Conjure Wife (7 page)

College faculty members were as badly misrepresented to the general public as were college students. Actually they were a pretty timorous folk, exceedingly sensitive to social disapproval. That they occasionally spoke out fearlessly was all the more to their credit.

All of which of course reflected society’s slow-dying tendency to view teachers not as educators but as vestal virgins of a sort, living sacrifices on the altar of respectability, housed in suitably grim buildings and judged on the basis of a far stricter moral code than that applied to businessmen and housewives. And in their vestal-virgining, their virginity counted much more than their tending of the feeble flame of imaginative curiosity and honest intellectual inquiry. Indeed, for all most people cared, the flame might safely be let go out, so long as the teachers remained sitting around it in their temple — inviolate, sour-faced, and quite frozen testimonials to the fact that somebody was upholding moral values somewhere.

Norman thought wryly: Why, they actually want us to be witches, of a harmless sort. And Linade Tansy stop!

The irony tickled him and he smiled.

His good humor lasted until after his last class that afternoon, when he happened to meet the Sawtelles in front of Morton Hall.

Evelyn Sawtelle was a snob and a fake intellectual. The illusion she tried most to encourage was that she had sacrificed a great career in the theater in order to marry Hervey. While in reality she had never even been able to wrangle the directorship of the Hempnell Student Players and had had to content herself with a minor position in the Speech Department. She had an affected carriage and a slightly arty taste in clothes that, taken along with her flat cheeks and dull black hair and eyes, suggested the sort of creature you sometimes see stalking through the lobby at ballet and concert intermissions.

But far from being a bohemian, Evelyn Sawtelle was even more inclined to agonize over the minutiae of social convention and prestige than most Hempnell faculty wives. Yet because of her general incompetence, this anxiety did not result in tactfulness, but rather its opposite.

Her husband was completely under her thumb. She managed him like a business — bunglingly, overzealously, but with a certain dogged effectiveness.

“I had lunch today with Henrietta… I mean Mrs. Pollard,” she announced to Norman with the air of one who has just visited royalty.

“Oh say, Norman —” Hervey began excitedly, thrusting forward his brief case.

“We had a very interesting chat,” his wife swept on. “We talked about you, too, Norman. It seems Gracine has been misinterpreting some of the things you’ve been saying in your class. She’s such a sensitive girl.”

“Dumb bunny, you mean.” Norman corrected mentally. He murinured, “Oh?” with some show of politeness.

“Dear Henrietta was a little puzzled as just how to handle it, though of course she’s a very tolerant, cosmopolitan soul. I just mentioned it because I thought you’d want to know. After all, it is very important that no one get any wrong impressions about the department. Don’t you agree with me, Hervey?” She ended sharply.

“What, dear? Oh, yes, yes. Say Norman, I want to tell you about that thesis I showed you yesterday. The most amazing thing! Its main arguments are almost exactly the same as those in your book! An amazing case of independent investigators arriving at the same conclusions. Why, it’s like Darwin and Wallace, or —”

“You didn’t tell
me
anything about this, dear,” said his wife.

“Wait a minute,” said Norman.

He hated to make an explanation in Mrs. Sawtelle’s presence, but it had to be done.

“Sorry, Hervey, to have to substitute a rather sordid story for an intriguing scientific coincidence. It happened when I was an instructor here — 1929, my first year. A graduate student named Cunningham got hold of my ideas — I was friendly with him — and incorporated them into his doctor’s thesis. My work in superstition and neurosis was just a side line then, and partly because I was sick with pneumonia for two months I didn’t read his thesis until after he’d gotten his degree.”

Sawtelle blinked. His face resumed its usual worried expression. A look of vague disappointment came into Mrs. Sawtelle’s black-button eyes, as if she would have liked to read the thesis, lingering over each paragraph, letting her suspicions have full scope, before hearing the explanation.

“I was very angry,” Norman continued, “and intended to expose him. But then I heard he’d died. There was some hint of suicide. He was an unbalanced chap. How he’d hoped to get away with such an out-and-out steal, I don’t know, anyway, I decided not to do anything about it, for his family’s sake. You see, it would have supplied a reason for thinking he had committed suicide.”

Mrs. Sawtelle looked incredulous.

