Silas Timberman

by Howard Fast

  He might have wished that Reverend Masterson was a little less individualistic, a little less stiff-necked, but these were qualities which took unpredictable directions in these times. Certainly, he was not wrong to start with Masterson—and proceed from there. If Masterson rebuffed him—a possibility he considered—he could go on to others.

  It was about four o’clock on that afternoon, and the snow was just beginning to fall, when Ed Lundfest parked his car in front of the rectory. The rectory was a pleasant, unpretentious wing of the church, half stone, half brown weathered wood clothed with ivy and shaded, in the summertime, by two great elms. Elbert Masterson and his wife had occupied it for a generation and a half. Their children had grown up there and gone out from there to marry and rear families of their own. They lived there alone and very quietly, and when Lundfest tapped with the knocker, Mrs. Masterson, a withered little lady with dark eyes, opened the door herself. Lundfest knew her slightly; they exchanged polite greetings, and since it was obvious that he was there to see the pastor, Mrs. Masterson led Lundfest to the study, where, as she explained, the pastor was re-working the sermon of the day before.

  “Will he use it again?” Lundfest could not help but inquire.

  “Oh, no. I doubt that. But you know, he insists that a sermon has no meaning until after it’s been given, and he can see what people do with it and how they take it. Then he changes parts he feels were wrong—or not sufficient.”

  “You mean to publish?”

  “Oh, no. At least, we have no such thoughts yet. But he says it helps. It’s there, and he feels it should be right.”

  Lundfest nodded and went into the study, where he had the impression of a cavern of books, lit in the center by a shaded lamp on an old table. Reverend Masterson rose quickly to greet him, a tall, bony man in his middle sixties, with a long, pleasant, homely face that broke into a wide and comfortable smile.

  “Hello, Lundfest,” he said. “I didn’t expect you. I hope it’s some good tidings that brings you.”

  “Good and bad, you might say, the way all tidings are these days. I was driving by, and the notion struck me to drop in. I hope the moment is not inopportune.”

  “Most opportune. You won’t mind sitting with books above you, like a sword of Damocles? What does that suggest—would it be blasphemous to indulge a play of words, that he who takes up the book will perish by the book?”

  “Hardly blasphemous these days,” Lundfest answered, seating himself in the chair the pastor indicated.

  “I suppose not, but it’s an ugly thought, and it properly shames me. I reflect sometimes on how wedded our religion is, not only to the Book, but to books in general. Some say that without the rise of Protestantism, there would have been no printing press, and others hold that without the printing press and movable type, there would have been no Protestantism. I’m afraid that, for myself, I must reject both extremes. The forces of life never work that way; they are woven like the old-fashioned lamp wicks, which I remember well, though your generation possibly never saw one, and books are woven into our experience and our memory.”

  It gave Lundfest the opening he needed, and he remarked that, strangely enough, it was on a matter of books that he had stopped by to see Reverend Masterson.

  “You don’t say? I’m most interested.”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard something of the unpleasantness we’ve been having at the university?”

  “A little. I’m an intermittent reader of Fulcrum, and there are a handful of students in my congregation. Only a handful, I’m sorry to say. I wish it were more.”

  “I share your feelings there,” Lundfest nodded, “and perhaps it will be more. In any case, we’ve been having, altogether, a rather upsetting series of experiences. First, there was all that nonsense about Mark Twain—and then the uncovering of a communist conspiracy on campus. It gave Clemington the kind of publicity one doesn’t relish.”

  “Oh?”

  “I mean, it was not something anyone in the administration welcomed. Its effect was hardly salubrious. And it made almost mandatory the suspension of the faculty members involved.”

  “I heard about that,” the pastor nodded, “and I rather regretted it. I would have preferred the university, like one of our old oaks, to feel itself rooted firmly enough to withstand the cozening of a few communists. You might even have won them over—if they were communists?”

  “There isn’t much reason to doubt it.”

  “Well—please go on. I’m sorry I interrupted.”

  “You see, it has left us with a number of problems. If there’s one rotten apple in a barrel, it’s difficult to know the state of the others. We’ve never had to take measures against a thing like subversion in Clemington, but these are somewhat unprecedented times. We feel we have a solemn duty to make the university an American structure, top to bottom. Nor is that as easy as it sounds. It’s a many-sided, complex question, and of course I’m not responsible for all of it by any means. But when one deals with literature, one deals with books.”

  “Quite so.”

  “And books can be the instrument of the devil, when cleverly used. The last thing on earth we want is to be accused of book-burning or anything of the sort. I think I share your veneration of books. Yet we know that books are used against us, cleverly used by shrewd and conscienceless people. That I was in part the victim of this recent controversy on Mark Twain is a small matter. A far larger and more important matter is that such reading material as The Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg went unopposed to our youth—and that the act of exposing it should have had to happen so vulgarly, creating in effect the very atmosphere we desired to avoid at all costs, the atmosphere of book-burning.”

