Stoner

Lomax waved genially. "Come on in. We're just breaking up."

Stoner came in and pretended to examine the rows of books in their cases as Lomax and the student said their last words. When the student left, Stoner sat in the chair that he had vacated. Lomax looked at him inquiringly.

"It's about a student," Stoner said. "Charles Walker. He said you sent him around to me."

Lomax placed the tips of his fingers together and contemplated them as he nodded. "Yes. I believe I did suggest that he might profit from your seminar--what is it?--in the Latin tradition."

"Can you tell me something about him?"

Lomax looked up from his hands and gazed at the ceiling, his lower lip thrust out judiciously. "A good student. A superior student, I might say. He is doing his dissertation on Shelley and the Hellenistic Ideal. It promises to be brilliant, really brilliant. It will not be what some would call"--he hestitated delicately over the word--"sound, but it is most imaginative. Did you have a particular reason for asking?"

"Yes," Stoner said. "He behaved rather foolishly in the seminar today. I was just wondering if I should attach any special significance to it."

Lomax's early geniality had disappeared, and the more familiar mask of irony had slipped over him. "Ah, yes," he said with a frosty smile. "The gaucherie and foolishness of the young. Walker is, for reasons you may understand, rather awkwardly shy and therefore at times defensive and rather too assertive. As do we all, he has his problems; but his scholarly and critical abilities are not, I hope, to be judged in the light of his rather understandable psychic disturbances." He looked directly at Stoner and said with cheerful malevolence, "As you may have noticed, he is a cripple."

"It may be that," Stoner said thoughtfully. He sighed and got up from the chair. "I suppose it's really too soon for me to be concerned. I just wanted to check with you."

Suddenly Lomax's voice was tight and near trembling with suppressed anger. "You will find him to be a superior student. I assure you, you will find him to be an excellent student."

Stoner looked at him for a moment, frowning perplexedly. Then he nodded and went out of the room.

The seminar met weekly. For the first several meetings Walker interrupted the class with questions and comments that were so bewilderingly far off the mark that Stoner was at a loss as to how to meet them. Soon Walker's questions and statements were greeted with laughter or pointedly disregarded by the students themselves; and after a few weeks he spoke not at all but sat with a stony indignation and an air of outraged integrity as the seminar surged around him. It would, Stoner thought, have been amusing had there not been something so naked in Walker's outrage and resentment.

But despite Walker it was a successful seminar, one of the best classes Stoner had ever taught. Almost from the first, the implications of the subject caught the students, and they all had that sense of discovery that comes when one feels that the subject at hand lies at the center of a much larger subject, and when one feels intensely that a pursuit of the subject is likely to lead--where, one does not know. The seminar organized itself, and the students so involved themselves that Stoner himself became simply one of them, searching as diligently as they. Even the auditor--the young instructor who was stopping over at Columbia while finishing her dissertation--asked if she might report on a seminar topic; she thought that she had come upon something that might be of value to the others. Her name was Katherine Driscoll, and she was in her late twenties. Stoner had never really noticed her until she talked to him after class about the report and asked him if he would be willing to read her dissertation when she got it finished. He told her that he welcomed the report and that he would be glad to read her dissertation.

The seminar reports were scheduled for the second half of the semester, after the Christmas vacation. Walker's report on "Hellenism and the Medieval Latin Tradition" was due early in the term, but he kept delaying it, explaining to Stoner his difficulty in obtaining books he needed, which were not available in the University library.

It had been understood that Miss Driscoll, being an auditor, would give her report after the credit students had given theirs; but on the last day Stoner had allowed for the seminar reports, two weeks before the end of the semester, Walker again begged that he be allowed one more week; he had been ill, his eyes had been troubling him, and a crucial book had not arrived from inter-library loan. So Miss Driscoll gave her paper on the day vacated by Walker's defection.