Stoner

III

A week before commencement, at which Stoner was to receive his doctorate, Archer Sloane offered him a full-time instructorship at the University. Sloane explained that it was not the policy of the University to employ its own graduates, but because of the wartime shortage of trained and experienced college teachers he had been able to persuade the administration to make an exception.

Somewhat reluctantly Stoner had written a few letters of application to universities and colleges in the general area, abruptly setting forth his qualifications; when nothing came from any of them, he felt curiously relieved. He half understood his relief; he had known at the University at Columbia the kind of security and warmth that he should have been able to feel as a child in his home, and had not been able to, and he was unsure of his ability to find those elsewhere. He accepted Sloane's offer with gratitude.

And as he did so it occurred to him that Sloane had aged greatly during the year of the war. In his late fifties, he looked ten years older; his hair, which had once curled in an unruly iron-gray shock, now was white and lay flat and lifeless about his bony skull. His black eyes had gone dull, as if filmed over with layers of moisture; his long, lined face, which had once been tough as thin leather, now had the fragility of ancient, drying paper; and his flat, ironical voice had begun to develop a tremor. Looking at him, Stoner thought: He is going to die—in a year, or two years, or ten, he will die. A premature sense of loss gripped him, and he turned away.

His thoughts were much upon death that summer of 1918. The death of Masters had shocked him more than he wished to admit; and the first American casualty lists from Europe were beginning to be released. When he had thought of death before, he had thought of it either as a literary event or as the slow, quiet attrition of time against imperfect flesh. He had not thought of it as the explosion of violence upon a battlefield, as the gush of blood from the ruptured throat. He wondered at the difference between the two kinds of dying, and what the difference meant; and he found growing in him some of that bitterness he had glimpsed once in the living heart of his friend David Masters.

His dissertation topic had been "The Influence of the Classical Tradition upon the Medieval Lyric." He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marveled at the bitterness, the terror, the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living. When he thought of Masters, he thought of him as a Catullus or a more gentle and lyrical Juvenal, an exile in his own country, and thought of his death as another exile, more strange and lasting than he had known before.

When the semester opened in the autumn of 1918 it was clear to everyone that the war in Europe could not go on much longer. The last, desperate German counteroffensive had been stopped short of Paris, and Marshal Foch had ordered a general allied counterattack that quickly pushed the Germans back to their original line. The British advanced to the north and the Americans went through the Argonne, at a cost that was widely ignored in the general elation. The newspapers were predicting a collapse of the Germans before Christmas.

So the semester began in an atmosphere of tense geniality and well-being. The students and instructors found themselves smiling at each other and nodding vigorously in the halls; outbursts of exuberance and small violence among the students were ignored by the faculty and administration; and an unidentified student, who immediately became a kind of local folk hero, shinnied up one of the huge columns in front of Jesse Hall and hung from its top a straw-stuffed effigy of the Kaiser.

The only person in the University who seemed untouched by the general excitement was Archer Sloane. Since the day of America's entrance into the war he had begun to withdraw into himself, and the withdrawal became more pronounced as the war neared its end. He did not speak to his colleagues unless departmental business forced him to do so, and it was whispered that his teaching had become so eccentric that his students attended his classes in dread; he read dully and mechanically from his notes, never meeting his students' eyes; frequently his voice trailed off as he stared at his notes, and there would be one, two, and sometimes as many as five minutes of silence, during which he neither moved nor responded to embarrassed questions from the class.

William Stoner saw the last vestige of the bright, ironic man he had known as a student when Archer Sloane gave him his teaching assignment for the academic year. Sloane gave Stoner two sections of freshman composition and an upper division survey of Middle English literature; and then he said, with a flash of his old irony, "You, as well as many of our colleagues and not a few of our students, will be pleased to know that I am giving up a number of my classes. Among these is one that has been my rather unfashionable favorite, the sophomore survey of English literature. You may recall the course?"

Stoner nodded, smiling.

"Yes," Sloane continued, "I rather thought you would. I am asking you to take it over for me. Not that it's a great gift; but I thought it might amuse you to begin your formal career as a teacher where you started as a student." Sloane looked at him for a moment, his eyes bright and intent as they had been before the war. Then the film of indifference settled over them, and he turned away from Stoner and shuffled some papers on his desk.

So Stoner began where he had started, a tall, thin, stooped man in the same room in which he had sat as a tall, thin, stooped boy listening to the words that had led him to where he had come. He never went into that room that he did not glance at the seat he had once occupied, and he was always slightly surprised to discover that he was not there.

On November 11 of that year, two months after the semester began, the Armistice was signed. The news came on a class day, and immediately the classes broke up; students ran aimlessly about the campus and started small parades that gathered, dispersed, and gathered again, winding through halls, classrooms, and offices. Half against his will, Stoner was caught up in one of these which went into Jesse Hall, through corridors, up stairs, and through corridors again. Swept along in a small mass of students and teachers, he passed the open door of Archer Sloane's office; and he had a glimpse of Sloane sitting in his chair before his desk, his face uncovered and twisted, weeping bitterly, the tears streaming down the deep lines of the flesh.

For a moment more, as if in shock, Stoner allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd. Then he broke away and went to his room near the campus. He sat in the dimness of his room and heard outside the shouts of joy and release, and thought of Archer Sloane who wept at a defeat that only he saw, or thought he saw; and he knew that Sloane was a broken man and would never again be what he had been.

