The earnest
critics who accuse science fiction writers of paranoia have this fact on their
side: We do seem to agree with the paranoid that there are Conspiracies all
about us, lurking behind commonplace facades and shaping our ends by devious
and unperceived means. It is this classic theme that Mr. Matheson here
explores, pitting his venturesome young hero against a hitherto unsuspected
Conspiracy that affects every day of our lives… and proving joyously that a
Conspiracy is not necessary malevolent.
The Splendid
Source
by richard matheson
“… Then spare
me your slanders, and read this rather at night than in the daytime, and give it
not to young maidens, if there be any… But I fear nothing for this book, since
it is extracted from a high and splendid source, from which all that has issued
has had a great success…”
– Balzac: Contes
Drolatiques, Prologue
It was the one
that Uncle Lyman told in the summer house that did it. Talbert was just coming
up the path when he heard the punch line: “’My God!’ cried the actress, ‘I
thought you said sarsaparilla!’”
Guffaws exploded
in the little house. Talbert stood motionless, looking through the rose trellis
at the laughing guests. Inside his contour sandals his toes flexed
ruminatively. He thought.
Later he took a
walk around Lake Bean and watched the crystal surf fold over and observed the
gliding sans and stared at the goldfish and thought.
“I’ve been
thinking,” he said that night.
“No,” said Uncle Lyman, haplessly. He did not
commit himself further. He waited for the blow.
Which fell.
“Dirty jokes,” said Talbert Bean III.
“I beg your
pardon?”
“Endless tides of
them covering the nation.”
“I fail,” said
Uncle Lyman, “to grasp the point.” Apprehension gripped his voice.
“I find the
subject fraught with witchery,” said Talbert.
“With–?”
“Consider,” said
Talbert. “Ever day, all through our land, men tell off-color jokes; in bars and
at ball games; in theatre lobbies and at places of business; on street corners
and in locker rooms. At home and away, a veritable deluge of jokes.”
Talbert paused
meaningfully.
“Who makes
them up?” he asked.
Uncle Lyman
stared at his nephew with the look of a fishermen who has just hooked a sea
serpent–half awe, half revulsion.
“I’m afraid–“ he
began.
“I want to know
the source of these jokes,” said Talbert. “Their genesis; their fountainhead.”
“Why?”
asked Uncle Lyman. Weakly.
“Because it is
relevant,” said Talbert. “Because these jokes are a part of a culture
heretofore unplumbed. Because they are an anomaly; a phenomenon ubiquitous yet
unknown.”
Uncle Lyman did
not speak. His pallid hands curled limply on his half-read Wall Street
Journal. Behind the polished octagons of his glasses his eyes were
suspended berries.
At last he
sighed.
“And what part,”
he inquired, sadly, “am I to play in this quest?”
“We must begin,”
said Talbert, “with the joke you told in the summer house this afternoon. Where
did you hear it?”
“Kulpritt,” Uncle
Lyman said. Andrew Kulpritt was one of the battery of lawyers employed by Bean
Enterprises.
“Capital,” said
Talbert. “Call him up and ask him where he heard it.”
Uncle Lyman drew
a silver watch from his pocket.
“It’s nearly
midnight, Talbert,” he announced.
Talbert waved
away chronology.
“Now,” he said. “This is important.”
Uncle Lyman
examined his nephew a moment longer. Then, with a capitulating sigh, he reached
for one of Bean Mansion’s thirty-five telephones.
Talbert stood
toe-flexed on a bearskin rug while Uncle Lyman dialed, waited and spoke.
“Kulpritt?” said
Uncle Lyman. “Lyman Bean. Sorry to wake you but Talbert wants to know where you
heard the joke about the actress who thought the director said sarsaparilla.”
Uncle Lyman
listened. “I said–” he began again.
A minute later he
cradled the receiver heavily.
“Prentiss,” he
said.
“Call him up,”
said Talbert.
“Talbert,” Uncle Lyman asked.
“Now,” said Talbert.
