AT ONE O’CLOCK in Mr. Poncy’s office, Domna was tensely retelling the story to a group which now consisted of Mr. Poncy himself, Mrs. Fortune, young Mr. Bentkoop of Comparative Religion, Mr. Kantorowitz of Art, Mr. Van Tour, who had put his round head in, crying, “Here you all are!” and Mrs. Legendre of the Theatre. Sympathy and shock were instant; a sense of vicarious outrage—the vocational endowment of all educators—fused them like a Greek chorus behind their colleague as protagonist; strophic interjections of pity and disgust broke into the narrative before it was halfway finished. Even Mr. Poncy, who had thought to hold aloof from the affair, found himself with a capital stake in it by sheer virtue of seniority; as the first to have heard the story, he automatically assumed charge of it and kept interrupting Domna to underscore a point or add a detail which had made a strong impression on his own imagination, and very often, in doing so, he slightly altered the original, which in turn had been colored by Domna with the dye of her own temperament. Thus, in the telling and the response, the story became a living thing—the joint possession of the group—and was to some extent already alienated from its hero, of whom everyone agreed that, whatever was to be done (and on this there was great disagreement), he must be kept in the background, lest he do damage to his own case as they saw fit to administer it. In short, as usually happens in such affairs, the Mulcahy cause was immediately expropriated from its owner and taken over by a group which viewed it somewhat in the light of a property or a trust to be handled by an inner circle in accordance with its own best judgment; the element of secrecy enhanced this proprietary illusion; by common consent, lines were drawn between those who could be trusted and those who could not, between those in the office and those outside. And even within the office, certain discriminations began to be felt; Aristide in a low voice was emphasizing to Alma Fortune a departmental aspect of the case too little, he felt, taken into consideration by Domna, while Kantorowitz and Bentkoop, in the window-seat, exchanged a series of cryptic signs and voiceless words, indicating that Van Tour ought never to have been admitted to the conclave, and Ivy Legendre, whose empty stomach had set up its own growl, lazily urged Domna to call the meeting to order.
Everyone, that is, felt called upon to stipulate, like a lawyer, his own degree of interest in the case, and to distinguish his own area of human solidarity from that of his neighbor, carefully set up boundaries and limits, eminent domain. To Aristide, it was the manner of the dismissal, the irregularity of it, that was unsettling, while Alma felt for Catherine and the children, Kantorowitz for the Humanities, Bentkoop for theism, Ivy for all rebels and bohemians, irrespectively; only poor Van Tour appreciated the politics of the case, having once in his early struggles as a regionalist short-story writer and would-be contributor to Anvil joined the League of American Writers and the League for Peace and Democracy, in the same spirit, as he now protested, that a small-town doctor, hanging out his shingle, joined the Rotary or Kiwanis or roared every Tuesday with the Lions. For everyone but the plaintive Van Tour, in fact, Mulcahy’s confessed Communist past and the President’s right to fire him for it became immediately subordinated to some collateral issue; thus Bentkoop, on the strength of a number of conversations about grace and theological despair which he had enjoyed with Mulcahy was impelled to state, categorically, speaking as a neo-Protestant, that his support for Mulcahy rested, very simply, on his belief that it was important to have at least one theist in the Literature department.
