HENCE IT HAPPENED that the President, Furness, Domna Rejnev, and the two lady poets were among the few people connected with the poetry conference not to have a hangover on Saturday morning. Furness’ house, according to the brigade of students who came to clean it up, must have been the scene of revels; he himself, coming downstairs in the morning, renamed it the Mermaid Tavern. The informal ten o’clock session, held in Barnes Social around a table, was sluggish; the psychology student with the tape-recorder, who was stationed under the table with the poets’ permission, was able to pick up several new hangover recipes and to witness exchanges of No-Doz and benzedrine. By a forced agreement with the Psychology department, this recording was later destroyed, at the price of Dr. Grünthal’s resignation and the loss of the Rockefeller grant.
Young Mrs. Giolini, a pretty heiress with a black spit-curl, thought to be very stupid, read a paper on the mock-epic, which, according to the tape-recording, everybody believed she had had help with. She was in the habit of subsidizing upstart magazines of verse with typographical eccentricities, and already among the older poets the word was passing that she ought not to have been invited. One choleric little poet in middle life, with sideburns and short jutting whiskers, considered that they had each, every man-jack of them, been personally insulted by being asked to sit down at the round table with her; at the same time, he held that the college had showed a shocking discourtesy in leaving the two women to pass the previous night uncompanioned. This ill-feeling grew during the morning, as the inevitable publishers’ representatives began to arrive, in very hairy tweeds, and to drop onto the floor, cross-legged; they too, in most cases, had hangovers and had driven all the way over from Bucks County on the remote chance that another John Brown’s Body or a novel might be picked up at this conference. It was felt by the older poets, most of whom held academic jobs, that this conference, like every other one, was going to be shot through with commercialism; the younger poets were less incorruptible, and Herbert Ellison’s two friends immediately struck up an alliance, considered very questionable by the majority, with the youngest of the New York publishers, whom they pronounced “very intelligent.” And the worst fears of the majority were realized almost at once. Consy Van Tour, who was chairing the session, had the idiocy to call on the publishers to say a few words on the subject of modern poetry as it looked to them. They did not need to be asked twice. They all, it turned out, had strong identical opinions on the subject of modern verse, which they did not read much, they conceded (Translator’s note—“Not at all”), but which nevertheless they felt qualified to judge by virtue of their position: “This is the way it looks to the man behind the desk.” And to the man behind the desk, it did not communicate. The poets around the table indicated by their tight lips and wearied eyebrows that communication with these persons and their salesmen was the last thing they desired; but they did not have the rudeness to say so. And their restraint had the result of making the publishers more confident. Emboldened by an intuition of their own solid mediocrity, they became convinced that each of them, individually, was the audience that every author aimed and yearned to reach, and that if he did not reach them, well, manifestly, he failed. Having pronounced this sentence, they would calmly get up, stretch, stroll over to the window, like expert consultants whose part is done when the fault is pointed out, the execution being left to others.
The poets then took the joint hazard of asserting that their verse, all modern verse, was intelligible to any person who would take the trouble to read it—a perilous contention which was easily put to rout by the devilish kind of senior male student who had spent four years in college drilling holes in his teachers’ logic. Such a tall, large-eared Mephistopheles suavely rose from his place and read aloud a passage by one of the poets present and asked for a show of hands of those who understood it. A few hands hesitantly went up all around the room, but to everybody’s surprise but the poets’, who had been through this all before, there were several hands at the table itself that simply refused to go up. And one handsome young poet rose and gravely tried to explain that understanding of a given poem and respect for it were not necessarily identical, that he himself was not certain of the meaning of all the details in the disputed passage, but, even while the Literature faculty nodded in approval, he was interrupted by a fresh member of the Art department, who popped up like a jack-in-the-box to demand, “Why don’t you ask the author?”