A long breath exuded
between Uncle Lyman’s lips. Carefully, he folded his Wall Street Journal.
He reached across the mahogany table and tamped out his ten-inch cigar. Sliding
a weary hand beneath his smoking jacket, he withdrew his tooled leather address
book.
Prentiss heard it
from George Sharper, C.P.A. Sharper heard it from Abner Ackerman, M.D. Ackerman
heard it from William Cozener, Prune Products. Cozener heard it from Rod
Tassel, Mgr., Cyprian Club. Tassel heard it from O. Winterbottom, Winterbottom
heard it from H. Alberts. Alberts heard it from D. Silver, Silver from B.
Phryne, Phryne from E. Kennelly.
By an odd twist
Kennelly said he heard it from Uncle Lyman.
“There is
complicity here,” said Talbert. “These jokes are not self-generative.”
It was four a.m. Uncle Lyman slumped, inert and
dead-eyed, on his chair.
“There has to be
a source,” said Talbert.
Uncle Lyman
remained motionless.
“You’re not
interested,” said
Talbert, incredulously.
Uncle Lyman made
a noise.
“I don’t
understand,” said Talbert. “Here is a situation pregnant with divers
fascinations. Is there a man or woman who has never heard an off-color joke? I
say not. Yet, is there a man or woman who knows where these jokes come from?
Again I say not.”
Talbert strode
forcefully to his place of musing at the twelve-foot fireplace. He poised
there, staring in.
“I may be a
millionaire,” he said, “but I am sensitive.” He turned. “And this phenomenon
excites me.”
Uncle Lyman
attempted to sleep while retaining the face of a man awake.
“I have always had
more money than I needed,” said Talbert. “Capital investment was unnecessary.
Thus I turned to investing the other asset my father left–my brain.”
Uncle Lyman
Stirred; a thought shook loose.
“What ever happened,”
he asked, “to that society of yours, the S.P.C.S.P.C.A.?”
“Eh? The Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals? The past.”
“And your
interest in world problems. What about that sociological treatise you were
writing–”
“Slums: a
Positive View, you mean?”
Talbert brushed it aside. “Inconsequence.”
“And isn’t there
anything left of your political party, the pro-anti-disestablishmentarianists?”
“Not a shred.
Scuttled by reactionaries from within.”
“What about
Bimetallism?”
“Oh, that!”
Talbert smiled ruefully. “Passé, dear Uncle. I had been reading too many
Victorian novels.”
“Speaking of
novels, what about your literary criticisms? Nothing doing with The Use of
the Semi-colon in Jane Austen? Or Horatio Alger: The Misunderstood
Satirist? To say nothing of Was Queen Elizabeth Shakespeare?”
“Was Shakespeare Queen Elizabeth,”
corrected Talbert. “No, Uncle, nothing doing with them. They had momentary
interest, nothing more…”
“I suppose the same holds true for The
Shoe Horn: Pro and Con, eh? And those scientific articles–Relativity
Re-Examined and Is Evolution Enough?”
“Dead and gone,” said Talbert, patiently,
“dead and gone. These projects needed me once. Now I go on to better things.”
“Like who writes dirty jokes,” said Uncle
Lyman.
Talbert nodded, “Like that.”
***
When the butler
set the breakfast tray on the bed Talbert said, “Redfield, do you know any
jokes?”
Redfield looked out
impassively through the face an improvident nature had neglected to animate.
“Jokes, sir?” he
inquired.
“You know,” said
Talbert, “Jollities.”
Redfield stood by
the bed like a corpse whose casket had been upended and removed.
“Well, sir,” he
said, a full thirty seconds later, “once, when I was a boy I heard one…”
“I believe it went somewhat as follows,”
Redfield said. “When–uh–When is a portmanteau not a–”
“No, no,” said Talbert , shaking his head,
“I mean dirty jokes.”
Redfield’s eyebrows soared. The vernacular
was like a fish in his face.”
“You don’t know any?” said a disappointed
Talbert.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” said Redfield.
