At length he took himself away, and retired to his sitting-room in college to think over all that he had learned from the Professor before dinner-time, and from his interrogation of Topsy and the servants. The case baffled him.
He sat at his window on the first floor, looking out, in the gathering gloom, upon the velvet lawn and the stately background of fifteenth-century architecture, pierced just opposite his place of observation by a broad, low-pointed archway through which a section of the Front Quad could be faintly discerned. The Aquinas Club, he had been told, were holding their annual dinner that night, by invitation of the Fellows, in the Senior Common Room, and for some time past their proceedings, which were fully choral, had claimed his attention. He heard the tremendous burden of “On Ilkley Moor Baat ’At,” the stirring swing of “Auprès de la Blonde,” the complex cadences of “Green Grow the Rashes Oh!” the noble organ-music of “Slattery’s Mounted Foot,” the crashing staccato of “Still His Whiskers Grew,” the solemn keening of “The Typist’s Farewell.” Once there were indications that a Rhodes Scholar was trying, with as little success as usually waits on his countrymen’s efforts in that direction, to remember the words of his own national anthem.
Then there fell a hush; and it was not until half an hour later that Wimsey’s wrestling with his problem was disturbed by new sounds of academic liveliness in the Front Quad. He gazed expectantly towards the great archway, and presently a slight, pyjamaed figure fled across the darksome frame of vision, pursued by a loose group of obscurer shapes, dimly seen to be white-shirted, and quite plainly heard to yell. Wimsey sighed. The luxurious, self-conscious melancholy of those no longer ridiculously young, but having — with any luck — half a lifetime still before them, possessed him. Elbows on sill, chin in hands, he gazed into the now untenanted gloom, recalling lost binges of old years.
A little later the moon peered out from her curtains of cloud, and Wimsey, finding that his mood demanded some further recapturing of the spirit of a college by night, descended into the Quad and set out on a voyage of discovery. In the wall to his left hand an opening that looked like the doorway to a staircase of rooms, such as he had just quitted, turned out to be the archway of a vaulted passage leading into a tiny square of stone, whose small grated windows and peaked turret recalled one of Dore’s visions of the Paris of Rabelais. From this another entry led to another Quad, of normal size, and thence again he passed to one yet larger, which he could recognize by the battlements on the farther wall as Pateshull Quad.
As Wimsey stood at gaze, imagining what study, what talk, or possibly what chemin-de-fer, might be in progress behind the few windows that still showed lights within, a young man emerged from one of the staircase entries. He was white-shirted, his hair was somewhat disordered, and he carried under one arm an enormous book. This he took to the centre of the gravelled space, then placed it carefully on the ground, and sat upon it. Soon his wandering eye caught sight of Wimsey in the moonlight, and the two inspected one another in silence for some moments. Then the keen instinct of youth told the sitter that the figure before him, slender though it was, must be that of someone of thirty at least, and with instant deference to age and infirmity he rose and waved a hand towards the obese volume on the gravel.
“Won’t you sit down, sir?” he said. “Not enough room for two, I’m afraid, even on Liddell and Scott.”
“Thanks, I’d rather not,” Wimsey said. “I’m staying in your Fellows’ Quad, and I just came out for a stroll before turning in. You have been at the Aquinas dinner, perhaps?”
“Yes,” said the young man. “It was rather progressive, as a dinner — sort of thing makes you feel a trifle listless afterwards — so, if you’re sure you won’t—” He subsided upon his lexicon, then went on: “Young Warlock got it up his nose rather, you see, and went to sleep on the sofa, so we carried him to his rooms and put him to bed. Then the little devil woke up suddenly and got loose, and we had to chase him all over the college before we could get him bedded down again. Now I’m just sitting here for rest and meditation. D’you ever meditate?”
“Oh, often,” said Wimsey. “What were you thinking of meditating upon this time?”
“Housman’s edition of Manilius,” the young man answered, abstractedly removing his collar and tie. “Wonderful chap — Housman, I mean; Manilius was rather a blister. The way Housman pastes the other commentators in the slats does your heart good. I was just concentrating on the way he kicks the stuffing out of Elias Stöber — lovely!”
“Well, I won’t interrupt you,” Wimsey said. “I’m thinking something over myself, as a matter of fact.”
“All right, go to it,” the young man said amiably; then, lifting up his voice in an agreeable baritone, “I never envy a-a-anyone when I’m thinking… thinking… thinking… I say,” he added, “who are you? I’m Mitchell, named Bryan Farrant by my innocent parents; so of course I’m never called anything but B.F.”
“Hard luck! My name’s Wimsey.”
“Not Lord Peter?”
“Yes.”
“Sinful Solomon!” exclaimed the young man. “Here, you simply must confer distinction on my lexicon. I’ll have the cover you sat on framed.”
“No, really,” Wimsey laughed, “I must go. But do you and your friends really read the chronicles of my misspent life, then?”
“I should say we do read them!” cried Mr. Mitchell. “We eat them!”
“How jolly for you — I mean for me — that is to say, for her… oh well, you know what I mean,” Wimsey said distractedly.
“I suppose I do, if you say so,” said Mr. Mitchell without conviction. “You know the lyric there is about you?
“No, I hadn’t heard it,” Wimsey said. “It’s nice to be sublime, anyhow. Well, here I go. Good night.”
“Sweet dreams!” said Mr. Mitchell.
On the Sunday morning Wimsey awoke with that indescribable feeling that something has happened, but one does not know quite what. Mr. Mitchell’s parting wish had been not too exactly fulfilled. Wimsey had dreamed of having his head bitten off by a crocodile, after which he had attended a Yorkshire farmers’ market-day ordinary, and then, in the character of a missionary, had been chased by a cassowary over the plains of Timbuctoo.
He arose unrefreshed. From his bedroom window he perceived a College servant approaching the entrance to his staircase. The hour being no later than seven o’clock, the scout, who was in his shirtsleeves, had a broom over his left shoulder, a teapot in his right hand, an old cap on back to front, and a cigarette behind one of his ears. He was eating.
“What would Bunter say? Perish Bunter!” mused Wimsey ungratefully. “I am in the arms of Alma Mater once more, and this — this is one of the conditions of her kindness. I wonder what that scout is eating. I never saw Bunter eat. Perhaps he never does — it’s a low habit, eating.”
Eating! The term recurred again and again to Wimsey’s mind as he prepared himself for the facing of another day. What was it that was trying to force itself into the realm of consciousness?
An hour later, the scout, looking now much less like a hangman’s assistant, set out for him that Oxford breakfast whose origin is not to be descried through the mists of ages — coffee, scrambled eggs and bacon, toast, butter, marmalade. “And a jolly good breakfast too!” Wimsey reflected. “What was good enough for Duns Scotus and St. Edmund, Roger Bacon and More, Erasmus and Bodley, is good enough for me. And in this holy city I seem always to be hungry. How I always eat at Oxford!”