Chapter 6

Across Litton's field of view passed a figure that caught his eye. Absently he followed it as it enlarged with approach. He realized that it was Prof. Martha Binley, Ph.D., who taught Greek over there in the Annex.

"How well she is looking!" he mused.

The very thought startled him, as if some one had spoken unexpectedly. He wondered that he had noticed her appearance. After the window-sill blotted her from view he still wondered, dallying comfortably with the reverie.

IV

There was a knock at his door and in response to his call the door opened--and she stood there.

"May I come in?" she said.

"Certainly."

Before he knew it some impulse of gallantry hoisted him to his feet. He lifted a bundle of archeological reviews from a chair close to his desk and waited until she sat down. The chair was nearer his than he realized, and as Professor Binley dropped into it she was so close that Professor Litton pushed his spectacles up to his forehead.

It was the first time she had seen his eyes except through glasses darkly. She noted their color instantly, woman-like. They were not dull, either, as she had imagined. A cloying fragrance saluted his nostrils.

"What are the flowers you are wearing, may I ask?" he said. He hardly knew a harebell from a peony.

"These are hyacinths," she said. "One of the girls gave them to me. I just pinned them on."

"Ah, hyacinths!" he murmured. "Ah yes; I've read so much about them. So these are hyacinths! Such a pretty story the Greeks had. You remember it, no doubt?"

She said she did; but, schoolmaster that he was, he went right on:

"Apollo loved young Hyacinthus--or Huakinthos, as the Greeks called it--and was teaching him to throw the discus, when a jealous breeze blew the discus aside. It struck the boy in the forehead. He fell dead, and from his blood this flower sprang. The petals, they said, were marked with the letters Ai, Ai!--Alas! Alas! And the poet Moschus, you remember, in his 'Lament for Bion,' says:

"Nun huakinthe lalei ta sa grammata kai pleon aiai!

"Or, as I once Englished it--let me see, I put it into hexameters--it was a long while ago. Ah, I have it!"

And with the orotund notes a poet assumes when reciting his own words, he intoned:

"Now, little hyacinth, babble thy syllables--louder yet--Aiai! Whimper with all of thy petals; a beautiful singer has perished."

Professor Binley stared at him in amazement and cried: "Charming! Beautiful! Your own translation, you say?"

And he, somewhat shaken by her enthusiasm, waved it aside.

"A little exercise of my Freshman year. But to get back to our--hyacinths: Theocritus, you remember, speaks of the 'lettered hyacinth.' May I see whether we can find the words there?"

He bent forward to take and she bent forward to give the flowers. Her hair brushed his forehead with a peculiar influence; and when their fingers touched he noted how soft and warm her hand was. He flushed strangely. She was flushed a little, too, possibly from embarrassment--possibly from the warmth of the day, with its insinuation of spring.

He pulled his spectacles over his eyes in a comfortable discomfiture and peered at the flowers closely. And she peered, too, breathing foolishly fast. When he could not find the living letters he shook his head and felt again the soft touch of her hair.

"I can't find the words--can you? Your eyes are brighter than mine."

She bent closer and both their hands held the flowers. He looked down into her hair. It struck him that it was a remarkably beautiful idea--a woman's hair--especially hers, streaked as it was with white--silken silver. When she shook her head a snowy thread tickled his nose amusingly.

"I can't find anything like it," she confessed.

Then he said: "I've just remembered. Theocritus calls the hyacinth black--_melan_--and so does Vergil. These cannot be hyacinths at all."

He was bitterly disappointed. It would have been delightful to meet the flower in the flesh that he knew so well in literature. Doctor Martha answered with quiet strength:

"These are hyacinths."

"But the Greeks--"

"Didn't know everything," she said; "or perhaps they referred to another flower. But then we have dark-purple hyacinths."

"Ah!" he said. "Sappho speaks of the hyacinth as purple--_porphuron_."

Thus the modern world was reconciled with the Greek and he felt easier; but there was a gentle forcefulness about her that surprised him. He wondered whether she would not be interested in hearing about his edition of Nonnus. He assumed that she would be, being evidently intelligent. So he told her. He told her and told her, and she listened with almost devout interest. He was still telling her when the students in other classes stampeded to lunch with a many-hoofed clatter. When they straggled back from lunch he was still telling her.

