Gaudy Night Page 5

  ‘Shy?’ said Harriet. ‘Well, hardly. Nervy, perhaps – that blessed word covers a lot. But he doesn’t exactly seem to call for pity.’

  ‘Why should he?’ said Miss Barton. ‘In a very pitiful world, I don’t see much need to pity a young man who has everything he can possibly want.’

  ‘He must be a remarkable person if he has that,’ said Miss de Vine, with a gravity that her eyes belied.

  ‘And he’s not so young as all that,’ said Harriet. ‘He’s forty-five.’ (This was Miss Barton’s age.)

  ‘I think it’s rather an impertinence to pity people,’ said the Dean.

  ‘Hear, hear!’ said Harriet. ‘Nobody likes being pitied. Most of us enjoy self-pity, but that’s another thing.’

  ‘Caustic,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘but painfully true.’

  ‘But what I should like to know,’ pursued Miss Barton, refusing to be diverted, ‘is whether this dilettante gentleman does anything, outside his hobbies of detecting crimes and collecting books, and, I believe, playing cricket in his off-time.’

  Harriet, who had been congratulating herself upon the way in which she was keeping her temper, was seized with irritation.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Does it matter? Why should he do anything else? Catching murderers isn’t a soft job, or a sheltered job. It takes a lot of time and energy, and you may very easily get injured or killed. I dare say he does it for fun, but at any rate, he does do it. Scores of people must have as much reason to thank him as I have. You can’t call that nothing.’

  ‘I absolutely agree,’ said the Dean. ‘I think one ought to be very grateful to people who do dirty jobs for nothing, whatever their reason is.’

  Miss Fortescue applauded this. ‘The drains in my weekend cottage got stopped up last Sunday, and a most helpful neighbour came and unstopped them. He got quite filthy in the process and I apologised profusely, but he said I owed him no thanks, because he was inquisitive and liked drains. He may not have been telling the truth, but even if he was, I certainly had nothing to grumble about.’

  ‘Talking of drains,’ said the Bursar—

  The conversation took a less personal and more anecdotal turn (for there is no chance assembly of people who cannot make lively conversation about drains), and after a little time, Miss Barton retired to bed. The Dean breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘I hope you didn’t mind too much,’ she said. ‘Miss Barton is the most terribly downright person, and she was determined to get all that off her chest. She is a splendid person, but hasn’t very much sense of humour. She can’t bear anything to be done except from the very loftiest motives.’

  Harriet apologised for having spoken so vehemently.

  ‘I thought you took it all wonderfully well. And your Lord Peter sounds a most interesting person. But I don’t see why you should be forced to discuss him, poor man.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ observed the Bursar, ‘we discuss everything a great deal too much in this university. We argue about this and that and why and wherefore, instead of getting the thing done.’

  ‘But oughtn’t we to ask what things we want done,’ objected the Dean.

  Harriet grinned at Betty Armstrong, hearing the familiar academic wrangle begin. Before ten minutes had passed, somebody had introduced the word ‘values.’ An hour later they were still at it. Finally the Bursar was heard to quote:

  ‘God made the integers; all else is the work of man.’

  ‘Oh, bother!’ cried the Dean. ‘Do let’s keep mathematics out of it. And physics. I cannot cope with them.’

  ‘Who mentioned Planck’s constant a little time ago?’

  ‘I did, and I’m sorry for it. I call it a revolting little object.’

  The Dean’s emphatic tones reduced everybody to laughter, and, midnight striking, the party broke up.

  ‘I am still living out of College,’ said Miss de Vine to Harriet. ‘May I walk across to your room with you?’

  Harriet assented, wondering what Miss de Vine had to say to her. They stepped out together into the New Quad. The moon was up, painting the buildings with cold washes of black and silver whose austerity rebuked the yellow gleam of lighted windows behind which old friends reunited still made merry with talk and laughter.

