all the girls love a scholar . short story by Malcolm Bradbury . one fine day in late August , a little more than a year ago , I put on some clean socks , pressed my trousers , and made my way across the downs to Southampton , where I was to take ship for America . after governmental minions had knotted my suits together and counted the contents of my wallet , under the pretext of facilitating my embarkation , I went out onto the dock , and there she was , the R.M.S Grand Cham , a huge wedding cake of a ship , sturdy yet pleasantly worn after yeoman service on the transatlantic run . I paused and scratched my ear , touched by the moment ; I was going to America , safe in this titan of the deep - and what leisurely , playful , and even possibly lascivious hours lay before me ! I gathered up my hand baggage , which consisted of a portable typewriter and a briefcase containing a full-size x-ray photograph of my chest and a crisp mint copy of my Master &apos;s thesis , on the influence of Dryden on anybody , which I had just completed . I came fresh from two years of research , spent among the high stone pillars and solemnly dedicated atmosphere of the British Museum . I am essentially a provincial lad , lost in the vast , unwieldy City of London , and the British Museum was the only place I knew . I used to take the small red trains of the London underground as far as Tottenham Court Road station and emerge into the grey heady airs of Bloomsbury . then I would wend my way between the bookshops , publishers &apos; offices , and espresso bars , taking care not to go off course into the void , until I reached the British Museum . I would go into the reading room , where solid silence was packed hard and green up as far as the bowl of the dome , and walk over , always , to desk D-4 . ( after a few months , people knew that D-4 and Bradbury went together ; I was a member of a very exclusive club . ) I would settle down there amid the smell of leather bindings and leather desks and the strange aromas of unguents worn by middle European &amp;eacute;migr&amp;eacute;s , who notoriously used to repair to the British Museum to write seditious pamphlets . sometimes I would go down into the basement lavatory , where small men could be seen from time to time washing their hats . such eccentricities were commonplace in this high world of scholarship which I now frequented , and my urbanity grew daily . so this , then , was living . at eleven , I would go out for coffee ; at twelve-thirty for lunch ; and at three-fifteen for tea . in these interstices , I conducted a love affair with a large , flamboyant , and rather rich girl from Sheffield , who was also writing a thesis . I never saw her save during the daytime , and our relationship was conducted largely by correspondence within the museum . notes would arrive saying I &apos;m mad at you . you said you &apos;d have lunch with me yesterday . notes would leave saying sorry , my tutor came . ( my tutor would often pop in , and we would retire to a nearby teashop , eat buns , and discuss my thesis , at the same time feeding crumbs to the mice that kept appearing out of the wainscoting . ) but how about today ? I &apos;m your friend . when I accepted a fellowship in America , the notes came thick and fast ; she was very mad at me . I had that day taken my thesis to a little bookbinder up Gower Street , who had hit the edges with a hammer and put a binding on it , I felt very proud . so I took her out to dinner in Soho , then to a theatre , and finally I took her home on the underground . we sat on a bench in some gardens near the river . a sign saying hovis kept flashing at us from across the river , but we did n&apos;t look at it . the seat was wet , and ants kept taking things back and forth along it , but we did n&apos;t mind . at last , I ushered her to her door and promised never to forget her . now I was off to America to face a more rigorous r&amp;eacute;gime . I was going to the middle west to teach a course on gross illiteracies to freshmen . the gross illiteracies did n&apos;t sound very interesting . they included such deviations as the unjustifiable dangling modifier ( if thoroughly stewed , the patients will enjoy our prunes ) and the fused sentence ( his bus was late he missed his train ) . I realised that I was now finished with the cosmopolitan gentlemanly days of English research ; no more men washing their hats in the lavatory , no more eccentrics talking on economic theory to the stone lions in front of the British Museum . now , if I wanted to do research work , I had to take courses and acquire credits for a degree . but first , I told myself , forget scholarship and the academic life for a while : revel in the joys of a cruise . flunkies ushered me aboard the Grand Cham , and eventually I found my cabin . it was a tiny cabin , no bigger than a good-sized coffin , and it contained four berths , a communal set of drawers , and a hand basin about the size of the bowl of my pipe . my three cabin mates had arrived already ; they were long-faced , dark-haired English youths who looked exactly like me . one of them pointed out to me a package from Interflora . it was white heather from the British Museum girl , and the card said , I &apos;m your friend . I then began to unpack my briefcase . I lifted out the x-ray photograph and the thesis , and carried them to a convenient shelf . then I noticed a curious thing . already on the shelf , there lay three x-ray photographs and three fat Master &apos;s theses . I looked at my cabin mates inquiringly . they nodded . we were all on the same errand . bursting with bonhomie , we sat at the same table at dinner and talked about Dryden and George Eliot and the criticism of F R Leavis . suddenly , in a pause in our conversation , we observed something strange . the