At this instant, Consy Van Tour received a sharp poke in the ribs and a whole collection of scribbled notes, ordering him to call for the next question, but the students now were echoing the popinjay art teacher’s question, though more in a tone of entreaty. “That question is inevitably broached by an audience if the chairman doesn’t know his business,” observed the choleric poet to his neighbor, taking care that Consy heard him. “No,” they all semaphored sternly, as the wilting, plump Consy hesitated. “To ask a poet for an explanation of his poem is a violation of professional ethics, like asking a doctor to prescribe for you when you meet him at a friend’s house at dinner,” said the whiskered little poet, a formalist and neo-traditionalist, to Consy, when the meeting had been adjourned—he was a specialist in poetic etiquette, or rather in the correct forms to be observed with poets. He had already checked off several violations in the manners prevailing at Jocelyn, and his eye now followed with acerbity the student crawling out from under the table. “Where is Mr. Furness?” he sharply inquired, cocking an eyebrow at Consy. Consy did not know; he only knew, he protested, that Furness had telephoned him very early to ask him to take over this morning’s session. In reply, the poet took out his pocket-watch.
Hovering on the edges of this group, Alma Fortune was nearly beside herself. She was furious with Howard for not being here and with Domna as well, who had promised to take a carful of poets for a drive before luncheon. All around her, she saw poets covertly unfolding train-schedules and glancing at their watches; she heard muttered talk of their decamping after the afternoon session, before the buffet supper that was being prepared for them at Furness’ house by the best cook in the region. She was not familiar enough with the poetic temperament to know that this migratory urge was merely a passing one—after cocktails, most of the poets would be amenable to staying on, and some might not leave for several days, if they found a congenial bivouac. Ignorant of these contrarieties, she hurried about the room with a nervous smile, pointing out that the train being spoken of was slow, crowded, inconvenient, and invariably late into Harrisburg. She stopped to glare at a publisher who was offering rides in his Buick back to Bucks County, and then, on second thought, invited him to stay for supper. She spoke to her tenants, the red-faced poet and his wife, and all the while her eye was on the door, willing Furness to enter. Even Mulcahy, who ought to have been here, had rushed out toward the end of the session, without any explanation, on a note’s being passed to him by a student. There was nobody but herself and Consy—she discounted Ellison as useless—to round up the poets and see that they had their lunch properly and got to the chapel on time for the afternoon session. One of them, the poet of the masses, had already failed to appear for the session that had just ended, and now, as she was trying to make plans, three more slipped out the side door. “ ‘And now for God’s sake, hock and soda-water,’ ” laughed the very handsome curly-haired youth who had spoken at this morning’s session. Alma knew her Byron and knew what this meant; it was the locus classicus, she said to herself bitterly, of the hair-of-the-dog in literature. At this moment, when despair seized her, Furness debonairly entered.
What Alma did not suspect was that early that morning, before the session had started, the poet of the masses had been shaken awake by Furness and asked if he would mind driving in to see the President in his office. Dazed, breakfastless, and bleeding from a quick shave, he had tiptoed down the stairs behind Furness and out into the lucent morning, while the other poets still slept. This embassy was the fruit of the previous night’s interview, which had lasted until three in the morning, with Domna, himself, the President, and finally Bentkoop, who had been summoned out of bed, arguing what ought to be done. The result was that Furness had overslept and had nothing to eat either. And as he drove along in his Pontiac, alongside the poet, who had a terrible breath on, Furness wondered whether the counsels of night had been ill advised. He seriously doubted whether the poet would tell the President anything.
