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.
XII
During that year, and especially in the winter months, he found himself returning more and more frequently to such a state of unreality; at will, he seemed able to remove his consciousness from the body that contained it, and he observed himself as if he were an oddly familiar stranger doing the oddly familiar things that he had to do. It was a dissociation that he had never felt before; he knew that he ought to be troubled by it, but he was numb, and he could not convince himself that it mattered. He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.
In its forty-third year William Stoner's body was nearly as lean as it had been when he was a youth, when he had first walked in dazed awe upon the campus that had never wholly lost its effect upon him. Year by year the stoop of his shoulders had increased, and he had learned to slow his movements so that his farmer's clumsiness of hand and foot seemed a deliberation rather than an awkwardness bred in the bone. His long face had softened with time; and although the flesh was still like tanned leather, it no longer stretched so tautly over the sharp cheekbones; it was loosened by thin lines around his eyes and mouth. Still sharp and clear, his gray eyes were sunk more deeply in his face, the shrewd watchfulness there half hidden; his hair, once light brown, had darkened, although a few touches of gray were beginning around his temples. He did not think often of the years, or regret their passing; but when he saw his face in a mirror, or when he approached his reflection in one of the glass doors that led into Jesse Hall, he recognized the changes that had come over him with a mild shock.
Late one afternoon in the early spring he sat alone in his office. A pile of freshman themes lay on his desk; he held one of the papers in his hand, but he was not looking at it. As he had been doing frequently of late, he gazed out the window upon that part of the campus he could see from his office. The day was bright, and the shadow cast by Jesse Hall had crept, while he watched, nearly up to the base of the five columns that stood in powerful, isolate grace in the center of the rectangular quad. The portion of the quad in shadow was a deep brownish-gray; beyond the edge of the shadow the winter grass was a light tan, overlaid with a shimmering film of the palest green. Against the spidery black tracings of vine stems that curled around them, the marble columns were brilliantly white; soon the shadow would creep upon them, Stoner thought, and the bases would darken, and the darkness would creep up, slowly and then more rapidly, until . . . He became aware that someone was standing behind him.
He turned in his chair and looked up. It was Katherine Driscoll, the young instructor who last year had sat in on his seminar. Since that time, though they sometimes met in the corridors and nodded, they had not really spoken to each other. Stoner was aware that he was dimly annoyed by this confrontation; he did not wish to be reminded of the seminar and of what had ensued from it. He pushed his chair back and got awkwardly to his feet.
"Miss Driscoll," he said soberly and motioned to the chair beside his desk. She gazed at him for a moment; her eyes were large and dark, and he thought that her face was extraordinarily pale. With a slight ducking motion of the head she moved away from him and took the chair to which he vaguely motioned.
Stoner seated himself again and stared at her for a moment without really seeing her. Then, aware that his regard of her might be taken as rudeness, he tried to smile, and he murmured an inane, automatic question about her classes.
She spoke abruptly. "You—you said once that you would be willing to look over my dissertation whenever I had a good start on it."
"Yes," Stoner said and nodded. "I believe I did. Of course." Then, for the first time, he noticed that she clutched a folder of papers in her lap.
"Of course, if you're busy," she said tentatively.
"Not at all," Stoner said, trying to put some enthusiasm in his voice. "I'm sorry. I didn't intend to sound distracted."
She hesitantly lifted the folder toward him. He took it, hefted it, and smiled at her. "I thought you would be further along than this," he said.
"I was," she said. "But I started over. I'm taking a new tack, and—and I'll be grateful if you'll tell me what you think."
He smiled at her again and nodded; he did not know what to say. They sat in awkward silence for a moment.
Finally he said, "When do you need this back?"
She shook her head. "Any time. Whenever you can get around to it."
"I don't want to hold you up," he said. "How about this coming Friday? That should give me plenty of time. About three o'clock?"