Evening of the Good Samaritan (2 page)

It was a time in the history of the country when confidence made the man: witness (however reluctantly in present company) the success of the President of the United States. He did not call attention to it, but Hawkins was known to admire him, and something in the toss of his head made Winthrop think he more than admired, he sought to emulate him. He was almost defiantly self-confident.

Having won his friends, albeit the vote was not yet taken, Hawkins addressed himself to the one man present who might be considered a spokesman for his enemies. Alexander Winthrop conducted a daily column in Judge Phipps’s
Traders City Dispatch.
“Dr. Winthrop,” Hawkins said, smiling, “if Judge Phipps were among our number, how do you suppose he would vote?”

The wily young devil, Winthrop thought, to probe at that moment the well known inconsistency of the publisher. It was Phipps’s
Dispatch
which had first put the “red” charges into headlines.

“I’m hardly a better spokesman for Phipps than Phipps himself,” Winthrop said, “but I’ll say this: many’s the time I’ve heard him speak out for academic freedom.”

A murmur of dry, ironic laughter passed among the men around the table.

The chairman called for a vote.

In the banquet room itself the long tables were still pristine, row upon row of them, the linens gleaming, the silver neat, but the water in the glasses was turning beady. The smell of roasted turkey which had pleasantly smitten the nostrils of the guests arriving had now taken on the savor of left-over gravy. Cigar and cigaret smoke webbed the rafters. The faculty of Midwestern University, six hundred thirty men and women—about twenty men to every woman of them—waited restlessly. They were tired, irritable and nervous. The floors were drafty and the monastic benches along the walls chilly respite to those who had to get off their feet. They could not very well go to table ahead of their hosts.

Few of them were principals to the controversy, no more than a half dozen members of the faculty had been mentioned—and only Jonathan Hogan consistently—but all of them were inevitably having to take sides, to defend or deny the right of a university teacher to political activity outside the classroom. The definition was likely to be that broad—political activity—to those defending the right. To those who denied it, and some did openly, confident of vindication by the University trustees, it narrowed down to Communist influence in the classroom. That the loudest condemnation came from certain Catholic teachers in a school oriented toward Presbyterianism tended to make liberal partisans of otherwise conservatives. Practical men on both sides were thinking of the school’s endowment.

Everybody knew that Jonathan Hogan was a prime mover in something called The League Against War and Fascism. They were all against war—in the Midwest most people were against foreigners as well as their wars—but a man did not have to share the rostrum with Communists to prove it: so went the majority thinking.

Jonathan Hogan himself yellowed his fingers chain smoking. He felt an invisible
cordon sanitaire
around him through which his friends broke now and then to bring him cheer or ease his nerves. Someone—friend or enemy, he wondered afterwards—said, “Look here, Hogan, I shouldn’t worry. There are several universities in the East that’d be glad of a man of your calibre.”

That had the calibre of a shotgun, Hogan decided and winked at the man, though unintentionally. He had a tic that worsened under strain.

Finally the massive carved oak doors swung open and the president of the University came in, all amiability and apology, and followed by a jovial dozen of the most influential men in Traders City. A general air of sheepishness hung over the guests as they moved toward the tables.

A trustee headed each of the twelve tables and on the dais President Hawkins greeted the professors emeriti who were especially honored on this occasion every year. He stood a moment before taking his place. A hush fell over the hall. He tossed his head, his characteristically youthful gesture, and said, “I’ve been asked to say a word of apology and welcome—I shall say a good many more words later—but on behalf of the trustees and myself, I bid you, every man and woman, welcome and good appetite! But before we go to table, I want to read to you a release I have just handed to the press: ‘For immediate release: The Board of Trustees of Midwestern University, by unanimous vote, tonight reiterated the University’s belief in its responsibility for the teachings within its classrooms, and in the right of its members, outside the classroom, to any activity consistent with moral rectitude.

“‘The University regrets the violent partisanship recently agitating the campus; the students have been reprimanded and have subsequently shown every intention of confining themselves to peaceable demonstration.

“‘Accordingly, President Hawkins has respectfully requested the Commissioner of Police to withdraw the men on special assignment to the University campus.

