The Prelude to Adventure | Page 6

discuss it all from every possible point of view.
"I always knew he'd do something. . . ." He suddenly knew quite sharply, as though a voice had spoken to him, that he could not endure this any longer. There was gathering upon him the conviction that in a few minutes, rising from his place, he would cry out to the hall--"I, Olva Dune, this afternoon, killed Carfax. You will find his body in the wood." He repeated the words to himself under his breath. "You will find his body in the wood. . . ." "You will find . . ."
He finished his beef very quietly and then got up.
Craven appealed to him. "I say, Dune, do come and make a four--my rooms, half-past eight--Lawrence and Galleon are the other two."
Olva looked down at him with his grave, rather melancholy smile.
"Afraid I can't to-night, Craven; must work."
"Don't overdo it," Cardillac said.
The eyes of the two men met. Olva knew that Cardillac--"Cards" as he was to his friends, liked him; he himself did not hate Cardillac. He was the only man in the College for whom he had respect. They were both of them demanding the same thing from the world. They both of them despised their fellow-creatures.
Olva, climbing the stairs to his room, stood for a moment in the dark, before he turned on the lights. He spoke aloud in a whisper, as though some one were with him in the room.
"This won't do," he said. "This simply won't do. Your nerves are going. You've only got a few hours of it. Hold on--Think of the beast that he was. Think of the beast that he was."
He walked slowly back to the door and turned on the electric lights. He did not sport his oak--if people came to see him he would rather like it: in some odd way it would be more satisfactory than that he should go to see them--but people did not often come to see him.
He laid out his books on the table and sat down. He had grown fond of this room. The walls were distempered white. The ceiling was old and black with age. There was a deep red-tiled fireplace. One wall had low brown bookshelves. There were two pictures: one an Around reprint of Matsys' "Portrait of Aegidius"--that wise, kind, tender face; the other an admirable photogravure of Durer's "Selbstbildnis." The books were mainly to do with his favourite historical period--the Later Roman Empire. There was some poetry--an edition of Browning, Swinburne's Poems and Ballads, Ernest Dowson, Rossetti, Francis Thompson. There was an edition of Hazlitt, a set of the Spectator, one or two novels, Henry Lessingham and The Roads by Galleon, To Paradise by Lester, Meredith's One of Our Conquerors and Diana of the Crossways, The Ambassadors and Awkward Age of Henry James.
On the mantelpiece above the fireplace there were three deep blue bowls, the only ornaments in the room. Beyond the little diamond-paned windows, beyond the dark mysteries of the Fellows' garden, a golden mist rose from the lamps of the street, there were stars in the sky.
He faced his books. For a quarter of an hour he saw before him the hanging, baggy cheeks, the white, staring eyes, the glittering ring on the weak finger. His hands began to tremble. . . .
There was a timid knock on the door, and he was instantly sure that the body had been found, and that they had come to arrest him. He stood back from the door with his hand pressing on the table. It was almost a relief to him that the summons had come so soon--it would presently all be over.
"Come in," he said, and gave one look at the golden mist, at the stars, at the tender face of Aegidius.
The door was opened slowly with fumbling hands, and there stood there a large, fat, clumsy, shapeless creature, with a white face, a hooked nose, an open, foolish mouth.
The reaction was hysterical. To expect a summons to death and public shame, to find--Bunning. Bunning--that soft, blithering, emotional, religious, middle-class maniac--Bunning! "Soft-faced" Bunning, as he was called, was the man of Olva's year in whom the world at large found most entertainment. The son of some country clergyman, kicked and battered through the slow, dreary years at some small Public School, he had come up to Saul's with an intense, burning desire to make a mark. He was stupid, useless at games, having only somewhere behind his fat ugly body a longing to be connected with some cause, some movement, some person of whom he might make a hero.
He had, of course, within the first fortnight of his arrival, plunged himself into dire disgrace. He had asked Lawrence, coming like a young god from Marlborough, in to coffee; they had made