Poetic Justice (18 page)

“I must be getting very old indeed,” he finally murmured. “I actually find myself dreaming of the old days here, when we attended chapel in our gowns with fair regularity. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that this used to be a world of gentlemen, and I wish it still were. Nostalgia is a dangerous disease.”

“You’re just gloomy about this Cudlipp business, and no wonder,” Kate said, really worried about him. “What’s dangerous about nostalgia is that it’s phony. It’s a daydream in reverse. Like thinking we loved the books of our youth, when all we love is the thought of ourselves young, reading them.”

“You’re right. I resent so much being old, and being thought stuffy, that out of a kind of childish petulance I talk as though I were considerably older than I am. I don’t mind telling you there are moments when, quite apart from wanting Cudlipp back again, I wish that someone had handed me a poison, instead of him.”

“You must be pleased about O’Toole becoming Dean of the College.”

“I guess I must. My daughter’s going to have a baby.”

“One’s daughter’s having a baby must, in a certain way, be the most shocking thing that can happen to a man,” Reed said. “I’ve seen it often.”

“You’re probably right,” Clemance said. “Anyway, it’s getting to be winter, and that’s always dreary. Let’s hope that this will be a better spring—that the grass will not be trampled to dry earth, or the tulips crushed and broken.” He raised his hat and left them.

“So he noticed exactly what I did—the death of the grass and flowers. The war-torn countryside is always desolate; grass only grows later, among the crosses.”

“For God’s sake, Kate, I’m glad you at least waited till he was gone to make that heartening observation.”

“I can’t see making him greet a grandchild as the mark of doom as exactly designed to cheer him up.”

“It at least gives him a natural cause for feeling glum, instead of despair about the University. Where does the Political Science Department keep itself?”

“In Treadwell Hall—over there.”

“I’m going to reconnoiter. Kate …”

“Yes?” Kate said when he did not seem to be continuing.

“Oh, nothing. I’ll see you later.”

“Yes. I must give some thought to my seminar. We all of us spend so much time at committee meetings that we forget what we’re really here for.” She waved at Reed as she walked away.

Reed waited, he scarcely knew for what, in the basement of Treadwell Hall. It was dimly lit and unfinished. Reconnoitering, he had discovered the door leading to
the tunnels connecting the buildings. They had been used for years, Kate told him, by professors who did not want to emerge into the cold in winter, the rain in spring, or student greetings at any time. Another door apparently hid some machinery which made a good deal of noise but seemed otherwise of no interest. The box with the switches for the elevator was, as might have been expected, in the darkest corner. Reed looked at his watch. He went back upstairs and out onto the campus and walked about, thinking.

When he returned it was to contemplate the extremely wide pipes that ran along the basement about a foot from the ceiling. He jumped for one, but found he could not reach high enough to pull himself upward. He tried a running jump, but the basement did not provide adequate leaping room. Finally, he opened the door leading to the tunnel and pulled himself up on it until one of his feet rested on the knob. As he climbed he had to keep pushing the door, whose nature was to close itself, open with his other foot. At last he worked himself into a position to swing from the door onto one of the broad pipes. The door, relieved of his weight, closed. He was able to lie across the broad pipe on his stomach, resting his head on his hands. He was not invisible to anyone who looked up, but people do not normally look up in empty basements. Should he be discovered, Reed thought, he would merely go about the business of climbing down and make as dignified an exit as was possible under the circumstances. But he hoped to remain unnoticed long enough to see who came, and why.

His position was not uncomfortable. It interested him to realize that for all the physical vigor of the storybook
detective, this was the only time he had had the crease in his trousers endangered by anything more extraordinary than the heat of a courtroom. After a time, he began almost to doze.

But not quite. As the door from the stairway opened, he came fully awake. A man entered silently and hurried noiselessly across the basement to the door behind which was housed the machinery. He opened the door with a key and, reaching inside, extracted first a wooden doorstop with which he braced open the door, and then a long, hollow tube with which he moved to the center of the room. Raising the tube above his head, he proceeded to slip it over the light bulb and turn it until the light went out. Fortunately the man, who was Carrier, had his back to Reed while he worked. Having plunged the basement into darkness, Cartier, carrying his tube, retreated into the machinery room and closed the door behind him. All was dark and silent.

Not long after, the door from the stairway opened again, and another man entered—Reed could not, in the darkness, tell who it was. The new arrival walked over to the corner near where the power box for the elevator was and crouched down, resting, Reed supposed, on his heels. Again there was silence. For a great period of time, it seemed, they waited. Periodically, Reed could hear the elevator motor start up and then stop. He longed to switch his position on the pipe, but dared not. From time to time he felt rather than heard the man in the corner shift his weight.

Up in Mabel’s room, Reed thought, and we shall all be here until morning. And at the thought of explaining to Kate how he had happened to spend a whole night on
a pipe in the basement of Treadwell Hall, Reed began to feel himself hideously on the verge of the giggles, about the only calamity, he thought, which never befell Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.

How long it was until the door from the stairway opened was a question which might well have inspired agonized deliberations about the relativity of time. When the door did open, however, whoever entered was clearly bewildered to find himself in darkness. He listened—as Reed, holding his breath, listened, as the other two, he was certain, listened; but there was no sound. Running his hands along the wall to find his way, the last arrival moved around until he was in front of the elevator. Reed saw him take out a tiny pocket flashlight and consult his wristwatch. Before long, the elevator machinery could be heard running: the elevator had been called, one supposed, to a top floor. There was a pause as the light which indicates when the elevator is in motion went out; then it lit again. The listeners could hear the elevator descending. The newcomer moved toward the box containing the elevator power switch and the silence broke into clamoring noise. The door to the machine room was flung open, several men seemed to be grabbing one another, there was a scuffle toward the doors, Reed heard a man’s voice whisper: “For God’s sake get out of here,” and then there was the sound of a pressurized can being sprayed. “You goddam idiot,” the same voice whispered. By this time Reed had dropped down from the pipe and was guarding the door to the stairway. A man rushed against him and they were both propelled into the lighted stairway hall. The man with Reed was Hankster, and he was covered with
bright, luminous paint. As they stared at each other, speechless, they were joined by Carrier who simply announced “Ha!” in pleased tones, and refused to utter another syllable. The fourth man there, whoever he was, had vanished.

