The Paper Chase Read Online Free PDF Page B

the way he took off his clothes, but he could not be bothered to discover what it was.
    He switched off the light, but sleep seemed a long way away. He brooded over the events of the day, which seemed to have, from his point of view, a rather discouraging absurdity about them. The success of Where Dons Delight had been based partly on the fact that the sturdy respectability of most dons gave wide play to his sense of fantasy. But how could one write fantastically about Pont, Janine, and matron Hedda? To record their words and actions would be fantasy enough. Perhaps he should have tried for normality, a job in a State school. But then, of course, he would never have got one. His thoughts turned to Montague. What had he meant by saying that they were both at the school on Johnny’s business? The lines of a poem came into his head:
     
    O last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover,
    You’d the sun on one arm and the moon on the other,
    The sea it was blue and the grass it was green,
    Every star rattled a round tambourine;
    Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay;
    But you frowned like thunder and you went away.
     
    Montague frowned like thunder and Hedda went away, Jeremy burst asunder and Janine stood grand and grey. While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa. You had to say Mont ag ue to make it scan, Applegate thought, and then the tenses were wrong… He fell asleep.

Chapter Eight
    What noiseless sound woke him, what jagged lightning flash of truth lit the arcades of sleep he never knew. Awake he was certainly, and panic-stricken, aware that something had happened and that action was demanded of him. Hand groped for light switch over bed. There was none.
    For a moment place eluded him. Then he remembered, got out of bed, turned on the light, looked round the room. Nothing seemed changed. His watch said that the time was half past eleven. Annoyed with his own stupidity he put on a dressing gown, opened the balcony door and stared out into the night. An owl hooted. It was cold. He shut this door again, walked across the room, opened the door that led into the passage. Silence and darkness except for a line of light beneath the door opposite him. He remembered that Montague occupied this room. No doubt he was reading late, or writing a letter about Johnny’s business. Yet something had woken Applegate up, and he wanted to find out what it was. He took three steps across the passage and, feeling slightly foolish, tapped gently at Montague’s door.
    There was no reply. As he waited Applegate felt more and more foolish. Yet at the same time he had a sleepwalker’s determination to speak to Montague, to have it out with Montague as he put it to himself. “Are you there?” the sleepwalker asked. “Can I speak to you, Montague?”
    Still no reply. He must be asleep. Without hesitation Applegate turned the handle of the door.
    Montague lay on the bed on his back, fully dressed, one arm dangling. He was not asleep. From somewhere in the region of his heart there protruded the handle of a knife.
    The effect of sudden death on the beholder is incalculable. It can leave him unmoved, make him exultant even (but that is generally when the beholder has been himself the agent of death), or induce feelings of dizziness and repulsion. In Applegate’s case the effect of seeing Montague’s body on the bed was to make him afraid. Whether this fear was associated with the deaths of his parents, which at the time he had treated so lightheartedly, is a matter of opinion. What he felt, however, was nothing exact. It was as though the activities of some terrible machine, which he had managed to avoid for years, had quite suddenly caught him up so that now he heard the gears grinding and at close range saw all the cogs involved with each other to some awful end. He sat down on the little hard chair feeling quite faint.
    Slowly the faintness went away, to be succeeded by the stirrings of professional dignity and pride. He