That deafness was of a curious nature. Though he sometimes had difficulty understanding one who spoke directly to him, he was often able to hear with perfect clarity a murmured conversation held across a noisy room. It was by this trick of deafness that he gradually began to know that he was considered, in the phrase current in his own youth, a "campus character."
Thus he overheard, again and again, the embellished tale of his teaching Middle English to a group of new freshmen and of the capitulation of Hollis Lomax. "And when the freshman class of thirty-seven took their junior English exams, you know what class had the highest score?" a reluctant young instructor of freshman English asked. "Sure. Old Stoner's Middle English bunch. And we keep on using exercises and handbooks!"
Stoner had to admit that he had become, in the regard of the young instructors and the older students, who seemed to come and go before he could firmly attach names to their faces, an almost mythic figure, however shifting and various the function of that figure was.
Sometimes he was villain. In one version that attempted to explain the long feud between himself and Lomax, he had seduced and then cast aside a young graduate student for whom Lomax had had a pure and honorable passion. Sometimes he was the fooclass="underline" in another version of the same feud, he refused to speak to Lomax because once Lomax had been unwilling to write a letter of recommendation for one of Stoner's graduate students. And sometimes he was hero: in a final and not often accepted version he was hated by Lomax and frozen in his rank because he had once caught Lomax giving to a favored student a copy of a final examination in one of Stoner's courses.
The legend was defined, however, by his manner in class. Over the years it had grown more and more absent and yet more and more intense. He began his lectures and discussions fumblingly and awkwardly, yet very quickly became so immersed in his subject that he seemed unaware of anything or anyone around him. Once a meeting of several members of the board of trustees and the president of the University was scheduled in the conference room where Stoner held his seminar in the Latin Tradition; he had been informed of the meeting but had forgotten about it and held his seminar at the usual time and place. Halfway through the period a timid knock sounded at the door; Stoner, engrossed in translating extemporaneously a pertinent Latin passage, did not notice. After a few moments the door opened and a small plump middle-aged man with rimless glasses tiptoed in and lightly tapped Stoner on the shoulder. Without looking up, Stoner waved him away. The man retreated; there was a whispered conference with several others outside the open door. Stoner continued the translation. Then four men, led by the president of the University, a tall heavy man with an imposing chest and florid face, strode in and halted like a squad beside Stoner's desk. The president frowned and cleared his throat loudly. Without a break or a pause in his extemporaneous translation, Stoner looked up and spoke the next line of the poem mildly to the president and his entourage: "'Begone, begone, you bloody whoreson Gauls!'" And still without a break returned his eyes to his book and continued to speak, while the group gasped and stumbled backward, turned, and fled from the room.
Fed by such events, the legend grew until there were anecdotes to give substance to nearly all of Stoner's more typical activities, and grew until it reached his life outside the University. It finally included even Edith, who was seen with him so rarely at University functions that she was a faintly mysterious figure who flitted across the collective imagination like a ghost: she drank secretly, out of some obscure and distant sorrow; she was dying slowly of a rare and always fatal disease; she was a brilliantly talented artist who had given up her career to devote herself to Stoner. At public functions her smile flashed out of her narrow face so quickly and nervously, her eyes glinted so brightly, and she spoke so shrilly and disconnectedly that everyone was sure that her appearance masked a reality, that a self hid behind the facade that no one could believe.
After his illness, and out of an indifference that became a way of living, William Stoner began to spend more and more of his time in the house that he and Edith had bought many years ago. At first Edith was so disconcerted by his presence that she was silent, as if puzzled about something. Then, when she was convinced that his presence, afternoon after afternoon, night after night, weekend after weekend, was to be a permanent condition, she waged an old battle with new intensity. Upon the most trivial provocation she wept forlornly and wandered through the rooms; Stoner looked at her impassively and murmured a few absent words of sympathy. She locked herself in her room and did not emerge for hours at a time; Stoner prepared the meals that she would otherwise have prepared and didn't seem to have noticed her absence when she finally emerged from her room, pale and hollow of cheek and eye. She derided him upon the slightest occasion, and he hardly seemed to hear her; she screamed imprecations upon him, and he listened with polite interest. When he was immersed in a book, she chose that moment to go into the living room and pound with frenzy upon the piano that she seldom otherwise played; and when he spoke quietly to his daughter, Edith would burst into anger at either or both of them. And Stoner looked upon it all—the rage, the woe, the screams, and the hateful silences—as if it were happening to two other people, in whom, by an effort of the will, he could summon only the most perfunctory interest.
And at last—wearily, almost gratefully—Edith accepted her defeat. The rages decreased in intensity until they became as perfunctory as Stoner's interest in them; and the long silences became withdrawals into a privacy at which Stoner no longer wondered, rather than offenses upon an indifferent position.
In her fortieth year, Edith Stoner was as thin as she had been as a girl, but with a hardness, a brittleness, that came from an unbending carriage, that made every movement seem reluctant and grudging. The bones of her face had sharpened, and the thin pale skin was stretched upon them as upon a framework, so that the lines upon the skin were taut and sharp. She was very pale, and she used a great deal of powder and paint in such a way that it appeared she daily composed her own features upon a blank mask. Beneath the dry hard skin, her hands seemed all bone; and they moved ceaselessly, twisting and plucking and clenching even in her quietest moments.
Always withdrawn, she grew in these middle years increasingly remote and absent. After the brief period of her last assault upon Stoner, which flared with a final, desperate intensity, she wandered like a ghost into the privacy of herself, a place from which she never fully emerged. She began to speak to herself, with the kind of soft reasonableness that one uses with a child; she did so openly and without self-consciousness, as if it were the most natural thing she could do. Of the scattered artistic endeavors with which she had occupied herself intermittently during her marriage, she finally settled upon sculpture as the most "satisfying." She modeled clay mostly, though she occasionally worked with the softer stones; busts and figures and compositions of all sorts were scattered about the house. She was very modern: the busts she modeled were minimally featured spheres, the figures were blobs of clay with elongated appendages, and the compositions were random geometric gatherings of cubes and spheres and rods. Sometimes, passing her studio—the room that had once been his study—Stoner would pause and listen to her work. She gave herself directions, as if to a child: "Now, you must put that here—not too much—here, right beside the little gouge. Oh, look, it's falling off. It wasn't wet enough, was it? Well, we can fix that, can't we? Just a little more water, and—there. You see?"