Pamela Dean (16 page)

That was promising; it was a pity he was being promising when she was sweaty and irritable. They walked out of the Women's Center into the misty noon. Bell Field was half-hidden; the stream was invisible, and only the tops of the trees, sickly yellow and drained red, showed above the blank wisps that twined whitely in the woods. They went down the steep steps and along the side of Eliot, down the eroded gully and across the wooden bridge, as Janet and Molly had gone Saturday night to meet the piper.

"How long has Robin Armin been playing the bagpipes?" said Janet as they walked up the hill to Dunbar.

"As long as he's known there were bagpipes to play," said Nick.

"Was he playing last night, do you know?"

"He ought not to have been," said Nick, "it wasn't the time. Why?"

"Oh, I dreamt of horrible music. It was probably just the orange soda on top of too much Aristotle."

"I should certainly hope so," said Nick. "Robin makes excellent music."

There was beginning to be a crowd in Dunbar, but it was all of strangers. They dawdled along in line, talking about what a good teacher Miss Swifte was, and whether it was possible to compare her methods to Evans's. Dunbar's food line was set up with its desserts first: today, an uninspiring collection of limp grapefruit slices, little bowls of chocolate pudding topped with whipped cream that was far too stiff to be natural, and soggy-looking squares of yellow cake with some arcane red stuff in their middles.

"Every time I actually look at the food they give us," said Nick, helping himself to three bowls of pudding and shaking a plate of cake gently, "I remember that passage in

That Hideous Strength.
"

"Oh, you mean what Merlin says about the twentieth century?"

"'Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.'"

"Right. That cake's not very dry."

"If there's any left over it might be good tomorrow," said Nick, withdrawing his hand from the plate and taking another helping of pudding instead. Janet considered all the little bowls on his tray and suppressed a dreadful desire to ask him if he were having his period.

She missed Molly suddenly, and was aware of an impatience with this acquaintance with Nick, so fraught with emotion and so imperfect she could not even make a careless remark.

Well, there was no way out but through.

The room was furnished with unprepossessing chrome-and-vinyl chairs, of the stackable sort, and rectangular tables for two, which could be pushed together for people who wanted to eat in large groups. It occurred to Janet that you could not get a table for two in Eliot or Taylor. She and Nick set their trays down on the end table of a long row. Nick then picked the table up and separated it from its fellows.

"Sit down," he said, "and tell me about yourself."

"That's a very foolish request," said Janet, sitting down anyway. Nick waited until she was settled, and then fell casually into his own chair, as if he would not much have minded missing it and sitting on the floor instead. He looked a little put out; Janet went on ruthlessly. "Nobody you'd want to listen to for five minutes could possibly respond sensibly to it."

"I could," said Nick, in an injured voice.

"Tell me about yourself, then."

"I eat the air, promise-crammed," said Nick, in melancholy tones. "You cannot feed capons so."

"Who's usurped your rightful place, then?"

"You are too sharp by half," said Nick.

"Oh, come on. My father's a professor of English; of course I know
Hamlet."

"You didn't know Milton the other day," said Nick.

"Well, but Daddy's a romantic; he loves Shakespeare, especially because Keats seems so much like him; but he can't stand Milton." Having rattled this off, she felt herself going extremely hot in the face, and rapidly dumped the bowl of tomatoes into her plate of macaroni.

Nick, however, either had not intended to embarrass her in the first place or was easily distracted. "Keats seems so much like
whom?
"

"Shakespeare."

"Keats? That querulous, agonizing little emotion-ridden pestilence-befuddled liverer's son?"

"What
have
you been reading?" said Janet, staring at him with her fork suspended.

"What do
you
fancy he was like?"

"Keats? I don't know. I meant the poetry. Daddy says he's the only poet since Shakespeare who sounds remotely like him—whose imagery is anything like as varied and as well controlled, and who can convey so many layers of emotion at one time. I haven't read everybody in between—and neither has Daddy, he missed the Jacobeans—but even I can see the resemblance."

