Silas Timberman by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

surreptitious feeling of doing something wrong but not very wrong, and certainly very pleasant. When Ed Lundfest said that it was nice, she agreed with him. It was very nice; perhaps if it happened too often it would not be, but happening once like this, it was very nice indeed. He was not the most sensitive man in the world, but he seemed to recognize that today she was escaping from something, and he fitted himself to her mood and need. He did not mention Silas, nor did she mention his wife Joan. It was, Myra felt afterwards, a harmless and pleasant affair.
    * * *
    Silas was leaving the Faculty Club at about twelve forty-five, when he heard his name called, and he turned around and someone said, “Talk of the devil!” Ike Amsterdam was sitting at a table with Hartman Spencer, Alec Brady and Susan Allen; and they were smiling at his abstraction. “We were talking about you loud enough for you to hear,” Susan Allen said, and they made room for him and pulled over a chair. They were half way through their lunch, and when he explained that he had already eaten, they insisted that he have another cup of coffee with them. He looked at his watch, saw that he had a half-hour, and decided that it would be pleasant to sit with them for a while, and it was more pleasant because they were so obviously pleased. It always came as a little bit of a shock to Silas that people liked him and desired his presence. He sat down next to Susan Allen, an attractive woman in her late twenties, who taught the history of art and whose husband was an instructor in English Literature, both of them friends of himself and of Myra, and both of them valuing the friendship inordinately, as younger people will sometimes do with older people they like and admire. She poured coffee for him, and he stirred it thoughtfully as she asked.
    â€œAnd you’re not curious about what we were saying, Silas?”
    Hartman Spencer, who had won the Chalmers Award for his work on cosmic rays, was a short, square-built man of about fifty, with the hammered, mashed-in face of a professional boxer—which he had been for three years—and the gentle, inquiring smile of a saint, which he was not. Utterly devoted to Amsterdam, he had already made himself something of an international reputation in astro-physics, and was now engaged in writing a rather revolutionary monograph on the origin of the universe. Now he said.
    â€œSilas wouldn’t be curious about that. No good man is ever perturbed by what others say about him.”
    â€œSave us from good men,” said Ike Amsterdam. “They are a pestilential breed and more concerned for their reputations than a woman is for her looks. Leave Silas out of the category.”
    â€œIt’s interesting, Ike,” Susan Allen remarked, “that you can’t defend a man without insulting a woman.”
    â€œI am neither defending Silas nor attacking him.”
    Alec Brady watched them all, ate and watched them, his expression rather quizzical and reserved at once. He was a tall, long-faced, balding man in his middle forties, a full professor of European History, the author of three important books on the Napoleonic Wars, a captain of infantry in the Second World War and—a fact which he sedulously kept from public knowledge—a holder of the Distinguished Service Medal. He was not easy to know, and at the same time, one of the few men Silas wanted to know better. Like Silas, he lived close to his family, his wife and two children, and like Silas, he gave the impression of being singularly free of ambition. He was one of those men who rarely delivered judgments of others, a reticence that seemed to stem more from a particular understanding than from a desire to please and be liked.
    When Silas turned to him, a little uneasy at being the subject of conversation and somewhat gratified at the same time, he smiled and asked.
    â€œHow is the family, Silas?”
    Silas said they were