  ‘It might almost be term-time,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Yes.’ Miss de Vine smiled oddly. ‘If you were to listen at those windows, you would find it was the middle-aged ones who were making the noise. The old have gone to bed, wondering whether they have worn as badly as their contemporaries. They have suffered some shocks, and their feet hurt them. And the younger ones are chattering soberly about life and its responsibilities. But the women of forty are pretending they are undergraduates again, and finding it rather an effort. Miss Vane – I admired you for speaking as you did to-night. Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it – still more, because of it – that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.’

  ‘That is probably very true,’ said Harriet, ‘but what makes you say it?’

  ‘Not any desire to offend you, believe me. But I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harriet, ‘but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.’

  ‘I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.’

  They had entered the Old Quad, and the ancient beeches, most venerable of all Shrewsbury institutions, cast over them a dappled and changing shadow-pattern that was more confusing than darkness.

  ‘But one has to make some sort of choice,’ said Harriet. ‘And between one desire and another, how is one to know which things are really of overmastering importance?’

  ‘We can only know that,’ said Miss de Vine, ‘when they have overmastered us.’

  The chequered shadow dropped off them, like the dropping of linked silver chains. Each after each, from all the towers of Oxford, clocks struck the quarter-chime, in a tumbling cascade of friendly disagreement. Miss de Vine bade Harriet good night at the door of Burleigh Building and vanished, with her long, stooping stride beneath the Hall archway.

  An odd woman, thought Harriet, and of a penetrating shrewdness. All Harriet’s own tragedy had sprung from ‘persuading herself into appropriate feelings’ towards a man whose own feelings had not stood up to the test of sincerity either. And, all her subsequent instability of purpose had sprung from the determination that never again would she mistake the will to feel for the feeling itself. ‘We can only know what things are of overmastering importance when they have overmastered us.’ Was there anything at all that had stood firm in the midst of her indecisions? Well, yes; she had stuck to her work – and that in the face of what might have seemed overwhelming reasons for abandoning it and doing something different. Indeed, though she had shown cause that evening for this particular loyalty, she had never felt it necessary to show cause to herself. She had written what she felt herself called upon to write; and, though she was beginning to feel that she might perhaps do this thing better, she had no doubt that the thing itself was the right thing for her. It had overmastered her without her knowledge or notice, and that was the proof of its mastery.

  She paced for some minutes to and fro in the quad, too restless to go in and sleep. As she did so, her eye was caught by a sheet of paper, fluttering untidily across the trim turf. Mechanically she picked it up and, seeing that it was not blank, carried it into Burleigh Building with her for examination. It was a sheet of common scribbling paper, and all it bore was a childish drawing scrawled heavily in pencil. It was not in any way an agreeable drawing – not at all the kind of thing that one
would expect to find in a college quadrangle. It was ugly and sadistic. It depicted a naked figure of exaggeratedly feminine outlines, inflicting savage and humiliating outrage upon some person of indeterminate gender clad in a cap and gown. It was neither sane nor healthy; it was, in fact, a nasty, dirty and lunatic scribble.

  Harriet stared at it for a little time in disgust, while a number of questions formed themselves in her mind. Then she took it upstairs with her into the nearest lavatory, dropped it in and pulled the plug on it. That was the proper fate for such things, and there was an end of it; but for all that, she wished she had not seen it.

  3

  They do best who, if they cannot but admit love, yet make it keep quarter, and sever it wholly from their serious affairs and actions of life; for if it check once with business it troubleth men’s fortunes, and maketh men that they can no ways be true to their own ends.

  FRANCIS BACON

  Sunday, as the S.C.R. always declared, was invariably the best part of a Gaudy. The official dinner and speeches were got out of the way; the old students resident in Oxford, and the immensely busy visitors with only one night to spare had all cleared off. People began to sort themselves out, and one could talk to one’s friends at leisure, without being instantly collared and hauled away by a collection of bores.

