“I won’t argue. I’m a country bumpkin and Detroit always gets me.” He was born in Detroit. “But education isn’t everything. A car in every garage isn’t everything, nor a helicopter on every roof.”
“You sound like Thoreau,” I said. “What good is a telegraph line from Maine to Texas, if Maine has nothing to say to Texas?”
“Exactly.” He was talking now, and he let me have it: “Education isn’t everything. There’s a certain Doctor of Philosophy, for example, that I suspect of doing a pretty barbarous thing.”
“Dr. Goebbels?”
“This is serious. You can keep it under your hat.” I nodded.
“I’m telling you because I may need your help. I’ve got to clean this thing up before I go into the Navy.”
“I’ll help of course,” I said. “But what do you want me to help do?”
He answered my question in his own way:
“I’m not in a position to go to the F.B.I. I’m not certain I’m right, and if I’m wrong I can’t ruin a man’s career for nothing. But there’s been a leakage of information from the War Board to Nazi agents. You know we handle some pretty confidential stuff, and I’ve got to plug that leak. If I can uncover enough evidence to turn the case over to the Federal boys with a clear conscience–”
“Christ, do you suspect a member of the board?”
The five other members of the board flashed through my mind like actors in a disconnected movie short. Hunter, Leverett, Jackson, Vallon, Schneider. The President of the University, an ex officio member, attended some of the meetings, but he was above suspicion. Jackson was too: a former braintruster, head of the economics department, and a grassroots American liberal.
Hunter, a small brown man who looked like an efficiency expert and knew fifteen languages, hated the Nazis so much that when he was in Washington on a government assignment, the Dies Committee almost investigated him. Colonel Leverett commanded the troops on the campus and had taught at West Point. Vallon, of Romance Languages, was the descendant of a Rochellois Protestant who had come to America at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He was a slim, elegant man who wore a ruby on his left hand and looked like a prosperous actor. Vallon was said to have a Puritan conscience but I had never met his conscience.
Schneider was a German, Doctor of Philosophy of Heidelberg and head of the Department of German at Midwestern since 1935. He had left his chair at the University of Munich in protest against Nazi philosophies of education soon after Hitler rose to power. His classic letter of resignation to the Chancellor of the University of Munich had been published in translation in the United States, and made several hundred dollars in royalties for the International Red Cross.
“Do you suspect Schneider?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Why? On what grounds?” His judgments were impulsive at times and I wondered if this was a time.
“Who else?”
“That’s what I was thinking. What about me, then? I need the money more than Schneider with his ten thousand a year.”
“Sure. Do you suspect yourself? Do you love Germany?” His irony was as subtle as a blowtorch.
“Not passionately,” I said.
“Schneider loves Germany.”
“Maybe he does. But he hates the Nazis and Hitler. Remember what he said about Hitler in that open letter? ‘When a hyena drapes a lion’s skin over his narrow flanks and attempts to improvise a lion’s bearing and a lion’s voice, the imposture is immediately and pitifully apparent to all sensitive eyes and ears, and to all discriminating noses.’ Something like that.”
“There’s such a thing as protesting too much,” Alec said. “There have been wolves in liberal’s clothing before.”
“There’s such a thing as suspecting too much.”
“Perhaps. If Schneider really hates the Nazis so violently, why did he leave his son in Germany to be educated after he left himself?”
“That doesn’t prove anything. I heard that the Nazis wouldn’t let the boy go. He stayed with his mother’s family in Germany and then they conscripted him.”
“They let him go two years ago,” Alec said. “He’s been in this country since 1941.”
“Well, you seem to know more about it than I do. But you haven’t shown me a case against Schneider.”
“There’s been a leakage of information from the War Board,” he repeated in a whisper like a leakage of steam from a boiler. “Maybe Schneider isn’t responsible. If he isn’t, who is? Who else is there?”
“How much do you know about Vallon? Your secretary, Helen Madden, has access to everything we touch. I’m not accusing anybody, but how much do you know about her?”
“Enough,” he said. He drained his glass and got off the stool, looking at me slantwise. The jaw muscles under his ears moved like a tangled bunch of worms. “Helen promised to marry me last week.”
As I got off the stool, I saw my face in the mirror behind the bar. It was red and flustered-looking. I said, “Oh! Congratulations,” and Alec said, “Thanks.”
We went out the door and around the corner to the car and drove back to Arbana through the domains of King Henry the First, American model. Alec had relapsed into his deaf-mute phase, a new thing to me though we had been friends for years. I sat in the seat beside him and thought about Schneider. The only thing I knew against Herman Schneider was that he privately held the opinion that Shakespeare was a German on his mother’s side. And that he was vain of his beard, which he treated like a pet mink.
We had driven into Detroit in the morning and lunched there, so it was barely four o’clock when we got back to Arbana. The little city was a relief after Detroit, which gave me the megalopolitan blues in spite of what I had said to Judd. Arbana is different. In the leafy season it looks almost like a forest from an airplane, there are so many trees. Now in September the trees were beginning to turn, but most of the leaves were still green. There was green grass on the campus, and when Alec stopped the car in front of McKinley Hall I could hear the power-mowers humming.
He said, “No hard feelings, Bob. You’re perfectly right to keep an open mind, of course. I’ve got to go over to the Board office to catch up on some work, but I’d like to talk to you to-night.”
“Fine. About Helen, I think she’s a fine woman. I was just using her as an example, but I picked one hell of an example. What time to-night?”
“Will you be free at ten? How about my office up in McKinley? There’ll be nobody to disturb us.”
“Right. See you at ten.” I slammed the door and Alec drove away to the Graduate School. I could have gone to the Library and done some work but I didn’t feel like working. I decided to go up to the English Department office to see if there was any mail in my box, and started up the walk to McKinley Hall.
McKinley Hall is the British-Museum-classic building five stories high and a block long, which houses the college of arts and the administrative offices of Midwestern University. Arbana is the Athens of the West and McKinley Hall is its Parthenon and I am Pericles.
I started up the sweeping steps of the stupendous portico without even an alpenstock to lean on. There were students sitting on the steps, mostly girls in sweaters and young soldiers in their new winter uniforms. It was the end of the summer term, and they were holding post-mortems over the examinations they had been writing. A few pioneer couples were holding hands.
As I reached the top, Hunter the linguist, Professor of Comparative Literature, came out through one of the swinging glass doors. He was a small, wiry man with little black eyes like licorice drops and a face as brown as his Harris tweeds.
“Hello, Hunt.”
“Hello, Bob, how did it go?”
“It looks as if Alec will make it. They turned me down.”