Three to Be Read

by Philip Wylie

  “How come?” he said, pushing past Marylin.

  Ramsay looked up. “How come what?”

  “That. Saving his life. Diving that deep-with nothing. Staying under water like a fish. How come?”

  Ramsay felt the pulse fluttering in the wrist he held. He looked at the deck, obscurely. “It wasn’t—anything.”

  “How come?” Dodson was still too frantic to show much self-control.

  Ramsay said quietly, “Well—it wasn’t anything, really. You see—at Poaki—the natives were pearl divers. And I dived with them—from the time I was a little kid. I’ve been down deeper. And maybe even stayed under longer-when I was in practice.”

  Dodson stared wildly. “Why didn’t you tell us you were a pearl diver?”

  “I never thought of it,” Ramsay said. He turned. “You can let up, Des, for a moment, and see how he breathes. His pulse is coming back.”

  Late that evening, Marylin and Ramsay started through the lobby of the hotel, for a walk. He was limping from cuts sustained when he had used his knees to push lumps of coral under the timbers. But they would have strolled, in any case, only to the nearest park bench or secluded nook.

  A voice in the lobby reached them. Dodson’s voice—on long distance. He had left open the phone booth door and he was shouting loudly enough to hold the attention of the whole room. Marylin checked Ramsay.

  “Listen! Dod’s talking to Dave and Clay, in Miami Beach.”

  Ramsay tried to escape. He did not want to eavesdrop on an inter-fraternal conversation. She held him.

  “Sure, Pierce is all right,” Dodson was saying. “I just left the hospital and I’ll tell you how all right he is. He asked me if I could get the nurse changed to a blonde. His voice is a bit squeaky—but as impertinent as ever. He told the head nurse he wanted beefsteak, not custard. Called the custard, ‘these filthy curds.’”

  Dodson laughed. There was a pause. Then he said, “How did you hear about that?

  Pierce wrote, eh? So okay! So okay! Our Binney isn’t a fighter. He didn’t help out in that restaurant brawl. We can skip it, however. He has other virtues… . Yeah… . Yeah… . I know I’m the best swimmer—and I was twenty feet short… . Yep… . Sixty feet down… . I said at least three minutes, and Crunch agrees … The guy is half fish… . That’s right, pearl diving… . Ye gods, I never thought to ask him if he got any pearls! He got Pierce—isn’t that enough?”

  Marylin led Ramsay toward the door. “Did you?”

  “Did I what?” The door turned and the aromatic dark enveloped them.

  “Ever get any pearls?”

  “A few,” Ramsay smiled. “Quite a few, in fact. You’ll see, if you ever happen to marry me.”

  The formal announcement of their engagement was made by the Brushes at a lawn party, on a Junelike December afternoon. Green acres, ornamented here with topiary art, there with a blue swimming pool, and yonder with a maze and a tennis court, stretched from the large house to the azure bay. They were now populated with hundreds of persons. Among these were Crunch and Des, dressed for the occasion, beaming, greeting many an old friend and customer.

  Crunch walked to a long table and took a cup of punch. He handed a second to Des. They made each other a small, nearly invisible toast.

  “Marylin looks terrific,” Des said.

  “Nice gal. I think Ram can handle her, too.”

  “Easy!” Des said. “She’ll graduate this year, though. And he’ll probably take her to some faraway spot. I’ll miss ‘em. Had fun watching the guy finally learn to fish.”

  Crunch shook his head. “Ram told me yesterday he had a lot of work to do here on Brill’s disease-and several other things have turned up. I’ll bet they stick around for a while. Miami could use a good research epidemiologist.” He stared across the wide lawn at Dr. Binney.

  Ramsay was bathed in a sensation of bliss so deep and extensive that he almost knew—but not quite—it could not endure. He, too, was sipping punch—and talking to a favorite Brush aunt—Aunt Augusta—who had flown down from Seattle. A large woman, characteristically, with a high pile of white hair, a foghorn voice, and a gentle heart. She eyed Ramsay thoughtfully. “You’re a strange choice for my niece, young man. But I think… .”

  Ramsay’s attention wandered. There was an unobtrusive commotion amongst the guests. Pierce stepped up hurriedly to Crunch and Des. They set down their glasses—unfinished—and followed Pierce through a tall hedge.

