The Centaur Read Online Free PDF Page B

He remembered the thunder. Zimmerman might still be in the building; he never went home. The centaur listened for a rumble upstairs, and in that moment of listening everything altered. The girl dropped from around his neck. Without a backwards look, Venus vanished into the underwood. A thousand green petals closed upon her passage. Love has its own ethics, which the deliberating will irrevocably offends. Then as now, Caldwell stood on that spot of cement alone and puzzled, and now, as then, climbed the stairs with a painful, confused sense of having displeased, through ways he could not follow, the God who never rested from watching him.
    He climbed the flights of stairs to his room on the second floor. The steps seemed built for the legs of a more supple species; his clumsiness was agonizing. Each wave of pain forced his gaze tight against a section of wall where a ballpoint pen had looped, a varnished newel post whose bevelled cap had been torn from the glue-glazed dowel stump, a corner of the stairs in which a little black drift of dust and grit had hardened, a windowpane filmed in grease and framed in rusty mullions, a dead stretch of yellow wall. The door to his room was shut. He expected to hear turbulence through it; but there was instead an ominous quiet. His skin twitched. Had Zimmerman, detecting noise, come and taken over the class?
    This fear proved justified. He pushed open the door, and there, not two yards away, Zimmerman’s lopsided face hunglike a gigantic emblem of authority, stretching from rim to rim of Caldwell’s appalled vision. With a malevolent pulse, it seemed to widen still further. An implacable bolt, springing from the center of the forehead above the two disparately magnifying lenses of the principal’s spectacles, leaped space and transfixed the paralyzed victim. The silence as the two men stared at one another was louder than thunder.
    Zimmerman turned to the class; it had been tamed into alphabetical rows of combed, frightened children. “Mr. Caldwell has graciously returned to us.”
    The class obediently snickered.
    “I think such devotion to duty should be rewarded with a mild round of applause.”
    He led the clapping; his cupped palms patted each other daintily. Zimmerman’s extremities were queerly small for such a massive head and torso. He wore a sports coat whose padded shoulders and broad checkered pattern emphasized the disproportion. Above the ironical applause a few boys’ smirks glinted toward Caldwell. The humiliated teacher licked his lips. They tasted charred.
    “Thank you, boys and girls,” Zimmerman said. “That is quite enough.” The gentle applause abruptly stopped. The principal turned to Caldwell again; the unbalance of his face seemed that of a proud pregnant cloud tugged by a wind high in heaven. Caldwell uttered a nonsensical syllable that was meant to be a shout of praise and adoration.
    “We can discuss this later, George. The children are anxious for their lesson.”
    But Caldwell, frantic to explain, to be absolved, bent and lifted his trouser leg, an unhoped-for indecency that burst the class into loud hilarity. And indeed Caldwell had in his heart asked for some such response.
    Zimmerman understood this. He understood everything. Though Caldwell instantly dropped the trouser leg and straightened to attention, Zimmerman continued to gaze down at his ankle, as if it were at an infinite distance from him but his eyes were infinitely percipient. “Your socks don’t quite match,” he said. “Is this your explanation?”
    The class burst again. Immaculately timing himself, Zimmerman waited until he would be audible above the last trickling chuckles. “But George—George—you should not allow your commendable concern with grooming to interfere with another pedagogic need, punctuality.”
    Caldwell was so notoriously a poor dresser, his clothes were so nakedly shabby, that there was rich humor even in this; though doubtless many of the laughers had