It was not until he was interrupted by an afternoon class of his own that he realized how long he had talked. He apologized to Professor Binley; but she said she was honored beyond words. She had come to ask him a technical question in prosody, as from one professor to another; but she had forgotten it altogether--at least she put it off to another visit. She hastened away in a flutter, feeling slightly as if she had been to a tryst.

Litton went without his lunch that day, but he was browsing on memories of his visitor. He had not talked so long to a woman since he could remember. This was the only woman who had let him talk uninterruptedly about himself--a very superior woman, everybody said.

When he went to his room that night he was still thinking of hyacinths and of her who had brought them to his eyes.

He knocked from his desk a book. It fell open at a page. As he picked it up he noted that it was a copy of the anonymous old spring rhapsody, the _Pervigilium Veneris_, with its ceaselessly reiterated refrain, "To-morrow he shall love who never loved before." As he fell asleep it was running through his head like a popular tune: _Cras amet qui nunquam amavit; quique amavit cras amet_.

It struck him as an omen; but it did not terrify him.

V

Professor Martha called again to ask her question in verse technic. The answer led to further talk and the consultation of books. She was a trifle nearsighted and too proud to wear glasses, so she had to bend close to the page; and her hair tickled his nose again foolishly.

Conference bred conference, and one day she asked him whether she would dare ask him to call. He rewarded her bravery by calling. She lived in a dormitory, with a parlor for the reception of guests. Male students were allowed to call on only two evenings a week. Litton did not call on those evenings; yet the fact that he called at all swept through the town like a silent thunderbolt. The students were mysteriously apprised of the fact that old Professor Litton and Prof. Martha Binley were sitting up and taking notice. To the youngsters it looked like a flirtation in an old folks' home.

Litton's very digestion was affected; his brain was in a whirl. He was the prey of the most childish alarms; gusts of petulant emotion swept through him if Martha were late when he called; he was mad with jealousy if she mentioned another professor.

She was growing more careful of her appearance. A new youth had come to her. She took fifteen years off her looks by simply fluffing her hair out of its professorial constriction. Professor Mackail noticed it and mentioned to Professor Litton that Professor Binley was looking ever so much better.

"She's not half homely for such an old maid!" he said.

Professor Litton felt murder in his heart. He wanted to slay the reprobate twice--once for daring to observe Martha's beauty and once for his parsimony of praise.

That evening when he called on Martha he was tortured with a sullen mood. She finally coaxed from him the astounding admission that he suspected her of flirting with Mackail. She was too new in love to recognize the ultimate compliment of his distress. She was horrified by his distrust, and so hurt that she broke forth in a storm of tears and denunciation. Their precious evening ended in a priceless quarrel of amazing violence. He stamped down the outer steps as she stamped up the inner.

For three days they did not meet and the university wore almost visible mourning for its pets. Poor Litton had not known that the human heart could suffer such agony. He was fairly burned alive with loneliness and resentment--like another Hercules blistering in the shirt of Nessus. And Martha was suffering likewise as Jason's second wife was consumed in the terrible poisoned robe that Medea sent her.

One evening a hollow-eyed Litton crept up the dormitory steps and asked the overjoyed maid for Professor Binley. When she appeared he caught her in his arms as if she were a spar and he a drowning sailor. They made up like young lovers and swore oaths that they would never quarrel again--oaths which, fortunately for the variety of their future existence, they found capable of infinite breaking and mending.

Each denied that the other could possibly love each. He decried himself as a stupid, ugly old fogy; and she cried him up as the wisest and most beautiful and best of men. Since best sounded rather weak, she called him the bestest; and he did not charge the impossible word against her as he had against Teed. He did not remember that Teed had ever used such language. Nobody could ever have used such language, because nobody was ever like her!

