The Groves of Academe: A Novel (Transaction Large Print Books) (22 page)

Cathy warmly protested. “It’s a holiday,” she reproached her. “We can have a good long gab. No students, no classes, no convocation. You don’t really have to work.” “I have papers to do,” said Domna, with a sidelong glance at Henry, “and achievement sheets to get in.” Yet she stayed, when pressed, and helped wash up the dishes as usual. Henry saw plainly that she was ashamed for them but that this very shame, also, was preventing her from making a difference in their relation. Certain acutely telling little things, however, betrayed her reluctance to be any longer “at home” here; she made a show, for example, of not knowing where to put the china and glassware, though she had helped wash up a dozen times before and knew the cupboards like the palm of her hand. In the past, too, she had busied herself wiping the tables and counters; she would get out the broom and sweep the floor and sometimes even set the table for breakfast, putting a silly glass ornament in the middle and pleating the children’s napkins. But tonight she was irking to get away; she dried the dishes at top speed, like a kitchen worker in a hash house, and was off to get her coat on before the sink was emptied. Henry drove her home, with a sick, empty feeling, as at the end of something, knowing that she knew and that she knew that he knew that she knew. If she turned on him, the others would follow her; they had all been looking for an excuse to lose faith in him, and one apostasy would be ample to show the others the way. And at the moment, he blamed himself completely for what had happened; he felt humbled for his lack of trust in her and let himself grovel in the feeling with penitent abandon—all of which he tried to convey to her at the ultimate moment on her doorstep, in a fervid, miscreant’s handclasp and a quick, blind turning away. To admit culpability was to open the way to amendment, he repeated to himself on the way home, and he was tempted suddenly to appear at her door and make a full confession; yet he knew at the same moment that it was too late—his confession should have preceded Cathy’s slip if it were to have any air of
bona fides.
What more, he asked himself, could he tell her in words than he had already indicated wordlessly? Words and explanations had no place in true friendship, which was a connexion of souls. Had he need to beg her in words not to give him away, when eye and lip and hand beseeched her higher understanding? Moreover, he thought, with a sudden dry cackle, she
dared
not tell on them—anybody she confided in would think her an utter fool and a turncoat.

John Bentkoop and his wife, Virginia, were in their night-clothes when Domna cranked the old bell. He came downstairs, blinking and pulling on his bathrobe, followed by Virginia in a pink woolen dressing-gown. She would not let him open the door until he turned on the flashlight and they saw through the side-panes the Russian girl standing on the porch. Virginia, who was a sensible girl, instantly drew her into the dark house, put an arm around her and guided her into the living room. She had met her only once, at a college lecture, but she divined correctly that her feet were wet. John hastily made a fire. Domna sat crouched on a hassock by the fireplace; she would not take off her shoes or her polo coat at the beginning, apologizing that she had been pacing outside the house for hours, trying to make up her mind whether to intrude on them, and would go at once when she had said what she had to say. After the first few words, Virginia absented herself; she came back with a pot of coffee and big, white, cheap cups on a tray, served them, and sat down by the oil lamp in a rocker—there was no electricity in the house. “You
must
stay,” she proffered. “I’ve made up a bed upstairs. I’ve always wanted to know you. Next year, I’m going to take your course.” Without further parlance, she took up her knitting, a pale green baby sweater; the motion of her needles kept pace with the conversation. She had pale, almost greenish fair hair, pale sea-like green eyes, a pink and white complexion, fair brows, delicate hands; everything about her was pastel and tranquilly decided—in short, she was the complement of Domna, whom she scanned with earnest attention, as though the other girl were something—a flower, a chemical process—she had read about in a book and she was now satisfying herself as to her reality. This child-like faculty of attention was her notable characteristic; nothing appeared to strike her as aberrant in a world that was myriad with difference; she looked at her husband carefully whenever he made a point, as though studying afresh the whorls of his personality. Before the discussion was over, she had finished the sweater, laid it aside in a basket and begun casting a new set of stitches on the yellow needles. Toward the end, when it was nearly morning, she added her voice to the symposium. This voice, surprisingly, was rather clear and loud, like a boy’s voice that has not changed yet.

