From this the conversation naturally passed to biology, Mendelian factors and Brave New World. It was cut short by the emergence of Harriet’s former tutor from a crowd of old students. Harriet and Phœbe made a concerted rush to greet her. Miss Lydgate’s manner was exactly what it had always been. To the innocent and candid eyes of that great scholar, no moral problem seemed ever to present itself. Of a scrupulous personal integrity, she embraced the irregularities of other people in a wide, unquestioning charity, As any student of literature must, she knew all the sins of the world by name, but it was doubtful whether she recognised them when she met them in real life. It was as though a misdemeanour committed by a person she knew was disarmed and disinfected by the contact. So many young people had passed through her hands, and she had found so much good in all of them; it was impossible to think that they could be deliberately wicked, like Richard III or Iago. Unhappy, yes; misguided, yes; exposed to difficult and complicated temptations which Miss Lydgate herself had been mercifully spared, yes. If she heard of a theft, a divorce, even worse things, she would knit puzzled brows and think how utterly wretched the offenders must have been before they could do so dreadful a thing. Only once had Harriet ever heard her speak with unqualified disapproval of any one she knew, and that was of a former pupil of her own who had written a popular book about Carlyle, ‘No research at all,’ had been Miss Lydgate’s verdict, ‘and no effort at critical judgment. She has reproduced all the old gossip without troubling to verify anything. Slipshod, showy, and catchpenny. I am really ashamed of her.’ And even then she had added: ‘But I believe, poor thing, she is very hard up.’
Miss Lydgate showned no signs of being ashamed of Miss Vane. On the contrary, she greeted her warmly, begged her to come and see her on Sunday morning, spoke appreciatively of her work, and commended her for keeping up a scholarly standard of English, even in mystery fiction.
‘You give a lot of pleasure in the S.C.R.,’ she added, ‘and I believe Miss de Vine is also a fervent admirer of yours.’
‘Miss de Vine?’
‘Ah, of course, you don’t know her. Our new Research Fellow. She’s such a nice person, and I know she wants to talk to you about your books. You must come and make her acquaintance. We’ve got her for three years, you know. That is, she only comes into residence next term, but she’s been living in Oxford for the last few weeks, working in Bodley. She’s doing a great work on National Finance under the Tudors, and makes it perfectly fascinating, even for people like me, who are stupid about money. We are all so glad that the College decided to offer her the Jane Barraclough Fellowship, because she is a most distinguished scholar, and has had rather a hard time.’.
‘I think I’ve heard of her. Wasn’t she Head of one of the big provincial colleges?’
‘Yes; she was Provost of Flamborough for three years; but it wasn’t really her job; too much administration, though of course she was marvellous on the financial side. But she was doing too much, what with her own work, and examining for doctorates and so on, and coping with students – the University and the College between them wore her out. She’s one of those people who always will give of her best; but I think she found all the personal contacts uncongenial. She got ill, and had to go abroad for a couple of years. In fact, she has only just got back to England. Of course, having to give up Flamborough made a good deal of difference from the financial point of view; so it’s nice to think that for the next three years she’ll be able to get on with her book and not worry about that side of things.’
‘I remember about it now,’ said Harriet ‘I saw the election announced somewhere or other, last Christmas or thereabouts.’
‘I expect you saw it in the Shrewsbury Year-Book. We are naturally very proud to have her here. She ought really to have a professorship, but I doubt if she could stand the tutorial side of it. The fewer distractions she has, the better, because she’s one of the real scholars. There she is, over there – and, oh dear! I’m afraid she’s been caught by Miss Gubbins. You remember Miss Gubbins?’
‘Vaguely,’ said Phœbe. ‘She was Third Year when we were freshers. An excellent soul, but rather earnest, and an appalling bore at College Meetings.’
‘She is a very conscientious person,’ said Miss Lydgate, ‘but she has rather an unfortunate knack of making any subject sound dull. It’s a great pity, because she is exceptionally sound and dependable. However, that doesn’t greatly matter in her present appointment; she holds a librarianship somewhere – Miss Hillyard would remember where – and I believe she’s researching on the Bacon family. She’s such a hard worker. But I’m afraid she’s putting poor Miss de Vine through a cross-examination, which doesn’t seem quite fair on an occasion like this. Shall we go to the rescue?’
As Harriet followed Miss Lydgate across the lawn, she was visited by an enormous nostalgia. If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted by agents, contracts, publishers, blurb-writers, interviewers, fan-mail, autograph-hunters, notoriety-hunters, and competitors; abolishing personal contacts, personal spites, personal jealousies; getting one’s teeth into something dull and durable; maturing into solidity like the Shrewsbury beeches – then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one’s own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things.
But she doubted whether she were now capable of any such withdrawal. She had long ago taken the step that put the grey-walled paradise of Oxford behind her. No one can bathe in the same river twice, not even in the Isis. She would be impatient of that narrow serenity – or so she told herself.
