Testimony Of Two Men (46 page)

“I tell you, Jeff, they are doing some wonderful things down there. They’ve often stopped the infective process, arrested the disease, so that many are outpatients and are living with husbands and wives around the institution, and even having children. The causative agent has been isolated, and that’s half the problem, and it’s just a matter of time until we have the cure. At least, I’m sure they can arrest the disease in you. It hasn’t gone far enough to have caused you much permanent damage.

“There are all kinds of people there, men, women, children, teachers, doctors, former missionaries, people like yourself, from every class and walk in life. I’ve heard about it. They say it is the most hopeful place in the world. You can do a great deal there for the others, Jeff.”

But Jefferson’s head had fallen on his chest in incredulous despair.

“Let me write to Elizabeth,” said Jonathan. “She’s an intelligent girl, you say. She has the right to make a choice for herself. Let her decide if she will go down there with you and stay until they have arrested it. It’s her life, as well as yours.”

“I don’t have the right to ask her to make the decision,” said Jefferson, but he lifted his head a little. “Imagine isolating herself down there, with a—a leper, for God’s sake!”

“She still has the right to decide. Give me the address, and I’ll send her a telegram at once. That’s better than a letter.”

He added, “It isn’t the end of the world for you, Jeff. Nothing ever is until they shovel the dirt on you.” He thought, You’re a fine one to talk!

“A telegram to Elizabeth?” said Jefferson, and for the first time there was a little hope in his voice. “Jon, I’d appreciate that, I honestly would. But what if she doesn’t come, or can’t stand the thought of me any longer?”

“Then, you’ve lost nothing but a trivial woman, and that isn’t a loss at all.”

He suddenly saw Mavis’ face clearly but now the internal vision did not bring its usual spasm of anguish. It brought nothing at all but self-disgust and the blank realization that she had, indeed, been totally worthless and had not deserved all the pain he had suffered. How could he ever have desired her? There were all the years he had known her before their marriage, and he had refused to look at her realistically for a single moment, and then when he had finally known, he had almost lost his mind. That howling laughter, since childhood! She had not concealed it from him or had denied him that she was anything but what she was. He had been the fantasy maker, not Mavis.

He felt that something crippling had fallen from him and that something was beginning to stretch in him a little. The effect was both exhilarating and painful, but he was not sure that he liked this new dimension he had just glimpsed.

“What did you say Jeff?” he asked.

“You’ve given me a little hope, Jon. I immediately thought of suicide.”

“Don’t be alarmed at that. No intelligent man never thought of it. The world isn’t a sweet place. We know that. It’s a damned, ugly, painful, wretched place of existence, but we must come to terms with it somehow.” Something I never did myself, he thought with ruefulness. “I saw a young man this morning who had lost his faith, all he had in the world, and wanted to die of it. His affliction is worse than yours, Jeff, for now he must find out how to live without the only thing which mattered to him, or refind it.”

“You believe I can refind—something?”

“I think we all can,” said Jonathan, and felt surprise.

Dr. Hedler had been listening to this with considerable surprise of his own and he stared at Jonathan, who had forgotten he was present. Well, well, thought the old doctor, this boy isn’t as harsh and brutal as we have thought, and I, for one, am ashamed that I had thought it myself.

Before Jonathan left, he said to him in the hall outside, “Jon, don’t leave Hambledon. I know, I know! I’ve been as bad as everyone else, dear boy, as bad as everyone else, if not worse. Forgive me, if you can.”

“Good old Louis,” said Jonathan, and shook his head and went away.