On any other occasion, this avowal would have provoked a clamor, since it laid bare a view of education-as-indoctrination that was as shocking to the liberals and pluralists present as would have been the sight of an imported serpent rearing up on Aristide’s Coptic rug. But this morning such a response was held in abeyance, as it were, for the duration of Henry’s emergency; the notion, in fact, of a working alliance with God produced an agreeable sensation of jesuitry in everyone, as though it were a pact with the dark Plutonic powers. They felt heartened and stimulated by the very novelty of it and by a sense of mysterious big battalions moving up to support them from the rear. What impressed them about Henry’s case, as presented by Domna, was precisely the mixture of the commonplace and the bizarre. On the one hand, there was the family man and fellow-teacher; on the other, the arcanum of Communism, which excited their curiosity and at the same time relieved it. They saw themselves plunged into the adventurous and already looked on their colleagues, who were not to be made privy to this secret, as so many insensitive pharisees, incapable of understanding the motives that could have influenced a high-strung, conscientious individual to immolate himself in the mass. And the fact was, of course, that they did not understand it either, but forebore from asking embarrassing questions out of shame and a kind of shyness in the presence of the equivocal. Like so many gingerly Thomases, they contented themselves with fingering the wounds held out to them and attesting their intellectual superiority by their readiness to believe the incredible. When Van Tour cried out, for the third time, in his wailing, womanish voice. “What I don’t see, Domna, is why doesn’t he come right out and confess it,” everyone sighed aloud, and Aristide got up and, leading him into a corner, took him over by rote the whole history of the case, of Senator McCarthy, the Hiss trial, the crisis of liberalism in American universities, though in reality Van Tour’s question had more than once visited his own mind.
Meanwhile, in the faculty dining-room, Howard Furness, head of the Literature department, who had had an appointment with Alma Fortune at twelve forty-five sharp to discuss a certain student who was coming up for Sophomore Orals, was glancing at his Cartier wrist-watch, a gift from one of last year’s parents, and straightening his knitted tie from sheer uneasiness. His sharp, dapper mind was extremely sensitive to any disarray in the outer garment of reality, and the empty places at table wounded him, like missing buttons on a coat. He had been quick, in fact, to see that those who were absent belonged to his chosen circle; something was up, he perceived, from which he was being excluded—a judgment was being passed on him. He was not so stupid, however, as to think, after the first bad moment, that they had met to discuss him directly; rather, he scented a crisis, having learned to detect a crisis by the fact that people avoided him during its early stages. Deeply mistrustful himself, he had learned to know that he was mistrusted and could not think why; the longing for intimacy he felt seemed to him a plain guaranty of the openness and simplicity of his character; it did not occur to him that he was gregarious out of suspicion.
When the vegetable soup had been removed and the napkins still lay rolled in their napkin rings before the empty places, he slipped out into the hall to telephone, pausing to glance at himself in the men’s room mirror, where he saw only bright delft-blue eyes, flat, rather wooden features with a certain set of resolve to the jaw, and a Bermuda Christmas tan that gave a “finish” to the whole, like a wax stain on floorboards. This simulacrum reassured him; he caulked his face for the inquiry. “Give me the Co-op,” he murmured, legato, to Switchboard, with a sliding determination in his voice. The store phone was finally answered by Mrs. Tryk, the Co-op or soda-shop manageress, who shouted into it as usual in a surly, contumelious tone. “This is Mr. Furness,” he said lightly. “I had an appointment with Mrs. Fortune. I wondered if she could have mistaken it and be waiting for me in the store.” “Not here now,” called Mrs. Tryk. Howard sent his smile over the wire. “Would you mind looking around for me and seeing if any of the other people from my department are there? Or Mr. Bentkoop or Mrs. Legendre? They might be able to tell me where she is.” “Nobody here but Fraenkel of History and Mulcahy. Do you want to talk to them?” Having obtained this much information, Furness lifted an eyebrow—so Mulcahy, who regularly went home to lunch, was eating in the Co-op! But where, in that case, were the others? He felt this violation of the established pattern to be an offense first against himself and second against common decency. “Don’t trouble to get Dr. Mulcahy to the phone,” he said hastily. “Just ask him if he has seen Mrs. Fortune.” He added this latter merely for form’s sake; he felt a sudden unwillingness to know where any of them were.