And when she said that he could not possibly love a homely, scrawny old maid like her, he delivered a eulogy that would have struck Aphrodite, rising milkily from the sea, as a slight exaggeration. And as for old maid, he cried in a curious blending of puerility and scholasticism:

"Old maid, do you say? And has my little Margy-wargles forgotten what Sappho said of an old maid? We'd have lost it if some old scholiast on the stupid old sophist Hermogenes hadn't happened to quote it to explain the word glukumalon--an apple grafted on a quince. Sappho said this old maid was like--let me see!--'like the sweet apple that blushes on the top of the bough--on the tip of the topmost; and the apple-gatherers forgot it--no, they did not forget it; they just could not get it!' And that's you, Moggles mine! You're an old maid because you've been out of reach of everybody. I can't climb to you; so you're going to drop into my arms--aren't you?"

She said she supposed she was. And she did.

Triumphantly he said, "Hadn't we better announce our engagement?"

This threw her into a spasm of fear. "Oh, not yet! Not yet! I'm afraid to let the students all know it. A little later--on Commencement Day will be time enough."

He bowed to her decision--not for the last time.

For a time Litton had taken pleasure in employing his learning in the service of Martha's beauty. He called her classic names--_Meæ Deliciæ_, or _Glukutate_, or _Melema_. A poem that he had always thought the last word in silliness became a modest expression of his own emotions--the poem in which Catallus begs Lesbia, "Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, then a thousand more, then a second hundred; then, when we have made up thousands galore, we shall mix them up so that we shall not know--nor any enemy be able to cast a spell because he knows--how many kisses there are."

His scholarship began to weary her, however, and it began to seem an affectation to him; so that he was soon mangling the English language in speech and in the frequent notes he found it necessary to send his idol on infinitely unimportant matters that could not wait from after lunch to after dinner.

She coined phrases for him, too, and his heart rejoiced when she achieved the epoch-making revision of Stuart into Stookie-tookie! He had thought that Toodie was wonderful, but it was a mere stepping-stone to Stookie-tookie.

Her babble ran through his head like music, and it softened his heart, so that almost nothing could bring him to earth except the recitations of Teed, who crashed through the classics like a bull in a china-shop or, as Litton's Greeks put it, like an ass among beehives.

During those black days when Litton had quarreled with Martha he had fiercely reminded Teed that only a month remained before his final examinations, and warned him that he would hold him strictly to account. No classics, no diploma!

Teed had sulked and moped while Litton sulked and moped; but when Litton was reconciled to Martha the sun seemed to come out on Teed's clouded world, too. He took a sudden extra interest in his electrical studies and obtained permission to work in the laboratory overtime. He obtained permission even to visit the big city for certain apparatus. And he wrote the despondent, distant Fannie Newman that there would "shortly be something doing in the classics."

VI

One afternoon Professor Litton, having dismissed his class--in which he was obliged to rebuke Teed more severely than usual--fell to remembering his last communion with Martha, the things he had said--and heard! He wondered, as a philologist, at the strange prevalence of the "oo" sound in his love-making. It was plainly an onomatopoeic word representing the soul's delight. Oo! was what Ah! is to the soul in exaltation and Oh! to the soul in surprise. If the hyacinths babbled _Ai, Ai!_ the roses must murmur Oo! Oo!

The more he thought it over, the more nonsense it became, as all words turn to drivel on repetition; but chiefly he was amazed that even love could have wrought this change in him. In his distress he happened to think of Dean Swift. Had not that fierce satirist created a dialect of his own for his everlastingly mysterious love affairs?

Eager for the comfort of fellowship in disgrace he hurried to the library and sought out the works of the Dean of St. Patrick's. And in the "Journal to Stella" he found what he sought--and more. Expressions of the most appalling coarseness alternated with the most insipid tendernesses.

The old dean had a code of abbreviations: M.D. for "My dear," Ppt. for "Poppet," Pdfr. for "Poor dear foolish rogue," Oo or zoo or loo stood for "you," Deelest for "Dearest," and Rettle for "Letter," and Dallars for "Girl," Vely for "Very," and Hele and Lele for "Here and there." Litton copied out for his own comfort and Martha's this passage.

Do you know what? When I am writing in my own language I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it: "Zoo must cly Lele and Hele, and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate Pdfr., pay? Iss, and so la shall! And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood mollow."

