VI
One afternoon Professor Litton, having dismissed his class—in which he was obliged to rebuke Teed more severely than usual—fell to remembering his last communion with Martha, the things he had said—and heard! He wondered, as a philologist, at the strange prevalence of the "oo" sound in his love-making. It was plainly an onomatopœic word representing the soul's delight. Oo! was what Ah! is to the soul in exaltation and Oh! to the soul in surprise. If the hyacinths babbled Ai, Ai! the roses must murmur Oo! Oo!
The more he thought it over, the more nonsense it became, as all words turn to drivel on repetition; but chiefly he was amazed that even love could have wrought this change in him. In his distress he happened to think of Dean Swift. Had not that fierce satirist created a dialect of his own for his everlastingly mysterious love affairs?
Eager for the comfort of fellowship in disgrace he hurried to the library and sought out the works of the Dean of St. Patrick's. And in the "Journal to Stella" he found what he sought—and more. Expressions of the most appalling coarseness alternated with the most insipid tendernesses.
The old dean had a code of abbreviations: M.D. for "My dear," Ppt. for "Poppet," Pdfr. for "Poor dear foolish rogue," Oo or zoo or loo stood for "you," Deelest for "Dearest," and Rettle for "Letter," and Dallars for "Girl," Vely for "Very," and Hele and Lele for "Here and there." Litton copied out for his own comfort and Martha's this passage.
Do you know what? When I am writing in my own language I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it: "Zoo must cly Lele and Hele, and Hele aden. Must loo mimitate Pdfr., pay? Iss, and so la shall! And so leles fol ee rettle. Dood mollow."
And Dean Swift had written this while he was in London two hundred years before, a great man among great men. With such authority back of him Litton returned to his empty class-room feeling as proud as Gulliver in Lilliput. A little later he was Gulliver in Brobdingnag.
Alone at his desk, with none of his students in the seats before him, he took from his pocket—his left pocket—a photograph of Prof. Martha Binley. It had been taken one day on a picnic far from the spying eyes of pupils. Her hair was all wind-blown, her eyes frowned gleamingly into the sun, and her mouth was curled with laughter.
He sat there alone—the learned professor—and talked to this snapshot in a dialogue he would have recently accepted as a perfect examination paper for matriculation in an insane-asylum.
"Well, Margy-wargy, zoo and Stookie-tookie is dust like old Dean Swiffikins, isn't we?"