"Say me some Keats, then."

Janet looked at him with a certain alarm. He sounded quite grim about it. His glasses had slipped down his nose, and he was looking at her half over and half through them, without seeming to notice. He had crossed his arms on his chest, and both his hands were in fists. "All right," said Janet. "All right." What in the world could she recite? He knew the sonnet on Chapman's Homer; most of the rest he would probably have labeled "querulous."

Not "Ode to a Nightingale," which had illness and drugs in it; not "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," which, in Nick's mood, would probably be labeled not only querulous, but pestilence-
and
emotion-ridden. Something out of "The Eve of St. Agnes" or "Hyperion"

might do the trick, but she had only recently discovered them and did not trust her memory to do them justice.

I'll give you querulous, thought Janet, and cleared her throat. "'This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might strea

m again, And thou be

conscience-calmed—see here it is—I hold it towards you.'"

Nick's hands had fallen to his sides. Janet, looking straight at him now that she had done remembering, and feeling a little smug, realized with a shock that he had turned rather pale. He pushed his glasses up his nose with a hand that shook. "That's
Measure for
Measure,
" he said, just audibly. "Or
The Winter's Tale?
Or
Troilus and Cressida;
I always forget what gems are hidden in that dungheap. That's not Keats. Is it?"

"Yes, it is," said Janet; to her fury, she sounded apologetic.

"As you love me, don't tease me. If it's Keats, what's it from?"

"It was written in the margin of
The Cap and Bells,
" said Janet; she thought the "as you love me" showed a great deal of assurance, but now was not the time to fuss at him about it; he was seriously upset. "His unfinished play. My father says—"

"I cry you mercy," said Nick, getting up, "I'm unwell. No, it's all right, don't bother. I'll call you later."

No you won't, thought Janet, watching him with a maddening mixture of worry and annoyance. He got out of the room without falling over, so he was probably all right. She went back to her own lunch, though she felt very little enthusiasm for it. She looked at Nick's abandoned tray, and suddenly giggled. In some peculiar way, he
was
having his period.

She was struggling with a desire to eat the bowl of pudding Nick had left behind when a resonant and charming voice, made more charming by its diffidence, said, "Excuse me."

Janet looked up, half smiling, and then firmly closed her mouth. It was not Kit Lane, but his abominable brother—John, they said—no doubt about to exercise upon her some of his famous sarcasm.

"Excuse me," he said again, so shyly that she was rendered speechless, "did we have a fight in the library over
The Romance of the Rose?
"

"We?"
said Janet, rather more feebly than she had intended. He was perfectly gorgeous; it was indecent. She wondered, suddenly, what it might be like to go through life having that effect on everybody. How could you possibly live up to it? If you were homely, or merely cute, or plain but nice like Molly, or austere like Sharon or even healthy like Christina or normally pretty like Nora, you could always startle people with your eloquence or your intelligence or your athletic ability. What did you have left to startle them with if you looked like this?

"All right. You are the girl I was rude to?"

"Yes," said Janet. Honesty and a curious feeling of pity prompted her to add, "I did bait you a little, maybe; but I just wanted some basic information, like when I could have the book."

"Oh, I've got no excuse; I was just in a foul temper. May I sit down?"

"Sure," said Janet.

The young man sat down in Nick's chair and pushed Nick's tray to one side. "I'm very sorry indeed," he said. "I wonder if you'd allow me to make it up to you?"

All these people were always offering to make something up to you. Would this one offer pizza, too? Janet contented herself with looking inquiring, and he said, "The Old Theater is doing
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
in repertory with
Hamlet
; should you like to go see one of them?"

"Both," said Janet instantly; he laughed, she blushed. "But that's not fair, you weren't that rude. Make it
Hamlet.
"

"No, I think I was. Both, then. Have you any Saturday classes?"

"One-B," said Janet, mournfully.

"I'll get tickets for Saturday nights, then." He got up, looking more relieved than seemed reasonable. "Oh," he said. "I'm Thomas Lane."