John threw another log on the fire and paced up and down before it. “I think, Domna,” he said judiciously, “you’re doing him a minor injustice. It doesn’t seem to me likely that they cooked it up between them, as you say. More likely she half guessed and he told her. I’m willing to buy that for what it’s worth.” Domna’s shadowed face showed a faint stirring of relief; as she listened, she slipped her coat from her shoulders and Virginia silently came and took it. “I’ve never put much credence,” continued John, easily, like a wound-up bobbin unreeling, “in Hen’s power to keep a secret. To the best of my knowledge, he told one of his tutees the very first thing, probably before he told you. If he hadn’t told Cathy finally, she would have been one of the few people in the community he didn’t favor with his confidence. The town’s buzzing with it; I heard it from the garage-man and the grocer and the druggist, all very concerned about Mrs. Mulcahy and about Mr. Mulcahy’s prospects for paying their precious bills. Why, I think Hen could get up a real rank-and-file movement among the tradespeople here to petition for his continuance.” He laughed but Domna sighed restlessly. “I would pay them myself to be rid of him,” she declared in a passionate tone. John studied her concernedly, with a pursing of the large lips. “You’re really suffering,” he discovered. “Drink some more coffee. It’s mainly shock, you know. You’re one of the few people on this campus that really had faith in Hen. It’s a shame it had to be you to discover this. Those of us who’ve known him a little longer would have been better prepared.” “Oh, that dinner!” she suddenly moaned, as it came back to her. “They talked about
love,
Virginia. ‘Could I love a leper?’” “Could you?” asked Virginia, setting the cup in her hand. “I don’t think so,” said Domna. “Neither could I,” said Virginia. “At least, I never have.” “But what I was supposed to understand by this,” said Domna, raising her eyes to John, “was that Henry was a moral leper and that I didn’t love him sufficiently. Of course, it’s perfectly true. I don’t. Not sufficiently for this.” Her face stiffened. There was a silence. “Did you really suspect it?” she demanded, in a different, half-hopeful tone. “Honor bright,” said John. “Ask Virginia.” Virginia paused in her knitting. “Yes, he did. You aren’t married or you’d see how hard it is to keep something from your wife.” “And you really think,” insisted Domna, “that it wasn’t cooked up, deliberately, beforehand, as a bid for sympathy?” John shook his long head. “That’s not how these things work, Domna; one begins by persuading
oneself,
and this germ of persuasion is infectious. Hen has a remarkable gift, a gift for being his own sympathizer. It’s a rare asset; it could be useful to him in politics or religion.” He spoke with perfect seriousness. “He’s capable of commanding great loyalty, because he’s unswervingly loyal to himself. I’m not being sarcastic. Very few of us have that. It’s a species of self-alienation. He’s loyal to himself, objectively, as if he were another person, with that feeling of sacrifice and blind obedience that we give to a leader or a cause. In the world today, there’s a great deal of free-floating, circumambient loyalty that fixes itself on such people, who seem to offer, by their own example, the possibility of a separation from the self that will lead to a higher union with the self objectified in an idea. It’s Hen’s fortune or his fate to have achieved this union within his own personality; he’s foregone his subjectivity and hypostatized himself as an object.”

He settled himself on the hearth-rug and wound his arms round his long, bony legs in their white pajama bottoms. Virginia laid down her knitting and joined him; she rested her head on his shoulder. The fire threw a ruddy light on the three absorbed faces, as in a painting by La Tour. Around them, outside the circle of the lamp, the room was nearly dark: they might have been sitting by a campfire on a chill beach after a night picnic, or in a forest-clearing, keeping watch. The even heat of the fire in their faces, the lateness of the hour, the shadows, the rattling of the small-paned windows, the eeriness of the man they spoke of, produced a sensuous content and numbness; they felt close to the primeval mysteries, the chiaroscuro of good and evil. John hugged his knees. His olive student-face assumed a didactic mien. “The criteria of truth and falsity, as we know them, don’t exist for Hen. He doesn’t examine his statements from the point of view of the speaker but from the point of view of the listener. He listens to himself as you or I might listen to him and asks himself, ‘Is it credible?’ Even in private soliloquy, credibility is the standard he applies; that is, he looks at truth with the eyes of a literary critic and measures a statement by its persuasiveness. If he himself can be persuaded he accepts the moot statement as established. This is real alienation. In the critical part of his mind, he’s extraordinarily cold with himself, cold and dedicated. Hence his incessant anxiety, like the anxiety of a military commander or an author or a stage-director; he’s busy with problems of reception, stage effects, cues, orchestration; his inner life is a busy rehearsal and testing for activity on the larger stage of tomorrow, where the audience, as usual, will miss the finer points. Immersed in all these difficulties, hung up on the little snags of production, he’s impatient, understandably, with outside interrogation. ‘Is it true?’ you want to know, but the question’s irrelevant and footless. Do you ask an amber spot whether it’s true? Or an aria? At bottom, he doesn’t give a damn, Domna, what you or I think, any more than a general cares about democratic opinion. We’re not his critics or even, primarily, his audience; we’re amateurs whom, unfortunately, he must use in his production, green troops whom he has to put up with since the great Commander we all act under saw fit to send him no better.”

