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By Root 8986 0

the wind, blowing hard again on this side of the house. On his return with the whisky bottle he rightly deduced the Consul to have hidden in the cupboard, his eyes ranged the Consul's books disposed quite neatly--in the tidy room where there was not otherwise the slightest sign its occupant did any work or contemplated any for the future, unless it was the somewhat crumpled bed on which the Consul had evidently been lying--on high shelves around the walls: Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, Serpent and Siva Worship in Central America, there were two long shelves of this, together with the rusty leather bindings and frayed edges of the numerous cabbalistic and alchemical books, though some of them looked fairly new, like the Goetia of the Lemegaton of Solomon the King, probably they were treasures, but the rest were a heterogeneous collection: Gogol, the Mahabharata, Blake, Tolstoy, Pontoppidan, the Upanishads, a Mermaid Marston, Bishop Berkeley, Duns Scotus, Spinoza, Vice Versa, Shakespeare, a complete Taskerson, All Quiet on the Western Front, the Clicking of Cuthbert, the Rig Veda--God knows, Peter Rabbit; "Everything is to be found in Peter Rabbit," the Consul liked to say--Hugh returned, smiling, and with a flourish like a Spanish waiter poured himself a stiff drink into a tooth mug. "Wherever did you find that?--ah!... You've saved my life!"

"That's nothing. I did the same for Carruthers once." Hugh now set about shaving the Consul who had become much steadier almost immediately.

"Carruthers--the Old Crow?... Did what for Carruthers?"

"Held his head."

"He wasn't tight of course, though."

"Not tight... Submerged. In a supervision too." Hugh flourished the cut-throat razor. "Try and sit still like that; you're doing fine. He had a great respect for you--he had an enormous number of stories about you, mostly variations on the same one... however. The one about your riding into college on a horse--"

"Oh no... I wouldn't have ridden it in. Anything bigger than a sheep frightens me."

"Anyway there the horse was, tied up in the buttery. A pretty ferocious horse too. Apparently it took about thirty-seven gyps and the college porter to get it out."

"Good lord... But I can't imagine Carruthers ever getting so tight he'd pass out at a supervision. Let me see, he was only praelector in my time. I believe he was really more interested in his first editions than in us. Of course it was at the beginning of the war, a rather trying period... But he was a wonderful old chap."

"He was still praelector in mine."

(In my time?... But what, exactly, does that mean? What, if anything, did one do at Cambridge, that would show the soul worthy of Siegebert of East Anglia--Or, John Cornford! Did one dodge lectures, cut halls, fail to row for the college, fool one's supervisor, finally, oneself? Read economics, then history, Italian, barely passing one's exams? Climb the gateway against which one had an unseaman-like aversion, to visit Bill Plantagenet in Sherlock Court, and, clutching the wheel of St Catherine, feel, for a moment asleep, like Melville, the world hurling from all havens astern? Ah, the harbour bells of Cambridge! Whose fountains in moonlight and closed courts and cloisters, whose enduring beauty in its virtuous remote self-assurance, seemed part, less of the loud mosaic of one's stupid life there, though maintained perhaps by the countless deceitful memories of such lives, than the strange dream of some old monk, eight hundred years dead, whose forbidding house, reared upon piles and stakes driven into the marshy ground, had once shone like a beacon out of the mysterious silence, and solitude of the fens. A dream jealously guarded: Keep off the Grass. And yet whose unearthly beauty compelled one to say: God forgive me. While oneself lived in a disgusting smell of marmalade and old boots, kept by a cripple, in a hovel near the station yard. Cambridge was the sea reversed; at the same time a horrible regression; in the strictest sense--despite one's avowed popularity, the godsent opportunity--the most appalling of nightmares,