Late in November many of those who had gone away to war began to return to Columbia, and the campus at the University was dotted with the olive drab of army uniforms. Among those who returned on extended leaves was Gordon Finch. He had put on weight during his year and a half away from the University, and the broad, open face that had been amiably acquiescent now held an expression of friendly but portentous gravity; he wore the bars of a captain and spoke often with a paternal fondness of "my men." He was distantly friendly to William Stoner, and he took exaggerated care to behave with deference toward the older members of the department. It was too late in the fall semester to assign him any classes, so for the rest of the academic year he was given what was understood to be a temporary sinecure as administrative assistant to the dean of Arts and Sciences. He was sensitive enough to be aware of the ambiguity of his new position and shrewd enough to see its possibilities; his relations with his colleagues were tentative and courteously noncommittal.

The dean of Arts and Sciences, Josiah Claremont, was a small bearded man of advanced age, several years beyond the point of compulsory retirement; he had been with the University ever since its transition, in the early seventies of the preceding century, from a normal college to a full University, and his father had been one of its early presidents. He was so firmly entrenched and so much a part of the history of the University that no one quite had the courage to insist upon his retirement, despite the increasing incompetence with which he managed his office. His memory was nearly gone; sometimes he became lost in the corridors of Jesse Hall, where his office was located, and had to be led like a child to his desk.

So vague had he become about University affairs that when an announcement came from his office that a reception in honor of the returning veterans on the faculty and administrative staff would be held at his home, most of those who received invitations felt that an elaborate joke was being played or that a mistake had been made. But it was not a joke, and it was not a mistake. Gordon Finch confirmed the invitations; and it was widely hinted that it was he who had instigated the reception and who had carried through the plans.

Josiah Claremont, widowed many years before, lived alone, with three colored servants nearly as old as himself, in one of the large pre-Civil War homes that had once been common around Columbia but were fast disappearing before the coming of the small, independent farmer and the real-estate developer. The architecture of the place was pleasant but unidentifiable; though "Southern" in its general shape and expansiveness, it had none of the neo-classic rigidity of the Virginia home. Its boards were painted white, and green trim framed the windows and the balustrades of the small balconies that projected here and there from the upper story. The grounds extended into a wood that surrounded the place, and tall poplars, leafless in the December afternoon, lined the drive and the walks. It was the grandest house that William Stoner had ever been near; and on that Friday afternoon he walked with some dread up the driveway and joined a group of faculty whom he did not know, who were waiting at the front door to be admitted.

Gordon Finch, still wearing his army uniform, opened the door to let them in; the group stepped into a small square foyer, at the end of which a steep staircase with polished oaken banisters led upward to the second story. A small French tapestry, its blues and golds so faded that the pattern was hardly visible in the dim yellow light given by the small bulbs, hung on the staircase wall directly in front of the men who had entered. Stoner stood gazing up at it while those who had come in with him milled about the small foyer.

"Give me your coat, Bill." The voice, close to his ear, startled him. He turned. Finch was smiling and holding his hand out to receive the coat which Stoner had not removed.

"You haven't been here before, have you?" Finch asked almost in a whisper. Stoner shook his head.

Finch turned to the other men and without raising his voice managed to call out to them. "You gentlemen go on into the main living room." He pointed to a door at the right of the foyer. "Everybody's in there."

He returned his attention to Stoner. "It's a fine old house," he said, hanging Stoner's coat in a large closet beneath the staircase. "It's one of the real showplaces around here."

"Yes," Stoner said. "I've heard people talk about it."

"And Dean Claremont's a fine old man. He asked me to kind of look out for things for him this evening."

Stoner nodded.

Finch took his arm and guided him toward the door to which he had pointed earlier. "We'll have to get together for a talk later on this evening. You go on in now. I'll be there in a minute. There are some people I want you to meet."

Stoner started to speak, but Finch had turned away to greet another group that had come in the front door. Stoner took a deep breath and opened the door to the main living room.

When he came into the room from the cold foyer the warmth pushed against him, as if to force him back; the slow murmur of the people inside, released by his opening the door, swelled for a moment before his ears accustomed themselves to it.

Perhaps two dozen people milled about the room, and for an instant he recognized none of them; he saw the sober black and gray and brown of men's suits, the olive drab of army uniforms, and here and there the delicate pink or blue of a woman's dress. The people moved sluggishly through the warmth, and he moved with them, conscious of his height among the seated figures, nodding to the faces he now recognized.

At the far end another door led into a sitting parlor, which was adjacent to the long, narrow dining hall. The double doors of the hall were open, revealing a massive walnut dining table covered with yellow damask and laden with white dishes and bowls of gleaming silver. Several people were gathered around the table, at the head of which a young woman, tall and slender and fair, dressed in a gown of blue watered silk, stood pouring tea into gold-rimmed china cups. Stoner paused in the doorway, caught by his vision of the young woman. Her long, delicately featured face smiled at those around her, and her slender, almost fragile fingers deftly manipulated urn and cup; looking at her, Stoner was assailed by a consciousness of his own heavy clumsiness.

For several moments he did not move from the doorway; he heard the girl's soft, thin voice rise above the murmur of the assembled guests she served. She raised her head, and suddenly he met her eyes; they were pale and large and seemed to shine with a light within themselves. In some confusion he backed from the doorway and turned into the sitting room; he found an empty chair in a space by the wall, and he sat there looking at the carpet beneath his feet. He did not look in the direction of the dining room, but every now and then he thought he felt the gaze of the young woman brush warmly across his face.

The guests moved around him, exchanged seats, altered their inflections as they found new partners for conversation. Stoner saw them through a haze, as if he were an audience. After a while Gordon Finch came into the room, and Stoner got up from his chair and walked across the room to him. Almost rudely he interrupted Finch's conversation with an older man. Drawing him aside but not lowering his voice, he asked to be introduced to the young woman pouring tea.

