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Words: 53044 in 25 pages
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the bad habit of joking.
"Heh, to the deuce with knowledge. Your much-heralded knowledge is but a form of cowardice. It is a fact! Yes, you want to encircle the infinite with a wall and you fear to cast a glance behind the wall. Yes, sir! And if ever you should glance beyond the wall you would be dazzled and close your eyes,--yes,--"
"Walls are the foundation of every human--" I began.
R-13 sprinkled his fountain. O- laughed rosily and roundly. I waved my hand: "Well, you may laugh, I don't care." I was busy with something else. I had to find a way of eating up, of crushing down, that square-root of minus one. "Suppose," I offered, "we go to my place and do some arithmetical problems."
O- glanced at R-, then serenely and roundly at me; the soft, endearing color of our pink checks came to her cheeks.
"But today I am.... I have a check to him today." "And tonight he is busy, so that--"
The moist varnished lips whispered good-naturedly: "Half an hour is plenty for us, is it not, O-? I am not a great lover of your problems; let us simply go over to my place and chat."
I was afraid to remain alone with myself, or to be more correct, with that new strange self, who by some curious coincidence bore my number, D-503. So I went with R-. True, he is not precise, not rhythmic, his logic is jocular and turned inside out, yet we are.... Three years ago we both chose our dear, rosy O-. This tied our friendship more firmly together than our school-days did. In R-'s room everything seems like mine; the Tables, the glass of the chairs, the table, the closet, the bed. But as we entered, R- moved one chair out of place, then another,--the room became confused, everything lost the established order and seemed to violate every rule of Euclid's geometry. R- remained the same as before; in Taylor and in mathematics he always lagged at the tail of the class.
We recalled Plappa, how we boys used to paste the whole surface of his glass legs with paper notes expressing our thanks . We recalled our priest . Our priest had a very powerful voice; a real hurricane would come out of the megaphone. And we children would yell the prescribed texts after him with all our lung-power. We recalled how our scapegrace, R-13, used to stuff the priest with chewed paper; every word was thus accompanied by a paper wad shot out. Naturally, R- was punished, for what he did was undoubtedly wrong, but now we laughed heartily;--by we I mean our triangle, R-, O-, and I, I must confess, I too.
"And what if he had been a living one? Like the ancient ones, heh?" We'd have b... b..., a fountain running from the fat bubbling lips. The sun was shining through the ceiling, the sun above, the sun from the sides, its reflection from below. O- on R-13's lap and minute drops of sunlight in O-'s blue eyes. Somehow my heart warmed up. The square-root of minus one became silent and motionless....
"Today I did not write; today I was busy with something else." "B-b-busy" sprinkled straight into my face.
"What else?"
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