This hideous twilight into which their lives had passed froze Eugene with its terror, and choked him with fury. He would grow enraged after reading a letter from home and pound the grained plaster of the dormitory wall until his knuckles were bloody. They have taken his courage away! he thought. They have made a whining coward out of him! No, and if I die, no damned family about. Blowing their messy breaths in your face! Snuffling down their messy noses at you! Gathering around you till you can’t breathe. Telling you how well you’re looking with hearty smiles, and boo— hooing behind your back. O messy, messy, messy death! Shall we never be alone? Shall we never live alone, think alone, live in a house by ourselves alone? Ah! but I shall! I shall! Alone, alone, and far away, with falling rain. Then, bursting suddenly into the study, he found Elk Duncan, with unaccustomed eye bent dully upon a page of Torts, a bright bird held by the stare of that hypnotic snake, the law.
“Are we to die like rats?” he said. “Are we to smother in a hole?”
“Damn!” said Elk Duncan, folding the big calfskin and cowering defensively behind it.
“Yes, that’s right, that’s right! Calm yourself. You are Napoleon Bonaparte and I’m your old friend, Oliver Cromwell. Harold!” he called. “Help! He killed the keeper and got out.”
“’Gene!” yelled Harold Gay, hurling a thick volume from him under the spell of Elk’s great names. “What do you know about history? Who signed Magna Charta, eh?”
“It wasn’t signed,” said Eugene. “The King didn’t know how to write, so they mimeographed it.”
“Correct!” roared Harold Gay. “Who was Æthelred the Unready?”
“He was the son of Cynewulf the Silly and Undine the Unwashed,” said Eugene.
“On his Uncle Jasper’s side,” said Elk Duncan, “he was related to Paul the Poxy and Genevieve the Ungenerous.”
“He was excommunicated by the Pope in a Bull of the year 903, but he refused to be cowed,” said Eugene.
“Instead, he called together all the local clergy, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Gay, who was elected Pope,” said Elk Duncan. “This caused a great schism in the Church.”