“‘Classes will convene at the usual hour Monday morning.’”

He turned, eschewing the dramatic possibilities of the moment, and addressed himself to the dean of theological studies: “Doctor Stoneham, will you say the blessing, please?”

Jonathan Hogan did not eat very much; he was not a man who ever ate heartily. But there were those, eating crow along with their turkey or fish, who enjoyed the meal far less than he did. Such a man was Walter Fitzgerald. After the president’s address—it would be called in the morning papers one of his most notable speeches: The Purpose of a University—when the formal seating was abandoned, men of natural affinity drew together with an ease impossible before the dinner. Camaraderie prevailed. Professor Fitzgerald felt himself a lonely man. He was profoundly shaken by the outcome of the trustees’ meeting: that the opinion was unanimous he found hard to believe.

Standing apart, he fell easy prey to a woman who had wanted all evening to tell someone of a new project. The head of the library school was preparing a bibliography of sources … on God knows what. Fitzgerald would have liked to get away from her. It was said she could always find a cripple in a room on whom to lavish the charity of her attention. He half-listened, his eyes straying from her round, eager face in pursuit of a way of escape. Suddenly the woman inquired after his wife and his daughter. “I wonder if she will be as beautiful as her mother.”

Having discomfited him by the intimacy, she shot a smile up into his face and walked away, leaving him in no greater admiration of women certainly than he had been before her company. He turned and found himself in company he wanted even less.

Jonathan Hogan seemed to be taking the president’s words as a personal vindication, accepting congratulations all around. If it occurred to him to regret his part in bringing notoriety upon the school, he was not showing it. Yet he was not arrogant. Even Fitzgerald would not say that. And when, as Fitzgerald had observed, the chairman of the Board of Trustees had not merely shaken hands with him, but had put his arm about him, he himself could scarcely do less now than offer Hogan his hand.

“Well, Fitzgerald?”

Fitzgerald said as they shook hands, “The important thing is that we trust one another. That’s the important thing.” He did not mean to be hypocritical. He said what he thought had to be said.

Hogan understood him better, perhaps, than Fitzgerald understood himself: he was a man who fell so pitiably short of his own ideal he needed constantly to strike a pose; he reminded Hogan of an Elizabethan priest—all voice and no sacrament. His life was one long ceremony. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of philosophy, had come into Midwestern University with the present administration. His teaching background was fifteen years at a boys’ preparatory school where eight out of ten students went on to study for the priesthood. He was not a scholar, not in terms admissible to Hogan, for, his being a Thomist, Fitzgerald’s logic was proscribed; he believed in absolutes of truth. But it was typical of this administration that students wishing to study scholastic philosophy would be taught by a scholastic. Fitzgerald was the next best thing to a Jesuit. And there were times, such as the days just past, when he reminded Hogan of one: he was a lovely mixture of caution and righteousness.

“That’s the important thing,” he said. “There you have it.”

Fitzgerald looked sharply at him to see if he were speaking his own mind or trying to provoke him. It was hard to tell from Hogan’s face. His eyes were not unkind, but the lines at his mouth were perpetually sardonic, his smile always suggesting skepticism or, worse, mockery, an attitude Fitzgerald envied even while he condemned it. Hogan’s head nodded a little almost constantly, a tic of some sort pulling at his eye. That a man as frail as he should remain an atheist and a radical was to Fitzgerald incomprehensible.

Hogan considered himself far less than a radical in his chosen field. He taught economics and identified himself with Keynes. He had been one of the men tapped by Washington in the early days of the New Deal. The economics suited him: he believed in capitalism if labor were strong enough to strike a balance in the bargaining; he thought its control until that time the proper province of government. But Washington politics appalled him, the maneuvering for power destructive of the whole ideal. He had not stayed there long.

The library woman, making the rounds of several coteries, trying to find an opening for herself, unintentionally wheeled back to them. “There you are again!” she cried, shot her smile at them, and made off in another direction.

“Damned woman,” Fitzgerald said.