“Hello, Howard.” Mulcahy’s rather ectoplasmic voice effused itself into Furness’ ear. Both men disliked each other intensely, under cover of departmental solidarity and a joint sponsorship of the same canon of authors. The Proust-Joyce-Mann course, in which they alternated from year to year, had been a buffer between them, Furness making it a point to stress Proust by innuendo over Joyce, for whom he felt no great sympathy, and Mulcahy vice versa. “Alma’s not here. Can I help you?” Furness, who combined crudeness with the sensitivity of the princess of the pea—in short, a raw man, well polished, a bright, country-green apple—distinctly heard an ooze of satisfaction percolate through the voice of his subordinate. Wherever she is, he knows, he said to himself with bitterness. The vindictive thought that this egregious fellow might at long last have been fired had more than once darted through his mind, yet the voice on the other end of the wire sounded more as if it had received a promotion. “No thanks, Hen,” he said shortly and moved to put up the receiver; the line, however, remained open—Henry was waiting, like an encouragement. “Are you through?” inquired the operator. “You haven’t seen Domna, have you, or Ivy?” Furness burst out, thickly, despite himself. His tone suddenly grew querulous, as when he had been drinking, and a wild feeling of loneliness drove him to abase himself. “Where is everybody, anyway? What’s up?” “Perhaps they’ve gone to Gus’s for a drink,” suggested Henry, too helpful. “Probably,” assented Furness, hanging up.
Mulcahy made his way back to his table, where the small scoop of chocolate ice-cream he had ordered was melting into the plastic and waxed paper chalice. He was, in fact, waiting for Domna, who had promised to fetch him for lunch some fifteen minutes ago and who had neither come nor telephoned. Yet he felt no particular apprehension; the fat was in the fire, and he had only to wait on the outcome; his fate and he had separated. Furness’ telephone call assured him, at any rate, that all was going according to schedule: six empty chairs in the faculty dining-room must be testifying, like a vacant jury-box, to a discussion of his peers still in progress. Here, in the near-empty shop, with Mrs. Tryk and her assistant engorging their noonday sandwiches at the table in the corner and Bill Fraenkel correcting some papers for an afternoon class, he had a sense of having crossed a Rubicon and of belonging no longer to himself but to history, a strange and yet restful experience, as though one part of him sat in a stage-box, watching with folded arms for the rise of the curtain, oblivious to the groundlings and their noise.
What interested him retrospectively, and just precisely, he thought, as an onlooker, was the question of how and when the risky inspiration had come to him. That Maynard considered him a Communist must have been a strong factor from the outset, yet as he had paused in the hall outside Domna’s door, listening thoughtfully to her and her student, he had not yet (he was certain) felt the metonymic urge that would prompt him, once in her office, to substitute the effect for the cause, the sign for the thing signified, the container for the thing contained. It was the artist in him, he presumed, that had taken control and fashioned from newspaper stories and the usual disjunct fragments of personal experience a persuasive whole which had a figurative truth more impressive than the data of reality, and hence, he thought, with satisfaction, truer in the final analysis, more universal in Aristotle’s sense. Evidently so, to judge by first results; there could be no doubt that Domna, just now, had experienced an instant recognition: of himself as the embodiment of a universal, the eidos, as it were, of the Communist, Lazarus to their Dives, the underground man appointed to rise from the mold and confront society in his cerements. That he had never, as it happened, chanced to join the Communist Party organizationally did not diminish the truth of this revelation.
Sitting here in the soda-shop, licking his little wooden spoon, he tried deliberately to re-imagine himself as a Communist, as the man he had just described to Domna, and perceived that, just as he had thought, very little adaptation was required. To them, he opined, glancing at the manageress and her assistant, who were conversing sotto voce over their pot of tea, he was a Communist already or worse, just as to Maynard Hoar he was a Communist or worse, i.e., an honest doubter who went to what meetings he chose, irrespective of the Attorney General’s list and the hue and cry in the colleges. And if they in their own minds and deeds equated him with a Communist, what more had he done just now than appropriate the label they dared not attach to him in their public pronouncements? By a faultless instinct, it would seem, he had been led to obey the eternal law of the artist, Objectify, or as James had put it and he himself was always urging his students, Dramatize, dramatize! Contemplating what he had done he felt a justified workman’s pride, which became tinctured, as he waited, with a drop or two of bitterness: he could imagine the hostile critics, the derogators, and detractors, finding flaws, carping, correcting, and above all minimizing, cutting him down to scale. Easy enough, he assured them, by hindsight to demonstrate the logic of the process, which was that of a simple reversal or transfer; anybody, having been shown, could do it a second time; yet the fact remained that he was the first, the very first, so far as he knew, in all history to expose the existence of a frame-up by framing himself first.