“If I may make a suggestion. May I say that the chauffeur is more likely to–”
“You know any dirty jokes, Harrison?”
Talbert asked through the tube as the Rolls Royce purred along Bean Road toward
Highway 27.
Harrison looked blank for a moment. He
glanced back at Talbert. Then a grin wrinkled his carnal jowls.
“Well, sir,” he began, “there’s this guy sittin’ by the runway
eatin’ an onion, see?”
Talbert unclipped his four-color pencil.
***
Talbert stood at an elevator rising to the tenth floor of the
Gault Building.
The hour ride to New York had been most
illuminating. Not only had he transcribed seven of the most horrendously vulgar
jokes he had ever heard in his life but had exacted a promise from Harrison to
take him to the various establishments where these jokes had been heard.
The hunt was on.
max axe/detective
agency–read the words on the frosty-glassed
door. Talbert turned the knob and went in.
Announced by the beautiful receptionist,
Talbert was ushered into a sparsely furnished office on whose walls were a
hunting license, a machine gun, and framed photographs of the Seagram factory,
the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in color and Herbert J. Philbrick who had led
three lives.
Mr. Axe shook Talbert’s hand.
“What could I do for ya? he asked.
“First of all,” said Talbert, “do you know any dirty jokes?”
Recovering, Mr. Axe told Talbert the one
about the monkey and the elephant.
After he left the agency, Talbert began making
the rounds with Harrison. He heard a joke the first place they went.
“There’s this midget in a frankfurter
suit, see? it began.
It was a day of buoyant discovery. Talbert
heard the joke about the cross-eyed plumber in the harem, the one about the preacher
who won an eel at a raffle, the one about the fighter pilot who went down in
flames and the one about two Girl Scouts who lost their cookies in the
laundromat.
Among others.
***
“May I ask,” asked Uncle Lyman, “why?”
“While making the rounds with Harrison
today,” explained Talbert, “salesman of ladies’ undergarments told me that a
veritable cornucopia of off-color jokes exists in the person of Harry Shuler,
bellboy at the Millard Filmore. This salesman said that, during a three-day
convention at that hotel, he had heard more new jokes from Shuler than he had
heard in the first thirty-nine years of his life.”
“And you are going to–?” Uncle Lyman
began.
“Exactly, said Talbert. “We must follow
where the spoor is strongest.”
“Talbert,” said Uncle Lyman, “Why do you do
these things?”
“I am searching,” said Talbert, simply.
“For what, dammit!” cried Uncle Lyman.
Uncle Lyman covered his eyes. “You are the
image of your mother,” he declared.
“Say nothing of her,” charged Talbert.
“She was the finest woman who ever trod the earth.”
“Then how come she got trampled to death
at the funeral of Rudolph Valentino?” Uncle Lyman charged back.
“Think of it,” he said after a moment’s
reflection. “The nation alive with off-color jokes–the world alive! Ad
the same jokes, Uncle, the same jokes. How? How? By what strange
means do these jokes o’erleap oceans span continents? By what incredible
machinery are these jokes promulgated over mountain and dale?”
He turned and
met Uncle Lyman’s mesmeric stare.
“I
mean to know,”
he said.
At
ten minutes before midnight Talbert boarded the plane for San Francisco and
took a seat by the window. Fifteen minutes later the plane roared down the
runway and nosed up into the black sky.
Talbert
turned to the man beside him.
“Do
you know any dirty jokes, sir?” he inquired, pencil poised.
The man stared at him. Talbert gulped.
“Oh, I am sorry,” he said,
“Reverend.”
***
Shuler told him the one about the man
sitting on the runway eating an onion, see? Talbert listened, toes kneading
inquisitively in his shoes. The joke concluded, he asked Shuler where this and
similar jokes might be overheard. Shuler said at a wharf spot known as Davy
Jones’s Locker Room.
Early that evening after drinking with one
of the West Coast representatives of Bean Enterprises, Talbert took a taxi to
Davy Jones’s Locker Room. Entering its dim, smoke-fogged interior, he took a
place at the bar, ordered a screw-driver, and began to listen.
