“LOOK HERE, Alma,” countered Howard Furness, with a light rasp in his tenor voice, “how do we know any of this is true?” The teacup on his saucer lurched and slopped as he spoke; they were drinking tea in her apartment in Linden Hall; a meeting of the full department was scheduled to begin here in a few moments, and Howard had arrived first, by design. Already, he felt captious and stubborn. “You take too much for granted,” he decreed roughly, thrusting a cigarette into his holder; like everything he did when he was jarred, this ordinary action seemed brutal and personal, a violation of frontiers. In silence, Alma passed him a little box of Vulcan matches. She was a widow of forty, small, dark, wiry, energetic, with a passion for Jane Austen and Goethe, the poles of an unusual temperament, which was at once rough-hewn and fanciful, delicate and dynamic. Twenty years ago, she had been a New Woman, of the femme savante school, and she had not been altered either by marriage or by the death of her life-companion—it was as though she had lost a congenial sister or a woman colleague with whom she had shared a flat and a small collection of books, bibelots, and common habits; having lived together with Mr. Fortune by a continuous stipulation of mutual consent, she had allowed him his independence in departing. She dressed in jerseys and wool skirts and brogues, wore a boyish haircut and necklaces of turquoise or Mexican silver, was fond of tea, little Cuban cheroots, Players, English Ovals, candied ginger, and so on. In the spring, she picked the first violets; in the autumn, a bouquet of wild grasses, which stood all winter on her mantel in a brass container. She was both extremely outspoken and extremely reserved; her personality was posted with all sorts of No Trespassing signs and crisscrossed with electric fences, which repelled the intruder with a smart shock. To men, in particular, the protocol of her nature was bewildering, like court etiquette; like a queen, too, she had her favorites, who were permitted familiarities and indulgences not granted to their superiors in rank or outward attainments—at Jocelyn, this footstool position was occupied by Henry Mulcahy and his dependents.
Howard Furness was a friend of Alma’s, but she pricked him continually, like a nettle. Her black, wizened, peppercorn eyes regarded him with a permanent twinkle which anticipated his weakness and shriveled his independence; she would seldom speak to him seriously, except on department business, called him “Howie,” or “little Howie,” though he stood five feet nine, or even, when specially humoring him, her “little manikin-minikin,” which suggested, and not only to Howard’s mind, a dressed department-store dummy or a ventriloquist’s puppet. In moments of peace, he endured this, but in moments of crisis, like the present one, he was driven to take up with her a peculiarly sidling and derogatory tone, full of insinuation, as though he coarsely “saw through” her, like that of a boy to his sister. And at bottom, he did murkily consider all attainment, idealism, and so forth, to be a sort of speciousness; the upper world, for him, was divided into admitted frauds, hypocritical frauds, unconscious frauds: this fraudulence, in fact, to his glazed-pottery-blue eye, constituted the human, and below it was only animal activity, which was of no interest or amusement to the observer. Every relationship, therefore, propelled itself for him toward confession and mutual self-exposure; the slurrings and elisions of his voice conspired to this end; even in his ingratiating mood, his talk had a sidelong motion, suggestive of complicity. At the same time, he had a firm sense of what was reasonable and proper, of the Palladian façade of appearances and observances, a sense which was at present aggrieved by the farrago of incoherent accusation which was being offered him in all earnestness by a woman of supposedly critical temper; his jealousy of Mulcahy was sharpened by creative envy—to what lengths would sheer audacity carry the man?
Yet his natural envy, as of a fellow safe-cracker, together with a respect for the laws of slander, imposed on him a code, if not of silence, at any rate of restraint. He would do no more than restively hint his belief that Hen was lying, and this made him irritable, since nobody, he knew, would credit him with a voluntary act of abstention, but, on the contrary, everyone would gladly misjudge him and suppose that careerist motives kept him from supporting a colleague whom actually he distrusted for impersonal reasons and in the end from a sense of proportion. He made a deft little grimace and pushed his cup aside. “Let’s try to keep our heads,” he advised, with a worldly flourish of the cigarette-holder. “We’re all sorry for Cathy, but that’s the risk Hen has run. Frankly,” he shrugged, “the human angle leaves me rather cold. We all have our hard-luck stories, and Cathy was Hen’s lookout.” A peculiar, provocative smile had become affixed to his features, and his voice had a ring of defiance; in this atmosphere of coddling, he felt it his duty to vaunt himself as a particularly hard-boiled egg, but he found a cool pleasure in the role that outstripped his corrective intention; the desire to be original passed, through justification, into a positive wish to offend.
“In Maynard’s place,” he rather airily announced, “I should have acted sooner. For six months, at least, our friend Hen has been asking to be fired, and today he finally got what he was looking for. I’m not interested in his Party membership, or the meetings he went to; the more fool he, if he didn’t break with the Party when the breaking was good.” His voice had begun to rise, despite himself; Alma’s assessing silence worked on him like a reproach. “What you fine people choose to ignore,” he said, curbing himself, “is the academic record. In the two years he’s been here, how many times has he turned in his achievement sheets on schedule? Or reported class absences? Or filled in the field-period reports? How many conferences has Hen missed? Have you any idea?” In reply, Alma slightly lifted her shoulders, as though to deprecate all this as immaterial. There was a knock on the door, and Aristide softly entered; with an air of great precaution, like a late theatre-goer who fears to interrupt the performance, he tiptoed across the room and lowered himself onto the Empire sofa. As Howard’s indictment continued, his mild, smooth, benign face, like a Swiss weather-clock, registered a variety of alarmed expressions, from administrative pain to total mystification; this recital of quotidian misdemeanors affected him like a traveler’s tale, an account of strange customs prevailing among unfathomable peoples. “Last summer,” Howard concluded, with a sweep of the white cuff, “seven of Hen’s students wrote me, wanting their projects back. The others apparently didn’t care.” He gave a little laugh, in tribute to his normal skepticism. “We have some duty to the students, I assume. Little Elmendorf, let me remind you, nearly didn’t graduate last year when Hen mislaid her thesis and insisted, in the department, that it had never been turned in.” He quirked an eyebrow. “We know enough elementary Freud by this time to see the psychopathology of that. Little Elmendorf’s father, as we have cause to remember, was a trustee.”
