I realized, from the ache across my shoulders, how tensely I had been sitting. My armpits were wet. Rivulets had been running down my sides. What did one do now? Applaud? I sought M’Cwyie from the corner of my eye. She raised her right hand. As if by telepathy the girl shuddered all over and stood. The musicians also rose. So did M’Cwyie. I got to my feet, with a Charley Horse in my left leg, and said, “It was beautiful,” inane as that sounds. I received three different High Forms of “thank you.” There was a flurry of color and I was alone again with M’Cwyie. “That is the one hundred-seventeenth of the two thousand, two hundred-twenty-four danced of Locar.” I looked down at her. “Whether Locar was right or wrong, he worked out a fine reply to the inorganic.” She smiled. “Are the dances of your world like this?” “Some of them are similar. I was reminded of them as I watched Braxa-but I’ve never seen anything exactly like hers.” “She is good,” M’Cwyie said. “She knows all the dances.” A hint of her earlier expression which had troubled me… It was gone in an instant. “I must tend my duties now.” She moved to the table and closed the books. “M’narra.” “Good-bye.” I slipped into my boots. “Good-bye, Gallinger.” I walked out the door, mounted the jeepster, and roared across the evening into night, my wings of risen desert flapping slowly behind me.
II
I had just closed the door behind Betty, after a brief grammar session, when I heard the voices in the hall. My vent was opened a fraction, so I stood there and eavesdropped; Morton’s fruity treble: “Guess what? He said `hello’ to me awhile ago.” “Hmmph!” Emory’s elephant lungs exploded. “Either he’s slipping, or you were standing in his way and he wanted you to move.” “Probably didn’t recognize me. I don’t think he sleeps any more, now he has that language to play with. I had night watch last week, and every night I passed his door at 0300–I always heard that recorder going. At 0500 when I got off, he was still at it.” “The guy _is_ working hard,” Emory admitted, grudgingly. “In fact, I think he’s taking some kind of dope to keep awake. He looks sort of glassy-eyed these days. Maybe that’s natural for a poet, though.” Betty had been standing there, because she broke in then: “Regardless of what you think of him, it’s going to take me at least a year to learn what he’s picked up in three weeks. And I’m just a linguist, not a poet.” Morton must have been nursing a crush on her bovine charms. It’s the only reason I can think of for his dropping his guns to say what he did. “I took a course in modern poetry when I was back at the university,” he began. “We read six authors–Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Stevens, and Gallinger–and on the last day of the semester, when the prof was feeling a little rhetorical, he said, `These six names are written on the century, and all the gates of criticism and hell shall not prevail on them.’ “Myself,” he continued, “I thought his _Pipes of Krishna_ and his _Madrigals_ were great. I was honored to be chosen for an expedition he was going on. “I think he’s spoken two dozen words to me since I met him,” he finished. The Defense: “Did it ever occur to you,” Betty said, “that he might be tremendously self-conscious about his appearance? He was also a precocious child, and probably never even had school friends. He’s sensitive and very introverted.” “Sensitive? Self-conscious?” Emory choked and gagged. “The man is as proud as Lucifer, and he’s a walking insult machine. You press a button like `Hello’ or `Nice day’ and he thumbs his nose at you. He’s got it down to a reflex.” They muttered a few other pleasantries and drifted away. Well bless you, Morton boy. You little pimple-faced, Ivy-bred connoisseur! I’ve never taken a course in my poetry, but I’m glad someone said that. The Gates of Hell. Well now! Maybe Daddy’s prayers got heard somewhere, and I am a missionary, after all! Only… …Only a missionary needs something to convert people _to_. I have my private system of esthetics, and I suppose it oozes an ethical by-product somewhere. But if I ever had anything to preach, really, even in my poems, I wouldn’t care to preach it to such low-lifes as you. If you think I’m a slob, I’m also a snob, and there’s no room for you in my Heaven–it’s a private place, where Swift, Shaw, and Petronius Arbiter come to dinner. And oh, the feasts we have! The Trimalchio’s, the Emory’s we dissect! We finish you with the soup, Morton!