Stoner

But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought; he had given it to the knowledge that had been revealed to him--how many years ago?--by Archer Sloane; he had given it to Edith, in those first blind foolish days of his courtship and marriage; and he had given it to Katherine, as if it had never been given before. He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.

He could not think of himself as old. Sometimes, in the morning when he shaved, he looked at his image in the glass and felt no identity with the face that stared back at him in surprise, the eyes clear in a grotesque mask; it was as if he wore, for an obscure reason, an outrageous disguise, as if he could, if he wished, strip away the bushy white eyebrows, the rumpled white hair, the flesh that sagged around the sharp bones, the deep lines that pretended age.

Yet his age, he knew, was not pretense. He saw the sickness of the world and of his own country during the years after the great war; he saw hatred and suspicion become a kind of madness that swept across the land like a swift plague; he saw young men go again to war, marching eagerly to a senseless doom, as if in the echo of a nightmare. And the pity and sadness he felt were so old, so much a part of his age, that he seemed to himself nearly untouched.

The years went swiftly, and he was hardly aware of their passing. In the spring of 1954 he was sixty-three years old; and he suddenly realized that he had at the most four years of teaching left to him. He tried to see beyond that time; he could not see, and had no wish to do so.

That fall he received a note from Gordon Finch's secretary, asking him to drop by to see the dean whenever it was convenient. He was busy, and it was several days before he found a free afternoon.

Every time he saw Gordon Finch, Stoner was conscious of a small surprise at how little he had aged. A year younger than Stoner, he looked no more than fifty. He was wholly bald, his face was heavy and unlined, and it glowed with an almost cherubic health; his step was springy, and in these later years he had begun to affect a casualness of dress; he wore colorful shirts and odd jackets.

He seemed embarrassed that afternoon when Stoner came in to see him. They talked casually for a few moments; Finch asked him about Edith's health and mentioned that his own wife, Caroline, had been talking just the other day about how they all ought to get together again. Then he said, "Time. My God, how it flies!"

Stoner nodded.

Finch sighed abruptly. "Well," he said, "I guess we've got to talk about it. You'll be--sixty-five next year. I suppose we ought to be making some plans."

Stoner shook his head. "Not right away. I intend to take advantage of the two-year option, of course."

"I figured you would," Finch said and leaned back in his chair. "Not me. I have three years to go and I'm getting out. I think sometimes about what I've missed, the places I haven't been to, and--hell, Bill, life's too short. Why don't you get out too? Think of all the time--"

"I wouldn't know what to do with it," Stoner said. "I've never learned."

"Well, hell," Finch said. "This day and age, sixty-five's pretty young. There's time to learn things that--"

"It's Lomax, isn't it? He's putting the squeeze on you."

Finch grinned. "Sure. What did you expect?"

Stoner was silent for a moment. Then he said, "You tell Lomax that I wouldn't talk to you about it. Tell him that I've become so cantankerous and ornery in my old age that you can't do a thing with me. That he's going to have to do it himself."

Finch laughed and shook his head. "By God, I will. After all these years, maybe you two old bastards will unbend a little."

But the confrontation did not take place at once, and when it did--in the middle of the second semester, in March--it did not take the form that Stoner expected. Once again he was requested to appear at the dean's office; a time was specified, and urgency was hinted.

Stoner came in a few minutes late. Lomax was already there; he sat stiffly in front of Finch's desk; there was an empty chair beside him. Stoner walked slowly across the room and sat down. He turned his head and looked at Lomax; Lomax stared imperturbably in front of him, one eyebrow lifted in a general disdain.

Finch stared at both of them for several moments, a little smile of amusement on his face.