He suddenly gave vent to a wholly unpremeditated and rather concessive laugh. A truant sympathy for Hen made his argument sway and topple, just as he reached to crown it—his public positions were always unsteady, being built up, block by wooden block, like a child’s tower, out of what he held to be correct and fitting; a mere stir in the ambience or an inner restlessness could unbalance him. In this case, it was the presence of Aristide, perturbedly nodding and deploring, and the recollection of Elmendorf Senior, a beetling kulak of the region, that brought a glint of malice to his eye. The subversive he acknowledged in himself was all at once irresistibly appealed to by Hen’s consistent vagaries of character. One side of Howard, his best, the side that drew his students, was an airy sybarite in the moral sphere and behaved as a sort of prodigious host, officiating, somewhat in the background, over the great banquet of life and letters, calling in the dancing-girls and the poets, drunken Alcibiades and simple Agathon, applauding each turn without invidious distinction; in this mood, he wore a garland perpetually round his neck; his collar was loosened, his blue stare moist with afflatus; he cried, Encore, encore; and his methodology was simply reductive: he considered Socrates to be a man and mortal. The indignation he had felt, just now, with Mulcahy, tacked as it neared the ethical and sought another route for its expression. He took a more pacific tone and, thrusting his rather undershot jaw out, said, “God knows, Alma, I don’t enjoy playing the Christer. Minding Hen’s p’s and q’s is not my idea of a picnic. But let’s face up to the facts here. If you’ve got to champion Hen out of personal loyalty, that’s your affair; each to his own taste. Take it up with Maynard; I won’t stop you. But for God’s sake, if you must go into it, do it with your eyes open.”
There was a second knock on the door. Aristide leaned forward. “Excuse me, Alma,” he interjected, “Ellison asked me to tell you that he was sick in bed.” Alma gave a snort; Herbert Ellison, the young poet of the department, who taught verse-writing and modern poetry, was never on hand when needed; she suspected him of moral cowardice or of an intellectual superiority to the mundane, which amounted to the same thing. Domna Rejnev and Van Tour came into the room together and without a word took seats, side by side, as if pledged to a common intransigence. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Furness exclaimed, paying no attention to them and continuing, deliberately, from where he had left off, “Hen’s appointment is not being terminated for political misbehavior. If Hen was ever a Party member, this is the first Maynard or anybody else ever knew of it.” He paused to let this sink in, together with its implications, and his eye inadvertently met Domna’s; she was staring at him with an expression of such cold ferocity that he shivered and lost track of what he had meant to say. He had been steeling himself for the last half-hour against just this look of hers, which he had precisely anticipated, but which nevertheless made him quail. His soul, however, stiffened obstinately; he was half in love with Domna, or so he kept telling himself, and this drove him, tactically, to resist her. “I don’t delude myself,” he cried, with a certain resolved desperation that brought all eyes but Domna’s curiously to rest on him, as if for once he spoke directly from the heart, “I know what you’re thinking!” Domna turned him her profile in a gesture of contempt. “That I’m behind this dismissal, that I’m jealous of Hen, that I’m a trimmer”—he made a slight ironic bow to Alma, who was fond of using this word. “Believe me,” he glanced at Domna, who kept her head averted, “Maynard didn’t consult me. If he had consulted me . . .” He shrugged. “What would you have had me say? What would you have said in my place if you had been nearly two years acting as a buffer, between Hen and the bursar and the registrar, between Hen and his tutees, between Hen and the Jocund, between Hen and the student council? If other departments had complained to you about Hen’s raids on their students?”
Aristide cleared his throat; Domna’s pink lips parted and swiftly closed again; she took out a pencil and began to draw, indifferently, in her notebook; Alma coughed, a quick, shrill, peppery cough that at once earned her the right to answer. “No need to quarrel,” she said tersely, and the room came to order. Her voice was like a pointer, moving sharply on a map or blackboard, which gave her an air of authoritative impersonality, though as a matter of fact she was congenitally nervous and suffered from intermittent eczema, asthma, shingles, and all the usual disorders of the repressed female brain-worker. Her neck, as she spoke, reddened and she coughed, from time to time, awkwardly. “We have a simple difference of opinion. We differ, apparently, as to Henry’s professional qualifications. We indorse him; you do not. That’s the nub of the matter. The political question is secondary. Nobody has the right to teach merely because he is or was a Communist—on that we can all surely agree?” All heads promptly nodded but Domna’s. “You disagree?” swiftly asked Alma. “ ‘Nobody has the right to be a policeman,’ ” quoted Domna, rather slowly. “I am not sure. In principle . . . yes . . . no. I am not sure.” A heavy frown appeared on her forehead; everyone turned to look at her in perplexity. Domna’s thought-processes, as they all knew, were rather lengthy and tortuous; Van Tour heaved a sigh. “Let’s say you temporarily abstain,” put in Alma, kindly. “The point need not come up unless Howie persuades us that Henry is unfit to teach on academic grounds. I think we would all say, however, that membership in the Communist Party, past or present, does not in itself establish unfitness to teach.” Aristide revolved this statement. “Well now, Alma,” he allowed, “I am not sure you have the correct formulation. Intellectual freedom—that is the usual point, isn’t it? Can a Communist under discipline have intellectual freedom? We hear that they cannot, that they are under strict orders to promote their infamous doctrine; their minds are not free as ours are.” Van Tour interrupted, excitedly. “Catholics are not free either,” he protested with heat. Like many teachers of English, he was not able to think very clearly and responded, like a conditioned watch-dog, to certain sets of words which he found vaguely inimical; in an argument he was seldom able to discriminate between a friend and a foe, the main contention and a side-issue. With a person of his temperament, a statement of preliminary axioms, such as Alma had been attempting, was fatal. He was now under the impression that Aristide was slurring Mulcahy; a mid-western distrust of foreign languages, moreover, led him to associate Aristide, who was a Protestant, with the ukases of the Vatican. “Catholics believe in a single truth, too,” he cried, warming. “They only tolerate opposition in countries where they haven’t taken over the government. Look at Spain! Why should we let them teach when we won’t allow it to Communists?” “Hear, hear!” remarked Howard, amused. “No one has intellectual freedom,” asserted Domna suddenly, in a vicious, smoldering tone.
