“BUT IT’S not fair to me, Alma,” argued Mulcahy the follow ing morning. He had hurried over to her office as soon as he got the news. He was in a mood to be angry with Domna, who ought to have told him at once, he contended, even though they had agreed not to communicate by telephone for fear of Cathy and her questions—“What did Domna want, dear?” The girl ought to have had the sense to realize that this was urgent and not waited to let him find out, via the campus mail, that Alma had taken a decision that imperiled his whole cause. Merely another illustration, he exclaimed savagely, as he flew across the campus, overcoat flapping, of the folly of entrusting one’s destiny to the lax attentions of outsiders—what did it matter to Domna that a trump card had just been thrown away while she slept in her virgin bedstead the sleep of the just and the idiot? Alma’s letter of resignation was by this time—he glanced despairingly at the chapel clock—waiting on Maynard’s blotter for his eminence to read. Had he himself been informed on time, it might have been possible to go through the mail-sack and remove it. Even now, he calculated, as he endeavored to drill reason into Alma’s obstinate head, there was still a chance that Maynard might be late getting to his office or away on one of his eternal fund-raising tours or addressing a forum of educators on the Spirit of Free Inquiry, ha, ha. The prudence of an official, he thought limply, ought never to be underestimated; it would not be the first occasion on which this one had taken cover to let some tempest of criticism blow over, give tempers time to cool, the counsels of moderation to prevail, etc., etc. A great one was Mr. Hoar for “letting things shake down a bit till we can view them in their true perspective.”
Even assuming that the damage was done, that this fool Draconic letter could not be retrieved, Alma herself, in all conscience, one would think, could do something to undo its effects. It was not unreasonable, certainly, to ask of her that she go to Maynard of her own accord and explain how things really stood: that she had written hastily, in the first shock of hearing of her friend’s dismissal, but that she would be pleased to withdraw her resignation just as soon as Maynard, on his side, withdrew his own ill-considered letter of yesterday. Yet Alma, perversely, refused to see that this “final” resignation of hers was intrinsically selfish and seemed determined to persist in resigning no matter what amends Maynard made, a thing which was as unfair to Maynard as it was to himself and to the students, who had been given every reason to think that the old girl was a fixture at Jocelyn.
“Can’t you see, Alma,” he supplicated, “that such a stand is really un-Christian?” The necessity of taking this tone filled him with impatience; he had an innate distaste for flattery, yet there seemed no other way of making an unpleasant truth palatable to a woman accustomed to dictate in her own little circumscribed sphere of fawning pupils and colleagues who feared her sharp tongue, even, to tell the truth, as he himself did a little at this moment, so that he kept going all around Robin Hood’s barn, he thought wearily, instead of coming to the point and talking to her like a Dutch uncle, which, God knows, she deserved. “You’re bent,” he gently chided, “on punishing the whole college for one man’s mistake, and for all we know, Alma—let’s be charitable—it may have been simply a mistake, an error of judgment such as all of us are liable to. Even I,” he went on earnestly, “who’ve been singled out for Maynard’s persecution, even I think it wrong to condemn Maynard unheard. It’s very Old Testament of you, like those jealous, feminine wraths of Jehovah that wanted to wipe out a whole city in return for a sin. You put me in the absurd position of the interceding prophet, pleading for our latter-day Sodom against your terrible ire. Relent toward us, stay your hand!” But this mock-heroic approach was a mistake; she merely shook her black locks, smiling, as though he had paid her a compliment, her berry-black eyes coruscating in their eternal, indulgent twinkle. “I did what I had to do,” she affirmed with a sudden faraway look, as though fixing an appointment with her destiny.
