“I won’t vouch for the exact words,” said Wimsey, “but it was to that effect—you know my mother’s style. Old Thorpe tried to look dignified, but mother ruffled up like a little hen and said, looking beadily at him: ‘In my day we called that kind of thing hysterics and naughtiness. We didn’t let girls pull the wool over our eyes like that. I suppose you call it a neurosis, or a suppressed desire, or a reflex, and coddle it. You might have let that silly child make herself really ill. You are all perfectly ridiculous, and no more fit to take care of yourselves than a lot of babies—not but what there are plenty of poor little things in the slums that look after whole families and show more sense than the lot of you put together. I am very angry with Mary, advertising herself in this way, and she’s not to be pitied.’ You know,” said Wimsey, “I think there’s often a great deal in what one’s mother says.”
“I believe you,” said Parker.
“Well, I got hold of mother afterwards and asked her what it was all about. She said Mary wouldn’t tell her anything about herself or her illness; just asked to be let alone. Then Thorpe came along and talked about nervous shock—said he couldn’t understand these fits of sickness, or the way Mary’s temperature hopped about. Mother listened, and told him to go and see what the temperature was now. Which he did, and in the middle mother called him away to the dressing-table. But, bein’ a wily old bird, you see, she kept her eyes on the looking-glass, and nipped round just in time to catch Mary stimulatin’ the thermometer to terrific leaps on the hot-water bottle.”
“Well, I’m damned!” said Parker.
“So was Thorpe. All mother said was, that if he wasn’t too old a bird yet to be taken in by that hoary trick he’d no business to be gettin’ himself up as a grey-haired family practitioner. So then she asked the girl about the sick fits—when they happened, and how often, and was it after meals or before, and so on, and at last she got out of them that it generally happened a bit after breakfast and occasionally at other times. Mother said she couldn’t make it out at first, because she’d hunted all over the room for bottles and things, till at last she asked who made the bed, thinkin’, you see, Mary might have hidden something under the mattress. So Ellen said she usually made it while Mary had her bath. ‘When’s that?’ says mother. ‘Just before her breakfast,’ bleats the girl. ‘God forgive you all for a set of nincompoops,’ says my mother. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’ So away they all trailed to the bathroom, and there, sittin’ up quietly on the bathroom shelf among the bath salts and the Elliman’s embrocation and the Kruschen feelings and the toothbrushes and things, was the family bottle of ipecacuanha—three-quarters empty! Mother said—well, I told you what she said. By the way, how do you spell ipecacuanha?”
Mr. Parker spelt it.
“Damn you!” said Lord Peter. “I did think I’d stumped you that time. I believe you went and looked it up beforehand. No decent-minded person would know how to spell ipecacuanha out of his own head. Anyway, as you were saying, it’s easy to see which side of the family has the detective instinct.”
“I didn’t say so—”
“I know. Why didn’t you? I think my mother’s talents deserve a little acknowledgment. I said so to her, as a matter of fact, and she replied in these memorable words: ‘My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I’m an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it’s so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes.’ However, apart from all that, I said to mother (in private, of course), ‘It’s all very well, but I can’t believe that Mary has been going to all this trouble to make herself horribly sick and frighten us all just to show off. Surely she isn’t that sort.’ Mother looked at me as steady as an owl, and quoted a whole lot of examples of hysteria, ending up with the servant-girl who threw paraffin about all over somebody’s house to make them think it was haunted, and finished up—that if all these newfangled doctors went out of their way to invent subconsciousness and kleptomania, and complexes and other fancy descriptions to explain away when people had done naughty things, she thought one might just as well take advantage of the fact.”
“Wimsey,” said Parker, much excited, “did she mean she suspected something?”
“My dear old chap,” replied
