"I ask you to forgive my sudden display. But in the last few days I have lost nearly a third of the members of the department, and I see no hope of replacing them. It is not you at whom I am angry, but—" He turned away from Stoner and looked up at the high window at the far end of his office. The light struck his face sharply, accentuating the lines and deepening the shadows under his eyes, so that for a moment he seemed old and sick. "I was born in 1860, just before the War of the Rebellion. I don't remember it, of course; I was too young. I don't remember my father either; he was killed in the first year of the war, at the Battle of Shiloh." He looked quickly at Stoner. "But I can see what has ensued. A war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we— you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime." He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. "The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has aimed his life to build."
Stoner cleared his throat and said diffidently, "Everything seems to have happened so quickly. Somehow it had never occurred to me, until I talked to Finch and Masters. It still doesn't seem quite real."
"It's not, of course," Sloane said. Then he moved restlessly, turning away from Stoner. "I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'll simply say this: it's your choice to make. There'll be a conscription; but you can be excepted, if you want to be. You're not afraid to go, are you?"
"No, sir," Stoner said. "I don't believe so."
"Then you do have a choice, and you'll have to make it for yourself. It goes without saying that if you decide to join you will upon your return be reinstated in your present position. If you decide not to join you can stay on here, but of course you will have no particular advantage; it is possible that you will have a disadvantage, either now or in the future."
"I understand," Stoner said.
There was a long silence, and Stoner decided at last that Sloane had finished with him. But just as he got up to leave the office Sloane spoke again.
He said slowly, "You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do."
For two days Stoner did not meet his classes and did not speak to anyone he knew. He stayed in his small room, struggling with his decision. His books and the quiet of his room surrounded him; only rarely was he aware of the world outside his room, of the far murmur of shouting students, of the swift clatter of a buggy on the brick streets, and the flat chug of one of the dozen or so automobiles in town. He had never got in the habit of introspection, and he found the task of searching his motives a difficult and slightly distasteful one; he felt that he had little to offer to himself and that there was little within him which he could find.
When at last he came to his decision, it seemed to him that he had known all along what it would be. He met Masters and Finch on Friday and told them that he would not join them to fight the Germans.
Gordon Finch, sustained still by his accession to virtue, stiffened and allowed an expression of reproachful sorrow to settle on his features. "You're letting us down, Bill," he said thickly. "You're letting us all down."
"Be quiet," Masters said. He looked keenly at Stoner. "I thought you might decide not to. You've always had that lean, dedicated look about you. It doesn't matter, of course; but what made you finally decide?"
Stoner did not speak for a moment. He thought of the last two days, of the silent struggle that seemed toward no end and no meaning; he thought of his life at the University for the past seven years; he thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.
"I don't know," he said at last. "Everything, I guess. I can't say."
"It's going to be hard," Masters said, "staying here."
"I know," Stoner said.
"But it's worth it, you think?"
Stoner nodded.
Masters grinned and said with his old irony, "You have the lean and hungry look, sure enough. You're doomed."
Finch's sorrowful reproach had turned into a kind of tentative contempt. "You'll live to regret this, Bill," he said hoarsely, and his voice hesitated between threat and pity.
Stoner nodded. "It may be," he said.
He told them good-by then, and turned away. They were to go to St. Louis the next day to enlist, and Stoner had classes to prepare for the following week.
He felt no guilt for his decision, and when conscription became general he applied for his deferment with no particular feeling of remorse; but he was aware of the looks that he received from his older colleagues and of the thin edge of disrespect that showed through his students' conventional behavior toward him. He even suspected that Archer Sloane, who had at one time expressed a warm approval of his decision to continue at the University, grew colder and more distant as the months of the war wore on.
He finished the requirements for his doctorate in the spring of 1918 and took his degree in June of that year. A month before he received his degree he got a letter from Gordon Finch, who had gone through Officer's Training School and had been assigned to a training camp just outside New York City. The letter informed him that Finch had been allowed, in his spare time, to attend Columbia University, where he, too, had managed to fulfill the requirements necessary for a doctorate, which he would take in the summer from Teachers College there.
It also told him that Dave Masters had been sent to France and that almost exactly a year after his enlistment, with the first American troops to see action, he had been killed at Chateau-Thierry.
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.