Naturally, he acknowledged, shrugging, there were holes in the story. Maynard, he dared say, would pretend to have had no previous knowledge of this “alleged” membership; trust dear Maynard to feign bewilderment, innocence, injury. But in the adage of the martyred President, which he heartily recommended to Maynard, you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. The gullible public, he promised Maynard, would find that denial a mite hard to swallow when it put it together with the F.B.I.’s visit, the swift, peremptory dismissal, the victim’s open confession. . . .
A little, secure smile glinted from his eyes and faded as, inadvertently, he caught sight of the clock. Fear suddenly reduced him; they had had time, and more than time, to come to a decision. Supposing they were asking for some piece of tangible evidence? He had not thought of this. Was it likely, he swiftly countered, that he would have kept his Party card in his desk at home for a student-sitter to discover? Or in a bank vault rented for the purpose? Nonsense, he remarked, crisply, turning his impatience on himself. What was proof in these days that anybody dreamed of looking for it? Who asked Miss Bentley for proof in a far more weighty context? In these days, it would be a work of supererogation to show that one had been a Communist; the rub was to show one had not been.
The idea that a man in his right mind would run the risk of proclaiming himself a Communist when the facts were the other way would simply occur to no one. That he could safely vouch for; the ordinary liberal imagination, he affirmed with a side glance at young Fraenkel, busy as a bee with his papers, could not encompass such a possibility. And it was of course a fantastic hazard—to that extent one should not blame Fraenkel and the others—one that few men alive would take and that he himself would not have risked this morning at many colleges outside of Jocelyn. In the present state of public opinion, all his advisers would tell him, he was inviting an academic lynching bee by such a gratuitous admission; if news of it percolated out West, thanks to some indiscretion of Domna’s, he would be open to prosecution for perjury. But this prospect, he observed with interest, did not daunt him; the choice he had just made in accepting himself as a Communist was having, he discovered, an extraordinary effect on his prejudices, as of liberation, such as a man might have in accepting himself as a homosexual. In fact, he could trace in himself a certain detached interest in the experience of being imprisoned, so that he felt rather defrauded by a vague recollection of having heard somewhere that perjury was not an extraditable offense.
On the other hand, he assured himself, the risk was not really so great as lesser minds would assume. He was gambling, as he had already pointed out to himself, on Maynard’s reputation as a liberal, which meant something to Maynard that the worldly would not understand, but, over and above this, on the element of fantasy in Jocelyn, which nobody would understand who had not witnessed the freakish character of its tides of opinion, the anomalies of its personnel, the madness of its methodology which had produced here a world like a child’s idea of China, with everything upside down. And as if to illustrate the point, the door now slowly opened to admit a blast of wind and Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones in galoshes and turban. “Good morning,” intoned Mr. Jones, inclining his long body from the hips, like an idol being bowed in a parade. “Are these ladies serving us, dear colleague?” he inquired in a deep, “cultured” voice, rhythmically unwrapping the turban, which proved to be an Argyle scarf. He made his way stiffly to the counter; the manageress paid him no heed. “May I implore a western sandwich?” he asked in a sonorous tone, addressing the room at large; his elongated, hanging-Christ profile was turned toward Mulcahy; one drooping brown eye slowly winked. “The kitchen’s closed,” shot out the manageress, addressing no one, in her turn, but stating this as a generalization. Henry bit his lips. “By whose authority?” he quietly challenged. Fraenkel’s Ever-sharp suddenly paused in its scribbling; there was a pregnant silence, till the manageress slammed down the teapot and pounded over to the counter. “I can give you ham-on-rye, Swiss-on-rye,” she cannonaded. “Swiss, if you please. A thousand thanks,” said Mr. Jones, bowing to Henry. “I was perishing for a bite to eat. May I join you?”