Pulling her wandering thoughts together, she found herself being introduced to Miss de Vine. And, looking at her, she saw at once that here was a scholar of a kind very unlike Miss Lydgate, for example, and still more grotesquely unlike anything that Harriet Vane could ever become. Here was a fighter, indeed; but one to whom the quadrangle of Shrewsbury was a native and proper arena; a soldier knowing no personal loyalties, whose sole allegiance was to the fact. A Miss Lydgate, standing serenely untouched by the world, could enfold it in a genial warmth of charity; this woman, with infinitely more knowledge of the world, would rate it at a just value and set it out of her path if it incommoded her. The thin, eager face, with its large grey eyes deeply set and luminous behind thick glasses, was sensitive to impressions; but behind that sensitiveness was a mind as hard and immovable as granite. As the Head of a woman’s college she must, thought Harriet, have had a distasteful task; for she looked as though the word ‘compromise’ had been omitted from her vocabulary; and all statesmanship is compromise. She would not be likely to tolerate any waverings of purpose or woolliness of judgment. If anything came between her and the service of truth, she would walk over it without rancour and without pity – even if it were her own reputation. A formidable woman when pursuing the end in view – and the more so, for the deceptive moderation and modesty she would display in dealing with any subject of which she was not master. As they came up, she was saying to Miss Gubbins:
‘I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances concerned into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves; and if you get those wrong, you falsify the picture really seriously.’
Here, just as Miss Gubbins, with a mulish look in her eye, was preparing to expostulate, Miss de Vine cau
ght sight of the English tutor and excused herself. Miss Gubbins was obliged to withdraw; Harriet observed with regret that she had untidy hair, an ill-kept skin and a large white safety-pin securing her hood to her dress.
‘Dear me!’ said Miss de Vine, ‘who is that very uninspired young woman? She seems very much annoyed with my review of Mr. Winterlake’s book on Essex. She seems to think I ought to have torn the poor man to pieces because of a trifling error of a few months made in dealing, quite incidentally, with the early history of the Bacon family. She attaches no importance to the fact that the book is the most illuminating and scholarly handling to date of the interactions of two most enigmatic characters.’
‘Bacon family history is her subject,’ said Miss Lydgate, ‘so I’ve no doubt she feels strongly about it.’
‘It’s a great mistake to see one’s own subject out of proportion to its background. The error should be corrected, of course; I did correct it – in a private letter to the author, which is the proper medium for trifling corrections. But the man has, I feel sure, got hold of the master-key to the situation between those two men, and in so doing he has got hold of a fact of genuine importance.’
‘Well,’ said Miss Lydgate, showing her strong teeth in a genial grin, ‘you seem to have taken a strong line with Miss Gubbins. Now I’ve brought along somebody I know you’re anxious to meet. This is Miss Harriet Vane – also an artist in the relating of details.’
‘Miss Vane?’ The historian bent her brilliant, short-sighted eyes on Harriet, and her face lit up. ‘This is delightful. Do let me say how much I enjoyed your last book. I thought it quite the best thing you’d done – though of course I’m not competent to form an opinion from the scientific point of view. I was discussing it with Professor Higgins, who is quite a devotee of yours, and he said it suggested a most interesting possibility, which had not before occurred to him. He wasn’t quite sure whether it would work, but he would do his best to find out. Tell me, what did you have to go upon?’
‘Well, I got a pretty good opinion,’ said Harriet, feeling a hideous qualm of uncertainty, and cursing Professor Higgins from the bottom of her heart. ‘But of course—’
At this point Miss Lydgate espied another old pupil in the distance and ran away. Phœbe Tucker had already been lost on the way across the lawn. Harriet was left to her fate. After ten minutes, during which Miss de Vine ruthlessly turned her victim’s brain inside out, shook the facts out of it like a vigorous housemaid shaking dust from a carpet, beat it, refreshed it, rubbed up the surface of it, relaid it in a new position and tacked it into place with a firm hand, the Dean mercifully came up and burst into the conversation.
‘Thank goodness, the Vice-Chancellor’s taking himself off. Now we can get rid of this filthy old bombazine and show off our party frocks. Why did we ever clamour for degrees and the fun of stewing in full academicals on a hot day? There! he’s gone! Give me those anything-but-glad-rags and I’ll shove them into the S.C.R. with mine. Has yours got a name on it, Miss Vane? Oh, good girl! I’ve got three unknown gowns sitting in my office already. Found lying about at the end of term. No clue to owners, of course. The untidy little beasts seem to think it’s our job to sort out their miserable belongings. They strew them everywhere, regardless, and then borrow each other’s; and if anybody’s fined for being out without a gown, it’s always because somebody pinched it. And the wretched things are always as dirty as dish-clouts. They use them for dusters and drawing the fire up. When I think how our devoted generation sweated to get the right to these garments – and these young things don’t care that for them! They go about looking all bits and pieces, like illustrations to Pendennis – so out of date of them! But their idea of being modern is to imitate what male undergraduates were like half a century ago.’
