Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (283 page)

I was not concerned solely with revulsion. Inquisitiveness looked out under loathing to make me wonder what lay behind the night’s events. What had really happened, and what did it all mean?

From scraps of conversation accidentally heard or deliberately eavesdropped, from the newspapers, from deduction and remembered fragments, I reconstructed the picture which made the background. Its borders reached a long way from Astor Place.

For years the world had been waiting, half in dread, half in resignation, for war to break out between the world’s two great powers, the German Union and the Confederate States. Some expected the point of explosion would be the Confederacy’s ally, the British Empire; most anticipated at least part of the war would be fought in the United States.

The scheme of the Grand Army, or of that part of it which included Tyss, was apparently a far-fetched and fantastic attempt to circumvent the probable course of history. The counterfeiting was an aspect of this attempt which was nothing less than trying to force the war to start, not through the Confederacy’s ally, but through the German Union’s—the Spanish Empire. With enormous amounts of the spurious currency circulated by emissaries posing as Confederate agents, the Grand Army hoped to embroil the Confederacy with Spain and possibly preserve the neutrality of the United States. It was an ingenuous idea evolved, I see now, by men without knowledge of the actual mechanics of world politics.

If I ever had any sentimental notions about the Army, they vanished now. Tyss’s mechanism may not have been purposefully designed to palliate, but it made it easy to justify actions like Sprovis’s. I had no such convenient way of numbing my conscience. But even as I brooded over the weakness and cowardice which made me an accomplice, I looked forward to my release. I had not seen Enfandin since his offer; in a week I would leave the bookstore for his sanctuary, and I resolved my first act should be to tell him everything. And then that dream was exploded just as it was about to be realized.

I do not know who it was that broke into the consulate or for what reason, and was surprised in the act, shooting and wounding Enfandin so seriously he was unable to speak for the weeks before he was finally returned to Haiti to recuperate or die. He could not have gotten in touch with me, and I was not permitted to see him; the police guard was doubly zealous to keep him from all contact since he was both an accredited diplomat and a black man.

I did not know who shot him. It was most unlikely to be anyone connected with the Grand Army, but I did not know. I could not know. He
might
have been shot by Sprovis or George Pondible. Since the ultimate chain could have led back to me, it did lead back to me. If this were the Manichaeanism of which Enfandin had spoken, I could not help it.

The loss of my chance to escape from the bookstore was the least of my despair. It seemed to me I was caught by the inexorable, choiceless circumstance in which Tyss so firmly believed and Enfandin denied. I could escape neither my guilt nor the surroundings conducive to further guilt. I could not change destiny.

Was all this merely the self-torture of any introverted young man? Possibly. I only know that for a long time, long as one in his early twenties measures time, I lost all interest in life, even dallying with thoughts of suicide. I put books aside distastefully or, which was worse, indifferently.

I must have done my work around the store; certainly I recall no comments from Tyss about it. Neither can I remember anything to distinguish the succession of days. Obviously I ate and slept; there were undoubtedly long hours free from utter hopelessness. The details of those months have simply vanished.

Nor can I say precisely when it was my despair began to lift. I know that one day—it was cold and the snow was deep on the ground, deep enough to keep the minibiles off the streets and cause the horsecars trouble—I saw a girl walking briskly, red-cheeked, breathing in quick visible puffs, and my glance was not apathetic. When I returned to the bookstore I picked up Field Marshal Liddell-Hart’s Life of General Pickett and opened it to the place where I had abandoned it. In a moment I was fully absorbed.

Paradoxically, once I was myself again I was no longer the same Hodge Backmaker. For the first time I was determined to do what I wanted instead of waiting and hoping events would somehow turn out right for me. Somehow I was going to free myself from the bookstore and all its frustrations and evils.

This resolution was reinforced by the discovery that I was exhausting the volumes around me. The books I sought now were rare and ever more difficult to find. Innocent of knowledge about academic life I imagined them ready to hand in any college library.

