Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  “I don’t know why I did it,” the girl bleated pitifully. “I was in love with him and he wouldn’t even look at me. I was going to kill myself last night, and I thought I would do this instead, to hurt him, or —

  “Now, Margaret, you must control yourself,” Mrs. Carr admonished, her hands hovering over the girl’s shoulders.

  “Just a minute,” Norman said. “Miss Van Nice —”

  She looked around and up at him, apparently just becoming aware of his presence.

  Norman waited a little. Neither of them moved. Then he said, “Miss Van Nice, last night between the time you decided to kill yourself and the time you decided to hurt me this way, did you do something else? Did you by any chance make a phone call?”

  The girl didn’t answer, but after a few moments a blush appeared on her tear-stained face, overspread it, and flowed down under her dress. A little later even her forearms were dull read.

  Cunnison registered vague curiosity.

  Mrs. Carr looked at the girl sharply, bending toward her. For a moment Norman fancied that there was something distinctly venomous in her searching glance. But that was probably just a trick of the thick glasses, which sometimes magnified Mrs. Carr’s eyes until they looked fishlike.

  The girl did not react as Mrs. Carr’s hands touched her shoulders. She was still looking at Norman, now with an expression of agonized embarrassment and entreaty.

  “That’s all right,” Norman said softly, “Nothing to worry about,” and he smiled at her sympathetically.

  The girl’s expression changed completely. She suddenly shook loose from Mrs. Carr and sprang up facing Norman. “Oh, I hate you!” she screamed. “I hate you!”

  Gunnison followed him out of the office. He yawned, shook his head, and remarked, “Glad that’s over. Incidentally, Gardner says nothing could possibly have happened to her.”

  “Never a dull moment,” Norman responded, absently.

  “Oh, by the way,” Gunnison said, dragging a stiff white envelope out of his inside pocket, “here’s a note for Mrs. Saylor. Hulda asked me to give it to you. I forgot about it before.”

  “I met Hulda coming out of your office this morning,” Norman said, his thoughts still elsewhere.

  Somewhat later, back at Morton, Norman tried to come to grips with those thoughts, but found them remarkably slippery. The dragon on the roof ridge of Estrey Hall lured away his attention. Funny about little things like that. You never even noticed them for years, and then they suddenly popped into focus. How many people could give you one single definite fact about the architectural ornaments of buildings in which they worked? Not one in ten, probably. Why, if you had asked him yesterday about that dragon, he couldn’t for his life have been able to tell you even if there was one or not.

  He leaned on the window sill, looking at the lizardlike yet grotesquely anthropoid form, bathed in the yellow sunset glow, which, his wandering mind remembered, was supposed to symbolize the souls of the dead passing into and out of the underworld. Below the dragon, jutting from under the cornice, was a sculptured head, one of a series of famous scientists and mathematicians decorating the entablature. He made out the name “Galileo,” along with a brief inscription of some sort.

  When he turned back to answer the phone, it suddenly seemed very dark in the office.

  “Saylor? I just want to tell you that I’m going to give you until tomorrow —”

  “Listen, Jennings,” Norman cut in sharply, “I hung up on you last night because you kept shouting into the phone. This threatening line won’t do you any good.”

  The voice continued where it had broken off, growing dangerously high. “— until tomorrow to withdraw your charges and have me reinstated at Hempnell.”

  Then the voice broke into a screaming obscene torrent of abuse, so loud that Norman could still hear it very plainly as he placed the receiver back in the cradle.

  Paranoid — that was the way it sounded.

  Then he suddenly sat very still.

  At twenty past one last night he had burned a charm supposedly designed to ward off evil influence from him. The last of Tansy’s “hands.”

  At about the same time Margaret Van Nice had decided to avow’ her fanciful passion for him, and Theodore Jennings had decided to make him responsible for an imaginary plot.

  Next morning sanctimonious Trustee Fenner had called up Thompson about the Utell party, and Hervey Sawtelle, poking around in the stacks, had found —

  Rubbish!