“But what about me?” exclaimed Henry, nettled at her opacity. She kept missing the point on purpose, he thought furiously—did she want him to spell it out for her in letters a foot high? Very well, he inwardly told her, setting his teeth. You force me to speak plainly; on your own head be it. “What you don’t seem to realize, Alma,” he expostulated, “is that this gesture of yours is a disservice to the very party you intend to benefit. Your resignation, offered provisionally, can be a deterrent to Maynard. His high opinion of you, the department’s dependence on you, can be just the lever we need to force him to do what we want. But if you resign out and out like this, you present him with one reason less for doing the right thing. He has no incentive to rehire me if you tell him in so many words that you won’t come back in any case. When you’ve got a pistol to a man’s head, you don’t pull the trigger until you get what you can out of him.” The strain of speaking patiently such elementary truths was tiring him; his vocal cords ached as after a long tutorial with one of those exasperating students who kept their own counsel and allowed you to explain and explain what they had already learned from the textbook. From Alma’s frowning brow, he could get no idea of whether he had already said enough or too much or too little to carry his message home. Her chin was sunk in her hand, and he had a suspicion that what he said depressed her in some way: did she think him venal, he wondered, for bringing the bald facts of barter to her attention? He suddenly felt the need of lifting the discussion to a higher plane. “I understand very well,” he continued, “your reaction of moral revulsion, but you’re behaving as though there were only yourself to consider. Once you go, Maynard’s conscience goes; you must face that, Alma. To have a firm character like yours is a responsibility, which you mustn’t and can’t run away from. So long as you can play the part of Maynard’s spiritual gadfly, you have the obligation to do so. I won’t speak of myself and Cathy—I know that you wouldn’t willingly harm us and have done what you did in our interest as it appeared to you—but beyond my own selfish concern, I can see something else: a weak man like Maynard in a position of power has the right to expect others stronger than himself to keep a watch on him and call him to task when he goes wrong. It’s a thankless job but you must keep it and not run away, like Jonah, into the belly of the whale.”
He moistened his lips and sat back, confident that he had at last made an impression. Alma’s voice, when she spoke, was crestfallen; he supposed that the allusion to Cathy had cut her. “My strategy,” she said, “was different. I know Maynard Hoar very well, Hen, and my feminine instinct tells me that he responds only to the irrevocable, to a fait accompli. It’s a defect of imagination; you and I have too much; Maynard has too little. Tomorrow is never present to him until it becomes yesterday. My father was such a man. I left home for good when I was fifteen and went to work as a stack-girl in a library—my sisters reaped the benefits of his repentance. I’ve never seen him since.” The cords in her neck tightened with her emphasis; Henry regarded her thoughtfully; it was the first autobiographical word he had ever heard from her and her intensity carried a certain conviction.
He remained, as yet, unpersuaded, but his mind had opened to new possibilities. Unconsciously, he took a new tone with her, as though he wished her to defeat him in argument. “Look, Alma,” he said, decisively. “You really have no right to do this. I can’t permit you to break your career on Cathy’s and my behalf. You think you’ll have no trouble getting another appointment, but let me tell you things aren’t what they were when you first came to Jocelyn. You’ll find conformity entrenched in every office, studying your dossier, asking questions, wondering ‘what was the background of your decision to leave Jocelyn.’ ” His voice suddenly tautened as he cited the well-remembered formula. “Guilt by association. The amalgam. The smear. I know it too well, Alma. You’ll be tarred by the same brush, I can promise you!” Tears sprang to his eyes as he relived his own experience, forgetting blindly, for the nonce, the purpose of what he was saying. “Naturally,” he concluded, dully, “I’m grateful to you for your warmheartedness, but there are things one cannot accept.”
Despite himself, while he was speaking, a growing reverence for this woman began to mingle with his reprehension. Thought of detachedly, as a story, a tale to be told in the common rooms, her sacrifice had magnitude; it stirred him, like a legend heard in the distant future, on his own tongue. As he half-listened to her answer once again with the arguments she had just invoked, one part of his mind commenced to wonder how he could accept this sacrifice, having repudiated it so firmly, while another part still faintly protested at being sidetracked from its original object—how was it possible for her to have read Maynard and human nature better, as she kept averring, than he? “I learned long ago,” she stoutly reiterated, “that one can’t bargain in these affairs. If one wants to be effective, one hands in one’s resignation and clears out. There’s no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late.”
His pale eyes watched her curiously: she had been laying out her class notes, solitaire-wise, in a series of stacks, and now, with an abrupt gesture, she scooped them all up together, like a deck of cards when the hand is finished. The neatness of the desk, the small, tense, wiry hands, the old-fashioned pen-holder and pen-wiper, the silver paper-cutter (a legacy, surely, of Mr. Fortune, who was said to have left her well fixed), the worn briefcase stood in the corner all suddenly struck him as manifestations of a disciplined life-force; he became aware of reserves of certainty in her before which his own convictions prepared to abdicate. Not since graduate school, he dreamily realized, had he experienced this uncanny sensation, like an animal’s, of the otherness of a separate being, with its own mysterious sources of propulsion; and that this epiphany should have been accorded him at this crisis in his affairs seemed to him instantly a Sign, which he obeyed with a sort of joy and altar-boy’s punctilio.
“Very well,” he acceded, with a sigh.
“In this instance,” his Diotima continued, “we must let Maynard know that he is living in the real world, that if he takes certain actions certain consequences will irreparably follow. If I make my resignation contingent on concessions from him, he will never be sure that I would have gone through with it, that he couldn’t have won me back in June or during the summer term. In fact, the whole tendency, Hen, of a conditional resignation would be to encourage Maynard to procrastinate, stave off any decision in the hope that I might exercise the proverbial woman’s privilege and change my mind. And, oh my dear, who knows? Perhaps I would,” she exclaimed on a more sprightly note. “We’re weak vessels, all of us, we thinking reeds. I hold it safer to burn my bridges.”
She snapped a rubber band around her notes and stood up, with a shake of her skirt. “I have a class,” she apologized and rapped him with her knuckles sympathetically on the arm. “Don’t worry. One resignation will be enough to give Maynard an idea of how the wind blows. He’ll be taking in sail soon. Wait and see if he doesn’t. You have other friends, you know. Even poor Howie is having some second thoughts. He’s afraid that Domna will be next, and you know his little penchant there.”
Henry made a sour face. “Domna will never resign,” he asserted, not knowing why he said this. Now that Alma was leaving him, he felt all at once abandoned, cheated, misused; he picked on Domna, partly to vent his mistrustfulness on a convenient target, and partly to detain Alma; yet the instant he had spoken he had a vicious certainty that he was right. “Domna is very young,” pensively observed Alma. “Moreover, she has a moral problem. We talked it over together last night.” Henry’s suspicions returned; he disliked the suggestion of “sharing” or “quiet time” that had come into Alma’s voice and felt like a carcass greedily picked between the two of them—what were their relations anyway? No wonder Domna had been too busy to telephone him with the news. “She isn’t altogether sure in her own mind,” said Alma thoughtfully, “whether she wants to stay at Jocelyn. If she’s going to resign in any case, she feels that it might be dishonest for her to let Maynard think, by resigning now, that she was doing it on your account. Or, conversely, if she resigns now, she feels that she might be under an obligation to stay if Maynard renews your contract.” Henry made a movement of impatience. “What infernal jesuitry!” he exclaimed. Alma shook her head at him, reproachfully. “No, my dear. You are quite wrong. Domna must know what she wants herself before she can rush into an action. There’s a side of her—she confessed it—that merely wants to emulate me. And another side, related to it, that would like to take credit for a principled action while suiting its own convenience. It was I, if you must know, Hen, who warned her against this possibility.”
“I see,” said Henry, slowly, with a polite show of being convinced; in one part of his intelligence, he was, if not convinced, then impressed by this exercise of feminine scruples; he stored the lesson away in his memory against the future. “But Alma,” he interposed, as she made again to leave, “I don’t precisely follow how this argument can apply to Domna and not to you. If Domna must withdraw her resignation when Maynard renews my contract, why not you? It would seem to me that the same principle holds.” Alma’s eyes crinkled with laughter. “That’s a man for you,” she cried. “It’s not the same at all. Domna, you see, would sacrifice herself by staying. My sacrifice is to go. It’s very important,” she continued, soberly, tapping him with a forefinger, “to play for real stakes in these cases. You are worth something to us, my dear friend, and we must show that we mean it. No flimflam or mere attitudinizing. Until Domna decides in her own mind whether she would stay on at Jocelyn if this unfortunate thing hadn’t happened, she has no way of knowing whether it would cost her anything to resign. And she must not resign until she knows.” In the peremptory underscorings of that voice he heard the echo of many a formidable tutorial; Alma had what he had characterized as a sentimental severity that scared the girls stiff and left the boys stolid: many a soft lower lip had been sharply caught back and bitten, as Mrs. Fortune, leaning forward across her desk, eyes glistening and chin propped on her knuckles, lovingly impaled a moral weakness and squeezed it, like a pimple. “I see,” he repeated.
And as he hurried off to telephone Cathy, he did indeed see, he believed, something which had not come under Alma’s notice: the older woman, surely, was devoured by pride and watchful envy of the younger and wanted to have all the honors of a disinterested action to herself. She it was of course—how crudely she had given herself away!—who had talked the stupid Domna carefully out of the limelight. The girl had been all set to resign yesterday afternoon—she had told him so herself—and had simply let herself be bamboozled out of double billing. Yet it was clever of Alma, he had to admit, to have fixed on the typically Russian preoccupation with motive to divert the girl from her own rightful claims on celebrity; nothing would have served so well. The conceit of the “noble” action, he said to himself, chuckling, l’acte gratuit, the selfless, improvident, senseless, luxurious, spendthrift action, this had touched the soft spot of the little iron maiden, so resolved to distinguish herself from the others, the mere canaille of the faculty whose ancestors had had to work for a living, by the implacable purity of her motives. He was in no mood now to carp at this jousting of the two ladies for favor, which had a certain charm as well as a higher utility; all honors to Alma for carrying off the first round of the tourney. Yet even as he fancied them caparisoned for battle, another idea genially obtruded itself, like the gloss of a Marxist critic; he smiled sardonically as he walked.
In Domna, he was ready to wager, there was a fond of shrewdness, a sharp mother-wit, as there had been in old Tolstoy, that knew which side its bread was buttered on. The silken shirt under the peasant blouse—he had heard Domna hotly deny this story related of the old sinner, and then, characteristically, defend it by paradox. After all, the Marxians were not so wrong to look for the economic base—with Alma out, Domna would be the reigning précieuse of the department, with a step up in rank, very likely, and a nice little salary hike. He would not be surprised, for that matter, if Alma herself did not have another appointment tucked up her sleeve. More power to her, he thought succinctly; so long as she kept it dark. And yet, along with his relief, if this should be so, he admitted to a certain wry disappointment which made him dismiss the suspicion as if it had come from someone else.
Having been persuaded, faute de mieux, to accept Alma’s resignation in its present and no doubt irrevocable form, he was free at last to take a satisfaction in it that had been coursing through him all along, like a subterranean rivulet which he had tried dutifully to hold within bounds but which now bubbled up in a freshet of joy and, yes, brotherhood. He longed to share with the incredulous, infidel world the glad news of what Alma had done for him, the splendid finality of the thing, a bursting of the bonds of materialism and selfishness that turned the wintry morning, as he sped along, chin burrowed in his coat-collar, into an Eastertide. And as he walked, he argued sotto voce with an imaginary opponent, a devil’s advocate who tried, of course, to strip the act of its significance, reduce it to the level of things seen every day. How many others, answered Henry, would have been equal to it; how many cases could you name in recent academic history where such solidarity has been manifested, straight off, the first crack out of the box, without anybody’s asking for it? He nodded to passing students, promising himself that in time these too would hear what Cathy’s condition unfortunately now interdicted, and yet at the same time he wondered whether everybody’s well-meant efforts at secrecy could keep the story, once it broke, from spreading like wildfire on the campus. Howard Furness would soon be talking and Miss Crewes, of course, Maynard’s secretary—how could you hope at Jocelyn to keep such a scandal under wraps?
“I told her,” he said breathlessly to John Bentkoop, whom he ran up against in the main building, in the milling, mid-morning crowd by the mail-safes, “I told her that there were things one couldn’t accept, that I was grateful to her for her warmheartedness, but that I couldn’t willingly see her expose herself to the proscriptions of our present era, which hasn’t been surpassed, I assure you, since the times of Sulla or Diocletian. After what I’ve been through myself, I couldn’t permit another human being. . . .” He broke off as a few curious students began to collect at his elbow. Young John withdrew a long hand from his mail-safe, glanced through his mail leisuredly, and gripped Henry’s shoulder. “Easy,” he advised in his cavernous and yet fraternal American voice. “That’s Alma’s affair, Hen; you must let her take care of it.” Under his gaze, which warningly identified them, the students moved off. He was a follower of Niebuhr and Barth, a farm-boy of the region who had gone to Jocelyn on a scholarship, lost his faith and regained it through the medium of anthropology. Every word he uttered had a weight of great consideration, and his deep young voice creaked, like a pair of high shoes ascending a dark stairway with precaution. He had large, grave brown eyes, with a strange blackish glitter in their depths, a long face, lantern-jawed, but rather winsome, and a crew haircut. “The time may have come in Alma’s life,” he pontificated, “when a change may have great value. We don’t make such decisions until we’re inwardly prepared for them. You may have been merely the necessary stimulant for a fruition long overdue.” A dim smile, touching his cheekbones, like a ray of light falling from a clerestory, indicated that this remark was illuminated by the comic spirit.
Mulcahy recognized, with discomfort, that he had begun on a false note. Nevertheless, he persisted. “No, John,” he said apologetically, “you’re all wrong. There’s no need to pretend that everything is for the best in the best of all Leibnitzian worlds. This is going to be an awful wrench for Alma. Her whole life and her memories are here. She’s made an extraordinary sacrifice. She doesn’t pretend otherwise, and I’m grateful to her for not pretending. She said in so many words that she wished me to know what I was worth to her, what my continuance here was worth to her and to all my friends.” Bentkoop’s jaws flexed, but he said nothing. Mulcahy saw in a disillusioning flash that none of these “friends” cared to hear of Alma’s sacrifice, lest it be construed as a demand on themselves, like those oral pledges made at charitable meetings. “Naturally,” he went on, with a short laugh, “I don’t expect everybody to commit suttee for me. Though just between ourselves, I have a suspicion that Domna and Alma are vying for the honors of the widow’s pyre. I really shouldn’t say that,” he added, seeing a shade of interest cross the young man’s face. “It’s all Alma’s show and more credit to her. Amazing woman, don’t you think?” In his refusal to be dislodged from his topic, he found himself beginning to babble. “But I must tell you, she had a wonderful formulation, quite in character for her, straight out of the feminist movement, with the sound of the doors slamming in the Doll’s House. She said ‘there’s no other way for a man or an institution to learn that one is serious than to learn it too late.’ ” He looked at Bentkoop expectantly; Bentkoop gravely nodded. “I have a tutee coming; how about you, Hen?” he interposed, with just a hint of admonishment. Mulcahy had the unpleasant feeling that all through this conversation there had been pity for himself in the atmosphere. He had already missed an appointment this morning and wondered if Bentkoop knew it. Bentkoop had the office just across the hall and often left his door open, as though to spy on his comings and goings. “Very likely,” he said shortly. “They keep changing their hours. I can’t keep track of them. Half the time I wait there and they don’t show up. Then they have the hypocrisy to go and complain to the registrar.”
“Come on, boy,” said Bentkoop equably, with again that nuance of understanding in his manner, as though, thought Mulcahy spitefully, he were guiding a drunkard past a beckoning saloon door. They walked back across the campus together.
“I imagine Maynard is on the hot seat this morning,” confidently remarked Mulcahy, as they came abreast the Administration Building; he could not resist a final allusion to Alma’s coup de foudre. “Poor fellow,” observed John, unexpectedly. Mulcahy’s eyes dilated. “What do you mean, poor fellow?” he scornfully cried. “I should think I was more to be pitied. Or Alma.” Bentkoop gripped his arm again; he wore a long dark back-belted coat of a cheap shaggy material much affected by priests and young existentialists. “Don’t harrow yourself so, Hen,” he murmured, with a moved note in his deep voice that touched and surprised Mulcahy. “Don’t deliberately try to think we’re all against you. I’m on your side, boy. Surely Domna told you. What I meant was simply that I shouldn’t like to be in Maynard’s shoes. A man who does a foolish thing is more to be pitied than his victim, provided the victim has recourses. How would you like to be opening Alma’s letter, receiving petitions, listening to deputations . . . ?” Henry’s heart gave a surge of happiness. “Deputations?” he ventured.
John kicked away a clinker on the walk. “So I understand,” he said. “But who?” marveled Henry. “When?” “Domna and myself, I believe,” answered John casually. “It’s not been decided for certain yet. There’s to be another meeting, I’m told, at lunch-time. You know, Hen, if I were you, I’d try to stay out of this thing as much as is humanly possible. Everything’s being done that can be done, as they tell the patient’s relatives. This is an operation; anesthetize yourself till it’s over any way you know how. You’ll only alienate sympathy if you don’t keep your hand out of it. You have more at stake than we have, which makes you more eager, more fearful that we’re not doing the right thing by you. You can’t help it, but the public doesn’t like it. That’s the terrible thing about victims,” he added thoughtfully. “In fact, you could define a victim as one who must be more concerned about himself than anybody else is for him. Even Christ on the cross had such a moment: ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ ”
“You’re right,” exclaimed Henry. “You’re right.” For the second time that morning his heart was swollen with gratitude; tears came to his eyes at being understood, finally, after years of what he now understood to have been a mere fancied neglect. The idea that he had been at fault toward his colleagues entered his mind and was welcomed. “You don’t know what it means to me to be set right when I need it. People seldom speak plainly to me; it must be my own fault. I repel it with my arrogance, I suppose. I’ll try to do what you say, John; keep out of it till it’s over. No more back-seat driving. And yet, truthfully, my nerves are so bad that I hardly know whether I’m up to it. What do you think I should do, John, go home and stay there for a day or so and let Domna run the show?” “How much can you keep from Cathy?” replied John, glancing at him sidelong, with a certain curiosity. “Very little, in the past,” admitted Henry. “It’s not as though I’d had side affairs and were a practiced deceiver. Sometimes I feel sure she’ll smell it on me, like liquor or another woman.” “Better not try to stay home then,” advised Bentkoop, with what sounded like a slight loss of interest. “Stick it out here as well as you can. Work, you know. The great anodyne.” He paused as they climbed the broad stone stairs and purposefully lowered his voice. “By the way, Hen, there’s some sort of rumor around that this thing has gotten to the students. They even say that there’s a petition circulating. Do you know anything about it?”
Henry held himself taut. Experience had taught him that surprise of all reactions was the most difficult to imitate, for one was always an instant too late. He therefore remained immobile, as though frozen to stone by what he had heard, while considering what to say. “I don’t believe it,” he finally said, in measured tones, biting off the words, one by one. John scratched his ear, which had a rather pendulous lobe from being pulled, thoughtfully, in many a long discussion. “So they say,” he repeated. The moment prolonged itself, awkwardly. “I heard it,” he added, as though apologizing, “from Bill Fraenkel, who had it from a student. There’s a girl, Lilia Something, a freshman, who’s supposed to be passing a petition.” Mulcahy laughed. “Why, I don’t even know her,” he cried with exuberance; for a reckless moment, he had been on the verge of an admission, which the slightest real encouragement from Bentkoop might have succeeded in wringing out of him. “It just goes to show how the smallest thing gets distorted and magnified. I never heard of the girl. Probably some student grievance petition that has nothing to do with me, and Bill Fraenkel gets wind of it and tries to make me responsible.” He stopped and gnawed his lip. “As a matter of fact, John,” he suggested, “Fraenkel was in the store yesterday when I was talking to Domna—” Bentkoop put an end to this speculation. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he cut in, on a note of weariness. “I’d hate to see the students get their teeth in this one. Bad business, Hen. Bodes no good for anybody, including you, you know. I’d like to see this thing settled quietly. Maynard’s amenable to reason if you don’t force him out on a limb. If you do, there’ll be a fight, I’m afraid, and somebody’s likely to get hurt.” He scratched his ear again. “Technically, I assume you know, Hen, Maynard’s well within his rights. Since you don’t have tenure, he’s not obliged to show cause.” He broke off and held open the storm door for Mulcahy, who preceded him into the vestibule. Despite this deference, natural and proper from a younger man to an older, Mulcahy felt suddenly uneasy, as though binoculars were trained on his back.
This religious young man, he suspected, had been giving him a series of tips, like one of God’s strong men or gangsters; there was an aura of pleasant-spoken omniscience about him that reeked of spiritual blackmail. Could he be seeking to convert him to Protestantism by establishing a ghostly commerce with his conscience? Bentkoop held open the inner door, and again Mulcahy passed through ahead of him but pulled up and waited while Bentkoop stamped nonexistent snow from his overshoes. How he dallied, observed Mulcahy; as though expecting a keyword to be passed, like a priest who sits secure in the confessional, confident from long experience of the sins that will come tumbling out! Nothing further, however, was said, beyond a short good-bye, as they discerned their tutees waiting outside their separate doors. The interview, thought Mulcahy, as he unlocked his office, had a curiously raw, unfinished, and provocative quality, as if, to state it flatly, Bentkoop knew something. He felt a sudden interest in discovering Bentkoop’s real motive for supporting him, for Domna’s explanation—that Bentkoop wished to see at least one theist in the Literature department—seemed to Mulcahy all at once terribly thin and unconvincing: if this was one’s motive, one would certainly not avow it at Jocelyn. Impatiently, he wrote off the human element: Bentkoop was too intelligent to be taken in as the others were. There was something else, he was certain, some inscrutable purpose, of which he himself was either the tool or the beneficiary.
Ushering the student in, he took stock of the boy, wondering whether this weedy sophomore could be trusted to carry a message to Sheila McKay without letting the whole campus in on it, yet scrupling as to whether to call off the petition—if indeed there was one in existence—merely on Bentkoop’s say-so. There were certain interests, he abruptly perceived, notably Mr. Maynard Hoar’s, that might be very well served by having a student movement nipped in the bud; and what could be cleverer than to persuade him, through the mediation of Mr. Bentkoop, their agent, to do the job himself. It went without saying that the Administration cabal would have a spy planted, yet who would have thought they could have acted so promptly and with such amazing foresight? And what a masterstroke, he breathed, to have their spy actually appointed to serve on the proposed deputation, with only Domna to ride herd on him, a shy, high-minded girl with no experience of academic politics. Yet still, in the back of his mind, Mulcahy seesawed, accepting a paper from the student and running his eyes absently over it, while his pencil jotted corrections of spelling and punctuation: was he not being too astute, he rebuked himself, and ascribing to them a cleverness which was an attribute of his own intelligence and quite out of keeping with their own clumsy maneuvers?
It was always possible that Bentkoop had spoken to him in all good faith and sincerity, to warn him of what might be a costly mistake in timing, in which case he would do well to heed the admonition and curb his impatient disciples before they could do him harm. And yet how had Bentkoop known to come directly to him? There were a thousand ways, he assured himself, in which the students could have got hold of the story without his intervention. Why behave as if he had set the damned petition afoot? A spasm of irritation shook him. He could not determine where their machinations ended and his own, over-active intelligence began the work of conjecture—it was the old philosophical stickler: how to distinguish the mind’s knowledge of its objects from its experience of its own processes? In short, can we know anything, he muttered under his breath and raised his eyes from the paper. “Before we get on to this, Jerry,” he commenced, “could you take a message for me to one of your fellow-tutees? Don’t give it to just anybody in the dormitory. See that you tell her personally. Sheila McKay. Tell her to come to see me directly after lunch; she forgot to take her assignment and I want to explain it to her.” The boy nodded. “Glad to, Dr. Mulcahy. Do you want me to go now?” The teacher smiled at this alacrity. “No,” he said, lightly, seeing with relief and a certain pale regret that the name, Sheila McKay, had no special meaning for Jerry, and that the petition, therefore, could not be making great headway, “afterwards will do very nicely.”