“But, Norman,” Sawtelle commented anxiously, “was that really wise? I mean to keep silent. Weren’t you taking a chance? I mean with regard to your academic reputation?”

Abruptly Mrs. Sawtelle’s manner changed.

“Put that thing back in the stacks, Hervey, and forget about it,” she directed curtly. Then she smiled archly at Norman. “I’ve been forgetting I have a surprise for you, Professor Saylor. Come down to the sound booth now, and I’ll show you. It won’t take a minute. Come along, Hervey.”

Norman had no excuse ready, so he accompanied the Sawtelles to the rooms of the speech department at the other end of Morton, wondering how the speech department ever found any use for someone with as nasal and affected a voice as Evelyn Sawtelle, even if she did happen to be a professor’s wife and a thwarted tragedienne.

The sound booth was dim and quiet, a solid box with soundresistant walls and double windows.

Mrs. Sawtelle took a disk from the cabinet, put it on one of the three turntables, and adjusted a couple of dials. Norman jerked. For an instant he thought that a truck was roaring toward the sound booth and would momentarily crash through the insulating walls. Then the abominable noise pouring from the amplifier changed to a strangely pulsing wail or whir, as of wind prying at a house. It struck a less usual chord, though, in Norman’s agitated memory.

Mrs. Sawtelle darted back and swiveled the dials.

“I made a mistake,” she said. “That’s some modernistic music or other. Hervey, switch on the light. Here’s the record I wanted.” She put it on one of the other turntables.

“It sounded awful, whatever it was,” her husband observed.

Norman had identified his memory. It was of an Australian bull-roarer a colleague had once demonstrated for him. The curved slat of wood, whirled at the end of a cord, made exactly the same sound. The aborigines used it in their rain magic.

“… but if, in these times of misunderstanding and strife, we willfully or carelessly forget that every word and thought must refer to something in the real world, if we allow references to the unreal and the nonexistent to creep into our minds

Again Norman started. For now it was his own voice that was coming out of the amplifier and he had an odd sense of jerking back in time.

“Surprised?” Evelyn Sawtelle questioned coyly. “It’s that talk on semantics you gave the students last week. We had a mike spotted by the speaker’s rostrum — I suppose you thought it was for amplification

— and we made a sneak recording, as we call it. We cut it down here.”

She indicated the heavier, cement-based turntable for making recordings. Her hands fluttered around the dials.

“We can do all sorts of things down here,” she babbled on. “Mix all sorts of sounds. Music against voices. And —”

“Words
can
hurt us, you know. And oddly enough, it’s the words that refer to things that aren’t, that can hurt us most. Why…”

It was hard for Norman to appear even slightly pleased. He knew his reasons were no more sensible than those of a savage afraid someone will learn his secret name, yet all the same he disliked the idea of Evelyn Sawtelle monkeying around with his voice. Like her dully malicious, small-socketed eyes, it suggested a prying for hidden weaknesses.

And then Norman moved involuntarily for a third time. For suddenly out of the amplifier, but now mixed with his voice, came the sound of the bull-roarer that still had that devilish hint of an onrushing truck.

“Oh there I’ve done it again,” said Evelyn Sawtelle rapidly, snatching at the dials. “Messing up your beautiful voice with that terrible music.” She grimaced. “But then, as you just said, Professor Saylor, sounds can’t hurt us.”

Norman did not correct her typical misquoting. He looked at her curiously for a moment. She stood facing him, her hands behind her. Her husband, his nose twitching, had idled over to the still moving turntables and was gingerly poking a finger at one of them.

“No,” said Norman slowly, “they can’t.” And then he excused himself with a brusque. “Well, thanks for the demonstration.”

“We’ll see you tonight,” Evelyn called after him. Somehow it sounded like, “You won’t get rid of me.”

How I detest that woman, thought Norman, as he hurried up the dark stair and down the corridor.

Back at his office, he put in a good hour’s work on his notes. Then getting up to switch on the light, his glance happened to fall on the window.

After a few moments, he jerked away and darted to the closet to get his field glasses.

Someone must have a very obscure sense of humor to perpetrate such a complicated practical joke.

Intently he searched the cement at the juncture of roof ridge and clawed feet, looking for the telltale cracks. He could not spot any, but that would not have been easy in the failing yellow light.

The cement dragon now stood at the edge of the gutter, as if about to walk over to Morton along the architrave of the big gateway.