Janet got up, too, and held out her hand. "Janet Carter," she said.

His hand was very cool and light. He grinned. "Ought I to have offered a performance of
The Cenci
instead?"

He had recognized her name, then. Her father was the only professor who taught that play. "No, thank you," said Janet, who did not care for Shelley, "Shakespeare will do just fine."

"I'll call you, then, when I've got the tickets." He vanished into the surge of the noontime crowd.

Janet sat down again and stared at Nick's abandoned tray. She felt as if she had betrayed a child. She wondered, in parallel with feeling guilty, if it was wise to accept invitations to the theater from strangers whose only observed behavior prior to the invitation had been discourteous and odd in the extreme. Perhaps she could get Anne or Kit to tell her something about Thomas.

"Thomas," she said slowly. Thomas, the one of whom Kit had said there wasn't a chance of his behaving like that.

"Oh,
hell,
" she said under her breath, stacking her own tray recklessly atop Nick's and carrying them both to the return chute. What was she going to say to Nick?

She pushed her way through the long line of students and found herself back in the first-floor corridor of Dunbar, with its brown carpet that would not show the mud. She stopped at the first telephone she saw and called Fourth Taylor. It rang thirty-four times and was finally answered by a laconic male voice that said, "City Morgue. You stab 'em, we slab 'em."

Controlling her fury at this adolescent wit, Janet said, "May I speak to Nick Tooley, please?"

"Minute," said the voice. It returned very shortly, and said, "Not here. Can I take a message?"

"No, thanks, I'll try later," said Janet politely, and slammed the receiver back onto the hook. She looked at her watch, and ran down the corridor as if the long-legged seekers of Schiller were after her. She stopped suddenly at the foot of the stairs, and then ran up them and banged on the door of 423, where Schiller had been delivered. Nick might very well have sought refuge there, if he was really sick.

Nobody answered the door. Janet ran back down the stairs and went with as much speed as she could muster back to Ericson. In the empty room, she shoved the books and notebooks for her next two classes into her knapsack, flung it onto her back, and ran back downstairs with a corner of
Modern Anthropology
digging into her shoulder blade. She tore across campus to Sterne Hall and ducked into the Health Service. Two pale girls and a boy with his arm in a sling sat rather sullenly on the benches pr ovided. Janet approached

the nurse on duty, who, clearly and infuriatingly indulging young love, checked the sign-in book and said that Nicholas Tooley had not been in today. Janet thanked her as courteously as she could manage, and darted back halfway across campus to Professor Soukup's class.

Professor Soukup was enough to take her mind off her troubles; but Professor King, in the next class, merely proceeded to tell them exactly what they had just read in their first textbook. Janet, while allowing that this might be necessary because the style of the textbook was so bad, was considerably annoyed. The information did not seem to her, in any case, to be any more than common sense might have produced; there was no need to have gone to the ends of the earth for it. Why couldn't they have a nice, intelligent discussion of fossils?

She sat making elaborate doodles in the margins of her notebook, until she noticed with alarm that she had written the dates of Keats's birth and death and was about to put down Shakespeare's, as if there were some numerological answer to her problems. She put down Shakespeare's anyway, and looked at the figures. 1795-1821; 1564-1616. No, that was of no use whatsoever. She supposed she should have checked all the bathrooms on First Dunbar, or possibly all the bathrooms in the dormitory. Or he might have gone outside and wandered about in the woods and fallen over. Idiot boy. Why should Keats make anybody ill—anybody with a reasonable romantic sensibility, anyway?

Janet sat up a little straighter and turned a page in her notebook, in case Mr. King should have noticed her mind wandering. He didn't appear to notice much beyond his difficulty with the chalk and the blackboard, but you never knew. Then she applied herself to the problem of why she was assuming it was the Keats that had gotten Nick. Far more likely it was fencing on an empty stomach; or fencing on top of one of Taylor's vile breakfasts; or fencing in a large, hot wool sweater on a mild autumn day.

What
was
she going to tell him about going to the theater with Thomas Lane?