Stoner tried to keep his voice from becoming stiff. “It isn’t a question of forgiving. It’s simply a question of our behaving toward each other so that not too much discomfort is made for the students and the other members of the department.”
“I’m going to be very frank with you, Stoner,” Lomax said. His anger had quieted, and his voice was calm, matter of fact. “I don’t think you’re fit to be a teacher; no man is, whose prejudices override his talents and his learning. I should probably fire you if I had the power; but I don’t have the power, as we both know. We are—you are protected by the tenure system. I must accept that. But I don’t have to play the hypocrite. I want to have nothing to do with you. Nothing at all. And I will not pretend otherwise.”
Stoner looked at him steadily for several moments. Then he shook his head. “All right, Holly,” he said tiredly. He started to go.
“Just a minute,” Lomax called.
Stoner turned. Lomax was gazing intently at some papers on his desk; his face was red, and he seemed to be struggling with himself. Stoner realized that what he saw was not anger but shame.
Lomax said, “Hereafter, if you want to see me—on department business—you will make an appointment with the secretary.” And although Stoner stood looking at him for several moments more, Lomax did not raise his head. A brief writhing went across his face; then it was still. Stoner went out of the room.
And for more than twenty years neither man was to speak again directly to the other.
It was, Stoner realized later, inevitable that the students be affected; even if he had been successful in persuading Lomax to put on an appearance, he could not in the long run have protected them from a consciousness of the battle.
Former students of his, even students he had known rather well, began nodding and speaking to him self-consciously, even furtively. A few were ostentatiously friendly, going out of their way to speak to him or to be seen walking with him in the halls. But he no longer had the rapport with them that he once had had; he was a special figure, and one was seen with him, or not seen with him, for special reasons.
He came to feel that his presence was an embarrassment both to his friends and his enemies, and so he kept more and more to himself.
A kind of lethargy descended upon him. He taught his classes as well as he could, though the steady routine of required freshman and sophomore classes drained him of enthusiasm and left him at the end of the day exhausted and numb. As well as he could, he filled the hours between his widely separated classes with student conferences, painstakingly going over the students’ work, keeping them until they became restless and impatient.
Time dragged slowly around him. He tried to spend more of that time at home with his wife and child; but because of his odd schedule the hours he could spend there were unusual and not accounted for by Edith’s tight disposition of each day; he discovered (not to his surprise) that his regular presence was so upsetting to his wife that she became nervous and silent and sometimes physically ill. And he was able to see Grace infrequently in all the time he spent at home. Edith had scheduled her daughter’s days carefully; her only “free” time was in the evening, and Stoner was scheduled to teach a late class four evenings a week. By the time the class was over Grace was usually in bed.
So he continued to see Grace only briefly in the mornings, at breakfast; and he was alone with her for only the few minutes it took Edith to clear the breakfast dishes from the table and put them to soak in the kitchen sink. He watched her body lengthen, an awkward grace come into her limbs, and an intelligence grow in her quiet eyes and watchful face. And at times he felt that some closeness remained between them, a closeness which neither of them could afford to admit.
At last he went back to his old habit of spending most of his time at his office in Jesse Hall. He told himself that he should be grateful for the chance of reading on his own, free from the pressures of preparing for particular classes, free from the predetermined directions of his learning. He tried to read at random, for his own pleasure and indulgence, many of the things that he had been waiting for years to read. But his mind would not be led where he wished it to go; his attention wandered from the pages he held before him, and more and more often he found himself staring dully in front of him, at nothing; it was as if from moment to moment his mind were emptied of all it knew and as if his will were drained of its strength. He felt at times that he was a kind of vegetable, and he longed for something—even pain—to pierce him, to bring him alive.
He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.
Once, late, after his evening class, he returned to his office and sat at his desk, trying to read. It was winter, and a snow had fallen during the day, so that the out-of-doors was covered with a white softness. The office was overheated; he opened a window beside the desk so that the cool air might come into the close room. He breathed deeply, and let his eyes wander over the white floor of the campus. On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything—the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars—seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness. Then, behind him, a radiator clanked. He moved, and the scene became itself. With a curiously reluctant relief he again snapped on his desk lamp. He gathered a book and a few papers, went out of the office, walked through the darkened corridors, and let himself out of the wide double doors at the back of Jesse Hall. He walked slowly home, aware of each footstep crunching with muffled loudness in the dry snow.
