“Okay,” I said quietly and followed him into his unfamiliar room. He shut the door behind us and sported his oak. As I sat down and lighted a cigarette to regain my composure, he stared at me so hard and so intensely that a feeling of annoyance and embarrassment crept over me.

  “When you get your eyes full, fill your pockets,” I remarked flippantly, the phrase occurring to me out of some dim, kindergarten memory.

  He ignored my infantile banality.

  “Fenton,” he said, starting to pace up and down the floor, “before I ask you to do what I called you in here for, I want you to swear that you will never, under any circumstances, tell anyone in the world …”

  “Stop being so dramatic,” I interrupted impatiently. “Of course I won’t tell.”

  “But you swear?”

  “Not often, but I will—if you insist.”

  “All right. I trust you. I suppose I have to. First of all I want you to witness my signature on a document here.”

  I nodded. He opened the door and called out to Hankin who came up from the landing below. Then the South African signed his name and the gyp and I solemnly affixed our own signatures. The proceeding was simple enough and certainly not sufficient to justify all the fuss and tumult.

  When we were left alone together, Baumann folded up the document and remarked solemnly, “And now I want to tell you that I am probably going to have to leave Cambridge.”

  “Exeat, absit or aegrotat?” I asked, mentioning the only three methods by which one can leave Cambridge without spoiling one’s chance of a degree. I was rather proud of being able to use a sentence composed almost entirely of Latin words to a classical scholar.

  “If I go at all, I’m going down for good,” he replied curtly.

  Now this was news—real front page stuff, if you like. News of importance in the very highest circles, athletic and academic. Baumann was by far the most consequential undergraduate at All Saints.

  “But what about the Varsity match against the M. C. C. this week?” I stammered.

  “So much the better for that cocky ass, Somerville. I don’t suppose he will object very strongly to taking my place on the team.” The corners of his mouth drooped in an acid smile.

  “But the Lenox scholarship?” I asked again, and this time I could not conceal my interest in his reply. “You must be crazy to give up your chances of that, Baumann.”

  “Make things a bit easier for your pal, Grayling,” he remarked. “That’s about all I have to offer you in return for what I am going to ask you to do for me. It’s not that I am considering either Somerville or Grayling themselves—you can be sure of that. They’re like the rest of these blasted Englishmen.

  “They hate me because I happen to be good at the things on which they fancy they have a monopoly; they despise me because I don’t interest myself in what they call their college activities—because I don’t waste my time drinking tea with a lot of stupid undergraduates….”

  This was too much for me. I am no blind or besotted Anglophile—nor do I subscribe to the popular fallacy that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton—but I still feel that there is something to be said for England and her educational institutions.

  “I think,” I said coolly, as I threw my cigarette into the fireplace and rose from my chair, “that you had better ask favours from some stupid undergraduate of your own nationality. I am an American but I do happen to be at an English University. Both you and I have come over here to do or be done by Cambridge, Baumann. It has been remarkably generous to you. And as for me, I happen to like it. My best friends are English. Cheerio!” My hand was on the door knob.

  “Machktig!” he muttered between his teeth, as he jumped up to stop me. “I’m sorry, Fenton, but I let my feelings get the better of me for a moment. You see, I’m a Dutchman—a Boer. The English have always treated us badly. We don’t love them, we …”

  “We might try staying in our own country then,” I remarked, but I could not help feeling sorry for this creature who was so warped and twisted with bitterness—for a man so friendless that he was obliged to ask favours of a total stranger. Besides, there had been a note of genuine homesickness in his voice.

  I sat down again.

  “I am going back,” he cried, in a tone that was at once exultant and resentful. “I hate to leave just before I’ve got what I came for, but I see no other way out. Don’t ask me my reasons.”

  ‘“He who has drunk of Afric’s fountains will surely drink again,’” I quoted lightly. “And—incidentally—I’m in a heck of a hurry. I’m due to lunch with Comstock in ten minutes.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t keep you long.”

