“If so, it’s the fault of people like you. You speak of intelligence. Have you any beyond the strict little field you have shut yourself up in? After all, Ivan, you’re a citizen, aren’t you?” But as if Ivan’s tone had only really reached through to Edward after his answer, he leaned forward suddenly with his head in his hands. “Do this one thing for me, if not for yourself. It’s perfectly safe,” he added as if he had let himself show too much feeling.

“We don’t speak the same language, Edward. You have no right to call me a coward. Let me explain myself.” Goldberg now was the one to stand and walk about the room. “If I give my name to your committee, I’ll be badgered day and night by every other committee under the sun for any cause of the same kind. If I give my name, it will end by having no value. Even as a citizen, I feel my work as an educator and a scholar is my real responsibility. I do not have time for extracurricular activities. That is final.” He stood with his back to the window, waiting for Edward to storm out of the room. But instead the man just sat there, hunched over, his head in his hands and for a moment Ivan had the fantastic illusion that he was crying.

“You know there is no one I respect more than you as a scholar, Edward,” he said quite gravely, the little smile gone at last. He and Edward were so near to being friends, so near to crashing through the thin glass wall between them, that at this moment he felt that if he could only go over and put a hand on Edward’s shoulder, the glass would slide away.

They faced each other. But when Edward lifted his head, his eyes were blazing. Not tears but a paroxysm of anger shook him, the more terrible because for once it was controlled.

“Scholarship of the only kind I respect will have a hard time existing from now on, I mean scholarship which has some relation to the world in which it exists,” he said, hammering out each word.

“Your book on Wallace Stevens, for instance?” Goldberg fought back.

Edward got up from his chair and stood there like a little bull. “It can hardly be written. But of course this is something you don’t know about——”

“I don’t carry the world about all the time like an unborn baby inside me, if that’s what you mean.”

“Maybe it is what I mean. I’d rather do that, ridiculous as it may appear to you, than do what the German professors did—wash my hands of any responsibility, let the Nazis take over, and then wake up in a concentration camp. You can still go your own way, Ivan. You’re lucky.…”