Gaudy Night

That evening, the faculty gather for dinner earlier than usual. Harriet suspects they all want to catch a preliminary glimpse of Wimsey, who is an invited guest. Harriet feels some nervousness on his account. She isn’t sure what sorts of questions the female academics will put to him. Despite her concerns, Wimsey acquits himself well during the meal, conversing on a variety of topics with the scholars who specialize in those subjects. In short order, he wins them all over with his wit and charm: “Once again, [Harriet] felt Wimsey as a dangerous alien and herself on the side of the women, who, with so strange a generosity, were welcoming the inquisitor among them” (420).

After the meal, the group goes to the Senior Common Room for coffee. Before Harriet enters with Wimsey, she asks him what he wants her to do as part of their strategy to ferret out information. He asks her to use the two characteristics that made him fall in love with her: keep to the point and speak the truth. Harriet wryly contemplates the two very unromantic qualities that triggered Wimsey’s passion for her: “Now that she knew, she thought that a more unattractive pair of qualities could seldom have been put forward as an excuse for devotion” (421).

The group in the common room engages in a lengthy and lively discussion on a number of different topics, ranging from morality to crime detection to truth. Wimsey discretely mines for information and strikes gold when Miss de Vine tells the story of a male academic’s disgrace. She discovered that he had stolen a historical document that would disprove a thesis he’d put forth. When de Vine alerts the college authorities, her colleague is stripped of his degree, fired, and his family is left destitute. Someone at the table questions whether his wife should have stood by him after his disgrace, and everyone agrees that husbands expect doglike devotion from their wives. As the evening wears on, Harriet senses that her colleagues are expecting Wimsey to broach the topic of the Poison-Pen, but he never does. After the party breaks up, Harriet escorts Wimsey to the gate. Walking back to her room, she notices Miss Hillyard pacing around the Fellows’ Garden for an hour-and-a-half.

The morning after the faculty dinner, Wimsey and his nephew appear in the quad. The women in the Senior Common Room observe them, many commenting on the viscount’s handsomeness. Harriet goes downstairs to find out the reason for the visit. St. George had positioned himself near the building exit to see if he could identify the strange woman he’d encountered in Fellows’ Garden, but none of the residents match the description. Wimsey returns Harriet’s academic gown and case file. He says he must go away to London and York for a few days on some mysterious errand. After he leaves, Harriet realizes that her case file contained her unfinished sonnet. She is even more embarrassed when she realizes that Wimsey read and completed it. In the lines he wrote, she begins to understand his behavior:

Harriet had seen him strip off his protections, layer by layer, till there was uncommonly little left but the naked truth. That, then, was what he wanted her for. For some reason, obscure to herself and probably also to him, she had the power to force him outside his defenses (458).

She also realizes that Wimsey is waiting for her to fight her way through her personal defenses to find the truth of her own feelings. Her insights into their relationship give her much to ponder: “She went to bed thinking more about another person than about herself. This goes to prove that even minor poetry may have its practical uses” (460).

The following evening, Harriet goes to have dinner with friends. While there, she receives a call purporting to be from the Warden’s scout, asking her to return to the college immediately. Harriet doesn’t have her car, so she says she’ll arrive by foot around eleven o’clock in the evening. As she hurriedly makes her way back, it occurs to her that the call might be a set-up. She finds a campus call box and asks the college porter, Padgett, to keep watch near Fellows’ Garden in case of an ambush. Fearing an attack, she hastily scribbles a love note to Wimsey and slips it into her pocket in case her dead body is found the next day.

Just as Harriet reaches the gate near the garden, the Warden arrives home from an evening out. The two enter the college together, and the anticipated attack is averted. Padgett confirms that someone was lurking in the vicinity but might have been frightened off by Miss Hillyard, who likes to walk in the garden late at night. After she arrives back in her room, Harriet destroys the love note.

The following morning, tempers are short in the common room, and arguments break out over petty issues. Miss Edwards says that things have reached a crisis, and she would be glad to call in the police: “If we’re like this now; what’s going to happen to us at the end of term? You ought to have had the police in from the start, and if I’d been here, I’d have said so” (472).

Wimsey returns from his trip to compare notes with Harriet. He’s been attempting to track down Arthur Robinson, the academic fraud that Miss de Vine exposed years earlier in her career. Wimsey suspects that Robinson might be at the bottom of the poison pen mystery because the trouble at Shrewsbury started shortly after de Vine’s arrival. Wimsey has been able to learn that Robinson vanished shortly after his disgrace and may have gone abroad and changed his name. The Climpson Agency has been tasked with tracing Robinson’s current whereabouts as well as that of any family he might have. So far, no new information about him has surfaced.

Harriet proposes that she and Wimsey take a drive in the country to talk further about the case. As they travel the countryside, she tells him about the fake phone call and her brush with disaster. Wimsey immediately pulls over to the side of the road and insists on giving Harriet a crash course in how to defend herself if someone tries to strangle her. After covering the basics, they drive on, but Wimsey also stops at a shop to buy her a dog collar. He says this will prevent an attacker from slitting her throat. After putting the collar on, Harriet examines the result: “It was a massive kind of necklace and quite surprisingly uncomfortable. Harriet fished in her bag for a hand mirror and surveyed the effect” (482). She immediately removes it but promises to wear it if she’s out walking alone at night.

Wimsey comments that this is the only gift she’s ever allowed him to give her. Harriet says he may buy her an antique chess set she’s been admiring in a nearby shop window. Wimsey immediately enters the shop and begins haggling with the merchant over every single chess piece until they arrive at a price. The process takes over an hour. When the owner goes in search of packing materials, Wimsey and Harriet amuse themselves making music at an antique spinet.

Two young men enter the shop, and one of them objects to Wimsey’s choice of song. It turns out to be Pomfret, who believes Wimsey is mocking his rejected proposal by Harriet. Wimsey is able to subdue him and send him away in the care of his schoolmate. Back in the car, Harriet explains the situation and Wimsey decides to write Pomfret a formal note of apology. However, he admits, “I hate being loomed over by gigantic undergraduates and made to feel my age” (493)