Stoner

"Act Three, Scene Four," said Masters. "And so providence, or society, or fate, or whatever name you want to give it, has created this hovel for us, so that we can go in out of the storm. It's for us that the University exists, for the dispossessed of the world; not for the students, not for the selfless pursuit of knowledge, not for any of the reasons that you hear. We give out the reasons, and we let a few of the ordinary ones in, those that would do in the world; but that's just protective coloration. Like the church in the Middle Ages, which didn't give a damn about the laity or even about God, we have our pretenses in order to survive. And we shall survive--because we have to."

Finch shook his head admiringly. "You sure make us sound bad, Dave."

"Maybe I do," Masters said. "But bad as we are, we're better than those on the outside, in the muck, the poor bastards of the world. We do no harm, we say what we want, and we get paid for it; and that's a triumph of natural virtue, or pretty damn close to it."

Masters leaned back from the table, indifferent, no longer concerned with what he had said.

Gordon Finch cleared his throat. "Well, now," he said earnestly. "You may have something in what you say, Dave. But I think you go too far. I really do."

Stoner and Masters smiled at each other, and they spoke no more of the question that evening. But for years afterward, at odd moments, Stoner remembered what Masters had said; and though it brought him no vision of the University to which he had committed himself, it did reveal to him something about his relationship to the two men, and it gave him a glimpse of the corrosive and unspoiled bitterness of youth.

On May 7, 1915, a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania, with a hundred and fourteen American passengers on board; by the end of 1916 submarine warfare by the Germans was unrestricted, and relations between the United States and Germany steadily worsened. In February 1917 President Wilson broke off diplomatic relations. On April 6 a state of war was declared by Congress to exist between Germany and the United States.

With that declaration, thousands of young men across the nation, as if relieved that the tension of uncertainty had finally been broken, besieged the recruiting stations that had been hastily set up some weeks before. Indeed, hundreds of young men had not been able to wait for America's intervention and had as early as 1915 signed up for duty with the Royal Canadian forces or as ambulance drivers for one of the European allied armies. A few of the older students at the University had done so; and although William Stoner had not known any of these, he heard their legendary names with increasing frequency as the months and weeks drew on to the moment that they all knew must eventually come.

War was declared on a Friday, and although classes remained scheduled the following week, few students or professors made a pretense of meeting them. They milled about in the halls and gathered in small groups, murmuring in hushed voices. Occasionally the tense quietness erupted into near violence; twice there were general anti-German demonstrations, in which students shouted incoherently and waved American flags. Once there was a brief-lived demonstration against one of the professors, an old and bearded teacher of Germanic languages, who had been born in Munich and who as a youth had attended the University of Berlin. But when the professor met the angry and flushed little group of students, blinked in bewilderment, and held out his thin, shaking hands to them, they disbanded in sullen confusion.

During those first days after the declaration of war Stoner also suffered a confusion, but it was profoundly different from that which gripped most of the others on the campus. Though he had talked about the war in Europe with the older students and instructors, he had never quite believed in it; and now that it was upon him, upon them all, he discovered within himself a vast reserve of indifference. He resented the disruption which the war forced upon the University; but he could find in himself no very strong feelings of patriotism, and he could not bring himself to hate the Germans.

But the Germans were there to be hated. Once Stoner came upon Gordon Finch talking to a group of older faculty members; Finch's face was twisted, and he was speaking of the "Huns" as if he were spitting on the floor. Later, when he approached Stoner in the large office which half a dozen of the younger instructors shared, Finch's mood had shifted; feverishly jovial, he clapped Stoner on the shoulder.