Lord Peter reached home about midnight, feeling extraordinarily wakeful
and alert. Something was jigging and worrying in his brain; it felt
like a hive of bees, stirred up by a stick. He felt as though he were
looking at a complicated riddle, of which he had once been told the
answer but had forgotten it and was always on the point of remembering.
“Somewhere,” said Lord Peter to himself, “somewhere I’ve got the key to
these two things. I know I’ve got it, only I can’t remember what it is.
Somebody said it. Perhaps I said it. I can’t remember where, but I know
I’ve got it. Go to bed, Bunter, I shall sit up a little. I’ll just slip
on a dressing-gown.”
Before the fire he sat down with his pipe in his mouth and his
jazz-coloured peacocks gathered about him. He traced out this line and
that line of investigation—rivers running into the sand. They ran out
from the thought of Levy, last seen at ten o’clock in Prince of Wales
Road. They ran back from the picture of the grotesque dead man in Mr.
Thipps’s bathroom—they ran over the roof, and were lost—lost in the
sand. Rivers running into the sand—rivers running underground, very far
down—
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
By leaning his head down, it seemed to Lord Peter that he could hear
them, very faintly, lipping and gurgling somewhere in the darkness. But
where? He felt quite sure that somebody had told him once, only he had
forgotten.
He roused himself, threw a log on the fire, and picked up a book which
the indefatigable Bunter, carrying on his daily fatigues amid the
excitements of special duty, had brought from the Times Book Club.
It happened to be Sir Julian Freke’s “Physiological Bases of the
Conscience,” which he had seen reviewed two days before.
“This ought to send one to sleep,” said Lord Peter; “if I can’t leave
these problems to my subconscious I’ll be as limp as a rag tomorrow.”
He opened the book slowly, and glanced carelessly through the preface.
“I wonder if that’s true about Levy being ill,” he thought, putting the
book down; “it doesn’t seem likely. And yet—Dash it all, I’ll take my
mind off it.”
He read on resolutely for a little.
“I don’t suppose Mother’s kept up with the Levys much,” was the next
importunate train of thought. “Dad always hated self-made people and
wouldn’t have ’em at Denver. And old Gerald keeps up the tradition. I
wonder if she knew Freke well in those days. She seems to get on with
Milligan. I trust Mother’s judgment a good deal. She was a brick about
that bazaar business. I ought to have warned her. She said something
once—”
He pursued an elusive memory for some minutes, till it vanished
altogether with a mocking flicker of the tail. He returned to his
reading.
Presently another thought crossed his mind aroused by a photograph of
some experiment in surgery.
“If the evidence of Freke and that man Watts hadn’t been so positive,”
he said to himself, “I should be inclined to look into the matter of
those shreds of lint on the chimney.”
He considered this, shook his head and read with determination.
Mind and matter were one thing, that was the theme of the physiologist.
Matter could erupt, as it were, into ideas. You could carve passions in
the brain with a knife. You could get rid of imagination with drugs and
cure an outworn convention like a disease. “The knowledge of good and
evil is an observed phenomenon, attendant upon a certain condition of
the brain-cells, which is removable.” That was one phrase; and again:
“Conscience in man may, in fact, be compared to the sting of a
hive-bee, which, so far from conducing to the welfare of its possessor,
cannot function, even in a single instance, without occasioning its
death. The survival-value in each case is thus purely social; and
if humanity ever passes from its present phase of social development
into that of a higher individualism, as some of our philosophers have
ventured to speculate, we may suppose that this interesting mental
phenomenon may gradually cease to appear; just as the nerves and
muscles which once controlled the movements of our ears and scalps
have, in all save a few backward individuals, become atrophied and of
interest only to the physiologist.”
“By Jove!” thought Lord Peter, idly, “that’s an ideal doctrine for the
criminal. A man who believed that would never—”
And then it happened—the thing he had been half-unconsciously
expecting. It happened suddenly, surely, as unmistakably, as sunrise.
He remembered—not one thing, nor another thing, nor a logical
succession of things, but everything—the whole thing, perfect,
complete, in all its dimensions as it were and instantaneously; as
if he stood outside the world and saw it suspended in infinitely
dimensional space. He no longer needed to reason about it, or even to
think about it. He knew it.
There is a game in which one is presented with a jumble of letters and
is required to make a word out of them, as thus:
C O S S S S R I
The slow way of solving the problem is to try out all the permutations
and combinations in turn, throwing away impossible conjunctions of
letters, as:
S S S I R C
or
S C S R S O
Another way is to stare at the inco-ordinate elements until, by no
logical process that the conscious mind can detect, or under some
adventitious external stimulus, the combination:
S C I S S O R S
presents itself with calm certainty. After that, one does not even need
to arrange the letters in order. The thing is done.
Even so, the scattered elements of two grotesque conundrums, flung
higgledy-piggledy into Lord Peter’s mind, resolved themselves,
unquestioned henceforward. A bump on the roof of the end house—Levy
in a welter of cold rain talking to a prostitute in the Battersea
Park Road—a single ruddy hair—lint bandages—Inspector Sugg calling
the great surgeon from the dissecting-room of the hospital—Lady
Levy with a nervous attack—the smell of carbolic soap—the Duchess’s
voice—“not really an engagement, only a sort of understanding with her
father”—shares in Peruvian Oil—the dark skin and curved, fleshy profile
of the man in the bath—Dr. Grimbold giving evidence, “In my opinion,
death did not occur for several days after the blow”—india-rubber
gloves—even, faintly, the voice of Mr. Appledore, “He called on me,
sir, with an anti-vivisectionist pamphlet”—all these things and many
others rang together and made one sound, they swung together like bells
in a steeple, with the deep tenor booming through the clamour:
“The knowledge of good and evil is a phenomenon of the brain, and is
removable, removable, removable. The knowledge of good and evil is
removable.”