That evening he sent a telegram to Elizabeth Cochrane,
a
long and detailed telegram of several pages. He had little hope. Women were not particularly intelligent and though they were emotional, their emotions were superficial, and they were instinctively selfish, and their ability to love was very shallow. At midnight he received Elizabeth’s reply:

COMING TO HAMBLEDON AT ONCE TO JOIN JEFF AND WILL GO WITH HIM TO LOUISIANA STOP HAVE SENT HIM SIMILAR TELEGRAM STOP WE MUST WORK TOGETHER TO GIVE HIM A REASON FOR LIVING STOP THANK YOU DOCTOR AND GOD BLESS YOU

Well, thought Jonathan. This must be
a
rare creature, indeed. A rare and unusual creature. How many women would abandon a young and happy life to go into isolation and misery and despair with a man? How many women can love that way?

When he saw Jefferson at his house the next day, the young man was almost jubilant. “I’ve gained something, Jon.
I
used to look at Elizabeth and wonder what I had to offer
a
girl like that! I must be something very special, don’t you think?” and he laughed.

“I think we all are,” said Jonathan. “In
a
way,” he supplemented in reluctant qualification.

”
You’ve said that so often before, every Fourth,” said Marjorie, as she worked in the kitchen with the cook, preparing the picnic baskets. ” ‘Tribal rites. Sentimentalism. Chauvinism.’ I know them all. Perhaps you are right. But there will be children there, and young people. They have a right to learn to be proud of their country. What was it Sir Walter Scott said?

” ‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land?’”

“Mother,” said Jonathan, “do you think the speeches of the mayor and that damned crafty Campion will inspire the youthful mind and enlarge it and make it proud? As for Campion, he never speaks anything but lies and banalities. I don’t know why I’m going with you—under my present circumstances. Just a farewell appearance.”

The blue and white kitchen, big and airy though hot even so early in the day, was full of odors of frying chicken, potato salad, fresh bread, baking cakes and coffee. Jonathan picked up a small chicken leg and began to gnaw on it. This was so unlike the fastidious and formal Jonathan that Marjorie glanced up with pleased surprise. Something had changed Jonathan, relaxed him a little. He was actually licking his fingers like a small boy. He had never done this before in her memory. He had never seemed to care for food at all and usually ate it with impatience as a necessary gesture to living.

“I’m just thinking of what Thomas Macaulay said,” Jonathan remarked, idly considering the chicken again as piles of it lay on white napkins. “About America. ‘Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your republic will be laid waste by internal barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth.’ He said, and wrote, that in 1857, forty-four years ago. It’s now the twentieth century. I think he was an excellent prophet. Something’s knocking on the gates of America and it isn’t nice. Or hopeful.”

“Macaulay was a pessimist,” said Marjorie, brushing aside a wisp of her dark fine hair with the back of her hand. “Don’t you remember what Abraham Lincoln said even earlier: ‘Shall we expect a transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined with all the treasures of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.’ “

“You forgot something,” said Jonathan, finally taking a wing of chicken. “Lincoln added something else to that: ‘We shall be betrayed from within.’ The new Vandals. The same mobs which stormed the Tuileries and tore up the stones of the streets of Paris. The same people who in Germany supported Bismarck and the Socialism he picked up from Karl Marx. Now, there was a nasty tyrant for you: Bismarck! Almost as bad as the French Communist, Robespierre, during the French Commune in 1795.”

“We have a sensible man in President McKinley,” said Marjorie. “Jon, if you really want some of that potato salad, sit down and have it on a plate. Don’t fish out the egg with your fingers. It isn’t sanitary.” But she was delighted.

“My hands are always sanitary,” said Jonathan. “President McKinley. Yes, a sensible man. But that riotous Vice-President of his: Roosevelt! Dear old rambunctious Teddy! What a calamity it would be for America if he were ever President! It takes a rich and pampered man to exalt something he calls the masses, probably because he knows nothing about them. The people are much more realistic. I differentiate people from mobs, of course, and the American people, in the majority, are pretty sound. Suppose I skip the celebrations today?”

“And let me go alone? Harald isn’t here, and he never came with us anyway on the Fourth. Do you want people to pity me, especially that odious Mrs. Morgan who is so smug, about her boy? And the Kitcheners, and their nice little daughter Maude?”

