CHAPTER VIII

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