Silas Timberman (14 page)

THE PROTEST

On Wednesday night, November 2nd, the day before the scheduled campus protest meeting in defense of Ike Amsterdam, Silas sat up late working on the text of his remarks for the following day. It was with some wonder and not a little humility that he reflected upon the fact that he, whose days were spent in lecturing, had never made a public address; and as he examined the variety of doubts and fears which possessed him, he came to the conclusion that not the least among them was a horror of raising his voice outside of the sheltering walls of a classroom. Shelter had been a deep and important factor in his life—and perhaps a good deal of his life had been a search for such shelter, shelter from all the wild storms that blew in a world that never touched him, shelter from the frightful things that men did to each other, shelter from the ogres of hunger and cold, shelter from the murky and complicated disputes called politics. A classroom was such shelter; a man was a king in his classroom, and the students listened—and always he, Professor Timberman, was someone who knew a little more than the next person.

But in this case, he was far from sure that he knew more than the next person, and floundering and struggling through words to express his anger at what was happening to a man close and dear to him, he seemed to be making no progress at all. In the deepest sense, he was writing against desire; for when all was said and done, his desire still was that he should live in peace, with the hand of no man raised against him. He looked around him at his little study, and thought to himself that this was truly what a man desired, the solid comfort and reassurance of it, the comfortable oak desk at which he worked, the shelves of books from floor to ceiling, the little storehouses of wisdom through the centuries, each of them so solidly encased with threads of origin, culture and tradition, each of them lighting one aspect or another of man's thought and civilization—and to light their light, the old green-shaded lamps, the comfort of chairs, the prints which he and Myra had selected so carefully to decorate the wall, the hooked rug upon the floor, with its pattern of a fine ship in full sail and its quaint old Latin inscription:
Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto
. How often he had intended to look that up and discover whether it came from Cicero or elsewhere, and how often he had rolled the words on his tongue,
I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I consider a matter of indifference to me
. Well put, and grandly put, and this was the substance of the close comfort here; but then it came to him that it was not so at all, and all the substance and security here was as hollow as one of those tropical gourds, where the fruit drys up and leaves only hard seeds to rattle in the emptiness. He glanced at the neat pile of manuscript paper which contained the three chapters he had already completed and which he had titled, tentatively,
Mark Twain and the Country of His Choice
, and realized with a sick feeling of utter despair that it was a fraud, that he knew little of the real
Mark Twain
, the man who hated and raged and stormed, and even less of the country of his choice.

When he looked again at his books, his many, precious, treasured books, he could only think of those writers of ancient Egypt who, frozen in the still tyranny of their culture, spent whole lifetimes sedulously copying works even more ancient—and deluding themselves that they were practicing the lost creative art of literature.

He was relieved when Myra came in and sat down, and looked at him half-humorously, half-questioningly, in that particular way she had.

“The children are sleeping,” she said. “Sleeping children are more beautiful than anything in the world, I'm sure—and more relaxing, and what do you think? I brought in wood and made a fire, so we could sit by it and hold hands. Isn't that a nice idea? How does it go?”

“It doesn't go. I've written two paragraphs.”

“Read them to me.”

“And they're no damn good. Listen to this—‘I've known Ike Amsterdam twenty years. And in those twenty years, he was friend, teacher—' Oh, the hell with it! It's no good. I'm not saying what I want to say.”

“What do you want to say?”

“I don't really know, except that I want to cry out at the top of my lungs that something devilish and damnable and hideous is happening here, something like a disease, something that stinks to the heavens with rot and death!”

“And you don't because that wouldn't be considered and cool and objective—”

“Sarcasm doesn't help.”

“I'm not trying to be sarcastic, Si. I've been thinking about this too. I want to ask you something—it's at the bottom of this business, I think. Why did you sign that petition against the atom bomb?”

“Why did you?”

“I'm asking you, Si. Ask me later.”

“All right, I'll try. It's not easy to know why you do something. People like ourselves, Myra, we almost never have to explain why we do anything, do we?”

“No, not very often.”

“It was Alec Brady who came to me with the petition—do you know, Myra, the moment he opened it up, the moment he showed it to me and began to talk about it, I knew what he was.”

“What do you mean—you knew what he was?”

“A communist.”

Her eyes turned toward the door of the study, involuntarily, and Silas said, almost shrilly,

“There it is! Why did you do that? By God, is this a word a man can't speak without fear and terror? What kind of a nightmare are we living in—what kind of a genteel, civilized, unholy nightmare do we inhabit? I tell myself that I'm a free-born, independent citizen of the United States of America, and I no more than mention the word
communist
, and there's danger—and my wife is afraid and looks to see whether anyone can overhear me!”

“Si, someone will hear you, if you shout like that.”

“This is Indiana, not Germany!”

Myra became very calm, folding her hands in her lap and contemplating Silas with the curious interest one has for a new but intriguing acquaintance. “Very well,” she said softly. “You knew Alec Brady was a communist. Would you mind telling me how you knew?”

“I know how I knew, but it makes no sense. You asked me why I signed that damned petition. Well, I looked at Brady, and asked myself why he was taking it around—and do you know, my dear Myra, my dear good, sweet wife—we live in a world so empty of principle, so devoid of any interest but self-interest, so cursedly like that damned refrigerator that sits in our kitchen like a protecting household god, that I could find no reason, no reason on earth why Alec Brady should hold out that petition to me except that he must be a member of the Communist Party. And do you know, I asked him.”

“What did he say?” Myra wanted to know. “If you want to tell me?”

