The Widening Stain Read online

  Cameron switched on the lights and found two burned-out globes. As he was replacing them, Assistant Professor Casti entered and glanced inquiringly about the catalogue room.

  “Did you find Mademoiselle Coindreau?” said Gilda.

  “No. She wasn’t in the Occulta or the seminary.”

  “Well, she’s probably somewhere around.”

  “Probably.”

  Professor Casti, with a troubled air, turned and left.

  “She was there a couple of minutes ago,” said Cameron to Gilda.

  “Where? In the Occulta?”

  “Yes. I was in the Wilmerding, making the rounds of the lights. She was in the Occulta. Talking to a man.”

  “Oh. Who?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t make out his voice. They weren’t talking very loud. But I did hear one thing. She called him a papoose.”

  “A what?”

  “A papoose. You know, Indian baby.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense!”

  “I didn’t say it made sense. I said she called him a papoose.”

  “You shouldn’t listen to private conversations, Cameron.”

  “No. And you shouldn’t listen to me when I repeat them to you, either.”

  “I guess you’re right, Cameron.”

  “I guess I am right, Miss Gorham. There, that works all right.”

  Cameron moved away, grinning. He was clearly pleased with his repartee. He walked lightly, still lithe and erect for all his sixty-five years.

  “Gilda!”

  It was Parry again.

  “Gilda! I’ve been thinking since I left you. Thinking about you.”

  “And what, pray, have you been thinking about me?”

  “There was a young lady named Gorham

  Who behaved with extreme indecorum;

  She gave Mrs. Grundys

  A glimpse of her undies.

  First time I knew that she wore ’em!”

  Chapter III

  ON THE campus, only two minutes’ walk from the Library, stands the Faculty Club. The dining-room, smoking-room, and common rooms are on the ground floor; the three upper stories consist of two-room and three-room suites for the faculty. The University designed the building originally as a sort of housing project for poor married instructors. But the rents proved too high for the instructors’ salaries, and no provision was made by the architects for nurseries. The instructors, fecund like all the lower organisms, remained in their quarters on the hot top floors of made-over frame boarding-houses in College Town. “The University’s motto,” said Professor Parry, “is: If you can’t be chaste, be sterile.”

  The upper floors of the Faculty Club are therefore occupied by the bachelors of the staff. These are the aristocrats of the campus. They drive bright-colored convertible coupes, not the five-year-old black sedans favored by the married men. They travel in the summer; they buy books and bibelots; they have jolly dinners in hotels. They are regarded on the campus with mingled admiration and censure. “The University ought to burn out that nest of old bachelors and scatter them,” said an irritated faculty daughter.

  At eight in the evening the gentlemen of the Faculty Club were dressing for the President’s reception.

  In Apartment 1-B Dr. Sandys was carefully trimming his goatee with a pair of nail-scissors. He pressed his stomach against the wash-basin and leaned forward toward the mirror, making faces to get the goatee in various lights. Delicately he snipped at a gray hair. There were getting to be a good many gray hairs. Before long the total effect of the goatee would be nearer to gray-brown than to its previous rich and lustrous horse-chestnut. It would make him look really old. For the hundredth time he meditated parting with the goatee entirely. Where had he read that men grew beards as a symbol of concealment, of guilt? He frowned at the thought and prodded the shy chin beneath its cushion. It would be interesting to see his chin again, after twenty years. Perhaps people would admire him more without his goatee. Perhaps they would like him better. Those pretty creatures in the catalogue room. . . . That charming and intelligent Miss Gorham. . . . Not in her first youth, of course; all the better; old enough to have some sense, and certainly very attractive. . . . What would it feel like to be kissed on the actual spot now so well defended by the goatee? When he was a young fellow in the Hopkinson Library, there had been a girl who had kissed him there. That was before the trouble. . . . Some time on a summer vacation he would shave the thing off and have a real good look at himself. But not tonight, of course, just before the President’s reception.

