Stoner

Her paper was entitled "Donatus and Renaissance Tragedy." Her concentration was upon Shakespeare's use of the Donatan tradition, a tradition that had persisted in the grammars and handbooks of the Middle Ages. A few moments after she began, Stoner knew that the paper would be good, and he listened with an excitement that he had not felt for a long time. After she had finished the paper, and the class had discussed it, he detained her for a few moments while the other students went out of the room.

"Miss Driscoll, I just want to say--" He paused, and for an instant a wave of awkwardness and self-consciousness came over him. She was looking at him inquiringly with large dark eyes; her face was very white against the severe black frame of her hair, drawn tight and caught in a small bun at the back. He continued, "I just want to say that your paper was the best discussion I know of the subject, and I'm grateful that you volunteered to give it."

She did not reply. Her expression did not change, but Stoner thought for a moment that she was angry; something fierce glinted behind her eyes. Then she blushed furiously and ducked her head, whether in anger or acknowledgment Stoner did not know, and hurried away from him. Stoner walked slowly out of the room, disquieted and puzzled, fearful that in his clumsiness he might somehow have offended her.

He had warned Walker as gently as he could that it would be necessary for him to deliver his paper the next Wednesday if he was to receive credit for the course; as he half expected, Walker became coldly and respectfully angry at the warning, repeated the various conditions and difficulties that had delayed him, and assured Stoner that there was no need to worry, that his paper was nearly completed.

On that last Wednesday, Stoner was delayed several minutes in his office by a desperate undergraduate who wished to be assured that he would receive a C in the sophomore survey course, so that he would not be kicked out of his fraternity. Stoner hurried downstairs and entered the basement seminar room a little out of breath; he found Charles Walker seated at his desk, looking imperiously and somberly at the small group of students. It was apparent that he was engaged in some private fantasy. He turned to Stoner and gazed at him haughtily, as if he were a professor putting down a rowdy freshman. Then Walker's expression broke and he said, "We were just about to start without you"--he paused at the last minute, let a smile through his lips, bobbed his head, and added, so that Stoner would know a joke was being made-- "sir."

Stoner looked at him for a moment and then turned to the class. "I'm sorry I'm late. As you know, Mr. Walker is to deliver his seminar paper today upon the topic of 'Hellenism and the Medieval Latin Tradition.'" And he found a seat in the first row, next to Katherine Driscoll.

Charles Walker fiddled for a moment with the sheaf of papers on the desk before him and allowed the remoteness to creep back into his face. He tapped the forefinger of his right hand on his manuscript and looked toward the corner of the room away from where Stoner and Katherine Driscoll sat, as if he were waiting for something. Then, glancing every now and then at the sheaf of papers on the desk, he began.

"Confronted as we are by the mystery of literature, and by its inenarrable power, we are behooved to discover the source of the power and mystery. And yet, finally, what can avail? The work of literature throws before us a profound veil which we cannot plumb. And we are but votaries before it, helpless in its sway. Who would have the temerity to lift that veil aside, to discover the undiscoverable, to reach the unreachable? The strongest of us are but the puniest weaklings, are but tinkling cymbals and sounding brass, before the eternal mystery."

His voice rose and fell, his right hand went out with its fingers curled supplicatingly upward, and his body swayed to the rhythm of his words; his eyes rolled slightly upward, as if he were making an invocation. There was something grotesquely familiar in what he said and did. And suddenly Stoner knew what it was. This was Hollis Lomax--or, rather, a broad caricature of him, which came unsuspected from the caricaturer, a gesture not of contempt or dislike, but of respect and love.