Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 2

The Professor’s Awakening-3

The perfessor always eats his dinner in one of them coats with the open-face vest to it, and one night I thinks I will, too. When you is in Rome you does like the Dagos does, I thinks.

So I sends for James along before dinner time and I says: “Where is my dinky clothes to eat dinner in?” I says.

James he says I'm to continue to eat dinner by myself. Which is all right, I tells him, but I'll do it in style or I'll quit the job. So he goes and asks Miss Estelle, and she comes in with that lemon grin on, but looking, too, like I done something to please her.

“Is it true,” she says, “that already the effects of a refined environment has overcome defections in early training and a misfortune in ancestral hereditary?” she says. Or they was words to that effect.

“It is true,” I says. And the perfessor's being too small she made James give me his'n. But when I seen all that shirt front it made me feel kind of uncomfortable, too. So I takes them off again and puts on my old striped sweater and puts on the vest and coat over that, and the effect of them red stripes running crossways is something gorgeous with one of them open-face vests over it.

So after I eat I don't want to go to bed and I gets a box of the perfessor's cigars and goes into the library and thinks I'll see if he's got anything fit to read. I dig around for a while among them shelves, and most everything is one brand of science or other, but finally I got hold of a little book that was real interesting. That was the damndest book! It was all in rhyme, with the explanations of the rhyme printed in real talk down the sides so as you could tell where you was at and what it was about. It's about an Ancient Mariner. The nut that wrote it he's never been sailing none, I bet; but he can make you feel like you been going against the hop in one of them c***k joints. Of course, there ain't nothing real literary about it like one of them Marie Corelli stories I read once and it ain't got the excitement of a good Bill Hart movie or a Nick Carter story, but I got real interested in it. The I-man of that story he was a Jonah to the whole ship. He seen an albatross circling around, and he up with his air g*n and give him his'n. It wasn't for nothing to eat, but just to be a-shooting. And from that on everybody gets as sick of living as a bunch of Chicago factory hands when another savings bank busts, and they all falls down and curses him. And the snakes wiggles all over the top of the water like I seen 'em one time when they cleaned out a reservoir where one of them prairie towns gets its drinking water from. And the Ancient Mariner he tries to die and can't make it; and their ghosts is whizzing all around that ship and they go by him in the moonlight like a puff of steam goes by you on a frosty morning out of an engine-room manhole. And there's a moral to that story, too. I bet the fellow that doped that out had been on an awful bat. I like to of talked with that nut. They was a fellow named Looney Hogan use to have them phoney hunches, and he use to tell me what he saw after he had 'em. Looney was awful good company and I use to like to hear him tell what he seen and what he thinks he seen, but he walked off of a grain barge up to Duluth when he was asleep one night and he never did wake up.

Sitting there thinking of the awful remarkable things that is, and the ones that isn't, and the ones that maybe is and maybe isn't, and the nuts that is phoney about some things and not about others, and how two guys can look at the same thing and when you ask them about it both has seen different things, I must a-went to sleep. And I must a-slept a long time there, and pretty soon in my sleep I heard two voices and then I wakes up sudden and still hears them, low and quicklike, in the room that opens right off from the library with a pair of them sliding doors like is on to a boxcar. One was a woman's voice, and not Miss Estelle's, and she says like she was choked up:

“But I must see them before we go, Henry.”

And the other was a man's voice, and it wasn't no one around our house.

“But, my God!” he says, “suppose you catch it yourself, Jane!”

I set up straight then, and I would of give a good deal to see through that door, because Jane was the perfessor's wife's first name.

“You mean suppose you get it,” she says. I like to of seen the look she must of give him to fit in with the way she says that you. He didn't say nothing, the man didn't; and then her voice softens down some, and she says, low and slow: “Henry, wouldn't you love me if I did get it? Suppose it marked and pitted me all up?”

“Oh, of course,” he says, “of course I would. Nothing can change the way I feel. You know that.” He said it quick enough, all right, just the way they do in a show, but it sounded too much like it does on the stage to of suited me if I'd been her. I seen folks overdo them little talks before this.

I listens some more, and then I see how it is. This is that musician feller Biddy Malone's been talking about. Jane's going to run off with him all right, but she's got to kiss the kids first. Women is like that. They may hate the kids' pa all right, but they's dad-burned few of 'em don't like the kids. I thinks to myself: “It must be late. I bet they was already started, or ready to start, and she made him bring her here first so's she could sneak in and see the kids. She just simply couldn't get by. But she's taking a fool risk, too. Fur how's she going to see Margery with that nurse coming and going and hanging around all night? And even if she tries just to see William Dear it's a ten to one shot he'll wake up and she'll be ketched at it.”