Hogan chuckled. He felt almost giddy with relaxation, benevolent even unto Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald cast a quick, scrutinous gaze over the company. Hogan forestalled his escape. “I have a favor to ask of you, professor. On the surface it may seem presumptuous, but I assure you in the end, it won’t be.”

He was interrupted by the arrival of a short, stout, balding man who came up to them shaking his finger in anticipation of what he had to say. “There is a man! Ach, a man like a god, our Hawkins. Did you ever hear such words before? A poet. He should be an emperor. And a man of God, of religion. You hear me, Jonathan? The man is of God, I say. Do you deny it?”

Hogan laid his hand on the shoulder of his friend. “Professor Fitzgerald, do you know Doctor Mueller?”

The two men, already acquainted, merely nodded for Mueller was talking again, his accent coming through the more strongly the more rapid his speech. Its being Austrian, there ran through it a steady sound of buzzing. “Once I knew one other man like him, my good patron, the archduke, Otto, God preserve him. It is the only hope for Europe, a man like him. Cultured, liberal, a patron of music, of science … and yes, of women. His mother, the Empress Zita, what beauty! There now, I spit on Hitler!”

Hogan smiled wryly and gently patted the back of his friend. Long and thin, short and thickset, they made a curious pair, a proper study in the variations in human anatomy. “Would God your Archduke Otto would do the same.”

Mueller very nearly jumped up and down. He gave the effect of so doing even though his toes did not leave the floor. “He will! You will see. You will see.”

“I am much afraid,” Hogan said softly, “it will be Hitler who will spit on the Archduke.”

“Oh, that man,” Mueller said, shaking his jowl like a mastiff. “He is the greatest bastard in the world.”

“Easily that,” Hogan said.

Fitzgerald said, “The trouble with men like Hogan, Dr. Mueller, they think they are the only ones who hate Hitler.”

“We are. At least, we are the only ones who hate him enough.”

“And you are not even a Jew,” Mueller said, and gave him a hug. “It is wonderful. I love this man.”

Fitzgerald cleared his throat. He was distinctly embarrassed. Foreigners were much too emotional, especially Jews.

Hogan, also embarrassed, grinned, which made him look boyish and thus closer to his actual age than his infirmities ordinarily allowed.

“I have interrupted you?” Mueller said.

“Nothing that can’t wait,” said Hogan.

“Why should it wait?” Mueller took from his pocket, leaving the pocket gaping, a paper bag. “I have here the sweets and the nut-meats, and biscuits I have already made into crumbs. My girls will be waiting at home like mice to collect them.” He shook Fitzgerald’s hand heartily and then took Hogan’s hand in both his own. “Jonathan, I am very proud of the President of this University, like the President of the country …”

“So am I. Good night, Erich,” Hogan said affectionately.

Mueller rollicked off, pausing soon, having something to say to almost everyone he passed.

Fitzgerald said dryly, “He’s generous with his comparisons.”

“With everything. He has a young wife and four girls, did you know? A confident man obviously—in America.” He glanced at Fitzgerald from under drawn brows. In his own way he was baiting the man who often baited him.

Fitzgerald said, “A physicist, isn’t he?”

Hogan nodded.

“I envy him,” Fitzgerald said. “Oh, not the four daughters. God knows one’s trial enough, but that abstract world of his, dabs of light on a black screen, a multiplicity of mathematical equations, a kind of music of the spheres and all so marvelously removed from responsibility in this unhappy world. How fortunate a refuge!”

Hogan denied himself contemplation of the man’s fatuousness. “You have a touch of the poet, professor.”

“My Irish origins.”

Hogan doubted he was that proud of them.

“You wanted to ask me something, Hogan. Do. I don’t care for crowds like this. You’re accustomed to crowds, of course.”

“I’ve grown accustomed to them, yes,” Hogan said blandly. “Why, I have a son, professor, the younger of two—the older boy’s all right. For that matter, so is Marcus—all right. But this may amuse you, I’m a little fearful of where his social conscience may lead him.” To a man like Fitzgerald the words would have distinct political coloring. “I’m father enough, you see, to want certain of the solid opportunities for him. He’s a doctor of medicine. Wants to be a surgeon. What he needs is further residency in a good hospital.”