“Well, really, Johnny, I don’t run a pornography shop, you know. Most people find that quite strong enough.”
Johnny sighed. “Peopre get excited over ze funnies’ sings.”
Meanwhile, Methuen was closeted with Cook and Dalrymple, the prospective endower, in another of those interminable and indecisive conferences. R. Hanscom Dalrymple looked like a statue that the sculptor had never gotten around to finishing. The only expression the steel chairman ever allowed himself was a canny, secretive smile. Cook and Methuen had a feeling he was playing them on the end of a long and well-knit fish line made of U. S. Federal Reserve notes. It was not because he wasn’t willing to part with the damned endowment, but because he enjoyed the sensation of power over these oh-so-educated men. And in the actual world, one doesn’t lose one’s temper and tell Croesus what to do with his loot. One says: “Yes, Mr. Dalrymple. My, my, that is a brilliant suggestion, Mr. Dalrymple! Why didn’t we think of it ourselves?” Cook and Methuen were both old hands at this game. Methuen, though otherwise he considered Wendell Cook a pompous ass, admired the president’s endowment-snagging ability. After all, wasn’t Yale University named after a retired merchant on the basis of a gift of five hundred and sixty-two pounds twelve shillings?
“Say, Dr. Cook,” said Dalrymple, “why don’t you come over to the Taft and have lunch on me for a change? You, too, Professor Methuen.”
The academics murmured their delight and pulled on their rubbers. On the way out Dalrymple paused to scratch Johnny behind the ears. Johnny put his book away, keeping the title on the cover out of sight, and restrained himself from snapping at the steel man’s hand. Dalrymple meant well enough, but Johnny did not like people to take such liberties with his person.
So three men and a bear slopped down College Street. Cook paused now and then, ignoring the sprinkle, to make studied gestures toward one or another of the units of the great soufflé of Georgian and Collegiate Gothic architecture. He explained this and that. Dalrymple merely smiled his blank little smile.
Johnny, plodding behind, was the first to notice that passing undergraduates were pausing to stare at the president’s feet. The word “feet” is meant literally. For Cook’s rubbers were rapidly changing into a pair of enormous pink bare feet.
Cook himself was quite unconscious of it, until quite a group of undergraduates had collected. These gave forth the catarrhal snorts of men trying unsuccessfully not to laugh. By the time Cook had followed their stares and looked down, the metamorphosis was complete. That he should be startled was only natural. The feet were startling enough. His face gradually matched the feet in redness, making a cheerful note of color in the gray landscape.
R. Hanscom Dalrymple lost his reserve for once. His howls did nothing to save prexy’s now-apoplectic face. Cook finally stooped and pulled off the rubbers. It transpired that the feet had been painted on the outside of the rubbers and covered over with lampblack. The rain had washed the lampblack off.
Wendell Cook resumed his walk to the Hotel Taft in gloomy silence. He held the offensive rubbers between thumb and finger as if they were something unclean and loathsome. He wondered who had done this dastardly deed. There hadn’t been any undergraduates in his office for some days, but you never wanted to underestimate the ingenuity of undergraduates. He noticed that Ira Methuen was wearing rubbers of the same size and make as his own. But he put suspicion in that direction out of his mind before it had fully formed. Certainly Methuen wouldn’t play practical jokes with Dalrymple around, when he’d be the head of the new Department of Biophysics when—if—Dalrymple came through with the endowment.
The next man to suspect that the Yale campus was undergoing a severe pixilation was John Dugan, the tall thin one of the two campus cops. He was passing Christ Church—which is so veddy high-church Episcopal that they refer to Charles I of England as St. Charles the Martyr—on his way to his lair in Phelps Tower. A still small voice spoke in his ear: “Beware, John Dugan! Your sins will find you out!”
Dugan jumped and looked around. The voice repeated its message. There was nobody within fifty feet of Dugan. Moreover, he could not think of any really serious sins he had committed lately. The only people in sight were a few undergraduates and Professor Methuen’s educated black bear, trailing after his boss as usual. There was nothing for John Dugan to suspect but his own sanity.
R. Hanscom Dalrymple was a bit surprised at the grim earnestness of the professors in putting away their respective shares of the James Pierpont dinner. They were staying the eternal gnaw of hunger that afflicts those who depend on a college commissary for sustenance. Many of them suspected a conspiracy among college cooks to see that the razor edge wasn’t taken off students’ and instructors’ intellects by overfeeding. They knew that conditions were much the same in most colleges.
Dalrymple sipped his coffee and looked at his notes. Presently Cook would get up and say a few pleasant nothings. Then he would announce Dalrymple’s endowment, which was to be spent in building a Dalrymple Biophysical Laboratory and setting up a new department. Everybody would applaud and agree that biophysics had floated in the void between the domains of the departments of zoology, psychology, and the physiological sciences long enough. Then Dalrymple would get up and clear his throat and say—though in much more dignified language: “Shucks, fellas, it really isn’t nothing.”
Dr. Wendell Cook duly got up, beamed out over the ranked shirt fronts, and said his pleasant nothings. The professors exchanged nervous looks when he showed signs of going off into his favorite oration, there-is-no-conflict-between-science-and-religion. They had heard it before.
He was well launched into Version 3A of this homily, when he began to turn blue in the face. It was not the dark purplish-gray called loosely “blue” that appears on the faces of stranglees, but a bright, cheerful cobalt. Now, such a color is all very well in a painting of a ship sailing under a clear blue sky, or in the uniform of a movie-theater doorman. But it is distinctly out of place in the face of a college president. Or so felt the professors. They leaned this way and that, their boiled shirts bulging, popping and gaping as they did so, and whispered.
Cook frowned and continued. He was observed to sniff the air as if he smelled something. Those at the speakers’ table detected a slight smell of acetone. But that seemed hardly an adequate explanation of the robin’s-egg hue of their prexy’s face. The color was now quite solid on the face proper. It ran up into the area where Cook’s hair would have been if he had had some. His collar showed a trace of it, too.
Cook, on his part, had no idea of why the members of his audience were swaying in their seats like saplings in a gale and whispering. He thought it very rude of them. But his frowns had no effect. So presently he cut Version 3A short. He announced the endowment in concise, businesslike terms, and paused for the expected thunder of applause.
There was none. To be exact, there was a feeble patter that nobody in his right mind would call a thunder of anything.
Cook looked at R. Hanscom Dalrymple, hoping that the steel man would not be insulted. Dalrymple’s face showed nothing. Cook assumed that this was part of his general reserve. The truth was that Dalrymple was too curious about the blue face to notice the lack of applause. When Cook introduced him to the audience, it took him some seconds to pull himself together.
He started rather lamely: “Gentlemen and members of the Yale faculty… uh… I mean, of course, you’re all gentlemen… I am reminded of a story about the poultry farmer who got married—I mean, I’m not reminded of that story, but the one about the divinity student who died and went to—” Here Dalrymple caught the eye of the dean of the divinity school. He tacked again: “Maybe I’d… uh… better tell the one about the Scotchman who got lost on his way home and—”