Read Online Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner - Free Book Online

as freezing travelers feel a dry room and a fire.
Crowded
in, rubbing our hands with satisfaction, and were never the same thereafter. Thought better of ourselves, thought better of the world.
    In its details, that dinner party was not greatly different from hundreds we have enjoyed since. We drank, largely and with a recklessness born of inexperience. We ate, and well, but who remembers what? Chicken Kiev, saltimbocca, escallope de veau, whatever it was, it was the expression of a civilized cuisine, as far above our usual fare as manna is above a baked potato. A pretty table was part of it, too—flowers, wine in fragile glasses, silver whose weight was a satisfaction in the hand. But the heart of it was the two people who had prepared the occasion, apparently just to show their enthusiasm for Sally and me.
    They put Sally on Sid’s right, distinguished above other women and exposed to his full gallant attention. Over other conversation I heard him telling her a romantic story about their honeymoon, about a time in Delphi when a man they had met on the boat to Itea fell over the cliff and they were three days finding his body. Sally was a little high. A smile hung on her lips and her eyes were on his face, ready for cues that would move her to amazement, concern, or laughter. As for me, I was king of the castle between Charity and her mother. They quizzed me on a hundred California subjects from Yosemite to Dust Bowl refugees, and not only they but others near us, Alice and Lib especially, attended my answers as if I had been speaking from the sacred cave. How lovely it is to be chosen, how flattering to have such bright eyes on you as you divide the light from the darkness.
    After dinner, coffee and brandy in the living room. While my awed freshman student was serving coffee and Sid went around with his tray of snifters and his bottle of VSOP, Charity put a record on the phonograph.
“Now!”
she cried, and flopped onto a couch. “Now we’ll all sit for a few minutes and just digest and
lis
ten!”
    But Marvin Ehrlich had carried from the table an argument about the Spanish Civil War he had been having with Ed, a continental neutral. And I had found a place on a sofa beside Charity’s mother, and thought it my duty as a gentleman to make small talk.
    As I was settling back after putting Aunt Emily’s cup on the coffee table for her, I heard Marvin say, “. . . rather go fascist? You’ve got to go one way or the other. Want to join up with Franco and Mussolini and Hitler? What’s the matter with being on the side of the masses?”
    “Masses?” Ed said. “What masses? Americans don’t know anything about any masses. Masses are a European notion, they’re a cheese that won’t travel.”
    “No? What about the middle-class masses?”
    Hoots from Ed.
    To Aunt Emily, as the strains of clarinet and strings swept the room, I made what I hoped was drawing-room conversation. “What is it about Mozart that makes him sound so happy? Is it just the tempo, or is there something else? How do you make pure sound sound happy?”
    “Shhhhhhh!”
Charity said, to both Marvin Ehrlich and me, and as we subsided into digestion and attentiveness she salved our severally bruised feelings with the most forgiving of smiles.
    I don’t know how English Departments are now, for I escaped them years ago. But I know how they used to look. They used to look first class. They used to look like high serene lamaseries where the elect lived in both comfort and grace. Up there, scholars as learned and harmless as Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford moved among books and ideas, eating and drinking well, sleeping soft, having three-month summer vacations during which they had only to cultivate their inclinations and their “fields.” Freed by tenure, by an assured salary, by modest wants, by an inherited competence, or by all four, they were untouched by the scrabbling and scuffling that went on outside the walls, or down in the warrens where we