  Dr. Sandys snipped an eighth of an inch from a protruding hair, dusted himself off, and put on his evening shirt. Great idea, these modern evening shirts, with only a single button. The trouble is, that button is in the middle of the back, where a stoutish man can barely reach. Dr. Sandys, straining hard, panted as he ran his thumbs up and down the middle of his back. He could not find the button, naturally, because the button was gone.

  In Apartment 2-A Professor Belknap was also having shirt trouble. His proper collar was a fifteen, or even fourteen and three quarters. Anything larger than a fifteen and a quarter revealed entirely too much of his long, thin neck. With a fifteen and a quarter collar he could wear a fifteen and a half shirt. But even a fifteen and a half shirt had its bosom placed too high for his long body. What he really needed was something like a seventeen shirt with a fifteen collar. He buttoned his black vest. Standing close to the full-length mirror of his bathroom door, he could distinctly see the bottom of the stiff shirt-bosom above the top of the vest. He took off the vest, made a little fold where the vest fitted over the nape of the neck, and fastened the fold with a pin. Now the vest sat higher, and definitely overlapped the shirt-bosom. But below the vest was a white line isolating the vest from the trousers.

  Women, damnable observant women, would notice immediately that his vest did not reach from his trousers to his shirt-bosom. Damnable tailors! Damnable shirt-makers! Damnable women, especially, always whispering to one another, interfering, ogling, spying on him! Damnable women, walking about nearly naked to swim in the University lake, or coiling on sofas as if they were in bed! He would like to—

  But there was no use going on this way. And there was no use going to the President’s reception merely to be laughed at. But no, to stay away would be weakness. He would not give them the easy triumph of saying that he was afraid to come to the President’s reception. He was not afraid of them.

  He pulled up the slides of his suspenders, raising his trousers to their painful limit. Carefully he adjusted his vest. He retreated slowly from the mirror. At a distance of about four feet the bottom of the shirt-bosom seemed to merge with the vest. He must simply keep well away from people, prevent them from getting so close that they could look down at his vest-top. And he must not reveal his mood by appearing sulky. He must think of something cheerful. He would think about good old Jakob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum.

  He thought about the Malleus Maleficarum, about the agreeableness of the type and binding, and about his own generosity in giving it to the Library. He went on to think of old Sprenger’s apt quotation from Seneca: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” He recalled his story of the man whose wife was drowned in a river and who persisted in looking upstream for the body. “My wife was always so contrary in life,” he explained, “that doubtless she is still so in death!” That old Witch-Hammer was really quite a card.

  Professor Belknap was soon very cheerful.

  In Apartment 1-E Professor Parry muttered as he dressed. He had laid out his tails, a fine new suit made by the best tailor in town. He looked on them with affection. Only a dozen members of the faculty possessed tails, and half of the dozen bulged and puffed when they tried to wear their aged relics. Professor Parry slipped on the trousers, enjoying the kiss of the soft wool. He continued to mutter. He muttered:

  “ ‘As to pants,’ said a fellow in Putnam,

  ‘It’s a terrible bother to butnam—’ ”<
br />
  He tested the suspenders over his gleaming shirt. “Utnam, butnam, cutnam, dutnam, futnam—”

  He examined his pumps critically.

  “Gutnam, hutnam, kutnam, lutnam, mutnam, quutnam, rutnam, sutnam. Sutnam. Shutnam. That’s it! Shutnam!”

  He slipped on his pumps with a shoe-horn.

  “I’d hate to get shutnam. A terrible thing to get shutnam. Shutnam. Shut-in. Prison. Jail. Claustrophobia. Claustrophobia. Obia, bobia, cobia. So be yuh. No, be yuh? Know be a!

  It may only, I know, be a—

  cute claustrophobia.

  Ha, I’ve got it!

  ‘As to pants,’ said a fellow in Putnam,

  ‘Though I wear ’em, I never will butnam;

  It may only, I know, be a

  Mild claustrophobia;

  But I terribly fear being shutnam!’ ”

  He laughed aloud. “There’s a good one for Gilda!”