  “Of course, Hadleyberg,” the pastor said, “—I don’t suppose I’ve read it these twenty years. But I remember it warmly.”

  “That’s just it. A thing changes with the times.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “Yet we don’t want to burn books, and certainly the university does not want to impose restrictions on books. It was our thought that if a committee of prominent Clemington citizens, headed, perhaps, by a man like yourself, was constituted as a sort of general library board for the university—” He was watching the pastor carefully. “—to pass on what books are an expression of the American way and what books seek to destroy truth and knowledge and all we hold dear, why we might have a solution to that particular problem.”

  The pastor received this in thoughtful silence, his shoulders hunched over his littered table, his long, angular face relaxed in contemplation, his chin supported by the back of his hand. It was impossible for Lundfest to imagine what he was thinking. He appeared neither pleased nor displeased, but rather absorbed in the flow of his own thoughts. After what Lundfest felt was an uncomfortably long interval, he said mildly.

  “In other words, you would like me to take up the burden of censorship?”

  “Censorship? No, I don’t like the word. Communist censorship of the truth is precisely what we are combating.”

  “Another word then?”

  “I would say, judgment.”

  “To sit in judgment on books,” the pastor nodded. “That has enormous possibilities, you know, Professor Lundfest. I imagine that one of the first books upon which I would have to pass judgment would be a treatise on insubordination and defiance of temporal power, written some two thousand years ago by four Jews. Even its truthfulness is disputed, for the four accounts of the same incident are considerably at variance with one another.”

  “Surely you’re not serious?”

  “I wonder? Here you come into our modest little rectory—I turn no one away, Professor—and make what is, by your lights, I suppose, an eminently reasonable proposal to an obscure small-town preacher. Yet I wonder that the heavens did not shake. You don’t follow me, do you, Professor?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You expected me to agree with you and embrace you?”

  �
�Well, I don’t know that I’d put it that way. We face an evil and implacable enemy—”

  “There have always been such enemies, Professor. The soul of man has never moved unfettered and unhindered. But do you know, Professor, I would not even pass judgment upon your own books. It has become customary, these past years, to preface any statement of principle with the fervent declaration that one hates communism more than the next person. I omit that apology. I am not even sure that I hate communism, because I do not know communism. But I do hate, with all the wrath God gave me, the enemies of the soul of man! Small, grasping men who fear books because they fear light! Evil men, who would silence every voice except those voices they hold are the right and true voices!” He added more gently, “I am not being personal, believe me.”

  “The hell you’re not, damn you,” Lundfest thought, but said aloud, “I must say, this is a rather surprising statement, Reverend Masterson.”

  “And am I a communist now because I have made it?”

  Lundfest laughed deprecatingly, “Come now, do I seem such a fire-breather? I do feel, however, that you are blind to the dangers around us.”

  “Possibly. And I’m afraid I shall have to live with my blinders. Twenty years ago, I enjoyed reading Hadleyberg. I could not face the thought that I could live in a country where reading it might be forbidden to me. You know, Professor, it would seem to me, from what you have said, that you are determined to burn books, whatever niceties you qualify it with. If so, God help you and God help all of us, for those are the last fires that madmen kindle before they destroy themselves.”

  “Those are very harsh words, Reverend,” Lundfest said, unable to contain his anger. “Thoughtless words, too, I must say.”

  “Perhaps. But so I feel, and so I must speak.”

  He accompanied Ed Lundfest to the door, and wished him a pleasant good night.

  * * *

  This was a bad day, and Myra Timberman would remember it; nor was it because today was unprecedented. Myra had come to understand that nothing is really without precedent, but precedent is always a little different from what follows. Ironically enough, from the series of events through which she was living, she had come to understand, as she had never understood before, the deeper meaning of the ancient civilization which she had studied and about which she lectured. Its patina of antiquity disappeared, and an interconnection of all events and forces became apparent to her.

  It was ironic because it was too late. This morning, she had received a letter from the chairman of the board of the foundation which financed her lectures. In carefully constructed and thoughtful sentences, it explained to her that certain areas of education which, as it put it, were outside of the mainstream of the foundation’s work, were to be discontinued. Regret was expressed that her lectures fell into that category, and it was hoped that in the very near future, some means would be discovered whereby these higher studies of classical civilization might again be resumed at Clemington.

  The tone was so sincerely regretful, and the regrets so painfully honest, that at first Myra felt herself in sympathy, as if to say, “Poor foundation—poor, harassed foundation, with $22,000,000 to spend, and to be plagued with such petty problems as a grant in classical civilization!” It took a little more than a moment to accept the fact that an institution like this would be concerned sufficiently to get rid of the wife of a professor who had been called before a congressional committee. Silas, who found her in tears—a state not frequent with Myra—tried to comprehend what it meant to her to lose this part of her life, and why it struck her so much more deeply than it had struck him. But Myra couldn’t explain; she couldn’t sum up for Silas, as of the moment, all her hopes and doubts and agonizing inner struggles, and the manner in which she had worked them out, the paths she had followed.