Talbert went over to the bar and asked Tony for the major source
of his lewdiana. After reciting the limerick about the sex of the asteroid
vermin,[1] the
bartender referred Talbert to a Mr. Frank Bruin, salesman, of Oakland, who
happened not to be there that night.
Talbert, at once, retired to a telephone
directory where he discovered five Frank Bruins in Oakland. Entering a booth
with a coat pocket sagging change, Talbert began dialing them.
Two of the five Frank Bruins were
salesmen. One of them, however, was in Alcatraz at the moment. Talbert traced
the remaining Frank Bruin to Hogan’s Alleys in Oakland where his wife said
that, as usual on Thursday nights, her husband was bowling with the Moonlight
Mattress Company All-Stars.
Quitting the bar, Talbert chartered a taxi
and started across the bay to Oakland, toes in ferment.
Veni, vidi, vici?
***
Bruin was not a needle in a haystack.
The moment Talbert entered Hogan’s Alleys
his eye was caught by a football huddle of men encircling a portly, rosy-domed
speaker. Approaching, Talbert was just in time to hear the punch line followed
by an explosion of composite laughter. It was the punch line that intrigued.
“‘My God!’ cried the actress,” Mr. Bruin
had uttered, “‘I thought you said a banana split!’”
This variation much excited Talbert who
saw in it a verification of a new element–the interchangeable kicker.
When the group had broken up and drifted,
Talbert accosted Mr. Bruin and, introducing himself, asked where Mr. Bruin had
heard that joke.
“Why d’ya ask, boy?” asked Mr. Bruin.
“No reason,” said the crafty Talbert.
“I don’t remember where I heard it, boy,” said Mr. Bruin finally.
“Excuse me, will ya?”
Talbert trailed after him but received no
satisfaction–unless it was in the most definite impression that Bruin was
concealing something.
Later, riding back to the Millard Filmore,
Talbert decided to put an Oakland detective agency on Mr Bruin’s trail to see
what could be seen.
When Talbert reached the hotel there was a
telegram waiting for him at the desk.
mr. rodney tassel received long distance call from mr. george
bullock, carthage hotel, chicago, was told joke about midget in salami suit, meaningful?
= axe
Talbert’s eyes
ignited.
“Tally,” he
murmured, “ho.”
An hour later he
had checked out of the Millard Filmore, taxied to the airport and caught a
plane for Chicago.
Twenty minutes
after he had left the hotel, a man in a dark pinstripe approached the desk
clerk and asked for the room number of Talbert Bean III. When informed of
Talbert’s departure the man grew steely-eyed and immediately retired to a
telephone booth. He emerged ashen.
***
“I’m sorry,” said
the desk clerk, “Mister Bullock checked out this morning.”
“Oh.” Talbert’s
shoulders sagged. All night on the plane he had been checking over his notes,
hoping to discern a pattern to the jokes which would encompass type, area of
genesis and periodicity. He was weary with fruitless concentration. Now this.
“And he left no forwarding address?” he asked.
“Only Chicago,
sir,” said the clerk.
“I see.”
Following a bath
and luncheon in his room, a slightly refreshed Talbert settled down with the
telephone and the directory. There were 47 George Bullocks in Chicago. Talbert
checked them off as he phoned.
At 3:00 o’clock
he slumped over the receiver in a dead slumber. At 4:21, he regained
consciousness and completed the remaining eleven calls. The Mr. Bullock in
question was not at home, said his housekeeper, but was expected that evening.
“Thank you
kindly,” said a bleary-eyed Talbert and, hanging up, thereupon collapsed on the
bed–only to awake a few minutes past seven and dress quickly. Descending to the
street, he gulped down a sandwich and a glass of milk, then hailed a cab and
made the hour ride to the home of George Bullock.
The man himself
answered the bell.
“Yes?” he asked.
Talbert
introduced himself and said he had come to the Hotel Carthage earlier to see
him.
