I PUT the Tars through their paces. With every moment that passed, I felt myself drawing closer to the completion of a phase of my life, a phase that I would think of thirty years later as characterized in a significant and memorable way by my involvement with the Young Tars. My excitement and happiness grew. I began to feel the pride that comes with the satisfactory completion of something, a feeling that has since become one of the sustaining emotions of my life, the feeling that makes me rub my hands together, grin, sigh, and say to myself, “At last it’s finished, and it’s perfect—well, as close to perfect as I can make it.”
I didn’t try to make my feelings show, but they influenced, inevitably, my tone of voice, my gestures, and my carriage, for I was not then any more than I am now able to keep my emotions out of my style. The message in the style I used with the Tars was as clear as the message in the style I used with Mr. Summers. Without quite understanding what I was doing, I was using style to communicate an idea, the idea that things were reaching some kind of conclusion, something like perfection, a pleasure of a yet-to-be-determined kind. The Tars saw it, understood it, and returned it. The rehearsal was shipshape. The Tars were spiffy. Our ship was coming into port.
When we had finished the rehearsal, and the last echoes of the Tars Hymn died away, I held my hands up for silence. The idea that something was up hung in the air, and I got the quiet I wanted.
“This is the time when we would usually end the rehearsal and call Mr. Summers and the Precious Metals out to start the regular part of the meeting,” I said, heart pounding, palms sweating. “But tonight I have kind of a surprise for you. You remember that I told you this would be the last version of the Tars Manual,” I said.
I held it over my head.
“Well I meant it.”
A resounding cheer.
“And now I’m going to prove it to you.”
Silence.
“I want everybody to turn to the last page in the manual.”
Flipping of pages.
“The very last page.”
When everyone had turned to the last page, I began reading.
“Wait a minute, Peter,” Porky interrupted. “Are you really going to resign now, or is this just practice?”
“I’m really going to resign now,” I said.
“Well, this may be kind of a technical point,” said Porky, “but if you’re really resigning, shouldn’t you do it in the real meeting? This is just the practice for the meeting, isn’t it?”
“Not any more,” I said, beaming, enormously grateful to Porky for playing the straight man this way. I flipped back to the beginning of the manual and read:
I looked up at Porky and grinned.
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s very good. Very, very good. I’m gonna get Mr. Summers out here,” he said, chuckling. “I’ve got to see what he thinks of this. Just wait a minute, Peter, okay?”
“If I wait, I might chicken out, Porky,” I said. “I’ve got to keep going.”
“All right,” said Porky, jumping from the bleachers and trotting across the floor, “but try to stretch it out.”
From the pocket of my bell-bottom Tars Trousers, I took my spiral-bound notebook. I flipped it open and began reading from it a revised, final version of the remarks I had first prepared months earlier. “You know,” I read, adopting a puzzled look, to indicate that the world was sometimes just too illogical, too crazy a place for me to understand, “I always thought Mr. Summers was making a mistake when he made me the Scribe.” This was received with a little uneasy chuckling. I continued in my practiced all-kidding-aside tone: “After all, I only got the job because I happened to be carrying a notebook. I won’t make that mistake again.”
I tossed my notebook over my shoulder as I had tossed the court-martial procedures. A little more uneasy chuckling.
“Now that I’m going to resign, I want you to know that, all things considered, I liked being Scribe, but I have to admit that I’ve got better things to do than change the order of the traits again—”
There was laughter at this, we-know-just-what-you-mean laughter.
After a pause, I added, “—and again—”
They roared.
After a longer pause, I said, “—and again.”
I brought down the house.
In Topical Guide 233, Mark Dorset considers Words on Paper: Their Power and Dialect, Slang, Idiolect from this episode.
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