DOMNA, WHEN Henry had left her, turned on a guilty impulse sharply to her right and made for Linden Hall, where Alma had her apartment. She was going to confess to Alma the thing she had just done and purge her soul of the falsity in which Mulcahy had left her. It seemed to her that she had committed a very unfriendly act: the embarrassing truth was that it had been she, just as she had said, who had first alarmed the department with the prattle of Mulcahy’s student, the pale, anxious, little McKay girl, who had recently attached herself to her, hanging about after French class, waiting to walk with her to the post-office and confiding to her all the worries and scruples of an over-conscientious nature.
The burden of this conventional child’s avowal was that she was afraid of Dr. Mulcahy, who was making her read Ulysses, which shocked her, pumping her about her other teachers, filling her up with all sorts of menacing theories about the artist as arch-conspirator, demanding that she and her friends baby-sit free of charge and do all sorts of menial work for Mrs. Mulcahy, who spent a great deal of time at the hairdresser’s or in her bedroom, lying down, writing poetry. According to this wide-eyed Sheila, some of the boys in her circle were “slaves” to Dr. Mulcahy: he was coaching them to play a disruptive part at the poetry conference and running them ragged in his household so that they had no time to study and were finding themselves conditioned in all their courses but his. This gush of confidence imparted twice a week had in it something of awe and pristine wonder that had tempted Miss Rejnev to listen to it, at first, from a sense of intellectual duty—to Sheila, Dr. Mulcahy was a phenomenon, like thunder, for which she sought an adult explanation that would restore tranquillity to her cosmos. And the child herself, in her timid way—as Domna, torn between amusement and solicitude, related to Alma and Considine—had been groping toward understanding while holding tight to the rail of analogy: the boys revolving around Mulcahy in charmed servitude, she breathlessly discovered, reminded her of the followers of Ulysses turned into swine by Circe’s spell. Hence, in a certain fashion, it was conceded, the experience of Mulcahy had been valuable to her, as the beginning of her mental life.
One scene, however, described by Sheila, had made Domna and her colleagues very uncomfortable: an account of how Mulcahy, coming home one afternoon, had endeavored to make a boy confess to breaking a serving-dish which in fact he had not broken, sending him out of the room to “think it over,” and agreeing grandly to accept his apology when the boy remained uncommunicative. Such a scene, nevertheless, they all acknowledged, belonged, all too horribly, to the purlieus of private life; it was not the department’s business to regulate Mulcahy’s personal relations with his students nor to pry into the details of his hold on them. “They love him, Miss Rejnev,” Sheila explained simply, when asked why they stood for such treatment. “He flatters them, you mean,” sharply corrected Mrs. Fortune, who had been detailed to be present at this interview. And yet the two teachers, once the frightened girl was gone, had exchanged looks of bafflement—they believed in love and its inviolable sanctities. It was the same with Consy Van Tour’s excited report that he had seen Mulcahy borrow money from a student to pay for a huge bag of groceries in the village store, so heavy, affirmed Consy, that the student staggered as he carried it out to the car. This was not the department’s affair either—there was no college rule forbidding loans from students to faculty—and, for all anyone knew, this might have been an isolated instance. Such insights into Mulcahy’s personal life fell under the heading of gossip, and not only Domna, but her two friends and Aristide, to whom these stories were confided (eliciting an “Inouï!” and a bulging of the big, flat eyes), felt somewhat guilty for dwelling on them. Yet it seemed as if everything conspired, in this particular period, to bring to their attention damaging facts about Mulcahy, which rained on them like reproaches; and this concurred, very awkwardly, with a sudden coolness and haughtiness shown by Mulcahy to all of them, a coolness to which Domna held the clue, which she felt that, in all honor, she ought not to divulge. And the fact that she had not, despite greater and greater provocations—including a most damnable attempt to woo her favorite girl-student away from her—said a word to anybody but the Bentkoops of her unpleasant little discovery gave her, she was persuaded, a certain leeway in listening, not only to Sheila’s tales, but to the tales brought to her ears by every little bird on the campus.