  He went over to his desk and started to slip some papers into an envelope. I caught a crackling sound suggestive of crisp, new bank notes. There was something desperate, almost final in his purposeful movements. I felt a vague sensation of uneasiness.

  “Baumann,” I remonstrated, “you are not going to do anything stupid, are you? Not suicide? I want to keep my promise to you but I don’t want to get involved in anything that might be—er—embarrassing. I am an alien, you know. I’m registered with the Police and an object of suspicion. I’d hate to get into any sort of mess.”

  He paused in the act of licking the flap of an envelope.

  “Suicide? Good heavens, no! But—” he added quickly, “I would like to feel you’d keep your word to me even if anything really drastic did happen. I am not asking you to do something against the law. I’m merely asking you to post a letter for me—to safeguard the happiness of—but, never mind, I know I can trust you.”

  “Well, what it is you want me to do?” I looked ostentatiously at my watch.

  He put into my hands a large, plain envelope. There was no address, no writing on the outside.

  “In this envelope,” he said, “is another envelope, addressed and stamped. I would prefer that you do not try to find out who it is addressed to, but if your curiosity—”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “All right, then. Now I told you that I may have to leave Cambridge. If I do so, it will be suddenly and at a moment’s notice. The method and time of my departure are still doubtful. You will, of course, know that I am gone—if I go. I want you to take this package to the post, open the outer envelope and put the other in the box. If I do not go, I will ask for it back.”

  “Seems like an awful lot of fuss and mystery. I don’t see why—”

  “There are reasons,” he interrupted, “why I may not be in a position to post it myself. Anything may happen. I may be—er—incapacitated. I might—” here he paused and seemed to shudder. “I might even be worse than that. But, whatever happens, it is a matter of life and death that this letter should be posted within the shortest possible time of my leaving Cambridge, No, I am perfectly sane,” he added, seeing my expression of alarm.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, “and if you ever want the package back and I am not in my room, it will be in the second volume of Boswell’s Life of Johnson—on the shelf to the right of my fireplace.”

  A look of relief and gratitude had replaced the sullen expression.

  “I don’t know how I can ever thank you, Fenton,” he muttered. “You’ve taken a great load off my mind and if there’s anything I can do for you in return—”

  “There is something,” I replied in a tone of assumed indifference. “You could tell me who that girl was who came up here about an hour ago. The one in the raincoat. She went into your room, didn’t she?”

  While I was speaking I watched his eyes very closely. A hardly perceptible flicker seemed to pass over them but he quickly turned away so that I could not see his face. For a moment I was consumed by an insane, humiliating jealously.

  “A girl did some up here some time ago,” he replied, and I felt sure that it cost him an effort to control his voice. “She was—she was looking for a John Bowman. I traced him in the registry list for her. He’s at Trinity.” Not once during this entire speech did his eyes meet mine.

  “She told me she was looking for Professor Long,” I said suspiciously.

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Perhaps she changed her mind. You know what women are. Sorry I can’t tell you more, Fenton, but I don’t even know her name. And—thanks a thousand times.”

  I was late for my lunch with Lloyd Comstock, a nice but rather nondescript youth who occupied a room on the second floor of “A” staircase. He came to fetch me at length and I ran into him just as I was leaving Baumann’s rooms. His cheerful face expressed surprise when he saw the direction from which I was coming and he made a few caustic remarks about “My new friend of two and a half terms’ standing.” Then we went down to lunch.

  The rest of the afternoon was peaceful and uneventful. Lloyd Comstock and I played five leisurely sets of tennis and then took a canoe up the Cam to Grantchester. There we bathed and lay naked in the sunshine, talking about nothing whatsoever, reading at intervals, munching biscuits, smoking pipes and enjoying ourselves as only undergraduates know how.

  Time seemed to have stood still for awhile and the whole world was bounded by pale blue sky, white scudding clouds and meadows golden with buttercups. There was no shadow to mar the perfection of my happiness.