  He washed his hands and put the pearl stud in his shirt. He carefully adjusted his white vest, a dainty thing of watered silk with an almost invisible design. It amply covered the lower edge of his shirt-bosom. But as he worked with deft fingers his smile faded and changed slowly into a frown. When his tail coat was snugly in place and he had surveyed himself from every reasonable angle, he went to his bureau. He opened the drawer which contained his shirts. From underneath the pile he drew two photographs. One was a portrait from a professional studio, showing the stiffly smiling face of Lucie Coindreau. It was inscribed: “For Francis. From Lucie.” The other photograph showed a crudely painted airplane, the comic property of a cheap photographer, of the sort that thrive along the shabbier boardwalks. Peering from the grotesque airplane were the broadly grinning faces of Francis Parry and Lucie Coindreau.

  Frowning, Professor Parry tore the photographs into small pieces. When about to drop them in the waste-basket, he thought better of it. He built a little fire in a broad standing ashtray. The fragments were soon entirely consumed. Professor Parry, smiling again, closed his door and set forth for his appointment with Gilda. He muttered:

  “ ‘As to pants,’ said a fellow in Putnam—”

  In Apartment 3-D, the smallest and cheapest of the Faculty Club, Assistant Professor Casti had laid aside the somber costume of the day and was putting on the more somber hues of evening. Apartment 3-D was furnished with various pieces of maple, cherry, and golden oak. Each item of furniture had been bought at a remarkable bargain. The large and somewhat faded photographs of Paris on the walls had been discarded by the Department of Romance Languages. It was not so much poverty that had determined Professor Casti’s choice of furniture and decoration as a ceaseless search for advantage. To find a good, though slightly shaky table underpriced in a second-hand store, needing only a few repairs he could make in his laboratory, gave him a lasting sense of delight. He felt that he was getting the better of a shiftless and incompetent world. He liked to tell his visitors the price he had paid for everything, and to revel in their polite astonishment. The money he saved went to repay his borrowings for his expensive years in French graduate schools. He would often complain about the economics of the professorate. He calculated that it had cost his parents and the state twenty thousand dollars to carry him to the end of his education, and that with the costs of research and publication a professor was lucky to pay off the investment in his professional preparation by the time he became emeritus.

  His evening clothes, his shirt, tie, and shoes, had been bought at chain stores which give you the advantage of large-scale buying and low overhead. He had shrewdly checked the quality of each article. It would be hard to say quite what was wrong with the ensemble. There was a kind of meanness about it, enhanced by the wearer’s mean satisfaction with his appearance. He seemed a collection of little advantages gained, but the collection did not make a total of anything.

  Professor Casti proceeded deftly and efficiently with his dressing. He seemed abstracted; his brow was knit. When he had applied the last pat to his coat he went to his desk, an imposing roll-top from a bankrupt insurance office. He inspected the loose-leaf calendar pad. Five notes were written on it, in his careful, scrupulous hand:

  “Send off-prints to Ph. R.

  10. See Miss G about Mss

  2. See Dean about new kymograph

  8.30. Pres. reception

  Settle matters with L. C. Be firm.”

  Through the first three items neat pencil lines had been drawn.

  He picked up a pencil and drew a line through “8.30. Pres. reception.” He stared for a full minute at the calendar, then tore off the sheet, crumpled it, and dropped it in the waste-basket. He patted his pockets, left the room, and locked the door. He descended to the parking-space behind the Faculty Club and gazed long and lovingly at a monumental Pierce-Arrow. He turned, and set off to walk the short distance to the Presidential Mansion.

  Apartment 2-C would impress a visitor by its mingling of austerity and modest luxury. On the walls hung Piranesi prints of Roman ruins, and two fine portraits: one of Professor Hyett’s father and one of his cousin, Dr. Pickard, who had been University Librarian until his death a year before. An eighteenth-century French desserte was adapted to serve as a small cocktail bar. The sofa and easy chairs, in dark green and brown, were comfortably overstuffed.