“Why?” asked Mr.
Bullock.
“So you could
tell me where you heard that joke about the midget in the salami suit,” said
Talbert.
“Sir?”
“I said–”
“I heard what you
said, sir,” said Mr. Bullock, “though I cannot say that your remark makes any
noticeable sense.”
“I believe, sir,”
challenged Talbert, “that you are hiding behind fustian.”
“Behind fustian,
sir?” retorted Bullock. “I’m afraid–”
“The game is up,
sir!” declared Talbert in a ringing voice. “Why don’t you admit it and tell me
where you got that joke from?”
Talbert flashed a Mona Lisa smile. “Indeed?” he said.
And turning lightly on his heel, he left
Bullock trembling in the doorway. As he settled back against the taxicab sea
again, he saw Bullock still standing there, staring at him. Then Bullock
whirled and was gone.
“Hotel Carthage,” said Talbert, satisfied
with his bluff.
Riding back, he thought of Bullock’s
agitation and a thin smile tipped up the corners of his mouth. No doubt about
it. The prey was being run to earth. Now if his surmise was valid there would
likely be–
A lean man in a long raincoat was sitting
on the bed when Talbert entered his room. The man’s mustache, like a muddy
toothbrush, twitched.
“Talbert Bean?” he asked.
Talbert bowed.
The man, a Colonel Bishop, retired, looked at Talbert with metal
blue eyes.
“What is your game, sir?” he asked tautly.
“I don’t understand,” toyed Talbert.
“I think you do,” said the Colonel, “and
you are to come with me.”
“Oh?” said Talbert.
He found
himself looking down the barrel of a .45 calibre Webley-Fosbery.
“But of course,” said Talbert coolly. “I
have not come all this way to resist now.”
***
He was shoved–none too gently–into an
automobile, and then driven swiftly along what felt like a dirt road. The tires
crackled over pebbles and twigs.
Suddenly the blindfold was removed.
Talbert blinked and looked out the windows. It was a black and cloudy night; he
could see nothing but the limited vista afforded by the headlights.
“You are well isolated,” he said ,
appreciatively. Colonel Bishop remained tight-lipped and vigilant.
After a fifteen-minute ride along the dark
road, the car pulled up in front of a tall, unlighted house. As the motor was
cut Talbert could hear the pulsing rasp of crickets all around.
“Well,” he said.
“Emerge,” suggested Colonel Bishop.
“Of course,” Talbert bent out of the car
and was escorted up the wide porch steps by the Colonel. Behind, the car pulled
away.
Inside the house, chimes bonged hollowly
as the Colonel pushed a button. They waited in the darkness and, in a few
moments, approaching footsteps sounded.
A tiny aperture opened in the heavy door,
disclosing a single bespectacled eye. The eye blinked once and, with a faint
accent Talbert could not recognize, whispered furtively, “Why did the widow
wear black garters?”
“In remembrance,” said Colonel Bishop with great gravity, “of
those who had passed beyond.”
The door opened.
The owner of the eye was tall, gaunt, of
indeterminable age and nationality, his hair a dark mass wisped with gray. His
face was all angles and facets, his eyes piercing behind large, horn-rimmed
glasses He wore flannel trousers and a checked jacket.
“This is the Dean,” said Colonel Bishop.
“How do you do,” said Talbert.
“Come in, come in,” the Dean
invited, extending his large hand to Talbert. “Welcome, Mister Bean.” He
shafted a scolding look at Bishop’s pistol. “Now, Colonel,” he said, “indulging
in melodramatics again? Put it away, dear fellow.”
“We can’t be too careful,” grumped the Colonel.
Talbert stood in the spacious grace of the
entry hall looking around. His gaze settled, presently, on the cryptic smile of
the Dean, who said:
“So. You have found us out, sir.”
Talbert’s toes whipped like pennants in a
gale.
“Have I?” he covered his excitement with.
“Yes,” said the Dean. “You have. And a
masterful display of investigative intuition it was.”
