RMatheson - Mad House (1953) Read Online Free Page A

token in the coin box and weaved down the length of the bus. He passed a professor he knew and nodded to him distractedly. He slumped down on the back seat and stared at the grimy, rubberized floor boards.
    This is a great life, his mind ranted. I am so pleased with this, my life and these, my great and noble accomplishments.
    He opened the briefcase a moment and looked in at the thick prospectus he had outlined with the aid of Dr. Ramsay.
    First week—1.
Everyman.
Discussion of. Reading of selections from
Classic Readings For College Freshmen.
2.
Beowulf.
Reading of. Class discussion. Twenty minute quotation quiz.
    He shoved the sheaf of papers back into the briefcase. It sickens me, he thought. I hate these things. The classics have become anathema to me. I begin to loathe the very mention of them. Chaucer, the Elizabethan poets, Dryden, Pope, Shakespeare. What higher insult to a man than to grow to hate these names because he must share them by part with unappreciative clods? Because he must strain them thin and make them palatable for the dullards who should better be digging ditches.
     
    He got off the bus downtown and started down the long slope of Ninth Street.
    Walking, he felt as though he were a ship with its hawser cut, prey to a twisted network of currents. He felt apart from the city, the country, the world. If someone told me I were a ghost, he thought, I would be inclined to believe.
    What is she doing now?
    He wondered about it as the buildings floated past him. What is she thinking as I stand here and the town of Fort drifts by me like vaporous stage flats? What are her hands holding? What expression has she on her lovely face?
    She is alone in the house, our house. What might have been our
home.
Now it is only a shell, a hollow box with sticks of wood and metal for furnishings. Nothing but inanimate dead matter.
    No matter what John Morton said.
    Him with his gold leaves parting and his test tubes and his God of the microscope. For all his erudite talk and his papers of slide-ruled figures; despite all that—it was simple witchcraft he professed. It was idiocy. The idiocy that prompted that ass Charles Fort to burden the world with his nebulous fancies. The idiocy that made that fool of a millionaire endow this place and from the arid soil erect these huge stone structures and house within a zoo of wild-eyed scientists always searching for some fashion of elixir while the rest of the clowns blew the world out from under them.
    No, there is nothing right with the world, he thought as he plodded under the arch and onto the wide, green campus.
    He looked across at the huge Physical Sciences Center, its granite face beaming in the late morning sun.
    Now she is calling the cab. He consulted his watch. No. She is in the cab already. Riding through the silent streets. Past the houses and down into the shopping district. Past the red brick buildings spewing out yokels and students. Through the town that was a potpourri of the sophisticated and the rustic.
    Now the cab was turning left on Tenth Street. Now it was pulling up the hill, topping it. Gliding down toward the railroad station. Now…
    “Chris!”
    His head snapped around and his body twitched in surprise. He looked toward the wide-doored entrance to the Mental Sciences Building. Dr. Morton was coming out.
    We attended school together eighteen years ago, he thought. But I took only a small interest in science. I preferred wasting my time on the culture of the centuries. That’s why I’m an associate and he’s a doctor and the head of his department.
    All this fled like racing winds through his mind as Dr. Morton approached, smiling. He clapped Chris on the shoulder.
    “Hello there,” he said. “How are things?”
    “How are they ever?”
    Dr. Morton’s smile faded.
    “What is it, Chris?” he asked.
    I won’t tell you about Sally, Chris thought. Not if I die first. You’ll never know it from me.
    “The usual,” he said.
    “Still on the outs