With Miss de Vine she had many interesting conversations. The Fellow’s personality attracted and puzzled her very much. More than with any other of the dons, she felt that with Miss de Vine the devotion to the intellectual life was the result, not of the untroubled following of a natural or acquired bias, but of a powerful spiritual call, over-riding other possible tendencies and she felt inquisitive enough, without any prompting, about Miss de Vine’s past life; but inquiry was difficult, and she always emerged from an encounter with the feeling that she had told more than she had learnt. She could guess at a history of conflict; but she found it difficult to believe that Miss de Vine was unaware of her own repressions or unable to control them.
With a view to establishing friendly relations with the Junior Common Room Harriet further steeled herself to compose and deliver a “talk” on “Detection in Fact and Fiction” for a College literary society. This was perilous work. To the unfortunate case in which she had herself figured as the suspected party she naturally made no allusion; nor in the ensuing discussion was anybody so tactless as to mention it. The Wilvercombe murder was a different matter. There was no obvious reason why she should not tell the students about that, and it seemed unkind to deprive them of a legitimate thrill on the purely personal grounds that it was a bore to have to mention Peter Wimsey in every second sentence. Her exposition, though perhaps erring slightly on the dry and academic side, was received with hearty applause, and at the end of the meeting the Senior Student, one Miss Millbanks, invited her to coffee.
Miss Millbanks had her room in Queen Elizabeth, and had furnished it with a good deal of taste. She was a tall, elegant girl, obviously well-to-do, much better dressed than the majority of the students, and carrying her intellectual attainments easily. She held a minor scholarship without emoluments, declaring publicly that she was only a scholar because she would not be seen dead in the ridiculous short gown of a commoner. As alternatives to coffee, she offered Harriet the choice of madeira or a cocktail, politely regretting that the inadequacy of college arrangements made it impossible to provide ice for the shaker. Harriet, who disliked cocktails after dinner, and had consumed madeira and sherry on an almost wearisome number of occasions since her arrival in Oxford, accepted the coffee, and chuckled as cups and glasses were filled. Miss Millbanks inquired courteously what the joke was.
“Only,” said Harriet, “that I gathered the other day from an article in the Morning Star that ‘undergraduettes,’ in the journalist’s disgusting phrase, lived entirely on cocoa.”
“Journalists,” said Miss Millbanks, condescendingly, “are always thirty years behind the times. Have you ever seen cocoa in College, Miss Fowler?”
“Oh, yes,” said Miss Fowler. She was a dark, thick-set Third Year, dressed in a very grubby sweater which, as she had previously explained, she had not had time to change, having been afflicted with an essay up to the moment of attending Harriet’s talk. “Yes, I’ve seen it in dons’ rooms. Occasionally. But I always looked on that as a kind of infantilism.”
“Isn’t it a re-living of the heroic past?” suggested Miss Millbanks. “O les beaux jours que ce siècle de fer. And so on.”
“Groupists drink cocoa,” added another Third Year. She was thin, with an eager, scornful face, and made no apology for her sweater, apparently thinking such matters beneath her notice.
“But they are oh! so tender to the failings of others,” said Miss Millbanks. “Miss Layton was ‘changed’ once, but she has now changed back. It was good while it lasted.”
Miss Layton, curled on a pouffe by the fire, lifted a wicked little heart-shaped face alight with mischief.
“I did enjoy telling people what I thought of them. Too rapturous. Especially confessing in public the evil, evil thoughts I had had about that woman Flaxman.”
“Bother Flaxman,” said the dark girl, shortly. Her name was Haydock and she was, as Harriet presently discovered, considered to be a safe History First. “She’s setting the whole Second Year by the ears. I don’t like her influence at all. And if you ask me, there’s something very wrong with Cattermole. Goodness knows, I don’t want any of this business of being my brother’s keeper-we had quite enough of that at school-but it’ll be awkward if Cattermole is driven into doing something drastic. As Senior Student, Lilian, don’t you think you could do something about it?”
“My dear,” protested Miss Millbanks, “what can anybody do? I can’t forbid Flaxman to make people’s lives a burden to them. If I could I wouldn’t. You don’t surely expect me to exercise authority? It’s bad enough hounding people to College Meetings. The S.C.R. don’t understand our sad lack of enthusiasm.”
“In their day,” said Harriet, “I think people had a passion for meetings and organization.”
“There are plenty of inter-collegiate meetings,” said Miss Layton. “We discuss things a great deal, and are indignant about the Proctorial Rules for Mixed Parties. But our enthusiasm for internal affairs is more restrained.”
“Well, I think,” said Miss Haydock bluntly, “we sometimes overdo the laisser-aller side of it. If there’s a big blow-up, it won’t pay anybody.”
“Do you mean about Flaxman’s cutting-out expeditions? Or about the ragging affair? By the way, Miss Vane, I suppose you have heard about the College Mystery.”
“I’ve heard something,” replied Harriet, cautiously. “It seems to be all very tiresome.”
“It will be extremely tiresome if it isn’t stopped,” said Miss Haydock. “I say we ought to do a spot of private investigation ourselves. The S.C.R. don’t seem to be making much progress.”
“Well, the last effort at investigation wasn’t very satisfactory,” said Miss Millbanks.
“Meaning Cattermole? I don’t believe it’s Cattermole. She’s too obvious. And she hasn’t the guts. She could and does make an ass of herself, but she wouldn’t go about it so secretively.”
“There’s nothing against Cattermole,” said Miss Fowler, “except that somebody wrote Flaxman an offensive letter on the occasion of her swiping Cattermole’s young man. Cattermole was the obvious suspect then, but why should she do all these other things?”
“Surely,” Miss Layton appealed to Harriet, “surely the obvious suspect is always innocent.”
Harriet laughed; and Miss Millbanks said:
“Yes; but I do think Cattermole is getting to the stage when she’d do almost anything to attract attention.”
“Well, I don’t believe it’s Cattermole,” said Miss Haydock. “Why should she write letters to me?”
“Did you have one?”
“Yes; but it was only a kind of wish that I should plough in Schools, the usual silly thing made of pasted-up letters. I burnt it, and took Cattermole in to dinner on the strength of it.”
“Good for you,” said Miss Fowler.
“I had one too,” said Miss Layton. “A beauty-about there being a reward hell for women who went my way. So, acting on the suggestion given, I forwarded it to my future address by way of the fireplace.”
“All the same, said Miss Millbanks, ”it is rather disgusting. I don’t mind the letters so much. It’s the rags, and the writing on the wall. If any snoopy person from outside happened to get hold of it there’d be a public stink, and that would be a bore. I don’t pretend to much public spirit, but I admit to some. We don’t want to get the whole College gated by way of reprisals. And I’d rather not have it said that we were living in a madhouse.”
“Too shame-making,” agreed Miss Layton; “though of course, you may get an isolated queer specimen anywhere.”
“There are some oddities in the First Year all right,” said Miss Fowler. “Why is it that every year seems to get shriller and scrubbier than the last?”
“They always did,” said Harriet.