  Harriet paid her visit of state to the Warden, who was holding a small reception with sherry and biscuits, and then went to call upon Miss Lydgate in the New Quad. The English tutor’s room was festooned with proofs of her forthcoming work on the prosodic elements in English verse from Beowulf to Bridges. Since Miss Lydgate had perfected, or was in process of perfecting (since no work of scholarship ever attains a static perfection) an entirely new prosodic theory, demanding a novel and complicated system of notation which involved the use of twelve different varieties of type; and since Miss Lydgate’s handwriting was difficult to read and her experience in dealing with printers limited, there existed at that moment five successive revises in galley form, at different stages of completion,, together with two sheets in page-proof, and an appendix in typescript, while the important Introduction which afforded the key to the whole argument still remained to be written. It was only when a section had advanced to page-proof condition that Miss Lydgate became fully convinced of the necessity of transferring large paragraphs of argument from one chapter to another, each change of this kind naturally demanding expensive over-running on the page-proof, and the elimination of the corresponding portions in the five sets of revises; so that in the course of the necessary cross-reference, Miss Lydgate would be discovered by her pupils and colleagues wound into a kind of paper cocoon and helplessly searching for her fountain-pen amid the litter.

  ‘I am afraid,’ said Miss Lydgate, rubbing her head, in response to Harriet’s polite inquiries as to the magnum opus, ‘I am dreadfully ignorant about the practical side of bookmaking. I find it very confusing and I’m not at all clever at explaining myself to the printers. It will be a great help having Miss de Vine here. She has such an orderly mind. It’s really an education to see her manuscript, and of course her work is far more intricate than mine – all sorts of little items out of Elizabethan pay-rolls and so on, all wonderfully sorted out and arranged in a beautiful clear argument. And she understands setting out footnotes properly, so that they fit in with the text. I always find that so difficult, and though Miss Harper is kindly doing all my typing for me, she really knows more about Anglo-Saxon than about compositors. I expect you remember Miss Harper. She was two years junior to you and took a second in English and lives in the Woodstock Road.’

  Harriet said she thought footnotes were always very tiresome, and might she see some of the book.

  ‘Well, if you’re really interested,’ said Miss Lydgate, ‘but I don’t want to bore you.’ She extracted a couple of paged sheets from a desk stuffed with papers. ‘Don’t prick your fingers on that bit of manuscript that’s pinned on. I’m afraid it’s rather full of marginal balloons and interlineations, but you see, I suddenly realised that I could work out a big improvement in my notation, so I’ve had to alter it all through. I expect,’ she added wistfully, ‘the printers will be rather angry with me.’

  Harriet privately agreed with her, but said comfortingly that the Oxford University Press was no doubt accustomed to deciphering the manuscripts of scholars.

  ‘I sometimes wonder whether I am a scholar at all,’ said Miss Lydgate. ‘It’s all quite clear in my head, you know, but I get muddled when I put it down on paper. How do you manage about your plots? All that time-table work with the alibis and so on must be terribly hard to bear in mind.’

  ‘I’m always getting mixed up myself,’ admitted Harriet. ‘I’ve never yet succeeded in producing a plot without at least six major howlers. Fortunately, nine readers out of ten get mixed up too, so it doesn’t matter. The tenth writes me a letter, and I promise to make the correction in the second edition, but I never do. After all, my books are only meant for fun; it’s not like a work of scholarship.’

  ‘You always had a scholarly mind, though,’ said Miss Lydgate, ‘and I expect you find your training a help in some ways, don’t you? I used to think you might take up an academic career.’

  ‘Are you disappointed that I didn’t?’

  ‘No, indeed. I think it’s so nice that our students go out and do such varied and interesting things, provided they do them well. And I must say, most of our students do do exceedingly good work along their own lines.’