  Clayton—the weight-lifting brother—and Davidson—the boxer—soon went through the same hedge, quickly.

  Ramsay said, “Excuse me,” to Aunt Augusta. He departed.

  Beyond the hedge was the maze and beyond the maze he heard voices. Voices raised in anger. He knew the maze—Marylin had taught it to him under romantic conditions-and when he came out on the other side he found the four Brush boys, Crunch and Des, and a tall, very husky stranger who was talking loudly.

  “I say I’m going in—and I say you can’t stop me.”

  Dodson saw the doctor. “Stay out of this one, will you, Ramsay?”

  The young stranger thereupon broke past Dodson and Clayton and rushed up to Ramsay. “You’re the person I wanted to see. Hello, wise guy!”

  “Who are you?” Ramsay asked.

  The man said nothing. He was somewhat taller than Ramsay and a good deal heavier. He came closer, glaring. Pierce spoke flatly. “This is a bird named Roger.

  Marylin used to go around with him.”

  “For a lot of years,” Roger said hotly.

  “She told him about you, Ramsay,” Pierce continued, “and broke it off, long since.

  This cluck is somewhat drunk—”

  Roger took it up on his own. “—and so I came over here, Dr. Ramsay Binney—to bust you wide open!”

  “You did?” Ramsay seemed to doubt it.

  “Just one smack,” Roger continued. “That’s all. You took my girl, but I don’t give up easy. I’m going to fix it so you’ll spend your honeymoon picking teeth out of your throat.”

  The Brushes—as well as Crunch and Des—moved in slowly.

  Ramsay glanced at them and shook his head.

  Roger stepped nearer still. His hands closed.

  Davidson spoke. “You better step back, Ramsay. The guy’s a fighter. A dirty one, too—I’ve boxed with him. One poke—and you’ll be in rotten shape for a party. Just back away-and we’ll close in-toss the monkey out of the grounds… .”

  Ramsay did not back away. He eyed Roger and murmured, “I wouldn’t want to hurt him.”

  Roger said, “Whaaaat?”

  Ramsay said. “Marylin’s mine—and that’s that. It’s tough, but it happens. I’m sorry.

  I’d—I’d like to be your friend.”

  “What you are going to be, is my meat.”

  “I said—” Ramsay’s voice dropped—“I don’t want to hurt you. And I might. So don’t swing, I warn you.”

  Roger swung.

  The muscles of six extraordinarily powerful men tensed. From where they stood, they couldn’t spare Ramsay the first haymaker. But they could stop a second blow.

  The first haymaker, however, went wide. Ramsay had moved—with incredible swiftness. “I tell you, Roger,” he repeated, almost mournfully, “quit that! I’m not sure but I might seriously injure you.”

  Roger’s eyes were blindly enraged. He gathered himself and rushed in. The six men now waited: maybe the doctor wasn’t bluffing.

  What followed was in no sense boxing. It was not wrestling, as wrestling is known. It was not ju-jitsu. Ramsay was everywhere. His hands, legs, arms, elbows, shoulders—flew like shadows. He was on his knees for an instant. For another, he seemed to sail in the air.

  Roger was bent to one side, then the other, turned around, struck in fifty places; his punches went wide, weakened, ceased. Quite suddenly he shot into the air and fell with a heavy thud. Ramsay was on him again, but this time not attacking. While Crunch and the four brothers stared—breathing hard, a little sh
ocked—Ramsay tested Roger’s neck and then his shoulders.

  “Nothing broken,” he said with immense relief. “Egad! I was scared I’d really hurt him!” He felt the pulse in Roger’s neck. “He’ll come to—in about five minutes.”

  Silence. Finally Pierce said, in a meek tone, “Ram, I thought you didn’t fight?”

  “I don’t. This isn’t fighting—as a sport.”

  “Just what do you call it? That oaf should have mangled you.”

  Ramsay frowned. He was not panting or perspiring—but he was looking rather unhappily at two small grass stains on his trouser knees. “Have to change, I guess. Maybe one of you ‘will lend me something?” He bethought himself of the question. “What do I call it? Oeenee-mao-paakii. That would translate, approximately, as ‘the way of the serpent.’ It’s also called, ‘the ninety deaths.’”

