They said no more. They embraced so that neither might see the other's face, and made love so that they would not speak. They coupled with the old tender sensuality of knowing each other well and with the new intense passion of loss. Afterward, in the black night of the little room, they lay still unspeaking, their bodies touching lightly. After a long while Katherine's breath came steadily, as if in sleep. Stoner got up quietly, dressed in the dark, and went out of the room without awakening her. He walked the still, empty streets of Columbia until the first gray light began in the east; then he made his way to the University campus. He sat on the stone steps in front of Jesse Hall and watched the light from the east creep upon the great stone columns in the center of the quad. He thought of the fire that, before he was born, had gutted and ruined the old building; and he was distantly saddened by the view of what remained. When it was light he let himself into the hall and went to his office, where he waited until his first class began.
He didn't see Katherine Driscoll again. After he left her, during the night, she got up, packed all her belongings, cartoned her books, and left word with the manager of the apartment house where to send them. She mailed the English office her grades, her instructions to dismiss her classes for the week and a half that remained of the semester, and her resignation. And she was on the train, on her way out of Columbia, by two o'clock that afternoon.
She must have been planning her departure for some time, Stoner realized; and he was grateful that he had not known and that she left him no final note to say what could not be said.
XIV
That summer he did not teach; and he had the first illness of his life. It was a fever of high intensity and obscure origin, which lasted only a week; but it drained him of his strength, he became very gaunt, and suffered in its aftermath a partial loss of hearing. For the entire summer he was so weak and listless that he could walk only a few steps without becoming exhausted; he spent nearly all that time in the small enclosed porch at the back of the house, lying on the day bed or sitting in the old easy chair he had had brought up from the basement. He stared out the windows or at the slatted ceiling, and stirred himself now and then to go into the kitchen to get a bite of food.
He had hardly the energy to converse with Edith or even with Grace—though sometimes Edith came into the back room, spoke to him distractedly for a few minutes, and then left him alone as abruptly as she had intruded upon him.
Once, in the middle of summer, she spoke of Katherine.
"I just heard, a day or so ago," she said. "So your little coed has gone, has she?"
With an effort he brought his attention away from the window and turned to Edith. "Yes," he said mildly.
"What was her name?" Edith asked. "I never can remember her name."
"Katherine," he said. "Katherine Driscoll."
"Oh, yes," Edith said. "Katherine Driscoll. Well, you see? I told you, didn't I? I told you these things weren't important."
He nodded absently. Outside, in the old elm that crowded the back-yard fence, a large black-and-white bird—a magpie —had started to chatter. He listened to the sound of its calling and watched with remote fascination the open beak as it strained out its lonely cry.
He aged rapidly that summer, so that when he went back to his classes in the fall there were few who did not recognize him with a start of surprise. His face, gone gaunt and bony, was deeply lined; heavy patches of gray ran through his hair; and he was heavily stooped, as if he carried an invisible burden. His voice had grown a little grating and abrupt, and he had a tendency to stare at one with his head lowered, so that his clear gray eyes were sharp and querulous beneath his tangled eyebrows. He seldom spoke to anyone except his students, and he responded to questions and greetings always impatiently and sometimes harshly.
He did his work with a doggedness and resolve that amused his older colleagues and enraged the younger instructors, who, like himself, taught only freshman composition; he spent hours marking and correcting freshman themes, he had student conferences every day, and he attended faithfully all departmental meetings. He did not speak often at these meetings, but when he did he spoke without tact or diplomacy, so that among his colleagues he developed a reputation for crustiness and ill temper. But with his young students he was gentle and patient, though he demanded of them more work than they were willing to give, with an impersonal firmness that was hard for many of them to understand.
It was a commonplace among his colleagues—especially the younger ones—that he was a "dedicated" teacher, a term they used half in envy and half in contempt, one whose dedication blinded him to anything that went on outside the classroom or, at the most, outside the halls of the University. There were mild jokes: after a departmental meeting at which Stoner had spoken bluntly about some recent experiments in the teaching of grammar, a young instructor remarked that "To Stoner, copulation is restricted to verbs," and was surprised at the quality of laughter and meaningful looks exchanged by some of the older men. Someone else once said, "Old Stoner thinks that WPA stands for Wrong Pronoun Antecedent," and was gratified to learn that his witticism gained some currency.
But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.
And though he looked upon them with apparent impassivity, he was aware of the times in which he lived. During that decade when many men's faces found a permanent hardness and bleakness, as if they looked upon an abyss, William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass; he saw them walk up to back doors, with the bitter pride of men who go to their executions, and beg for the bread that would allow them to beg again; and he saw men, who had once walked erect in their own identities, look at him with envy and hatred for the poor security he enjoyed as a tenured employee of an institution that somehow could not fail. He did not give voice to this awareness; but the knowledge of common misery touched him and changed him in ways that were hidden deep from the public view, and a quiet sadness for the common plight was never far beneath any moment of his living.
He was aware, too, of the stirrings in Europe like a distant nightmare; and in July 1936, when Franco rebelled against the Spanish government and Hitler fanned that rebellion into a major war, Stoner, like many others, was sickened by the vision of the nightmare breaking out of the dream into the world. When the fall semester began that year the younger instructors could talk of little else; several of them proclaimed their intention of joining a volunteer unit and fighting for the loyalists or driving ambulances. By the close of the first semester a few of them had actually taken the step and submitted hasty resignations. Stoner thought of Dave Masters, and the old loss was brought back to him with a renewed intensity; he thought, too, of Archer Sloane and remembered, from nearly twenty years before, the slow anguish that had grown upon that ironic face and the erosive despair that had dissipated that hard self—and he thought that he knew now, in a small way, something of the sense of waste that Sloane had apprehended. He foresaw the years that stretched ahead, and knew that the worst was to come.