Alma coughed and resumed control of the discussion. “Let me re-frame the point. Past membership in the Communist Party does not in itself establish unfitness to teach.” “Aye, aye,” cried Van Tour. Aristide nodded. “Hence,” pursued Alma, “if we can agree that Henry possesses the necessary academic qualifications, we will be in a position to argue that his dismissal be reconsidered, (a) in view of the present discriminatory practices in the colleges, which will make him, if fired, virtually unemployable, (b) in view of his own admission of former membership in the Communist Party, which, in the absence of direct evidence of his incompetence, suggests at any rate that political discrimination may have been exercised here against him.” Howard withdrew his tongue from his cheek and whistled. “Very discreet, Alma,” he commended. “You make no concrete charges, bring forward no evidence, and merely counsel Maynard to avoid the appearance of evil. I take my hat off. May you mediate for me when my hour comes.” He blew her a congratulatory kiss. “Agreed,” retorted Alma, absently. “Alma,” put in Aristide, “a single correction, if I may. Strictly speaking, Henry is not being fired. His contract is not being renewed, a rather different thing where future employment is concerned. I presume that you are using the expression loosely, as a sort of shorthand, and, so long as we all understand that, it may be convenient to do so.”
Alma nodded. “Now, whatever we think ourselves, Maynard will undoubtedly tell us that Henry is not being fired, as you say, Aristide, but being let out for routine administrative reasons. What’s more, he will mean it, I assure you. If Maynard has fired Henry for political activities, he has no conscious idea he has done so. Therefore, it devolves on us to give him our opinion that Henry is professionally competent and deprive him of the psychological basis for treating the problem as a purely routine incident. And, as Howie points out, it is possible that Maynard has been acting in good faith and knows nothing of the Party membership. In which case, the vigorous protest of Henry’s department ought to open his eyes to what appears to be a flagrant injustice. Now, Howard,” she said pleasantly, with an air of “drawing him out,” “you are in disagreement with the rest of us. You do not think Henry competent for a number of reasons which you have cited and which, so far as they go, we are prepared to accept, I think, without further question. The head of the department, we will all agree, is in a position to have a certain kind of knowledge of a teacher’s routine work and routine failures which the rest of us, happily, are spared. We will all admit, I think, that Henry has been lax, but which of us here, I wonder, is in a position to cast the first stone?” Her shot-like eyes peppered them; she folded her muscular hands in her lap. “Not I,” said Van Tour eagerly. “I’m always late with my achievement sheets. My students are forever after me to return their little term papers.” He flapped a white hand in the air. “And the complaints I’ve had from the registrar’s office!” He heaved his shoulders in their suede jacket and sent his eyes to heaven. “Nor I,” exclaimed Domna. “You know yourself, Howard,” she chided him, “that I forget to record class absences. And my library history is shocking. I never remember,” she earnestly told them, “to put the books on reserve.” “We all have our peccadilloes,” warmly declared Aristide, “I remember one of my students—do you recall the case, Alma?—Hyslop, I believe the name was, who was doing a paper for me on Victor Hugo or was it Dumas fils?” His large flat lips stretched and tightened around the proper names, like a rubber band contracting; he had never anglicized a French word in all his professional history, with the single considered exception of Paris.
Howard broke in with a jerky laugh. “Et tu, Aristide?” he reproached him. “I should never have thought it.” The malicious smile returned to his face. “Shall we all confess and take our hair down? I could unfold a tale or two myself.” Every face, he noted, showed alarm—what tales, he asked himself, were they thinking of? Alma, he knew, privately censured him for “too close a relation with the students.” It was believed, also, that he had written certain well-to-do students’ term papers. Moreover, he kept a trot in his office, of the plots of the world’s famous novels, which he had once pressed on Domna in an emergency. For a moment, scanning their faces, he felt a lurching desire to rock the boat of their conventions by some untoward and scandalous revelation; he steadied himself with a jolt. “We’ve all of us let our work pile up on us from time to time,” he announced in a rather cavalier and yet sententious tone. “But in Hen’s case, there’s a point where quantity became quality. The quality of his work has been affected.”
“How do you know?” cried Van Tour. “You don’t know the quality of a man’s work from the memos you get from the registrar!” He spoke quickly and belligerently, from what everyone recognized to be a job-insecurity of his own. He was a well-intentioned, fat, youngish man with a sentimental devotion to literature and a belief in its “improving” qualities, but chronically vague and disoriented; like many sentimental people, he really felt things more deeply than those who characterized him as sentimental; he was truly moved by a beautiful passage and truly warmed to indignation by injustice to man or animal, yet there was always something in his feeling that seemed wide of the mark or of too literal or personal an application—in this case, his defense of Mulcahy had, in the embarrassed ears of his colleagues, an overtone of personal defensiveness; he was unable to distinguish between Mulcahy and himself, and he plopped into Mulcahy’s ambience like a whitefish into a sea-full of sharks. “How do you know,” he demanded, “the quality of a man’s relation with his students from these two-by-four official complaints? A teacher’s relation with his students is something very private and sacred; yes, sacred!” he cried. “I’m not afraid of using the word. I’ve heard Domna’s students beef about those reserve books, but that doesn’t mean they don’t adore Domna.” Domna, somewhat offended by this direct and unexpected criticism, even though she had just confessed herself guilty, moved uneasily on her straight chair. “And the same goes for Hen,” Van Tour added, settling back in his seat with an air of virtue and finality.
