But this was not known immediately. William Stoner received the telephone call that informed him of Horace Bostwick's ruin and suicide, and he broke the news to Edith as gently as his estrangement from her would allow him.
Edith took the news calmly, almost as if she had been expecting it. She looked at Stoner for several moments without speaking; then she shook her head and said absently, "Poor mother. What will she do? There has always been someone to take care of her. How will she live?"
Stoner said, "Tell her"—he paused awkwardly—"tell her that, if she wants to, she can come live with us. She will be welcome."
Edith smiled at him with a curious mixture of fondness and contempt. "Oh, Willy. She'd rather die herself. Don't you know that?"
Stoner nodded. "I suppose I do," he said.
So on the evening of the day that Stoner received the call, Edith left Columbia to go to St. Louis for the funeral and to stay there as long as she was needed. When she had been gone a week Stoner received a brief note informing him that she would remain with her mother for another two weeks, perhaps longer. She was gone for nearly two months, and William was alone in the big house with his daughter.
For the first few days the emptiness of the house was strangely and unexpectedly disquieting. But he got used to the emptiness and began to enjoy it; within a week he knew himself to be as happy as he had been in years, and when he thought of Edith 'sinevitable return, it was with a quiet regret that he no longer needed to hide from himself.
Grace had had her sixth birthday in the spring of that year, and she started her first year of school that fall. Every morning Stoner got her ready for school, and he was back from the University in the afternoon in time to greet her when she came home.
At the age of six Grace was a tall, slender child with hair that was more blond than red; her skin was perfectly fair, and her eyes were dark blue, almost violet. She was quiet and cheerful, and she had a delight in things that gave her father a feeling that was like nostalgic reverence.
Sometimes Grace played with neighbor children, but more often she sat with her father in his large study and watched him as he graded papers, or read, or wrote. She spoke to him, and they conversed—so quietly and seriously that William Stoner was moved by a tenderness that he never foresaw. Grace drew awkward and charming pictures on sheets of yellow paper and presented them solemnly to her father, or she read aloud to him from her first-grade reader. At night, when Stoner put her to bed and returned to his study, he was aware of her absence from his room and was comforted by the knowledge that she slept securely above him. In ways of which he was barely conscious he started her education, and he watched with amazement and love as she grew before him and as her face began to show the intelligence that worked within her.
Edith did not return to Columbia until after the first of the year, so William Stoner and his daughter spent Christmas by themselves. On Christmas morning they exchanged gifts; for her father, who did not smoke, Grace had modeled, at the cautiously progressive school attached to the University, a crude ashtray. William gave her a new dress that he had selected himself at a downtown store, several books, and a coloring set. They sat most of the day before the small tree, talked, and watched the lights twinkle on the ornaments and the tinsel wink from the dark green fir like buried fire.
During the Christmas holiday, that curious, suspended pause in the rushing semester, William Stoner began to realize two things: he began to know how centrally important Grace had become to his existence, and he began to understand that it might be possible for him to become a good teacher.
He was ready to admit to himself that he had not been a good teacher. Always, from the time he had fumbled through his first classes of freshman English, he had been aware of the gulf that lay between what he felt for his subject and what he delivered in the classroom. He had hoped that time and experience would repair the gulf; but they had not done so. Those things that he held most deeply were most profoundly betrayed when he spoke of them to his classes; what was most alive withered in his words; and what moved him most became cold in its utterance. And the consciousness of his inadequacy distressed him so greatly that the sense of it grew habitual, as much a part of him as the stoop of his shoulders.
But during the weeks that Edith was in St. Louis, when he lectured, he now and then found himself so lost in his subject that he became forgetful of his inadequacy, of himself, and even of the students before him. Now and then he became so caught by his enthusiasm that he stuttered, gesticulated, and ignored the lecture notes that usually guided his talks. At first he was disturbed by his outbursts, as if he presumed too familiarly upon his subject, and he apologized to his students; but when they began coming up to him after class, and when in their papers they began to show hints of imagination and the revelation of a tentative love, he was encouraged to do what he had never been taught to do. The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.
He was both saddened and heartened by his discovery of what he might do; beyond his intention, he felt he had cheated both his students and himself. The students who had been able theretofore to plod through his courses by the repetition of mechanical steps began to look at him with puzzlement and resentment; those who had not taken courses from him began to sit in on his lectures and nod to him in the halls. He spoke more confidently and felt a warm hard severity gather within him. He suspected that he was beginning, ten years late, to discover who he was; and the figure he saw was both more and less than he had once imagined it to be. He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.
Thus, when Edith came back from St. Louis, she found him changed in a way that she could not understand but of which she was instantly aware. She returned without warning on an afternoon train and walked through the living room into the study where her husband and her daughter quietly sat. She had meant to shock them both by her sudden presence and by her changed appearance; but when William looked up at her, and she saw the surprise in his eyes, she knew at once that the real change had come over him, and that it was so deep that the effect of her appearance was lost; and she thought to herself, a little distantly and yet with some surprise, I know him better than I ever realized.
William was surprised at her presence and her altered appearance, but neither could move him now as they might once have done. He looked at her for several moments and then got up from his desk, went across the room, and greeted her gravely.
Edith had bobbed her hair and wore over it one of those hats that hugged her head so tightly that the cropped hair lay close to her face like an irregular frame; her lips were painted a bright orange-red, and two small spots of rouge sharpened her cheekbones. She wore one of those short dresses that had become fashionable among the younger women during the past few years; it hung straight down from her shoulders and ended just above her knees. She smiled self-consciously at her husband and walked across the room to her daughter, who sat on the floor and looked up at her quietly and studiously. She knelt awkwardly, her new dress tight around her legs.