The red-haired woman knew immediately what had awakened her. She made
no further movement, but lay there, propped on one elbow. From the
opposite bed came placid snores.
Presently, although there was no further sound, her eyes were drawn to
the blacker smudge of the phone. She lifted it quietly and whispered,
"Expected you, dear. I was sure you'd feel it, too."
The other voice came over the wire in bursts--jerky. "How
_couldn't_ I feel it? Like a great gust of wind. Complete collapse
of Protective Screen in her quarter. Balance gone. Oh, I told you this
would happen. She's up to something. I'll go crazy until I know what."
"No need to lose your head," whispered the red-haired woman gruffly,
eying the opposite bed. "She's upset the Balance, all right. But in
a very peculiar way. Any upset I ever heard of came from Excessive
Aggression, Unjustified Death-attempts, or sudden Career-smashing. But
Tansy's done the reverse--let down her guard."
"Yes, just to hoodwink us! She's discovered a new weapon. Something
bad. Why else should she take such a chance? She's planning to smash
us. We've got to beat her to it!"
"Now, now, dear, no tantrums!" A third voice was coming over the wires,
a sweetly reproving voice, just the sort to go with silver hair. "We
mustn't do anything we'd be sorry for. We must be sure of our ground."
"Do you mean we're just to wait?" The jerky voice had grown stridently
indignant. "When we know she must have a new weapon? While she gets
ready to smash us?"
"I didn't say we were to wait forever." There was a chilling tingle of
tartness in the sweet old voice. "I recognize the danger. I recognize
also that she has upset the Balance and must take the consequences.
When we are sure of our ground, we will act. A prospect which, I may
say, delights me."
"And do nothing until then?"
"Yes, dear! Except to watch her--and him."
The red-haired woman smiled grimly, listening to the other two. Such
chatterers! The other bed creaked as the sleeper changed position.
"In any case," she whispered, cutting in, "there should be consequences
whether we act or not. With the Protective Screen down, things should
begin to happen to her--and especially to him. Things which have been
accumulating for a long, long, time--"
* * * * *
"And _how_ is Tansy?" asked Mrs. Carr, with such sweet solicitude
that for a moment Norman wondered if the silver-haired dean of women
had even more of an inside wire on the private lives of the faculty
than was generally surmised. But only for a moment. After all, sweet
solicitude was the dean of women's stock-in-trade.
"We missed her at our last faculty wives' meeting," Mrs. Carr
continued. "She's such a gay soul. And we _do_ need gaiety
these days." Cold morning sunlight glinted on her thick glasses and
glowed frostily in her apple-red cheeks. She put her hand on his arm.
"Hempnell _appreciates_ Tansy, Professor Saylor."
Norman's "And why not?" changed to "I think that shows good
judgment" as he said it. He derived sardonic amusement from
recalling how five years ago Mrs. Carr was a charter member of
The-Saylors-are-a-demoralizing-influence Club.
Mrs. Carr's silvery laughter trilled in the chilly air. "I must get on
to my student conferences," she said.
He watched her hurry off, brisk and erect for all her near-seventy
years, wondering if the sudden friendliness meant that there had
been an unexpected improvement in his chances of getting the vacant
chairmanship of the sociology department. Then he turned into Morton
Hall.
When he had climbed to his office, the phone was ringing. It was
Thompson, the public-relations man.
"A rather delicate matter, Professor Saylor." Delicate matters were
Thompson's forte. "This morning one of the trustees phoned me. It
seems he had just heard something--I haven't the slightest idea from
where--concerning you and Mrs. Saylor. That over Christmas vacation you
had attended a party given by some prominent but ... er ... very rowdy
theatrical people. I was wondering if--"
"--I would issue a denial? Sorry, but it wouldn't be honest."
"Oh ... I see. Well, that's all there is to it, then." Thompson
answered bravely after a moment. "I thought you'd like to know, though.
The trustee was very hot under the collar. Talked my ear off about how
these theatrical people were conspicuous for drunkenness and divorce."
"He was right. Nice folks. I'll introduce you to them some time."
"Oh ... yes," replied Thompson apprehensively. "Good-by."
The buzzer sounded, terminating the eight-o'clock classes. Norman
swiveled his chair away from the desk and leaned back, amusedly
irritated at this latest manifestation of the Hempnell "hush-hush"
policy. Not that he had made any particular attempt to conceal the
Berryman party, which had been a trifle more tempestuous than he had
expected. Still, he had said nothing to anyone on campus. No use in
being a fool. Now, after three months it all came out anyway.