“But in that case, Consy”—Mr. Van Tour’s name was Considine—“how are we to assess anyone?” inquired Furness, soothing; folly in another made him considerate, like a nurse. “We can’t quiz each and every student on his instructor without setting up a spy-system; teaching would become intolerable.” He gave a slight shake of his straight shoulders. “And we can’t let the students have a veto-power over the faculty; that would be frightful. Teaching, like all the arts, can’t be democratic or subject to referendum; it must be run from within, by an autonomous guild, according to guild standards.” “Exactly, Howard!” exclaimed Mrs. Fortune. “You’ve put your finger on the point. Now what are these standards to be? Are they to be administrative or internal, like the standards of a poem? Within certain limits, isn’t it possible for each teacher to make his own, as a poem makes its own laws? Isn’t that what we have here at Jocelyn that all of us treasure, whatever we may say about it? A certain autarchy, a rule of equals, without mutual interference?” Her small, dark-complected face had flushed; she leaned forward, hands folded between her knees, her skirt stretched tight, exposing round garters. Domna’s forehead puckered. “But a poem,” she objected, “justifies itself in the long run by referring back to life. . . .” “Tolstoyan!” retorted Alma playfully, “be silent.” Seizing the pacific opportunity, Howard winked at Domna. “Somebody—I believe Orwell—” he lightly divagated, “says that you can’t prove that a poem is good. A piece of news we must keep from the students at all costs or we should all be out of a job.” “You can’t prove that a poem is good, but you can know it,” said Domna, suddenly, with conviction. “There’s an act of faith involved, in each step of the esthetic initiation, a kind of new and quite arbitrary decision made when we choose to replace Turgenev with Tolstoy, or Lydgate with Chaucer. We make these choices in accordance with our own life-purposes; knowledge is not fortuitous but the fruit of a conscious decision, a turning toward, as Eliot says. In general, we submit ourselves to the judgment of the poets in these matters; we allow our poets to tell us that Donne is superior to Milton, and here perhaps we are wrong, but we cannot know that we are wrong until we also become poets. Tolstoy was wrong, in my belief, about Shakespeare, but his wrongness has a certain authority; we pause to listen to him because he was a poet. In the same way, it is only we teachers who have earned the right to be listened to on the question of another teacher’s competence, who have earned,” she finished, somewhat defiantly, “the right, if you want, to be wrong.”
Howard nodded, soberly. He had followed Domna’s argument to the end, unlike most of the others, because he knew her to be honest and presumed that therefore, before she finished, a doubt would suddenly dart out of her, like a mouse from its hole. In general, he agreed with what she had said, though with certain practical reservations. He was quite well aware that he knew nothing empirically about the quality of Hen’s teaching; but neither, he was certain, did the others, and he would have liked to get this admission on the table. “Fitness to teach” was an imponderable which he had no intention of pretending to weigh; administratively, however, Hen was a nuisance, and while he himself would have done nothing to dislodge him, he thought it obtuse to pretend that no reason for dislodging him existed. Domna’s “right to be wrong,” he thought, smiling, he did not contest, especially since the phrasing seemed calculated to disturb the certainties of the others, those of Aristide, in particular, whose face, bent in consultation now with Domna, wore a thoroughly anxious look, as though he had abruptly discovered that he had been exposed to some contagious disease. “You think it possible, then, that we are mistaken in Hen?” he gravely queried, accepting a piece of ginger from Alma and sinking his large, white teeth into it cautiously, as his big pale gray eyes probed Domna’s bright ones.
“Unlikely,” declared Alma, plumping down the silver dish. “Domna is right, of course, abstractly. Some sort of act of faith is probably involved for all of us here. But it’s not the unreasoning faith of a savage; it’s the accumulation of a lifetime of observation and inference. I can’t say, of course, from my own direct knowledge, that Henry is a good teacher. I go partly by hearsay and mainly by inference. I know, from our talks together, just as you all do, that Henry is a man with a brain, a big brain. The finest brain, if I may say so, on our faculty. I can’t think that our students can find anything but profit in being exposed to that brain, whatever happens to their projects or their ridiculous achievement sheets. I’ve profited myself, I can promise you. The man thinks rings around me.” She blew out a puff of smoke and mechanically all looked upward for the ring to form. The definiteness of her tone produced in every mind a concrete and haunting image. Mulcahy’s brain seemed to materialize before them, under Alma’s pointer, like a slide in a medical lecture, a cranium in profile or cross-section, with the tissue of veins and arteries, the soft gray matter, the cerebrum and cerebellum, all of unusual size and preternatural activity. Aristide’s eyes protruded. “You don’t say?” he exclaimed. “I should not have rated him quite so high. Where would you place him, Alma, on our friend Grünthal’s scale?” Van Tour giggled. “How about the Rorschach?” he whispered to Domna. “I agree with Alma,” she proclaimed, silencing him with a jab of the elbow. “Henry is the only man in the department who has standing outside of Jocelyn. I knew his early articles in the Kenyon when I was still a student. The synthesis he tried to make between Marx and Joyce was an important critical effort of the Thirties. You may pretend, Howard, that Joyce is a dead end,” she went on, excitably, though this was what she thought herself, “an interesting molehill in which certain pedants have tunneled till they buried themselves alive, that all this is pseudo-modernism, neo-orthodoxy, but what else, please tell me, is there that you find so un-sterile and fructifying? Where has your Proust led us? What you consider modern, your new decadence, is simply the latest billow of the Gothic Revival—Petrus Borel, my God!” Her accent had become more marked, as she felt herself moving along sure ground; like most European women when they argue, she was both angry and zestful. “You may say that these Joyce excavations of Henry’s are like some labor of the Pyramids, a monument of waste in the desert! Yes, in a certain sense, I agree, but it is at any rate a monument, a work requiring patience, study, the knowledge of seven foreign languages—a human sacrifice! What have you or I or any of us here to compare with it? Which of us has learned Italian or studies Hebrew at night with the Bible?”
Domna stopped, breathless, scornfully conscious that she was probably giving offense to the feelings of the others. Whenever she saw, or thought she saw, excellence, she had a summary impulse to make others bow the knee to it, as she did. Generosity in all things was a point of pride with her, but she had no pity for those too lowly placed to dispense it. Thus, in the little speech she had just made, she had been driven by the demon of arrogance to wound Furness’ vanity and incidentally, for all she knew, the separate vanities of the other three. But for the moment she felt perfectly reckless of such matters and did not care whether the effect of what she had said would be a net reduction of the sympathy that had hitherto been extended to her idol. Indeed, she rather enjoyed the idea that only she was sufficiently spendthrift (that is, sufficiently rich in resources) to pay Mulcahy full homage.