* * *

It had been early in June, the June before, just a few days before classes ended, and he and Brady were sitting on one of the stone benches at the edge of the fine grove of oaks for which the campus of Clemington was so justly renowned. It was about five o'clock, the summer afternoon shadows already long, the slow mantle of evening beginning to settle upon the place; and all of it, Silas remembered, gave him some sense of that inevitable melancholy that always accompanied the end of a school year. Brady had wanted a word with him, and they had walked over here, chatting about one thing and another, himself rather pleased to be with Brady, liking the man better than he understood him, and idly wondering what Brady had on his mind. The truth of it was that Silas liked and admired Brady, and was also a little bit in awe of him; and it was a part of Silas' thinking that the men he knew and liked on the campus were also men he mistrusted to a certain degree, feeling that he fell short of their level, thereby pampering his own reserve and not inviting any rebuff. But Brady had a comfortable quality. His long and rather ugly features made an engaging face, and the fringe of red hair around his bald head made a balance between the sage and the ridiculous—and like many Irishmen, he used his voice well.

His relationship with Silas had not been very close, stemming from the mutual regard for Ike Amsterdam, but it was Silas rather than Brady who held back. The few evenings they had spent together, Silas had enjoyed immensely, fascinated by the big man's dry and merciless treatment of what went on in the world now and what had gone on in the past; but that repelled Silas at the same time. He was uneasy with people whose knowledge was specific and whose judgments were sharp and unrelenting. He would also ask himself, somewhat petulantly, “Why does Brady, whom I prefer to be with, prefer to be with me?”

He asked himself that now and took a certain satisfaction in the fact that Brady wanted something from him. Brady had a petition, which called for the outlawing of the atomic bomb, then and forever; yet it was at odds with a cynical man. After Silas had read it—it was quite short—he sat in silence for a while, his thoughts piling on each other with no particular point of reference; and then he came to the decision that Brady was a communist. “Of all people, Brady,” he said to himself, and just for the moment, he forgot the petition and indulged the fascination of having discovered this amazing fact, which perhaps was not so amazing after all. It was typical of Silas that he asked the question immediately and directly.

“Why do you ask?” Brady wanted to know.

That was the point Silas made to Myra five months later. People do not approach other people with such petitions. A vast atomic frying pan had been devised, and in it, each was prepared to fry separately, and it was no concern of Silas' whether his neighbor, his neighbor's wife and children, or a million people in Timbuctu were incinerated. Conditioning had gone into that, and Silas was as well conditioned as the next person. He said to Brady,

“I suppose because I can't think of any other reason why you'd ask me to sign that.”

“That's a bitter commentary on us and our lives, isn't it?”

“When you look at it that way.”

“What other way is there to look at it, Silas?”

“Well, you know what I mean. If I could feel, as you do, that behind this enigma of Russia there's something good, something else than senseless terror and regimentation—”

“How do you know I feel that way? You mean you've made up your mind that I'm a communist?”

“I suppose so. Are you?”

“Since you've made up your mind, there's not much point except the satisfaction of your curiosity in my answering,” Brady smiled. “Will you sign it?”

“You wouldn't have brought it to me unless you thought I would,” Silas replied, rather sadly.

“No, I suppose not.”

“It won't do any good. Would that be the difference between you and me, Alec? I don't believe things like this do any good—any at all.”

“If enough people say something, they'll be listened to.”

“Enough people?” Silas looked beyond him, across the campus.

“It goes a little further than Clemington. The whole world has a common desire to live. They're tired of being used.”

“It seems to me that it's a case of who uses them most cleverly. From all I've heard, this is a Russian scheme, isn't it?”

“I won't even argue that, although I would deny it. The point is, it's a plan to stop this damned horror before it starts.”

“If I sign it,” Silas said, staring at it, reading it through again—“if I sign it, it means trouble, doesn't it? Like everyone else, I'm afraid to sign things. I get things like this sometimes in the mail, and I don't sign them, even when I consider them justified. I live my own little lie, like everyone else. I live in a free land, where I'm afraid to sign a petition and then I justify the fear by telling myself that I'm being used, that it's a trick, a front, a device—” He looked up at Brady. “Those are your arguments, aren't they?”

“Yours,” Brady answered.

“All the same, I don't think I'll sign it. Why did you think I would?”

“Because of what you just said, I suppose. This is a pretty bad time, Silas. Talk about Russia from now until August, and it doesn't alter the fact one iota that this is a damned bad time, with a black mantle of fear sinking over the whole nation, with people afraid and afraid to admit that they are, confused, disarmed, with teachers being hounded like sheep and scholars being told what they should not think and writers being told what they should not write, and having their books burned if they don't conform—conformity, that's the hallmark of the time. We used to say that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, but now it's the refuge of cowards as well. But you see, this isn't the first time this kind of thing has happened, and this isn't the first place it has happened to. It never really works. You can't take one hundred and sixty million people, and snap the whip, and have them jump through the hoop. There are always people who won't jump—who insist that their right to think, to see the nature of reality, is precisely what makes them human, and who will not surrender their humanness. That's why I think you'll sign that petition—even if you've decided that I'm a communist and that it's all a communist trap.”

In the end, Silas signed it—as he told Myra.

* * *

And he did not immediately understand why she had asked the question at all; because, as so often happens, the question became lost in the detail of the answer. He, Silas Timberman, was two things, two men, two lives, two parts of special awareness. One life, he lived; the other life was an awareness that existed without action—except where action was forced upon him, as when for a brief moment all of the United States and a good part of the rest of the world read with a mixture of amusement, concern, and perhaps horror, of a college professor in a mid-western university who was forbidden to teach the writings of Mark Twain.