He lifted his glasses to the creature’s head — blank and crude as an unfinished skull. Then on an impulse he dropped down to the row of sculptured heads, focused on Galileo, and read the little inscription he had not been able to make out before.

“Eppur si muove.”

The words Galileo was supposed to have muttered after recanting before the Inquisition his belief in the revolution of the earth around the sun.

“Nevertheless, it moves.”

A board creaked behind him, and he spun around.

By his desk stood a young man, waxen pale, with thick red hair. His eyes stood out like milky marbles. One white, tendon-ridged hand gripped a .22 target pistol.

Norman walked toward him, bearing slightly to the right.

The skimpy barrel of the gun came up.

“Hullo, Jennings,” said Norman. “You’ve been reinstated. Your grades have been changed to straight A’s.”

The gun barrel slowed for an instant.

Norman lunged in.

The gun went off under his left arm, pinking the window.

The gun clunked on the floor. Jenning’s skinny form went limp. As Norman sat him down on the chair, he began to sob, convulsively.

Norman picked up the gun by the barrel, laid it in a drawer, locked the drawer, pocketed the key. Then he lifted the phone and asked for an on-campus number. The connection was made quickly. “Gunnison?” he asked.

“Uh-huh, just caught me as I was leaving.”

“Theodore Jennings’ parents live right near the college, don’t they? You know, the chap who flunked out last semester.”

“Of course they do. What’s the matter?”

“Better get them over here quick. And have them bring his doctor. He just tried to shoot me. Yes, his doctor. No, neither of us is hurt. But quickly.”

Norman put down the phone. Jennings continued to sob agonizingly. Norman looked at him with disgust for a moment, then patted his shoulder.

An hour later Gunnison sat down in the same chair, and let off a sigh of relief.

“I’m sure glad they agreed about asking for his commitment to the asylum,” he said. “It was awfully good of you, Norman, not to insist on the police. Things like that give a college a bad name.”

Norman smiled wearily. “Almost anything gives a college a bad name. But that kid was obviously as crazy as a loon. And of course I understand how much the Jennings, with their political connections and influence, mean to Pollard.”

Gunnison nodded. They lit up and smoked for a while in silence. Norman thought how different real life was from a detective story, where an attempted murder was generally considered a most serious thing, an occasion for much turmoil and telephoning and the gathering of flocks of official and unofficial detectives. Whereas here, because it occurred in an area of life governed by respectability rather than sensation, it was easily hushed up and forgotten.

Gunnison looked at his watch. “I’ll have to hustle. It’s almost seven, and we’re due at your place at eight.”

But he lingered, ambling over to the window to inspect the bullet hole.

“I wonder if you’d mind not mentioning this to Tansy?” Norman asked. “I don’t want to worry her.”

Gunnison nodded. “Good thing if we kept it to ourselves.” Then he pointed out the window. “That’s one of my wife’s pets,” he remarked in a jocular tone.

Norman saw that his finger was trained on the cement dragon, now coldly revealed by the upward glare from the street lights.

“I mean,” Gunnison went on, “she must have a dozen photographs of it. Hempnell’s her specialty. I believe she’s got a photograph of every architectural oddity on campus. That one is her favorite.” He chuckled. “Usually it’s the husband who keeps ducking down into the darkroom, but not in our family. And me a chemist, at that.”

Norman’s taut mind had unaccountably jumped to the thought of a bull-roarer. Abruptly he realized the analogy between the recording of a bull-roarer and the photograph of a dragon.

He clamped a lid on the fantastic questions he wanted to ask Gunnison.

“Come on!” he said. “We’d better get along.”

Gunnison started a little at the harshness of his voice.

“Can you drop me off?” asked Norman in quieter tones. “My car’s at home.”

“Sure thing,” said Gunnison.

After he had switched out the lights, Norman paused for a moment, staring at the window. The words came back.

“Eppur si muove.”

They had hardly cleared away the remains of a hasty supper, when there came the first clang from the front-door chimes. To Norman’s relief, Tansy had accepted without questioning his rather clumsy explanation of why he had gotten home so late. There was something puzzling, though, about her serenity these last two days. She was usually much sharper and more curious. But of course he had been careful to hide disturbing events from her, and he ought only to’ be glad her nerves were in such good shape.