With thick chalked fingers John Dorsey thoughtfully massaged his torso from loin to chin.
“Now, let me see,” he whined with studious deliberation, “what he gives on this.” He fumbled for the notes.
Tom Davis turned his reddening cheeks toward the window, a low sputter of laughter escaping from his screwed lips.
Guy Doak gazed solemnly at Eugene, with a forked hand stroking his grave pallid face.
“Entgegen,” said Eugene, in a small choked voice, “follows its object.”
John Dorsey laughed uncertainly, and shook his head, still searching the notes.
“I’m not so sure of that,” he said.
Their wild laughter leaped like freed hounds. Tom Davis hurled himself violently downward over his desk. John Dorsey looked up, adding uncertainly his absent falsetto mirth.
From time to time, in spite of himself, they taught him a little German, a language of which he had been quite happily ignorant. The lesson had become for them a daily hunger: they worked it over with mad intensity, speeding and polishing their translation in order to enjoy his bewilderment. Sometimes, deliberately, they salted their pages with glib false readings, sometimes they interpolated passages of wild absurdity, waiting exultantly for his cautious amendment of a word that did not exist.
“Slowly the moonlight crept up the chair in which the old man was sitting, reaching his knees, his breast, and finally,”—Guy Doak looked up slyly at his tutor, “giving him a good punch in the eye.”
“No-o,” said John Dorsey, rubbing his chin, “not exactly.’Catching him squarely in the eye’gets the idiom better, I think.”
