Then a day had come when Miss Sally Ann told him calmly that in a short time she would be ready to leave the Rest House and come home, but not to the situation she had left. She was not, she declared, blaming him — but her survival, not to say well-being, depended on an end to the tensions between them. She had not permitted him to reply: if he was at home when she arrived, after the Carnival holidays, his presence would signify his readiness to Start Afresh; if not, she would assume that he had found himself finally and for all unwilling, or unable, to respond to her needs — which he would then be free to regard as excessive if it comforted him to do so — and they would legalize their separation.
"I walked down the steps of that there house with my head fit to crack," he told me. "And on one step I loved Sally Ann and hated myself, and on the next it was vicey-versy. I tried to think I'm okay, and what the heck anyhow — - but it never did sound just right. So I figured I'd better stroll around some to clear my head, and next thing I knew, I was out along the highway, and I thought I saw a cycle go by with some young slicker a-driving it, and Miss Sally Ann in the sidecar!"
I expressed my astonishment, and Max, who had waked again in time to hear the last few episodes of Peter Greene's history, said "Hah," not very sympathetically. But Greene himself seemed more bemused than disturbed by his vision.
"I don't see how it could of been, do you, George? The fellow weren't more'n twenty agewise, smiling and flash-eyed; and Sally Ann was a-giggling at something he'd said to her, holding her hand to her mouth the way she does, and I swear she looked exactly like she did the first day of that Carnivaclass="underline" happy and fresh as a spring lamb, and pretty as all outdoors. Must of been some co-ed and her date, just looked like her. Must of been! Or my oldest girl Barbara May that's about gone kerflooey herself, playing hooky from school. It don't matter. All I could think was how sweet and happy Sally Ann was when I took her to the Carnival, and how tore up we've been since. And no matter whose flunking fault it is — hers or mine or the terms we live in — I just stood there and bawled to think of it. And then I decided, by Billy Gumbo, I'd thumb me a ride to Great Mall in time for this year's Carnival. Kind of look things over, you know, back where it all started, and see what's what." He sighed, blinked his eye several times, and glanced at his wristwatch. "Which we better get along down the road for, don't we'll never find rooms tonight."
"I don't understand," I protested. "You're just going to the Spring Carnival, and not to register?"
He had initialed our bill for the waitress and was squinting with his good eye at the young hams that flexed and pressed beneath her tight uniform. He reddened and turned at my words, thumbing his chest.
"Look here, sir: I'm okay, doggone it! Any man's liable to have trouble with a strange gal when he's been married long as I have; that's the only reason I couldn't make the grade with O.B.G.'s daughter."
"I beg your pardon?" Both his terminology and his attitude perplexed me.
"Ah, flunk it. Let's hit the road."
As if, having lingered such a while at the Pedal Inn, he found it suddenly unbearable, Greene all but fled the place. As we wakened snoring Croaker (whose vine-work now climbed halfway up my stick) I saw our troubled host doing push-ups on the gravel apron and grinning at the cordial taunts of young couples parked all about. Max shook his head. Outside in the cooling floodlit dark I remounted Croaker and Max the cycle, but before we set out Greene left off the bantering he'd resumed, and took his hand from the throttle briefly to squint up at me.
"S'pose there really was a Grand Tutor!" he cried. Max had been sitting with his eyes closed; now he opened them to contemplate his driver's twisted grin. "S'pose you were Him right enough, come to put good old New Tammany on the track again, and you'd heard all the stuff I've told you 'bout me and Sally Ann and how everything's gone kerflooey! What would you say?"
Flabbergasted that he'd not truly believed me all that while, I could only stare at him. After a second he turned his face away and bitterly raced the engine. But the lights had flashed twice — bright for that second in both his eyes, the true and the false alike made mirrors by the pain he spoke of.
3
Now we passed swiftly through a series of residential districts — rather handsome, I thought, though I could not understand at once why a family of four or five required as much stall-space as our entire herd — and pressed into the formidable traffic of the central quads. I clutched Croaker's head and gazed as one reluctant to believe his eyes; I could not have said which were most dismaying: the mighty buildings, square after square ablaze with light; the multitude of human folk, mostly young people in similar costume, who thronged the sidewalks with books in their hands and plugs in their ears, through which I was told they heard musical sounds from a central transmitter; or the elm-lined avenues themselves, wide as a pasture, paved in black, and lit like noon by blue-white lamps armed out from poles. All glittered in observance of the Spring Carnivaclass="underline" huge foil-and-tinsel ovoids hung suspended over intersections; on the arm of every lamp-post perched a mammoth butterfly, terrifying until I learned they were not real creatures; their sequined wings, three meters in span, slowly closed and opened, sparkling with little lights in half a dozen colors. Here and there we saw groups of celebrants in gaudy garb, singing and roistering; some wore dominoes and checkered tights, others caps with bells or full-face masks, horrid of aspect; here was a girl delicious in white tights and tall silk ears, with a ball of cotton fluff atop the cleft of her rump; there a muscled red-cloaked chap with hayfork and imitation horns. These sometimes saluted as we passed, and merrily I waved my stick in reply; the rest ignored them and us alike, unless to make apprehensive way for Croaker. From everywhere the bold bright messages flashed at us: DEGREES WITH EASE — SAY "PHYS. ED., PLEASE." NO SWEAT: PRE-VET. HAPPY CARNIVAL FROM YOUR DEPARTMENT OF POULTRY HUSBANDRY.
"No zing in that there last one," Peter Greene remarked. Having made our way down what appeared to be the widest and most resplendent thoroughfare, we parked the motorcycle at its end. Here the boulevard became a mighty lawn of grass, flanked by statelier buildings and nobler elms, and fronted, just before us, by an iron fence-gate twenty meters tall. Unlike all else of eminence round about, Main Gate (for so I recognized it, with a shiver, and the lawn as Great Mall, and the imposing edifice far down it as Tower Hall) was unlit: guards prowled in the shadow along the ivied, gargoyled wall into which it made and before the famous one-way turnstile at the road's end. I was much excited by the general spectacle, and impatient to see all at once. It was the last night of the Carnivaclass="underline" crews of workmen were already dismantling some temporary structures along the mall; on one side of us was many-storied Bi-Sci House, the exclusive apartment hotel for professors of the natural sciences, with its notorious Vivisection Bar-B-Q underneath; adjacent were the glittering Gate House Ballroom, the Sophomore Cinema and Shooting Gallery, and other places of amusement whose fame was campus-wide. Opposite were cultural attractions: the Fine Arts Salesroom, the Pan-Sororal Playhouse, and nearest us, sloping down from Mall Wall, the vast Amphitheater managed jointly by the Sub-Departments of Ancient Narrative and Theatrical Science. I was taken with particular curiosity by this last because the playbills advertised that evening's performance as The Tragedy of Taliped Decanus, a work of whose hero I had heard though I hadn't read the tale of his adventures. It was to be the conclusion of a week-long series of classical productions, and lines of people were already filing in to witness it.