Stoner

XI

A few weeks after the fall semester of 1932 began, it was clear to William Stoner that he had been unsuccessful in his battle to keep Charles Walker out of the graduate English program. After the summer holidays Walker returned to the campus as if triumphantly entering an arena; and when he saw Stoner in the corridors of Jesse Hall he inclined his head in an ironic bow and grinned at him maliciously. Stoner learned from Jim Holland that Dean Rutherford had delayed making the vote of last year official and that finally it had been decided that Walker would be allowed to take his oral preliminaries again, his examiners to be selected by the chairman of the department.

The battle was over then, and Stoner was willing to concede his defeat; but the fighting did not end. When Stoner met Lomax in the corridors or at a department meeting, or at a college function, he spoke to him as he had spoken before, as if nothing had happened between them. But Lomax would not respond to his greeting; he stared coldly and turned his eyes away, as if to say that he would not be appeased.

One day in late fall Stoner walked casually into Lomax's office and stood beside his desk for several minutes until, reluctantly, Lomax looked up at him, his lips tight and his eyes hard.

When he realized that Lomax was not going to speak Stoner said awkwardly, "Look, Holly, it's over and done with. Can't we just drop it?"

Lomax looked at him steadily.

Stoner continued, "We've had a disagreement, but that isn't unusual. We've been friends before, and I see no reason—"

"We have never been friends," Lomax said distinctly.

"All right," Stoner said. "But we've got along at least. We can keep whatever differences we have, but for God's sake, there's no need to display them. Even the students are beginning to notice."

"And well the students might," Lomax said bitterly, "since one of their own number nearly had his career ruined. A brilliant student, whose only crimes were his imagination, an enthusiasm and integrity that forced him into conflict with you —and, yes, I might as well say it—an unfortunate physical affliction that would have called forth sympathy in a normal human being." With his good right hand Lomax held a pencil, and it trembled before him; almost with horror Stoner realized that Lomax was dreadfully and irrevocably sincere. "No," Lomax went on passionately, "for that I cannot forgive you."

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.