A constrained silence followed her outburst. “Grant Hen everything you say,” remarked Furness at length, “none of all that really touches on the question of whether he’s the right man for Jocelyn or for this particular department. God knows,” he interjected, laughing, “I don’t want to put myself in the position of robbing the poor-box or taking the widow’s mite. Let’s pretend that poor old Hen was a big figure in his time; let’s allow him his few words of Hebrew and his quotation from Leopardi. What you’re invoking, nevertheless, Domna, is a medieval standard of scholarship as an end in itself. Here at Jocelyn, I’ve been given to believe, we’re after something different: an active, two-way relation between the student and the faculty-member. Great learning can be an impediment to this; it opens up too great a hiatus, as in Hen’s case, between the student and the instructor. Hence we don’t insist on the Ph.D. or even the Master’s; in fact, we regard advanced degrees as a liability, if anything. None of us, except you, excuse me, Aristide, would be here if the college didn’t have this policy. Quite apart from other factors, Hen’s appointment, from the beginning, was a regression from Jocelyn principles. Hen, to speak frankly, has never subscribed to our methods, and I think a great deal of the trouble we’ve had with him can be laid to an unconscious resistance on his part to the experimental ideology. This refusal to fill out the achievement sheets and the field-period reports isn’t the result of mere inefficiency—it’s an act of obstructionism, or sabotage of the experimental machinery, unconscious, as I say, and very likely irrational; I think it very probable that Hen literally cannot fill out our achievement sheet. More power to him, in a way; one can’t help but respect an integrity that buckles at putting a check beside ‘prejudiced but genial’ or ‘truly liberal.’ ” The mocking smile played over his lips, but at bottom he was powerfully in earnest. For all his derogation, he truly believed in the modern, as subversive of established values, a mine or fuse laid under the terrain of the virtuous; the words, modern, secular, experimental, were drawled out by him in a seductive, blandishing tone, like a veiled erotic invitation.
“Hence, Alma,” he declared, “I can’t join you in thinking that all Hen’s sins of omission can be relegated to the realm of mere technicalities. They’re the expression of a certain reactionary Schweikism which we’ve seen also in faculty meetings.” “Most interesting, Howard,” exclaimed Aristide. “I’ve observed the same thing myself. Hen and I have had a number of discussions on the question of relative grading, and he assures me that he doesn’t believe in it. He believes in absolute grading. I had not myself drawn the inference that he subscribes to a belief in the Absolute.” “I too believe in absolute grading,” insisted Domna. Furness laughed. “My eye,” he said. “How many Excellents did you give last term? You’re a real fraud, Domna, when it comes to the achievement sheet. You grade them on their beauty or on a look in their eye. Your marks, take it from me, my dear, are an exercise in sheer coquetry.” He laid a drawling stress on the last words; Domna colored. “As far as that goes,” he continued, “our friend Hen is rather liberal with the Excellents when it serves his purpose. But seriously, the point is, Hen doesn’t belong here, doesn’t share our objectives. He came here—let’s be frank—for asylum; we gave it to him. He ought, long since, discovering his hostility to us, to have looked for another connection. Instead, he’s remained here on sufferance and treated his post as a sort of embassy, with extra-territorial rights, from which to attack our institutions. Why should Maynard stand for it? He’s stood for it this long, I can assure you, out of simple kindheartedness and decency, in the hope that Hen would have the grace to move on, once he had re-established himself, to the kind of academic work he prefers. If Hen had made the slightest effort to find a post he liked better, during the two years he’s been here, I should have more sympathy now for him and for Cathy. . . . After all, Alma,” he argued, turning his persuasion on her, “Cathy is responsible, equally with Hen, not only for his hanging on here, but also for the attacks he’s made on Maynard and the faculty as a whole. Having been married, you know very well that the woman can always control these choices. I’ve tried, more than once, to get her to see that Hen was doing himself harm with these continual rows over trivialities, and she’s graciously informed me that Hen owes it to himself as a pedagogue to correct misdoing wherever he sees it. That Zeal-of-the-Land-Busy approach bores me, I must say. She encourages Hen in these power-fantasies to keep her hold on him as the one true and excellent wife; why, the woman’s a regular Maintenon. As it happens”—his eyes narrowed—“the last time I went there, to offer a little unwanted advice, my car wouldn’t start when I left and I was treated, through the picture-window, to an imitation of myself. Cathy, wearing Hen’s hat and muffler, was prancing up and down the room—”
“Stop it,” cried Alma, sharply. She and Domna exchanged a horrified look. These imitations of Cathy’s were well known to them; indeed they had laughed at them heartily, but seen from Furness’ side of the window, they assumed another perspective. In this light, Mulcahy’s position at Jocelyn did in fact appear unjustified. Moreover, the two women could not help but feel to some extent implicated in that rather dubious position; they also had encouraged Hen to tilt against the local pieties and abetted him in his sarcasms; for the first time, strangely enough, it came home to them that Maynard Hoar did have a sort of case against their friend, but at the same moment they discovered that it would be wiser not to see this just now—any justice to Maynard would have to be done hereafter. Yet a sense of complicity held them silent in each other’s presence; each read the other’s thoughts and did not wish to be the first to disavow them. But Van Tour rushed in, colors flying, and saved them from a moral predicament. “ ‘Why don’t you go back where you came from?’ ” he hotly quoted, turning to Furness. “Isn’t that what you’re really saying, Howard? It’s the old move-on-buddy line that we used to hear in the Hoover days when anybody got independent. ‘Why don’t you go back to Russia if you like it so well there?’ I must say,” he added, chastely, “I never thought I’d be listening to that old bull slung at Jocelyn.” For a moment, every face wore a look of gratitude to the speaker for reviving the old militant simplicities, like a martial tune from long ago, but then a sigh went up; the inalienable right to “bore from within” was something they no longer believed in, though they felt a sort of pain where the belief had been, as a veteran does in an amputated limb. “It’s no good, Consy,” said Furness, regretfully. “Change that phonograph record. Maynard doesn’t owe Hen a living just because Hen disagrees with him. How about it, Domna?” he pressed her. “Even you wouldn’t allege that.”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Candidly, I don’t know. Logically, you are right, of course. Maynard owes Henry nothing as a college president; yet as a man I feel that he does. There’s a certain noblesse oblige that we owe to people who criticize us and whom we have the power to harm. Strength ought to impose chivalry; we stay our hand against a disarmed opponent.” Furness smiled, recognizing an echo from his own course in the Epic. “You think it’s my feudal background?” averred Domna. “The code of the noble which is based on privilege? That is true, I think, but it is also the Christian ethic. What would you put in its place? A purely utilitarian view, which treats men as things in terms of their utility value?” Her voice had grown firmer as she moved into the field of rebuttal. “As long as we have a society of privilege, the code of the noble should restrain us against the exercise of an absolute power.
