It was in dealing with stupid pupils that his wit was shown. A dunce, who had done nothing right, would not receive a mark of Zero from him, for Hector would geld the unhappy wretch of marks not only for arriving at a wrong solution, but for arriving at it by a wrong method. It was thus possible to announce to the class that the dunce had been awarded minus thirty-seven out of a possible hundred marks; such announcements could not be made more than two or three times a year, but they always brought a good laugh. And that laugh, it must be said, was not vaingloriously desired by Hector as a tribute to himself, but only in order that it might spur the dunce on to greater mathematical effort. That it never did so was one of the puzzles which life brought to Hector, for he was convinced of the effectiveness of ridicule in making stupid boys and girls intelligent.
If he had dealt in ridicule wholesale, and if he had joyed in it for its own sake, he would have been a detestable schoolroom tyrant, and his classes would have hated him. But he dealt out ridicule in a selfless, almost priestly, manner, and most of his pupils admired him. Mackilwraith, they said among themselves, knew his stuff and would stand no nonsense. There is a touch of the fascist in most adolescents; they admire the strong man who stands no nonsense; they have no objection to seeing the weak trampled underfoot; mercy in its more subtle forms is outside their understanding and has no meaning for them. Hector, with his minus awards for the stupid, suited them very well, insofar as they thought about him at all.
The class upon whose work he was engaged on this particular evening lacked any remarkable dunce, any girl with a hopelessly addled brain, or a boy who was incapable of recognizing even the simplest sets of factors. But there were certain papers upon which he put a cabbalistic word which he had taken over from a teacher of his own younger days. Written always in capitals, and flaming like the Tetragrammaton on the breastplate of the High Priest, the word was TOSASM, and it was formed from the initials of a teacher’s heartcry—The Old Stupid and Silly Mistake.
The following morning, however, as soon as he had taken breakfast at the Snak Shak, he went to a bookshop and bought a copy of The Tempest. He then made his way to the Salterton Collegiate and Vocational Institute, for although there were no classes on Saturdays it was Hector’s custom to enjoy the freedom of the empty building. He let himself in, nodded to a couple of janitors who were, as school janitors so often are, mopping at something invisible in the corridors, made his way to the Men Teachers’ Room, and settled down to read the play, and to make up his mind which part he would request for himself.
Hector’s acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare was not extensive. When himself at school he had been required to read and answer questions about Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Henry V; owing to some fold or tremor in the curriculum he had been compelled to spend two years upon this latter play. In his mind these plays were lumped together with Hiawatha, The Lay of the Last Minstrel and Sohrab and Rustum, as “literature”—that is to say, ambiguous and unsupported assertions by men of lax mind. But as he had grown older, he had grown more tolerant toward literature; there might be, he admitted to himself, “something in it”. But it was not for him, and he had had no truck with it. He very rarely read a book which was not about mathematics, or about how to teach mathematics; he subscribed to The American Mathematical Monthly; he read newspapers and news magazines, and occasionally he relaxed with The Reader’s Digest, for he had a taste for amateur doctoring, and liked to ponder over the miraculous drugs and therapeutic methods described there.
He found The Tempest somewhat baffling. He had supported the suggestion that the Little Theatre present a Shakespearean play, for he was strongly in favour of plays which were “worth while”; it was widely admitted that Shakespeare was worth while. But in what precise union of qualities this worthwhileness lay was unknown to him. His first encounter with The Tempest was like that of the man who bites a peach and breaks a tooth upon the stone.
In the very first scene, for instance, there was a coarse reference to the Female Functions. He read it again and again; he consulted the notes, but they were unhelpful; in spite of a conviction held over from school days that poets were people who hid their meaning, such as it was, in word puzzles it seemed clear enough that in this case Shakespeare meant to be Smutty. Obviously this was a play to be approached with the utmost caution. He might even have to change his mind about acting.
He read on. It was toilsome work, but by mid-afternoon he had finished The Tempest, he understood it, he had assessed the value of every part in it, and although he would not have gone so far as to say that he liked it, he admitted to himself that there was probably “something in it”. He had decided, also, that the part for him was Gonzalo. This person was described as “an honest old counsellor”, and he had no offensive lines to speak; he had fifty-two speeches, some of them quite long but none which would place an undue strain upon his memory; he was not required to do anything silly, and he would require a fairly impressive costume and almost certainly the desired false whiskers. This was the part for him. He would speak to Mrs Forrester about it on Monday night.
He began memorizing the part of Gonzalo that evening, and was word perfect in his first scene before he went to bed.
At twenty-five minutes past eight on Monday evening Hector was on the pavement outside the apartment building where the Forresters lived. He was a little early, for he intended to make his call at half-past eight exactly. It would not do to surprise the Forresters at their evening meal, or too soon after it. He had calculated that people in the Forresters’ position ate at seven o’clock. He himself ate at the Snak Shak from six to six twenty-five precisely, every evening of his life. This evening he had returned to the YMCA, re-washed his already clean face and hands, and put on the clean shirt which he would not normally have worn until Tuesday morning. He put on a new blue tie, especially purchased, and felt as he looked in the mirror that it produced a rather rich effect under his ruddy face and somewhat heavy bluish jowl. He then waited patiently, running over Gonzalo’s first scene in his head, until it was time to make his call. And, as always, he reached his destination ahead of time. So he walked to a point two blocks away, walked back again, and at eight-thirty precisely he pressed the bell of the Forresters’ apartment.
Nellie opened the door. “Good-evening, Mrs Forrester,” said Hector; “I just happened to be passing, and I remembered something I wanted to mention to you.”
A surprise awaited him in the tasteful living-room. Vambrace, Valentine Rich, young Bridgetower and a person whom he still thought of as “the Webster girl” were seated there. It was not until this moment that he realized how sensitive and secretive he was about his desire to act; he could not possibly blurt out his request before these people. His dismay showed in his face.