourbon and water.”
Josiah Ahlberg returned with full tumblers. “They’re tearing one another to pieces just now about the Aims of Education. As if they were the first living men to notice that it ought to have an aim. General education versus specialized studies—you know the setup. Insane! All it means is that each Faculty wants to grab more dough and prestige for itself.” Josiah gave Nigel an amiable snarl.
“But the Classical Faculty is above such low motivations?”
“My dear Strangeways, you were a classicist yourself, the Master tells me. You know the classics don’t need prestige. They’ve trained the best minds through the centuries; they’d still be the best discipline, the best way to put bone into thinking—conceptual and practical thinking—if we gave them a chance.”
“Your brother would hardly agree.”
“Chester?” Josiah made a smirking grimace. “The Business School! Trying to make a gentlemanly discipline out of the pursuit of rogues and anarchists! Every successful businessman has been an anarchist, a pure self-seeker: they’ve got to the top because the rest of us keep the laws, or can’t share their monomania for money.”
“I was thinking of Mark,” Nigel put in mildly.
Josiah narrowed his eyes. “Mark? His talents don’t lie in the money-making direction. Very much the reverse.”
“No, I meant he wouldn’t agree with you that the classics are the best foundaton—”
“Oh, I see. Sure. English. Not content with going to bed with that softest of soft options, he tries to make a governess out of her.”
“He seems quite able,” said Nigel.
“He writes crappy little articles for pseudo-scholarly magazines, if that’s a proof of ability. When I was at Harvard, we read books—English and American literature—because a gentleman naturally read such books, took them in his stride. We did not—” Josiah snorted—“we did not ‘study English literature.’ Any more than the Greek audience ‘studied’ Aeschylus. Fancy telling an intelligent fellow why and how he ought to like Shakespeare!”
“You’re from the South, aren’t you, Mr. Ahlberg?”
“From the South? Is that my accent or my reactionary views? Actually my mother was a Southerner. However, my father’s second wife came from the Midwest.”
“What do you think of Susannah Tate? I met her last Sunday with your brothers.”