“Seven old men?”
“Yes, old stumblebums. Picked them up on the Common and brought them out to his room. Gave them a couple of drinks and took them into the dining hall to dinner — had a special table reserved.”
“My God! I’d never heard about that.”
“The damnedest sight I ever saw — Jones leading that troop. Naturally their clothes were awful. I remember one of them kept wiping his nose on his sleeve.”
“Charming!”
“It didn’t bother Jones. He sat them down at the table and then got up and made a little speech, welcoming them to Harvard — you should’ve seen old Sampson’s face, the Head of the House.”
“Didn’t he get in trouble?”
“Hell, no! He told Sampson later they were the faculty of his old school.”
“Sampson couldn’t have believed that!”
“Of course not; but what could he say? Everything was perfectly orderly.”
“He must be insane.”
“A clean old man,” murmured South.
“I can’t figure it out,” said East. “He graduates with honors without studying, and now he’s getting a Ph.D. the same way. And yet he does crazy things like that.”
“Now he’s talking about fires, riots, and sudden death.”
“He’ll probably find something.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
CHAPTER II
WHEN Jones left the bridge game and came out on Mt. Auburn Street it was quarter of eight. The chimes, regularly cursed by students living near by, were ending their quarter-hourly concert.
He cursed the chimes and the weather collectively.
Dodging pools of slush, he crossed a street and headed toward Hallowell House.
Edmund Jones was tall, he was thin, and he was slightly sunken; that is, his chest did not expand unless called upon to do so. Some said his face looked haggard, but this was not so. It was just terribly tired. When he sat down in a chair it was hard to believe he would be able to get up again. He did not collapse in a chair, he entwined himself in it. And yet he moved quickly and nervously; his clothes drooping on his body were always neat.
He looked as if he had just come out of a hospital after a lingering illness, but he could play five sets of tennis in a midsummer sun or an hour’s squash in a steam-heated court and come out perspiring slightly. He was a physical contradiction.
Someone, years before, inspired possibly by his heavy eyebrows and condescending expression, had called him Jupiter. Preparatory school nicknames are everlasting. There is no need for quotation marks. Many of his acquaintances did not know his first name; he was Jupiter Jones, whether he liked it or not — and he did.
At the corner he stopped in at Joe’s for some cigarettes. Joe, fat and smiling, was mixing a milk shake for an undergraduate; two others were going through the movie magazines on the stand.
“How’s tricks, Mr. Jones?” said Joe, waving a glass. Jupiter was a good customer — his checks seldom bounced.
“O. K., Joe. Package of Camels,” answered Jupiter, and as Joe handed him the cigarettes, Jupiter asked his favorite question.
“How’s business?”
The answer came as it always did: a shrug of the shoulders, “Oh, you know, same as usual, sometime good, sometime bad, same as usual.”
Jupiter smiled and felt better. Good old Joe, he’s got it down right, same as usual. He looked over the shoulder of one of the magazine readers. A cleverly draped girl stared up at him.
“Steady, boys, steady,” he said as he went out.
Across Mt. Auburn Street away from the Square, you go by dingy two-family houses and tenements and suddenly come upon a House. To a stranger, the transition from the squalid near-slum to the imposing white tower, the even rows of windows, the chimneys, and above all the endless red bricks of a House is startling. After a while you get used to it. You have to. That may be why those old buildings are still there.
Jupiter looked at the clock on the tower of Hallowell House and saw that it was ten minutes of eight. He knew it was ten minutes of eight, but the tower is so placed that when you come to the House from the Square you have to look at the clock. It’s not easy to lose track of the time in Cambridge, even if it is to waste it, he thought.
Hallowell House forms a square. On the east end is the main tower, distinguished from the other Houses by its dome, which is painted orange, a horrid, almost unbelievable greenish orange. Opposite the main tower, across the court, there is another smaller tower which covers the dining hall, common room, and library. There are two entries on either side of the main tower, which read, from left to right, Entry A, B, C, and D. To get to the rest of the building you have to go through an arcade under the tower.
Jupiter lived on the ground floor of Entry B on the left — there are two rooms on each floor of an entry, one on each side of the stairs; there are four floors, making a total of eight rooms per entry. He went to his room, switched on a light, picked up a notebook from the table, switched off the light, and went out. Professor Singer’s room was next to his on the same floor; only a wall separated them, but he had to go outside and into Entry A to get to it. This annoyed him, as it always did.
As he passed Singer’s window he saw it was lighted. Through a crack in the curtain he caught a glimpse of the man at his desk.
“I’ll be right with you, old boy,” he said, opening the entry door.
He knocked on the right-hand door and waited, his hand on the doorknob. Nothing happened. He knocked again, harder. Still nothing.
“Come on, come on, it’s only me — or I,” he muttered. He was getting nervous.
He went outside for another look in the window. Singer was still at his
