Silas Timberman (15 page)

“Let this go now, it's no good,” he said to Myra, and they went into the livingroom and sat down on the couch, facing the fire. Myra watched him without making it obvious that she was doing so, sensing the play of mood within him, the stress and counter-stress of his turbulent thoughts. That was her own deduction, and it surprised her that she could couple the word
turbulent
with Silas, whom she was so used to thinking of as a person in repose. So he sits now, the man she had married and joined so much of her life with, a tall, skinny, thin-faced man, rather timid—

He might have picked up the notion. In his own thoughts, he was still making an assessment of Alec Brady and Ike Amsterdam and himself as well, and he remarked to Myra.

“Do you know, I'm a coward.” And then looked at her, almost defiantly.

“I suppose most men are, most of the time,” she nodded.

“I don't want to talk tomorrow. I can't. I can't get up in front of those students and talk. I can't, Myra.”

“I guess not.”

“What do I do about it?”

“They're putting
Fulcrum
together now. You can drive over there and make a statement and explain how you were used all along, and since you're practically convinced that Alec Brady is a communist, you have the best out in the world, and you might just as well denounce the student meeting as a communist plot—”

“That's very helpful.”

“What do you expect me to say, Silas? I keep wondering whether we are unlike the rest of this country or very like them. Our precious enlightenment is a sort of darkness, isn't it? You're a coward and so am I.I was pretending to be facetious before, but another part of me meant what I said. I'm afraid, and I don't know how I became afraid. It didn't all happen in the past few weeks. It couldn't have.”

“And when you turn to me, there's nothing to lean on, is there, Myra?”

“I don't know.”

“What is it?” he asked helplessly. “I'm forty years old, and I'm empty. I used to sleep like a baby, and now I lie in bed thinking that only a little while is left, and then I'll die, and I get sick with the simple fact of mortality. I'm afraid.”

Myra said nothing, but sat there watching the fire with the fire-light playing upon her face and features, a handsome, full-bodied woman, as ripe as he was dry.

“Are you ever sorry you married me?” he asked her.

“Sometimes.” She wanted desperately for him to be angry, emotional, violent—and knew he would not be.

“I never measured up, did I? No riches, no poverty. No villain, no hero—”

“Si, let's go to bed!” she said suddenly, bitterly.

* * *

The Times
had said: “Tall, loose-limbed, myopic, almost an old-fashioned crayon drawing of what a pedagogue should be, it is difficult to think of subversive intent in connection with Professor Silas Timberman.”

It was raining when he awoke in the morning, a thin, cold, nasty rain that would be intermittently driven by sudden and fierce gusts of wind, and he said to himself, “Thank God, there'll be no meeting.” But by the time he had left the house, the rain had stopped; the cold, gray, windy sky remained.

The Tribune
was alarmed but not too alarmed: “It is comforting to recall that this sort of nonsense is not new to America. Laughter is an excellent antidote. And one must remember that this is no service to the real and necessary campaign against subversives.”

He met Susan Allen. “Isn't this weather wonderful!” she cried. “And doesn't your spirit just soar with that wild wind! I do love a day like this. I think I'd want to be a sea-gull on a day like this more than anything else.”

“Are you and Bob coming to the meeting?” he asked her.

“Of course. No matter how much I hate communism, Silas, when you think of poor Professor Amsterdam, after all these years—you do get angry, and you do want to protest.”

The St. Louis Post
, nearer to the scene, took a more somber point of view: “For ourselves, we feel that the reports of Mark Twain's politics are greatly exaggerated; but whether one agrees or disagrees with the literary judgments of the authorities at Clemington, it is hard to support the removal of Alvin Morse, student editor of
Fulcrum. Fulcrum
has an honorable history among college newspapers, and many a respected journalist broke ice on its pages. At the most, Morse was guilty of a lack of editorial judgment, but freedom of the college press demands that student editors be allowed to make errors and suffer with their errors.”

Lawrence Kaplin was already in the office when Silas arrived, and he observed that Silas did not look particularly happy.

