Chapter VII

Next day he went around campus like a man in a daze. He had had a long and heavy sleep, but he looked as if he were stupefied by weariness. Even Harold Gunnison remarked on it.

"It's nothing," he replied. "I'm just lazy."

Gunnison smiled skeptically. "You've been working too hard. That's the temptation we're all up against. But it butchers efficiency. Better ration your hours of work. Your jobs won't go hungry if you feed them ten hours a day.

"Trustees are queer cusses," he continued with apparent irrelevance. "And Pollard's more a politician than an educator. But he brings in the money, and that's what college presidents are for."

Norman indicated that he appreciated the sympathy, but he felt as far removed from Gunnison as from the hordes of gayly dressed students who filled the walks and socialized in clusters. As if there were a wall of faintly clouded glass between. His only aim--and even that was blurred--was to prolong his present state of fatigued reaction from last night's events, and to avoid all thoughts.

Thoughts were dangerous. He felt their presence here and there in his brain, like pockets of poison, harmless as long as you left them encysted and did not prick them. One was more familiar than the others. It had been there last night. He felt vaguely thankful that he could not longer see inside of it.

Another was concerned with Tansy, and why she had seemed so cheerful and forgetful this morning.

Another--a very large one--was sunk so deeply in his mind that he could only perceive a small section of its globular surface. He knew it was connected with an unfamiliar emotion that he had sensed yesterday more than once, and he knew that it must under no circumstances be disturbed. He could feel it pulsate slowly and rhythmically, like a monster asleep in mud.

Another had to do with knots and lightning.

Another--tiny but prominent--was somehow concerned with cards.

And there were more, many more.

His situation was akin to that of the legendary hero who must travel through a long and narrow corridor, without once touching the morbidly enticing, poisoned walls.

He knew he could not avoid contact with them indefinitely, but in the meantime the thought-cysts might shrink and disappear.

The day fitted with his superficially dull and lethargic mood. Instead of the cool spell that should have followed the storm, there was a hot foretaste of summer in the air. Student absences rose sharply. Those who came to class were inattentive, and exhibited other symptoms of spring fever.

Only Bronstein seemed animated. He kept drawing Norman's other students aside by twos and threes, and whispering to them heatedly. Norman found out that he was trying to get up a petition of protest on Sawtelle's appointment. Norman asked him to stop it. Bronstein refused, but in any case he seemed to be failing in the job of arousing the other students.

Norman's lectures were languid. He contented himself with transforming his notes into accurate verbal statements with a minimum of mental effort. He watched the pencils move methodically as notes were taken, or wander off into intricate doodles. Two girls were engrossed in sketching the handsome profile of the fraternity president in the second row. He watched foreheads wrinkle as they picked up the thread of his lecture, smooth out again as they dropped it.

And all the while his own mind was wandering off on side tracks. They were too fugitive, too much like daydreams to be called thoughts.

One began when he recalled the epigram about a lecture being a process of transferring the contents of the teacher's notebook into the notebooks of the students, without allowing it to pass through the minds of either. That made him think of mimeographing.

Mimeograph, it went on. Margaret van Nice. Theodore Jennings. Gun. Windowpane. Galileo. Scroll--(Sheer away from that! Forbidden territory.)

The daydream backtracked and took a different turning. Jennings. Gunnison. Pollard. President. Emperor. Empress. Juggler. Tower. Hanged man--(Hold on! Don't go any further.)

As the long dull day wore on, the daydreams gradually assumed a uniform coloration.

Gun. Knife. Sliver. Broken glass. Nail. Tetanus.

War. Mangled bodies. Mayhem. Murder. Rope. Hangman. (Sheer off again!) Gas, Poison.

The coloration of blood and physical injury.

And ever more strongly, he felt the breath-like pulsations of the monster in the depths of his mind, dreaming nightmares of carnage from which it would soon awake and heave up out of the mud. And he powerless to stop it. It was as if a crusted-over swamp, swollen with underground water, were pushing up the seemingly healthy ground above by imperceptible degrees--nearing the point when it would burst through in one vast slimy eruption.

* * * * *

Starting home, Norman fell in with Mr. Carr.

"Good evening, Norman," said the old gentleman, lifting his Panama hat to mop his forehead, which merged into an extensive bald area.

"Good evening, Linthicum," said Norman. But his mind was occupied with speculating how, if a man let a thumbnail grow and then sharpened it carefully, he could cut the veins of his wrist and so bleed to death.

Mr. Carr wiped the handkerchief around his beard.

"I enjoyed the bridge thoroughly," he said. "Perhaps the four of us could have a game when the ladies are away at the faculty wives' meeting next Thursday? You and I could be partners, and use the Culbertson slam conventions." His voice became wistful. "I'm tired of always having to play the Blackwood."

