Read Ebook: A matter of size by Mines Samuel

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Ebook has 146 lines and 13717 words, and 3 pages

A MATTER OF SIZE

Professor Hiram Dexter put the finishing touches on his toilet by tenderly brushing out his crisp, black Vandyke beard. He stepped back to look at himself in the mirror. He had to stoop a little for even the full-length glass was short for his six feet four inches of gangling height. Nevertheless he regarded his image with undiluted satisfaction.

"Ah, Dexter," he sighed, "you're a dashing rascal."

Humming tunelessly, for he was quite tone-deaf, he picked up a book titled, "The Nutritive Quotient, Vitamin Factors And Trace Elements of Protein-High Diets," put his hat on, the light out, and left the house.

Outside, a spring night hovered tenderly over the campus of Fredonia College. The darkness was alive with the richness of new grass, the vagrant perfumes of verbena, alyssum, calendula, nemophila and ageratum, not to mention lobelia, mignonette, nicotiana, scabiosa, Kochia and salpiglossis. He knew them all and loved every Latin syllable.

His nostrils dilated with pleasure as he strode, with a loose, almost clanking motion, along the concrete paths. It was a night for romance, for tender, whispered discussions of vitamins and tissue regeneration, of gamma rays and the atom.

Professor Dexter's heart welled with the rich pathos of life. As straight as the curving paths would allow, he headed directly for the neat brick house where dwelt his lady love: Professor Clarissa Wilkins, of the Domestic Science Department.

At the foot of her steps, a shadow loomed out of the dark. It was a very short, barrel-shaped shadow. Prof. Dexter leaned over from his great height, to peer at it.

"Ah--is that you, Donald?" he queried.

"Who were you expecting?" snapped the tubby shadow peevishly. "Hirohito?"

Professor Donald Curtis was in almost every way the opposite of his friend Hiram Dexter. He was five feet two inches in his elevator shoes and his circumference was better than that by two or three inches. He was as quick, and jumpy in his movements as a chipmunk and he seemed to buzz around the taller, slower-moving man like an irritated bumble-bee. Nevertheless they were fast friends, rivals only in their physics research--and for the hand of Professor Clarissa Wilkins.

They turned and ascended the steps together. Professor Curtis clutched to his plump bosom a book titled: "A Statistical History of the Nutritional Influence Upon Intelligence of the Child From One to Six." Neither were Greeks, but they both came bearing gifts subtly slanted to their beloved's tastes.

Professor Dexter pressed the doorbell and a muted chime rang softly within. The door opened and light bathed them, pressing back the soft darkness of the spring night.

"Good evening, Professor," Professor Dexter said, beaming at the lady in the doorway.

"Good evening, Professor," Professor Curtis echoed, smiling broadly.

"Oh, it's you," Professor Wilkins said. If this had been the South she would have said you-all.

Clarissa was an energetic spinster in her forties with snapping black eyes, graying hair drawn into a neat, no-nonsense bun at the back of her head and the most remarkable grasp of bio-chemistry of any woman alive. Professors Dexter and Curtis admired her intellectual attainments extravagantly and mistook the admiration for love.

She let them in, accepted their gifts with a murmured thanks and waved them vaguely to chairs. She seemed a little absent-minded, a bit distracted this evening.

Professor Dexter cleared his throat.

"A most amusing thing happened in class today," he began. "I was lecturing--"

"That was amusing enough," Professor Curtis snapped testily. "Professor--er--Clarissa," he said daringly, "referring to the Stefansson experiments in living on meat alone for a year--"

He was peering around anxiously.

A flicker of emotion crossed Clarissa's face, but was gone at once. She rose.

"I'll get them."

She returned bearing a plate heaped high with crisp, crunchy, chocolated cookies. The professors' eyes lighted. They reached.

Professor Dexter hurried into the conversational breach, impolitely not even waiting for his mastication to cease.

"A most amusing thing happened in class today," he repeated.

The doorbell chimed.

Anticipation lighted up Professor Wilkins' cool gray eyes. She went to the door and presently returned with a man in tow.

"Professor Dexter, Professor Curtis, you know Mr. Donahue, our athletic director."

They knew Jake Donahue. They did not approve of mere muscle, without mind. They gave his powerful, athletic figure, his rugged, square-jawed face a disapproving glance.

"How d'ye do?" they said.

"Hi!" said Jake Donahue.

He sat down. Clarissa transferred the plate of cookies to his side. He munched. And a surprising thing happened. Mere muscle could never triumph over intellect, yet the Professors Dexter and Curtis found themselves pocketed, side-tracked and elbowed aside.

The conversation was of football, racing, track, crew, basketball, pole-vaulting, shot-putting, boxing, swimming, wrestling, baseball, not to neglect tennis, skeet-shooting, ice-skating, skiing, horseback riding, lacrosse, bob-sledding, jai-alai, handball and billiards.

They took it for an hour. Then they folded their tents like the Arabs and as silently withdrew. The final blow was that Clarissa hardly seemed to know they were departing.

Defeated, they stared at one another, when outside. The spring night was still fulsome with perfume and romance. But the joy had gone from their hearts, the glamour was an empty, mocking shell.

"This may be new to us, Professor, but it is a familiar thing," Curtis said as they began to walk down the path. "The female of the species wishes to be conquered. Hence, whatever her intellectual endowments, instinct triumphs over intellect and she succumbs to the animal magnetism of brute force."

"But it's Clarissa!" Professor Dexter said weakly.

"Even Clarissa. Oh, of course if she married him she would soon awake to her horrible mistake. She would weary of an endless conversation about basketball and foot racing. She would yearn for the rarified heights of our discussions. But it would be too late."

"We must rescue her from this tragic error, Professor," Dexter said firmly.

"Yes," Curtis agreed. "How? Did you ever try to change Clarissa's mind?"

"Uh--once." Professor Dexter shuddered at the memory. "It was worse than my fraternity initiation--which I still remember with revulsion after twenty-six years."

They walked in moody silence for a while, Professor Curtis skipping to keep up with his friend's loose-jointed stride. Then Professor Dexter stopped with an exclamation.

"There is a way!" he said. "Look. It seems obvious that what Clarissa admires in this Jake Donahue is not his conversation but his overwhelmingly masculine physique. Do you agree?"

Curtis grunted. His own figure was a sore spot with him.

"Against Jake Donahue--let us face it--we do not cut inspiring figures. I am too tall and you are too short. But suppose we were to change--suppose I were to come down four or five inches and fill out correspondingly and you were to come up ten inches and slim out correspondingly? Then how would we compare with Donahue?"

Professor Curtis stared at him angrily.

"There may be something wrong with my ears, but I doubt it," he snapped. "I think I heard you say what I heard you say. And I wish to point out, with bitterness, that this is hardly the time for fanciful pleasantries."

"Nonsense!" Professor Dexter said. "I am not joking. We have the means in our grasp. Come along with me and I'll show you."

He hurried the protesting Curtis along, the little man's feet fairly flying to keep up. At the darkened physics building, Dexter used his key and let them in. They went up to the laboratory.

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