“I shall make no discount for flummery, sir.” Wolfe sighed. “For my part, I have an idea that if I collect my fees I shall have earned them. Your friend Mr. Chapin is a man of quality.”
Cabot nodded. “Paul Chapin is a distorted genius.”
“All genius is distorted. Including my own. But so for that matter is all life; a mad and futile ferment of substances meant originally to occupy space without disturbing it. But alas, here we are in the thick of the disturbance, and the only way that has occurred to us to make it tolerable is to join in and raise all the hell our ingenuity may suggest.—How did Paul Chapin acquire his special distortion? I mean the famous accident. Tell me about it. I understand it was at college, a hazing affair.”
“Yes. It was pretty terrible.” Cabot sat on the edge of the desk. “No doubt of that, but good God, other men, the war, for instance... oh well. I suppose Paul was distorted from the beginning. He was a freshman, the rest of us were sophomores and on up. Do you know the Yard?”
“The Yard?”
“At Harvard.”
“I have never been there.”
“Well. There were dormitories — Thayer Hall. This was at Thayer Middle Entry — Hell Bend. We were having a beer night downstairs, and there were some there from outside — that’s how fellows like Gaines and Collard happened to be present. We were having a good time around ten o’clock when a fellow came in and said he couldn’t get in his room; he had left his key inside and the doors had snap locks. Of course we all began to clap.”
“That was a masterpiece, to forget one’s key?”
“Oh no. We were clapping the opportunity. By getting out a hall window, or another room, you could make your way along a narrow ledge to the window of any locked room and get in that way. It was quite a trick — I wouldn’t try it now for my hope of the Supreme Court — but I had done it in my freshman year and so had many others. Whenever an upperclassman forgot his key it was the native custom to conscript a freshman for that service. There was nothing extraordinary about it, for the agility of youth. Well, when this fellow — it was Andy Hibbard — when he announced he had locked himself out, of course we welcomed the opportunity for a little discipline. We looked around for a victim. Somebody heard a noise in the hall and looked out and saw one going by, and called to him to come in. He came in. It was Chapin.”