“What you charge Henry with, is an abuse of hospitality. All very fine, as if Maynard had treated him in the style of an Arab sheik, as an honored guest of the college! Then, if this were so”—her eyes had begun to flash—“I would say yes, by all means, Henry had the obligation to repay courtesy with courtesy. But this is not the case here. Far from it. Maynard has used Henry to advertise his own reputation as a liberal; he hires him to salve his own conscience and write an article for the paper on how much better conditions are at Jocelyn than behind the iron curtain of reaction in the big rich universities. He treats him as we treat the DP’s, as a sort of testimonial to the paradise of freedom we have here, and then imposes on him all sorts of restrictions of what he can think and not think, do and not do. He is put to work at the lowest possible salary, housed in wretched conditions at an exorbitant rent, ordered to adapt his teaching methods to the progressive routine, expected to conform socially, to take advice and be grateful every day, like a refugee counting his blessings. When he shows signs of independence, it is time to get rid of him; out with him, out with the wife and children, accuse him of disloyalty to the Jocelyn way of life!”
Furness made a motion of ducking; he smiled uneasily. Domna, roused, he thought, was rather splendid, in the manner of a classic heroine; a chaste fire glowed from her; she had the air of a dragon-killer or an acrobatic virgin bringing the serpent to heel. He allowed his admiration for her person to neutralize the effect of what she was saying; that is, he evaded the task of considering it as either true or false. “Go on, Domna,” urged Alma, sympathetically. Domna complied, but more modestly; she feared that once again she had yielded to the temptation to show off—was she herself not treating Henry as an occasion for the display of youthful virtue and high feeling? “Hospitality,” she speculated, “is a mutual affair, as the French word hôte indicates. Here in America, I think, we tend to overemphasize the obligations of the guest, as though he entered a hotel where the rules were pasted over the wash-basin. It may be that Henry has infringed the house-rules of Jocelyn by treating himself, not as a visitor, but as a member of the family, with all the prerogatives of criticism that family membership implies. But if he is wrong, and he is not a member of the family, but a stranger in the house, must we not then treat him with aidôs? Does not his special situation make gratitude less incumbent on him than aidôs on Maynard and on us?”
Tears suddenly shone in her eyes; her voice trembled slightly; she was one of those romantic girls who are more moved and shaken by a concept, visiting their own lips, like an annunciation, than by poetry or visual art. Alma, who had a tenderness for youth and its sudden gusts of feeling, nodded quickly at her with sympathy and understanding. Furness folded his arms. “May I ask,” ventured Aristide, “for a translation? At one time, I was fortunate enough to pick up a little modern Greek in the Peloponnesus but my classic Greek is rudimentary.” “Care or ruth,” threw out Furness, negligently. “At bottom, untranslatable. The concept doesn’t exist for us. See Gilbert Murray.” “It’s another of those double words like hôte,” supplied Alma. “Aidôs is both that which inspires horror and pity, and the feeling aroused in the bystander. Aidôs applies to the wretchedness of a beggar or a suppliant and to the sentiment of concern one is obliged to show for him. A certain awe surrounds it. It is what Achilles, the killer of his son, in the end feels for Priam when he raises him up and weeps with him.” “And what the boy in the Iliad begs of Achilles,” put in Domna, “who is about to slay him. ‘Have a care for me.’ Greek logic demands that whatever is full of horror should command an appropriate response. ‘The concept doesn’t exist for us.’ ” She fixed her stern bright gaze on Furness. Aristide took out a little notebook and inscribed the word and the definition with a flourish, like one taking down the address of a pension. He snapped the notebook shut.
“So,” inquired Alma, whimsically smiling, “are we to show aidôs for Henry?” She looked around her expectantly. Howard stroked his jaw. “Aidôs,” he remarked, “whatever it may be, and you girls can have it to play with, is not an official quantity. In strict justice, there is no aidôs, and I for one propose to deal justly. As a working member of the department, I would be guilty of misconduct if I signed a petition citing Hen for merit as a teacher. There has to be some standard in these things, in fairness to the students and the rest of us. You can do what you want unofficially, Alma; appeal to Maynard for clemency; that’s your feminine privilege. But we can’t let clemency become the official business of the department.” He lit a cigarette and deliberately leaned his head back, exhaling; he yawned. “But it’s not a question of clemency,” insisted Domna, abruptly shifting her ground. “I feel and I think we all feel—with the exception of you, of course—that Henry is a qualified teacher and more than that—as Alma says, a first-class mind. Added to that we feel that his rather desperate personal situation entitles him to more consideration than we would be entitled to ourselves and far outweighs what one might call the personality issue. Plus, to my mind, at any rate, a third factor: in the current political situation, a liberal college ought to lean over backward not to fire anybody who is suspected of Communism, just as a woman’s college ought to lean over backward to hire women when they’re discriminated against in the men’s colleges. Where discrimination exists, protection of the out-group is mandatory, even where such a policy runs the risk of creating a new set of special privileges.”
“I’m glad to hear you acknowledge the risk, Domna,” remarked Furness on a rising note of irony. “You see where your policy would lead. To vying groups of separatist minorities organized for self-protection. We have something like this already in the Catholic and Jewish boycott groups, in the FEPC, which all you so-called liberals favor without seeing where it tends. I feel very little enthusiasm for the extension of this admirable principle to the universities. We’re not yet relief organizations, you must admit. The time may come, of course, when it will be sufficient to show need to get any kind of a job that individual vanity suggests; a wife and four hungry children will entitle the holder to teach calculus or astronomy or whatever his little heart fancies, and a college will become a mere dispensary for cripples of the social order.” He spoke roughly, with feeling, having come up the hard way himself; yet there was a certain sparring note in his voice suggestive of sport for sport’s sake; he baited Domna for the whim of it.