Domna cupped her pointed chin in her hand; she stared reflectively into the blaze. “So,” she pondered finally, “when Cathy guessed or he told her, he had no hesitation in going through with the imposture? He felt justified in doing it since she
might
have found out and
might
have been dead by this time for all Maynard cared?” John laughed. “Such might-have-beens are for neophytes,” he said, stretching. “When Cathy found out, Hen as an intelligent man saw that it was simpler that she knew. The worry of protecting her was removed and he was supplied with a consultant he could trust.” He sat up cross-legged on the hearth-rug and conned the two girls’ faces. “Be honest with me, both of you,” he demanded. “What would you have done in his place? Would you actually have interrupted the proceedings to announce that Cathy knew and there was no further worry on her score? Think what it meant to him. What were his chances of being rehired if the college didn’t have Cathy on its conscience? Most people, I’m afraid, would do pretty much as Hen did. What about you, Virginia?” “I really don’t know,” said Virginia, “I like to think I would come out with the truth, but probably I would try to play possum until the matter was settled. I would stay away from my supporters and hope that nobody would ask me.” Domna leaned forward. “Is it conceited of me? I think I would tell the truth.” The taut declaration made a silence. Virginia’s look consulted her husband. She spoke. “You don’t really know, Domna,” she argued. “You’ve never been in the position he is. In your situation, it wouldn’t cost much to tell the truth.” A look of pride glittered in Domna’s face; her nostrils flared. “It costs nothing to tell the truth when one has the habit. One becomes entangled in self-pity and lies.” She drew out the last word with a strong diphthong and sibilant hissing of the
s.
“He threw himself on our pity. This was not an honest act. He lied to Maynard about Cathy and lied to us about the lie. Or is he lying to us now and she is healthy and it is all a fantasy that we believed?” Heated and gleaming in the firelight, her pure features were almost ugly. “And now we are all in it; we are all lying for him. I lied this morning to the President: my students do not praise Henry—it is I who praise him to the students, who sit with their faces
so.
” She made an idiot face with sunken jaw and goggling eyes. “I lied tonight at his house, two, three times. I lie to myself about him.” She jumped up and lit a cigarette and stood by the mantelpiece, puffing. “And now what am I to do? I am to lie some more, I presume. You know that I cannot carry this nasty story to the President. I cannot. I tell myself that it’s my duty but I cannot. If Henry had not been my friend, still I could not do it. Do you blame me? And I cannot tell Henry, either, that I know and am not deceived by him. I think this is a weakness. I’m ashamed for him; I cannot face him; I am afraid of him and that terrible white freckled face.” “Undoubtedly, he knows that you know, Domna,” put in John, by way of comfort. Domna flared up. “So what will he do, murder me? Let him do it,” she cried recklessly, striking the mantelpiece a blow. John smiled at these heroics and then grew thoughtful. “He’s more likely to accuse you of something,” he said gravely, after due reflection.

He appeared to consult again with himself. “Look here, Domna,” he finally suggested, “there’s a good deal to be said for Hen on the plus side. You felt it once yourself or you wouldn’t be suffering disillusion. Your friendship wasn’t a deception; Hen is extremely likable in the early stages of an acquaintance. He has a taste for abstract conversation that makes him peculiarly accessible, like some of the old philosophers. He’s interested in ontological questions, which are the great binders of diverse humanity. On some of the better students, he has an extraordinarily tonic effect. To my mind, he’s worth keeping here aside from the question of Cathy and the four children and the bills and all the rest. He has an agile mind and excellent training. What I said at our first meeting is a true statement of what I believe. I think it valuable for the Literature department to have a theist teaching in it. Hen’s brand of theism and mine differ; in his personal life, he may belong to the devil’s party, but the devil is a theist too. What’s needed at Jocelyn or any college is a mind concerned with universals and first principles; the students take to them like catnip if they’re given half a chance. Your department’s monstrously one-sided—you’re concerned with formal questions exclusively: Tolstoy’s method, the method of Virginia Woolf, the elucidation of Mann’s symbols, the patterns of Katherine Anne Porter. All appropriate enough for criticism, but it isn’t what the student reads for. A student reads an author for his ideas, for his personal metaphysic, what he calls, till you people teach him not to say it, his ‘philosophy of life.’ He wants to detach from an author a portable philosophy, like the young Joyce in
A Portrait of the Artist
—a laudable aim which you discourage by your insistence on the inseparability of form and content.”