And Dean Swift had written this while he was in London two hundred years before, a great man among great men. With such authority back of him Litton returned to his empty class-room feeling as proud as Gulliver in Lilliput. A little later he was Gulliver in Brobdingnag.

Alone at his desk, with none of his students in the seats before him, he took from his pocket--his left pocket--a photograph of Prof. Martha Binley. It had been taken one day on a picnic far from the spying eyes of pupils. Her hair was all wind-blown, her eyes frowned gleamingly into the sun, and her mouth was curled with laughter.

He sat there alone--the learned professor--and talked to this snapshot in a dialogue he would have recently accepted as a perfect examination paper for matriculation in an insane-asylum.

"Well, Margy-wargy, zoo and Stookie-tookie is dust like old Dean Swiffikins, isn't we?"

There was a rap on the door and the knob turned as he shot the photograph into his pocket and pretended to be reading a volume of Bacchylides--upside down. The intruder was Teed. Litton was too much startled and too throbbing with guilt to express his indignation. He stammered:

"We-well, Teed?" He almost called him teed-leums, his tongue had so caught the rhythm of love.

Teed came forward with an ominous self-confidence bordering on insolence. There was a glow in his eye that made his former tyrant quail.

"Professor, I'd like a word with you about those conditions. I wish you'd let me off on 'em."

"Let you off, T-Teed?"

"Yes, sir. I can't get ready for the exams. I've boned until my skull's cracked and it lets the blamed stuff run out faster than I can cram it in. The minute I leave college I expect to forget everything I've learned here, anyway; so I'd be ever so much obliged if you'd just pass me along."

"I don't think I quite comprehend," said Litton, who was beginning to regain his pedagogical dignity.

"All you've gotta do," said Teed, "is to put a high enough mark on my papers. You gimme a special examination and I'll make the best stab I can at answering the questions; then you just shut one eye and mark it just over the failure line. That'll save you a lot o' time and fix me hunky-dory."

Litton was glaring at him, hearing the uncouth "gimme" and "gotta," and wondering that a man could spend four years in college and scrape off so little paint. Then he began to realize the meaning of Teed's proposal. His own honor was in traffic. He groaned in suffocation:

"Do you dare to ask me to put false marks on examination-papers, sir?"

"Aw, Professor, what's the dif? You couldn't grind Latin and Greek into me with a steel-rolling machine. Gimme a chance! There's a little girl waiting for me outside and a big job. I can't get one without the other--and I don't get either unless you folks slip me the sheepskin."

"Impossible, sir! Astounding! Insulting! Impossible!"

"Have a heart, can't you?"

"Leave the room, sir, at once!"

"All right!" Teed sighed, and turned away. At the door he paused to murmur, "All right for you, Stookie-tookie!"

Litton's spectacles almost exploded from his nose.

"What's that?" he shrieked.

Teed turned and came back, with an intolerable smirk, straight to the desk. He leaned on it with odious familiarity and grinned.

"Say, Prof, did you ever hear of the dictagraph?"

"No! And I don't care to now."

"You ought to read some of the modern languages, Prof! Dictagraph comes from two perfectly good Latin words: dictum and graft--well, you'll know 'em. But the Greeks weren't wise to this little device. I got part of it here."

He took from his pocket the earpiece of the familiar engine of latter-day detective romance. He explained it to the horribly fascinated Litton, whose hair stood on end and whose voice stuck in his throat in the best Vergilian manner. Before he quite understood its black magic Litton suspected the infernal purpose it had been put to. His wrath had melted to a sickening fear when Teed reached the conclusion of his uninterrupted discourse:

"The other night I was calling on a pair of girls at the dormitory where your--where Professor Binley lives. They pointed out the sofa near the fireplace where you and the professoress sit and hold hands and make googoo eyes."

There was that awful "oo" sound again! Litton was in an icy perspiration; but he was even more afraid for his beloved, precious sweetheart than for himself--and that was being about as much afraid as there is. Teed went on relentlessly, gloating like a satyric mask:

"Well, I had an idea, and the girls fell for it with a yip of joy. The next evening I called I carried a wire from my room across to that dormitory and nobody paid any attention while I brought it through a window and under the carpet to the back of the sofa. And there it waited, laying for you. And over at my digs I had it attached to a phonograph by a little invention of my own.