Nor was I any longer satisfied with the printed word alone. My friendship with Enfandin had shown me how fruitful a personal, face-to-face relationship between teacher and student could be, and it seemed to me such ties could develop into ones between fellow scholars, a mutual, uncompetitive pursuit of knowledge.

Additionally I wanted to search the real, the original sources: unpublished manuscripts of participants or onlookers, old diaries and letters, wills or account books, which might shade a meaning or subtly change the interpretation of old, forgotten actions.

My problems could be solved ideally by an instructorship at some college, but how was this to be achieved without the patronage of a Tolliburr or an Enfandin? I had no credentials worth a second’s consideration. Though the immigration bars kept out graduates of foreign universities, no college in the United States would accept a self-taught young man who had not only little Latin and less Greek, but no mathematics, languages, or sciences at all. For a long time I considered possible ways and means, both drab and dramatic; at last, more in a spirit of whimsical absurdity than sober hope, I wrote out a letter of application, setting forth the qualifications I imagined myself to possess, assaying the extent of my learning with a generosity only ingenuousness could palliate, and outlining the work I projected for my future. With much care and many revisions I set this composition in type. It was undoubtedly a foolish gesture, but not having access to so costly a machine as a typewriter, and not wanting to reveal this by penning the letters by hand, I resorted to this transparent device.

Tyss picked up one of the copies I struck off and glanced over it. His expression was critical. “Is it too bad?” I asked despondently.

“You should have used more leading. And lined it up and justified the lines and eliminated hyphens. Setting type can never be done mechanically or half heartedly—that’s why no one yet has been able to invent a practical typesetting machine. I’m afraid you’ll never make a passable printer, Hodgins.”

He was concerned only with typesetting, uninterested in the outcome. Or satisfied, since it was predetermined, that comment was superfluous.

Government mails, never efficient and always expensive, being one of the favorite victims of holdup men, and pneumatic post limited to local areas, I dispatched the letters by Wells-Fargo to a comprehensive list of colleges. I can’t say I then waited for the replies to flow in, for though I knew the company’s system of heavily armed guards would insure delivery of my applications, I had little anticipation of any answers. As a matter of fact I put it pretty well out of my mind, dredging it up at rarer intervals, always a trifle more embarrassed by my presumption.

It was several months later, toward the end of September, that the telegram came signed Thomas K. Haggerwells. It read, ACCEPT NO OFFER TILL OUR REPRESENTATIVE EXPLAINS HAGGERSHAVEN.

I hadn’t sent a copy of my letter to York, Pennsylvania, where the telegram had originated, or anywhere near it. I knew of no colleges in that vicinity. And I had never heard of Mr. (or Doctor or Professor) Haggerwells. I might have thought the message a mean joke, except that Tyss’s nature didn’t run to such humor and no one else knew of the letters except those to whom they were addressed.

I found no reference to Haggershaven in any of the directories I consulted, which wasn’t too surprising considering the slovenly way these were put together. I decided that if such a place existed I could only wait patiently until the “representative,” if there really was one, arrived.

Tyss having left for the day, I swept a little, dusted some, straightened a few of the books—any serious attempt to arrange the stock would have been futile—and took up a recent emendation of Greasy’s
Fifteen Decisive Battles
by one Captain MacArthur.

I was so deep in the good captain’s analysis (he might have made a respectable strategist himself, given an opportunity) that I heard no customer enter, sensed no impatient presence. I was only recalled from my book by a rather sharp, “Is the proprietor in?”

“No ma’am,” I answered, reluctantly abandoning the page. “He’s out for the moment. Can I help you?”

My eyes, accustomed to the store’s poor light, had the advantage over hers, still adjusting from the sunlit street. Secure in my audacity, I measured her vital femininity, a quality which seemed, if such a thing is possible, impersonal. There was nothing overtly bold or provocative about her, though I’m sure my mother would have thinned her lips at the black silk trousers and the jacket which emphasized the contour of her breasts. At a time when women used every device to call attention to their helplessness and consequently their desirability and the implied need for men to protect them, she carried an air which seemed to say, Why yes, I am a woman: not furtively or brazenly or incidentally, but primarily; what are you going to do about it?

