Last night we held our College Christmas Dance, and there was no sleep till morn, as is entirely proper when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing Hours with flying-feet. It was about one o’clock, and I had been to look at the dancing in the Round Room, where the flying Hours were being chased in a circle, which is after all what you would expect in a Round Room. I then went downstairs to the Chapel; it seemed unlikely that any couples would be sitting out there, and I would gain ten minutes of blessed quietness. But the Chapel was not empty.

The man who was standing at the altar, gazing so intently at the reredos, was not odd in any way, and yet I felt at once that he was extraordinary in every way. He seemed to be middle-aged, and yet he was not an academic; you can always date an academic by the cut of his dress suit, which he buys before he is thirty and uses very sparingly for the next forty-five years. But this man’s tail-coat might have been made yesterday, though its cut was conservative. His hair was rather long, and curly, but it was most elegantly arranged. His bearing was distinguished. I am somewhat too old to describe a man’s face as beautiful without self-consciousness, yet he was undeniably beautiful—beautiful but of an icy hauteur. I recognized the type at once; obviously a visiting lecturer from some Mid-Western American University.

“It is a handsome piece of work, isn’t it?” said I, referring to our reredos.

He did not look at me. “Quite interesting, as these family portraits go,” he murmured. I concluded that he must be deaf.

“It is Russian, seventeenth century, what is called a travelling iconostasis,” I said, raising my voice.

“A pity there is no picture of Father here. Still, not bad of its kind,” said he, still ignoring me.

“I take it you are a visitor to our Department of Fine Art,” I shouted.

He turned then and looked at me. It was a look in which pity and contempt vied for supremacy. I was taken aback, for I have not been looked at in that way since my final oral examination, now some thirty years ago.

“You do not know me?” said he.

This nettled me. I am not very good at names, but I am first-rate at faces. I knew that I had never seen him before. And yet—there was something familiar about him.

“Does this give you a clue?” said the stranger, and in an instant he was transformed. A scarlet, tight-fitting costume, and a voluminous red cloak appeared where the fashionable dress-suit had been, and the murmur of the discotheque upstairs seemed suddenly to be changed to some familiar bars of—who was it—yes, Gounod.

“Of course I know you now,” I cried; “you are the new director of the Opera School. How good of you to come in fancy dress.”

“No!” he shouted, impatiently, and once again he was transformed. This time he wore a rough, hairy costume, the feet of which were like hooves; great ram’s horns sprang from his brow, and at the back, where the seat of his trousers had been, there was now an ugly face from the mouth of which a long red tongue lolled obscenely.

“Of course,” I shouted, and laughed foolishly, for I was becoming somewhat unnerved; “you must be one of the actors from the medieval play group, the Poculi Ludique Societas. What a good disguise!”

“Disguise!” he roared, and his voice was like a lion’s. At the same moment the pendulous tongue of that nether face blew a loud raspberry—the very trumpet-call of derision. “Wretched child of an age of unbelief, what is to be done with you?” And suddenly, to my intense dismay, there was—right before me in the Chapel—a red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads. The noises made by those seven heads were very hard on the nerves, and the delicate scent of the beautiful man’s cologne had given place to a stench of brimstone that made me gasp. I leapt backward, tumbled over a chair and crashed to the ground.

“O the Devil!” I exclaimed, and suddenly the dragon was gone and the beautiful man stood before me. “Well, you’ve got it at last,” said he, and helped me to rise.

I did not stay on my feet for an instant. I know when I am outclassed; I dropped immediately to my knees. “Great Lord,” I said, and as my voice did not seem to be trembling enough naturally I added a shade more tremolo to it by art, “Great Lord, what is your will?”

“My will is that you stand up and forget all that medieval mummery,” said the Devil—for now it was as plain as could be who the visitor was. “You wretched mortals insist on treating me as if I had not moved forward since the sixteenth century; but living outside time as I do, I am always thoroughly up-to-date.”

“All right,” said I, getting to my feet, “what can I do for you? An excellent supper is being served in the Upper Library, or if you would fancy a damned soul or two, I can easily give you a College list, with helpful markings in the margin.”

“Oh dear, dear, dear,” said he; “what a cheap Devil you must think me. I don’t want any of your Junior Fellows, or any of your colleagues, either; I leave such journeyman’s work as they are to my staff.”

A thought of really horrible dimension—of blasting vanity—swept through me. Trying to keep pride out of my voice, I whispered, “Then you have come for me?”

The Devil laughed—it was a silvery snicker, if you can imagine such a thing—and poked me playfully in the ribs. “Get along with you, and stop fishing for compliments,” said he.

It was that poke in the ribs that reassured me. I had always been told the Devil has a common streak in him, and now he had shown it I was not so afraid. “Well,” said I, “I am sure that you have not come here for nothing; if you don’t want souls—even so desirable a spiritual property as my own soul—what can I offer you?”

“Nothing but a really good look at this handsome reredos,” he replied. “Doubtless you will find this strange, but at this time of year, when so much Christmas celebration is going on, I feel a little wistful. I hear so many people saying that they are going home for Christmas. Do you know, Master, I should very much like to go home for Christmas.”

I was too tactful to offer any comment.

“But of course I shan’t be asked,” he said, and a look of exquisite melancholy transformed the beautiful, proud face into the saddest sight that I have ever beheld.

When I was a boy there was still a large public for a novel by Marie Corelli called The Sorrows of Satan, but even she never guessed that not being asked home for Christmas was one of them.

I was in a quandary. Against overpowering and insensate Evil I could have thrown myself, and been consumed in defence of the College. But against sentimentalism I did not know what to do. This was a time for the uttermost in tact.

“Do they have a pretty lively time at your old home, when Christmas rolls round?” I asked, thinking that this colloquial tone might disarm him.

“I can’t say,” he replied; “as I told you, I’ve never been asked back since my difference of opinion with my Father, such a long time ago. Christmas didn’t begin until aeons after that.”

“Ah, I think I understand your situation,” I said. “No wonder you are so wicked. It’s not your fault at all. You are what we now call the product of a broken home.”

The Devil gave me a look which made me profoundly uneasy. “Just because I am enjoying your sympathy, don’t imagine that I cannot read you like a book,” he said. “You think you are cleverer than I; it is a very common academic delusion.”

“I certainly do not think I am cleverer than you,” said I; “I know only too well what happens to professors who get that idea; the unfortunate Dr. Faustus, for instance. But I do think you might play fair with me; you ask for my sympathy, and when I do the best I can you threaten me and accuse me of hypocrisy. Please let us talk on terms of intellectual honesty.”