OF THIS TIME, OF THAT PLACE
89
Tertan's face and wondered how he could have so long deceived himself.
Tertan was still talking and the class had lapsed into a kind of patient
unconsciousness, a coma of respect for words which, for all that most
of them knew, might be profound. Almost with a suffusion of shame,
Howe believed that in some dim way the class had long age had some
intimation of Tertan's madness. He reached out as decisively as he could
to seize the thread of Tertan's discourse before it should
be
entangled
further.
"Mr. Tertan says that the blame must be put upon whoever kills
the joy of living in another. We have been assuming that Captain Alving
was a wholly bad man, but what if we assume that he became bad only
because Mrs. Alving, when they were first married, acted toward him
in the prudish way she says she did?"
It was a ticklish idea to advance to freshmen and perhaps not
profitable. Not all of them were following.
"That would put ·the blame on Mrs. Alving herself, whom most of
you admire. And she herself seems to think so." He glanced at his watch.
The hour was nearly over. "What do you think, Mr. De Witt?"
De Wittrose to the idea, he wanted to know if society couldn't be
blamed for educating Mrs. Alving's temperament in the wrong way.
Casebeer was puzzled, Stettenhover continued to look at his hands until
the bell rang.
Tertan, his brows louring m thought, was making as always for a
private word. Howe gathered his books and papers to leave quickly. At
this
moment of his discovery and with the knowledge still raw, he could
not engage himself with Tertan. Tertan sucked in his breath to prepare
for speech and Howe made ready for the pain and confusion. But at
that moment Casebeer detached himself from the group with which he
bad been conferring and which he seemed to represent. His constituency
remained at a tactful distance. The mission involved the time of an
assigned essay. Casebeer's presentation of the plea-it was based on the
freshmen's heavy duties at the fraternities during Carnival
Week~ut
across Tertan's preparations for speech. "And so some of us fellows
thought," Casebeer concluded with heavy solemnity, "that we could do
a better job, give our minds to it more, if we had more time."
Tertan regarded Casebeer with mingled curiosity and revulsion.
Howe not only said that he would postpone the assignment but went on
to
talk
about the Carnival and even drew the waiting constituency into
the
conversation. He was conscious of Tertan's stern and astonished
lllare,
then of his sudden departure.
Now that the fact was clear, Howe knew that he must act on it. His
course was simple enough. He must lay the case before the Dean. Yet
lie
hesitated. His feeling for Tertan must now, certainly, be
in
some way
invalidated. Yet could he, because of a word, hurry to assign to official
md
reasonable solicitude what had been, until this moment, so various
