Testimony Of Two Men (89 page)

“Courage is always the price that life demands for granting peace,” said the priest.

“A worthy sentiment, Father, and perhaps true. But if a man jeopardizes everything in his life for the sake of the peace of his conscience, he often has reason to regret his nobility. Heroes are lauded in story books and in history, yet even in history they frequently come to a sad and inglorious end. Later, of course, they are eulogized, but that does them no good at all when they are in their graves.”

“Then only God remembers,” said the priest, and Louis looked embarrassed. He thought that he might begin to believe that if Jon were saved from what was planned for him.

Today, thought Jonathan Ferrier, I will hunt Jenny down it I have to take Hambledon, and the island, apart with my bare hands.

He had not been sleeping well lately, partly because of the heat, which did not abate, and the sullen hot days, and partly because as the time approached for his departure from Hambledon he was feeling a strong depression, which never lifted. He knew he could not stay in his town under present circumstances, which became worse day by day rather than better, but a heavy sadness had come to live with him which he could not philosophize away nor laugh at in his usual manner. Then there was the elusive Jenny, and her elusiveness had at first irritated him and then had become a source of impatient anger. He had heard rumors that Robert Morgan was visiting her more and more frequently, in spite of the smart warning he had received from Jonathan, and was even seen at local public gatherings with her, including Chautauqua and the circus, of all things. Jonathan was finding it harder and harder to keep from making kindly and derisive remarks to the ingenuous Robert, who no longer spoke of Jenny Heger.

He had been calling at the island at least three times a week, usually between five and six in the afternoons, and Jenny was always “not at home,” according to Harald and the servants, or totally invisible and not to be found. Jonathan had thought of writing to her in plain terms but was afraid that Harald might recognize his handwriting and that was intolerable. Worse, Jenny might refuse to answer. (Coy? thought Jonathan. No, she’s anything but that.)

He decided, early this morning as the sun came up, that he would see, or find, Jenny at noon on the island, before she had time to hide or whatever it was she did when he appeared.

He stood at the bedroom window and looked to the east, hoping for rain. But there was only a brilliant scarlet glittering in the east, sparkling through the long dark fronds of a great willow, and a harsh dusty odor of parching land. The “mountains seemed to heave and pant for moisture and coolness; their green had become brownish and burnt. If there was ever a downpour of any magnitude, Hambledon, in its river valley, would be in the same position as some Spanish towns on waterless plains which suddenly experienced a deluge and then flash floods. Even the river was sinking more and more visibly each day, and at noon the sky was brazen. At night everything seemed to gasp feebly.

Jonathan cursed as he struggled into clothing already damp with his own sweat the moment it touched his body. He would make his hospital calls early, overseeing what Robert Morgan had done. He called Robert’s house and said with curtness, “I don’t want to be out in this heat more than I have to, Bob, so I am going to the hospitals as much before noon as possible. Will you be there?”

Robert yawned, glanced at his bedside clock, and said, “For God’s sake, it’s only a quarter to seven! You don’t usually start until nine. Very well. I’ll meet you at the hospitals. St. Hilda’s first?”

“Don’t I always?” asked Jonathan, and hung up, feeling again a huge irritation against practically everything and everybody, and waiting for the heavy depression to fall on him again. It did as he went downstairs to the morning room, where breakfast was waiting. But Marjorie had not as yet arrived, and Jonathan sat down and gloomily contemplated the warm prunes in a dish before him. He rang the bell and the little waitress came in and he said, “Haven’t we a slice of cold watermelon, Mary, or a cantaloupe, or perhaps a chilled orange?”

“For breakfast, Doctor?” asked the girl, astounded. “It’s always prunes for breakfast, isn’t it, or stewed figs?”

“I’m starting something new,” said Jonathan, “beginning today. Bring me some cold fruit if we have it.”

“It will disturb the stomach, Doctor,” the girl said. He could not help smiling at her.

“It’s my stomach, Mary, and if I get cholera infantum at my age, it will be my own damned fault, won’t it?”

A few moments later the cook arrived, disbelieving, and sweltering in her bulk. “Doctor, is Mary right? Do you want some fresh fruit—fresh—and cold, for breakfast? I never heard of such a thing!”