“A fight with Myra more than anything else, I guess,” Silas said, disturbed to a point where he violated a long-standing rule never to discuss such matters with anyone. “I seem to be less and less able to understand her.”

“We are all of us less and less able to understand the women we are married to—and they us. That's not simply a platitude, Silas. As in other areas, we reap what we sow. I look forward to listening to you this afternoon. I hope the meeting is large—large enough to take the curse off.”

“And how large would that have to be?”

“A lot larger than I expect,” Kaplin smiled, rather sadly.

The major regional paper in Chicago found reason for rejoicing: “It is rewarding to note how promptly Anthony C. Cabot, president of Clemington, reacted to what otherwise would have been a most unpleasant situation. His statement in the first edition of
Fulcrum
, under the new editor, that he would welcome a loyalty oath for the faculty of Clemington, helps to clear the air. We have long been advocates of loyalty oaths for all teachers in all institutions of public education—and in all tax-exempt institutions, such as Clemington. It is slanderous to assert that the taking of loyalty Oaths is incompatible with free education. A person who refuses to take a simple oath of loyalty to his country and sworn denial of membership in any organization classed as subversive, is not fit to teach the children of our nation.”

“How long is it now?” Silas asked himself, as he lectured by rote, went through his classes by rote. “Is it two weeks and only two weeks?”

Then, in the corridor, he met Ed Lundfest, and the two halted for a moment and looked at each other in silence before there was any greeting. There had to be a greeting. Man lived in a structure of civilization.

“Hello, Ed,” Silas said finally.

Lundfest nodded and passed by.

“Well, I'll be damned,” Silas said, and he smiled for the first time that day.

The Mirror
in the East was blunt and expressive: “We never held a brief for commies anywhere, and we like them less in the schools. There is nothing a child can learn from the commies that's worth learning, and the sooner they're booted out of our school system, the better off we'll be—even if a few sensitive souls are hurt in the process. As for Mark Twain, we venture to predict he'll survive the process.”

Such blunt expressiveness was not too different from the tone of letters Silas had begun to receive recently, a new type of correspondence, liberally sprinkled with four-letter words not normally committed to paper. Silas read these with a sense of complete unreality. Some came from Indianapolis, and pointed out that the national headquarters of the American Legion was not too far distant, and others came from the town of Clemington; but all were unsigned, and they made Silas wonder what sort of strange human being sat down to write such letters—and what pathological satisfaction he received from the process. There was one from Indianapolis that spoke in words strangely similar to the
Mirror
editorial, stating flatly,

“There aint nothing you can teach, and the first thing you ought to do is go back to Russia where you stinkin commies belong. If you dont, we will teach you some good old americanism with a fencepole up your ass or maybe a rope you know where. And that goes for the bitch your married to.”

He didn't show them to Myra—or even to Brady. He destroyed them as if they were things so shameful that surely part of the shame would rub off on him.

Myra, quite unexpectedly, was waiting for Silas as he came out of Whittier Hall at two o'clock. She smiled at him, and he grinned back, and for a moment it was being young again and in love and filled with the sight and sound of the person you loved.

“I thought you'd want company,” she said.

“Did you?”

“Uh-huh. How's the speech? Did you get anything written?”

“No. I'll manage. I'll say a few words and it'll be all right. I'm glad you came.”

They linked arms. There was no rain now, but it was cold and windy, with a gray sky overhead. The paths and the lawns were full of dead leaves, sodden leaves and new-fallen leaves dancing over the wet carpet. Even from where they were at Whittier Hall, across the whole length of the campus, they could see the eddy of students beginning to gather around the Civil War monument in Union Plaza, but hundreds of others criss-crossed the campus in apparent unconcern; and Silas realized that the events of such deep moment in his life left many others in this place indifferent or apathetic. Was it that way all over, across the whole land, each alone in his own petty agony?

“They look not and care not to see for whom the bell tolls,” he thought to himself, and then remembered that a few weeks ago he had cared as little as they—
I hoe my own row and you hoe yours
.

With a sense of shock, Myra saw the grief on his face.

“Silas!”

“It's nothing,” he said, and when he smiled, the smile was true. There was a time with him when one mood was long-lasting and even; but of late, he had been shaken by many things, and the moods came and went.

“How do you feel?” Myra asked him.

“Do you know how I feel—I feel like we've just met, and I'm in love with you, and I'm afraid because the love won't be returned. That's how I feel.”

“That's the nicest thing you've said in a long, long time, Si.” Still she regarded him anxiously. “I'm sorry about last night. Don't be afraid about me, Si. Don't you think I'll stick with you? I will.” They walked across the campus, arm in arm, the wind growing colder and more violent. “This will make it bad for the meeting, won't it?”

“I don't know,” he answered, and the truth of it was that he knew little or nothing about such things, or what could possibly be expected from an outdoor meeting of protest—yet there was a world where nothing came easily or gently, where all things were fought for, and where men put their shoulders together again and again, because they had no other strength than their numbers, their bare hands multiplied, their angry voices. As they approached the crowd of students and faculty gathering for the demonstration, Myra's heart was unexpectedly lifted, and the wild, savage abandon of sky and wind caught her up, filled her with a feeling of youth and strength and pride—and made her strangely happy, so that her arm tightened around Silas' and her body pressed closer to his. He, on the other hand, was drawn back in fleeting passages of memory to his own youth, the small, badly-weathered house, within walking distance of the saw mill where his father had worked, and then other houses as one mill and another closed, the land stripped bare of trees, exhausted—as inevitably as his father was exhausted, dried up, bent and broken with work and left with no other pride and possession than his son, who would live by the wealth of his knowledge and not by the toil of his hands.…

* * *

When he stood up to speak, on the broad granite base of the Civil War monument, the bearded man of stone behind him, compassionate and large and unadorned with sophistry, each arm supporting a wounded boy—surprising in its reminder that wars are fought by boys—when he stood up to speak there, Silas knew what he would say, even though he had not known in any conscious way a few moments before. He stood there, facing the microphone, looking at almost a thousand upturned faces; and in the beginning, he was very nervous, his hands in his pockets and the palms of his hands wet and his collar wet too; but then the nervousness went away, and he was completely calm. It was apparent to Myra and to many others listening and watching that this tall, mild-looking man, framed by the old stone monument and the wild, wind-tossed sky, was a dramatic figure indeed, a memorable figure—even before he began to speak—in himself a plea for logic and reason in a dying age of logic and reason; but to Silas, there was only his own inner concentration on a resolution of conflicting and confused thoughts—and thereby, as he spoke, he let the past die; even knowing that the future was highly speculative and still unmade.

He spoke slowly and quietly, rather amazed and pleased at the way the amplifying system the students had rigged up projected his voice, and then as he went on, his voice grew sharper and harder; but at first, he said quietly.

“Until today, I felt fairly alone. A few friends were always near, but not enough to keep me from feeling that sense of being alone. I will not be alone any more. I do not know what the outcome of this shameful affair will be, and even if there is never again a meeting on campus as large and heartwarming as this, I will know that hundreds of our students have hearts to feel with and voices to make their feelings articulate.

“I thought last night that I would speak about my friend, Professor Amsterdam, whom I cherish and love and honor, and who has honored me with his friendship; but it would ill-become me to defend him. He needs no defense; honorable men have never needed character witnesses. Instead, I want to speak of that thing behind the action which has been taken against him—that murky and deadening cloud of fear and terror that has been spreading all over the land.

“It is a strange tyranny, indeed, a tyranny which most of us will not admit—and thereby will not face. It is a tyranny easy to live with, for the only price it asks is the surrender of honor and of reason—and it seems that we are rapidly coming to a point where we have only contempt for reason and a very primitive understanding of honor. I say this humbly, for until a few weeks ago, I was one of those who sternly denied that any tyranny existed, and a part of the process of my own education, you all know—indeed, the whole world knows by now, to our own shame.