It would seem, she inwardly protested, that she had been singled out by fatality to learn the worst about Mulcahy, as though in punishment for her credulity. Hardly a day passed, she swore, but that some student tapped on her door, to complain that Dr. Mulcahy was not in his office for his tutorial and did she know where he was, or, if it were not a student, it was the librarian, asking if she would speak to Hen about sending in his reserve list on time. There was, as she knew, a natural explanation for these recurrences: it was supposed by the ignorant that she and Mulcahy were still friendly, and those who needed to complain of him had found, by experience, that it was pleasanter to do so through an intermediary. Hence, it had fallen to her lot to be, where Mulcahy was concerned, the bearer of bad tidings, which soured their relations still further. She had no doubt that he presumed that she was spying on him—a warrantable conclusion from the evidence. Therefore, as March had worn on, with its flurry of spring colds, leading to unavoidable absences, latenesses and so on, she had delegated the task of mediation to Alma, who at once fell under Henry’s displeasure, and at length to Aristide, who sped back and forth on his errands of conciliation, with the invisibility and discretion of Hermes, winging between mortals and Olympus. All these reprimands and reminders ought, of course, to have fallen to Furness to deliver, but a conspiracy of delicacy spared him, so that he alone of the original group was unaware of the real state of affairs and even supposed, as the three guiltily recognized from remarks of his casually thrown out, that Hen had finally buckled down to the job.
And Domna and her two colleagues were unable to determine, reluctantly listening to Furness, what color their own affrighted imagination was lending to the picture of Hen’s delinquency. Was he worse, as it certainly seemed to them, or were they merely conscious, awkwardly, of certain features of his behavior which they had firmly overlooked in the past? And if he was better, if he was now “behaving himself,” as Furness lightly noted, then what must he have been in the past, when they had all so staunchly underwritten him? The very thought made their reason quake. And the fact that he had drawn away from them, that he sometimes indeed seemed positively unfriendly, as Consy declared, aghast, gave their investigations a certain posthumous character, as though, like Proust’s Marcel, they were tracking down infidelities of a lover dead and beyond the grasp of their reproaches.
The stories they had inevitably begun to hear of the goings-on in the little house on the hill, of Cathy’s extravagances, of the close friendship with Ellison, made them, in fact, wonder whether this was the same Henry. “It doesn’t sound like the Henry I knew,” Alma kept repeating, as though her own Henry had strayed from her, like a household cat. And the two women, in particular, sometimes fell victims to the temptation of tracing the faults they now saw in Henry directly to Ellison’s influence and of dating Henry’s deterioration from the day he threw off their soft yoke. Hence, it was only natural that they should fasten on Sheila’s report of the deep-laid plans for the poetry conference as a pretext for bringing Henry to book, censuring the insufferable Ellison, and restoring order to the department under their benevolent tyranny; and they found no difficulty in enlisting the indignation of the gentle, public-spirited Consy, whose Writers’ Workshop students had told him enough already, he asserted, to freeze his balls blue.
From this moment, they all three ceased to feel guilty and became animated by a spirit of public interest. Up to then, though greatly disturbed by the stories brought to them by Domna from Sheila, which were corroborated by their own canvassing among Mulcahy’s students, they had felt that reluctance to intervene that characterized them as true liberals. They were conscious of owing a duty to the students to protect them from the eccentricities of a teacher whom they themselves had sponsored, but they could not be sure how far this duty extended and where it conflicted with their duty to Mulcahy as a fellow-being with certain gifts and certain handicaps, for which due allowance must be made. There was also, they could not help but feel, a duty to themselves, a duty not to spy, not to be underhanded, not to encourage informers or welcome irresponsible gossip, but this duty, likewise, was in conflict with both the other two, for how were they to determine the limits of their responsibilities if they did not inform themselves precisely as to what was going on?