It had been Domna’s whim that they should ask him, a real feminine caprice. For, first of all, she had refused to believe that all three men—Furness, the President, and Bentkoop—had taken no stock in the wild story Hen had told her and that she and Alma and Aristide and Consy had accepted without question. “How could you ‘know,’ Dr. Hoar, that he was not a Party member? How can anyone ‘know’ such a thing?” “By instinct, simply,” said Furness. “We knew it in our bones,” he added, with a sour laugh of self-disparagement. “But weren’t you interested in pressing it further?” she persisted, with widened eyes, ignoring him, and keeping after Maynard. “If you thought Hen deliberately told such a lie, why didn’t you say so?” “My dear,” said Maynard simply, “it was a very hot potato. I am an administrator, Domna. You people were backing him—some of my best teachers. I had no belief, or wish to believe, that Hen was a Communist—I could hardly reinstate him on that basis; that’s not the kind of argument you use on the bursar or the trustees. I chose to ignore the question. What was relevant to my purpose was your feeling, yours and John’s and Kantorowitz’s and Aristide’s and Alma Fortune’s. If you backed him you left me no choice. I respected your opinion, but not enough, apparently.” He gave a sorrowful laugh. Yet Domna remained incredulous. “You too, John?” she murmured when John came in, as though accusing him of perfidy. What struck Furness, straight off, was that this strange tone of hers and soft, reproachful eyes seemed to betoken an intimacy that he himself had never enjoyed with her.
And then, almost at once, she and John had dropped into a low-voiced colloquy, from which Domna had emerged with one of her sudden, startling volte-faces. All at once, backed up by Bentkoop, she had taken the curious position that there must be some misunderstanding: Mulcahy could never have been a Communist Party member. She knew this, she declared—with her strange, positive logic—by the fact that she had found herself skeptical when the story of the recognition scene had been repeated to her, just now, by the President—she had been too far away to catch the exact words herself—which showed her, she said, that she had never really believed Mulcahy in the first place and had been merely overriding her doubts, in order, perhaps, to think ill of the President or perhaps for some more worthy motive. But she now was certain that she had been half-consciously gulling herself. Furthermore, and it was here that Bentkoop seconded her, there was something very implausible, she insisted, in their account of Vincent Keogh’s behavior. No anarchist who was a decent fellow, as Keogh appeared to be, would denounce a former comrade to the authorities, still less expose him, for no reason, in a public room, in the presence of his employer and his colleagues. “Anarchists are not informers,” she kept repeating, over Furness’ objections. This stubborn repetition and Bentkoop’s deep-voiced assents had the effect, not of convincing Furness and the President, who after all had heard the conversation with their own ears and were not simply reiterating a maddening abstraction, but of persuading them that further investigation would at any rate do no harm. It was agreed that Furness should bring Keogh to the President’s office at nine-thirty. As to what they could do next, if Keogh were to substantiate what he had implied the previous evening, none of them dared think. It was the President’s vague hope, apparently, that the truth could be somehow suppressed. Furness did not concur in this; he had no hope at all; but only a suicidal compulsion to know at all costs. As he drove along the black-top road, dipping and rising through the newly plowed farmland, he was a prey to the darkest jealousies, including a jealousy of political activism.
When Keogh, rumpled, badly shaven, his dark-blue eyes bloodshot, was ushered into the President’s wainscoted sanctum and saw there, waiting for him, the pretty Russian girl, a strange dark bony young man, and the President himself, he perceived immediately that this was a judicial occasion. Up to this moment, he had supposed that the President was going to offer him a job, which he was strengthening himself to refuse. Thinking over the previous evening, in the student social room, he could not imagine now what offense he had given, and a truculent heat rose in him, which he damped by reminding himself that these people were human beings. He concentrated his thoughts on the girl, who was wearing a handsome white wool dress, with a dark purple stripe down the center of it, which he mentally tagged as very expensive. Having been poor all his life and intending to remain so, he had a funny itch to know how much things cost, things, that is, that he would never have—yachts, custom cars, jewels—but this feeling was without rancor on the whole. Furness, whose wrist-watch and tie-pin he had already appraised, pulled up a chair next to him and sat down. The dark young man was sitting in the window-embrasure. To Keogh, it was like a scene from a movie, in the District Attorney’s office.
The President, whom Keogh cast as Robert Mitchum, came rapidly to the point. “Last night, Mr. Keogh, you spoke to one of our teachers, whom you remembered as a former comrade in the Party.” Keogh sat upright with a jerk. “Whoa!” he protested, but the President went smoothly on. “Don’t jump, please, to false conclusions, Mr. Keogh. We—all of us, my two young colleagues, Mr. Furness and myself—are asking you to tell us in strict confidence what you know about this. We have no idea of using this information in any way, shape, or form. We’re all liberals, believe me”—Keogh sat absolutely still—“and there’s not one of us who isn’t shocked and sickened by the reign of terror in our colleges.” He reached out and selected a pamphlet from one of the bookcases; the others appeared slightly embarrassed, and out of the corner of his eye Keogh saw Furness wink at the Russian girl. “You don’t have to take me on faith,” continued the President, extending the pamphlet to Keogh. “I refer you to my article in the New York Times magazine, which brought me”—he faintly smiled—“a good deal of obloquy from our academic witch-hunters.” Keogh obediently opened the text. “I deal there with my own problems as an administrator in handling an academic freedom case, the case of a man charged, unjustly, as I thought, with communistic tendencies by one of our over-zealous state legislatures.” He chose another pamphlet from the bookcase. “Here,” he said, proffering it, “I deal with the problem in a more theoretical way. Examine it at your leisure; I’d be glad of your opinion. Out where you come from, in California, you know a good deal more, I dare say, than we do about the loyalty issue.” Keogh nodded, rather confusedly, as the President went on to say, warmly, “You’ve probably been in the thick of the fight for academic liberties.” The President leaned dynamically across the desk. “But the man I describe there, the man I welcomed to Jocelyn over the dissent of all the nay-sayers among my trustees and my faculty, is none other than the man you recognized as a former comrade—Henry Mulcahy!” A prankish smile briefly rested on the President’s fine features. “You can see that your revelation has left me, as a liberal pundit, in a rather delicate, not to say embarrassing position. But that of course is not the point. The point is our colleague himself. It would seem now that he perjured himself in his testimony to the legislature—a very serious thing, as you know. I’m not sure myself, without taking legal advice, what the best course is for him now. But to help him—rest assured, we mean to help him, every one of us—we need to know the truth, for Mulcahy’s own protection. Look upon us, if you want, as his lawyers.” He gripped the edge of the desk and his dark eyes gazed warmly into Keogh’s. “Naturally,” he interpolated, “there’s no question of dismissal.” Furness made a wry face, but the President firmly continued. “I can assure you, Mr. Keogh, that your conscience will be absolutely clear on that score.”
Keogh twisted the President’s two pamphlets in his hands; after the first cursory glance, he made no attempt to examine them. “You don’t have to worry about my conscience, friend,” he said with an insouciant smile. “I don’t know what I’d tell you otherwise, but under the circumstances, I’ll sing, gladly.” “Sing?” wondered the President. “I’ll talk,” said Keogh, laughing. “This bird Mulcahy was never in the Party or near it.” The Russian girl made a joyful sound and clapped her hand to her lips. The men looked sharply at each other. “To me,” remarked Keogh, “that means nothing either way today. I don’t know how you feel. Some of you liberals look on an old Party card as a testimonial to the bearer’s manliness, like a first dose of the clap.” “No,” murmured Furness, smiling. “We are not so innocent. You bring us great relief, I must say. You come among us like a deus ex machina.” Keogh, who was perfectly literate, felt offended by something slurring in Furness’ tone and in the veering stare of his blue eye. “I’m not a worker-robot,” he retorted. “I look on myself as a free individual.” “Please go on, Mr. Keogh,” said the President. “Please,” said the Russian girl, giving Furness an angry look. “I don’t object,” said Keogh. “In the fraction, I was given the assignment of recruiting Mulcahy to the Party. He seemed to be close to us on some things, but when it came to an organizational question, there was absolutely no dice. If I may say so without damage to his present standing in this liberal company”—he bowed—“Hen was very cautious, very much the home-body. Has he still got that wife?” The Russian girl laughingly nodded. “She was there last night; she writes poetry.” “What about the John Reed Club?” said the dark young man. “He came to a meeting or two,” said Keogh. “Under my steering. He stood in the back of the hall, with arms folded, so.” Keogh folded his arms, high on his heavy chest, and looked around the room, sardonically, while the company chuckled. “He asked some satirical questions. Later, he informed me that these lumpen-intellectuals had nothing to say to him. He was one of those birds that are more Communist than the Communists in theory, but you’ll never meet them on the picket-line. A weird, isolated figure, with a talent for self-dramatization.” Everyone nodded, and he went on for some time, analyzing Mulcahy in terms of his class background, his two years at Oxford, his Jesuit schooling, when he recollected that he was talking to Mulcahy’s employer and pulled himself up short, with the sense that already he had perhaps said too much.
The meeting broke up, with the President’s cordial thanks, and Keogh, to his sorrow, was sent off to breakfast with Furness at a coffee-shop in the old red-brick town. The Russian girl, so she said, had an errand and went off with the dark young man, their heads bent in close conference as they crossed the campus. Furness looked at his wrist-watch with the woven gold strap and called after her, sharply, to be on hand at the close of the morning session. It was already eleven-thirty, and he seemed suddenly peevish and preoccupied. From the moment they sat down to breakfast and he called out, “Miss,” awkwardly, to the waitress, he rubbed Keogh the wrong way. The self-made intellectual dandy was a type Keogh disliked intensely, and he quickly saw that Furness was unsure with him, in some peculiar way, placatory, and at the same time eager to be off. He unfolded the Mulcahy case and Keogh was repelled, both by the story itself, and by the veneer of amused sympathy with which Furness coated it and that seemed to overlay, as in fancy furniture, what Keogh took to be a raw spite and envy. So far as Keogh could see, only the Russian girl and the woman named Alma and the fellow they had just seen called Bentkoop had behaved with a modicum of humanity, and he felt suspicious even of them, as Furness smilingly elaborated the later events of the narrative, like a salesman in a plush store demonstrating the fittings of a suitcase or swiftly knotting a four-in-hand in supple, hairless fingers. The more he considered it, studying the dapper Furness, who patently believed in nothing, not even in himself, nothing, that is, but the amusing warp-and-woof of events and persons, the more he began to feel that the meeting in the President’s office had not been all it seemed. In the light of what Furness was telling him, of feuds and fissions and reversals, their concern for Mulcahy seemed acted. He had a sudden inkling that they would have liked to get the goods on Mulcahy, that whatever he himself had told them they would have been pleased, pleased if Mulcahy were a Communist and pleased, even more, if he were not, since this made him out a liar, which was probably even worse, from a liberal-respectable point of view. “We had to know, don’t you see?” Furness kept drawling in his peculiar, half-cultivated voice, as if he were trying anxiously to drag Keogh in to some disagreeable dark corner of the soul. This insistence on their psychology seemed to Keogh quite spurious and unnecessary. Though the President had assured him that there was no question of a discharge, he wondered now that he had believed him so readily, or rather, not believed him, but dismissed the problem as irrelevant. It was possible, he saw, that he had been very cleverly taken in. The idea that he might have played just now the role of a stool-pigeon or an informer was offensive to his whole sense of himself. He stood up suddenly and asked to use the telephone. Furness, fitting a cigarette into his holder, looked up with a flitting uneasiness, as though he descried his intention; he did not, naturally, have the courage to challenge him. Keogh stepped into the booth, found the Mulcahy number in the telephone book, and got Cathy Mulcahy on the telephone. He asked her to tell her husband, if she could locate him, that he would like to have a word with him whenever it was convenient. Cathy Mulcahy’s voice showed prompt and business-like understanding. “Where are you?” she demanded, succinctly. When he told her, she was silent for a moment, and then her voice came rapidly over the wire. “Tell Furness you want to look up something in the Library. Hen will meet you there, in ten minutes if I can reach him. If not, wait there till somebody comes for you. I’ll try to send a student.” As he came out of the telephone booth, Furness was paying the check at the counter only a few feet off, just barely out of earshot.
Keogh’s suspicions were fortified, both by Mrs. Mulcahy’s response and by what he took to be an attempt at surveillance on Furness’ part. He held no special brief for Mulcahy, less, if anything, when he saw him again in the Library, but it seemed to him, nevertheless, that he owed Mulcahy this much: to let him know that the President and certain staff-members had been asking questions about him, which he himself had answered, he now thought, too freely. Mulcahy thanked him, pressed his hand effusively, and sped off. He showed no interest in renewing the acquaintance, which relieved Keogh, who watched the tall, pot-bellied figure bolt out the swinging doors with a slight new feeling of dubiety. Should he have kept his mouth shut? He paced up and down, staring into the glass cases, where the books of the poets, including all of his own, were displayed. The middle-aged librarian respectfully bustled up and offered to help him, and this kindness softened him to the college, which looked to him once again like a pretty decent place. He left the librarian and strolled out onto the library steps; across the evergreen-shaded campus, where boys and girls were walking arm in arm, he saw the Russian girl hurrying toward one of the buildings. He had a sudden impulse to call out to her. Did he owe it to her to tell her what he had just told this shit, Mulcahy, etc., etc.? But as the ridiculous question, like a repeating decimal, propounded itself to him, he struck his open left hand a blow with his right fist. No, he inwardly shouted to himself; Keogh, keep out of this, or they will get you. The chapel clock struck one. Within twenty hours, he perceived, they had succeeded in leading him up the garden path into one of their academic mazes, where a man could wander for eternity, meeting himself in mirrors. No, he repeated. Possibly they were all very nice, high-minded, scrupulous people with only an occupational tendency toward backbiting and a nervous habit of self-correction, always emending, penciling, erasing; but he did not care to catch the bug, which seemed to be endemic in these ivied haunts. He drew a draught of spring air, flexed his chest muscles, and signaled to a tall blond girl in a tight turtle-neck sweater, who rode up to him, questioningly, on a bicycle. He knew that he was supposed to be somewhere at this hour; they had given him several purple schedules which he had promptly thrown away, on principle, just as he had tossed the President’s two pamphlets into a large green can under an elm-tree.
Meanwhile, over fried sausages, red-apple rings, fried potatoes, fried chicken, fried onions, in the coffee-shop of the old hotel, the poets who were still on schedule were relenting somewhat toward the conference. The old mountain town was very picturesque, with red-brick dwellings, trimmed in white, with green shutters, fronting directly on the single street, which, from its open end, looked out onto rolling farm country, stone houses and great barns, as onto the land of Canaan seen from Mount Nebo. The young poets were insensible to scenery and to the spirit of history, as well as to good farm-style cooking, but the older poets’ lyres were more attuned to the atmospheric. The resemblance to the Promised Land, first pointed out by Miss Mansell, tempted them into speculations on the influence of the Old Testament on American history. They wondered whether this likeness to the prophesied Canaan had not been seized upon by the early settlers as a form of verification, which had led them into the theological controversies so characteristic of this region, and so much more prolonged and literal than the theocratic rivalries of New England—“These people,” proclaimed the red-faced poet, with a billow of the arm that included the startled waitress and the cashier, “still imagine that they are living in the Bible.” “And up there on the hill, we still imagine it, in our own fashion,” edged in Furness, with a plaintive smile, trying to draw the conversation back to Jocelyn itself. “Our progressive methodology,” he announced, “with its emphasis on faith and individual salvation, is a Protestant return to the Old Testament.” Miss Mansell turned to look at him politely, but the others went on eating, as though he had not spoken. “And our presidents, poor fellows,” he continued, on a diminishing scale of assurance, “live the dishonored life of prophets, a life of exposure and contumely, for trying to put into practice literally the precepts of a primitive liberalism.” The poets still ignored him, except for the whiskered poet, who threw him a glance of fiery rebuke—this was the sort of observation that the poets were supposed to frame, and it was unseemly to have it supplied, ready made up, by jackanapes on the faculty.
The poets had no interest in Jocelyn or its President, whom they took for granted as the usual money-raiser, not too successful, to judge by the size of the fee. The President they knew generically, and this was sufficient. At a given point in the afternoon’s proceedings, he could be counted on to rise from his seat and put a question that had long been bothering him—why did not modern poetry communicate to him? Somewhat more perplexed than the publishers, but vigorous and manly, he would call on modern poetry to step down from its pedestal and meet with the ordinary man in the marketplace; he would ask for a positive contribution to the vexed debates of our times. This speech, which was not yet known to the President or his faculty, was foreknown to the poets down to the last metaphor, just as the red-faced poet’s extempore speech attacking Eliot was as well known to his confrères as it was to his own wife. And they could anticipate with equal lucidity the attack on themselves that would be launched from some unexpected quarter in the Literature department, an attack which would be backed up, since this was a progressive college, by a sudden foray of students from the audience who would hurl a daring question or two and then fall into silence, nudging each other vainly to start the assault again. The deadly animosity between the professor and the poet was somewhat muted here by the fact that, strangely, there appeared to be only two literary careerists in the Literature department, the young versifier, Ellison, and his ally, Mulcahy, whose empty place still gaped at the long table—both of whom, naturally, were supposedly managing the conference, for ends of their own that had not yet become manifest but which, predictably, had something to do with a power-struggle within the department and a drive toward prestige in the literary world outside. Of the two, the poets preferred Mulcahy, who was a man of some acuity, but they did not indicate this, any more than they gave way to the natural attraction they felt to the little Rejnev girl and her friend, Mrs. Fortune—they had learned not to take sides, even with the losers, which in this case was their instinct. They came to Jocelyn in the same spirit that dentists or doctors attend a professional convention, knowing that the public speeches would be, on the whole, very tiresome, but that, if they could keep out of the way of the faculty, they could drink and visit with their friends. The more experienced they were, the more they considered the whole project to be an affair of mutual exploitation—a contract, like any other, in which they did not intend to be worsted. They gulped their caffeine tablets, therefore, and smiled encouragingly at the little Rejnev girl, who looked very white at the prospect of taking the chair. The red-haired man, Mulcahy, was still absent, which they put down as a black mark in their book.
An hour and a half before, the President had had a shattering experience that altogether eclipsed the poetry conference from his mind, so that he did not, as it happened, make the speech that he would certainly have made under normal circumstances. Without knocking, brushing by the secretary, as she explained later, Henry Mulcahy had burst into the President’s private office, white-faced, malevolent, trembling, and demanded to know what the President had meant by interrogating a visiting poet about Mulcahy’s political affiliations. A shocking scene followed. Mulcahy, as Maynard told Bentkoop, as soon as he could get him on the phone, literally shook his fist in Maynard’s face, threatened to expose him to the A.A.U.P., and to every liberal magazine and newspaper in the country. He was going to write a sequel to the President’s magazine article that would reveal to the whole world the true story of a professional liberal: a story of personal molestation, spying, surveillance, corruption of students by faculty stool-pigeons. A girl-student, he shouted, had already confessed to him in his office, when he faced her with it, a sordid tale of spying assignments given her by the White Russian, Miss Domna Rejnev.
“What could I do, John?” pleaded the President. “The man is quite mad. My first idea, naturally, was to throw him bodily out of my office. But then, God forgive me, I hesitated. I saw very clearly that he had me in a vise of blackmail. The campus was full of outsiders—these poets, other teachers, publishers, parents. What was I going to do? Fire him? I can’t fire him. He has a contract. I would have to show cause and that would mean, in all probability, a lawsuit. The college can’t afford it. The terrible thing, John, is that, on the surface, everything he says is true. We did interrogate the poet; the people in the Literature department were keeping tabs on him. It’s all twisted, of course, by his warped imagination to give a sinister meaning, but still those things were done. I sat there looking at him and I lost all faith in the power of my denials to convince anybody, even myself. Maybe our behavior did have an ugly little kink in it: I don’t know; I’ve lost the ability to say. Tell me, John—you believe in religion—what am I being punished for?” John made an indeterminate sound. “At that moment,” continued the President, his voice desperately rising, as he tried to laugh, “I looked out the window and saw nuns, nuns on Jocelyn’s driveway, going into the chapel. I thought I had gone mad.” John laughed. “They came for the afternoon session. One of the poets is a convert.” “I know, I know,” said the President, impatiently. “But listen to me, John. Then I said to myself, ‘I will bribe him.’ I actually thought of offering him five years’ salary to leave the campus today. But then of course I saw that that was what he wanted. He would have a club over me for life. He could always say, with truth, that I had tried to bribe him into silence.”
“So what did you do?” said John, as the President’s voice died away. “I didn’t do anything,” retorted Maynard. “I just sat there. Miss Crewes opened the door a crack to find out what was going on and she saw me sitting there, with my head in my hands, and Hen sitting opposite, cool as a cucumber. She thought I had had a nervous breakdown or a stroke, like the last president, till I looked up and told her to go away.” John laughed. But the President was beyond resentment. “Finally, I raised my eyes and I said to him, ‘What is it you want of me, man? Do you merely want to ruin me or have you an ulterior purpose? Tell me that, please,’ I said, ‘just as a matter of interest, just between ourselves. Are you a conscious liar or a self-deluded hypocrite?’ ” Over the wire, John whistled. “You know what he answered?” asked the President. “He quoted the famous old paradox, the paradox of the liar. ‘A Cretan says, all Cretans are liars.’ That was his answer. As for interpretation, he informed me that the problem was subjective. ‘We’re none of us certain of our motives; we can only be certain of facts.’ And these facts, which he’d already enumerated, could not be denied by me.” John sighed. “Then,” said the President, “he quite changed his tune. ‘I’m not concerned with truth, Maynard,’ he said to me, very straightforwardly. ‘I’m concerned with justice. Justice for myself as a superior individual and for my family.’ ”
The President’s voice sounded weary. “He claimed the right to pursue his profession, the right to teach without interference or meddling, the right to bring up his family in reasonable circumstances. What could I say? I spoke of my own rights and duties, to the trustees, to the student-body. And he snapped me up immediately. ‘And does that include the duty to interrogate visiting poets on my political affiliations?’ ” Maynard laughed. “I admitted that that had been misguided, and he offered, very sweetly, to accept my apology.” There was a protracted silence. “So?” said John, anxiously. “So,” replied the President firmly, “I concluded that it was best for me to resign.” He heard the young man gasp. “Yes,” he asseverated, with something of his old buoyancy. “I saw that I was too much incriminated. The college would never get rid of him as long as I was at the tiller. With another skipper, who can’t be blackmailed, there’s a fair chance of getting him out. I confess I thought of Samson, bringing down the temple on the Philistines and himself.”
“Maynard,” cried the young man, protestingly. “You haven’t told him?” “No,” said Maynard. “But Miss Crewes knows and Esther. We’ve already sent off a letter to the head of the board of trustees.” He sighed. “Are the poets gone, by the way?” “I don’t think so,” said John. “I think the party at Howard’s is still going strong.” The President chuckled. “That Miss Mansell, you know—I think she had something to do with giving me courage to do it.” John made an inquiring sound. “I used to be quite a classicist,” said the President, “when I was a kid in high school. I wanted to be a lawyer and Cicero was my hero. That talk on Virgil and that reading brought it all back to me. It was running through my head all the time I was talking to him and he was quoting paradoxes at me. ‘You damnable demagogue,’ I kept cursing him under my breath as I watched him. And then I felt guilty. A demagogue—what does it mean? A leader of the demos or the people. I suppose, in a certain sense, I must be saying farewell to progressivism. At any rate, John, at the very end of our talk, I just looked at him and declaimed the first line of the first Catiline oration.” Taking a firm grip on the telephone, he threw his handsome head back and brave tears of oratory rose into his forensic eyes. “ ‘Quo usque tandem, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra?’ ‘How far at length, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience?’ ” At the other end of the phone, the young man signaled to his wife, who crept up and put her ear to the receiver as the President’s noble voice rolled on.
THE END