He took the plate which the manageress pushed toward him and balanced it on a cup of coffee. “This is a pleasure,” he announced, in that curious, careful voice that appeared to have an echo in it, like a double entendre. “May I tell you how much I enjoyed your performance at last Tuesday’s faculty meeting?” The notion that this Byzantine lay-figure was capable of factional feeling alerted Henry’s interest and made him conscious of a moral law behind the smallest actions, as though a stone had spoken up or a fish in a German fairy-tale. “What points especially struck you?” he queried, in a disengaged and considerate tone, which nevertheless had a little feeler behind it. “The scrambled eggs, my dear fellow. Delicious!” Jones uttered a two-note musical laugh. “I am very fond of a pun, though my friends tell me it is the lowest form of wit. Do you agree with that?” Henry was aware of a great disappointment. “Our two greatest writers, Shakespeare and Joyce, were accomplished punsters,” he said shortly. Mr. Jones took a bite of his sandwich. “Domestic, of course,” he sighed. “My wife tells me that our President would be more sympathetic with your protest if he were obliged to eat, like ourselves, from the commissary. My wife is a Corsican, you know; from Ajaccio.” He offered these credentials in a definitive tone, quite bewildering to Mulcahy, who did not understand what they were supposed to signify—that his wife was an expert on cookery or a woman of implacable passions? Nevertheless, Henry’s interest cautiously revived; strange bedfellows, he reflected; and yet an unexpected ally, discovered thus casually, deserved, he thought, generosity, like the prodigal son returning. “We are both under medical orders,” pursued Mr. Jones. “We neither smoke nor drink nor permit ourselves any gassy foods—hot breads, of course, foods fried in deep fat, fatty meats, commercial cakes made with baking powder. . . . Quite a hardship, we’ve found it, dining in commons. In our apartment, of course, there is a little hot plate, but my wife does not think it economical to purchase for two in your stores here. But if you will do us the honor . . . ?” Henry’s pale eyes shifted; he felt his integrity compromised; yet he did not wish to offend. “My wife is not well,” he explained in a lowered voice. The idea of binding Mr. Jones to him privately, without yielding the social quid pro quo that Mr. Jones was angling for, gained a foothold in his mind, though experience bade him dislodge it: nothing in life was free, as he had learned to his bitter cost; the Joneses of this world, foiled of their pound of flesh, could become the most dangerous enemies. “It’s a heart and kidney condition brought about by the birth of our boy,” he quickly amplified, lest Jones begin to execute a withdrawal. “Nothing she won’t recover from, given complete rest. These extra-curricular activities required by the college have put too much of a strain on her; there’s low blood pressure too and a retroverted uterus. Our doctor privately tells me that those Saturday night dances might have killed her.” He was tempted now to go on, go the whole hog, but the door opened again, and it was Domna. He got up in haste from his chair and began to tie his muffler. “It’s been good to have this talk with you,” he murmured. “Let’s see each other again.” “By all means,” declared Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, still seated. “I’ve been wanting such a time to ask you—do you know that delicious little thing of Maurice Baring’s . . . ?” Domna was faintly smiling and dancing a little on her toes. “Ah, good morning, Miss Rejnev!” Mr. Jones began slowly to rise, like a fountain in the gardens of Allah. Henry turned up his overcoat collar and hurriedly took Domna’s arm; he had gone pale and his lips were bluish, as though he were already out of doors. “Another time,” he muttered. “An appointment. . . .” His mittened hand agitated the door. “Your check, Mr. Mulcahy,” called the manageress, an accusing finger pointing to the table where the evidence, the ice-cream calyx, still remained. Trembling, he began to search his pockets; Domna paid, from her purse.