And then I thinks, suppose she is ketched at it? What of it? Ain't a woman got a right to come into her own house with her own door key, even if they is a quarantine on to it, and see her kids? And if she is ketched seeing them, how would anyone know she was going to run off? And ain't she got a right to have a friend of hern and her husband's bring her over from her mother's house, even if it is a little late?

Then I seen she wasn't taking no great risks neither, and I thinks mebby I better go and tell that perfessor what is going on, fur he has treated me purty white. And then I thinks: “I'll be gosh-derned if I meddle. So fur as I can see that there perfessor ain't getting fur from what's coming to him, nohow. And as fur her, you got to let some people find out what they want fur theirselves. Anyhow, where do I come in at?”

But I want to get a look at her and Henry, anyhow. So I eases off my shoes, careful-like, and I eases acrost the floor to them sliding doors, and I puts my eye down to the little c***k. The talk is going backward and forward between them two, him wanting her to come away quick, and her undecided whether to risk seeing the kids. And all the time she's kind o' hoping mebby she will be ketched if she tries to see the kids, and she's begging off fur more time ginerally.

Well, sir, I didn't blame that musician feller none when I seen her. She was a peach.

And I couldn't blame her so much, either, when I thought of Miss Estelle and all them scientifics of the perfessor's strung out fur years and years world without end.

Yet, when I seen the man, I sort o' wished she wouldn't. I seen right off that Henry wouldn't do. It takes a man with a lot of gumption to keep a woman feeling good and not sorry fur doing it when he's married to her. But it takes a man with twicet as much to make her feel right when they ain't married. This feller wears one of them little, brown, pointed beards fur to hide where his chin ain't. And his eyes is too much like a woman's. Which is the kind that gets the biggest piece of pie at the lunch counter and fergits to thank the girl as cuts it big. She was setting in front of a table, twisting her fingers together, and he was walking up and down. I seen he was mad and trying not to show it, and I seen he was scared of the smallpox and trying not to show that, too. And just about that time something happened that kind o' jolted me.

They was one of them big chairs in the room where they was that has got a high back and spins around on itself. It was right acrost from me, on the other side of the room, and it was facing the front window, which was a bow window. And that there chair begins to turn, slow and easy. First I thought she wasn't turning. Then I seen she was. But Jane and Henry didn't. They was all took up with each other in the middle of the room, with their back to it.

Henry is a-begging of Jane, and she turns a little more, that chair does. Will she squeak, I wonders?

“Don't you be a fool, Jane,” says the Henry feller.

Around she comes three hull inches, that there chair, and nary a squeak.

“A fool?” asks Jane, and laughs. “And I'm not a fool to think of going with you at all, then?”

That chair, she moved six inches more and I seen the calf of a leg and part of a crumpled-up coat tail.

“But I am going with you, Henry,” says Jane. And she gets up just like she is going to put her arms around him.

But Jane don't. Fur that chair swings clear around and there sets the perfessor. He's all hunched up and caved in and he's rubbing his eyes like he's just woke up recent, and he's got a grin on to his face that makes him look like his sister Estelle looks all the time.

“Excuse me,” says the perfessor.

They both swings around and faces him. I can hear my heart bumping. Jane never says a word. The man with the brown beard never says a word. But if they felt like me they both felt like laying right down there and having a fit. They looks at him and he just sets there and grins at them.

But after a while Jane, she says:

“Well, now you know! What are you going to do about it?”

Henry, he starts to say something, too. But——

“Don't start anything,” says the perfessor to him. “You aren't going to do anything.” Or they was words to that effect.

“Professor Booth,” he says, seeing he has got to say something or else Jane will think the worse of him, “I am——”

“Shut up,” says the perfessor, real quiet. “I'll tend to you in a minute or two. You don't count for much. This thing is mostly between me and my wife.”

When he talks so decided I thinks mebby that perfessor has got something into him beside science after all. Jane, she looks kind o' surprised herself. But she says nothing, except:

“What are you going to do, Frederick?” And she laughs one of them mean kind of laughs, and looks at Henry like she wanted him to spunk up a little more, and says: “What can you do, Frederick?”

Frederick, he says, not excited a bit:

“There's quite a number of things I could do that would look bad when they got into the newspapers. But it's none of them, unless one of you forces it on to me.” Then he says: