JOCELYN’S MOOT poetry conference opened on a fine Friday afternoon in April with the usual difficulties of transportation. Like so many small colleges, Jocelyn had preserved its historic atmosphere at the price of having been passed over by the railroads, the nearest main station being in Harrisburg, twenty-eight miles away. This fact having been made known to the poets, an afternoon train was named, which could be conveniently met by the official welcomers after the last class hour and before the appointed baptism of cocktails at the President’s house—this arrangement, as was pointed out in an official purple hectographed schedule issuing from the President’s office, would give the men poets plenty of time to “get acquainted” with the department and the lady poets time to “wash up.”
Yet the poets, as usual at such affairs, elected to display their individualism and their freedom from the trammels of the academic by ignoring the train suggested and arriving by diverse routes and at different hours of the day. Some came by car too late for the cocktail party, and also for dinner in commons, having stopped, so they said, to explore the cloisters at Ephrata, so that some faculty-wives in their dinner dresses were obliged to turn to and make sandwiches and coffee. One deaf old poet appeared in the morning and spent the whole day wandering about the campus, lonely as a cloud. One, taking unfair advantage of the provision for expenses, arrived by plane in Pittsburgh, whence he telephoned collect for somebody to come and get him; one came on Saturday morning; one did not come at all. The poet of the masses hitchhiked and was picked up on the highway by some students, who carried him off to Gus’s. The English poet arrived in York, unannounced, having discovered a local train that no one else knew existed. One old freedom-loving poet descended from a parlor-car with his wife, who had not been specified in the invoice; this produced a momentary upheaval in the sleeping arrangements, for it had been planned to create a men’s dormitory in Howard Furness’ upstairs and a women’s dormitory at Miss Rejnev’s. The problem was solved at the last moment by Mrs. Fortune’s offer to vacate her apartment—after a number of beds had already been hauled about by members of the baseball team. In short, of the eleven poets who accepted (representing, in many cases, a second choice on the part of the committee, since a number of the original invitees had to decline, citing prior commitments to attend several other poetry conferences being held the same week on The Contemporary Neglect of Poetry), only one, a woman lyricist, arrived at the proper time and place, and this, as it turned out, proved most inconvenient, requiring two special trips on the part of Considine Van Tour in his new red convertible, which could not travel more than twenty miles an hour, for he had failed to recognize, at first blush, in the large woman with the grip, whom he took for one of the church-workers so prevalent in the neighborhood, the subject of the Cecil Beaton photograph that appeared on the back jacket of her books.
Yet in this large, comfortable woman, with tight-drawn bands of black hair and a Sunday-meeting hat, who alighted at long last soughing on Miss Rejnev’s doorstep, he had found much sharp discrimination and a worldly understanding of life. They had had a most rewarding conversation on the trip back, concerning the various factional struggles within the department, which he felt it his duty to apprise her of, lest she be made the victim of a deception; she listened with great acuteness to what he himself feared was a rather confused account of the outrageous behavior of Henry Mulcahy and Herbert Ellison, whom he did not hesitate to warn her against by name; and it pleased him to be able to turn her over to Domna with the assurance, “I leave you in good hands,” and see her nod in return, a great, calm, capable nod, like a wink of the universe, that accepted the reliability of her landlady in supra-mundane matters. Meanwhile, other poets, riding perilously in Mulcahy’s swaying old Plymouth, were also “getting to know” the department, an experience they took quite calmly, since it happened to them at every college.
Led upstairs by Domna, to the larger bedroom, the lady poet tried the bed, approved it, asked for a medicine glass, a saucer, an extra pillow and a shoelace; she loosened her corset, looked out the window, inquired the age of the house, the local agricultural product, remarked that she had been born on a farm, and that she would like to press out a skirt—if it were not too much trouble—before the evening session. She then took off the skirt she was wearing, revealing a pair of long pink bloomers, and allowed Domna to persuade her to take a nap while her evening apparel was being ironed. Domna being a slow ironer, and the evening skirt being long and wide, they arrived at the President’s house at seven-fifteen, just as the last poet was leaving; Esther Hoar hastily telephoned commons to save some hot food and a table for four, and to Switchboard to post a notice that the lecture would be fifteen minutes late. The President in his dinner-jacket appeared somewhat distrait, but the guest politely ignored this; she was accustomed to find small colleges on her arrival in a state of tension and disorder, like some small mountainous country on the verge of a revolution. Over the remains of the Christian Brothers’, they leisuredly discussed train schedules, botany, Mennonite customs, agricultural patterns, the Pullman Company, a conversation which tortured the President with the idea that he was being patronized, as though by some stately fellow-passenger in a parlor-car, as they glided into the alien West. It was a peculiarity of this woman poet that she turned her whole body slowly from the waist when addressed by a new interlocutor, as though she were an obliging ear-trumpet maneuvering into position to take account of some strange new noise reaching her from afar; and her discourse also had something of this measured adjustment or focusing. As one of her old friends took pains to assure a group of students later, this was not really a sign of condescension on Harriette’s part, but only a trick of her corseting. Nevertheless, the President, early in the conference, had developed feelings of inferiority; as he sat there, glancing at his wrist-watch, the terrible sensation that he was something infinitely small, at the other end of a telescope, or a very faint, pre-verbal noise assailed him.
What troubled him even more, however, was the fact that the poets, as he observed them gathered together this first night in commons, showed no inclination to discuss poetry. He had imagined something very different—a two-day Platonic banquet of the mind, from which the students might garner the crumbs at the public sessions—but all he could pick up, when he and his party finally took their places in the dining room, was a clamor of personal allusions that made him fear for his eardrums, a good deal of profanity from the younger members, and several unflattering references to members of his own faculty. The only similarity he could detect to Plato’s banquet was that some of the poets seemed to be tipsy, or “high,” as he preferred to call it, genially, and this, despite the fact that acting on Furness’ advice he had decided to serve only sherry, which had elicited, according to Esther, several very rude comments from the corduroy-clad youth element. It occurred to him that some of the poets must have a bottle in their rooms.
Yet, in spite of his apprehensions, which he tried to mute even to himself, believing, as he did, in every man’s right to regulate his own behavior, once he reached the age of discretion, that is, when he graduated from college—so long, he silently stipulated, as the other fellow was not injured—the first or Friday night session went off on the whole pretty well. Alma Fortune was mistress of ceremonies; she wore a low-necked black beaded dress and black jet earrings that served to bring out more worldly gleams in her twinkling personality than the college generally saw. Under her sharp eye, a contingent of youths from Ellison’s Verse-writing who were lounging against one wall slowly took seats toward the rear, where their comments, at any rate, were inaudible, thanks to the overhang of the gallery. In Alma’s introduction, she showed to great advantage, thought the President, that gift for the local allusion that was her strong point as a teacher. A light reference to the mishaps of the afternoon, to the saga of missed connections, led her back to the early history of the college, to the frontier, and thence to the Epic, the topic around which the poets had been asked to frame their remarks. She hoped—with a side-twinkle for the students, to whom this was a twice-told tale—that the hex signs on the neighboring barns would serve to ward off all evil influences from the vicinity and not, as the ignorant sometimes thought, to attract them or indicate their presence. With a glancing hint at the dual function of poetry—as black and white magic—, at the role of the daemonic in art (the Mann students pricked up their ears), and at the witchery of Miss Harriette Mansell’s verse, she gaily sat down, tucked her skirt under her and turned her bright, wizened face, dancing with a thousand expectations, up to Miss Mansell, who strode toward the podium. Miss Mansell was wearing a very high-necked black heavy crêpe blouse encrusted with sequins and a long black crêpe skirt. There was a patter of applause from the poets, who were seated on benches that gave the effect of choir-stalls on the right-hand side of what had once been an altar and now served as a stage. Several of the poets leaned over to tap a shoulder or whisper in an ear and receive a quick nod in reply, as though in confirmation—it was apparent that Mrs. Fortune’s speech had given satisfaction. The poets, in fact, indicated that they were agreeably surprised by it, a thing which they made no attempt to hide from the audience: they would not, they rudely pantomimed, have expected to find such tactful literacy here. Having thus consulted with each other, like birds on a telephone wire, they unanimously folded their arms and settled down to listen to Miss Mansell’s talk, which proved to be on Virgil.
A faint sigh rustled through the faculty. From the point of view of the student-body, the choice was not a happy one. The majority of the students present had never heard of the person being alluded to as the Mantuan; they supposed he was a modern poet whom their faculty had not yet caught up with—a supposition correct in a sense, as Howard Furness, maliciously grinning, remarked in his slippery voice afterwards. A few scowling scholarship students who had not had the good fortune to be educated progressively moved restlessly in their seats, as though fighting being awakened from a dream to the realities of their old Latin teacher and the abhorrent learning-by-rote. There were stifled cries of “Let me out of here,” “This is where I came in,” and boisterous pummelings and punchings, quieted by a glare from a bright Austrian girl named Lise, who was doing her major project on Hermann Broch and The Death of Virgil. Lise’s major project, as the news of it spread around the room, evoked instant respect and attention; heads turned to nod at her approvingly, as though some member of her family had just been mentioned from the dais, and Lise sat blushing joyfully, like a bride. Unfortunately, this dark pretty girl did not understand Latin, which was Miss Mansell’s forte; nevertheless, she strained forward, not wishing to miss a word.
Miss Mansell did indeed read beautifully; she made a majestic Dido, and from her flashing orb and classic bust something of passion and tragic nobility did communicate itself even to those who were unable to appreciate her control of the hexameter. At a whispered request from Mulcahy, who darted up to the podium, she read aloud her own recent translation of the Prince-of-peace eclogue and followed this with a free sight translation of Dido’s speech, a real virtuoso performance, which she finished with streaming locks, moistened eye, and flushed cheek, to a salvo of applause from the poets, which informed even the soundest sleeper in the audience that something stirring had taken place. Even to students who had never seen her published photograph, it was suddenly manifest that she had once been very handsome and had loved in the heroic style, just as they felt something of the Augustan amplitude in the tidal swell of the dactyl breaking on the shoal of the caesura. To Maynard and his wife, the reading had been “a rare treat,” as they exclaimed, coming up to Miss Mansell afterwards; they knew, however, that they would have to pay for it later, at the bench of progressive judgment, for they could see, two rows in front of them, the head of the Social Sciences division vigorously conferring with the head of Natural Sciences—to these two Robespierres there could be no question of the President’s connivance in this reactionary coup of the Literature department; and it was a mark of Maynard’s moral courage, therefore, that he went up, publicly, to shake the hand of the victorious Calliope.
Fortunately for the President, there was an irregularity in the solid front of the Social and Natural Sciences. Dr. Muller, the historian, one of the pillars of the college, had listened to the lecture with the greatest approval. “Fine stuff,” he called out to the President, patently holding him responsible also. Dr. Muller, like many historians, had certain regressive tendencies arising from the nature of his subject, which called forth a tolerance for the past, in the same way that some occupations, like sandhogging, give rise to their own occupational diseases. He had just been reading an article in a learned journal which strove to show, by quotation, that Virgil, far from upholding the centralized tyranny of Augustus, had been secretly a republican oppositionist, giving his poetic sympathy, not to Aeneas, but to the conquered and unfortunate, exemplified by Dido. Hence, he had been in the throes of scholarly anticipation from the very first moment of the lecture, so much so that he had paid little heed to the stated theme—the problems of a heightened language raised by the epic form—and had concentrated all his powers of attention on the moment when, after the lecture, he would sequester the handsome Miss Mansell and put to her the question that was throbbing through his brain: Could the Prince-of-peace eclogue, in the light of these discoveries, be now considered spurious or was it to be read, rather, as a powerful example of irony? When in due course, after the lecture, he did have the opportunity of laying the problem before her, he met with a set-back. Perhaps he had spoken too fast, being, like a boy, so full of his spermy question that he crammed it all into one sentence, without consideration for the lady’s slower pace. But either Miss Mansell did not hear him correctly, as she leaned slowly sideward, like a tronometer, to apprehend his presence, or she did not perceive the cogency of his question for the understanding of the phenomenon of imperialism in our own times. Arrested, no doubt, in an historical phase of the development of language, like a magnificent fly in amber, she took him to be offering some new and purely verbal definition of irony and directed him to somebody named Empson—if he caught the name rightly—and his treatment of the pastoral mode. And her answer was so richly complete in itself, so rounded and duly meditated, that he did not have the heart or the temerity to put the question again. He forgave her, very shortly, from the brisk egoism of his nature, as he had learned to forgive other provocative lecturers and fine students who failed to live up to their promise. Indeed, at the next week’s meeting of the Social Science division, he administered a rebuke to his colleagues; granting, as he said, a certain bias in the handling of the poetry conference, an exception had to be made in the case of Miss Mansell, who had shown, he thought, a fine understanding of the vital relation between democratic principles and sanity in art.
The second and final speaker of the evening was a very old poet, clean and fresh as a rose, a bank president in private life, very mild and courteous, with a gentle quavering voice and a tight set of the long soft lips, like a Presbyterian pew-holder. He had a style of old-fashioned, elaborate compliment, in which there could be detected the flourishes of an antique penmanship and the scratching of a bookkeeper’s quill. He began his address with a series of tributes, to Mrs. Fortune, “our gracious Janeite,” to the President, the student-body, the college as a whole, and to each of the poets on the platform, individually, with a special gallantry toward the two ladies; as his keen powder-blue eye passed over the audience, he did not omit favorable mention of “our audacious friend, Dr. Mulcahy,” or of “our young friend, Mr. Herbert Ellison,” or of Miss Domna Rejnev, “whose verses we have been reading with astonishment.” These compliments, under which some of the recipients could be seen to bridle, amazed the student-body, which was given the illusion of having been inducted, personally, into some venerable temple of commerce, treading, like new depositors, reverently behind the soft, padding footfalls of the manager of this very old and reliable firm, which kept nevertheless a spry pace with the times and for which, as the slogan had it, no account was too small. The President, however, shifting uncomfortably on his haunches on the cushionless bench and smiling an appreciative smile, felt a country boy’s wariness of this old party, who reminded him of the original John D. Rockefeller dipped in attar of roses; he made a jovial note to watch his mental pocketbook in the transactions to follow.
The lecturer, pinkly smiling, announced that he would speak on Lucretius, which caused a flurry of interest among the poets on the platform: was this the long-awaited beginning of a new phase? They leaned forward tensely, alit with professional excitement. In the audience, the President frowned; the faculty was uneasy. Had the poets conspired among themselves to make game of the students? Feeling the President’s eye on him, Furness turned and flung out his hands in a gesture that pleaded his innocence. He, like many of his colleagues, was recalling, with some disquiet, the old poet’s bland question at the sherry party—“Is this the fabled college where everything is run backward?”—and the air of gentle disappointment with which he bore the news that no, indeed, it was not, that the courses ran normally from the immediate past to the present, Mrs. Fortune interjecting, proudly, that her modern novel course, as distinguished from Mr. Van Tour’s and Mr. Furness’, began with Jane Austen and stopped with Henry James. Yet the idea that Jocelyn was being “had” subsided in all minds but the President’s as the lecturer proceeded to block out his subject with the greatest care for the students’ understanding. He read his speech from a prepared manuscript, looking up from time to time to insert a date or an historical footnote, and making no sorties into the original text. Indeed, he admitted to an “otiose” preference for reading the philosophers in translation, a side-remark that made the President long to tell him to take his tongue out of his cheek and put it where it belonged, into his utterance. For the truth was that, contrary to all expectations, which were based on the notorious “difficulty” of his verse, the poet’s essay had an innocuous and guileless character, like a schoolboy’s précis or a junior-encyclopedia article on its subject—there was nothing new in it, as the Literature department began to murmur among itself, with puzzlement. His talk was, in fact, so clear that the best disposal the Literature faculty could make of it was to assume that they had not understood it, that of the proverbial four levels of meaning that they so stringently enforced on their classes they themselves had seized only on the literal and had failed of the moral, the allegorical, and the anagogical. Or had Consy Van Tour seen something of the second in the allusion to Democritus and the atom? Was the poet, as Consy divined, suggesting that the atomic bomb represented today’s most promising theme for a philosophical epic? Like Dr. Muller with Miss Mansell, Consy could hardly wait for the speech to end in order to tell the speaker of the interesting work being done in his radio verse drama seminar on the hydrogen bomb, bacillic warfare, interplanetary rockets; he turned full around in his seat and nodded triumphantly at his friend, Ivy Legendre, of the Theatre, who had been trying to persuade him that science fantasy was hick.
To the Natural Science Division the talk was not, per se, objectionable. Lucretius, Democritus, Pliny—these were names of honor with them; and they sat back contentedly, once they had made sure that the speaker was not going to use Lucretius to attack modern science, something always to be feared when the names of the ancients were invoked. They were glad, moreover, to be able to give their tolerance to at least one part of the conference, for they found themselves in a peculiar position vis-à-vis their best students, who were enthusiastic about literature and rated very high in it on the achievement sheets. This strange morganatic alliance between the Literature faculty and the top science majors, most of whom were boy prodigies, was always upsetting to the professional scientists, and at no time more than now when to their discomposure, as they applauded, they heard their young physicists and chemists pronouncing the talk elementary. But this was a minority judgment. The majority, hearing the poets’ applause, more prolonged and respectful than what had been given Miss Mansell, concluded, like their teachers, that something must have been lacking in their own understanding.
This led to an unfortunate incident during the question period. A very literal-minded girl, the terror of her instructors, with pink snub nose and flaxen braids, dressed in a laced bodice like a peasant in an operetta, got up and boldly asked the poet whether he was a primitive. “A primitive, my dear young lady?” pondered that Mr. Turveydrop. “What can you mean?” He looked quizzically around him, as though for assistance. “Do you wish to know whether I am an aboriginal or a savage?” The poets laughed. “Or do you mean to imply that I am primordial, that is, ancient?” The President ground his teeth, but the girl, blushing in great red disks, stood her ground, as she had stood it in a whole series of Sophomore Orals. “No,” she said firmly. “I meant that your lecture was very simplified, like a primitive painting. And I thought you might like to tell us whether this was deliberate.” In the front row, Furness groaned. “Touché!” exulted Domna Rejnev, beside him. Mulcahy caught her eye and winked. Across the whole short front row that was the department passed a sudden smile of pride: one of their worst students had just voiced the question that no critic, for twenty years, had dared voice even to himself. A red-faced, white-haired poet on the platform unexpectedly slapped his knee, but the majority looked frostily disapproving. “Deliberate?” repeated the poet, rather angrily. “I’m afraid I cannot tell you. But there is nothing in art which is not studied.” The girl opened her mouth again and struck a rather “cute” pose, putting one finger to her open mouth and scuffing her ballet-slipper along the floor, a pose which the department sadly recognized as the sign that she had outlived her moment. Alma Fortune rose from her chair on the platform. “Sit down, Gertrude,” she ordered, but kindly. “We mustn’t tire our speaker.”
Howard Furness, smiling, got up to propose that the poet might read some of his famous poems, which were already known to the students through the college record library. But the old man was disinclined; on his stiff, thin legs he moved out of the limelight and sank into a chair at the back of the stage, where he sat, chafing his hands. The audience began to clap in unison for his return; it was felt that he had been offended, and there was a general friendly desire to pay him homage for poems that had given pleasure in the past and that remained, even now, in the modernist canon, preserved, like his fresh complexion. When the old man continued to refuse, the poet who had been dubbed by Ellison the poet of the masses, a middle-aged, heavy-set man with a scarred prominent jaw, wearing a red flannel shirt and heavy boots, stood up suddenly in his place, at the very end of the bench, and declared that he would read them. There was a movement of incredulity among the poets; it was not supposed, obviously, that this person, smelling of beer and doubtless of sweat—for he boasted of having been seven days on the hoof—was familiar with the old man’s frail, difficult poems, which had emerged from the Imagist movement, convoluted and pale, like sea-shells. Throughout the whole audience, in fact, there was a feeling of alarm as the red-shirted poet, without waiting for an answer, made straight for the lectern, like a worker resolutely moving to seize the power-switch in a factory. It was feared that he would read his own poems or somehow do the old man outrage. But to everyone’s surprise, when the old man’s books were not forthcoming and a student was sent out to look in Furness’ office, the proletarian poet began to recite from memory those forty-year-old verses written in the counting-house, on the backs of checks and deposit-slips, celebrating merchant princes and their ladies and the life of the summer hotel. To these crabbed and yet fastidious verses, the proletarian poet’s delivery added something uproarious and revivalistic, hell-and-damnation thunder lit up with a certain social savagery and wide-open bohemianism, which suggested a good deal of the atmosphere of The Outcasts of Poker Flat. “Preserve us from our admirers,” whispered a young poet, sardonically, to his ally. Yet an obscurity in the old man’s poems, or rather the uncertainty as to how he had meant them hit upon by the student, Gertrude, made this dramatic interpretation possible, and though the old man sat picking at his buttons throughout the recitation, it was a manifest success with the students, the boys in particular, who stamped on the floor and called out for more, until Mulcahy, at a cue from Ellison, whispered to Alma to put a stop to the reading. The poets, it seemed, were displeased.
This did not arise, as might have been thought, from professional jealousy, but from a deeper feeling, the natural antagonism between the poet and his audience that now began to be exhibited at the Jocelyn poetry conference. It was a profound, suspicious, almost animal antagonism, without necessary basis in outward circumstance but arising, as it were, from the skin, from a bristling of the hair on the nape of the neck, and the proof that the proletarian poet was not really a poet was the fact that he did not appear to feel it. The true poet, unlike the prose-writer, explained Howard Furness in lowered tones to the President, does not care to be admired or even to be read, except by a few chosen fellow-poets; a taste for public admiration in a poet is already, as he himself knows, the fatal sign of his deterioration; he has ceased to be proud, protective, and fiercely possessive of his work. Hence—he airily continued, while the President listened, aghast—all attempts, on the part of well-meaning academics, to persuade the poet that he is loved are futile and self-defeating, for the poet does not wish to be loved and flocks to symposia on the Contemporary Neglect of Poetry to be reassured that he is not. And the spontaneous applause, just now, accorded the proletarian poet’s rousing reading of the old man’s work, was, from the point of view of the poets on the platform, an unmitigated disgrace and catastrophe. Even Domna Rejnev—he pointed out, guiding the President’s attention to where she stood in the front of the hall, nervously talking to the proletarian poet, whom everybody else was shunning—was finding her libertarian principles sorely put to the test; and, in fact, as they watched, she slipped away from the poet and took neutral refuge with Alma Fortune, who was chatting with Miss Mansell. The President was shocked. “Why, it’s like the old Greek ostracism,” he commented, reaching into his pocket for his pipe.
An impulse of hospitality led him to start through the emptying hall to where the proletarian poet was standing, alone and conspicuously abandoned, scratching his jaw. Senior girl-students were passing punch and cookies; the poet took a cookie from the tray and made some remark to the girl, who blushed and hurried on with her duties; this particular student, as the President recalled from her advisers, was unfortunately very shy. Before the President could get to him, however, the poet, with his mouth full of cookie, suddenly reached out and seized the arm of Henry Mulcahy, which was hovering over the refreshment tray. Mulcahy, observed the President, was in very good form this evening; the continuation of his appointment seemed to have put a little weight on him; the fixed, precise smile had lost its baneful character, and he diffused an air of good fellowship. Up on the platform, Cathy, accompanied by Ellison, was the center of a little group; her rich laugh rang out. The poet grasped her husband’s hand and shook it. “Hello, old friend, don’t you know me?” Mulcahy paled under his freckles; he peered at the poet mistrustfully and endeavored to withdraw his hand. “I don’t believe so,” he said coldly. “I know your work, of course.” He started to veer away and caught the President’s eye, in full rebuke, resting on him. “At Brooklyn College in the old days,” reminded the poet. “In the old John Reed Club. I was using my Party name, then.” Furness, who had caught up with Maynard, threw the President a quick look of interrogation and wonder. Both men, by common consent, moved closer. A pair of curious physics students, noticing this, nudged each other and edged up; Alma Fortune’s attention was caught; Miss Mansell’s body slowly turned. “And what was your Party name?” inquired Henry, with a faint smile of derision. “John Marshall,” chuckled the poet. “Now do you remember?” Henry bit his white underlip. “Indistinctly,” he admitted. “I’ve changed,” conceded the poet, with a sudden note of bitterness and significance. “In more ways than one.” He touched his chin. “I got that in a San Francisco dock-strike. With the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific. That was after I broke with the Party.” He laid a finger on his broad, thick-flanged nose. “When I broke with the Party, they broke that for me. Twice. When I was laid up in the hospital, my new life began. New name. New ideas. I began to do some reading. I went into the hospital a Trotskyite and came out an anarchist, thanks to an old Wobbly working-stiff who used to bring me books.”
By this time, half the room was listening. The tall young girls put down their trays on the empty benches and came nearer. Several attenuated young poets and the red-faced, white-haired poet who had slapped his knee and was noted for his dynamic Americanism and metrical intransigency now pushed purposefully forward. The old poet had left, accompanied by two of his cohorts, and, with his departure, a desire to make some gesture of solidarity with the proletarian poet had overtaken the poets remaining, who felt a certain human compunction and also curiosity. The proletarian poet, moreover, was unobjectionable to them as a man of action; indeed, they found him picturesque, as did the students crowding around him, with talkative wonder, as though he were an historical remain, a chipped statue in a square. Everybody, it seemed, had expected him to be much younger; and the explanation, which he himself cheerfully volunteered, lay in his rebirth. His poetry, he explained, with citations, was youthful, direct, and sensuous, celebrating free relations with women, red-wine parties, bull sessions, hitchhiking; as a poet, in short, he was the same age as the Jocelyn literary set, while as a man he was forty-five years old. But it was as a man, sad to say, that he interested the students, who in their turn quickly explained to him that their own literary age was about fifty, thanks to the Jocelyn system of individual instruction, which had made them old before their time. Much later that night, in one of the social rooms, a girl Philosophy major showed him that he had paid the price of a robust and time-conscious nature, that is, that he was dated, that he embodied a militant yesterday, which seemed farther from today than the pyramids; and it was precisely this fact that drew the students to him and permitted Dr. Mulcahy to hurry out of the room, unnoticed, while the poet continued to talk of frays with the Bridges union, mutiny on a banana boat off New Orleans, the strike at Ohrbach’s, the old John Reed Club. When the poet finally looked for him, he was gone, like a spectral vapor.
In the moonlight, on the chapel steps, the President and Furness turned to face each other. “Who would have guessed it?” exclaimed the President. Furness shook his smooth head. “Not I,” he disclaimed. “I still wouldn’t credit it if I hadn’t seen Hen turn tail and run.” They took a few steps into the reviving mountain air, on the gravel of the circular driveway. “It puts him in a better light, you know,” remarked Furness, finally, in a tone of apologetics. Their feet crunched as they walked. “For us, Howard,” distinguished Maynard. “But we must look at the whole picture. How many students, would you say, got in on the beginning of it? Oh, my God!” he cried, suddenly, as the whole picture smote him afresh. Furness regarded him with a certain amused tenderness. “Two or three,” he hazarded. “But there’s a fifty-fifty chance, Maynard, that they didn’t take in the meaning of it. The kids here aren’t very political these days; you can’t seem to get that through your noodle.” The President shook his curly head. “There’s no such animal, Howard. If the kids aren’t political, as you call it, it means that they’ve given in to the forces of conformity and reaction.” His handsome face tightened. “If this thing gets out, I’ll have the trustees on my back again.” They rounded the drive again. “Poor devil, poor hunted devil,” he mused, “he was perjured, apparently, before the legislature.” He lit his pipe and spoke through clamped teeth, indistinctly; a terrible new thought had occurred to him. “Howard, you don’t think . . . ?” Furness looked at him sharply; his strong, active face was ravaged in the moonlight. “That he’s still in it?” supplied Furness. The President sorrowfully nodded; he looked eagerly into Furness’ face, with a consciousness of his own pathos—was he once, twice, or thrice deceived? Furness shrugged. “I should doubt it,” he replied. “But am I a competent judge?” He grinned. “I would have sworn, I would have sworn,” he insisted, “before a legislature, that it was all a blague.” They walked for a time in silence. “Who knows most about all this?” said the President, suddenly. “Domna,” replied Furness. “She’s the only one he told directly.” “We’d better get her,” resolved Maynard. “Right away. Tonight.” “What about the poetesses?” objected Furness. “She’s supposed to be driving them home, to my house.” “You do it,” said the President. “Take them to Domna’s. And then come back. I want you to be there.” Furness made a deprecatory gesture. “I was planning to serve a little whiskey,” he said. The President blew up. “For God’s sake, Howard!” he said bluntly. “My whole career is at stake. We’ve got to cover this thing up, as soon as we can find out what to cover. This is no moment for a drinking-party. Is there any way, do you think, that we could call off this damned conference and send them about their business?” Furness laughed. “We could abduct the poet of the masses. That’s what his former comrades would do.” “Stop using that silly name,” exclaimed the President. “What is the fellow’s name, for that matter? I rather liked him,” he added, to soften the effect of his outburst. “Vincent Keogh,” said Furness. “My God,” cried the President. “Another Irishman!” Furness made a final protest. “Maynard,” he warned, “Domna and Mulcahy aren’t on good terms at present.” “What does it matter?” cried Maynard. “The girl’s honest, isn’t she?” Furness raised a nonchalant shoulder. “But north-northwest, like the rest of us. She can tell a hawk from a handsaw.” He waved and hurried off to his car.