At this moment. Miss Mollison, from three places away on the same side of the table, leaned across her neighbors and screamed something.
“What?” screamed Phoebe.
Miss Mollison leaned still further, compressing Dorothy Collins, Betty Armstrong and Mary Stokes almost to suffocation.
“I hope Miss Vane isn’t telling you anything too blood-curdling!”
“No said Harriet, loudly. ”Mrs. Bancroft is curdling my blood.”
“How?”
“Telling me the life-histories of our year.”
“Oh!” screamed Miss Mollison, disconcerted. The service of a dish of lamb and green peas intervened and broke up the formation, and her neighbors breathed again. But to Harriet’s intense horror, the question and reply seemed to have opened up an avenue for a dark, determined woman with large spectacles and rigidly groomed hair, who sat opposite to her, and who now bent over and said, in piercingly American accents: “I don’t suppose you remember me, Miss Vane? I was only in college for one term, but I would know you anywhere. I’m always recommending your books to my friends in America who are keen to study the British detective story, because I think they are just terribly good.”
“Very kind of you,” said Harriet, feebly.
“And we have a very dear mutooal acquaintance,” went on the spectacled lady.
Heavens! thought Harriet. What social nuisance is going to be dragged out of obscurity now? And who is this frightful female?
“Really?” she said, aloud, trying to gain time while she ransacked her memory. “Who’s that. Miss-”
“Schuster-Slatt” prompted Phoebe’s voice in her ear.
“Schuster-Slatt.” (Of course. Arrived in Harriet’s first summer term. Supposed to read Law. Left after one term because the conditions at Shrewsbury were too restrictive of liberty. Joined the Home Students, and passed mercifully out of one’s life.)
“How clever of you to know my name. Yes, well, you’ll be surprised when I tell you, but in my work I see so many of your British aristocracy.” Hell! thought Harriet. Miss Schuster-Slatt’s strident tones dominated even the surrounding uproar.
“Your marvellous Lord Peter. He was so kind to me, and terribly interested when I told him I was at college with you. I think he’s just a lovely man.”
“He has very nice manners,” said Harriet. But the implication was too subtle.
Miss Schuster-Slatt proceeded: “He was just wonderful to me when I told him all about my work.” (I wonder what it is, thought Harriet.) “And of course I wanted to hear all about his thrilling detective cases, but he was much too modest to say anything. Do tell me, Miss Vane, does he wear that cute little eyeglass because of his sight, or is it part of an old English tradition?”
“I never had the impertinence to ask him,” said Harriet.
“Now isn’t that just like your British reticence!” exclaimed Miss Schuster-Slatt; when Mary Stokes struck in with “Oh, Harriet, do tell us about Lord Peter! He must be perfectly charming if he’s at all like his photographs. Of course you know him very well, don’t you?”
“I worked with him over one case.”
“It must have been frightfully exciting. Do tell us what he’s like.”
“Seeing,” said Harriet, in angry and desperate tones, “seeing that he got me out of prison and probably saved me from being hanged, I am naturally bound to find him delightful.”
“Oh!” said Mary Stokes, flushing scarlet, and shrinking from Harriet’s furious eyes as if she had received a blow. “I’m sorry-I didn’t think-”
“Well, there,” said Miss Schuster-Slatt, “I’m afraid I’ve been very, very tactless. My mother always said to me, ‘Sadie, you’re the most tactless girl I ever had the bad luck to meet.’ But I am enthusiastic. I get carried away. I don’t stop to think. I’m just the same with my work. I don’t consider my own feelings; I don’t consider other people’s feelings. I just wade right in and ask for what I want, and I mostly get it.”
After which, Miss Schuster-Slatt, with more sensitive feeling than one might have credited her with, carried the conversation triumphantly away to the subject of her own work, which turned out to have something to do with the sterilization of the unfit, and the encouragement of matrimony among the intelligentsia.
Harriet, meanwhile, sat miserably wondering what devil possessed her to display every disagreeable trait in her character at the mere mention of Wimsey’s name. He had done her no harm; he had only saved her from a shameful death and offered her an unswerving personal devotion; and for neither benefit had he ever claimed or expected her gratitude. It was not pretty that her only return should be a snarl of resentment. The fact is, thought Harriet, I have got a bad inferiority complex; unfortunately, the fact that I know it doesn’t help me to get rid of it. I could have liked him so much if I could have met him on an equal footing…
The Warden rapped upon the table. A welcome silence fell upon the Hall. A speaker was rising to propose the toast of the university.
She spoke gravely, unrolling the great scroll of history, pleading for the Humanities, proclaiming the Pax Academica to a world terrified with unrest. “ Oxford has been called the home of lost causes: if the love of learning for its own sake is a lost cause everywhere else in the world, let us see to it that here at least, it finds its abiding home.”
Magnificent, thought Harriet, but it is not war. And then, her imagination weaving in and out of the spoken words, she saw it as a Holy War, and that whole wildly heterogeneous, that even slightly absurd collection of chattering women fused into a corporate unity with one another and with every man and woman to whom integrity of mind meant more than material gain-defenders in the central keep of Man-soul, their personal differences forgotten in face of a common foe. To be true to one’s calling, whatever follies one might commit in one’s emotional life, that was the way to spiritual peace. How could one feel fettered, being the freeman of so great a city, or humiliated, where all enjoyed equal citizenship?
The eminent professor who rose to reply spoke of a diversity of gifts but the same spirit. The note, once struck, vibrated on the lips of every speaker and the ear of every hearer. Nor was the Warden’s review of the Academic year out of key with it: appointments, degrees, fellowships-all these were the domestic details of the discipline without which the community could not function. In the glamour of one Gaudy night, one could realize that one was a citizen of no mean city. It might be an old and an old-fashioned city, with inconvenient buildings and narrow streets where the passers-by squabbled foolishly about the right of way; but her foundations were set upon the holy hills and her spires touched heaven.
Leaving the Hall in this rather exalted mood, Harriet found herself invited to take coffee with the Dean. She accepted, after ascertaining that Mary Stokes was bound for bed by doctor’s orders and had therefore no claim upon her company. She therefore made her way along to the New Quad and tapped upon Miss Martin’s door. Gathered together m the sitting-room she found Betty Armstrong, Phoebe Tucker, Miss de Vine, Miss Stevens the Bursar, another of the Fellows who answered to the name of Barton, and a couple of old students a few years senior to herself. The Dean, who was dispensing coffee, hailed her arrival cheerfully.
“Come along! Here’s coffee that is coffee. Can nothing be done about the Hall coffee, Steve?”
“Yes, if you’ll start a coffee-fund,” replied the Bursar. “I don’t know if you’ve ever worked out the finance of really first-class coffee for two hundred people.”
“I know,” said the Dean. “It’s so trying to be grovellingly poor. I think I’d better mention it to Flackett. You remember Flackett, the rich one, who was always rather odd. She was in your year. Miss Fortescue. She has been following me round, trying to present the College with a tankful of tropical fish. Said she thought it would brighten the Science Lecture-Room.”