It took several hours to straighten the whole thing out, if “to straighten out,” as Reed later said to Kate, was possibly the correct verb.

Carrier was mightily pleased with the success of his “spy kit.” He had apparently begun his James Bond operations with a camera equipped with extremely fast film or, in the event of almost total darkness, a strobe light. This, he readily admitted, had been a dismal failure. Either he was not quick enough in handling the equipment, or the camera was not focused on anything very enlightening. Carrier had already, he said, come close enough to touch at least two of the elevator interferes, but even if he pursued them into a lighted area, they mingled with groups of students too quickly for him to feel certain of identifying them. Hence the pressurized paint can: it covered its victim with paint so that he could be readily recognized; melting away into a crowd would not be possible.

The only problem in this case was, as Hankster pointed out to Carrier in agonized whispers, the wrong man had been sprayed, the wrong man’s expensive clothes had been ruined, and they had all made idiots of themselves.

“Then what
were
you doing there?” Carrier had not unnaturally asked.

“Trying to prevent a misguided youngster from getting
himself into serious trouble for the wrong cause,” Hankster said.

“One of your radical students, no doubt,” Cartier said.

“Perhaps, as you say, a radical student, though hardly mine. The idea of disrupting the University by elevator hanky-panky did not originate with me, or him, or any radical in the ordinary sense of the word.”

“With whom, then, did it originate?” Reed asked.

“Cudlipp, of course,” Hankster said. “Didn’t you guess?”

They both stared at him for a moment. “And,” Reed asked, before Cartier could make some remark as rude as it was concise, “would you be willing to arrange for us to meet one of the students involved in this at Cudlipp’s instigation?”

“No,” Hankster said. “I’ll do my best to stop this business, if I have enough influence to accomplish it, enough persuasive powers, and am not poisoned by all this paint, but I won’t give you a single name. Sorry about that.”

He marched out, probably the first man, as Kate later observed, to desert a conversation with Cartier before Cartier did.

“But,” Kate asked Reed that night, “can Hankster’s accusation possibly be true?”

T
HE
following morning’s mail brought an invitation to a poetry reading from the Graduate Students’ English Society, The GSES, clearly proud of itself, announced its poet with a flourish and a photograph: W. H. Auden. Kate looked with pleasure at the picture of the white, marvelously rumpled face. Of Icelandic descent, Auden possessed, in the words of Christopher Isherwood, “hair like bleached straw and thick, coarse-looking, curiously white flesh, as though every drop of blood had been pumped out of his body.” The lines in Auden’s face, originally formed, Isherwood said, by “the misleading ferocious frown common to people of very short sight,” had, over the years, deepened and softened: the expression, Kate thought, looking at the photograph, was less ferocious than
experienced, life-tossed. She looked forward to the poetry reading. I wonder, she thought, if Clemance will be going. It seems, somehow, suitable that he and I and Auden should be in the same room together in these strange days. But of course he knows Auden and will probably want to see him first.

It would all have to be arranged soon. Auden’s reading was not far off and must have been arranged hurriedly, but the new GSES was doing well. The previous organization of Graduate English students had, in fact, belonged to the students only nominally; the faculty had used it to try out members from other institutions whom it might later choose to woo. Since the revolution, the GSES had been wrested from faculty hands and devoted to readings and discussion which the students thought interesting: everyone considered the arrangement a wonderful improvement as God knows it is, Kate thought, marking the date down on her calendar.

She was interrupted in this observation by the ringing of the telephone. Clemance, as though in answer to her thought, asked if she were going to the reading and if she would accompany him. Auden, Clemance said, would not be dining at the University but would arrive just for the reading. Somewhat astonished, Kate agreed to meet Clemance outside the auditorium. “I had just opened the invitation myself,” she said, “and was thinking that you must be planning to go.”

“Oh, yes,” Clemance said. “I have always, of course, admired his poetry, but it is truly eerie how near he is to the bone these days. Do you know the lines:

He is so right in those lines,” Clemance went on, “about how one feels, even toward those students who have most cavalierly and with least thought destroyed the confidence and cordiality it took years to establish. And so right, of course, about guilt. We who in the turmoil of today can continue to believe that we did nothing—we are the generation, are we not, who is finished? Will you bring Reed Amhearst?”

“To the reading? Certainly, if he wants to come; he hears so much Auden these days he’s quoting it himself. But I suspect there will be an awful mob.”

“I think I can reserve three seats,” Clemance said. “My influence, though waning, extends that far. A quarter of eight then, Friday evening?”

When he had rung off Kate pondered a bit about the fancy Clemance had taken to Reed, who appeared oddly skittish in the presence of the famous professor. Certainly that remark about the horrors of daughters having babies had been the absolutely most uncharacteristic remark she had ever heard Reed make. Well, it was probably one of the happier effects of the turmoil that people no longer sorted themselves out so neatly. Reed, indeed, had become a more rigorous attender of the
University than she. He was there now, hanging from pipes no doubt and contemplating elevators.

Reed, at that moment, was thinking of elevators, though not hanging from pipes. He was in fact smack in the middle of the campus contemplating Hankster’s suggestion about Cudlipp. A red herring? The determining factor was, of course, when precisely … Reed turned his steps toward the Administration Building.