Finch looked at him for a moment, the annoyed frown that had begun to pucker his forehead smoothing as his eyes widened. "You what?" Finch said. Though he was shorter than Stoner, he seemed to be looking down on him.

"I want you to introduce me," Stoner said. He felt his face warm. "Do you know her?"

"Sure," Finch said. The start of a grin began to tug at his mouth. "She's some kind of cousin of the dean's, down from St. Louis, visiting an aunt." The grin widened. "Old Bill. What do you know. Sure, I'll introduce you. Come on."

Her name was Edith Elaine Bostwick, and she lived with her parents in St. Louis, where the previous spring she had finished a two-year course of study at a private seminary for young ladies; she was visiting her mother's older sister in Columbia for a few weeks, and in the spring they were to make the Grand Tour of Europe—an event once again possible, now that the war was over. Her father, the president of one of the smaller St. Louis banks, was a transplanted New Englander; he had come west in the seventies and married the oldest daughter of a well-to-do central Missouri family. Edith had lived all her life in St. Louis; a few years before she had gone east with her parents to Boston for the season; she had been to the opera in New York and had visited the museums. She was twenty years of age, she played the piano, and had artistic leanings which her mother encouraged.

Later, William Stoner could not remember how he learned these things, that first afternoon and early evening at Josiah Claremont's house; for the time of his meeting was blurred and formal, like the figured tapestry on the stair wall off the foyer. He remembered that he spoke to her that she might look at him, remain near him, and give him the pleasure of hearing her soft, thin voice answering his questions and making perfunctory questions in return.

The guests began to leave. Voices called good-bys, doors slammed, and the rooms emptied. Stoner remained behind after most of the other guests had departed; and when Edith's carriage came he followed her into the foyer and helped her with her coat. Just before she started outside he asked her if he might call on her the following evening.

As if she had not heard him she opened the door and stood for several moments without moving: the cold air swept through the doorway and touched Stoner's hot face. She turned and looked at him and blinked several times; her pale eyes were speculative, almost bold. At last she nodded and said, "Yes. You may call." She did not smile.

And so he called, walking across town to her aunt's house on an intensely cold midwestern winter night. No cloud was overhead; the half-moon shone upon a light snow that had fallen earlier in the afternoon. The streets were deserted, and the muffled silence was broken by the dry snow crunching underfoot as he walked. He stood for a long while outside the large house to which he had come, listening to the silence. The cold numbed his feet, but he did not move. From the curtained windows a dim light fell upon the blue-white snow like a yellow smudge; he thought he saw movement inside, but he could not be sure. Deliberately, as if committing himself to something, he stepped forward and walked down the path to the porch and knocked on the front door.

Edith's aunt (her name, Stoner had learned earlier, was Emma Darley, and she had been widowed for a number of years) met him at the door and asked him to come in. She was a short, plump woman with fine white hair that floated about her face; her dark eyes twinkled moistly, and she spoke softly and breathlessly as if she were telling secrets. Stoner followed her into the parlor and sat, facing her, on a long walnut sofa, the seat and back of which were covered with thick blue velvet. Snow had clung to his shoes; he watched it melt and form damp patches on the thick floral rug under his feet.

"Edith tells me you teach at the University, Mr. Stoner," Mrs. Darley said.

"Yes, ma'am," he said and cleared his throat.

"It's so nice to be able to talk to one of the young professors there again," Mrs. Darley said brightly. "My late husband, Mr. Darley, was on the board of trustees at the University for a number of years—but I guess you know that."

"No, ma'am," Stoner said.

"Oh," Mrs. Darley said. "Well, we used to have some of the younger professors over for tea in the afternoons. But that was quite a few years ago, before the war. You were in the war, Professor Stoner?"

"No, ma'am," Stoner said. "I was at the University."

"Yes," Mrs. Darley said. She nodded brightly. "And you teach—?"

"English," Stoner said. "And I'm not a professor. I'm just an instructor." He knew his voice was harsh; he could not control it. He tried to smile.

"Ah, yes," she said. "Shakespeare . . . Browning . . ."

A silence came between them. Stoner twisted his hands together and looked at the floor.

Mrs. Darley said, "I'll see if Edith is ready. If you'll excuse me?"

Stoner nodded and got to his feet as she went out. He heard fierce whispers in a back room. He stood for several minutes more.

Suddenly Edith was standing in the wide doorway, pale and unsmiling. They looked at each other without recognition. Edith took a backward step and then came forward, her lips thin and tense. They shook hands gravely and sat together on the sofa. They had not spoken.

She was even taller than he remembered, and more fragile. Her face was long and slender, and she kept her lips closed over rather strong teeth. Her skin had the kind of transparency that shows a hint of color and warmth upon any provocation. Her hair was a light reddish-brown, and she wore it piled in thick tresses upon her head. But it was her eyes that caught and held him, as they had done the day before. They were very large and of the palest blue that he could imagine. When he looked at them he seemed drawn out of himself, into a mystery that he could not apprehend. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he said impulsively, "I—I want to know about you." She drew back from him a little. He said hastily, "I mean—yesterday, at the reception, we didn't really have a chance to talk. I wanted to talk to you, but there were so many people. People sometimes get in your way."

"It was a very nice reception," Edith said faintly. "I thought everyone was very nice."

"Oh, yes, of course," Stoner said. "I meant . . ." He did not go on. Edith was silent.

He said, "I understand you and your aunt will be going to Europe in a little while."

"Yes," she said.

"Europe . . ." He shook his head. "You must be very excited."