But the poetry conference, they had all agreed, was an entirely different matter. They owed it to the college as a whole, to the poets, to the national cultural scene, not to permit Henry, led on by Ellison, to abuse a trust that had been voted to him by the Literature department. Only Domna, with her anarchistic sympathies, showed, at the last moment, a tendency to balk at the idea of a departmental confrontation or showdown, but the others had quickly overridden her. It would be better to seek safety in numbers, they argued; to send Aristide as their deputy with such a commission as this one would not be fair to Aristide. And when Domna, almost inaudibly, volunteered to go herself to Henry, she was grateful when the others cried her down. “You mustn’t think of it,” they exclaimed tenderly, gazing at the fragile girl. “Think what happened to Bentkoop.” For Bentkoop, it seemed, had ventured to remonstrate with Henry on some matter touching a student; and just the week before the amazing story began to circulate that John had tried to run down Mulcahy on the streets of Lancaster, a story that nobody believed but that everybody, Mulcahy’s enemies in particular, repeated for a few days for the fun of it—it was said to be attested by a student and there were a number of variants in currency: that it was not Mulcahy but Mrs. Mulcahy, that it was one of the children, that it was the other way around, that Mulcahy had tried to run down Bentkoop.
Domna had given in, with a rueful backward glance at what Tolstoy would have thought of this performance; she was teaching Anna Karenina that week and had little doubt of his opinion. But she made no objection when it was decided to call in Furness, like the family doctor, of whom Tolstoy also disapproved. Yet when Furness was summoned and made privy to all their fears regarding the poetry conference, everybody, including Domna, experienced great relief. She had been wondering in secret whether they had not been making a mountain out of a molehill; but Furness listened to what they told him with a look of the gravest concern. To him, scandals were amusing only when they had become unavoidable, that is, after the fact; he anticipated them, so to speak, in retrospect.
And the fact that he had had no knowledge of these rumors that were spreading of boding indignities to elderly poets seemed to convince him of the existence of an emergency. He left Alma’s apartment in a state of spruce discomposure and telephoned back, almost at once, to say that his own researches among the students confirmed what the three had told him. The campus was seething with gossip; it had even reached the village. Mulcahy, to judge by the evidence, had been colossally indiscreet, talking not only to his students, but telling every local tradesman and repairman, in confidence, of the strategies of the poetry conference, which figured now in the local mind as an event like Armageddon, to be followed by Judgment and the final separation of the sheep from the goats. “They’re counting on seeing it in television,” he observed with a despairing laugh. This, in itself, had a certain professorial charm, to which Furness’ wit automatically responded, as to anything apocryphal or fabulous; but as head of the department, he admitted, he could not indulge his own taste. He was obliged to call a halt and play the old fogey. A private summons to a department meeting was already in Domna’s possession when Ellison played into the hands of the enemy by posting that absurd notice.
As Domna legged it up the worn stairs to Alma’s apartment, she was suddenly conscious, not only of a weakening of purpose, but of a wild, truant feeling of amusement and sympathy for the dreadful Mulcahy. “You know what Tolstoy would have said?” she demanded, bursting into the apartment. “He would have said we are all fools.” Alma came out of the kitchen in an apron, with her short, wiry hair tied up in a scarf. With her usual efficiency, she had already started cooking her supper. Seeing the single chop in the pan on the hot-plate, the frozen peas garishly bubbling in the copper saucepan beside it, the tray set with a woven straw mat, earthenware plate, large blue-green Mexican glass already filled with milk, Domna felt a light compunction toward the regularity of this woman’s life, so different from her own, which was ill-organized and haphazard like her moods. She herself, for example, could never have planned a series of hot menus around her solitude; she ate the same meal every night—an apple, some cheese, a roll, some salami—with the rare variation, after one of her aunt’s visits, of a can of cold borscht with sour cream and some pâté made by a Russian lady in New York. Even so, she had to force herself to do the dishes by deciding every night not to do them, which, as she pointed out to one of her tutees, was a homely illustration of Kierkegaardian freedom; by deciding not to do the dishes, she recovered her freedom to choose to do them. Her whole existence at Jocelyn had a transient and picnicky character, like that of a train trip on hard boards, in the European third class. The sizzling chop in Alma’s pan appalled her, as though it were a foretaste of eternity. It was Domna’s frailty, as a young and egoistic person, to experience in a heightened way a common subjective illusion, which was that her own life was free, determined only by voluntary choices, while the lives of other people around her were subject to harsh necessity. She was now under the impression that she pitied Alma very much, while in reality, on a sudden impulse, she somewhat scorned her.