Lord Peter Wimsey was not a young man who habitually took himself very
seriously, but this time he was frankly appalled. “It’s impossible,”
said his reason, feebly; “_credo quia impossibile_,” said his interior
certainty with impervious self-satisfaction. “All right,” said
conscience, instantly allying itself with blind faith, “what are you
going to do about it?”
Lord Peter got up and paced the room: “Good Lord!” he said. “Good
Lord!” He took down “Who’s Who” from the little shelf over the
telephone and sought comfort in its pages:
FREKE, Sir Julian, Kt. _cr._ 1916; G.C.V.O. _cr._ 1919;
K.C.V.O. 1917; K.C.B. 1918; M.D., F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S.,
Dr. en Méd. Paris; D. Sci. Cantab.; Knight of Grace of
the Order of S. John of Jerusalem; Consulting Surgeon
of St. Luke’s Hospital, Battersea. _b._ Gryllingham,
16 March, 1872, _only son_ of Edward Curzon Freke,
Esq., of Gryll Court, Gryllingham. _Educ._ Harrow and
Trinity Coll., Cambridge; Col. A.M.S.; late Member
of the Advisory Board of the Army Medical Service.
_Publications_: Some Notes on the Pathological Aspects
of Genius, 1892; Statistical Contributions to the
Study of Infantile Paralysis in England and Wales,
1894; Functional Disturbances of the Nervous System,
1899; Cerebro-Spinal Diseases, 1904; The Borderland
of Insanity, 1906; An Examination into the Treatment
of Pauper Lunacy in the United Kingdom, 1906; Modern
Developments in Psycho-Therapy: A Criticism, 1910;
Criminal Lunacy, 1914; The Application of Psycho-Therapy
to the Treatment of Shell-Shock, 1917; An Answer to
Professor Freud, with a Description of Some Experiments
Carried Out at the Base Hospital at Amiens, 1919;
Structural Modifications Accompanying the More Important
Neuroses, 1920. _Clubs_: White’s; Oxford and Cambridge;
Alpine, etc. _Recreations_: Chess, Mountaineering,
Fishing. _Address_: 282, Harley Street and St. Luke’s
House, Prince of Wales Road, Battersea Park, S.W.11.
He flung the book away. “Confirmation!” he groaned. “As if I needed it!”
He sat down again and buried his face in his hands. He remembered quite
suddenly how, years ago, he had stood before the breakfast table at
Denver Castle—a small, peaky boy in blue knickers, with a thunderously
beating heart. The family had not come down; there was a great silver
urn with a spirit lamp under it, and an elaborate coffee-pot boiling
in a glass dome. He had twitched the corner of the tablecloth—twitched
it harder, and the urn moved ponderously forward and all the teaspoons
rattled. He seized the tablecloth in a firm grip and pulled his
hardest—he could feel now the delicate and awful thrill as the urn
and the coffee machine and the whole of a Sèvres breakfast service had
crashed down in one stupendous ruin—he remembered the horrified face of
the butler, and the screams of a lady guest.
A log broke across and sank into a fluff of white ash. A belated
motor-lorry rumbled past the window.
Mr. Bunter, sleeping the sleep of the true and faithful servant, was
aroused in the small hours by a hoarse whisper, “Bunter!”
“Yes, my lord,” said Bunter, sitting up and switching on the light.
“Put that light out, damn you!” said the voice. “Listen—over
there—listen—can’t you hear it?”
“It’s nothing, my lord,” said Mr. Bunter, hastily getting out of bed
and catching hold of his master; “it’s all right, you get to bed quick
and I’ll fetch you a drop of bromide. Why, you’re all shivering—you’ve
been sitting up too late.”
“Hush! no, no—it’s the water,” said Lord Peter with chattering teeth;
“it’s up to their waists down there, poor devils. But listen! can’t you
hear it? Tap, tap, tap—they’re mining us—but I don’t know where—I can’t
hear—I can’t. Listen, you! There it is again—we must find it—we must
stop it.... Listen! Oh, my God! I can’t hear—I can’t hear anything for
the noise of the guns. Can’t they stop the guns?”
“Oh, dear!” said Mr. Bunter to himself. “No, no—it’s all right,
Major—don’t you worry.”
“But I hear it,” protested Peter.
“So do I,” said Mr. Bunter stoutly; “very good hearing, too, my lord.
That’s our own sappers at work in the communication trench. Don’t you
fret about that, sir.”
Lord Peter grasped his wrist with a feverish hand.
“Our own sappers,” he said; “sure of that?”
“Certain of it,” said Mr. Bunter, cheerfully.
“They’ll bring down the tower,” said Lord Peter.
“To be sure they will,” said Mr. Bunter, “and very nice, too. You just
come and lay down a bit, sir—they’ve come to take over this section.”
“You’re sure it’s safe to leave it?” said Lord Peter.
“Safe as houses, sir,” said Mr. Bunter, tucking his master’s arm under
his and walking him off to his bedroom.
Lord Peter allowed himself to be dosed and put to bed without further
resistance. Mr. Bunter, looking singularly un-Bunterlike in striped
pyjamas, with his stiff black hair ruffled about his head, sat grimly
watching the younger man’s sharp cheekbones and the purple stains under
his eyes.
“Thought we’d had the last of these attacks,” he said. “Been overdoin’
of himself. Asleep?” He peered at him anxiously. An affectionate note
crept into his voice. “Bloody little fool!” said Sergeant Bunter.