people at the next table were also talking about Dryden and George Eliot and the criticism of F R Leavis . so were the people at the table beyond that . soon everyone was turning round to look at everyone else , and it quickly became evident that the vessel was largely given over to American intellectuals returning from a year &apos;s stint in Rome or Paris or London and English intellectuals going for a year &apos;s stint to the Folger or to Stanford or to the palaces of cultivation in the middle west . there were English-speaking union fellows , commonwealth fund fellows , Henry fellows , and Jane Eliza Procter visiting fellows . there were Guggenheims and Rockefellers , Fords and Gulbenkians . my goodness , remarked someone , what a blow for the human intelligence if this ship should sink . it was a sobering thought . perhaps , someone else suggested , we should have been shared out among several vessels , so that some of us , at least , should survive . as one of my cabin mates remarked , the incidence of scholars was more than random ; it was statistically significant . you know , he said , the historians of race migration have missed this . there &apos;s a thesis in it . I hastened to assure him that with a passenger list of this sort no potential subject for a thesis would be likely to go begging . oh , good ! said my companion . I &apos;m relieved . because it is n&apos;t really my field . already I was beginning to suspect that the passenger list of the vessel was not my field either , and during the next day or two I could not help but feel that the atmosphere was growing claustrophobic . there were a few passengers without even their Master &apos;s degrees , going to visit relatives or get married in the states , or returning from a tour of Europe . you saw them occasionally , walking about defiantly carrying copies of novels by Nevil Shute , and I , for one , never let them go by without sparing them a few kindly words . by and large , though , the passengers gathered in groups on the boat deck each day in informal seminars , keeping alive the tradition of academic debate during this tough , fallow spell while they were cut off from a university and out under the open sky . one evening , my roommates and I were sitting in our cabin deluging our nostrils with heather pollen when there came a tap at the door and a young American scholar we had already met ( he was a Swinburne man ) entered . hi , he said . we said hi back at him , and he explained that a meeting had been held and it had been decided to formalise the discussions on the boat deck by holding daily seminars devoted to comparisons of American and European life and thought , which would keep our minds from rusting and at the same time serve as an orientation programme for those unfamiliar with various lands . people would contribute papers , and discussion would be encouraged . you know , this is the greatest opportunity we &apos;ll ever have , he said . we can n&apos;t let an opportunity like this go by . there was , he had to admit , one painful drawback . we are n&apos;t authorised to award credits toward any degree , but we do n&apos;t think this should stand in our way , and we hope it will n&apos;t deter you from coming . we congratulated him on being so infected with the joy of pure scholarship . he thanked us and adjured us to be present at ten-thirty the next morning . for some strange reason , possibly a decline in my metabolism , I could n&apos;t quite relish the prospect . I went to the meeting the next day , however , and an eminent professor from Emmanuel College , Cambridge , gave a paper on the cheapest way to buy potatoes in England , and then there was a discussion about how to get off a turnpike in the states . it was good , searching stuff , well presented and well delivered , and showing the stamp of original minds , yet somehow I did n&apos;t seem up to it , and when the Swinburne man , who was in general charge , assigned us Moby Dick , to be read before the next class , I felt I &apos;d almost rather take an incomplete in the course . fortunately for me , my fears of being bested in a debate on Melville were relieved by a chance encounter , at the dance that evening , with an elegantly proportioned American nurse , tanned as brown as a berry by a two-month tour of Italy . I had no business being at the dance at all , with so much reading to do , but I thought perhaps he would n&apos;t call on me in the quiz . looking on this unqualified specimen of American womanhood , charming even without her M.A , I found myself spiritually closer to her than I did to many a scholar . I was , in short , tempted into silken dalliance . the desire for knowledge , the desire to learn all there was to know about the Weltanschauung of the female in America , egged me on . I began my course of study the next day . I was , as I have said , a modest and provincial English youth , but my companion seemed inclined to thaw me . you &apos;re so polite , she said . it &apos;s cute , but you will n&apos;t snow an American girl that way . she was telling me , in the late afternoon , how to snow an American girl , when the Swinburne man appeared . say , he said , we missed you today . I apologised for my absence . we had a great class on how to use an Automat , he said . then one of the guys in your cabin talked about how to get shillings to put into English gas meters . it was very interesting . I &apos;m sure , I said . I &apos;m sorry I missed it . next morning , the Swinburne man was at our cabin early , looking for me . I told him that I should most surely have joined the group that day were I not working on a project of my own . he left , a trifle dejected , and my project came along shortly afterward from her cabin , where she had been putting on a swimsuit , and we went to the pool . 