“Why would he say that, Domna?” said Alma, indulgently, taking out a bottle of wine and two old-fashioned glasses and pouring them both a drink. She clicked down the heat under the chop and gently pushed the girl into the sitting-room. “Oh,” said Domna, impatiently, tossing the wine in her glass, “we are all so concerned with trivialities—this ridiculous poetry conference; why are we excited about it?” Alma looked grave. “You know,” continued Domna, lightly, “I have a new obsession. All the time, these days, I say to myself, ‘What would Tolstoy think?’ And you know, one always knows. One does not have to call him up on the telephone.” She laughed. “It’s not at all the same with Dostoievsky. I don’t give a damn what he thinks.” Alma leaned forward. “Perhaps that’s because Dostoievsky is the greater artist,” she said seriously. “It’s all there, in the novels; there’s no injunction to action, no trailing moral imperatives, no direct preaching, as they used to say; the morality’s inseparable from the form.” Domna shook her head. “You are wrong. Tolstoy is the greater artist, even in style, which is not important. But Dostoievsky wrote badly. He was slipshod, like a journalist or a popular crime-novelist. ‘Pyotr Stepanovitch flew into the room.’ Not that it matters.” Alma flung up her hands. “Ah,” she laughingly cried, “I hear the terrible things you tell your students. That Dostoievsky is good only for comedy. You’re very reckless, Domna. You ought to be very sure you’re right.” Domna felt a temptation to get into a literary argument; but she checked herself, watching Alma as she arranged her dinner on the tray. “No, thank you,” she said. “Nothing for me.” She hesitated. “I came here to make you a confession,” she said, smiling. “But I don’t seem to be able to do it.”
“A confession?” Alma’s face was troubled. “Yes,” said Domna, as if carelessly. “I’m afraid I’ve just done something rather awful.” “No!” exclaimed Alma, politely, but with a shade of uneasiness. “I don’t believe you could.” “Wait until you hear. Henry followed me just now, out of the meeting. He wanted me to tell him who was behind our démarche. I’m afraid I may have left him with the impression that it was you.” Alma gave a shrill cry of horror. “Domna!” she exclaimed. “I don’t believe you! How could you have done such a thing?” Domna dropped her eyes. “Purely from motives of self-protection, I’m afraid. The thing is that I don’t know whether I really did it or I didn’t.” Alma made a gesture of impatience; she dropped her fork on her plate with a loud clatter. “You see,” added Domna in a low voice. “I said it was I, after he said it was you. Taken together, this, I think, may have given the impression that I was lying in order to shield you.” She considered this formulation and quickly nodded. “Yes, I think that is right. I believe I may even have wanted to leave that impression. But, as I say, I am not sure. I find it quite impossible, I discover, to describe to you exactly what happened. My words become disobedient, like the vocal cords of a person who habitually sings off key. I thought I heard the truth for an instant; somewhere I think I can still hear it, very faintly, but it eludes me, like perfect pitch.” Her whole manner was peculiarly dégagé; she set her wine-glass down on the lowboy and began to button her coat. “Domna!” ordered Alma, pointing to the chair opposite her. “Sit down there this instant and tell me what happened, straightforwardly. No more hints, if you please, and leave the interpretation to me.”