She nodded reluctantly.

"Where will you go? I mean—what places?"

"England," she said. "France. Italy."

"And you'll be going—in the spring?"

"April," she said.

"Five months," he said. "It isn't very long. I hope that in that time we can—"

"I'm only here for three more weeks," she said quickly. "Then I go back to St. Louis. For Christmas."

"That is a short time." He smiled and said awkwardly, "Then I'll have to see you as often as I can, so that we can get to know each other."

She looked at him almost with horror. "I didn't mean that," she said. "Please . . ."

Stoner was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, I— But I do want to call on you again, as often as you'll let me. May I?"

"Oh," she said. "Well." Her thin fingers were laced together in her lap, and her knuckles were white where the skin was stretched. She had very pale freckles on the backs of her hands.

Stoner said, "This is going badly, isn't it? You must forgive me. I haven't known anyone like you before, and I say clumsy things. You must forgive me if I've embarrassed you."

"Oh, no," she said. She turned to him and pulled her lips in what he knew must be a smile. "Not at all. I'm having a lovely time. Really."

He did not know what to say. He mentioned the weather outside and apologized for having tracked snow upon the rug; she murmured something. He spoke of the classes he had to teach at the University, and she nodded, puzzled. At last they sat in silence. Stoner got to his feet; he moved slowly and heavily, as if he were tired. Edith looked up at him expressionlessly.

"Well," he said and cleared his throat. "It's getting late, and I— Look. I'm sorry. May I call on you again in a few days? Perhaps . .

It was as if he had not spoken to her. He nodded, said, "Good night," and turned to go.

Edith Bostwick said in a high shrill voice without inflection, "When I was a little girl about six years old I could play the piano and I liked to paint and I was very shy so my mother sent me to Miss Thorndyke's School for Girls in St. Louis. I was the youngest one there, but that was all right because Daddy was a member of the board and he arranged it. I didn't like it at first but finally I just loved it. They were all very nice girls and well-to-do and I made some lifelong friends there, and—"

Stoner had turned back when she began to speak, and he looked at her with an amazement that did not show on his face. Her eyes were fixed straight before her, her face was blank, and her lips moved as if, without understanding, she read from an invisible book. He walked slowly across the room and sat down beside her. She did not seem to notice him; her eyes remained fixed straight ahead, and she continued to tell him about herself, as he had asked her to do. He wanted to tell her to stop, to comfort her, to touch her. He did not move or speak.

She continued to talk, and after a while he began to hear what she was saying. Years later it was to occur to him that in that hour and a half on that December evening of their first extended time together, she told him more about herself than she ever told him again. And when it was over, he felt that they were strangers in a way that he had not thought they would be, and he knew that he was in love.

Edith Elaine Bostwick was probably not aware of what she said to William Stoner that evening, and if she had been she could not have realized its significance. But Stoner knew what she said, and he never forgot it; what he heard was a kind of confession, and what he thought he understood was a plea for help.

As he got to know her better, he learned more of her childhood; and he came to realize that it was typical of that of most girls of her time and circumstance. She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation. She attended private schools for girls where she learned to read, to write, and to do simple arithmetic; in her leisure she was encouraged to do needlepoint, to play the piano, to paint water colors, and to discuss some of the more gentle works of literature. She was also instructed in matters of dress, carriage, ladylike diction, and morality.

Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned that she would have duties toward her husband and family and that she must fulfill them.

Her childhood was an exceedingly formal one, even in the most ordinary moments of family life. Her parents behaved toward each other with a distant courtesy; Edith never saw pass between them the spontaneous warmth of either anger or love. Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment. She was an only child, and loneliness was one of the earliest conditions of her life.

So she grew up with a frail talent in the more genteel arts, and no knowledge of the necessity of living from day to day.

Her needlepoint was delicate and useless, she painted misty landscapes of thin water-color washes, and she played the piano with a forceless but precise hand; yet she was ignorant of her own bodily functions, she had never been alone to care for her own self one day of her life, nor could it ever have occurred to her that she might become responsible for the wellbeing of another. Her life was invariable, like a low hum; and it was watched over by her mother, who, when Edith was a child, would sit for hours watching her paint her pictures or play her piano, as if no other occupation were possible for either of them.

At the age of thirteen Edith went through the usual sexual transformation; she also went through a physical transformation that was more uncommon. In the space of a few months she grew almost a foot, so that her height was near that of a grown man. And the association between the ungainliness of her body and her awkward new sexual estate was one from which she never fully recovered. These changes intensified a natural shyness—she was distant from her classmates at school, she had no one at home to whom she could talk, and she turned more and more inward upon herself.

Upon that inner privacy William Stoner now intruded. And something unsuspected within her, some instinct, made her call him back when he started to go out the door, made her speak quickly and desperately, as she had never spoken before, and as she would never speak again.

During the next two weeks he saw her nearly every evening. They went to a concert sponsored by the new music department at the University; on evenings when it was not too cold they took slow, solemn walks through the streets of Columbia; but more often they sat in Mrs. Darley's parlor. Sometimes they talked, and Edith played for him, while he listened and watched her hands move lifelessly over the keys. After that first evening together their conversation was curiously impersonal; he was unable to draw her out of her reserve, and when he saw that his efforts to do so embarrassed her, he stopped trying. Yet there was a kind of ease between them, and he imagined that they had an understanding. Less than a week before she was to return to St. Louis he declared his love to her and proposed marriage.