“Other things being equal,” she retorted sharply. “Please don’t distort what I say.” The others sat back, with a certain sense of relief from responsibility, prepared to enjoy la boxe; none of them, including the participants, would know what they thought of this matter till the winner had been certified. “Many factors,” declared Domna, “are involved in a decision to let an employee go. Professional competence; the so-called personal equation; the employee’s need and future prospects; and finally what one might name the exemplary effects of such a decision. If Maynard lets Henry go, how many other college presidents, seeing what Maynard as a professional progressive has done, will cease to feel any qualms about proceeding against their own Communists, ex-Communists, quasi-Communists? This isn’t a permanent situation in which to be a Communist will guarantee eternal carte blanche to teach and conduct oneself as one pleases, but an emergency in which any individual weakening of principle is likely to produce a landslide. Each of us knows from his own inner experience how tenuous are the restraints of conscience, how pliant to mass opinion and precedent, to the justification by numbers. If Maynard is permitted to fire Henry, without protest or challenge, fifty other heads will roll.”
Furness made a light gesture of disparagement. “Those unfortunate cases,” he said lazily, “will have to be decided on their merits. No action would ever be undertaken if one could envision all its consequences. Is Marx responsible for Stalin or Christ for the history of the Church? Very likely so, but the thought is a deterrent to virtue. Maynard’s responsibility, I should say, began and ended here at Jocelyn. To cultivate his own garden here and maintain the teaching standard is to set a sufficient example. To debase the teaching standard—however low you may think it already—on behalf of some vague social need would be an act of malfeasance, like the watering of stock or the currency. The same principle might be extended to our students: how often have we heard the argument that a student needs to graduate?”
“I believe I’ve heard it from your lips, Howard,” remarked Alma, smiling. Howard grinned. “Guilty,” he agreed, “guilty. You will never hear it again. It betrays a certain contempt for our diploma, as I think you yourself have argued.”
Domna twisted her hands. “I think I would not graduate an incompetent student merely because of his need to please his family.” Aristide cleared his throat. “There have been cases, however, Domna, where we have done so, where we have taken into consideration an unfortunate family situation, a browbeating father or grandparent and a wholly dependent offspring. I believe only last term,” he pursued, in an undertone, “you and I contrived to pass a certain student who was in danger of a nervous breakdown.” Domna bit her lip. “Yes, I know,” she murmured, “but that was really a marginal case. In general, the principle of need should not be governing, unless other factors are equal. Howard is trying to push us into a position where we will admit that our support of Henry rests on his incapacity. That isn’t so, really. If he were honestly a poor teacher, we would be wrong to indorse him. We would try to find some other means of solving his family problems, help him with money or fit him into some other position, where he could use his capacities better. . . .” Her earnest voice faltered, as she saw the magnitude of the difficulty. Furness was smiling. “And if he didn’t wish, Domna, to be ‘fitted into some other position’ but wished only to teach literature under our aegis?” His voice was triumphant; he had isolated what he believed to be the crux of Hen’s position. “No teacher,” replied Domna, flushing, “who wishes to teach can be totally bad, I suppose. . . .”
“Ah,” exclaimed Furness, “so that if Henry were only relatively bad, you would still wish us to sign a petition for him?” “Not on the same basis,” she said stoutly. “You keep distorting what I say, like a lawyer.” Yet she knew that he had not distorted, but on the contrary clarified a thing she did not care to have clear. “In any case,” she cried, “he is not relatively bad.” “Supposing,” suggested Furness, “there was no question of Cathy’s health or of Communism, would you still defend him? Would you insist that the college keep him on his merits if he would have no difficulty in getting a job elsewhere?” “Yes!” she cried, emphatically, suddenly relaxing and pushing her hair back; this, she believed, was what she really thought; Furness himself had shown her a way out of the corner he had driven her into. “Yes, I would,” she announced, “for the sake of the college, if not for his.”
“In that case,” argued Furness, “if you really believe that, why don’t you stick to your guns? Why bring in all this stuff about Cathy and Hen’s being a prisoner of the Party, if you really think it’s a straight case of merit going unrewarded? Have the courage of your convictions; go ahead and convince me that he’s a wonderful teacher!” He looked around the room pleasantly.
Domna gritted her teeth. “I did not bring in this stuff, as you call it, about Cathy and Communism. It is there. It has to be reckoned with. If you want, it provides additional reason for not firing Henry. Other things being equal. There is nothing strange or unusual about what I’m saying. It’s a rule we invoke every day in ordinary practice. If there are two candidates for a job, say, in a woman’s college, and both applicants are of equal or near-equal merit, we take the woman, since she lacks the man’s chance of being hired by a men’s college. Or a Jewish college, like Brandeis, will naturally hire Jewish applicants, since most other colleges discriminate against them.”
“And is that a cure for discrimination, Domna?” asked Furness, gently.
The friendliness of the tone troubled her. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I see what you mean. You are trying to say that a merit system, honestly applied, is a better cure for these evils. That if Vassar were to hire men without discrimination, and Fisk or Howard to hire whites, this might provide a superior example for Harvard or Columbia. That, as it is, Harvard feels no moral pressure to hire women, since they have their own colleges, and the same is true of the Negroes and the Jews.” Furness nodded. “A very profitable discussion,” said Aristide. “I often think we should keep minutes. However,” he glanced at his pocket-watch, “I believe we have strayed from the point.” “Domna doesn’t think so,” observed Howard, tenderly. “She’s been driven to see that she is really asking Maynard to keep Hen on as a charity. This is all very well for Hen, but sets a poor precedent.” He got up and stretched. “Let’s all go to Gus’s for a drink.” “But nothing is settled,” protested Van Tour. “It’s settled between Domna and me,” insisted Howard, winking, and putting an arm around her. Domna frowned and drew away. “No,” she said coldly, “it is not. You have not persuaded me at all that I regard Henry as a charity or that I am asking Maynard to discriminate in favor of him on account of his Communist past. If I were, you might be right in principle that such a policy might be bad for the progressive colleges since it amounts to a political means test in reverse.” She spoke very rapidly; her forte was not original thought but the ability to return someone else’s suggestion fully made up and labeled, like a pharmacist’s compound. “Certain colleges we could name have been subjected to a political deep-freeze by the fear of firing deserving Communists or fellow-travelers. But this is not the case here. I would argue, as I said, for Henry’s retention if the political question had never been introduced. In fact—” she hurriedly broke off, for what she had been about to say was that she, for one, would accept Furness’ challenge and narrow the issue, gladly, to one of intellectual merit.
