Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel

by De Vries, Peter

  “How are you, Waltz?”

  “Beginning to take a little nourishment.”

  I found myself affecting Inskip’s dry tone when I talked to them, for which I hated him, and myself too, of course. I was convinced that they secretly regarded me as a square. I did nothing that afternoon to offset the estimate. They had been talking about Picasso, in tones which assumed him to be the world’s greatest without question, etc. No one would dream of not taking that for granted—such was the implication. I felt my hackles rise. A certain stiffening resistance to all this caused me to make the remark I did, and with more heat than I had intended. “He lacks one thing,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Heart.”

  I saw Inskip look at Fangle and Pilbeam, and they all raised their teacups to their faces, no doubt to conceal or stifle smiles otherwise irrepressible. They had perhaps never heard such talk—certainly such language. The silence piqued me further.

  “He hasn’t got it here,” I said, and laid a hand on my breast.

  They were appalled. I had gone too far—I knew that. But there had been nowhere else to go from the original point (which I certainly had no intention of abandoning) but ahead. One is, in such cases, lured across the borders of tolerability by the sheer necessity of increased emphasis which the defense of a position entails. I had been driven to it.

  The rather constrained silences into which conversation petered from then on left a fairly clear idea of the subject into which they broke after I left. I encountered them a day or two later, walking together across the common toward lunch in Hamley Hall. They smiled a little too broadly at my approach, and when I stepped behind a tree to watch them after I had passed, their amused exchanges left no doubt as to their content. My secret was out. They had discovered that I was the End.

  My festering resentment led to the chain of events to which I am now coming.

  I had recently had sent over on one of my father’s trucks a chest of things stored for some years in my old room at home. Odds and ends including a couple of tennis rackets, fishing tackle and the like. Mainly things left over from boyhood days on Sparrow Street. Going through them late one afternoon when I was alone, I saw that they included an old air rifle I had completely forgotten about. There was some buckshot in it still. Idly, I pointed it out the open window, and as I did so I noticed the Three Little Prigs approaching across the common on their way to tea again in Hamley. The door to the dining hall and lounge lay under my second-story window and to the left. They were cutting diagonally along the walk on my right, in more or less three-quarter profile, and some fifty feet off, sauntering along with that familiar air of being something special. I was seized with an urge to pepper their shins with BB’s. Why not? It was darkening into dusk, my light was out, and the chapel carillon was booming out its regular vesper round—in effect the call to tea. So they would not have been able to hear where the shots were coming from any more than see. The lamps were not yet on in the quad.

  Fangle was the first to get it. I caught him smartly on the ankle, causing him to stop short with a little yelp and raise his foot to nurse it. The other two gathered sympathetically round, and between the peals of the chimes I thought I caught the word bee. They were evidently debating the question whether bees might still be about at this time of year, late October. I was on my knees on the floor. Now, propping the rifle carefully on the sill, I drew a bead on Inskip. He jumped too, and, hopping about with his hand on his instep, became in turn the center of interest. My aim was still as deadly as ever it had been as a lad, potting away at bottles and birds. I began firing briskly, working the hand pump which cocked the rifle and pressing the trigger alternately, as fast as I could. They were a sight to behold. “Come on dance, boys,” I said to myself. “Little more action, shall we? There, that’s better. Heart not important, eh? Well, we’ll see about that. Little livelier there, hop to it. Now we’re in business.”

  At last they had sense enough to put an end to this polka and run for cover. Led by Pilbeam, they ducked into a side door, a service entrance, and vanished into the basement.

  I thrust the rifle into the corner of a closet, put on a coat, and rushed downstairs to the lounge. I was sitting alone at a table sipping tea and reading a book when they came in. I lifted my cup without raising my eyes from the page, but my position enabled me to take them in on the edge of my vision. They set up a hubbub among two or three occupied tables at the other end of the lounge, relating what had just happened. I saw that my pretended immersion in the book would, beyond a certain point, cast suspicion on me rather than divert it, so I rose at last and went over to the group they had agitated.

  “What’s all the excitement about?”

  “Well, it’s the damnedest thing,” Pilbeam said. His face was flushed and his long thin hair hung in disordered strands. In a way he was the most satisfactory of the lot. “We’ve been shot at.”

  “Oh, come now.”

  “No, really. Right out there. As we were coming across the quad.”

  “You mean with a gun?”

  “That’s one of the points. It seemed like it—a shotgun—scattershot you know—but there was no sound. Look it here.”

  He put one foot on a chair and pulled up his trouser leg and lowered his sock, displaying several red welts.

  “This is extraordinary,” I said. “Let’s have a look at you chaps.”

  Inskip and Fangle each hoisted a foot up and exhibited their wounds, in their case unhooking garters in order to drop their socks. We all bent to examine the collective damage more closely.

  “That’s not shot,” said Bromley, a newly acquired young history teacher. “Obviously you wouldn’t be here to tell it. That’s BB’s. Buckshot.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out,” I said, and led the way outdoors. I was after all housemaster.

