Professor Carr had made a beeline for the bridge tables, and was
wistfully fingering the cards.
"I've been studying the mathematics of the shuffle," he began with a
bright-eyed air, as soon as Norman drifted into range. "The shuffle
is supposed to make it a matter of chance what hands are dealt. But
that is not true at all." He broke open a new pack of cards, and
spread the deck. "The manufacturers arrange these by suits--thirteen
spades, thirteen hearts, and so on. Now suppose I make a perfect
shuffle--divide the pack into equal parts and interleaf the cards one
by one."
He tried to demonstrate, but the cards got away from him.
"It's really not as hard as it looks," he continued amiably. "Some
players can do it every time, quick as a wink. But that's not the
point. Suppose I make two perfect shuffles with a new pack. Then,
no matter how the cards are cut, each player will get thirteen of a
suit--an event that, if you went purely by the laws of chance would
only happen once in about one hundred and fifty-eight billion times as
regards a _single_ hand, let alone all four."
Norman nodded, and Carr smiled delightedly.
"That's only one example. What is loosely termed chance is really the
resultant of several perfectly definite factors--chiefly the play of
the cards on each hand, and the shuffle habits of the players." He
made it sound as important as the Theory of Relativity. "Some evenings
the hands are very ordinary. Other evenings they keep getting wilder
and wilder--long suits, voids, and so on. Sometimes the high cards
persistently run north and south. Other times, east and west. Luck?
Chance? Not at all! It's the result of perfectly definite factors. Some
expert players actually make use of this principle to determine the
probable location of key cards."
Norman's mind went off on a tangent. Suppose you applied this principle
outside bridge? Suppose that coincidences and other chance happenings
weren't really as chancy as they looked? Suppose there were individuals
with a special aptitude for calling the turns, making the breaks? But
that was a pretty obvious idea--nothing to give a person the shiver it
had given him.
"I wonder what's holding up the Gunnisons?" Professor Carr was saying.
"We might start one table now. Perhaps we can get in an extra rubber,"
he added hopefully.
A peal from the chimes settled the question.
Gunnison looked as if he had eaten his dinner too fast, and Hulda
seemed rather surly.
"We had to rush so," she muttered curtly to Norman as he held the door.
Like the other two women, she almost ignored him and concentrated her
greetings on Tansy. It gave him a vaguely uneasy feeling, as when they
had first come to Hempnell and faculty visits had been a nerve-racking
chore. Tansy seemed at a disadvantage--somehow unprotected--in contrast
to the aggressive air of purpose animating the other three.
But what of it?--he told himself. That was usual with Hempnell faculty
wives. They acted as if they lay awake nights plotting how to poison
the people between their husband and the president's chair.
Whereas Tansy--But that was like what Tansy had been doing. His
thoughts started to gyrate confusingly, and he switched them off.
They cut for partners.
The cards seemed determined to provide an illustration for the theory
Carr had explained. The hands were uniformly commonplace--abnormally
average. No long suits. Nothing but 4-4-3-2 and 4-3-3-3 distribution.
Bid one; make two. Bid two; make one.
* * * * *
After the second round, Norman applied his private remedy for
boredom--the game of "Spot the Primitive." You played it by yourself,
secretly. It was just an exercise for an ethnologist's imagination. You
pretended that the people around you were members of a savage race,
and you tried to figure out how their personalities would manifest
themselves in such an environment.
Tonight it worked almost too well.
Nothing unusual about the men. Gunnison would, of course, be a
prosperous tribal chieftain; perhaps a little fatter, and tended by
maidens, but with a jealous and vindictive wife waiting to pounce. Carr
might figure as the basket maker of the village--a spry little old
man, grinning like a monkey, weaving the basket fibers into intricate
mathematical matrices. Sawtelle, of course, would be the tribal
scapegoat, butt of endless painful practical jokes.
But the women!
Take Mrs. Gunnison, now his partner. Give her a brown skin. Leave the
red hair, but twist some copper ornaments in it. She'd be heftier if
anything, a real mountain of a woman, stronger than most of the men in
the tribe, able to wield a spear or club. The same sleepy brutish eyes,
but the lower lip would jut out in a more openly sullen and domineering
way. It was only too easy to imagine what she'd do to the unlucky
maidens her husband showed too much interest in. Or how she would pound
tribal policy into his head when they retired to their hut. Or how her
voice would thunder out the death chants the women sang to aid the men
away at war.
