“You give a lot of pleasure in the S.C.R.,” she added, “and I believe Miss de Vine is also a fervent admirer of yours.”
“Miss de Vine?”
“Ah, of course, you don’t know her. Our new Research Fellow. She’s such a nice person, and I know she wants to talk to you about your books. You must come and make her acquaintance. We’ve got her for three years, you know. That is, she only comes into residence next term, but she’s been living in Oxford for the last few weeks, working in Bodley. She’s doing a great work on National Finance under the Tudors, and makes it perfectly fascinating, even for people like me, who are stupid about money. We are all so glad that the College decided to offer her the Jane Barraclough Fellowship, because she is a most distinguished scholar, and has had rather a hard time.”
“I think I’ve heard of her. Wasn’t she Head of one of the big provincial colleges?”
“Yes; she was Provost of Flamborough for three years; but it wasn’t really her job; too much administration, though of course she was marvellous on the financial side. But she was doing too much, what with her own work, and examining for doctorates and so on, and coping with students-the University and the College between them wore her out. She’s one of those people who always will give of her best; but I think she found all the personal contacts uncongenial. She got ill, and had to go abroad for a couple of years. In fact she has only just got back to England. Of course, having to give up Flamborough made a good deal of difference from the financial point of view; so it’s nice to think that for the next three years she’ll be able to get on with her book and not worry about that side of things.”
“I remember about it now,” said Harriet; “I saw the election announced somewhere or other, last Christmas or thereabouts.”
“I expect you saw it in the Shrewsbury Year-Book. We are naturally very proud to have her here. She ought really to have a professorship, but I doubt if she could stand the tutorial side of it. The fewer distractions she has, the better, because she’s one of the real scholars. There she is, over there-and, oh, dear! I’m afraid she’s been caught by Miss Gubbins. You remember Miss Gubbins?”
“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.”