“An extremely interesting suggestion, my dear sir. Perhaps you would like to expand it?”

Norm beamed. As he always said to Dutchy, they were easier to deal with when they had some brains, and didn’t weep, or shout at you.

“I’m glad you’re taking it like that, Professor. Now about Pearlie; there’s been talk. And particularly about that scene in the street a night or two ago. They say you were walloping her with a pretty big stick—”

“They say? Yes, much has been said about me, Mr Yarrow. I can guess who your informants were. They have been saying such things for many years. And now they say that I have been chastising my daughter in public, do they? With a stick? I am not in the least surprised. And how does the legend of Oedipus bear upon this accusation?”

“Professor, you love Pearlie.”

“Do I, Mr Yarrow? An extraordinary idea. That a man should love his daughter is understandable, but surely my detractors deny me any such natural feeling?”

“I mean, you love Pearlie too much.”

“And so I chastise her in public with a stick?”

“Exactly. You’re jealous, you see. You’re jealous of her normal love-object, young Solly Bridgetower.”

“Oh, you believe her to be in love with Bridgetower, do you?”

“Well, isn’t she engaged to him?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Well—wasn’t it in the paper?”

“Aha, so you believe what you see in the papers? A strange confession for a psychologist. No, Mr Yarrow, she is not engaged to him, nor has the idea of being engaged to him ever entered her head. Now, to return to your opinions about Oedipus, which I find refreshingly novel, what has Oedipus to do with all this?”

Norm had a feeling that he had lost the upper hand in this interview; it was not normal for the interviewee to be so icy calm, so impersonal, as this.

“From the piece in the paper it was natural to assume that she was engaged to him. You’ll admit that. Now Oedipus is a kind of symbol of a particular kind of love, you see, and…”

“Oedipus might be taken as a symbol of many things. In accordance with the prophecy, he slew his father Laius, and married Epikaste, the widow of Laius, to discover later that she was his mother. A strange love, certainly. But my dear mother died when I was a child of two, Mr Yarrow, and I have no recollection of her. I fail to see the resemblance between Oedipus and myself.”

“Perhaps you don’t know yourself as thoroughly as you should. Not that I mean to blame you, of course. It takes training to know yourself in the way I am talking about. But if you turn the Oedipus legend around, you get a daughter who kills her mother and is in love with her father. Do you follow me?”

“Inverted legends are no novelty to a classicist, my dear sir. Let me help you out; it is your idea that my daughter loves me to excess, and that in order to correct this undesirable condition I beat her publicly with a stick? Is that it?”

“No, not exactly. You’re being too literal. What I’m trying to get at is that your desire to keep Pearlie from her natural love-object, to keep her all to yourself, is—well, let’s not say unnatural; let’s just say it isn’t usual. Go on that way, and you may be headed for a crack-up. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought Oedipus into this. All that Freudian stuff is pretty complicated, and anyway I’m sure things haven’t got that far yet with you and Pearlie—if I make myself clear.”

“But you do not make yourself clear. And I am anxious that you should do so before you leave this room. After all, it is not every day that a man of my age, and of my quiet and retired mode of life, is confronted with a stranger who suggests that he lives in an unnatural relationship with his daughter. I should like to hear more.”

“Now, Professor, let’s not get extreme. When I was talking about Oedipus I was talking symbolically, you understand.”

“I do not profess to understand psychological symbolism, Mr Yarrow, but it does not require much training to realize that Oedipus is a symbol for incest. Isn’t that what you imply?”

“Oh, now just a minute. That’s pretty rough talk. Not incest, of course. Just a kind of mental incest, maybe. Nothing really serious.”

“Fool!” said the Professor, who had been growing very hot, and was now at the boil. “Do you imply that the sins of the mind are trivial and the sins of the flesh important? What kind of an idiot are you?”

“Now, Professor, let’s keep this objective. You must understand that I’m talking on the guidance level, not personally at all. I just want to help you to self-understanding. If you understand yourself, you can meet your problem, you see, and I’m here, in all friendliness, to try to help you to understand yourself, and to help Pearlie, and so forth, do you see?”

“But you have not yet told me what all this has to do with Oedipus.”

Norm was by this time sick of the name of Oedipus. A horrible suspicion was rising in his mind that the Oedipus Complex, which he had for some time used as a convenient and limitless bin into which he dumped any problem involving possessive parents and dependent children, was a somewhat more restricted term than he had imagined. The chapter on Freudian psychology in his general textbook had not, after all, equipped him to deal with a tiresomely literal professor of classics who knew Oedipus at first hand, so to speak. Norm had received his training chiefly through general courses and from some interesting work which proved fairly conclusively that rats were unable to distinguish between squares, circles and triangles.

“Let’s forget about Oedipus,” he said, and smiled a smile which had never failed him in all his career in social work.

“Not at all,” said the Professor, grinning wolfishly. “I am increasingly reminded of Oedipus. Do you not recall that in that tragic history, Oedipus met a Sphinx? The Sphinx spoke in riddles—very terrible riddles, for those who could not guess them died. But Oedipus guessed the riddle, and the chagrin of the Sphinx was so great that it destroyed itself. I am but a poor shadow of Oedipus, I fear, and you, Mr Yarrow, but a puny kitten of a Sphinx. But you are, like many another Sphinx of our modern world, an under-educated, brassy young pup, who thinks that gall can take the place of the authority of wisdom, and that a professional lingo can disguise his lack of thought. You aspire to be a Sphinx, without first putting yourself to the labour of acquiring a secret.”

“Aw, now, Professor, let’s not be bitter—”

“Bitter? Have I not a right to be bitter? You intrude upon me with your obscene accusation, and your muddle of old wives’ tales about me beating my daughter in the streets, and you tell me not to be bitter! No, you listen to me: I shall inform your superior of this, and if you dare to repeat any of this filthy nonsense to anyone else, I shall not only drive you out of this University in disgrace, but I shall take you to court and strip you of everything you possess. Get out of here! Get out! Get out!”

The Professor had worked himself up into a rage by this time; flecks of white bubbled from his lips, and his eyes rolled horribly. He seized his walking stick—not a blackthorn, for that was broken, but a knobbly ashplant—and he might have struck Norm with it if the expert in guidance had not darted into the corridor, to escape down the iron staircase so rapidly that it rumbled like thunder.

But when he was in safety he felt a certain comfort coursing warmly through him. The Professor’s rage, though alarming, was the normal response to what Norm had said; when a man was shown to himself he invariably wept or raged. It had been the Professor’s period of quiet, controlled watchfulness which had worried Norm. That was definitely abnormal, and hard to figure out. In fact, the more he thought about it, the less he understood it. And all that talk about Sphinxes—that didn’t sound too good. Simply made no sense at all. The Professor would bear watching.