“It is all right,” she called to him, as they ran through the wind, arms interlocked, to her car, a blustering old Buick touring model, unpainted, without a muffler, and buttoned up now, with torn celluloid and canvas curtains in the old-fashioned style. She turned on the ignition, threw a robe over him, and began to work the choke. “It’s all right,” she reiterated, maternally, over the throbbing of the juggernaut. “They’ve voted to support you. You wish to go to Gus’s or to town?” “Town,” said Henry faintly. The car started off down the hill, with bravura; behind the curtains, in the deafening noise, he had a sense of being kidnapped; even the snowy landscape looked unfamiliar. This captive feeling was intensified by the fact that he could hear what she said only in snatches; she did not turn her head; the car roared; the wind whistled; he shivered, forlorn, in the rug. The names, Alma, John, Ivy, and so on, came to him from a distance, repeated in a tone of authority, as if, he glumly felt, they belonged to her; she knew them now better than he. Nevertheless, he endeavored to feel grateful for what she had apparently done for him; he gave her full credit in advance. A certain feeling of jealousy, brought about by the repetition of those names, made him prefer, for the moment, to depreciate the others and think of it all as her doing, her spontaneous mediation, as though she were a divine goddess; his eyes moistened obediently, as he choked out his formula of thanks; humility made gratitude more fulsome, as he had discovered in the past.
Yet she, on her side, seemed girlishly determined that he should appreciate them all. Alma, he heard, was “wonderful,” Milton Kantorowitz was “wonderful”; even Aristide was “wonderful, so unexpectedly staunch,” as though, Mulcahy thought, grimly, the simple performance of one’s duty deserved a medal for heroism. Van Tour was “absolutely amazing.” “Who would have thought,” she cried gaily, “that the young man had so much blood in him?” It was clear, reflected Henry, watching her assured profile, that a meeting of the mutual admiration society had just concluded its business. And he could not help being nettled by the knowledge that they were all exploiting him, making him a pretext for the discovery of each other’s virtues: in this business, he remarked to himself sourly, he seemed to be the forgotten man. Every one of them had his own ax to grind here, a thing Domna made abundantly clear, but joyously, as though self-interest were a newly discovered cardinal virtue. “It means that each one has a real stake in it,” she cried, like some Hobbesian Miranda. “Only a really interested act is worth anything.” “Your view has the merit of paradox, at any rate,” commented Henry, non-committal. And he was the more resentful of Domna’s shining eyes, wind-whipped bright cheeks, with their flags of pride and accomplishment, when he discovered, toward the end of the ride, that the glorious little group had decided nothing whatsoever, so far as he could see.
They had decided to use “the existing machinery”—the very phrase set his teeth on edge. “It’s Aristide’s counsel we’re following,” she elected to inform him, while backing into the parking-space before the red-brick restaurant. “Just look behind and see if I am too close,” she interposed, as he started to protest, a typically feminine maneuver, he thought bitterly, seeing that it was as he had thought, his instinct had not misled him: he had been taken for a ride. He obeyed, however, with a shrug—“All right here.” “Aristide thinks it best,” she calmly pursued, shifting into first and letting out the clutch, “that we leave the political thing dormant for the moment.” “Look out!” shouted Henry involuntarily, as she hit the bumper of the car ahead. “Oh, how stupid of me! He thinks it best that we handle it departmentally and simply, as I say, get the department to accord you a vote of confidence which he, as head of the division, will carry to Maynard as a protest. Would you pass me my pocketbook, please?” “Domna!” His cry finally arrested this “normative” flow of words. “You must be mad! Don’t you see that that means working through Furness?” He gripped her arm to restrain her, lest she evade the issue by getting out of the car. “My dear girl, this is serious business. Furness, as you ought to know, is the classic type of informer, an academic police-spy. He’s already got the wind up; he called up the store just now, spying out the land. I told him nothing, naturally, but he’s got the bee in his bonnet. We shall have to work fast to circumvent him.” Domna’s face wore an expression of childish, crestfallen disappointment; she looked ready to cry from sheer defeated altruism, the vanity of good intentions. “We thought . . .” she jerked out, “Aristide . . . Milton . . . we all thought. . . .” Henry stretched his legs. “You thought,” he told her calmly, “of your own skins, procedural safeguards, and all the rest of it.” Domna’s lips quivered; tears stood on her thick lashes. “Not you, Domna,” he said, more kindly. “I exempt you from such intentions. At worst, you have been thoughtless. Didn’t it occur to you, after all we have said together about Furness, that you might, just possibly might, be endangering Cathy’s life if you followed the method you approve of? What a temptation to malice to let her know, by a slip of the tongue, what was happening to her husband!” She stiffened, as if in disagreement, and stole a look at her watch. “I must hurry,” she muttered. “I have a class.” “Or an anonymous denunciation, posted to the F.B.I.?” He smiled to see that she was shocked by these possibilities he was suggesting, shocked, of course, more by him than by Furness, and, truth to tell, he enjoyed shocking her: it reinstated him at the tiller of his fate.