  But, as we paddled back under the college bridges towards evening, the sky had become blotched and angry looking. It was incredibly warm for May. An electric storm was brewing and we felt that we had to race to avoid the rain.

  Before going into Hall I procured a students’ registry and went through it carefully from Aaronson to Zymovitch. There was no John Bowman at Trinity. There was no Bowman or John Bowman registered at any college in Cambridge. Someone had been misrepresenting facts….

  CHAPTER III

  Nocturne in “A” Staircase

  It is generally believed at Cambridge that the Deity is especially partial to the Latin language and to the classical scholars. At any rate, it is their privilege to address Him at some length in that tongue before sitting down to dinner in the Hall. Those who do not understand Latin must say a Quaker grace in silence, or sit down graceless like Charles Lamb.

  On this particular Monday night it was Baumann’s turn to pronounce the long blessing. He did it sullenly enough and seemed to be throwing out the sonorous Latin words almost in defiance rather than in gratitude. But he had got no further than “Oculi omnium in Tesperant, Doinine. Tudas iis…” when he was interrupted by a terrific burst of thunder.

  Everyone was startled, of course, by the unexpected noise, but I noticed that there was an almost terrified expression in Baumann’s eyes as he paused and looked apprehensively around him. He seemed completely unnerved and (as Michael Grayling informed me later) actually made a false quantity in the last line of the grace. Which, for a brilliant classical scholar, was almost as startling as the thunderclap itself.

  When we at length sat down to our meal, it was to an accompaniment of the pattering of hail. A regular tropical downpour had followed a day that was prematurely summery. I ordered a “college special” for Michael, Comstock and myself to keep the damp out of our bones. No beer in the world ever has or ever will come within nodding distance of the beer known as “college special.”

  Hall at Cambridge is a compulsory special for at least five out of every seven evenings a week. It is held to be the one time when the whole college collects itself as a body and presents a united front in singleness of purpose and oneness of appetite. It is the nearest approach to our American system of fraternities in that it typifies the principle of forced sociability.

  It is the great opportunity to prove or to make oneself a good mixer. It is the undergraduate’s daily chance to “meet the men” and to exchange the ideas that they were supposed to have been conning over in their lonely lodgings or crowded lectures. That kindred spirits invariably sit together in little cliques, and that the ideas they discuss seldom go deeper than the carburetors of their respective automobiles or the outcome of the next cricket match, are two points that have undoubtedly escaped the authorities.

  Michael, Comstock and I, who formed one of these little cliques, consumed two or three more “college specials,” finished our meal and passed outside to join the cluster of undergraduates at the notice boards. The storm—or the beer—seemed to have induced a state of unnatural excitement in all three of us and we decided, with one accord, that work would be out of the question with all this racket going on.

  The elements were on the rampage. Nor was it an ordinary polite English thunderstorm with a few sporadic flashes of sheet lightning, but a regular torrent broken by terrific crashes of thunder and lit by jagged forks of flame.

  Finally it was decided that we should join forces in my room in half an hour’s time.

  As I passed alone up “A” staircase, I paused for a moment outside the door of Dr. Warren, senior tutor of the college. He must have left the Combination Room without waiting for his port, for strains of Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat were wailing weakly against the sombre music of the storm. I thought that, if it was he who was playing, I had never heard him play so well before.

  As I stood there listening, whilst outside the lightning lit up the exquisite Gothic tracery of the college buildings, I had a moment of rare exultation. I knew this particular nocturne almost by heart, but now I felt I was hearing it for the first time. The delicate appoggiaturas, redolent of roses and Majorca moonlight, seemed to express all the poignant emotions which I had experienced since meeting the Profile that morning; and the dark rumblings of the storm were as an echo of the other tempest which was going on inside me. And all around me was Cambridge—Cambridge omniscient and eternal. In a single day the tempo of my existence had been accelerated. Life was exciting.