  With an angry snort of laughter at his own credulity, he picked up his hat and headed for home.

  5

  Tansy was in a radiant mood, prettier than she had seemed in months. Twice he caught her smiling to herself, when he glanced up from his supper.

  He gave her the note from Mrs. Gunnison. “Mrs. Carr asked after you, too. Gushed all over me — in a ladylike way, of course. Then, later on —” He caught himself as he started to tell about the cigarette and Mrs. Carr cutting him and the whole Margaret Van Nice business. No use worrying Tansy right now with things that might be considered bad luck. No telling what further consfruction she might put upon them.

  She glanced through the note and handed it back to him.

  “It has the authentic Hempnell flavor, don’t you think?” she observed.

  He read:

  Dear Tansy:

  Where are you keeping yourself? I haven’t seen you on campus more than once or twice this last month. If you’re busy with something especially interesting, why not tell us about it? Why not come to tea this Saturday, and tell me all about yourself?

  Hulda

  P.S. You’re supposed to bring four dozen cookies to the Local Alumni Wives’ Reception the Satisrday after.

  “Bather confused-sounding,” he said, “but I clearly perceive the keen bludgeon of Mrs. Gunnison. She looked particularly sloppy today.”

  Tansy laughed. “Still, we have been pretty antisocial these last weeks. I believe I’ll ask them over for bridge tomorrow night. It’s short notice, but they’re usually free Wednesdays. And the Sawtelles.”

  “Do we have to? That henpecker?”

  Tansy laughed. “I don’t know how you would ever manage to get along without me —” She stopped short. “I’m afraid you’ll have to endure Evelyn. After all, Hervey’s the other important man in your department, and it’s expected that you see something of each other socially. To make two tables, I’ll invite the Carrs.”

  “Three fearful females,” said Norman. “If they represent the average run of professors’ wives, I was lucky to get you.”

  “I sometimes think the same thing about professors’ wives’ husbands,” said Tansy.

  As they smoked over the coffee, she said hesitatingly, “Norm, I said I didn’t want to talk about last night. But now there’s something I want to tell you.”

  He nodded.

  “I didn’t tell you last night, Norm, but when we burned those… things, I was terribly frightened. I felt that we were knocking holes in walls that had taken me years to build, and that now there was nothing to keep out the —”

  He said nothing, sat very still.

  “Oh, it’s hard to explain, but ever since I began to… play with those things, I’ve been conscious of pressure from outside, A vague neurotic fear, something like the way you feel about trucks. Things trying to push their way in and get at us. And I’ve had to press them back, fight back at them with my — It’s like that test of strength men sometimes make, trying to force each other’s hand to the table. But that wasn’t what I was starting to say.

  “I went to bed feeling miserable and scared. The pressure from outside kept tightening around me, and I couldn’t resist it, because we’d burned those things. And then suddenly, as I lay in the dark, about en hour after I went to bed, I got the most tremendous feeling of relief. The pressure vanished, as if I’d bobbed up to the surface after almost drowning. And I knew then… that I’d gotten over my craziness. That’s why I’m so happy.” />
  It was hard for Norman not to tell Tansy what he was thinking. Here was one more coincidence, hut it knocked the others into a cocked hat. At about the same time as he had burned the last charm, experiencing a sensation of fear, Tansy had felt a great relief. That would teach him to build theories on coincidences!

  “For I was crazy in a way, dear,” she was saying. “There aren’t many people who would have taken it as you did.”

  He said, “You weren’t crazy — which is a relative term, anyway, applicable to anyone. You were just fooled by the cussedness of things.”

  “Cussedness?”

  “Yes. The way nails sometimes insist on bending when you hammer, as if they were trying to. Or the way machinery refuses to work, Matter’s funny stuff. In large aggregates, it obeys natural law, but when you get down to the individual atom or electron, it’s largely a matter of chance or whim —” This conversation was not taking the direction he wanted it to, and he was thankful when Totem jumped onto the table, creating a diversion.

  It turned out to be the pleasantest evening they had spent together in ages.