Though he did not know exactly how she would take the declaration and proposal, he was surprised at her equanimity. After he spoke she gave him a long look that was deliberative and curiously bold; and he was reminded of the first afternoon, after he had asked permission to call on her, when she had looked at him from the doorway where a cold wind was blowing upon them. Then she dropped her glance; and the surprise that came upon her face seemed to him unreal. She said she had never thought of him that way, that she had never imagined, that she did not know.

"You must have known I loved you," he said. "I don't see how I could have hidden it."

She said with some hint of animation, "I didn't. I don't know anything about that."

"Then I must tell you again," he said gently. "And you must get used to it. I love you, and I cannot imagine living without you."

She shook her head, as if confused. "My trip to Europe," she said faintly. "Aunt Emma . . ."

He felt a laugh come up in his throat, and he said in happy confidence, "Ah, Europe. I'll take you to Europe. We'll see it together someday."

She pulled away from him and put her fingertips upon her forehead. "You must give me time to think. And I would have to talk to Mother and Daddy before I could even consider . . ."

And she would not commit herself further than that. She was not to see him again before she left for St. Louis in a few days, and she would write him from there after she talked to her parents and had things settled in her mind. When he left that evening he stooped to kiss her; she turned her head, and his lips brushed her cheek. She gave his hand a little squeeze and let him out the front door without looking at him again.

Ten days later he got his letter from her. It was a curiously formal note, and it mentioned nothing that had passed between them; it said that she would like him to meet her parents and that they were all looking forward to seeing him when he came to St. Louis, the following weekend if that was possible.

Edith's parents met him with the cool formality he had expected, and they tried at once to destroy any sense of ease he might have had. Mrs. Bostwick would ask him a question, and upon his answer would say, "Y-e-es," in a most doubtful manner, and look at him curiously, as if his face were smudged or his nose were bleeding. She was tall and thin like Edith, and at first Stoner was startled by a resemblance he had not anticipated; but Mrs. Bostwick's face was heavy and lethargic, without any strength or delicacy, and it bore the deep marks of what must have been a habitual dissatisfaction.

Horace Bostwick was also tall, but he was curiously and unsubstantially heavy, almost corpulent; a fringe of gray hair curled about an otherwise bald skull, and folds of skin hung loosely around his jaws. When he spoke to Stoner he looked directly above his head as if he saw something behind him, and when Stoner answered he drummed his thick fingers upon the center piping of his vest.

Edith greeted Stoner as if he were a casual visitor and then drifted away unconcernedly, busying herself with inconsequential tasks. His eyes followed her, but he could not make her look at him.

It was the largest and most elegant house that Stoner had ever been in. The rooms were very high and dark, and they were crowded with vases of all sizes and shapes, dully gleaming silverwork upon marble-topped tables and commodes and chests, and richly tapestried furniture with most delicate lines. They drifted through several rooms to a large parlor, where, Mrs. Bostwick murmured, she and her husband were in the habit of sitting and chatting informally with friends. Stoner sat in a chair so fragile that he was afraid to move upon it; he felt it shift beneath his weight.

Edith had disappeared; Stoner looked around for her almost frantically. But she did not come back down to the parlor for nearly two hours, until after Stoner and her parents had had their "talk."

The "talk" was indirect and allusive and slow, interrupted by long silences. Horace Bostwick talked about himself in brief speeches directed several inches over Stoner's head. Stoner learned that Bostwick was a Bostonian whose father, late in his life, had ruined his banking career and his son's future in New England by a series of unwise investments that had closed his bank. ("Betrayed," Bostwick announced to the ceiling, "by false friends") Thus the son had come to Missouri shortly after the Civil War, intending to move west; but he had never got farther than Kansas City, where he went occasionally on business trips. Remembering his father's failure, or betrayal, he stayed with his first job in a small St. Louis bank; and in his late thirties, secure in a minor vice-presidency, he married a local girl of good family. From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal. Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance. Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself.

Mrs. Bostwick spoke less frequently and less directly of herself, but Stoner quickly had an understanding of her. She was a Southern lady of a certain type. Of an old and discreetly impoverished family, she had grown up with the presumption that the circumstances of need under which the family existed were inappropriate to its quality. She had been taught to look forward to some betterment of that condition, but the betterment had never been very precisely specified. She had gone into her marriage to Horace Bostwick with that dissatisfaction so habitual within her that it was a part of her person; and as the years went on, the dissatisfaction and bitterness increased, so general and pervasive that no specific remedy might assuage them. Her voice was thin and high, and it held a note of hopelessness that gave a special value to every word she said.

It was late in the afternoon before either of them mentioned the matter that had brought them together.

They told him how dear Edith was to them, how concerned they were for her future happiness, of the advantages she had had. Stoner sat in an agony of embarrassment and tried to make responses he hoped were appropriate.

"An extraordinary girl," Mrs. Bostwick said. "So sensitive." The lines in her face deepened, and she said with old bitterness, "No man—no one can fully understand the delicacy of— of—"

"Yes," Horace Bostwick said shortly. And he began to inquire into what he called Stoner's "prospects." Stoner answered as best he could; he had never thought of his "prospects" before, and he was surprised at how meager they sounded.

Bostwick said, "And you have no—means—beyond your profession?"

"No, sir," Stoner said.

Mr. Bostwick shook his head unhappily. "Edith has had—advantages—you know. A fine home, servants, the best schools. I'm wondering—I find myself afraid, with the reduced standard which would be inevitable with your—ah, condition —that . . ." His voice trailed away.

Stoner felt a sickness rise within him, and an anger. He waited a few moments before he replied, and he made his voice as flat and expressionless as he could.