I recognized a sturdy sensuality as I recognized the fact that she was bareheaded, almost as tall as I, and rather large-boned; certainly there was nothing related to me about it. Nor was it connected with surface attributes; she was not beautiful and still further from being pretty, though she might have been called handsome in a way. Her hair, ginger-colored and clubbed low on her neck, waved crisply; her eyes appeared slate gray. (Later I learned they could vary from pale gray to blue green.) The fleshly greediness was betrayed, if at all, only by the width and set of her lips, and that insolent expression.

She smiled, and I decided I had been quite wrong in thinking her tone peremptory. “I’m Barbara Haggerwells. I’m looking for a Mr. Backmaker”—she glanced at a slip of paper—“a Hodgins M. Backmaker who evidently uses this as an accommodation address.”

“I’m Hodge Backmaker,” I muttered in despair. “I—I work here.” I was conscious of not having shaved that morning, that my pants and jacket did not match, that my shirt was not clean.

I suppose I expected her to say nastily, So I see! or the usual, It must be fascinating! Instead she said, “I wonder if you’ve run across
The Properties of X
by Whitehead? I’ve been trying to get a copy for a long time.”

“Uh—I…Is it a mystery story?”

“I’m afraid not. It’s a book on mathematics by a mathematician very much out of favor. It’s hard to find, I suppose because the author is bolder than he is tactful.”

So naturally and easily she led me away from my embarrassment and into talking of books, relieving me of self-consciousness and some of the mortification in being exposed at my humble job by the “representative” of the telegram. I admitted deficient knowledge of mathematics and ignorance of Mr. Whitehead though I maintained, accurately, that the book was not in stock, while she assured me that only a specialist would have heard of so obscure a theoretician. This made me ask, with the awe one feels for an expert in an alien field, if she were a mathematician, to which she replied, “Heavens, no. I’m a physicist. But mathematics is my tool.”

I looked at her with respect. Anyone, I thought, can read a few books and set himself up as a historian; to be a physicist means genuine learning. And I doubted she was much older than I.

She said abruptly, “My father is interested in knowing something about you. “

I acknowledged this with something between a nod and a bow. She had been examining and gauging me for the past half hour. “Your father is Thomas Haggerwells?”

“Haggerwells of Haggershaven,” she confirmed, as though explaining everything. There was pride in her voice and a hint of superciliousness.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, Miss Haggerwells, but I’m afraid I’m as ignorant of Haggershaven as of mathematics.”

“I thought you said you’d been reading history. Odd you’ve come upon no reference to the Haven in the records of the past seventy-five years.”

I shook my head helplessly. “I suppose my reading has been scattered.” Her look indicated agreement but not absolution. “Haggershaven is a college?”

“No. Haggershaven is…Haggershaven.” She resumed her equanimity, her air of smiling tolerance. “It’s hardly a college since it has no student body nor faculty. Rather, both are one at the Haven. Anyone admitted is a scholar or potential scholar anxious to devote himself to learning. I mean for its own sake. Not many are acceptable.”

She need hardly have added this; it seemed obvious I could not be one of the elect, even if I hadn’t offended her by never having heard of Haggershaven. I knew I couldn’t pass the most lenient of entrance examinations to ordinary colleges, much less to the dedicated place she represented.

“There aren’t any formal requirements for fellowship,” she went on, “beyond the undertaking to work to full capacity, to pool all knowledge and hold back none from scholars anywhere, to contribute economically to the Haven in accordance with decisions of the majority of fellows, and to vote on questions without consideration of personal gain. There! That certainly sounds like the stuffiest manifesto delivered this year.”

“It sounds too good to be true.”

“Oh, it’s true enough.” She moved close, and I caught the scent of her hair and skin. “But there’s another side. The Haven is neither wealthy nor endowed. We have to earn our living. The fellows draw no stipend; they have food, clothes, shelter, whatever books and materials they need—no unessentials. We often have to leave our own individual work to do manual labor to bring in food or money for all.”