  “Poaki?” Dod asked, humbly.

  Ramsay nodded. “I didn’t really put the pressure on, you know. Took it very easy.

  Yeah. The head-hunters taught me. For a head-hunt, on our island, if you waste your spear, and have to come to grips, it’s always your head or the other man’s. Our tribe—before Mother and Father stopped them-had ‘the way of the serpent’-and they hardly ever lost a head.”

  “I can imagine not,” Dod said.

  Clayton snorted.

  “I’ll get you some trousers,” Pierce offered. “Come on, Ram. That guy’ll be hard for you to meet again—ever.”

  The doctor looked at Roger once more. “He’ll be stiff and pretty lame for a week or two, poor chap!” He shook his head sympathetically.

  Crunch and Des walked back—skirting the maze judiciously. They were seized upon by Aunt Augusta. “Aren’t you two the celebrated fishermen? I’m so glad to meet you! I’m Aunt Augusta Towers-née Brush! What are you both grinning about? Canary-swallowing of some sort!”

  Des looked the aunt over placidly and decided he liked her. “We’ve been watching Ramsay.”

  “Where is Ramsay? He left me—quite rudely, I thought—”

  “He had a little business to tend to,” Crunch replied. “Urgent. But trifling—for Ramsay—it turned out. He’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Augusta nodded. “I was just saying to him that I thought he was a rather—well—curious choice, for Marylin.”

  “He’ll do,” Crunch murmured.

  “Oh, I’m sure. But—really—he’s no athlete, like the others—”

  “No,” said Des. “No athlete.”

  “Wretched at games, I hear.”

  “He’s learning. In time—with confidence—”

  “Not,” said Augusta, “an outdoor type, at all.”

  Crunch raised an eyebrow. “Wellll—in the usual sense possibly not.”

  “What I mean is,” Augusta continued, “that you’d expect Marylin to pick for a husband somebody who was a sportsman.”

  Crunch and Des looked at each other and then at Augusta.

  Crunch said, “As to that—I think you can call Ram a sportsman, Aunt Augusta. I really do.”

  Experiment in Crime

  Chapter I

  A RINGING denunciation of crime was responsible for the entrance of Professor Martin Luther Burke into the demimonde. More accurately, the challenge of a lovely young lady precipitated the event. And the weather had something to do with it.

  Men’s lives are often—and fittingly—compared with the courses of rivers: one life is a noisy torrent, another is a lazy meander, and a third is a mere tributary. Some rivers flow inconspicuously for great distances only to encounter a geological fault that turns them abruptly into crashing falls and bellowing cataracts. So it was with Professor Burke.

  For his first six years he had merely grown, an undersized and unnoteworthy lad in a New England village—a mere rill. For seventeen years, he had thereafter studied—a small stream growing with the volume of knowledge. He had been an instructor after that, teaching sociology and psychology. Full professorship was accorded him in his thirtieth year, after a wartime interlude in which his forte had been disregarded by the Army and his knowledge of languages had been exploited. He had censored endless thousands of letters written by homesick G.I.s in other tongues than English. His collected lectures had been published. Now, as a professor of socio-psychology at the University of Miami, his course in life, like the courses he taught, seemed certain to flow serenely—a river without dash, a river that neither floods nor dries up, that scarcely changes even when it freezes.

  The trouble was the weather, to start with.

  It was an unsuitable day for scholarship. A warm haze hung over the land and sunlight filtered through it, lying on the lush vegetation like melted butter. Birds sang alluringly. A clump of bushes, planted directly under the windows by a thoughtless landscape architect, sent into the lecture room an unsettling perfume. It was bad enough for the young lady students to wear commercial fragrances with names like Tumult and Triple-Dare; that nature should conspire in the fashion was all but intolerable.

  Professor Burke paused in his lecture on Crime and Civic Corruption. “Greater Miami,” he said, “unfortunately furnishes a cross section of the socio-psychological ailments under discussion.” As usual, the mention of their own region instilled new interest among the students. “In this resort area the demand for what is called diversion reaches a nadir. The gambler, the bookmaker, the racketeer and the vice overlord line the pockets of the politician for illegal protection. I refer you here to Studies in Antisocial Organisms by Waite and Treachness, which contains a masterly chapter on South Florida… .”