"I must tell you, sir, that I had not considered these material matters before. Edith's happiness is, of course, my— If you believe that Edith would be unhappy, then I must . . ." He paused, searching for words. He wanted to tell Edith's father of his love for his daughter, of his certainty of their happiness together, of the kind of life they could have. But he did not go on. He caught on Horace Bostwick's face such an expression of concern, dismay, and something like fear that he was surprised into silence.

"No," Horace Bostwick said hastily, and his expression cleared. "You misunderstand me. I was merely attempting to lay before you certain—difficulties—that might arise in the future. I'm sure you young people have talked these things over, and I'm sure you know your own minds. I respect your judgment and . . ."

And it was settled. A few more words were said, and Mrs. Bostwick wondered aloud where Edith could have been keeping herself all this time. She called out the name in her high, thin voice, and in a few moments Edith came into the room where they all waited. She did not look at Stoner.

Horace Bostwick told her that he and her "young man" had had a nice talk and that they had his blessing. Edith nodded.

"Well," her mother said, "we must make plans. A spring wedding. June, perhaps."

"No," Edith said.

"What, my dear?" her mother asked pleasantly.

"If it's to be done," Edith said, "I want it done quickly."

"The impatience of youth," Mr. Bostwick said and cleared his throat. "But perhaps your mother is right, my dear. There are plans to be made; time is required."

"No," Edith said again, and there was a firmness in her voice that made them all look at her. "It must be soon."

There was a silence. Then her father said in a surprisingly mild voice, "Very well, my dear. As you say. You young people make your plans."

Edith nodded, murmured something about a task she had to do, and slipped out of the room. Stoner did not see her again until dinner that night, which was presided over in regal silence by Horace Bostwick. After dinner Edith played the piano for them, but she played stiffly and badly, with many mistakes. She announced that she was feeling unwell and went to her room.

In the guest room that night, William Stoner could not sleep. He stared up into the dark and wondered at the strangeness that had come over his life, and for the first time questioned the wisdom of what he was about to do. He thought of Edith and felt some reassurance. He supposed that all men were as uncertain as he suddenly had become, and had the same doubts.

He had to catch an early train back to Columbia the next morning, so that he had little time after breakfast. He wanted to take a trolley to the station, but Mr. Bostwick insisted that one of the servants drive him in the landau. Edith was to write him in a few days about the wedding plans. He thanked the Bostwicks and bade them good-by; they walked with him and Edith to the front door. He had almost reached the front gate when he heard footsteps running behind him. He turned. It was Edith. She stood very stiff and tall, her face was pale, and she was looking straight at him.

"I'll try to be a good wife to you, William," she said. "I'll try."

He realized that it was the first time anyone had spoken his name since he had come there.

IV

For reasons she would not explain, Edith did not want to be married in St. Louis, so the wedding was held in Columbia, in the large drawing room of Emma Darley, where they had spent their first hours together. It was the first week in February, just after classes were dismissed for the semester break. The Bostwicks took the train from St. Louis, and William's parents, who had not met Edith, drove down from the farm, arriving on Saturday afternoon, the day before the wedding.

Stoner wanted to put them up at a hotel, but they preferred to stay with the Footes, even though the Footes had grown cold and distant since William had left their employ.

"Wouldn't know how to do in a hotel," his father said seriously. "And the Footes can put up with us for one night."

That evening William rented a gig and drove his parents into town to Emma Darley's house so that they could meet Edith.

They were met at the door by Mrs. Darley, who gave William's parents a brief, embarrassed glance and asked them into the parlor. His mother and father sat carefully, as if afraid to move in their stiff new clothes.

"I don't know what can be keeping Edith," Mrs. Darley murmured after a while. "If you'll excuse me." She went out of the room to get her niece.

After a long time Edith came down; she entered the parlor slowly, reluctantly, with a kind of frightened defiance.

They rose to their feet, and for several moments the four of them stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say. Then Edith came forward stiffly and gave her hand first to William's mother and then to his father.

"How do," his father said formally and released her hand, as if afraid it would break.

Edith glanced at him, tried to smile, and backed away. "Sit down," she said. "Please sit down."

They sat. William said something. His voice sounded strained to him.

In a silence, quietly and wonderingly, as if she spoke her thoughts aloud, his mother said, "My, she's a pretty thing, isn't she?"

William laughed a little and said gently, "Yes, ma'am, she is."

They were able to speak more easily then, though they darted glances at each other and then looked away into the distances of the room. Edith murmured that she was glad to meet them, that she was sorry they hadn't met before.

"And when we get settled—" She paused, and William wondered if she was going to continue. "When we get settled you must come to visit us."

"Thank you kindly," his mother said.

The talk went on, but it was interrupted by long silences. Edith's nervousness increased, became more apparent, and once or twice she did not respond to a question someone asked her. William got to his feet, and his mother, with a nervous look around her, stood also. But his father did not move. He looked directly at Edith and kept his eyes on her for a long time.

Finally he said, "William was always a good boy. I'm glad he's getting himself a fine woman. A man needs himself a woman, to do for him and give him comfort. Now you be good to William. He ought to have someone who can be good to him."

Edith's head came back in a kind of reflex of shock; her eyes were wide, and for a moment William thought she was angry. But she was not. His father and Edith looked at each other for a long time, and their eyes did not waver.

"I'll try, Mr. Stoner," Edith said. "I'll try."

Then his father got to his feet and bowed clumsily and said, "It's getting late. We'd best be getting along." And he walked with his wife, shapeless and dark and small beside him, to the door, leaving Edith and his son together.

Edith did not speak to him. But when he turned to bid her good night William saw that tears were swimming in her eyes. He bent to kiss her, and he felt the frail strength of her slender fingers on his arms.

