Please Write for Details by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald [MacDonald, John D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780449129265
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1959-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Torrigan returned to El Hutchinson in a taxi on Monday, fifteen minutes after his class was scheduled to begin. Class met in the garden patio. Torrigan went to his room and appeared before the class ten minutes later. His class on the seventeenth day of July consisted of Barbara, Klauss, John Kemp, Monica, Harvey, Hildabeth and the Wahls. They had their easels set up and paint-boxes open, and were busily at work when Torrigan joined them. Nearly all of them hunched their shoulders slightly in instinctive preparation for his usual display of noise and energy, bounding from easel to easel, braying comment and criticism, chiding the timid, jeering at the confused. Every one of them knew he had been gone since before dinner on Friday evening. And they had heard reports on the odd circumstances of his leaving.

He stood there like a very old man, blinking placidly in the sunlight, dreaming the long memories of half-forgotten wars. The brave bristling of the big black beard had dwindled to a look of wilt. And the bold red brigand nose and the red lips nestling in the beard’s blackness had paled to a pink tinged with gray. His once arrogant and demanding eyes, pale and with that Mongol tilt, had all the vitality of glazed glass marbles in the bottom of a fish bowl. John Kemp, barely able to conceal the amusement arising from his shrewd guess as to the cause as well as the nature of Torrigan’s undoing, was nonetheless able to feel a twinge of very real sympathy for the man.

Hildabeth cackled loudly in the silence. “Mr. Teacher,” she said, “you put me in mind of a fella my daddy used to tell me about when I was a little tyke. This fella fell off his horse into a wallow and a whole herd of buffalo stampeded right over him and didn’t harm a hair of his head. But Daddy said he went around the rest of his life looking sort of far away, as if he lost something and couldn’t remember what it was or what he done with it.”

Torrigan looked at her blankly. “Eh? I … I guess I’m late. Please keep working.” His voice was soft and hoarse. They kept working. He shuffled slowly around and looked at their work and made mild and almost inaudible comments which made little sense. Every few moments he would yawn so hugely, opening a tired red cavern in the middle of the beard, that Barbara was reminded of poor Saltamontes. Torrigan lasted about forty minutes. And during the last ten minutes he was tottering rather than shuffling. He excused himself and floated blindly away.

Barbara flashed John Kemp a quick and knowing and rather feline look of great amusement. On Saturday, after walking the streets of Taxco, they had climbed up to the terrace of the Hotel Victoria and sat near the railing and had a chilled beer as they looked out over the town. While they were there, realizing that

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