From where he sat, the roof ridge of Estrey Hall neatly bisected his
office window along the diagonal. There was a medium-sized cement
dragon frozen in the act of clambering down it. For the tenth time
that morning he reminded himself that what had happened last night had
really happened. It was not so easy. And yet, when you got down to
it, Tansy's lapse into medievalism was not so very much stranger than
Hempnell's Gothic architecture, with its sprinkling of gargoyles and
other fabulous monsters designed to scare off evil spirits.
* * * * *
Saylor's nine-o'clock class in "Primitive Societies" quieted down
leisurely as he strode in a few seconds ahead of the buzzer. He set
a student to explaining the sib as a factor in tribal organization,
then put in the next five minutes organizing his thoughts and noting
late arrivals and absentees. When the explanation, supplemented with
blackboard diagrams of marriage groups, had become so complicated that
Bronstein, the prize student, was twitching with eagerness to take a
hand, he called for comments and criticisms, and succeeded in getting a
first-class argument going.
Finally the cocksure fraternity president in the second row said,
"But all those ideas of social organization were based on ignorance,
tradition, and superstition. Unlike modern society."
That was Norman's cue. He lit in joyously, pulverized the defender of
modern society with a point-by-point comparison of fraternities and
primitive "young men's houses" down to the actual details of initiation
ceremonies, which he dissected with scientific relish, and then
launched into a broad analysis of present-day customs as they would
appear to a hypothetical ethnologist from Mars. In passing, he drew a
facetious analogy between sororities and primitive seclusion of girls
at puberty.
The minutes raced pleasantly by as he demonstrated instances of
cultural lag in everything from table manners to systems of notation
and measurement. Even the lone sleeper in the last row surprised
himself by listening.
"Certainly we've made important innovations, chief among them the
scientific method," he said at one point, "but the primitive groundwork
is still there, dominating the pattern of our lives. We're modified
anthropoid apes inhabiting night clubs and battleships. What else could
you expect us to be?"
Marriage and courtship got special attention. With Bronstein grinning
delightedly, he drew detailed modern parallels to marriage by purchase,
marriage by capture, and symbolic marriage to a deity. He showed that
trial marriage is no mere modern conception but a well-established
ancient custom, successfully practiced by the Polynesians and others.
At this point he became aware of a beet-red, angry face toward the back
of the room--that of Gracine Pollard, daughter of Randolph Pollard,
president of Hempnell College. She glared at him outragedly, pointedly
ignoring the interest taken by the neighboring students in her blushes.
Automatically it occurred to him, "Now I suppose the little neurotic
will go yammering to mamma that Professor Saylor is advocating free
love." He shrugged the idea aside and continued the discussion without
modification. The buzzer cut it short.
But he was left feeling irritated with himself, and only half listened
to the enthusiastic comments and questions of Bronstein and a couple of
others.
Back at the office he found a note from Harold Gunnison, the dean of
men, asking for an interview. Having the next hour free, he set out
across the quadrangle for the Administration Building, Bronstein still
tagging along to expound some interesting theory of his own.
But Norman was wondering why he had let himself go. Admittedly, some
of his remarks had been a trifle raw. He had long ago adjusted his
classroom behavior to Hempnell standards, without losing intellectual
integrity, and this ill-advised though trivial deviation bothered him.
* * * * *
Mrs. Carr swept by him without a word, her face slightly averted,
cutting him cold. A moment later he realized the explanation. In his
abstraction, he had lighted a cigarette. Moreover, Bronstein, obviously
delighted at faculty infraction of a firmly established Hempnell taboo,
had followed suit.
He frowned but continued to smoke. Evidently the events of the previous
night had disturbed his mind more than he had realized. He ground out
the butt on the steps of the Administration Building.
In the doorway to the outer office he collided with the stylishly stout
form of Mrs. Gunnison.
"Lucky I had a good hold on my camera," she grumbled, as he stooped to
recover her bulging handbag. "I'd hate to try to replace a lens these
days." Then brushing back an untidy wisp of reddish hair from her
forehead, "You look worried. How's Tansy?"
He answered briefly, sliding past her. Now there was a woman who really
ought to be a witch. Sloppy, expensive clothes; bossy, snobbish, and
gruff; good-humored in a beefy fashion, but capable of riding roughshod
over anyone else's desires. The only person in whose presence her
husband's authority seemed a trifle ridiculous.
Harold Gunnison cut short a telephone call, and motioned him to come in
and shut the door.
"Norm," Gunnison began, scowling, "this is a pretty delicate matter."
Norman became attentive. When Harold Gunnison said something was a
delicate matter, unlike Thompson, he really meant it. They played golf
and squash together, and got on pretty well.
He braced himself to hear an account of eccentric, indiscreet, or
even criminal behavior on the part of Tansy. That suddenly seemed the
obvious explanation.
"You have a girl from the Student Employment Agency working for you? A
Margaret van Nice?"