“Vaguely,” said Phoebe. “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 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 waft over it without rancor 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 caught 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 “This is delightful-Do let me saw 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, aid 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. Phoebe 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 clamor 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 go 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.”