XII
During that year, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
In its forty-third year William Stoner’s body was nearly as lean as it had been when he was a youth, when he had first walked in dazed awe upon the campus that had never wholly lost its effect upon hi
m. Year by year the stoop of his shoulders had increased, and he had learned to slow his movements so that his farmer’s clumsiness of hand and foot seemed a deliberation rather than an awkwardness bred in the bone. His long face had softened with time; and although the flesh was still like tanned leather, it no longer stretched so tautly over the sharp cheekbones; it was loosened by thin lines around his eyes and mouth. Still sharp and clear, his gray eyes were sunk more deeply in his face, the shrewd watchfulness there half hidden; his hair, once light brown, had darkened, although a few touches of gray were beginning around his temples. He did not think often of the years, or regret their passing; but when he saw his face in a mirror, or when he approached his reflection in one of the glass doors that led into Jesse Hall, he recognized the changes that had come over him with a mild shock.
Late one afternoon in the early spring he sat alone in his office. A pile of freshman themes lay on his desk; he held one of the papers in his hand, but he was not looking at it. As he had been doing frequently of late, he gazed out the window upon that part of the campus he could see from his office. The day was bright, and the shadow cast by Jesse Hall had crept, while he watched, nearly up to the base of the five columns that stood in powerful, isolate grace in the center of the rectangular quad. The portion of the quad in shadow was a deep brownish-gray; beyond the edge of the shadow the winter grass was a light tan, overlaid with a shimmering film of the palest green. Against the spidery black tracings of vine stems that curled around them, the marble columns were brilliantly white; soon the shadow would creep upon them, Stoner thought, and the bases would darken, and the darkness would creep up, slowly and then more rapidly, until ... He became aware that someone was standing behind him.
He turned in his chair and looked up. It was Katherine Driscoll, the young instructor who last year had sat in on his seminar. Since that time, though they sometimes met in the corridors and nodded, they had not really spoken to each other. Stoner was aware that he was dimly annoyed by this confrontation; he did not wish to be reminded of the seminar and of what had ensued from it. He pushed his chair back and got awkwardly to his feet.
“Miss Driscoll,” he said soberly and motioned to the chair beside his desk. She gazed at him for a moment; her eyes were large and dark, and he thought that her face was extraordinarily pale. With a slight ducking motion of the head she moved away from him and took the chair to which he vaguely motioned.
Stoner seated himself again and stared at her for a moment without really seeing her. Then, aware that his regard of her might be taken as rudeness, he tried to smile, and he murmured an inane, automatic question about her classes.
She spoke abruptly. “You—you said once that you would be willing to look over my dissertation whenever I had a good start on it.”
“Yes,” Stoner said and nodded. “I believe I did. Of course.” Then, for the first time, he noticed that she clutched a folder of papers in her lap.
“Of course, if you’re busy,” she said tentatively.
“Not at all,” Stoner said, trying to put some enthusiasm in his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to sound distracted.”
She hesitantly lifted the folder toward him. He took it, hefted it, and smiled at her. “I thought you would be further along than this,” he said.
“I was,” she said. “But I started over. I’m taking a new tack, and—and I’ll be grateful if you’ll tell me what you think.”
He smiled at her again and nodded; he did not know what to say. They sat in awkward silence for a moment.
Finally he said, “When do you need this back?”
She shook her head. “Any time. Whenever you can get around to it.”
“I don’t want to hold you up,” he said. “How about this coming Friday? That should give me plenty of time. About three o’clock?”
She rose as abruptly as she had sat down. “Thank you,” she said. “I don’t want to be a bother. Thank you.” And she turned and walked, slim and erect, out of his office.
He held the folder in his hands for a few moments, staring at it. Then he put it on his desk and got back to his freshman themes.
That was on a Tuesday, and for the next two days the manuscript lay untouched on his desk. For reasons that he did not fully understand, he could not bring himself to open the folder, to begin the reading which a few months before would have been a duty of pleasure. He watched it warily, as if it were an enemy that was trying to entice him again into a war that he had renounced.