“You’ve heard of it now, dear.”

“It’s against nature, Doctor.”

Jonathan surveyed her kindly. “Emily, I’ve been against nature most of my life, but now I’m really getting into the battle.”

Mary, her face doubtful and averted and a little afraid, brought him a cold little melon and he attacked it with pleasure and with unusual appetite. Mary peeked at him around the swinging baize door, expecting him to have convulsions at any moment. Then she brought him his poached eggs, bacon and coffee and marmalade. By the time these arrived, Marjorie had come downstairs. “Aren’t you early, Jon?” she asked. She appeared more wan than usual, and thinner.

“I thought I’d make an early start and finish before the worst of the heat,” he said as he helped her into her chair.

“Is that cold fruit you have been eating?” she asked, looking with mistrust at the remains of the melon.

“Yes, and very good, too. Why should fresh fruit be served only at the end of a meal, and dinner at that? If I don’t drop dead of it by tonight, then I’ll have exploded another fallacy of the hacks, that fresh fruit on an empty stomach can cause the flux, dysentery, colic, colitis, and assorted ills. Never believed it anyway. Have a piece for yourself.”

“It looks inviting,” Marjorie admitted, and when Mary arrived, she gave her own order, to fresh consternation in the kitchen. “Dear me,” said Marjorie, touching her forehead with her handkerchief. “It is very hot, isn’t it? I can’t recall it being like this in Hambledon before. When the weather breaks, it will be quite violent.”

She told him then that she intended to go to Philadelphia in a few days to visit old friends and distant relatives. “And perhaps I’ll go to Atlantic City, too, for a look at the sea, and some coolness. I’ve never really got accustomed to living in a land-bound town like this.”

Jonathan said, “When I leave, which will now be very shortly, why don’t you return to your home in Philadelphia? After I’ve done a little wandering, I may settle there myself.”

Marjorie’s lips trembled as she smiled. “That would be nice, dear. Let me consider it. After all, I’ve lived here so long, a lifetime, thirty-six years, and I knew it, too, as a child. Still, it never really seemed my home, though I love this house of your father’s. It is hard for a woman of my age to be moved easily.”

“Fifty-five or -six isn’t ancient,” said Jonathan. Now he looked at his mother and saw her pale and dispirited appearance. “When you are in Philadelphia, why don’t you stop in and see Dr. Hearndon?”

“I may,” said Marjorie, who had already decided to visit the cardiologist. Her body seemed very thin in its light batiste embroidered shirtwaist and high lace collar, which rose to her chin.

“Why don’t you women wear sensible clothing in the summer?” asked Jonathan, with some uneasiness. He did not like his mother’s color and her air of lassitude. “That duck skirt of yours—it looks like iron.”

“Your high stiff collar is even worse,” said Marjorie. “Well, I hope you won’t miss me too much when I am in Philadelphia. Incidentally, Harald is going with me. I do wish Jenny would come, too. So lonely on that island, though
I
hear she has made some new friends.” Marjorie gave her son an artless glance.

“If you mean Bob Morgan,” replied Jonathan, “he is quite harmless.”

“They have been to dinner several times at the Kitcheners’,” said Marjorie. “Poor little Maude. She is really very smitten with Robert, and he is exactly right for her, though as men are so very foolish, he probably does not realize that.”

Jonathan stood up. “But, I’m sure that Maude, in the old way of women, will soon enlighten him,” he said, and left the room and the house. He went out into the hot light of the morning. He looked at the shriveling trees, at the burnt grass, at the dust in the gutters and between the cobblestones. It would be one hell of a day.

He looked over the lawns to his offices, still shut and closed and silent, and the depression became a hard rolling in him. They had been more of a home to him than his father’s house, which his mother had made so elegant and charming. There he had hung his first shingle and had contemplated it with pride. There he had settled the new furniture, and put in his cabinets and arranged his examination rooms. He knew every corner, every window, intimately. The sun glanced off the clean windows and glimmered on the polished wooden doors. The offices were now no longer his. They belonged to a stranger. They had abandoned him and had driven him away. For the first time in many days he thought of Mavis and was disagreeably surprised to feel a lunge of the old murderous hatred for his wife again in the very pit of his stomach. He had thought he was all finished with that, and he ran hurriedly down the steps of the deep wide porches and went to the livery stable.