  “Let it go. I’ll be all right.”

  She knew how much he leaned upon her. What happened, then, she asked herself, if neither had strength for the other? When, later that day, Silas went out into the first falling snow to talk to Joel Seever, she knew better than he what Joel Seever would say, and her heart went out to Silas; she wanted to protect him, cover him, shield him from any more of this.

  The telephone rang while Silas was gone. Susan answered it, and said, “For Silas, Mommy.” Myra took the phone, and a man said to her, “Who is this speaking?”

  “Mrs. Timberman. Who is this?”

  He said, “Never mind who this is, you red bitch! I’m calling on business, bad business. You and your husband, that’s our business.”

  “Who is this?” Myra demanded. “Is this some stupid joke?”

  “Joke? Look, you friggin’ red bitch, we don’t joke! This is for you and Silas. Get out! Get out of Clemington! Clemington is a clean city of decent, God-fearing Americans. We got no place for you. Get out before it’s too late!”

  Then there was the click of a receiver being put down, and then the dead wire. Myra went back to the children, but it must have been in her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Susan asked.

  “Nothing is wrong.”

  But of course it was in her face and nothing she did could hide it. The whole world was wrong—strange and wrong and terrible.

  Until Silas returned, she debated with herself whether or not she should tell him—and realized finally that she must tell him. He listened in silence, nodding a little, but with no violent reaction. She told herself, “He won’t let me know what he feels. We’re each hiding it from the other.”

  * * *

  At eight o’clock that evening, Myra opened the door to a tall, plain-faced elderly man, who said, “I’m sorry to intrude like this. My name is Elbert Masterson. I’m the Methodist pastor in town.”

  She had met him once or twice before, and on two occasions he had spoken at the university. “I should have recognized you. I’m sorry.”

  “Not at all. I remember you, because the first time we met, I was struck by a lovely and gracious woman. But why should you remember me? May I come in?”

  “Please do. I don’t know where my wits have gone. This has been a very upsetting day, I’m afraid, and you must forgive me. Let me help you off with your coat. The snow has stopped, hasn’t it?”

  “It has. And the moon is up, like daylight. Nature is always beautiful and rarely disappointing, don’t you think?”

  “Yes—yes, I suppose so.” Myra was trying to collect her thoughts. She led the pastor into the livingroom, asked him to sit down, and wondered what had brought him. He asked whether her husband was home.

  “Yes, he is. As a matter of fact, he’s upstairs now with a story for the children.”

  “You have three, don’t you, two girls and a boy?”

  “That’s right, three,” Myra answered, wondering whether this was to be another attempt to return the lost sheep to the fold.

  “And your husband reads to them each night?”

  “Oh, no—not every night. When he can. I guess you can imagine that we’ve been a little upset, so this is good for them tonight. Sometimes he reads, and sometimes he makes the story up, I suppose.”

  “Really. You know, a told story is always better than a read story, if only because you can get out of terrible situations you get into, don’t you think?”

  Myra found herself caught up in his warmth, and she found herself liking him. She imagined that, for most people, it was difficult not to like so plain and outgoing a person. His homely face had the plaintive quality of a long-eared dog. He wanted to be liked and did not trouble to conceal the fact.

  “I never thought of it just that way,” Myra said.

  “Yet it’s a dying talent—a vanishing talent. That’s a pity. Shall I wait for your husband? I would like to talk with him.”

  “Please do wait. He’ll be down in a moment or two.”

  He made himself comfortable and sipped at some sherry Myra found for him and told a rambling anecdote about the rectory until Silas appeared. They shook hands, and the pastor nodded firml
y.

  “Glad to see you again, Mr. Timberman. I hope you will pardon this intrusion. I came up here and dropped in because a very curious and disturbing thing happened to me today, and I wanted to discuss it with you.” Then he told Myra and Silas about Ed Lundfest’s visit, and more or less of the conversation that had gone on between them. He related what had happened with great objectivity and without particular emotion, made no moral judgments, finished and sat waiting. Myra, Silas saw immediately, was both disturbed and upset.

  “Well,” said Silas, “are you very surprised, Reverend?”

  “Are you, Mr. Timberman?”

  “No—I don’t think so,” Silas answered slowly. “I would have been shocked and horrified a month ago, but not now. Not now,” he repeated, almost to himself. “There’s even a sort of incredible logic in it.”

  “Logic?”

  “When a whole civilization turns its energies to the destruction of people, isn’t it a little childish to be concerned about books?”