  But next morning when he arrived at Morton, Norman wished he had not gotten started on that “cussedness of things” notion. It stuck in his mind. He found himself puzzling over the merest trifles — such as the precise position of that idiotic cement dragon. Yesterday he remembered thinking that it was exactly in the middle of the descending roof ridge. But now he saw that it was obviously two thirds of the way down, quite near the architrave topping the huge useless Gothic gateway set between Estrey and Morton. Even a social scientist ought to have better powers of observation than that!

  The jangle of the phone coincided with the nine o’clock buzzer.

  “Professor Saylor?” Thompson’s voice was apologetic. “I’m sorry to bother you again, but I just got another inquiry from one of the trustees — Liddell, this time. Concerning an informal address you were supposed to have delivered at about the same time as that… er… party. The topic was ‘What’s wrong with College Education.’”

  “Well, what about it? Are you implying there’s nothing wrong with college education, or that the topic is taboo?”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no. But the trustee seemed to think that you were making a criticism of Hempnell.”

  “Of small colleges of the same type as Hempnell, yes. Of Hempnell specifically, no.”

  “Well, he seemed to fear it might have a detrimental effect on enrollment for next year. Spoke of several friends of his with children of college age as having heard your address and being unfavorably impressed.”

  “Then they were supersensitive.”

  “He also seemed to think you had made a slighting reference to President Pollard’s… en… political activities.”

  “I’m sorry but I have to get along to a class now.”

  “Very well,” said Thompson, and hung up. Norman grimaced. The cussedness of things certainly wasn’t to be compared with the cussedness of people! Then he jumped up and hurried off to his “Primitive Societies.”

  Gracine Pollard was absent, he noted with an inward grin, wondering if yesterday’s lecture had been too much for her warped sense of propriety. But even the daughters of college presidents ought to be told a few home truths now and then.

  And on the others, yesterday’s lecture had had a markedly stimulating effect. Several students had abruptly chosen related subjects for their term papers, and the fraternity president had capitalized on his yesterday’s discomfiture by planning a humorous article for the Hempnell Buffoon on the primitive significance of fraternity initiations. All in all they had a very brisk session.

  Afterwards Norman found himself musing good-humoredly on how college students were misunderstood by a great many people.

  Collegians were generally viewed as dangerously rebellious and radical, and shockingly experimental in their morality. Indeed the lower classes were inclined to picture them as monsters of unwholesomeness and perversion, potential murderers of little children and celebrants of various equivalents of the Black Mass. Whereas actually they were more conventional than many high school kids. And as for experiments in sex, they were a long way behind those whose education ended with grade school.

  Instead of standing up boldly in the classroom and uttering rebel pronouncements, they were much more apt to be fawningly hypocritical, desirous only of saying the thing that would please the teacher most. Small danger of their getting out of hand! On the contrary, it was necessary to charm them slowly into truthfulness, away from the taboos and narrow-mindedness of the home. And how much more complex these problems became, and needful of solution, when you were living in an obvious time of interim morality like today, when national loyalty and faithfulness to family alone were dissolving in favor of a wider loyalty and a wider love — or in favor of a selfish, dog-eat-dog, atom-bombed chaos, if the human spirit were hedged, clipped, and dwarfed by traditional egotisms and fears.

  College faculty members were as badly misrepresented to the general public as were college students. Actually they were a pretty timorous folk, exceedingly sensitive to social disapproval. That they occasionally spoke out fearlessly was all the more to their credit.

  All of which of course reflected society’s slow-dying tendency to view teachers not as educators but as vestal virgins of a sort, living sacrifices on the altar of respectability, housed in suitably grim buildings and judged on the basis of a far stricter moral code than that applied to businessmen and housewives. And in their vestal-virgining, their virginity counted much more than their tending of the feeble flame of imaginative curiosity and honest intellectual inquiry. Indeed, for all most people cared, the flame might safely be let go out, so long as the teachers remained sitting around it in their temple — inviolate, sour-faced, and quite frozen testimonials to the fact that somebody was upholding moral values somewhere.