  Professor Hyett was dressing. A half-empty glass of port stood on the desserte. On the desk, a gilt-scrolled eighteenth-century escritoire, lay open a little edition of the Opera of Johannes Secundus, printed in Leiden in 1651. Professor Hyett loved the lusty humanist writers of the Renaissance. Between shirt and tie he paused to read:

  Hora suavicula, et voluptuosa,

  Hora blanditiis, lepore, risu,

  Hora deliciis, jocis, susurris,

  Hora suaviolis, parique magnis

  Cum Diis et Iove transigenda sorte.

  Smiling happily, he returned to his dressing. His coat fitted as well as it had ten years back. His figure was as trim as ever. Not like some of the colleagues, who seemed to let go suddenly amidships and get so sort of maternal-looking.

  He gave his black felt hat a good brushing. Looking at his watch, he found that he still had ten minutes.

  He finished his port, smacking it slowly. Then, a little irresolutely, he went to a cupboard beneath a bookcase and unlocked it. He selected a large volume with a florid Parisian binding. He sat down and turned the pages slowly, murmuring to himself and smiling.

  Ten minutes later he returned the volume to its place with a sigh and locked the cupboard. He set out for the President’s reception.

  In the janitor’s room of the University Library Cameron, the janitor, was sitting in an old easy chair with extrusions of doughty cotton seeping through many gaps of the upholstery. He was reading the Library copy of Conklin’s Principles of Abnormal Psychology. Naturally he was not asked to the President’s reception, and naturally he was glad of it.

  Chapter IV

  THE PRESIDENTIAL Mansion is a large, imposing, white-painted wooden building of about 1850, with a great two-story pillared portico that leaves the second-floor bedrooms in perpetual gloom, and with a series of magnificent parlors, twelve feet in height, that are, according to the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, hell’s delight to heat.

  On the evening of the President’s reception, President Temple, Mrs. Temple, and the Commandant of the R.O.T.C. stood in the small reception room at the left of the entrance. As the guests entered, the Commandant inquired their names, which he then shouted to President and Mrs. Temple. Even President Temple could slip up on the name of a staff member he had not seen for a year, and poor Mrs. Temple was certain to forget everything in a crisis.

  “Professor Anderson and Mrs. Anderson!” boomed the Commandant. Mrs. Temple welcomed the pair with more effusiveness than was fitting for an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Drawing. She realized, too late, that she had confused him with Professor Emeritus Henderson of Vegetable Crops.

  “Hello, Anderson. Good evening, Mrs. And
erson.” President Temple, large, bland, actor-faced, made for the couple a blend of hearty friendliness and condescension, as a theatrical spot-light operator blends his colored lights.

  “Professor Casti!” announced the Commandant. Now Mrs. Temple was sure she had something.

  “Oh, Professor Casti! I am so glad to see you! I hear such wonderful things about your psychopathic laboratory!”

  “Phonetics laboratory, my dear,” said President Temple. “How are you, Casti? Nice evening.”

  “Oh yes, phonetics laboratory, I mean. But you do work with pigs, don’t you, Mr. Casti?”

  “Well, in fact, you might call them so, he-he! Vile bodies, corpora vilia, anyway. As it happens, I have just sent off an article to the Phonetic Review—“

  “Dr. and Mrs. Churchill and Miss Churchill,” intoned the Commandant.

  “Ex-tremely int-a-resting! Ex-tremely int-a-resting!” said the President, motioning Casti on, to yield place to Dr. Churchill, of the Medical Staff.

  The guests, constantly displaced by new arrivals, drifted into the drawing-rooms.

  “In President Darrow’s time,” said old Mrs. Eadie to Professor and Mrs. Anderson, “Mrs. Darrow had a divan here, where the two big chairs are.”

  “I don’t like it so white,” said Mrs. Anderson. “I think white walls are kind of ghastly, and everything shows on them so.”

  “Mrs. Darrow was an ideal president’s wife. Every year she called on all the married professors and even the married instructors. Three calls an afternoon right up to Christmas. I declare, I don’t know how she did it.”

  “My walls are all a nice oatmeal color. Never shows a thing, hardly. When you have children, you know, you’ve got to think about those things.”