"No room for my clothes," he said, "but a man's got to keep his sense of values."
Carefully, with his eyes squinted, with the light glistening upon his fair skin and thinning blond hair, like a chemist measuring a rare substance, he poured the beer from the bottles into glasses.
"Got to be careful with this stuff," he said. "You get a lot of sediment at the bottom, and if you pour it off too quick, you get it in the glass."
They each drank a glass of the beer, complimenting Finch upon its taste. It was, indeed, surprisingly good, dry and light and of a good color. Even Edith finished her glass and took another.
They became a little drunk; they laughed vaguely and sentimentally; they saw each other anew.
Holding his glass up to the light, Stoner said, "I wonder how Dave would have liked this beer."
"Dave?" Finch asked.
"Dave Masters. Remember how he used to love beer?"
"Dave Masters," Finch said. "Good old Dave. It's a damned shame."
"Masters," Edith said. She was smiling fuzzily. "Wasn't he that friend of yours that was killed in the war?"
"Yes," Stoner said. "That's the one." The old sadness came over him, but he smiled at Edith.
"Good old Dave," Finch said. "Edie, your husband and I and Dave used to really lap it up—long before he knew of you, of course. Good old Dave . . ."
They smiled at the memory of David Masters.
"He was a good friend of yours?" Edith asked.
Stoner nodded. "He was a good friend."
"Chateau-Thierry." Finch drained his glass. "War's a hell of a thing." He shook his head. "But old Dave. He's probably somewhere laughing at us right now. He wouldn't be feeling sorry for himself. I wonder if he ever really got to see any of France?"
"I don't know," Stoner said. "He was killed so soon after he got over."
"Be a shame if he didn't. I always thought that was one of the main reasons he joined up. To see some of Europe."
"Europe," Edith said distinctly.
"Yeah," Finch said. "Old Dave didn't want too many things, but he did want to see Europe before he died."
"I was going to Europe once," Edith said. She was smiling, and her eyes glittered helplessly. "Do you remember, Willy? I was going with my Aunt Emma just before we got married. Do you remember?"
"I remember," Stoner said.
Edith laughed gratingly and shook her head as if she were puzzled. "It seems like a long time ago, but it wasn't. How long has it been, Willy?"
"Edith—" Stoner said.
"Let's see, we were going in April. And then a year. And now it's May. I would have been . . ." Suddenly her eyes filled with tears, though she was still smiling with a fixed brightness. "I'll never get there now, I guess. Aunt Emma is going to die pretty soon, and I'll never have a chance to . .
Then, with the smile still tightening her lips and her eyes streaming with tears, she began to sob. Stoner and Finch rose from their chairs.
"Edith," Stoner said helplessly.
"Oh, leave me alone!" With a curious twisting motion she stood erect before them, her eyes shut tight and her hands clenched at her sides. "All of you! Just leave me alone!" And she turned and stumbled into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
For a moment no one spoke; they listened to the muffled sound of Edith's sobbing. Then Stoner said, "You'll have to excuse her. She has been tired and not too well. The strain—"
"Sure, I know how it is, Bill." Finch laughed hollowly. "Women and all. Guess I'll be getting used to it pretty soon myself." He looked at Caroline, laughed again, and lowered his voice. "Well, we won't disturb Edie right now. You just thank her for us, tell her it was a fine meal, and you folks'll have to come over to our place after we get settled in."
"Thanks, Gordon," Stoner said. "I'll tell her."
"And don't worry," Finch said. He punched Stoner on the arm. "These things happen."
After Gordon and Caroline had left, after he heard the new car roar and sputter away into the night, William Stoner stood in the middle of the living room and listened to Edith's dry and regular sobbing. It was a sound curiously flat and without emotion, and it went on as if it would never stop. He wanted to comfort her; he wanted to soothe her; but he did not know what to say. So he stood and listened; and after a while he realized that he had never before heard Edith cry.
After the disastrous party with Gordon Finch and Caroline Wingate, Edith seemed almost contented, calmer than she had been at any time during their marriage. But she did not want to have anyone in, and she showed a reluctance to go outside the apartment. Stoner did most of their shopping from lists that Edith made for him in a curiously laborious and childlike handwriting on little sheets of blue notepaper. She seemed happiest when she was alone; she would sit for hours working needlepoint or embroidering tablecloths and napkins, with a tiny indrawn smile on her lips. Her aunt Emma Darley began more and more frequently to visit her; when William came from the University in the afternoon he often found the two of them together, drinking tea and conversing in tones so low that they might have been whispers. They always greeted him politely, but William knew that they saw him with regret; Mrs. Darley seldom stayed for more than a few minutes after he arrived. He learned to maintain an unobtrusive and delicate regard for the world in which Edith had begun to live.
In the summer of 1920 he spent a week with his parents while Edith visited her relatives in St. Louis; he had not seen his mother and father since the wedding.
He worked in the fields for a day or two, helping his father and the Negro hired hand; but the give of the warm moist clods beneath his feet and the smell of the new-turned earth in his nostrils evoked in him no feeling of return or familiarity. He came back to Columbia and spent the rest of the summer preparing for a new class that he was to teach the following academic year. He spent most of each day in the library, sometimes returning to Edith and the apartment late in the evening, through the heavy sweet scent of honeysuckle that moved in the warm air and among the delicate leaves of dogwood trees that rustled and turned, ghost-like in the darkness. His eyes burned from their concentration upon dim texts, his mind was heavy with what it observed, and his fingers tingled numbly from the retained feel of old leather and board and paper; but he was open to the world through which for a moment he walked, and he found some joy in it.
A few new faces appeared at departmental meetings; some familiar ones were not there; and Archer Sloane continued the slow decline which Stoner had begun to notice during the war. His hands shook, and he was unable to keep his attention upon what he said. The department went on with the momentum it had gathered through its tradition and the mere fact of its being.
Stoner went about his teaching with an intensity and ferocity that awed some of the newer members of the department and that caused a small concern among the colleagues who had known him for a longer time. His face grew haggard, he lost weight, and the stoop of his shoulders increased. In the second semester of that year he had a chance to take a teaching overload for extra pay, and he took it; also for extra pay, he taught in the new summer school that year. He had a vague notion of saving enough money to go abroad, so that he could show Edith the Europe she had given up for his sake.
In the summer of 1921, searching for a reference to a Latin poem that he had forgotten, he glanced at his dissertation for the first time since he had submitted it for approval three years earlier; he read it through and judged it to be sound. A little frightened at his presumption, he considered reworking it into a book. Though he was again teaching the full summer session, he reread most of the texts he had used and began to extend his research. Late in January he decided that a book was possible; by early spring he was far enough along to be able to write the first tentative pages.