  Norman thought wryly: Why, they actually want us to be witches, of a harmless sort. And Linade Tansy stop!

  The irony tickled him and he smiled.

  His good humor lasted until after his last class that afternoon, when he happened to meet the Sawtelles in front of Morton Hall.

  Evelyn Sawtelle was a snob and a fake intellectual. The illusion she tried most to encourage was that she had sacrificed a great career in the theater in order to marry Hervey. While in reality she had never even been able to wrangle the directorship of the Hempnell Student Players and had had to content herself with a minor position in the Speech Department. She had an affected carriage and a slightly arty taste in clothes that, taken along with her flat cheeks and dull black hair and eyes, suggested the sort of creature you sometimes see stalking through the lobby at ballet and concert intermissions.

  But far from being a bohemian, Evelyn Sawtelle was even more inclined to agonize over the minutiae of social convention and prestige than most Hempnell faculty wives. Yet because of her general incompetence, this anxiety did not result in tactfulness, but rather its opposite.

  Her husband was completely under her thumb. She managed him like a business — bunglingly, overzealously, but with a certain dogged effectiveness.

  “I had lunch today with Henrietta… I mean Mrs. Pollard,” she announced to Norman with the air of one who has just visited royalty.

  “Oh say, Norman —” Hervey began excitedly, thrusting forward his brief case.

  “We had a very interesting chat,” his wife swept on. “We talked about you, too, Norman. It seems Gracine has been misinterpreting some of the things you’ve been saying in your class. She’s such a sensitive girl.”

  “Dumb bunny, you mean.” Norman corrected mentally. He murinured, “Oh?” with some show of politeness.

  “Dear Henrietta was a little puzzled as just how to handle it, though of course she’s a very tolerant, cosmopolitan soul. I just mentioned it because I thought you’d want to know. After all, it is very important that no one get any wrong impressions about the department. Don’t you agree with me, Hervey?” She
ended sharply.

  “What, dear? Oh, yes, yes. Say Norman, I want to tell you about that thesis I showed you yesterday. The most amazing thing! Its main arguments are almost exactly the same as those in your book! An amazing case of independent investigators arriving at the same conclusions. Why, it’s like Darwin and Wallace, or —”

  “You didn’t tell me anything about this, dear,” said his wife.

  “Wait a minute,” said Norman.

  He hated to make an explanation in Mrs. Sawtelle’s presence, but it had to be done.

  “Sorry, Hervey, to have to substitute a rather sordid story for an intriguing scientific coincidence. It happened when I was an instructor here — 1929, my first year. A graduate student named Cunningham got hold of my ideas — I was friendly with him — and incorporated them into his doctor’s thesis. My work in superstition and neurosis was just a side line then, and partly because I was sick with pneumonia for two months I didn’t read his thesis until after he’d gotten his degree.”

  Sawtelle blinked. His face resumed its usual worried expression. A look of vague disappointment came into Mrs. Sawtelle’s black-button eyes, as if she would have liked to read the thesis, lingering over each paragraph, letting her suspicions have full scope, before hearing the explanation.

  “I was very angry,” Norman continued, “and intended to expose him. But then I heard he’d died. There was some hint of suicide. He was an unbalanced chap. How he’d hoped to get away with such an out-and-out steal, I don’t know, anyway, I decided not to do anything about it, for his family’s sake. You see, it would have supplied a reason for thinking he had committed suicide.”

  Mrs. Sawtelle looked incredulous.

  “But, Norman,” Sawtelle commented anxiously, “was that really wise? I mean to keep silent. Weren’t you taking a chance? I mean with regard to your academic reputation?”

  Abruptly Mrs. Sawtelle’s manner changed.

  “Put that thing back in the stacks, Hervey, and forget about it,” she directed curtly. Then she smiled archly at Norman. “I’ve been forgetting I have a surprise for you, Professor Saylor. Come down to the sound booth now, and I’ll show you. It won’t take a minute. Come along, Hervey.”