"Gosh! It was wonderful! It even repeated the creak of those old, rusty springs while you waited for her. And when she came--well, anyway, I got every word you said, engraved in wax, like one of those old poets of yours used to write on."

Litton was afraid to ask evidence in verification. Teed supplied the unspoken demand:

"For instance, the first thing she says to you is: 'Oh, there you are, my little lover! I thought you'd never come!' And you says, 'Did it miss its stupid old Stookie?' And she says: 'Hideously! Sit down, honey heart.' And splung went the spring--and splung again! Then she says: 'Did it have a mis'ble day in hateful old class-room? Put its boo'ful head on Margy-wargy's shojer.' Then you says--"

"Stop!" Litton cried, raising the only missile he could find, an inkstand. "Who knows of this infamy besides you?"

"Nobody yet--on my word of honor."

"Honor!" sneered Litton, so savagely that Teed's shameless leer vanished in a glare of anger.

"Nobody yet! The girls are dying to hear and some of the fellows knew what I was up to; but I was thinking that I'd tell 'em that the blamed thing didn't work, provided--provided--"

"Provided?" Litton wailed, miserably.

"Provided you could see your way clear to being a little careless with your marks on my exam-papers."

Litton sat with his head whirling and roaring like a coffee-grinder. A multitude of considerations ran through and were crushed into powder--his honor; her honor; the standards of the university; the standards of a lover; the unimportance of Teed; the all-importance of Martha; the secret disloyalty to the faculty; the open disloyalty to his best-beloved. He heard Teed's voice as from far off:

"Of course, if you can't see your way to sparing my sweetheart's feelings I don't see why I'm expected to spare yours--or to lie to the fellows and girls who are perishing to hear how two professors talk when they're in love."

Another long pause. Then the artful Teed moved to the door and turned the knob. Litton could not speak; but he threw a look that was like a grappling-iron and Teed came back.

"How do I know," Litton moaned, "how do I know that you will keep your word?"

"How do I know that you'll keep yours?" Teed replied, with the insolence of a conqueror.

"Sir!" Litton flared, but weakly, like a sick candle.

"Well," Teed drawled, "I'll bring you the cylinders. I'll have to trust you, as one gentleman to another."

"Gentleman!" Litton snarled in hydrophobic frenzy.

"Well, as one lover to another, then," Teed laughed. "Do I get my diploma?"

Litton's head was so heavy he could not nod it.

"It's my diploma in exchange for your records. Come on, Professor--be a sport! And take it from me, it's no fun having the words you whisper in a girl's ear in the dark shouted out loud in the open court. And mine were repeated in a Dutch dialect! I got yours just as they came from your lips--and hers."

That ended it. Litton surrendered, passed himself under the yoke; pledged himself to the loathsome compact, and Teed went to fetch the price of his degree of Bachelor of Arts.

Litton hung dejected beyond feeling for a long while. His heart was whimpering _Ai, Ai!_ He felt himself crushed under a hundred different crimes. He felt that he could never look up again. Then he heard a soft tap at the door. He could not raise his eyes or his voice. He heard the door open and supposed it was Teed bringing him the wages of his shame; but he heard another voice--an unimaginably beautiful, tragically tender voice--crooning:

"Oo-oo! Stookie-tookie!"

He looked up. How radiant she was! He could only sigh. She came across to him as gracefully and lightly as Iris running down a rainbow. She was murmuring:

"I just had to slip over and tell you something."

"Well, Martha!" he sighed.

She stopped short, as if he had struck her.

"'Martha'? What's the matter? You aren't mad at me, are you, Stookie?"

"How could I be angry with you, Marg--er--Martha?"

"Then why don't you call me Margy-wargleums?"

He stared at her. Her whimsical smile, trembling to a piteously pretty hint of terror, overwhelmed him. He hesitated, then shoved back his chair and, rising, caught her to him so tightly that she gasped out, "Oo!" There it was again! He laughed like an overgrown cub as he cried:

"Why don't I call you Margy-wargleums? Well, what a darned fool I'd be not to! Margy-wargleums!"