Gaudy Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

her, when the procession had slowly filed up to the High Table, and grace had been said, was the appalling noise in Hall. “Strike” was the right word. It fell upon one like the rush and weight of a shouting waterfall; it beat on the ear like the hammer-clang of some infernal smithy; it savaged the air like the metallic clatter of fifty thousand monotype machines casting type. Two hundred female tongues, released as though by a spring, burst into high, clamorous speech. She had forgotten what it was like, but it came back to her tonight how, at the beginning of every term, she had felt that if the noise were to go on like that for one minute more, she would go quite mad. Within a week, the effect of it had always worn off. Use had made her immune. But now it shattered her unaccustomed nerves with all and more than all its original violence. People screamed in her ear, and she found herself screaming back. She looked rather anxiously at Mary; could any invalid bear it? Mary seemed not to notice; she was more animated than she had been earlier in the day and was screaming quite cheerfully at Dorothy Collins. Harriet turned to Phoebe.
    “Gosh! I’d forgotten what this row was like. If I scream I shall be as hoarse as a crow. I’m going to bellow at you in a fog-horn kind of voice. Do you mind?”
    “Not a bit. I can hear you quite well. Why on earth did God give women such shrill voices? Though I don’t mind frightfully. It reminds me of native workmen quarrelling. They’re doing us rather well, don’t you think? Much better soup than we ever got.”
    “They’ve made a special effort for Gaudy. Besides, the new Bursar’s rather good, I believe; she was something to do with Domestic Economy. Dear old Straddles had a mind above food.”
    “Yes; but I liked Straddles. She was awfully decent to me when I got ill just before Schools. Do you remember?”
    “What happened to Straddles when she left?”
    “Oh, she’s Treasurer at Brontë College. Finance was really her line, you know. She had a real genius for figures.”
    “And what became of that woman—what’s her name?—Peabody? Freebody?—you know—the one who always said solemnly that her great ambition in life was to become Bursar of Shrewsbury?”
    “Oh, my dear! She went absolutely potty on some new kind of religion and joined an extraordinary sect somewhere or other where they go about in loin-cloths and have agapemones of nuts and grape-fruit. That is, if you mean Brodribb?”
    “Brodribb—I knew it was something like Peabody. Fancy her of all people! So intensely practical and sub-fusc.”
    “Reaction, I expect. Repressed emotional instincts and all that. She was frightfully sentimental inside, you know.”
    “I know. She wormed round rather. Had a sort of G.P. for Miss Shaw. Perhaps we were all rather inhibited in those days.”
    “Well, the present generation doesn’t suffer from that, I’m told. No inhibitions of any kind.”
    “Oh, come, Phoebe. We had a good bit of liberty. Not like before Women’s Degrees. We weren’t monastic.”
    “No, but we were born long enough before the War to feel a few restrictions. We inherited some sense of responsibility. And Brodribb came from a fearfully rigid sort of household—Positivists or Unitarians or Presbyterians or something. The present lot are the real War-time generation, you know.”
    “So they are. Well, I don’t know that I’ve any right to throw stones at Brodribb.”
    “Oh, my dear! That’s entirely different. One thing’s natural; the other’s—I don’t know, but it seems to me like complete degeneration of the grey matter. She even wrote a book.”
    “About agapemones?”
    “Yes. And the Higher Wisdom. And Beautiful Thought. That sort of thing. Full of bad syntax.”
    “Oh, lord. Yes—that’s pretty awful, isn’t it? I can’t think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one’s grammar.”
    “It’s a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I’m