Talbert looked around.
“”So,” he said, voice bated, “It is here.”
“Yes,” said the Dean, “Would you like to
see it?”
“More than anything in the world,”
said Talbert fervently.
“Come then,” said the Dean.
“Is this wise?” the Colonel warned.
“Come,” repeated the Dean.
They
started up a winding marble staircase.
“How did you suspect?” the Dean inquired. “That is to say–what
prompted you to probe the matter?”
“I just thought,” said Talbert
meaningfully. “Here are all these jokes yet no one seems to know where they
come from. Or care.”
“Yes,” observed the Dean, “we count upon
that lack of interest. What man in ten million ever asks where did you hear
that joke? Absorbed in memorizing the joke for future use, he gives no thought
to its source. This, of course, is our protection.
The Dean smiled at Talbert. “But not,” he amended,
“from men such as you.”
Talbert’s flush went unnoticed.
They reached the landing and began walking
along a wide corridor lit on each side by the illumination of candelabra. There
was no more talk. At the end of the corridor they turned right and stopped in
front of massive, iron-hinged doors.
“Is this wise?” the Colonel asked again.
“Too late to stop now,” said the Dean and
Talbert felt a shiver flutter down his spine. What if it were a trap? He
swallowed, then squared his shoulders. The Dean had said it. It was too late to
stop.
The great doors tracked open.
“Et voilà,” said the Dean.
***
The hallway was an avenue. Thick wall-to-wall carpeting sponged
beneath Talbert’s feet as he walked between the Colonel and the Dean. At
periodic intervals along the ceiling hung music emitting speakers: Talbert
recognized the Gaîté
Parisienne. His gaze moved to a
petit point tapestry on which Dionysian acts ensued above the stitched motto,
“Happy is the Man Who Is Making Something.”
“Incredible,” he murmured. “Here; in this
house.”
“Exactly,” said the Dean.
Talbert shook his head wonderingly.
“To think,” he said.
The Dean paused before a glass wall and,
braking, Talbert peered into an office. Among its rich appointments strode a
young man in a striped silk weskit with brass buttons, gesturing meaningfully
with a long cigar while, cross-legged on a leather couch, sat a happily
sweatered blonde of rich dimensions.
The man stopped briefly and waved to the Dean, smiled, then returned
to his spirited dictating.
“One of our best,” the Dean said.
“But,” stammered Talbert, “I though that
man was on the staff of–”
“He is,” said the Dean. “And, in his spare
time, he is also one of us.”
Talbert followed on excitement-numbed
legs.
“But I had no idea,” he said, “I presumed
the organization to be composed of men like Bruin and Bullock.”
“They are merely our means of
promulgation,” explained the Dean. “Our word-of-mouthers, you might say. Our creators
come from more exalted ranks–executives, statesmen, the better professional
comics, editors, novelists–”
“Off again?” the Dean asked pleasantly.
The big man grunted. It was a true grunt. He clumped off, lonely for a veldt.
“Unbelievable,”
said Talbert. “Such men as these?”
“Exactly,” said the Dean.
They strolled on past the rows of busy
offices. Talbert tourist-eyed, the Dean smiling his mandarin smile, the Colonel
working his lips as if anticipating the kiss of a toad.
“But where did it all begin?” a dazed
Talbert asked.
“That
is history’s secret,” rejoined the Dean, “veiled behind time’s opacity. Our venture
does have its honored past, however. Great men have graced its cause–Ben
Franklin, Mark Twain, Dickens, Swinburne, Rabelais, Balzac, oh, the honor roll
is long. Shakespeare, of course, and his friend Ben Jonson. Still further back,
Chaucer, Boccaccio. Further yet, Horace and Seneca, Demosthenes and Plautus.
Aristophanes, Apuleius. Yes, in the palaces of Tutankhamen was our work done;
in the black temples of Ahriman, the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan. Where did it
begin? Who knows? Scraped on rock , in many a primordial cave, are certain
drawings. And there are among us who believe that these were left by the
earliest members of the Brotherhood. But this is only legend…”
Now they had
reached the end of the hallway and were starting down a cushioned ramp.