Actually, after his first revulsion, he was inclined to let them have their way, but not without unsettling them a little, for future policy’s sake. If he yielded now, as he proposed to do in a few moments, and Furness proved obdurate to their entreaties (as he almost certainly would), then the next step in the dance, he could promise himself, would be called by Henry Mulcahy. He himself, through a natural impatience, common in quick minds, tended to prefer the short cut, but he had sufficient experience with faculty parliamentarians to know that, in every instance, it was necessary to exhaust legal means first, “employ the existing machinery,” etcetera, before they could be brought to an action that common sense would have dictated in the first place.
“You misunderstand Furness, I think,” answered Domna in a low, serious voice. “He likes you but fears you don’t like him. He has a bad character and longs to be loved. As to whether he would tell Cathy”—she shrugged, rather dispiritedly—“what is the use of arguing? I think not, but how shall I prove it?” She shrugged again. “Naturally, if you don’t wish it, we won’t do it that way.” She spoke in a flat, stubborn voice, but her breast rose in a sigh, in memory of the work lost. “But I must tell you frankly,” she added, as if compelled by conscience, “that if you refuse to do it our way, you will probably be out on a limb. Many people who will support you humanly will not involve themselves gratuitously in a political mess.” “And if I do it your way?” he insinuated. Domna suddenly looked blank; she had not, plainly, thought ahead beyond her conviction of easy victory. “What do you people offer me in exchange for the risk I shall be running?” His tone was perfectly pleasant, but the question seemed to disturb her. “Offer you?” she repeated, vaguely knitting her brows. “What do you mean, Henry? That seems a most odd conception.” “What will you do,” he said, waspishly, “when Furness turns you down in the department? Does your solidarity regretfully stop there?”
Domna once again looked hurt. “Alma and I spoke of resigning,” she finally let out, in a whisper. “Wonderful,” he absently assented, but his mind was elsewhere immediately. That was the sad thing about a confederacy: nothing was ever enough. “Just you and Alma?” he queried in a wistful tone, for already he was thinking in terms of a whole department. Domna flushed, which recalled him to the present and to the gratitude he was supposed to be showing. “Overlook my behavior,” he begged her. “I’m half crazy. I hardly know what I’m saying. Anything you want to do, of course, will be right because you decide to do it. Forgive me for questioning you at all. The defendant or victim in such cases as mine ought to be held incommunicado till his well-wishers have concluded their efforts. To be a victim or a defendant is simply inhuman. It brings out all one’s paranoia. Do whatever you think best and ignore me.” He spoke swiftly, bobbing his head in contrition, and then scrambled out of the car and hurried around to the other side to help her alight. Howard Furness, who had stopped for gas down the street, watched, behind the pump, while Mulcahy guided her solicitously into the restaurant.