Yet she checked herself, thinking of Henry. There were many here, like Van Tour, she assured herself, whose support for Henry must derive from a vicarious sense of political outrage, who were not large-minded enough to defend him if they did not suspect behind the scenes a conspiracy to displace him, a conspiracy of powerful interests to which they might fall the next victims. She had no right, she stoutly argued, to narrow the issues of the case to suit her individual fastidiousness. Moreover, she had been secretly struck by the perspicuity of Howard’s analysis and was wholeheartedly amazed and grateful that the others had let themselves be diverted by her from what was technically a very telling argument: did Mulcahy, after all, have an intellectual claim on a college whose axioms he openly derided? Did she, for that matter, or Alma have the right to put themselves forward as guardians of the college’s interest, when, strictly speaking, the college’s interest, as conceived by its President and trustees, was daily contravened by the whole group of them, who quite frankly preached to their classes the necessity of intellectual discipline, order, historical background, and who, in certain cases, had gone so far as to recommend to certain bright students that they transfer to a traditional college, where they stood some chance of getting a thoroughgoing formal education?
Humanly speaking, of course, she and Alma had the same right as anybody else to interfere in what was none of their business, the duty, in fact, of the bystander to interfere between father and son, employer and employee, state and subject, to protect elementary human rights and secure fair treatment for the weaker. Yet today’s fashion was to disguise this moral feeling in an expedient garb, to show Maynard Hoar that it was to the interest of the college not to fire Mulcahy, that is, to attribute to oneself a wholly specious sentiment of concern for the college’s welfare, as certain labor leaders fondly presented themselves as capitalism’s best friend, in short, to “sell” a moral argument in terms of a higher utility.
All this was quite repugnant to Domna, yet, having persuaded herself that it was necessary, on Henry’s behalf, to use every available means, play on every chord of sympathy, she felt Cathy’s contingent death hang over her, like a sword of judgment, if she permitted herself to reason in a matter that ought not to allow of reason but only of total adherence. And yet she no longer, she shamefacedly discovered, thought of Cathy as a person but as an opinion to be propitiated. It was only the spectacle of Furness, who stood before her, grinning, a horrid cautionary example of the consequences of cool logic and detachment, that encouraged her to push aside her doubts.
“What I am trying to say,” she blurted out, “is that the case is complex. You can’t reduce it to a single question of merit, but merit enters into it. Can’t we agree, Howard, that Henry as a teacher has sufficient merit not to be let out when his wife may die of the shock of it?” Touching the simple verities of the case, she smiled at him, certain that he would at last give in. “Come on, Howard,” urged Van Tour, “you can’t quarrel with that. Let’s give him our vote of confidence and get it over with, for God’s sake.” He pulled on his big overshoes and stamped impatiently on the floor. “Do you want a formal vote?” asked Alma. They all looked to Furness, expectantly. He stood, tying his blue muffler, surveying them with a queer, sad, impudent expression, teetering slightly on the balls of his feet, as though to hold the group on tenterhooks. “How about it?” said Van Tour; for the first time, he divined that Furness might really vote against them. “Sorry, children,” said Furness, with a little tightening of the voice, as he adjusted the folds of the muffler, “I can’t do it. You’ll have to count me out.” The faces watching him slowly fell, in a graduated series; Domna’s was the last to give up. “Oh, Howard,” she softly remonstrated, looking him searchingly in the eyes. “Sorry to be an old fogey,” he apologized. “A matter of principle, I’m afraid.” He made a jerky half-bow.
“Well, come on, what are we waiting for? We can outvote him,” proclaimed Van Tour, as everyone else hesitated. Aristide intervened. “I strongly advise, Alma,” he said, “that you observe the principle of unanimity, as we’ve done in all cases touching personnel. In our own department, we’ve found it a source of discord to carry any personnel decision over the dissent of an individual member. The effects on teamwork have been quite disquieting.” Alma nodded. “I move no vote,” she suggested. Van Tour bristled. “What has Aristide got to do with this?” he complained. “I thought he was here as an observer to carry the sense of the meeting back to his own branch of the division.” “I am not voting,” Aristide pointed out. “And Domna, strictly speaking, has only half a vote, since she teaches only the one course in your department.” Van Tour threw up his hands. “That cooks it,” he declared, despondently. “What’s the use of voting? Since Alma’s gone over to the enemy, that leaves one and a half to two. What about Ellison?” he recalled. “Where is he anyway?” “In bed,” replied Alma, shortly. “All in favor of no vote?” She and Furness promptly raised their hands. “Opposed?” Van Tour waved his hand vigorously and signaled to Domna, who, however, made no move and merely stared at her fingers enlaced tightly in her lap. She was too dispirited to vote and moreover agreed with Aristide that unanimity was desirable, but a new reluctance to offend Henry made her unwilling to put this on record. “Carried,” announced Alma.
“Good-bye, Hen,” said Van Tour bitterly, jerking on an Eskimo jacket with a big fur-lined hood. He glared at Furness as though he wished to strike him. Alma lit a cheroot. “Domna,” she called. “Before you go, I have something to show you.” She hurried over to the desk and picked up a long white envelope. “My letter to Maynard,” she said proudly. “Penned this afternoon.” The men, on their way out, paused in uneasy curiosity. “What do you mean, this afternoon?” demanded Furness loudly, sensing some animadversion on himself. Domna had opened the unsealed envelope; her eyes ran over the typed lines and then rose to meet Alma’s, a look of admiration in them; Alma, whom she liked and somewhat feared, was always a jump beyond her. “You knew how it would come out?” she said, marveling. Alma nodded. “Of course.” She glanced at Furness. “What did you expect of him, forsooth?” “Henry predicted it,” Domna whispered. Van Tour was peering over Domna’s shoulder. “You want him to see it?” the girl asked. “Why not?” said Alma, carelessly. She folded her arms and watched them. Consy gave a cry of dismay. “Alma’s resigned,” he exclaimed in horror. Aristide blanched. Furness utterly lost his self-possession. “But you should have told me,” he repeated in a peculiar tone of injury mingled with placation, “you should have told me, Alma; you should have told me, darling.” He swayed as he stood before her, as though he meant to fall down at her feet. Alma surveyed him coldly and put an arm around Domna. “I had no wish to coerce your decision, Howard, or to bargain with you. You voted as you saw best. And my own decision is final; whatever Maynard chooses to do, I shall not stay here any longer.”