Norman nodded, but he was thinking of how men have learned to swallow their tongues, and when the occasion came, die of suffocation. He tried to check himself. These were speculations appropriate only to the concentration camp. Visions of death kept rising in his mind, replacing one another. He felt the pulsations deepen, become unendurably strong. Mr. Carr nodded pleasantly and turned off. He quickened his pace, as if the walls of the poisoned passageway were contracting on the legendary hero and, unless the end were soon reached, he would have to shove out against them wildly.

From the corner of his eye he saw one of his students. She was staring at him puzzledly. He brushed past her.

He reached the boulevard. The lights were against him. He paused on the edge of the curb. A large red truck was rumbling toward the intersection at a fair rate of speed.

And then he knew just what was going to happen, and that he would be unable to stop himself.

He was going to wait until the truck was very close and then he was going to throw himself under the wheels. End of the passageway.

That was the meaning of the fifth stick figure, the tarot diagram that had departed from tradition.

Empress--Juggler--The truck was very close. Tower--The lights had started to change but the truck was not going to stop. Hanged man--

It was only when he leaned forward, tensing his leg muscles, that the small flat voice spoke into his ear, a voice that was a monotone and yet diabolically humorous, the voice of his dreams:

"Not for two weeks, at least. Not for two more weeks."

He regained his balance. The truck rushed by. He looked over his shoulder--first up, then around. No one but a small Negro boy and an elderly man, rather shabbily dressed, carrying a shopping bag. They were waiting to cross in the opposite direction. A shiver settled on his spine.

Eyes shifting warily from side to side, he crossed the street, and proceeded home. He no longer thought of death, except to fear it. As soon as he was inside, he poured himself a more than generous drink. Oddly, Tansy had set out soda and ice. He mixed the highball and gulped it down.

So he had been given two weeks? Two weeks in which to pick his life slowly apart, savor each stage of doom, before he should walk again the narrow corridor at the end of which a truck was always rumbling by.

Anger surged in him at the idea.

But perhaps that was what he was supposed to do--get angry.

He mixed himself another drink, took a gulp, then looked at it doubtfully.

Perhaps that was part of the plan, too.

* * * * *

Tansy came in, carrying a bundle. Her face was smiling and a little flushed. With a sigh of relief she set down the bundle and pushed aside the dark bangs from her forehead.

"_Whew_, what a sweltering day. I thought you'd be wanting a drink. Here, let me finish that one for you."

When she put down the glass there was only ice in it. "There, now we're blood brothers or something. Mix yourself another."

"That was my second," he told her.

"Oh, heck, I thought I was cheating you." She sat on the edge of the table and wagged a finger in his face. "Look, mister, you need a rest. Or some excitement. I'm not sure which. Maybe both. Now here's my plan. I make us a cold supper--sandwiches. Then, when it's dark and nobody can see us, we get Oscar out of the garage, and sinfully waste a half gram of rubber off his tires in driving to the Top of the Hill. We haven't done that for years. How about it, mister?"

He hesitated. Helped by the drink, his thoughts were veering. This was a crazy situation. Half his mind was still gripped by a sickening, panicky apprehension for his immediate personal future. The other half was coming under the spell of Tansy's gaiety.

She reached out and pinched his nose. "How about it?"

"All right," he said.

"Hey, you're supposed to act interested!" She slid off the table, started for the kitchen, then added darkly over her shoulder, "But that will come later."

She looked provocatively pretty, in her mock anger. He couldn't see any difference between now and fifteen years ago. He felt he was seeing her for the hundredth first time.

When the sandwiches came, he was reading the evening paper. The disquieting half-and-half mood persisted. He had found a local-interest item at the bottom of the fifth page.

STUDENT PRANKSTERS AT WORK AGAIN

A practical joke is worth any amount of trouble and physical
exertion. At least, that is the sentiment of a group of Hempnell
College students, as yet unidentified. But we are wondering about
the sentiments of Professor Norman Saylor, when he looked out the
window this morning and saw a stone gargoyle weighing a good three
hundred pounds sitting in the middle of his lawn. It had been
removed from the roof of one of the college buildings. How the
students managed to detach it, lower it from the roof, and
transport it to Professor Saylor's residence, is still a mystery.

Said Professor Saylor, "Thanks for the lawn ornament, boys, but I
really don't want it."

When President Randolph Pollard was asked if the pranksters had
been identified, he laughingly replied. "I guess our War Program of
physical education for men must be providing them with reserves of
excess strength and energy."

When we spoke to President Pollard he was leaving to address the
Lions' Club on "The College in War-time." (For details of his
address, see page 1.)

Just what you might expect. The usual repertorial inaccuracies. It wasn't a gargoyle; gargoyles are ornamental rainspouts. And the reporter had not used the lightning angle in his story. Probably thought it would sound too fishy.

Finally, the familiar touch of turning the item into an advertisement for the physical-education department. You had to admit that the Hempnell publicity office had a kind of efficiency.

Tansy swept the paper out of his hands.

"The world can wait," she said. "Here, have a bite of my sandwich."