Gordon Finch was in his shirt sleeves, his tie was loosened, and he was leaning back in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head. When Stoner came into the room he nodded genially and waved toward the leather-covered easy chair set at an angle beside his desk.
"Take a load off, Bill. How have you been?"
Stoner nodded. "All right."
"Classes keeping you busy?"
Stoner said dryly, "Reasonably so. I have a full schedule."
"I know," Finch said and shook his head. "I can't interfere there, you know. But it's a damned shame."
"It's all right," Stoner said a bit impatiently.
"Well." Finch straightened in his chair and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. "There's nothing official about this visit, Bill. I just wanted to chat with you for a while."
There was a long silence. Stoner said gently, "What is it, Gordon?"
Finch sighed, and then said abruptly, "Okay. I'm talking to you right now as a friend. There's been talk. It isn't anything that, as a dean, I have to pay any attention to yet, but—well, sometime I might have to pay attention to it, and I thought I ought to speak to you—as a friend, mind you—before anything serious develops."
Stoner nodded. "What kind of talk?"
"Oh, hell, Bill. You and the Driscoll girl. You know."
"Yes," Stoner said. "I know. I just wanted to know how far it has gone."
"Not far yet. Innuendos, remarks, things like that."
"I see," Stoner said. "I don't know what I can do about it."
Finch creased a sheet of paper carefully. "Is it serious, Bill?"
Stoner nodded and looked out the window. "It's serious, I'm afraid."
"What are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
With sudden violence Finch crumpled the paper that he had so carefully folded and threw it at a wastebasket. He said, "In theory, your life is your own to lead. In theory, you ought to be able to screw anybody you want to, do anything you want to, and it shouldn't matter so long as it doesn't interfere with your teaching. But damn it, your life isn't your own to lead. It's—oh, hell. You know what I mean."
Stoner smiled. "I'm afraid I do."
"It's a bad business. What about Edith?"
"Apparently," Stoner said, "she takes the whole thing a good deal less seriously than anyone else. And it's a funny thing, Gordon; I don't believe we've ever got along any better than we have the last year."
Finch laughed shortly. "You never can tell, can you? But what I meant was, will there be a divorce? Anything like that?"
"I don't know. Possibly. But Edith would fight it. It would be a mess."
"What about Grace?"
A sudden pain caught at Stoner's throat, and he knew that his expression showed what he felt. "That's—something else. I don't know, Gordon."
Finch said impersonally, as if they were discussing someone else, "You might survive a divorce—if it weren't too messy. It would be rough, but you'd probably survive it. And if this— thing with the Driscoll girl weren't serious, if you were just screwing around, well, that could be handled too. But you're sticking your neck out, Bill; you're asking for it."
"I suppose I am," Stoner said.
There was a pause. "This is a hell of a job I have," Finch said heavily. "Sometimes I think I'm not the man for it at all."
Stoner smiled. "Dave Masters once said you weren't a big enough son-of-a-bitch to be really successful."
"Maybe he was right," Finch said. "But I feel like one often enough."
"Don't worry about it, Gordon," Stoner said. "I understand your position. And if I could make it easier for you I—" He paused and shook his head sharply. "But I can't do anything right now. It will have to wait. Somehow . . ."
Finch nodded and did not look at Stoner; he stared at his desk top as if it were a doom that approached him with slow inevitability. Stoner waited for a few moments, and when Finch did not speak he got up quietly and went out of the office.
Because of his conversation with Gordon Finch, Stoner was late that afternoon getting to Katherine's apartment. Without bothering to look up or down the street he went down the walk and let himself in. Katherine was waiting for him; she had not changed clothes, and she waited almost formally, sitting erect and alert upon the couch.
"You're late," she said flatly.
"Sorry," he said. "I got held up."
Katherine lit a cigarette; her hand was trembling slightly. She surveyed the match for a moment, and blew it out with a puff of smoke. She said, "One of my fellow instructors made rather a point of telling me that Dean Finch called you in this afternoon."
"Yes," Stoner said. "That's what held me up."
"Was it about us?"
Stoner nodded. "He had heard a few things."
"I imagined that was it," Katherine said. "My instructor friend seemed to know something that she didn't want to tell. Oh, Christ, Bill!"
"It's not like that at all," Stoner said. "Gordon is an old friend. I actually believe he wants to protect us. I believe he will if he can."
Katherine did not speak for several moments. She kicked off her shoes and lay back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. She said calmly, "Now it begins. I suppose it was too much, hoping that they would leave us alone. I suppose we never really seriously thought they would."
"If it gets too bad," Stoner said, "we can go away. We can do something."
"Oh, Bill!" Katherine was laughing a little, throatily and softly. She sat up on the couch. "You are the dearest love, the dearest, dearest anyone could imagine. And I will not let them bother us. I will not!"
And for the next several weeks they lived much as they had before. With a strategy that they would not have been able to manage a year earlier, with a strength they would not have known they had, they practiced evasions and withdrawals, deploying their powers like skillful generals who must survive with meager forces. They became genuinely circumspect and cautious, and got a grim pleasure from their maneuverings. Stoner came to her apartment only after dark, when no one could see him enter; in the daytime, between classes, Katherine allowed herself to be seen at coffee shops with younger male instructors; and the hours they spent together were intensified by their common determination. They told themselves and each other that they were closer than they ever had been; and to their surprise, they realized that it was true, that the words they spoke to comfort themselves were more than consolatory. They made a closeness possible and a commitment inevitable.
It was a world of half-light in which they lived and to which they brought the better parts of themselves—so that, after a while, the outer world where people walked and spoke, where there was change and continual movement, seemed to them false and unreal. Their lives were sharply divided between the two worlds, and it seemed to them natural that they should live so divided.
During the late winter and early spring months they found together a quietness they had not had before. As the outer world closed upon them they became less aware of its presence; and their happiness was such that they had no need to speak of it to each other, or even to think of it. In Katherine 'ssmall, dim apartment, hidden like a cave beneath the massive old house, they seemed to themselves to move outside of time, in a timeless universe of their own discovery.
Then, one day in late April, Gordon Finch again called Stoner into his office; and Stoner went down with a numbness that came from a knowledge he would not admit.
What had happened was classically simple, something that Stoner should have foreseen yet had not.
"It's Lomax," Finch said. "Somehow the son-of-a-bitch has got hold of it and he's not about to let go."