  As he dissertated upon Waite and Treachness, his own eye wandered to the window and the green world beyond. MacFalkland was just passing—on a bicycle—golf bag jingling on his back and his hirsute chest showing through the open triangle of a rather loud sports shirt. MacFalkland had no four o’clock class. It was one bit of evidence—a chip in a large mosaic-which made Professor Burke sure that not he, but MacFalkland, was destined to be made Head of the Socio-Psychology Department, when there were funds enough for its establishment. Professor Burke found in a corner of his brain the unwelcome reflection that MacFalkland looked as if he still had several decades of teaching in him. He shook off the mordant idea.

  “The criminal,” he heard his voice assert, “is an intellectual defective. His crimes are evidence of the fact of his psychological inferiority. You might note down the phrase.” They noted it down while he glanced at his own typed manuscript. Vacation would be along soon, and he, too, could wing golf balls into the sunshine for three weeks.

  He wished he had MacFalkland’s shoulders. “The man guilty of corrupting the body politic is, essentially, lacking in imagination and logic. He saws off the limb which sustains him. Crime is identical with the lack of intelligence.”

  He glanced at his watch. He had one minute of lecture left—and twelve minutes of class time. He wound up his ringing denunciation—and banished hope, among those who imagined they might be dismissed early, by an old ruse:

  “Any questions, ladies and gentlemen?”

  A hand went up. The hand of Miss Marigold Macey. In spite of her campus-belle appearance, in spite of the frame of curls which seemed to escape her upswept brown locks by accident, and in spite of the further fact of her good marks, Miss Macey had a way of asking rather sharp questions.

  “Yes, Miss Macey?”

  She stood up politely. Standing, even in blouse, skirt, and low-heeled shoes, she was still unstudentlike. A little older than the other girls, for one thing. Her education had been interrupted by work having to do with the Red Cross. Several of his male students were as old as she, and even older—for a similar reason: the War.

  “I was wondering, Professor Burke, if you were acquainted with any gamblers, racketeers, vice overlords, and so on?” Her voice had a New England accent-although he understood her parents had lived in Florida for more than a decade.

  “I fail to see the relevance of the question,” he said firmly. />
  She picked up her notebook and flipped pages. She sounded apologetic. “Last October—in your lecture on the Techniques of the Socio-Psychologist, you said this: ‘The true student accepts no theory per se and takes no hearsay evidence; he tests every assertion against his own experience in society; he investigates for himself.’” She closed the notebook. “That’s what you said. I took it down in shorthand. Naturally, I wondered how much testing and investigating you had done-to lecture about crime.”

  Professor Burke flushed slightly. His class was amused. “At the time,” he said, “I was discussing public health, sanitation, slums, and so on. I hardly feel that such advice may be construed as urging association with criminals.”

  “I see,” the girl said. She did not sit down.

  “Was there another question?”

  She nodded. “In November,” she said, and he bridled a little at her accuracies, “you advised us to read a book called Social Non-Norms, by Ledbetter, Shrieben and Morissey. I read it—all eight hundred pages. And they say a criminal is sometimes a person of superior intellectual ability who cannot stand the restrictions imposed upon everybody· for the sake of mediocrities. They say that brains may thus lead to crime—rather than stupidity… .”

  Professor Burke made a mental note never again to recommend any book which he, himself had found too dull, ponderous and turgid for thorough perusal. He had skipped that part, evidently. But he did not like mutiny in his classes. He cleared his throat. “In my opinion, Ledbetter, Shrieben and Morissey erred in their appraisal of that particular subject. They worked carelessly, from inadequate material and false premises—”

  “Shrieben,” Miss Macy interrupted, “spent two years in the Capone organization in Chicago… .”

  He had forgotten that, too. “A romantic,” he said, “rather than a scientist. Shrieben mistook cunning for true intelligence. Every holder of an ordinary degree of Bachelor of Arts is the mental superior of any criminal.”

  Another hand went up—the hand of Wally Stratton, formerly of the Eighth Air Force and currently of the Football Squad. Obviously, he intended to go to the defense of the physically nubile but mentally thorny Miss Macey.