  Friends have said that it is impossible for me to lie, or put on an act, owing to a foxface all too ready to grin. In real emergencies, however, I have found myself perfectly able to dissemble. Nevertheless, I was glad for the relative obscurity of the twilight. Which, however, at the same time added to the difficulties of instituting a search for signs of ammunition at the spot where the trio said they had been ambushed. Somebody ran back for a flashlight, but a few of us meanwhile struck matches, by the light of which we found two or three of what Bromley had predicted.

  “It’s buckshot all right,” I said, holding them in my palm.

  “Yes,” Inskip said, bending his heavy, black head to look. “Now who would want to do a thing like that, and what for?”

  “Some nut,’’ Pilbeam put in. “The first thought that came to mind, I confess, was ‘a madman amok with a shotgun.’ With a silencer on it. But somebody amok with an air rifle is just as nuts. And dangerous. We’ve got to find him.”

  “Where do you think the shots were fired from?” I asked, resolved to set a brisk initiative in this search before it was seized by the student governing board with which the resident housemaster divided the responsibility for law and order.

  I was glad to see some confusion on this score. They all seemed to think the pellets had come from different directions, depending on where precisely they had been nipped. And once they had begun dancing, of course, chaos was complete. They could not agree on a coherent reconstruction of the crime—typically. A fake incident, involving someone rushing into a classroom firing blanks from a pistol, etc., is often staged by law teachers to demonstrate from the students’ later conflicting reports the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. All the three could agree on was that the shots had been fired from somewhere in Hamley Hall. I promised a prompt and thorough investigation.

  “Now you chaps have your tea, and then go back to your digs. You’ve had a rough time.”

  When I got back to my own quarters, Marion was just returning home from a late afternoon class. I related what had happened. She did not seem very interested, regarding it as merely a prank on the part of some student. She
laughed at the thought of the unctuous trio doing their jig, and went to take a bath I had drawn for her. I fixed us something a little stronger than tea, and we settled down to chat about her day.

  Needless to say no arms were uncovered as a result of such inquiries as I launched, and the matter began to drop from public attention. Once Fangle nailed me as I was hurrying across the quad and rather impatiently demanded to know what progress I had made. I said impressively, “None. It’s a complete mystery. We’re up against a blank wall.” I faced him like a thoroughgoing inspector, narrowing an eye. “There’s always the question of motive. Why would anyone want to take a pot at you? Have you chaps been doing anything lately?”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, and popped away into the dusk.

  The air rifle I stowed in the backmost depths of a storage closet where it would never be found, with the uneasy suspicion that I might very well avail myself of it another day when the factors leading to its original use again combined to send the trio into their predestined rhythms. Meanwhile the war on the Three Little Prigs proceeded on other fronts.

  The one I disliked most was Fangle. Inskip and Pilbeam, however competent as teachers, had easily his degree of smug superiority; they were as great snobs. But Fangle I took a special scunner to. He was one of your “intellectual converts,” in the familiar latter-day line I tend to find rather distasteful. Sophisticated embrace of the Nazarene, especially when combined with a tendency to upstage the general run of mankind, has always stuck me as more than a little odious. Fangle’s musical compositions likewise lacked all bowels, in that fine Pauline sense of the term. Part of his arrangements with the school required the production of a new symphonic score while we boarded and fed him. That this was going forward as prescribed was evident from the disagreeable sounds regularly issuing from the auditorium, where the college orchestra was rehearsing for the premiere also specified in the terms. This would be another of those brilliant technical exercises without—heart. Yes, I would nail my flag to that mast. All of this became involved in my mind, focalized in it, by the thought of this stiffish, buttoned-up figure saying he was a Christian. Well, if he was a Christian why did he not behave like one? A dash of footwash fundamentalism was what he needed, and that right early. I slipped into the cloakroom one day at teatime and pinned to the lapel of his overcoat one of the Jesus Saves buttons I had got from the mission.

  When he discovered it I don’t know. It was still there when he exited from the lounge between his two companions, talking of Cocteau. What its effects might have been on others while it remained in view I could likewise only try to imagine, for I obviously couldn’t take the risk of following him to see. It must certainly have been disposed of with alacrity the instant it was discovered. But I soon had a substitute. This was in the form of a Jesus Saves bumper sticker for his car. The mission also gave those out. I pasted it very tightly down on his rear bumper in the parking lot where he had been assigned a personal slot with his name on it among the places reserved for faculty members and important office personnel, and this time I had a fine view of the show.

  It was from a window of my apartment I stood watch to await his emergence, some hundred yards away, from a building where I knew he had a class in modern harmony during an hour when I myself was free. He usually came out the back, of which there was an unobstructed view. It was noon. The clock in the tower boomed the dismissal hour and, five minutes later, sure enough he came mincing out the door and across a short space of lawn to the lot.

