The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club · Chapter 18 (3/3)

“Well, you can deal best with all that. It’s the books and paintings I want to look at. H’m! Books, you know, Charles, are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ’em, then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”

“That’s a fact,” said Parker. “I’ve got rows of schoolboy stuff at home⁠—never touch it now, of course. And W. J. Locke⁠—read everything he wrote once upon a time. And Le Queux, and Conan Doyle, and all that stuff.”

“And now you read theology. And what else?”

“Well, I read Hardy a good bit. And when I’m not too tired, I have a go at Henry James.”

“The refined self-examinations of the infinitely-sophisticated. ’M-m. Well now. Let’s start with the shelves by the fireplace. Dorothy Richardson⁠—Virginia Woolf⁠—E. B. C. Jones⁠—May Sinclair⁠—Katherine Mansfield⁠—the modern female writers are well represented, aren’t they? Galsworthy. Yes. No J. D. Beresford⁠—no Wells⁠—no Bennett. Dear me, quite a row of D. H. Lawrence. I wonder if she reads him very often.”

He pulled down Women in Love at random, and slapped the pages open and shut.

“Not kept very well dusted, are they? But they have been read. Compton Mackenzie⁠—Storm Jameson⁠—yes⁠—I see.”

“The medical stuff is over here.”

“Oh!⁠—a few textbooks⁠—first steps in chemistry. What’s that tumbled down at the back of the bookcase? Louis Berman, eh? The Personal Equation. And here’s Why We Behave Like Human Beings. And Julian Huxley’s essays. A determined effort at self-education here, what?”

“Girls seem to go in for that sort of thing nowadays.”

“Yes⁠—hardly nice, is it? Hullo!”

“What?”

“Over here by the couch. This represents the latest of our lobster-shells, I fancy. Austin Freeman, Austin Freeman, Austin Freeman⁠—bless me! she must have ordered him in wholesale. Through the Wall⁠—that’s a good ’tec story, Charles⁠—all about the third degree⁠—Isabel Ostrander⁠—three Edgar Wallaces⁠—the girl’s been indulging in an orgy of crime!”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Parker, with emphasis. “That fellow Freeman is full of plots about poisonings and wills and survivorship, isn’t he?”

“Yes”⁠—Wimsey balanced A Silent Witness gently in his hand, and laid it down again. “This one, for instance, is all about a bloke who murdered somebody and kept him in cold storage till he was ready to dispose of him. It would suit Robert Fentiman.”

Parker grinned.

“A bit elaborate for the ordinary criminal. But I daresay people do get ideas out of these books. Like to look at the pictures? They’re pretty awful.”

“Don’t try to break it gently. Show us the worst at once.⁠ ⁠… Oh, lord!”

“Well, it gives me a pain,” said Parker. “But I thought perhaps that was my lack of artistic education.”

“It was your natural good taste. What vile color, and viler drawing.”

“But nobody cares about drawing nowadays, do they?”

“Ah! but there’s a difference between the man who can draw and won’t draw, and the man who can’t draw at all. Go on. Let’s see the rest.”

Parker produced them, one after the other. Wimsey glanced quickly at each. He had picked up the brush and palette and was fingering them as he talked.

“These,” he said, “are the paintings of a completely untalented person, who is, moreover, trying to copy the mannerisms of a very advanced school. By the way, you have noticed, of course, that she has been painting within the last few days, but chucked it in sudden disgust. She has left the paints on the palette, and the brushes are still stuck in the turps, turning their ends up and generally ruining themselves. Suggestive, I fancy. The⁠—stop a minute! Let’s look at that again.”

Parker had brought forward the head of the sallow, squinting man which he had mentioned to Wimsey before.

“Put that up on the easel. That’s very interesting. The others, you see, are all an effort to imitate other people’s art, but this⁠—this is an effort to imitate nature. Why?⁠—it’s very bad, but it’s meant for somebody. And it’s been worked on a lot. Now what was it made her do that?”

“Well, it wasn’t for his beauty, I should think.”

“No?⁠—but there must have been a reason. Dante, you may remember, once painted an angel. Do you know the limerick about the old man of Khartoum?”

“What did he do?”

“He kept two black sheep in his room. They remind me (he said) Of two friends who are dead. But I cannot remember of whom.”

“If that reminds you of anybody you know, I don’t care much for your friends. I never saw an uglier mug.”

“He’s not beautiful. But I think the sinister squint is chiefly due to bad drawing. It’s very difficult to get eyes looking the same way, when you can’t draw. Cover up one eye, Charles⁠—not yours, the portrait’s.”

Parker did so.

Wimsey looked again, and shook his head.

“It escapes me for the moment,” he said. “Probably it’s nobody I know after all. But, whoever it is, surely this room tells you something.”

“It suggests to me,” said Parker, “that the girl’s been taking more interest in crimes and chemistry stuff than is altogether healthy in the circumstances.”

Wimsey looked at him for a moment.

“I wish I could think as you do.”

“What do you think?” demanded Parker, impatiently.

“No,” said Wimsey. “I told you about that George business this morning, because glass bottles are facts, and one mustn’t conceal facts. But I’m not obliged to tell you what I think.”

“You don’t think, then, that Ann Dorland did the murder?”

“I don’t know about that, Charles. I came here hoping that this room would tell me the same thing that it told you. But it hasn’t. It’s told me different. It’s told me what I thought all along.”

“A penny for your thoughts, then,” said Parker, trying desperately to keep the conversation on a jocular footing.

“Not even thirty pieces of silver,” replied Wimsey, mournfully.

Parker stacked the canvasses away without another word.