‘Some of us old students aren’t much to write home about,’ said Harriet. ‘Look at Gubbins, for instance.’
‘Oh, my dear! That crashing bore. And all held together with safety-pins. And I wish she’d wash her neck.’
‘I think,’ said Miss de Vine, with painstaking readiness to set the facts in a just light, ‘that the colour is natural to her skin.’
‘Then she should eat carrots and clear her system,’ retorted the Dean, snatching Harriet’s gown from her. ‘No, don’t you bother. It won’t take me a minute to chuck them through the S.C.R. window. And don’t you dare to run away, or I shall never find you again.’
‘Is my hair tidy?’ inquired Miss de Vine, becoming suddenly human and hesitating with the loss of her cap and gown.
‘Well,’ said Harriet, surveying the thick, iron-grey coils from which a quantity of overworked hair-pins stood out like croquet-hoops, ‘it’s coming down just a trifle.’
‘It always does,’ said Miss de Vine, making vague dabs at the pins. ‘I think I shall have to cut it short. It must be much less trouble that way.’
‘I like it as it is. That big coil suits you. Let me have a go at it, shall I?’
‘I wish you would,’ said the historian, thankfully submitting to having the pins thrust into place. ‘I am very stupid with my fingers. I do possess a hat somewhere,’ she added, with an irresolute glance round the quad, as though she expected to see the hat growing on a tree, ‘but the Dean said we’d better stay here. Oh, thank you. That feels much better – a marvellous sense of security. Ah! here’s Miss Martin. Miss Vane has kindly been acting as hair-dresser to the White Queen – but oughtn’t I to put on a hat?’
‘Not now,’ said Miss Martin emphatically. ‘I’m going to have some proper tea, and so are you. I’m ravenous. I’ve been tagging after old Professor Boniface who’s ninety-seven and practically gaga, and screaming in his deaf ear till I’m almost dead. What’s the time? Well, I’m like Marjory Fleming’s turkey – I do not give a single damn for the Old Students’ Meeting; I simply must eat and drink. Let’s swoop down upon the table before Miss Shaw and Miss Stevens collar the last ices.’
2
’Tis proper to all melancholy men, saith Mercurialis, what conceit they have once entertained to be most intent, violent and continually about it. Invitis occurrit, do what they may, they cannot be rid of it, against their wills they must think of it a thousand times over, perpetuo molestantur, nec oblivisci possunt, they are continually troubled with it, in company, out of company; at meat, at exercise, at all times and places, non desinunt ea, quae minime volunt, cogitare; if it be offensive especially, they cannot forget it.
ROBERT BURTON
So far, so good, thought Harriet, changing for dinner. There had been baddish moments, like trying to renew contact with Mary Stokes. There had also been a brief encounter with Miss Hillyard, the History tutor, who had never liked her, and who had said, with wry mouth and acidulated tongue, ‘Well, Miss Vane, you have had some very varied experiences since we saw you last.’ But there had been good moments too, carrying with them the promise of permanence in a Heracleitean universe. She felt it might be possible to survive the Gaudy Dinner, though Mary Stokes had dutifully bagged for her a place next herself, which was trying. Fortunately, she had contrived to get Phœbe Tucker on her other side. (In these surroundings, she thought of them still as Stokes and Tucker.)
The first thing to strike her, when the procession had slowly filed up to the High Table, and grace had been said, was the appalling noise in Hall. ‘Strike’ was the right word. It fell upon one like the rush and weight of a shouting waterfall; it beat on the ear like the hammer-clang of some infernal smithy; it savaged the air like the metallic clatter of fifty thousand monotype machines casting type. Two hundred female tongues, released as though by a spring, burst into high, clamorous speech. She had forgotten what it was like, but it came back to her to-night how, at the beginning of every term, she had felt that if the noise were to go on like that for one minute more, she would go quite mad. Within a week, the effect of it had always worn off. Use had made her immune. But now it shattered her unaccustomed nerves with all and more than all its original violence. Peo
ple screamed in her ear, and she found herself screaming back. She looked rather anxiously at Mary; could any invalid bear it? Mary seemed not to notice; she was more animated than she had been earlier in the day and was screaming quite cheerfully at Dorothy Collins. Harriet turned to Phœbe.
‘Gosh! I’d forgotten what this row was like. If I scream I shall be as hoarse as a crow. I’m going to bellow at you in a fog-horn kind of voice. Do you mind?’
‘Not a bit. I can hear you quite well. Why on earth did God give women such shrill voices? Though I don’t mind frightfully. It reminds me of native workmen quarrelling. They’re doing us rather well, don’t you think? Much better soup than we ever got.’
‘They’ve made a special effort for Gaudy. Besides, the new Bursar’s rather good, I believe; she was something to do with Domestic Economy. Dear old Straddles had a mind above food.’
‘Yes; but I liked Straddles. She was awfully decent to me when I got ill just before Schools. Do you remember?’
‘What happened to Straddles when she left?’
Gaudy Night Page 3