Gaudy Night (Lord Peter Wimsey, #12)

by Dorothy L. Sayers

She had never gone back; at first, because she had loved the place too well and a clean break seemed better than a slow wrenching-away;

Harriet was glad that in these days she could afford her own little car. Her entry into Oxford would bear no resemblance to those earlier arrivals by train. For a few hours longer she could ignore the whimpering ghost of her dead youth and tell herself that she was a stranger and a sojourner, a well-to-do woman with a position in the world. The hot road span away behind her; towns rose from the green landscape, crowded close about her with their inn-signs and petrol pumps, their shops and police and perambulators, then reeled back and were forgotten. June was dying among the roses, the hedges were darkening to a duller green; the blatancy of red brick sprawled along the highway was a reminder that the present builds inexorably over the empty fields of the past.

Whatever I may have done since, this remains. Scholar; Master of Arts; Domina; Senior Member of this University (statutum est quod Juniores Senioribus debitam et congruam reverentiam tum in private tum in publico exhibeant); a place achieved, inalienable, worthy of reverence.”

Miss Lydgate showed no signs of being ashamed of Miss Vane. On the contrary, she greeted her warmly, begged her to come and see her on Sunday morning, spoke appreciatively of her work, and commended her for keeping up a scholarly standard of English, even in mystery fiction.

“She is a very conscientious person,” said Miss Lydgate, “but she has rather an unfortunate knack of making any subject sound dull.

“I think it’s rather an impertinence to pity people,” said the Dean. “Hear, hear!” said Harriet. “Nobody likes being pitied. Most of us enjoy self-pity, but that’s another thing.” “Caustic,” said Miss de Vine, “but painfully true.”

and that one melancholy lament for eternal loss: “Once, I was a scholar.”

“Not compromise?” “I don’t think the compromise works.” “That I should live to hear any person of English blood blaspheme against compromise!” “Oh, I’m not all English. I’ve got some bits of Scotch and Irish tucked away somewhere.” “That proves you’re English. No other race ever boasts of being mongrel. I’m quite offensively English myself, because I’m one-sixteenth French, besides all the usual nationalities. So that compromise is in my blood. However. Should you catalogue me as a heart or a brain?” “Nobody,” said Harriet, “could deny your brain.” “Who denies of it? And you may deny my heart, but I’m damned if you shall deny its existence.” “You argue like an Elizabethan wit—two meanings under one word.”

February was sobbing and blustering its lachrymose way into March when she received a letter from the Dean.

“Well, that’s what I mean. You expend the trouble and you don’t make any mistake—and then you experience the ecstasy. But if there’s any subject in which you’re content with the second-rate, then it isn’t really your subject.” “You’re dead right,” said Harriet, after a pause. “If one’s genuinely interested one knows how to be patient, and let time pass, as Queen Elizabeth said. Perhaps that’s the meaning of the phrase about genius being eternal patience, which I always thought rather absurd. If you truly want a thing, you don’t snatch; if you snatch, you don’t really want it. Do you suppose that, if you find yourself taking pains about a thing, it’s a proof of its importance to you?” “I think it is, to a large extent. But the big proof is that the thing comes right, without those fundamental errors. One always makes surface errors, of course. But a fundamental error is a sure sign of not caring. I wish one could teach people nowadays that the doctrine of snatching what one thinks one wants is unsound.” “I saw six plays this winter in London,” said Harriet, “all preaching the doctrine of snatch. I agree that they left me with the feeling that none of the characters knew what they wanted.”

“The worst of being a job,” said Miss de Vine, “is the devastating effect it has on one’s character. I’m very sorry for the person who is somebody else’s job; he (or she, of course) ends by devouring or being devoured, either of which is bad for one.

To make matters worse, her new mystery novel had got somehow stuck. She had five suspects, neatly confined in an old water-mill with no means of entrance or egress except by a plank bridge, and all provided with motives and alibis for a pleasantly original kind of murder. There seemed to be nothing fundamentally wrong with the thing. But the permutations and combinations of the five people’s relationships were beginning to take on an unnatural, an incredible symmetry. Human beings were not like that; human problems were not like that; what you really got was two hundred or so people running like rabbits in and out of a college, doing their work, living their lives, and actuated all the time by motives unfathomable even to themselves, and then in the midst of it all—not a plain, understandable murder, but an unmeaning and inexplicable lunacy.

April was running out, chilly and fickle, but with the promise of good things to come; and the city wore the withdrawn and secretive beauty that wraps her about in vacation. No clamour of young voices echoed along her ancient stones; the tumult of flying bicycles was stilled in the narrow strait of the Turf; in Radcliffe Square the Camera slept like a cat in the sunshine, disturbed only by the occasional visit of a slow-footed don; even in the High, the roar of car and charabanc seemed diminished and brought low, for the holiday season was not yet; punts and canoes, new-fettled for the summer term, began to put forth upon the Cherwell like the varnished buds upon the horse-chestnut tree, but as yet there was no press of traffic upon the shining reaches; the mellow bells, soaring and singing in tower and steeple, told of time’s flight through an eternity of peace; and Great Tom, tolling his nightly hundred-and-one, called home only the rooks from off Christ Church Meadow.

Here, then at home, by no more storms distrest, Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled; Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled, Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west, Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best, From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled, To that still centre where the spinning world Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

“And what are Beatrice and Carola going to be when they grow up?” “I hope they’ll be good girls, madam, and good wives and mothers—that’s what I’ll bring them up to be.” “I want to ride a motor-cycle when I’m bigger,” said Beatrice, shaking her curls assertively. “Oh, no, darling. What things they say, don’t they, madam?” “Yes, I do,” said Beatrice. “I’m going to have a motor-cycle and keep a garage.” “Nonsense,” said her mother, a little sharply. “You mustn’t talk so. That’s a boy’s job.” “But lots of girls do boys’ jobs nowadays,” said Harriet. “But they ought not, madam. It isn’t fair. The boys have hard enough work to get jobs of their own. Please don’t put such things into her head, madam. You’ll never get a husband, Beatrice, if you mess about in a garage, getting all ugly and dirty.” “I don’t want one,” said Beatrice, firmly. “I’d rather have a motorcycle.”

“Thank you, Harriet. Shall we now resume our interrupted holiday? Oh, my lost youth. Here are the ducks coming up for the remains of our sandwiches. Twenty-three years ago I fed these identical ducks with these identical sandwiches.” “Ten years ago, I too fed them to bursting-point.” “And ten and twenty years hence the same ducks and the same undergraduates will share the same ritual feast, and the ducks will bite the undergraduates’ fingers as they have just bitten mine. How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.... Be off, cullies that’s the lot.”

“Sorry.... Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” “So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Which accounts for my talking so much.”

manoeuvring uneasily on this slippery ground between jest and earnest, found foothold:

The Warden supplied him with a little local history, breaking off to say: “But probably you are not specially interested in all this question of women’s education.” “Is it still a question? It ought not to be. I hope you are not going to ask me whether I approve of women’s doing this and that.” “Why not?” “You should not imply that I have any right either to approve or disapprove.” “I assure you,” said the Warden, “that even in Oxford we still encounter a certain number of people who maintain their right to disapprove.” “And I had hoped I was returning to civilisation.”