  The sight was again something to behold. When he saw the evangelical legend blazoned in large phosphorescent red letters across the back of his Buick, he did a double take that would have done credit to a movie ham. He looked around him in angry bewilderment, then began to scratch furiously at the offending banner with his bare nails. It wouldn’t come off. A good soaking in hot water, and then possibly a sharp razor blade, would be needed. “It’s what you believe, man, isn’t it?” I said. “Then why don’t you say so? Tell the world. Spread the news. Gospel means good tidings.”

  By now he had hurled some books he was carrying into his car, slammed the door shut and marched back into the building. He must have gone straight through it to the Administration Building, because he returned in a minute with the new president, Smadbeck, now well in the saddle. He pointed to the bumper, all the while talking agitatedly. President Smadbeck, a tall man with smooth gray hair, shook his head sympathetically at what must have been a full account of what must by now have become borne in on Fangle as a fullscale operation. More was to be expected.

  When the car reappeared in due course with the streamer removed, except for untidy scraps still adhering to the chromium, other wholesome propaganda swiftly replaced it. GOD IS LOVE, CAREFUL—CHILDREN R BACK IN SCHOOL, and BROTHERHOOD WEEK were among those that followed. At the same time the war on the Harvard Group was pressed on every sector. Lines of poetry of a romantic or otherwise unacceptable turn were left in the trio’s mail pigeonholes or thumbtacked to the doors of their rooms, like theses. “I hid my heart in a nest of roses,” “Give smiles to those who love you less, but keep your tears for me,” “A heart once broken is a heart no more,” suggest the general tone of these. Sometimes a traditional wall motto supplanted the poetic fare—EARTH HAS NO SORROW HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL, KEEP ON KEEPIN’ ON! and the like. Then suddenly the technique would shift violently in the other direction and a more cerebral author be invoked to lend justification to the prevailing rain of treacle. A line from Henry James about intellect without emotion being like a bedspring without the mattress greeted Inskip on his return to his dormitory room one afternoon. But mostly the broadsides were kept in a key calculated to sicken and outrage—“heartfelt” sentiments would be the term for them. Pilbeam and Inskip lodged in Creighton Hall. The one was a bachelor, the other divorced. Fangle, whose wife was a voice teacher confined by her practice to their home in Boston, was given a furnished apartment off campus for the two semesters of his residence. He received a steady flow of inspirational matter through the mail when the bumper strips were discontinued for reasons of prudence as well as lack of supply. One day he was edified by the quatrains of Francis William Bourdillon’s about the mind having a thousand eyes and the heart but one, yet the light of a whole life dying when love is done. This occurred on a day when I was also interested to read in the paper that a dog in Minnesota had saved a child from drowning by jumping into the water and dragging it out of a pond into which it had fallen. I felt this to be another blow struck at the Harvard Group. Indeed, I clipped it out and sent it to Pilbeam. Life is in the end a soap opera. It is not Hamlet writhing in a skein of verse, nor the View of Toledo, nor even the Eroica. It is Beethoven going deaf, Joyce blind. It is the newlyweds in New Jersey colliding with another car ten minutes after the marriage and the bride wailing over the body of her groom, “Oh, my God! I’m a wife and a widow in one day!”

  The mood in which these activities kept me immersed naturally revived interest in some of my own compositions. I got out the uncompleted “Christmas at the Whorehouse” and glanced over what I had written so far:

  ’Twas Christmas at the whorehouse,

  And round that festive board

  More gay than at the poorhouse

  The mirth and laughter soared.

  Save in the case of gentle Peg,

  Who deemed it rather rough

  The way the girls did loll about

  Stuffed with stuffing and stuff.

  I deleted the last line as unworthy of the rest, and set to work rebuilding the stanza around a change in the second line running “deemed it unbecoming.” Perhaps the madam in charge could then rudely scatter her brood with the announcement, “The Mayor will be coming!” The Mayor might turn out to be Peg’s father, in keeping with the intended dramatic plan of the whole, with its tragic implication of incest narrowly averted.

  Anyone with a nostalgia for hogwash will have a taste for the old chromos. I came across a worn print of Watts’s Hope
, the painting of the bowed female figure plucking the last string remaining on her lyre, and took it upstairs to the second floor of Creighton Hall where Pilbeam’s room was. I had darted my usual glances in either direction to make sure I was alone in the passage, and had stooped to slip the print under the door, when it opened and a short fat man with a jolly red face smiled at me.

  “Looking for George?”

  “Why, no,” I stammered. “I guess I must have the wrong room.”

  “I’m Mr. Pilbeam. George’s father.”

  He extended his hand with a cordial expansion of his grin. I mumbled apologetically that the room I wanted was one flight up, and hurried toward the stairway accordingly. Mr. Pilbeam, who was evidently visiting his son, had been “on my way out for some cigars.” I hung over the stairwell to watch till he was safely out of sight before leaving the building with my mission undischarged. I decided to suspend the campaign—the emotional current behind which was not, however, checked. It was diverted into another channel.