Then Mrs. Sawtelle and Mrs. Carr, who had progressed to the top table
along with himself and Mrs. Gunnison. Mrs. Sawtelle first. Make her
skinnier. Scarify the flat cheeks with ornamental ridges. Tattoo the
spine. Witch woman. Bitter as quinine bark because her husband was
ineffectual. Think of her prancing before a spike-studded fetish. Think
of her screeching incantations and ripping off a chicken's head--
"Norman, you're playing out of turn," said Mrs. Gunnison.
"Sorry."
And Mrs. Carr. Shrivel her a bit. Leave only a few wisps of hair on
the parchment skull. Take away the glasses, and then her eyes would be
gummy. She'd blink and peer short-sightedly, and leer toothlessly, and
flutter her bony claws. A nice harmless old squaw, who'd gather the
tribe's children around her and tell them legends. But her jaw would
still be able to snap like a steel trap, and her clawlike hands would
be deft at applying arrow poison, and she wouldn't really need her eyes
because she'd have other ways of seeing things and even the bravest
warrior would grow nervous if she looked too long in his direction.
"Those experts at the top table are awfully quiet," called Gunnison
with a laugh. "They must be taking the game very seriously."
Witch women, all three of them, engaged in booting their husbands to
the top of the tribal hierarchy.
From the dark doorway at the far end of the room, Totem was peering
curiously, as if weighing some similar possibility.
* * * * *
But Norman could not fit Tansy into the picture. He could visualize
physical changes, like frizzing her hair, and putting some big gold
rings in her ears and a painted design on her forehead. But he could
not picture her as belonging to the same tribe. She persisted in his
imagination as a stranger woman, a captive, eyed with suspicion and
hate by the rest. Or perhaps a woman of the same tribe, but one who had
done something to forfeit the trust of all the other women. A priestess
who had violated taboo. A witch woman who had renounced witchcraft.
Abruptly his field of vision narrowed to the score pad. Evelyn Sawtelle
was idly scribbling stick figures as Mrs. Carr deliberated over a lead.
First the stick figure of a man with arms raised and three or four
balls above his head, as if he were juggling. Then the stick figure
of a queen, indicated by crown and skirt. Then a little tower, with
battlements. Then an L-shaped thing with a stick figure hanging from
it--a gallows. Finally, a truck bearing down on a man whose arms were
extended toward it in fear.
Just five scribbles. But he knew that four of them were connected with
a bit of unusual knowledge buried somewhere in his mind. A glance at
the exposed dummy gave him the clue.
Cards.
But this bit of knowledge was from the ancient history of cards, when
the whole deck was drenched with magic, when there was a Knight between
the Jack and the Queen, when the suits were swords, batons, cups, and
money, and when there were twenty-two special tarot cards in the pack,
of which today only the Joker remained. Tarot cards were used for
fortunetelling.
Four of the tarot cards were the Juggler, the Empress, the Tower, and
the Hanged Man.
Only the fifth stick figure, that of the man and truck, did not fit in.
But it gave him a peculiarly personal shudder. Death by being crushed
or mangled, as in an automobile accident, was his pet phobia.
Mrs. Sawtelle scratched out the stick figures and looked up at him
sullenly.
Mrs. Gunnison leaned forward, lips moving as if she might be counting
trump.
Mrs. Carr smiled, and made her lead. The risen wind began to make the
same intermittent roaring sound it had for a moment earlier in the
evening.
Why not, he asked himself. Three witch women, using magic as Tansy had,
to advance their husband's careers and their own. Making use of their
husband's special knowledge to give magic a modern twist. Suspicious
and worried because Tansy had given up magic; afraid she'd found a much
stronger variety, and was planning to make use of it.
And Tansy--suddenly unprotected, possibly unaware of the change in
their attitude toward her because, in giving up magic, she had lost her
sensitivity to the supernatural, her "woman's intuition."
Why not carry it a step further? Maybe all women were the same.
Guardians of mankind's ancient customs and traditions--including the
practice of witchcraft. Fighting their husband's battles from behind
the scenes, by sorcery. Keeping it a secret; and, on those occasions
when they were discovered, conveniently explaining it as feminine
susceptibility to superstitious fads.
Half of the human race still actively practicing sorcery.
Why not?
"It's your play, Norman," said Mrs. Sawtelle, sweetly.
"You look as if you had something on your mind," said Mrs. Gunnison.
