He found his release and fulfillment in the classes in which he himself was a student. There he was able to recapture the sense of discovery he had felt on that first day, when Archer Sloane had spoken to him in class and he had, in an instant, become someone other than who he had been. As his mind engaged itself with its subject, as it grappled with the power of the literature he studied and tried to understand its nature, he was aware of a constant change within himself; and as he was aware of that, he moved outward from himself into the world which contained him, so that he knew that the poem of Milton 'sthat he read or the essay of Bacon's or the drama of Ben Jonson's changed the world which was its subject, and changed it because of its dependence upon it. He seldom spoke in class, and his papers rarely satisfied him. Like his lectures to his young students, they did not betray what he most profoundly knew.
He began to be on familiar terms with a few of his fellow students who were also acting instructors in the department. Among those were two with whom he became friendly, David Masters and Gordon Finch.
Masters was a slight dark youth with a sharp tongue and gentle eyes. Like Stoner, he was just beginning his doctoral program, though he was a year or so younger than Stoner. Among the faculty and the graduate students he had a reputation for arrogance and impertinence, and it was generally conceded that he would have some difficulty in finally obtaining his degree. Stoner thought him the most brilliant man he had ever known and deferred to him without envy or resentment.
Gordon Finch was large and blond, and already, at the age of twenty-three, beginning to run to fat. He had taken an undergraduate degree from a commercial college in St. Louis, and at the University had made various stabs at advanced degrees in the departments of economics, history, and engineering. He had begun work on his degree in literature largely because he had been able, at the last minute, to get a small instructing job in the English Department. He quickly showed himself to be the most nearly indifferent student in the department. But he was popular with the freshmen, and he got along well with the older faculty members and with the officers of the administration.
The three of them—Stoner, Masters, and Finch—got in the habit of meeting on Friday afternoons at a small saloon in downtown Columbia, drinking large schooners of beer and talking late into the night. Though he found the only social pleasure he knew in these evenings, Stoner often wondered at their relationship. Though they got along well enough together, they had not become close friends; they had no confidences and seldom saw each other outside their weekly gatherings.
None of them ever raised the question of that relationship. Stoner knew that it had not occurred to Gordon Finch, but he suspected that it had to David Masters. Once, late in the evening, as they sat at a rear table in the dimness of the saloon, Stoner and Masters talked of their teaching and study with the awkward facetiousness of the very serious. Masters, holding aloft a hard-boiled egg from the free lunch as if it were a crystal ball, said, "Have you gentlemen ever considered the question of the true nature of the University? Mr. Stoner? Mr. Finch?"
Smiling, they shook their heads.
"I'll bet you haven't. Stoner, here, I imagine, sees it as a great repository, like a library or a whorehouse, where men come of their free will and select that which will complete them, where all work together like little bees in a common hive. The True, the Good, the Beautiful. They're just around the corner, in the next corridor; they're in the next book, the one you haven't read, or in the next stack, the one you haven't got to. But you'll get to it someday. And when you do—when you do—" He looked at the egg for a moment more, then took a large bite of it and turned to Stoner, his jaws working and his dark eyes bright.
Stoner smiled uncomfortably, and Finch laughed aloud and slapped the table. "He's got you, Bill. He's got you good."
Masters chewed for a moment more, swallowed, and turned his gaze to Finch. "And you, Finch. What's your idea?" He held up his hand. "You'll protest you haven't thought of it. But you have. Beneath that bluff and hearty exterior there works a simple mind. To you, the institution is an instrument of good —to the world at large, of course, and just incidentally to yourself. You see it as a kind of spiritual sulphur-and-molasses that you administer every fall to get the little bastards through another winter; and you're the kindly old doctor who benignly pats their heads and pockets their fees."
Finch laughed again and shook his head. "I swear, Dave, when you get going—"
Masters put the rest of the egg in his mouth, chewed contentedly for a moment, and took a long swallow of beer. "But you're both wrong," he said. "It is an asylum or—what do they call them now?—a rest home, for the infirm, the aged, the discontent, and the otherwise incompetent. Look at the three of us—we are the University. The stranger would not know that we have so much in common, but we know, don't we? We know well."
Finch was laughing. "What's that, Dave?"
Interested now in what he was saying, Masters leaned intently across the table. "Let's take you first, Finch. Being as kind as I can, I would say that you are the incompetent. As you yourself know, you're not really very bright—though that doesn't have everything to do with it."
"Here, now," Finch said, still laughing.
"But you're bright enough—and just bright enough—to realize what would happen to you in the world. You're cut out for failure, and you know it. Though you're capable of being a son-of-a-bitch, you're not quite ruthless enough to be so consistently. Though you're not precisely the most honest man I've ever known, neither are you heroically dishonest. On the one hand, you're capable of work, but you're just lazy enough so that you can't work as hard as the world would want you to. On the other hand, you're not quite so lazy that you can impress upon the world a sense of your importance. And you're not lucky—not really. No aura rises from you, and you wear a puzzled expression. In the world you would always be on the fringe of success, and you would be destroyed by your failure. So you are chosen, elected; providence, whose sense of humor has always amused me, has snatched you from the jaws of the world and placed you safely here, among your brothers."
Still smiling and ironically malevolent, he turned to Stoner. "Nor do you escape, my friend. No indeed. Who are you? A simple son of the soil, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky. You're bright enough—brighter anyhow than our mutual friend. But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there's something here, something to find. Well, in the world you'd learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it wasn't, something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world."
"What about you?" Finch asked. "What about yourself?"
"Oh," Masters said, leaning back, "I'm one of you. Worse, in fact. I'm too bright for the world, and I won't keep my mouth shut about it; it's a disease for which there is no cure. So I must be locked up, where I can be safely irresponsible, where I can do no harm." He leaned forward again and smiled at them. "We're all poor Toms, and we're a-cold."