Domna obeyed, with a slight shrug, observing, as she listened to her own words, as to a performance, that this “straightforward” account was extremely misleading—it left her in a better position than she knew herself to be in. But Alma appeared relieved. “You talked too much,” she conceded. “How could you have been so wobbly, Domna, as to let that man stand there and pump you? Couldn’t you at least have been silent, if you knew your own weakness? You ought to have turned on your heel the minute he accosted you with his questions.” Domna laughed. “You look on him as a seducer,” she suggested. “To me, he is more like Hamlet, with his soul-searching questions to Ophelia, ‘Are you honest?’ ” “Well, for that matter,” said Alma, “I think you were honest enough. Too much so. Has it occurred to you that you may have put your little friend, Sheila, in a pickle?” “Naturally,” agreed Domna. “But what am I to do? Must I go and confess to her also?” Alma failed to see that this question was intended ironically. “Of course not,” she said nervously. “You mustn’t think of such a thing. I already shudder to imagine what tales she must be bringing home to her parents.” She carried her tray out to the kitchen and put water on for her coffee. “And yet,” she pondered, returning, “I wonder whether we shouldn’t take measures to protect her, if Henry should be mad enough to try to trace her down through the files. Could we have her come to the department and petition for a change of tutor? You could take her on and she could shift to Aristide’s French section—no, that would be too crude. Oh, I rue the day, Domna, when you called us together to back that man.” The tea-kettle whistled and she hurried out to the kitchen. “And how we treated poor Howie!” Her voice rose above the whistle. “I blush for us in my bed of nights.”
“Howard was wrong,” said Domna, abruptly. “He was motivated by cynicism and hardness. And you know, Alma, I think that we are wrong now. That is what Tolstoy would tell us.” Alma laughed. “What would he advise us to do, Domna?” “Leave it alone,” called Domna. “It is all nonsense, you know, like worrying about balldresses and fans.” “Hardly that,” said Alma, coming into the room and handing Domna a cup of coffee rather coldly. “Yes, nonsense, Alma,” repeated Domna intensely. “What could Henry do to that wretched well-meaning little Sheila? He is not dangerous, you know.” “He could fail her,” said Alma, succinctly. “And so?” queried Domna, with a laugh. “To fail a course, is that so serious? She could make it up in the summer. None of our students would be damaged by a course of summer reading.” “You young monster,” said Alma, quizzically, shaking her head. “But the emotional experience, Domna,” she added on a rising note. “Think of the emotional experience for that soft, unformed little child.” Domna shrugged. “There are worse emotional experiences. Henry is an interesting man.” Alma pounced. “Look into your own soul, Domna. You’re simply minimizing the effects on Sheila to extenuate your own behavior.” Her dark eyes glowed; she leaned forward, with something in her aspect, thought Domna, of a fishing stork. “Examine your behavior, Domna,” she said coolly, folding her arms. “You come here to confess a mistake and you fall to condoning Henry, which is only an indirect way of condoning yourself for being weak with him.” Domna colored. “And yet what I say may be right,” she murmured. “I may have been led to truth through error.” Alma tapped impatiently on the table but Domna went on. “This poetry conference, think of it, are we not being nonsensical? Who can be hurt by it if it turns into a fracas? And there will be no fracas. It is all some mad vain delusion in the minds of Ellison and Mulcahy, which we pretend to be frightened by for mad vain reasons of our own. And if we do not pull back and examine we will find ourselves, precisely, doing what Henry fears of us—leading a crusade to force Maynard to fire him.” She stood up and rebuttoned her coat. Alma looked thoughtful. “It’s something we must be on guard against,” she admitted, rising. “Heaven knows,” she interjected, alarmedly, “I should not like to hurt poor Cathy and those children. Thank you,” she exclaimed, after a moment’s reflection, and leaned over and gave Domna a quick, warm hug. Domna responded. “You know,” she murmured, “I sometimes think Henry knows us better than we know ourselves. He forces us to choose whenever we see him. He asks only one question, ‘Are you with me or against me?’ ” She lifted her eyes and smiled. Alma walked her to the door; they stood for a moment, arms interlinked and swinging. “That, I suppose,” mused Alma, “that imperative, I mean, must be the heritage of that unfortunate political past of his. I often wonder how he came to it. I was very close once myself, Domna, and yet never, never!” Domna felt a vibrant shudder run through Alma’s frame. “It was a question of my freedom, I suppose,” Alma continued, with a faraway, firm look in her eyes. Domna’s lips parted and closed again, with reluctance. She had been about to make a suggestion but Alma’s dreamy, romantic expression restrained her, just as John Bentkoop, on a previous occasion, had been restrained, though Domna did not know it, by the belief in her own eyes.