The cold clear sunlight of the February afternoon slanted through the front windows of the Darley house and was broken by the figures that moved about in the large parlor. His parents stood curiously alone in a corner of the room; the Bostwicks, who had come in only an hour before on the morning train, stood near them, not looking at them; Gordon Finch walked heavily and anxiously around, as if he were in charge of something; there were a few people, friends of Edith or her parents, whom he did not know. He heard himself speaking to those about him, felt his lips smiling, and heard voices come to him as if muffled by layers of thick cloth.

Gordon Finch was beside him; his face was sweaty, and it glowed above his dark suit. He grinned nervously. "You about ready, Bill?"

Stoner felt his head nod.

Finch said, "Does the doomed man have any last requests?"

Stoner smiled and shook his head.

Finch clapped him on the shoulder. "You just stick by me; do what I tell you; everything's under control. Edith will be down in a few minutes."

He wondered if he would remember this after it was over; everything seemed a blur, as if he saw through a haze. He heard himself ask Finch, "The minister—I haven't seen him. Is he here?"

Finch laughed and shook his head and said something. Then a murmur came over the room. Edith was walking down the stairs.

In her white dress she was like a cold light coming into the room. Stoner started involuntarily toward her and felt Finch's hand on his arm, restraining him. Edith was pale, but she gave him a small smile. Then she was beside him, and they were walking together. A stranger with a round collar stood before them; he was short and fat and he had a vague face. He was mumbling words and looking at a white book in his hands. William heard himself responding to silences. He felt Edith trembling beside him.

Then there was a long silence, and another murmur, and the sound of laughter. Someone said, "Kiss the bride!" He felt himself turned; Finch was grinning at him. He smiled down at Edith, whose face swam before him, and kissed her; her lips were as dry as his own.

He felt his hand being pumped; people were clapping him on the back and laughing; the room was milling. New people came in the door. A large cut-glass bowl of punch seemed to have appeared on a long table at one end of the parlor. There was a cake. Someone held his and Edith's hands together; there was a knife; he understood that he was supposed to guide her hand as she cut the cake.

Then he was separated from Edith and couldn't see her in the throng of people. He was talking and laughing, nodding, and looking around the room to see if he could find Edith. He saw his mother and father standing in the same corner of the room, from which they had not moved. His mother was smiling, and his father had his hand awkwardly on her shoulder. He started to go to them, but he could not break away from whoever was talking to him.

Then he saw Edith. She was with her father and mother and her aunt; her father, with a slight frown on his face, was surveying the room as if impatient with it; and her mother was weeping, her eyes red and puffed above her heavy cheekbones and her mouth pursed downward like a child's. Mrs. Darley and Edith had their arms about her; Mrs. Darley was talking to her, rapidly, as if trying to explain something. But even across the room William could see that Edith was silent; her face was like a mask, expressionless and white. After a moment they led Mrs. Bostwick from the room, and William did not see Edith again until the reception was over, until Gordon Finch whispered something in his ear, led him to a side door that opened onto a little garden, and pushed him outside. Edith was waiting there, bundled against the cold, her collar turned up about her face so that he could not see it. Gordon Finch, laughing and saying words that William could not understand, hustled them down a path to the street, where a covered buggy was waiting to carry them to the station. It was not until they were on the train, which would take them to St. Louis for their week's honeymoon, that William Stoner realized that it was all over and that he had a wife.

They went into marriage innocent, but innocent in profoundly different ways. They were both virginal, and they were conscious of their inexperience; but whereas William, having been raised on a farm, took as unremarkable the natural processes of life, they were to Edith profoundly mysterious and unexpected. She knew nothing of them, and there was something within her which did not wish to know of them.

And so, like many others, their honeymoon was a failure; yet they would not admit this to themselves, and they did not realize the significance of the failure until long afterward.

They arrived in St. Louis late Sunday night. On the train, surrounded by strangers who looked curiously and approvingly at them, Edith had been animated and almost gay. They laughed and held hands and spoke of the days to come. Once in the city, and by the time William had found a carriage to take them to their hotel, Ediths gaiety had become faintly hysterical.

He half carried her, laughing, through the entrance of the Ambassador Hotel, a massive structure of brown cut stone. The lobby was nearly deserted, dark and heavy like a cavern; when they got inside, Edith abruptly quieted and swayed uncertainly beside him as they walked across the immense floor to the desk. By the time they got to their room she was nearly physically ill; she trembled as if in a fever, and her lips were blue against her chalk-like skin. William wanted to find her a doctor, but she insisted that she was only tired, that she needed rest. They spoke gravely of the strain of the day, and Edith hinted at some delicacy that troubled her from time to time. She murmured, but without looking at him and without intonation in her voice, that she wanted their first horns together to be perfect.

And William said, "They are—they will be. You must rest. Our marriage will begin tomorrow."

And like other new husbands of whom he had heard and at whose expense he had at one time or another made jokes, he spent his wedding night apart from his wife, his long body curled stiffly and sleeplessly on a small sofa, his eyes open to the passing night.

He awoke early. Their suite, arranged and paid for by Edith's parents, as a wedding gift, was on the tenth floor, and it commanded a view of the city. He called softly to Edith, and in a few minutes she came out of the bedroom, tying the sash of her dressing gown, yawning sleepily, smiling a little. William felt his love for her grip his throat; he took her by the hand, and they stood before the window in their sitting room, looking down. Automobiles, pedestrians, and carriages crept on the narrow streets below them; they seemed to themselves far removed from the run of humanity and its pursuits. In the distance, visible beyond the square buildings of red brick and stone, the Mississippi River wound its bluish-brown length in the morning sun; the riverboats and tugs that crawled up and down its stiff bends were like toys, though their stacks gave off great quantities of gray smoke to the winter air. A sense of calm came over him; he put his arm around his wife and held her lightly, and they both gazed down upon a world that seemed full of promise and quiet adventure.