He chose his buggy today, which would give him some shelter from the probing sun. He drove off through the hazy streets. It was still very early, but from open windows he could hear the unmelodious and—to him—obscene shrilling of the
new
phonographs and the new popular songs. Edison was truly a genius and a blessed man to his countrymen, but why he had invented the phonograph was a mystery to Jonathan, who detested popular music and its cheapness. At least three exuberant phonographs were grinding out a particularly detestable song, “Under the Silvery Moon, I like to spoon—”

Brash, lightless century. Who had called it the Century of Light? There were such marvelous things prophesied for it in practically the immediate future: A four-hour working day (while men still worked ten to twelve hours a day!), flying craft for every family by 1914, the total disappearance of disease and poverty “within our foreseeable lifetime,” large airy houses for a pittance for everybody, great parklands surrounding every city, automobiles which would race over enormous roads at a hundred or more miles an hour by 1920, an extension of life to at least one hundred and twenty by 1925, and, among the other fragrant bouquets of the politicians, absolute peace and no more wars. “Fraternity, liberty, equality!” they sang, picturing the “new” world on the threshold. “No hatred, no bigotry, no tyrants, no old despotisms, no hunger, ever again! Only love and light, forevermore! The Millennium!”

Jonathan, by nature, did not believe in millenniums, politicians’ promises and dreams, and love and light. He also believed, with Ibsen, that “When everybody has everything no one has anything” of value. But he did not doubt for a moment that the politicians would soon find a way of buying a country through gigantic bribes, for their own power, and that way would be the way of a personal income tax, an evil which had inevitably destroyed every nation in the past. It was a ludicrous spectacle: politicians buying the souls and bodies of the people with the money stolen from their own pockets! But mankind never learned. No, it never learned, and- even when faced with the ultimate and inevitable catastrophe, it could only look at it with dazed eyes and say, “How did this happen?”

The old tyrants and the old despotisms would soon arise in the world again. It was history. The world was due for the reappearance of the great dragons. They would arrive on schedule. I hope, thought Jonathan, not in my own lifetime, but I may not be so lucky. The grinding of the phonographs, or gramophones, as some called them, seemed to mock him like little shrieking demons.

Robert Morgan was not at St. Hilda’s yet when Jonathan arrived, now in a bad temper. But he met Philip Harrington, who never lost an opportunity to remind his friend that he was to be best man at his coming wedding with Elvira Burrows and to give Jonathan some fresh, and fatuous news of his bride. “That girl,” he said today to Jonathan, with pride, “you should see her linens!”

“Have you been sampling them before the wedding?” asked Jonathan. “To test their smoothness?”

“Don’t be crude,” said Philip.

“Wrinkles in a sheet can distract any girl’s bottom,” said Jonathan. “Never mind. But it’s a fact anyway and a curse on a honeymoon. What’s the matter?”

Philip’s large and good-tempered face had changed. “It’s Dr. Brinkerman—again.”

“Old Claude? What’s he been doing now?”

“Telling everyone I don’t know a uterus from
a
burlap sack. But I’m used to that now. You know what he thinks of us younger doctors. A nasty, surly brute, big as a house, and mean as a red-eyed bull, and as arrogant as an ignoramus.”

“I like your metaphors,” said Jonathan. “You should be of help to Elvira’s papa. But what’s the swine—not to mix metaphors—been up to lately?”

“He had a case, a young mother, first baby born at home, as usual, then something went wrong. Child premature; detached placenta. Her own doctor rushed her to the hospital and called Claude, who calls himself ‘the senior gynecologist
^,
around here. I and my friends are just butchers, according to him, or in our first year of med. Well, he operated on the girl —to save her life, to quote him—and removed the uterus. Twenty-two years old. Isn’t that pretty? While he was at it he also took her ovaries, and that’s the prettiest of all. Plunged into old middle age in her early twenties.”