“The Professor looks to me as if he knew how to look after himself,” said I.

Certainly he had no trouble at dinner. With that exquisite courtesy for which Massey College is famous, our Librarian had seen that three volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary were on his chair, so that he would be at no disadvantage, and there he sat, perched on N-Poy, chattering away happily to Dr. Swinton, a man with an insatiable appetite for scientific curiosities; on Murphy’s other side sat Professor Hume, the Master-Designate, and I knew that those two experienced hands at college hospitality would take good care of our strange guest. But I noticed that although he chased our good dinner round his plate with his knife and fork, he ate nothing, and drank no wine.

Our steward, Mr. Stojanovich, appeared beside my chair.

“That little gentleman, that Professor Murphy, asks if he might have some of his favourite drink.”

“Certainly, if we have it,” I said..

“We have it,” said Mircha; “it is vinegar.”

“Give him the best we have,” said I.

An odd request, I thought. Vinegar is, of course, a solution of acetic acid made, as the dictionary explains, from inferior wines; Canada, which yields place to no country in the world in the production of inferior wines, has first-rate vinegar. Mircha returned, bearing a demijohn which he showed me in the distinguished manner that adds so much to College functions. I took a little in a glass, and rolled it thoughtfully over my palate; it was a rich, full Loblaw 1980. I nodded approvingly, our guest was served, and I was interested to observe that he smacked his lips and, after two quick glasses, showed an increase of his former lively spirits.

Nor was that the end of it. When we went downstairs for more conversation and wine, Professor Murphy insisted that the vinegar jug go with him, and he nipped away all evening, consuming more in liquid volume than any four of the rest of us.

This was eccentric, certainly, but nothing more. However, when we were parting for the night, the strange guest seized me by the hand, and hissed: “I must talk to you.”

“If you wish,” I said; “I’ll ask Professor Zingg to bring you into my Lodgings.”

“No, no,” said little Murphy; “get rid of Zingg. Tell Zingg to go hang.”

As Professor Zingg was standing right beside him, this was rude. But Professor Zingg is not a man to lose his dignity; he smiled courteously at Jesus Maria Murphy, bowed very slightly, and left the room. But I thought there was an air of relief in his manner.

In no time at all I found myself sitting in my study, facing Professor Murphy, who was curled up in my big chair, with his third demijohn of vinegar, freshly opened, sitting on the floor beside him.

A hospitable thought struck me. “Would you like to use the plumbing?” I asked. After all, the law of gravity dictates that so much liquid intake must, at some point, impose this necessity.

“Use what?” he hissed. “Oh, the excusado. No, no; never go. Foolish, foolish. You shall find out why.”

I can’t say I liked the sound of that. But the Professor was hurrying on.

“You, Davies, you old man now, eh? You getting out of here? Dey kick you out, no?”

“Decidedly no,” I said, with some austerity, for I did not like his tone; “I am retiring, and the College has shown me every courtesy, as is its custom.”

“Yah, yah, but you sorry to go. You want to know what’s going to happen, eh?”

“Naturally I do. I am the first Master of this College; I hope the first of a long and splendid line. Not to be curious about the future would be impossible, though I know how ridiculous any such desire must be.”

“Why ridiculous?”

“Well—because of the brevity of human life.”

“Not brief at all. You not a scientist, eh?”

“No,” said I; “insofar as it is possible to sum up what I am, I am a student of literature with a psychological bias.”

“Oh, Holy Mother of God!” said Professor Murphy. “How you people spend your time! Still, I was just such an idiot when I was your age, a few hundred years ago. I was even a priest. Our university was started by priests, way back in the days of the Spanish Conquest; I was one of the founders and Sub-Rector for many years. But it is not easy to be a Spanish priest in the South American mountains, not if you have any real intelligence, not if you see what is right under your nose.”

I thought it better to humour this madman. Was he really claiming to be something like four hundred and fifty years old? “So you became an unbeliever?” I said.

“Never! Unbelievers are fools, worse than unilluminated believers. I became an illuminated believer. I expanded my realm of belief. I became an alchemist.”

“An alchemist?” said I. “Making gold, and that sort of thing?”

“Pah!” he said, and a good deal of saliva sprayed across the room at me. “I spit on gold! In South America is gold everywhere, kicking along the ground. No, no, I studied life, and as time went on, and science began to lift its head above the rubbish of faith, the Illumination came, and by the middle of the nineteenth century I was one of the earliest biologists.”

“Is it widely known that you have had such a long and interesting life?” I said.

“No; better not,” said he. “I change my name from time to time. Give up being priest, though I am still a good Catholic. But that is why I am now Murphy; lots of Murphys in Colombia. I can speak Irish. Begorrah, may your shadow never grow less, devil take you, damn your eyes, Mother Machree. Yes, now I am Professor Murphy, and head of a very big scientific section in our University.”

“And what brings you to Canada?” I said.

“I am scouting for candidates,” said he, looking at me with extreme cunning.

“For your faculty?” said I.

“No, no—for my Instituto Cryonico da Colombia. But we have strayed. We talked about your curiosity regarding the future of this College. There are lots of ways of finding out, you know.”

“Such as—?” said I.

“Well, Gematria, for one,” said he.

Gematria—the cabbala of numbers! How often had I not heard of it, that elaborate, ancient, but surely mad science of divination practised so long by the Jews, and part of the structure of their medieval scholasticism! I looked at Murphy with new eyes.

“But surely Gematria is known only among the Jews?” said I.

“If you live long enough and survive strongly enough the Jews begin to think you must be one of themselves, and they tell you secrets,” said Murphy. “You want to know how Gematria works?”

Of course I did.

“Then you must understand that numbers are the most important things under heaven. All is number, and God is the God of Numbers. I suppose you know Hebrew?”

“I’ve allowed it to grow a little rusty,” I said; “but I used to be able to read and write it pretty well.”

“Ah, then you know that in Hebrew there are no special signs for numbers, but each letter of the alphabet has a numerical equivalent, and that means that every word has a numerical equivalent also.”

“Yes, yes.”

“In the art of Gematria you divine secret things by reducing the appropriate words to their number equivalents, adding up those, then adding the integers of the sum again and again until you reach a number between one and eleven. That number is the Golden Number, and must be interpreted by knowledge of a very secret doctrine that embodies the rational pattern that lies beneath the seeming disorder of the universe.”

“Yes,” said I, “but how are you going to make that work with English words? Hebrew suppresses all the vowels but A, and lacks several of our letters.”

“That is part of the tradition. You fill in the gaps with Greek letters that also have numerical equivalents. Greek alchemists, Jewish alchemists, they worked hand in glove. It really does work, you know. Want to try?”

“I think you want to demonstrate your skill,” said I. Of course I wanted to try. But obviously I was not deceiving him; he went off into a fit of laughter, almost silent, producing a small noise like someone crushing tissue paper.