Gaudy Night

CHAPTER 2-3

‘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 tonight. 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 fumbling 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.