“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 other 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 blank, carried it into Burleigh Building with her for examination. It was of 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 me 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 other 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 bout practical side of book-making. 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 realized 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 timetable work with the alibis and so on must be terribly hard to bear in mind.”