“There
must be vast sums of money involved in this,” said Talbert.
“Heaven forfend,”
declared the Dean stopping short. Do not confuse our work with alley vending.
Our workers contribute freely of their time and skill, caring for naught save
the Cause.”
“Forgive me,” Talbert said. Then, rallying, he asked, “What
Cause?”
The Dean’s gaze fused on inward things. He
ambled on slowly, arms behind his back.
“The Cause of Love,” he said, “as opposed
to Hate. Of Nature, as opposed to the
Unnatural. Of Humanity, as opposed to Inhumanity. Of Freedom, as opposed to
Constraint. Of Health, as opposed to Disease. Yes, Mr. Bean, disease. The
disease called bigotry; the frighteningly communicable disease that taints all
it touches; turns warmth to chill and joy to guilt and good to bad. What
Cause?” He stopped dramatically, “The Cause of Life, Mr. Bean–as opposed to
Death!”
The Dean lifted a challenging finger. “We
see ourselves,” he said, “as an army of dedicated warriors marching on the
strongholds of prudery. Knights Templar with a just and joyous mission.”
“Amen to that,” a fervent Talbert said.
“Our Apprentice Room,” said the Dean,
“wherein we groom our future…”
“Oliver,”
said the Dean, nodding once.
“I’ve
done a joke, sir,” said Oliver. “May I–?”
“But
of course,” said the Dean.
Oliver
cleared viscid anxiety from his throat, then told a joke about a little boy and
girl watching a doubles match on the nudist colony
tennis court. The Dean smiled, nodding. Oliver looked up, pained.
“It is not without merit,” encouraged the Dean,
“but as it now stands, you see, it smacks rather too reminiscently of the
duchess-butler effect, Wife of Bath category. Not to mention the
justifiably popular double reverse bishop barmaid gambit.”
“Oh, sir,” grieved Oliver, “I’ll never
prevail.”
“Nonsense,” said the Dean, adding kindly, “son.
These shorter jokes are, by all odds, the most difficult to master. They must
be cogent, precise; must say something of pith and moment.”
“Yes, sir,” Oliver managed a smile and
returned to his cubicle. The Dean sighed.
“A somber business,” he declared. “He’ll
never be a Class-A. He really shouldn’t be in the composing end of it at all
but–” He gestured meaningfully, “–there is sentiment involved.”
“Oh?” said Talbert.
“Yes,” said the Dean. “It was his great
grandfather who, on June 23, 1848, wrote the first Traveling Salesman joke,
American strain.”
The Dean and the Colonel lowered their
heads a moment in reverent commemoration. Talbert did the same.
***
“Perhaps you wish to know more,” said the
Dean.
“Only one thing,” said Talbert.
“And that is, sir?”
“Why have you shown it to me?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel, fingering at his
armpit holster, “why indeed?”
The Dean looked at Talbert carefully as if
balancing his reply.
“You haven’t
guessed?” he said, at last. “No, I can see you haven’t. Mr. Bean… you are not
unknown to us. Who has not heard of your work, you unflagging devotion to
sometimes obscure but always worthy causes? What man can help but admire your
selflessness, your dedication, your proud defiance of convention and
prejudice?” The Dean paused and leaned forward.
“Mr Bean,” he
said softly. “Talbert–may I call you that?–we want you on our team.”
Talbert gaped.
His hands began to tremble. The Colonel, relieved, grunted and sank back into
his chair.
No reply came
from the flustered Talbert, so the Dean continued: “Think it over. Consider the
merits of our work. With all due modesty, I think I may say that here is your
opportunity to ally yourself with the greatest cause of your life.”
“I’m speechless,”
said Talbert. “I hardly–that is–how can I…”
But, already, the
light of consecration was stealing into his eyes.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Volume 12, No. 3, Whole No. 70, March
1957. From Playboy, 1956
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