Before Midnight

"Yes. I am a professor of history at Bemis College, but I won't be very long. It will amuse you to hear--no, that's not the right way to look at it. It will amuse me to tell you; that's better. One day last September a colleague showed me an advertisement of this contest, and said facetiously that as a student and teacher of history I should be interested. As a puzzle the thing was so obvious it was inane, and so was the second one, which my colleague also showed me. I was curious as to how long the inanity would be maintained, and got others as they appeared, and before long I found I was being challenged. I made a point of getting them without referring to any book, but the twelfth one so distracted me that I broke that ban just to get rid of it."

He screwed up his lips. "Have I said that I hadn't entered the contest?"

"No."

"Well, I hadn't. I regarded it as a diversion, an amusing toy. But after I had solved the twentieth and last, which I must confess was rather ingenious, I sent in an entry blank with my answers. If you were to ask me why I did so I would be at a loss. I suppose in the lower strata of my psyche the primitive lusts are slopping around in the mire, and somehow they managed it; they are not in direct communication with me. The next day I was appalled at what I had done. I had a professorship at the age of thirty-six; I was a serious and able scholar with two books to my credit; and I had well-defined ambitions which I was determined to realize. If I won a prize in a perfume contest--a perfume called Pour Amour--it would be a blemish on my career, and if I won a sensational one, a half or a quarter of a million, I would never live it down."

He smiled and shook his head. "But you won't believe I was appalled, because when I was notified that I was in a tie with seventy-one others, and was sent five new verses to solve in a week, I had the answers in four days and sent them in. I can only plead that schizophrenia must have many forms and manifestations, or I could resort to demonology. I was once much impressed by Roskoff's Geschichte des Teufels. Anyhow, I sent the answers, and was asked to come to New York, and arrived just twenty-four hours ago; and now I'm involved not only in a perfume contest--Pour Amour Rollins they'll call me--but in a murder, a nationwide cause cйlиbre. I am done for. If I don't resign I'll be fired. Can you get me a job?"