“And Jenny,” said Jonathan.

Marjorie bent her head over the bread she was cutting, and she sighed. Dear, stupid Jon, she thought. She said, “Yes, Jenny. She has given the domestics the day off, and she is all alone, and she was pathetically grateful for my invitation. She has so little pleasure, poor child. That is because she has a grim streak in her. She went to school in Hambledon, but knows no one. Her whole life was a kind of dedication to her father, who never lived on his island after all. She can’t get over the sorrow of it—and Harald to her, as you know, seems the interloper who has no right on the island at all.”

“Not the interloper,” said Jonathan. “Mother, don’t be naive.”

Now his face was ugly again, and he left the kitchen.

He went to his offices and walked through the hot closed rooms and then stood staring at his files. He no longer hated his dead wife. She had receded into unreality for him. But he hated those who were making it impossible for him to stay in his city, who were driving him out with uttered violence, lies, innuendoes, distrust and malice and hostility. He had asked nothing but to serve them and they had repudiated him. He found a bottle of whiskey in a drawer and drank deeply of it, not using a glass.

He went to a window which had a distant view of the river and he could see a portion of that ridiculous island, Heart’s Ease, its tall trees glittering with greenish silver in the sun. Then he had a strange thought. Why was it ridiculous, a dead man’s dream of beauty? Innocent dreams of joy and loveliness should not be despised. The “castle” was an anachronism, but then most blameless dreams were, for they were tranquil and full of peace and beatitude. Peter Heger had created an Eden, with love and tenderness for his wife and his daughter, and if it were a little grotesque, it had had the potentialities of an Eden. Who should deride a man’s yearning dream and vision of beauty, no matter how absurd it seemed to others? And what was the true measure of beauty or absurdity?

It was possible that Peter Heger could not endure his contemporary world and had tried to make a harbor for himself where he would not have to face it. Was it possible that most men had to make such harbors for themselves so that they could continue to five?

I have no harbor. I never had, thought Jonathan Ferrier. He looked at the bottle in his hand and then put it down. He stared at the bottle. Only this, since I was twenty-one. Who was the greater fool, Pete Heger, or me? I couldn’t endure my world, either. Pete at least tried to make a refuge for himself. I never tried. Who was the silly coward?

He looked at the island again and saw the face of Jenny Heger, the “Lilith” of Hambledon. He saw her face and her great blue eyes and the shining forehead and the black hair and the wild gestures and awkward movements. He felt a savage and angry fury and a sharp nudge of pain. She and his brother had desecrated a man’s innocent dream, had made it a name for laughter in the town. The pain increased, became almost unbearable, and he took up the whiskey again and drank. His telephone rang.

“Dear,” said Marjorie, “it’s time to help me load the baskets in the carriage.”

It was so banal, in the midst of his misery, that he laughed.

“You are looking very handsome,” said Marjorie as Jonathan helped her to place the picnic baskets in the surrey.
“I
like that blue and white striped blazer. But why do you men wear such stiff high collars, especially on a hot day like this? And stiff white cuffs and studs and collar buttons, and that remnant of little thin tie?”

“Why do you women wear stiff corsets of whalebone and dresses dragging in the dust? Fashion, woman, fashion.” He took off his straw sailor and wiped his forehead. He eyed his mother approvingly, and she was startled. She could not remember that he had ever admired her before. She wore a slender lawn dress printed in gray and rose and a broad straw hat with soft gray flowers and green leaves bending down its supple circle. Her aristocratic face, so like Jonathan’s, was flushed with heat and her hazel eyes were gentle and contemplative as she smiled at him. But there were mauve circles under her eyes and her lips were pale and a little drawn. Jonathan frowned. “Are you taking that digitalis I gave you?” he asked.

“When I remember. Please don’t fuss, dear. Forget you are a doctor, just for today. What a lovely day it is. It usually is, for the Fourth.”