  We had barely assembled in my room and got a good brew of coffee going when the door opened to admit Mr. Stuart Somerville. We were all a trifle surprised at the condescension and there was an awkward pause.

  In the first place the young aristocrat had little in common with the plain, outspoken Comstock; in the second place, we had learnt during Hall that Stuart had once again been picked as twelfth man for the Varsity match that week. His chances for a blue were receding fast and no one knew whether he would like the subject mentioned. The difference between the twelfth and eleventh man is the difference between success and failure. But he was least embarrassed of us all.

  “All we need now,” he remarked, as he glanced cheerfully around him, “is a chorus composed of Professor Long, the Merry Monocle and Baumann. Hank and the divine Bigger would do as front line comedians. ‘A’ staircase should all cling together on a night like this. Mind if I join you in a cup of coffee, Fenton on Torts?”

  “Delighted, Somerville on Spinach,” I replied, smiling. It was impossible to be annoyed for long with the irrepressible Stuart, even when he continued in his best pseudo-Americanized drawl:

  “That was a slick little chick I saw you talking to on the stairs this morning. When are you going to introduce me to the girl friend?”

  The question was merely rhetorical so I busied myself with the coffee cups and made no reply. I did not know that there had been a witness to the encounter. His agile mind now shifted to a totally different topic.

  “You know I wasn’t kidding when I told you this morning that North had got out. You’d better cable your old man to have his eye peeled. North escaped last night from the Cambridge Asylum for the Criminally Insane.”

  “I saw it too,” said Comstock casually. “That case was a rum go. An old Saints man, wasn’t he?”

  “Lived on this staircase—so I’ve heard,” commented Michael.

  “See Fenton’s Famous Second Trials, Chapter Thirteen, for a full description of the case and increase the coffers of a penniless American millionaire,” sang out Stuart. A well-aimed cushion ruffled his blond hair and made him look handsomer than ever.

  “Well, it’s a fine night for a murderous lunatic to come creeping back to his old haunts,” said Comstock, who had a strong leaning toward the sensational.

  “Goody-goody, creepy-crawly and spooky-spooky!” cried Somerville. “Let’s all tell ghost stories and make a night of it. I’ve got half a bottle of whisky and some biscuits in my room. Come and help me fetch them, Fenton.”

  As Somerville and I returned to my room with the whisky, I noticed that Baumann’s door was wide open. He was seated at his desk, working. The reading lamp was lit since the storm had made it darker than was usual at that hour. He did not look up as we passed, and his only reply was a grunt when Stuart called out pleasantly, “Congratters on getting on the team, Baumann.”

  For about half an hour we sat by my window eating cookies and drinking whiskies and sodas while we watched the storm lighting up the battlements of Kings Chapel and throwing into sudden, splendid relief the perpendicular stained windows and the Tudor Roses above the doorway. Never had the familiar spires of Cambridge appeared so fantastic or so exotic. It was a wild, extravagant night.

  A plea for ghost stories was again urged, this time by Lloyd Comstock.

  “Talking of criminal lunatics,” said Michael, after we had drawn the curtains and turned on all the lights, “a queer sort of thing happened last year in the village next to ours. Just a tiny little Gloucestershire hamlet where everybody is either a hundred years old or landed gentry dating back to Edward the Confessor. It was all rather beastly.

  “The first thing was that almost every young or youngish woman in the village got an anonymous letter—nasty obscene stuff. I saw one of them because my cousin is married to the village doctor and she got one, too. Somehow or other the writer of that letter had raked up an affair she had had years before with a young captain who was killed in the war.

  “The thing had been innocent enough, but insinuations in the letter were perfectly caddish. Even the vicar’s daughter, who’s no chicken, by the way, got one and almost went potty, she was so upset. The letters were all neatly printed on a kind of old-fashioned parchment. The postmark was Bristol, which is about thirty miles away.