Never was such a wonder as this story! Its passion drained me, yet I was bleating for more when Max's shophar hooted in the distance.
"What's that? Must you go?" She returned the precious volume to her bag. There'd be another tale tomorrow; she knew a host of them. And more peanut-butter.
"Bye-bye, now," she called. I scampered back to her, mistaking her meaning; the pull of the shophar against my movement brought tears to my eyes. Ah, was that it? Auf wiedersehen, then, till tomorrow… the herd was almost to the barn already.
"Bye-bye! Bye-bye!" I galloped tearfully through the fields. At the first of the stud-pens I paused to say respectfully bye-bye to Brickett Ranunculus, an Anglo-Nubian who but that he was polled had been my image of Great William.
Then I ran inside and threw my arms around Max, forking down hay.
"I love you, Max!"
"You gone crazy, boy?" Max put by his pitchfork. "Where you been again off from the herd, and don't tell nobody?" His tone was stern, but not angry; my odd behavior, however upsetting, no longer surprised him. With all my heart I longed to tell Max of my adventure — especially the miracle called story, which couldn't be shared with Redfearn's Tom. Yet I fought down that urge, and in fact said not a word about the peanut-butter sandwich, the field of cabbages, or my appointment for the morrow, all which wonders were to pitch me sleepless through the night. Some intuition warned verboten; taking my cue from that soul of invention, Wee Willie Gruff, I said bye-bye to fourteen years of perfect candor — and dissembled with Max Spielman.
4
May and June rent my soul in two. "I hate that play-pound!" I declared.
"So go out with the herd."
But the herd, I protested honestly enough, was a bore; who wanted to browse all day with old does? I pretended it was Redfearn's Tommy's absence that discontented me — but refused to stay behind with him in the buck-pens.
"Leave me alone," I said. "Stop pestering me to stay with the herd."
Max shrugged. "Who's pestering? All I want, you don't make yourself unhappy." I saw him raise his shaggy eyebrows: I had not got such notions from Redfearn's Tom or Mary V. Appenzeller. But I was past caring whose feelings I hurt or what anyone suspected. Lady Creamhair found me scarcely less unpleasant. I saw her every day now except when bad weather or bad temper kept me from the hemlock grove. I lived for our interviews, but spoiled them for the slightest reasons. She wouldn't tell me her real name, lest I repeat it to Max; nor would she say why Max shouldn't know of our friendship. I quite understood that there would be unpleasantness of some sort if he did — I would be penned for good and all with my brother bucks, and Lady Creamhair's keepers would see to it she was kept thenceforward in her barn. Only in blackest moods was I inclined to make a clean breast of things, but I pouted to Lady C. as if our secret were a burden of her imposing that I bore unwillingly. She read me no end of stories, and began to teach me to read for myself. My accent, which till then I'd not known I had, commenced to fade — rather, to be replaced by a manner of speaking no less unusual, as I have learned since. Her grandfather, she told me, had once been a professor of Antique Narrative somewhere on West Campus; inasmuch as the books I devoured were all from his collection, my speech came to be flavored with the seasons of older time. I learnt to say "Alas" where once I'd cried "Ach"; I no longer said "Nein," but might well lament "Nay."
Nor was it my locutions only that were thus marked. My fancy, theretofore ignorant of its hunger, I glutted on such heady fare as Tales of the Trustees, The Founder-Saga, and the exploits of legendary scholars who had wandered through the wilds of the ancient campus. Rich stuff. And like a starved man rendered ill by too-sudden feasting, my imagination that spring was sore blown. One day I would see myself as Great William Gruff, and Max and Lady C. as Trolls bent on keeping me, each in his fashion, from the Cabbage of a glorious destiny. Was it not that I was meant to be a splendider buck even than Brickett Ranunculus, and Lady C. had been sent by jealous powers to witch me into rude humanity? Or was it (alack) that I was of noble human birth, the stuff of chairmen and chancellors, but had — like many another student prince- been wizarded into beasthood by Max Spielman? Worse than either of these, another day I felt me no hero at all, not prince nor black-shagged Pyrenean, but a troll myself: a miserable freak resolved in the spite of monstership to destroy whatever decent thing came near my bridge. Thus no matter what my weather I behaved badly with one whose pardon I wretchedly craved when that weather changed; or else having injured them I despised them, out of the surplus of my loathing for myself. Painful season.
But since Creamhair was a friend of less long standing, and the hemlock grove less beloved of me than the barn, it was Max and Mary who bore the burthen of my contempt. I had used to sleep, often as not, nestled into Mary's brisket; now, though she cried for me as for an unweaned kid, when I came home at all I slept with Redfearn's Tommy. Max surely understood that my excursions were not innocent: I spoke to him in brusque one-syllables, not to have to feign the accent I'd come to hate the sound of; filled with petits fours and tossed salads I turned up my nose at his honest lespedeza; out of tone from afternoons of languid talk, I refused to wrestle with Redfearn's Tom for my keeper's amusement. But he only tisked his tongue, and not to provoke me to worse unkindness, stayed out of my presence as much as he could. When I slipped through his pen at night en route to prowl the fields, he would pretend to be asleep; but if I stole back to look five minutes later, I'd find him sitting up in the straw, gesturing at no one and mumbling into his whiskers, or sawing upon his ancient fiddle.
Lady Creamhair I barraged with questions, blunt in themselves and sneeringly put. She told me she had once been Queen-of-the-May; I asked her now about those fairy co-eds whom the old dons-errant had been wont to rescue from the clutch of wicked scientists: Were they younger than she, and comelier? How was it the hero's costume was given in detail, but never his stud-record? Could a Chancellor's flaxen-haired daughter, freshened by a strapping young Doctor of Philosophy like those in the Tales, surpass Mary Appenzeller's output of seventy-three pounds of butterfat in her first year's milking? If not, what was the ratio of milk-yield to body-weight, say, required to qualify a milch-lady for Advanced Registry? Seven to one? Five? Why did she, Lady Creamhair, not relieve herself every little while as did I and everyone I knew, including Max? If it was, as I suspected, that her exotic diet left nothing to void, why did it not affect me similarly? This boss of hers, whom she compared to a keeper: when had he last arranged to have her serviced; and did he mount her as a rule himself or keep studs for the purpose?
"Young man," she replied, "those are naughty questions."
"I'm a goat," I said.
"Indeed you are, when you ask things just to be unpleasant. I've told you already all a boy of fourteen needs to know about marriage and that. As far as the rest — it's simply not nice to go to the bathroom where people can see."