They breakfasted early. Edith seemed refreshed, fully recovered from her indisposition of the night before; she was almost gay again, and she looked at William with an intimacy and warmth that he thought were from gratitude and love. They did not speak of the night before; every now and then Edith looked at her new ring and adjusted it on her finger.

They wrapped themselves against the cold and walked the St. Louis streets, which were just beginning to crowd with people; they looked at goods in windows, they spoke of the future and gravely thought of how they would fill it. William began to regain the ease and fluency he had discovered during his early courtship of this woman who had become his wife;

Edith clung to his arm and seemed to attend to what he said as she had never done before. They had midmorning coffee in a small warm shop and watched the passers-by scurry through the cold. They found a carriage and drove to the Art Museum. Arm in arm they walked through the high rooms, through the rich glow of light reflected from the paintings. In the quietness, in the warmth, in the air that took on a timelessness from the old paintings and statuary, William Stoner felt an outrush of affection for the tall, delicate girl who walked beside him, and he felt a quiet passion rise within him, warm and formally sensuous, like the colors that came out from the walls around him.

When they left there late in the afternoon the sky had clouded and a thin drizzle had started; but William Stoner carried within him the warmth he had gathered in the museum. They got back to the hotel shortly after sunset; Edith went into the bedroom to rest, and William called downstairs to have a light dinner sent to their rooms; and on a sudden inspiration, he went downstairs himself into the saloon and asked for a bottle of champagne to be iced and sent up within the hour. The bartender nodded glumly and told him that it would not be a good champagne. By the first of July, Prohibition would be national; already it was illegal to brew or distill liquors; and there were no more than fifty bottles of champagne of any sort in the cellars of the hotel. And he would have to charge more than the champagne was worth. Stoner smiled and told him that would be all right.

Although on special occasions of celebration in her parents' home Edith had taken a little wine, she had never before tasted champagne. As they ate their dinner, set up on a small square table in their sitting room, she glanced nervously at the strange bottle in its bucket of ice. Two white candles in dull brass holders glowed unevenly against the darkness; William had turned out the other lights. The candles flickered between them as they talked, and the light caught the curves of the smooth dark bottle and glittered upon the ice that surrounded it. They were nervous and cautiously gay.

Inexpertly he withdrew the cork from the champagne; Edith jumped at the loud report; white froth spurted from the bottle neck and drenched his hand. They laughed at his clumsiness. They drank a glass of the wine, and Edith pretended tipsiness. They drank another glass. William thought he saw a languor come over her, a quietness fall upon her face, a pensiveness darken her eyes. He rose and went behind her, where she sat at the little table; he put his hands upon her shoulders, marveling at the thickness and heaviness of his fingers upon the delicacy of her flesh and bone. She stiffened beneath his touch, and he made his hands go gently to the sides of her thin neck and let them brush into the fine reddish hair; her neck was rigid, the cords vibrant in their tensity. He put his hands on her arms and lifted gently, so that she rose from the chair; he turned her to face him. Her eyes, wide and pale and nearly transparent in the candlelight, looked upon him blankly. He felt a distant closeness to her, and a pity for her helplessness; desire thickened in his throat so that he could not speak. He pulled her a little toward the bedroom, feeling a quick hard resistance in her body, and feeling at the same moment a willed putting away of the resistance.

He left the door to the unlighted bedroom open; the candlelight glowed feebly in the darkness. He murmured as if to comfort and assure her, but his words were smothered and she could not hear what he said. He put his hands upon her body and fumbled for the buttons that would open her to him. She pushed him away impersonally; in the dimness her eyes were closed and her lips tight. She turned away from him and with a quick movement loosened her dress so that it fell crumpled about her feet. Her arms and shoulders were bare; she shuddered as if from cold and said in a flat voice, "Go in the other room. I'll be ready in a minute." He touched her arms and put his lips to her shoulder, but she would not turn to him.

In the sitting room he stared at the candles that flickered over the remains of their dinner, in the midst of which rested the bottle of champagne, still more than half full. He poured a little of the wine into a glass and tasted it; it had grown warm and sweetish.

When he returned, Edith was in bed with the covers pulled to her chin, her face turned upward, her eyes closed, a thin frown creasing her forehead. Silently, as if she were asleep, Stoner undressed and got into bed beside her. For several moments he lay with his desire, which had become an impersonal thing, belonging to himself alone. He spoke to Edith, as if to find a haven for what he felt; she did not answer. He put his hand upon her and felt beneath the thin cloth of her nightgown the flesh he had longed for. He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence; then he moved his body upon her, gentle in his clumsiness. When he touched the softness of her thighs she turned her head sharply away and lifted her arm to cover her eyes. She made no sound.

Afterward he lay beside her and spoke to her in the quietness of his love. Her eyes were open then, and they stared at him out of the shadow; there was no expression on her face. Suddenly she flung the covers from her and crossed swiftly to the bathroom. He saw the light go on and heard her retch loudly and agonizingly. He called to her and went across the room; the door to the bathroom was locked. He called to her again; she did not answer. He went back to the bed and waited for her. After several minutes of silence the light in the bathroom went off and the door opened. Edith came out and walked stiffly to the bed.

"It was the champagne," she said. "I shouldn't have had the second glass."

She pulled the covers over her and turned away from him; in a few moments her breathing was regular and heavy in sleep.