"How are you getting along up there, Norm?" her husband called. "Those
women got you buffaloed?"
Buffaloed? He came back to reality with a jerk. That was just what they
almost had done. And all because the human imagination was a thoroughly
unreliable instrument, like a rubber ruler. Let's see, if he played his
queen it might set up a king in Mrs. Gunnison's hand so she could get
in and run her spades.
* * * * *
After that round, Tansy served refreshments, and the usual shop talk
began.
"Saw Pollard today," Gunnison remarked, helping himself to a section
of chocolate cake. "Told me he'd be meeting with the trustees tomorrow
morning, to decide among other things on the chairmanship in sociology."
Hervey Sawtelle choked on a crumb and almost lost his coffeecup.
Norman caught Mrs. Sawtelle glaring at him vindictively. She changed
her face and murmured, "How interesting." He smiled. That kind of hate
he could understand. No need to confuse it with witchcraft.
He went to the kitchen to get Mrs. Carr a glass of water, and met Mrs.
Gunnison coming out of the bedroom. She was slipping a leather-bound
booklet into her capacious handbag. It recalled to his mind Tansy's
diary. Probably an address book.
Totem slipped out from behind her, giving what sounded like a hiss as
he dodged past her feet.
"I loathe the animal," said Mrs. Carr bluntly, and walked past him.
Professor Carr had made arrangements for a final rubber, men at one
table, women at the other.
"A barbaric arrangement," said Tansy, winking. "You really don't think
we can play bridge at all."
"On the contrary, my dear, I think you play very well," Carr replied
seriously. "But I confess that at times I prefer to play with men. I
can get a better idea of what's going on in their minds. Whereas women
still baffle me."
"As they should, dear," added Mrs. Carr, bringing a flurry of laughter.
The cards suddenly began to run freakishly, with abnormal distribution
of suits, and play took a wild turn. But Norman found it impossible
to concentrate, which made Sawtelle an even more jittery partner than
usual.
He kept listening to what the women were saying at the other table. His
rebellious imagination persisted in reading hidden meanings into the
most innocuous remarks.
"You usually hold wonderful hands, Tansy. But now you don't seem to
have any," said Mrs. Carr. But suppose she was referring to the kind of
hand you wrapped in flannel?
"Oh, well, unlucky in cards ... you know." How had Mrs. Sawtelle meant
to finish the remark? Lucky in love? Lucky in sorcery? Idiotic notion!
"That's two psychic bids you've made in succession, Tansy. Better watch
out. We'll catch up with you." What might not a psychic bid stand for
in Mrs. Gunnison's vocabulary? Some kind of bluff in witchcraft? A
pretense at giving up conjuring?
"I wonder," Mrs. Carr murmured sweetly to Tansy, "if you're hiding a
very strong hand this time, dear, and making a trap pass?"
Rubber ruler. That was the trouble with imagination. According to a
rubber ruler, an elephant would be no bigger than a mouse, a jagged
line and a curve might be equally straight. He tried to think about the
slam he had contracted for.
"The girls talk a good game of bridge," murmured Gunnison in an
undertone.
Gunnison and Carr came out at the long end of two-thousand rubber and
were still crowing pleasantly as they stood around waiting to leave.
Norman remembered a question he wanted to ask Mrs. Gunnison.
"Harold was telling me you had a number of photographs of that cement
dragon or whatever it is on top of Estrey. It's right opposite my
window."
She looked at him for a moment, then nodded.
"I believe I've got one with me. Took it almost a year ago."
She dug a rumpled snapshot out of her handbag.
He studied it, and experienced a kind of shiver in reverse. This
didn't make sense at all. Instead of being toward the center of the
roof ridge, or near the bottom, it was almost at the top. Just what
was involved here? A practical joke stretching over a period of days
or weeks? Or--His mind balked, like a skittish horse. Yet--_Eppur si
muove_.
He turned it over. There was a confusing inscription on the back, in
greasy red crayon. Mrs. Gunnison took it out of his hands, to show the
others.
"The wind sounds like a lost soul," said Mrs. Carr, hugging her coat
around her as Norman opened the door.
"But a rather noisy one," her husband added with a chuckle.
When the last of them were gone, Tansy slipped her arm around his
waist, and said, "I must be getting old. It wasn't nearly as much of a
trial as usual. They seemed almost human."
Norman looked down at her intently. She was smiling peacefully. Totem
had come out of hiding and was rubbing against her legs.