  ‘What are the present lot like?’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Lydgate, ‘we’ve got some very good people up, and they work surprisingly hard, when you think of all the outside activities they manage to carry on at the same time. Only sometimes I’m afraid they rather overdo it, and don’t get enough sleep at night. What with young men and motor-cars and parties, their lives are so much fuller than they were before the War – even more so than in your day, I think. I’m afraid our old Warden would be very greatly disconcerted if she saw the college as it is to-day. I must say that I am occasionally a little startled myself, and even the Dean, who is so broad-minded, thinks a brassíre and a pair of drawers rather unsuitable for sun-bathing in the quad. It isn’t so much the male undergraduates – they’re used to it – but after all, when the Heads of the men’s colleges come to call on the Warden, they really ought to be able to get through the grounds without blushing. Miss Martin has really had to insist on bathing dresses – backless if they like, but proper bathing dresses made for the purpose, and not ordinary underwear.’

  Harriet agreed that this seemed only reasonable.

  ‘I am so glad you think so,’ said Miss Lydgate. ‘It is rather difficult for us of the older generation to hold the balance between tradition and progress – if it is progress. Authority as such commands very little respect nowadays, and I expect that is a good thing on the whole, though it makes the work of running any kind of institution more difficult. I am sure you would like a cup of coffee. No, really – I always have one myself about this time. Annie! – I think I hear my scout in the pantry – Annie! Would you please bring in a second cup for Miss Vane.’

  Harriet was fairly well satisfied already with eatables and drinkables, but politely accepted the refreshment brought in by the smartly uniformed maid. She made some remark, when the door was shut again, as to the great improvements made since her own day in the staff and service at Shrewsbury, and again heard the praise awarded to the new Bursar.

  ‘Though I am afraid,’ added Miss Lydgate, ‘We may have to lose Annie from this staircase. Miss Hillyard finds her too independent; and perhaps she is a little absent-minded. But then, poor thing, she is a widow with two children, and really ought not to have to be in service at all. Her husband was in quite a good position, I believe, but he went out of his mind, or something, poor man, and died or shot himself, or something tragic of that kind, leaving her very badly off, so she was glad to take what she could. The little girls are boarded out with Mrs. Jukes –
you remember the Jukeses, they were at the St. Cross Lodge in your time. They live down in St. Aldate’s now, so Annie is able to go and see them at week-ends. It is nice for her and brings in a trifle extra for Mrs. Jukes.’

  ‘Did Jukes retire? He wasn’t very old, was he?’

  ‘Poor Jukes,’ said Miss Lydgate, her kind face clouding. ‘He got into sad trouble and we were obliged to dismiss him. He turned out to be not quite honest, I am sorry to say. But we found him work as a jobbing gardener,’ she went on more cheerfully, ‘where he wouldn’t be exposed to so much temptation in the matter of parcels and so on. He was a most hardworking man, but he would put money on horse-races, and so, naturally, he found himself in difficulties. It was so unfortunate for his wife.’

  ‘She was a good soul,’ agreed Harriet.

  ‘She was terribly upset about it all,’ went on Miss Lydgate. ‘And so, to do him justice, was Jukes. He quite broke down, and there was a sad scene with the Bursar when she told him he must go.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Harriet. ‘Jukes always had a pretty glib tongue.’

  ‘Oh, but I’m sure he was really very sorry for what he’d done. He explained how he’d slipped into it, and one thing led to another. We were all very much distressed about it. Except, perhaps, the Dean – but then she never did like Jukes very much. However, we made a small loan to his wife, to pay off his debts, and they certainly repaid it most honestly, a few shillings each week. Now that he’s put straight I feel sure he will keep straight. But, of course, it was impossible to keep him on here. One could never feel absolutely easy, and one must have entire confidence in the porter. The present man, Padgett, is most reliable and a very amusing character. You must get the Dean to tell you some of Padgett’s quaint sayings.’

  ‘He looks a monument of integrity,’ said Harriet. ‘He may be less popular, on that account. Jukes took bribes, you know – if one came in late, and that sort of thing.’