She was beautiful. And she had a look at once very affectionate and very, very quizzical; a woman full of humor and satire indeed.
“Pfirschbaum is wrong!” said the professor positively, “cataclysmically wrong. Could he but see that look on your face, so kind, so amused, so arch; he would realize just how wrong he is.”
“I’m sure that he would. I would rather like to see the look on my face myself. It must be a study of mixed emotions. Oh, you’re doing it again, you little wolf! How sweet you are! I wonder who invented kissing in the first place?”
“It is generally attributed to the Milesians, Emily, but there has lately appeared evidence that it may be even earlier. Emily, you are wonderful, wonderful.”
“I know it. But keep telling me.”
2
Catherine came in then. She also had a quizzical look on her face, but there was something in it that was pretty dour too. And following her, and looking quite sheepish, was that little professor, what was his name? Oh yes, Diller.
The professor gave Emily one more kiss, and then turned to greet them. And suddenly a strange disquietude caught him in a grip of ice. “If he is Professor Diller, then who in multicolor blazes am I?”
Professors aren’t really absent-minded. It is just that they learn to relegate details to the background. But sometimes they don’t stay in the background, and now this detail was much to the fore. But the professor could think like a flash when necessary, and in no time at all he remembered not only who he was, but just what kind of trouble he was in.
But it didn’t help matters when, as he was leaving with Catherine, Emily called after him “It was fun, Tommy. Let’s do it again sometime.”
Nor was Catherine inclined to be quiet when he sat at home next door with her and read in his own notebook (which he now had back from Professor Dillard, after that awful mix-up when the identical-appearing reminder books of the two men had apparently been lying together on the table in the teachers’ lounge, and each man had mistakenly picked up the other’s),—when he read in his own notebook:
“You are professor T. K. C. Cromwell. The T is for Thomas. You teach Provencal and Early French Literature and teach it badly, but we must eat. This is your schedule. Never deviate from it or you will be lost—”
*
Now, if he had had his own notebook all the time, he would never have made such series of silly mistakes. Most of the trouble that comes to people in this world comes from reading the wrong books.
“To think,” said Catherine, “that a grown man could make a mistake like that, if it was a mistake. There is a point beyond which absent-mindedness is no longer a joke. How did you get by with your classes?”
“I don’t know. I suspected once that I was talking total nonsense.”
“And that little Killer Diller is as bad as you are. I was never so surprised in my life as when he waltzed in here and slapped me on… why I don’t know how you men can get so confused.”
“But we’ve explained how the notebooks must have got mixed up.”
“I understand how the notebooks were mixed. I do not understand how you are so mixed. Emily is vastly amused over this. I am not so amused.”
It isn’t that professors are absent-minded. Anybody should have had sense enough not to have made the notebooks that much alike.
Adam Had Three Brothers
In the town there are many races living, each in its own enclave, some of many square miles, some of a few acres only, some of but one or two streets. Its geographers say that it has more Italians than Rome, more Irish than Dublin, more Jews than Israel, more Armenians than Yerevan.
But this overlooks the most important race of all.
There is the further fact (known only to the more intense geographers): it has more Rrequesenians than any town in the world. There are more than a hundred of them.
By the vulgar the Rrequesenians are called Wrecks, and their quarter is Wreckville. And there is this that can be said of them that cannot be said of any other race on earth: Every one of them is a genius.
These people are unique. They are not Gypsies, though they are often taken for them. They are not Semites. They are not even children of Adam.
*
Willy McGilley, the oldest of the Wrecks (they now use Gentile names) has an old baked tablet made of straw and pressed sheep dung that is eight thousand years old and gives the true story of their origin. Adam had three brothers: Etienne, Yancy, and Rreq. Etienne and Yancy were bachelors. Rreq had a small family and all his issue have had small families; until now there are about two hundred of them in all, the most who have ever been in the world at one time. They have never intermarried with the children of Adam except once. And not being of the same recension they are not under the same curse to work for a living.
So they do not.
Instead they batten on the children of Adam by clever devices that are known in police court as swindles.
Catherine O’Conneley by ordinary standards would be reckoned as the most beautiful of the Wrecks. By at least three dozen men she was considered the most beautiful girl in the world. But by Wreckian standards she was plain. Her nose was too small, only a little larger than that of ordinary women; and she was skinny as a crow, being on the slight side of a hundred and sixty. Being beautiful only by worldly standards she was reduced even more than the rest of them to living by her wits and charms.
She was a show girl and a bar girl. She gave piano lessons and drawing lessons and tap-dancing lessons. She told fortunes and sold oriental rugs and junk jewelry, and kept company with lonely old rich men. She was able to do all these things because she was one bundle of energy.
She had no family except a number of unmarried uncles, the six Petapolis brothers, the three Petersens, the five Calderons, the four Oskamans; and Charley O’Malley, nineteen in all.
*
Now it was early morning and a lady knocked at her door.
“The oil stock is no good. I checked and the place would be three hundred miles out to sea and three miles down. My brother says I’ve been took.”
“Possibly your brother isn’t up on the latest developments in offshore drilling. We have the richest undeveloped field in the world and virtually no competition. I can promise we will have any number of gushers within a week. And if your brother has any money I can still let him have stock till noon today at a hundred and seventy-five dollars a share.”
“But I only paid twenty-five a share for mine.”
“See how fast it has gone up in only two days. What other stock rises so fast?”
“Well all right, I’ll go tell him.”
*
There was another
