Free High Jinx by William F. Buckley Page B

approach, which other students to let alone.
    The first of the Intourist Tours for the Cambridge University Socialist Society had yielded a harvest of two students whose fidelity, tested now for two years, had been established. Granted, there had been a slight problem with young Greenspan who had exuberantly volunteered to assassinate King George. But in Moscow it was judged, however tentatively, a satisfactory enterprise, and it was now established procedure that on their return to Cambridge, those students deemed worth cultivating would be put in touch with, and thereafter serve under the direction of, unit leaders. Both of them, after the first summer, had commended the recruiting instincts of Alice Goodyear Corbett; the second year, three of eleven student tourists accepted her discreetly proffered invitation.
    The experience, moreover, had done wonders for Alice Goodyear Corbett, whose self-confidence had blossomed and whose very appearance took on a special, arresting aspect: a handsome, passionate young woman, alight with enthusiasm, confident of her ability, shrewd in her insights.
    Alice Goodyear Corbett decided the very first night, when the Pushkin was rolling wildly in the cranky seas of the Channel and most of the ships’ passengers stayed in their staterooms in varied forms of queasiness and outright distress, that the young man from Trinity who had completed only his first year at Cambridge was the most attractive prospect for the Party of all the students she had mixed with, and before the evening was over they had engaged in sprightly conversation. She discovered that in his subtle, almost childish way (he was, after all, only just eighteen), the slim young man with no trace of a beard on his face, a light sprinkle of faded freckles reaching from his nose to his hair, so quick to grasp nuance, to expand and improvise on subjects only tangentially touched upon, so phenomenally knowledgeable on the subject—the communist enterprise—in which Alice Goodyear Corbett was an acknowledged expert, that notwithstanding his almost exaggerated youth, Alistair Fleetwood was really the senior presence in the group. She was at once perplexed, intrigued, and excited. It was almost midnight, and the bar was all but empty. She asked him if he would care for a nightcap, or would that overstrain his stomach? He answered that his stomach was perfectly fine, and ordered an orangeade. She touched her glass of vodka to his orangeade and said, ‘You will have a wonderful adventure during the next month, I promise you, Alistair.’
    â€˜Oh, I am quite certain that is the case, Miss Corbett. You know, that is, after all, why I came. That, combined with the intelligent disgust anyone has, or should have, who knows England as I know England. But we need not go into that: the class system, the public school snobberies, the grinding poverty of the working poor. It is possible that I could teach you something about my country that you don’t know. But I am so pleased to be here under your guidance! I look forward especially to learning Russian from you.’
    They said good night, and even walked out on deck for brief exposure to the howling wind. Alistair Fleetwood insisted on escorting her to her cabin, on reaching which he bowed his head slightly, smiled, and said he would see her tomorrow at the seminar. ‘Or maybe even before that, if you are at breakfast.’ Alice Goodyear Corbett smiled, and on sliding into her bed was mildly astonished to find that that young man—that child! she insisted on putting it that way, in self-reproach—had actually … aroused her.
    One month later they were again aboard the Pushkin, having travelled two thousand miles within the Soviet Union. Mostly, of course, they had been in Moscow and Leningrad. The reactions of the young Cantabrigians, Alice Goodyear Corbett reflected, were not very different from the reactions of the first and second groups, the one last