And then it was Friday, and he still had not read it. He saw it lying accusingly on his desk in the morning when he gathered his books and papers for his eight o’clock class; when he returned at a little after nine he nearly decided to leave a note in Miss Driscoll’s mailbox in the main office, begging off for another week; but he resolved to look at it hurriedly before his eleven o’clock class and say a few perfunctory words to her when she came by that afternoon. But he could not make himself get to it; and just before he had to leave for the class, his last of the day, he grabbed the folder from his desk, stuck it among his other papers, and hurried across campus to his classroom.
After the class was over at noon he was delayed by several students who needed to talk to him, so that it was after one o’clock when he was able to break away. He headed, with a kind of grim determination, toward the library; he intended to find an empty carrel and give the manuscript a hasty hour’s reading before his three o’clock appointment with Miss Driscoll.
But even in the dim, familiar quiet of the library, in an empty carrel that he found hidden in the lower depths of the stacks, he had a hard time making himself look at the pages he carried with him. He opened other books and read paragraphs at random; he sat still, inhaling the musty odor that came from the old books. Finally he sighed; unable to put it off longer, he opened the folder and glanced hastily at the first pages.
At first only a nervous edge of his mind touched what he read; but gradually the words forced themselves upon him. He frowned and read more carefully. And then he was caught; he turned back to where he had begun, and his attention flowed upon the page. Yes, he said to himself, of course. Much of the material that she had given in her seminar report was contained here, but rearranged, reorganized, pointing in directions that he himself had only dimly glimpsed. My God, he said to himself in a kind of wonder; and his fingers trembled with excitement as he turned the pages.
When he came to the last sheet of typescript he leaned back in happy exhaustion and stared at the gray cement wall before him. Although it seemed only a few minutes had elapsed since he started reading, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly four-thirty. He scrambled to his feet, gathered the manuscript hastily, and hurried out of the library; and though he knew it was too late for it to make any difference, he half ran across the campus to Jesse Hall.
As he passed the open door of the main office on his way to his own, he heard his name called. He halted and stuck his head in the doorway. The secretary—a new girl that Lomax had recently hired—said to him accusingly, almost insolently, “Miss Driscoll was here to see you at three o’clock. She waited nearly an hour.”
He nodded, thanked her, and proceeded more slowly to his office. He told himself that it didn’t matter, that he could return the manuscript to her on Monday and make his apologies then. But the excitement he had felt when he finished the manuscript would not subside, and he paced restlessly around his office; every now and then he paused and nodded to himself. Finally he went to his bookcase, searched for a moment, and withdrew a slender pamphlet with smeared black lettering on the cover: Faculty and Staff Directory, University of Missouri. He found Katherine Driscoll’s name; she did not have a telephone. He noted her address, gathered her manuscript from his desk, and went out of his office.
About three blocks from the campus, toward town, a cluster of large old houses had, some years before, been converted into apartments; these were filled by older students, younger faculty, staff members of the University, and a
scattering of townspeople. The house in which Katherine Driscoll lived stood in the midst of these. It was a huge three-storied building of gray stone, with a bewildering variety of entrances and exits, with turrets and bay windows and balconies projecting outward and upward on all sides. Stoner finally found Katherine Driscoll’s name on a mailbox at the side of the building, where a short flight of cement steps led down to a basement door. He hesitated for a moment, then knocked.
When Katherine Driscoll opened the door for him William Stoner almost did not recognize her; she had swept her hair up and caught it carelessly high in the back, so that her small pink-white ears were bare; she wore dark-rimmed glasses, behind which her dark eyes were wide and startled; she had on a mannish shirt, open at the neck; and she was wearing dark slacks that made her appear slimmer and more graceful than he remembered her.
“I’m—I’m sorry I missed our appointment,” Stoner said awkwardly. He thrust the folder toward her. “I thought you might need this over the weekend.”
For several moments she did not speak. She looked at him expressionlessly and bit her lower lip. She moved back from the door. “Won’t you come in?”
He followed her through a very short, narrow hall into a tiny room, low-ceilinged and dim, with a low three-quarter bed that served as a couch, a long, low table before it, a single upholstered chair, a small desk and chair, and a bookcase filled with books on one wall. Several books were lying open on the floor and on the couch, and papers were scattered on the desk.
“It’s very small,” Katherine Driscoll said, stooping to pick up one of the books on the floor, “but I don’t need much room.”
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