Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  “He’s very old now, and he wanted to go down to the roundhouse to talk with ‘the boys.’” Allan’s voice was lifeless, and Cornelia caught her breath. It wasn’t his father. “How interesting,” she said politely. “After all, he was an engineer, and I think you once said that he hasn’t been down to the yards for years. Did he enjoy it? And, by the way, how was the weather in Portersville? As bad as here?”

  “It didn’t begin to snow until we reached Philadelphia.” Allan had moved down the room and was pretending to study a landscape on the wall between two windows. “Cornelia, there’s a panic brewing. You can feel it.”

  “So you’ve been saying for two months, dear.” She stood up, rustling. “Perhaps you are wrong. I think we’ve finished with panics.”

  “You forget the Regans, and ‘young’ Gunther, and the rest of them.”

  Cornelia shrugged. “Sometimes, dear, you talk about our friends like Jon did. After all, they’re financiers, and financiers do what financiers are born to do, if one believes in fatalism, which I'm inclined to, myself. And now, please excuse me. I must dress, and I'd advise you to do the same.”

  She walked serenely toward the door, her hands clenched tightly in front of her. She had reached the threshold when Allan cried out, “Cornelia! There’s something I must tell you. …”

  Tony? she thought, stopping in the doorway, but not turning. DeWitt? Dolores? No, she would have heard. It was someone in Portersville; it could be no one else. She said in a loud hard tone, still not turning, “Allan. I am going to the Vanderbilts’, and you are, too, unless you want to humiliate me by letting me go alone.”

  He came to her rapidly and caught her shoulder, and she looked at him steadily. He could see her face, and he thought it as cold as painted marble, and as impervious. “Allan, my father is still very weak, and whatever you have to tell me must wait until tomorrow, for I feel it will affect him, too; and if you tell me now I may think I must go to my father, and that I shall not do. Tonight.”

  “Because of the Vanderbilt dinner?” he asked bitterly.

  She was slowly turning white under her rouge, but she answered with composure: “Because of the Vanderbilt dinner, and because of my father.”

  “Then, you have an idea?”

  “I have no ideas at all. I am just wondering if that fool of maid of mine has laid out my proper gown.” Her eyes contemplated him and they were like bits of amber, as remote from him as from a stranger. “I shall be ready in an hour.”

  She moved her shoulder under his hand, and he stepped back, releasing her. She went on, and he stood in the doorway and watched her mount the marble stairs, lifting her skirts and not looking back. She knows, he thought. She always knows everything, almost immediately. Does she care? I wonder. I’ve been married to her for many years and I never knew her. She lied to me last spring at Cannes. She lied to help me, or because I was boring her with my misery. I very often do.

  He went to the library table, wrote out a telegram: “Dearest Ruth, Cornelia and I will return to Portersville tomorrow afternoon and will remain with you for some time after your mother’s funeral.” He lifted his pencil, and hesitated, then continued: “Cornelia is broken-hearted and in no condition to travel tonight. She has not yet told the news to her father, for he is still ill. We send you our love.”

  He leaned his head on his hand and thought of the desolate young woman who had been deprived of both parents in only a few months. He thought of the silent house on the river, and the girl who wept without sound, and the voice of the river raging against the shrouded windows, and the woman lying in her coffin among flowers and candles. And he said to himself: There are times when I hate Cornelia, because nothing will ever stop her. I was stopped, a long time ago.

  The great ebony clock boomed through the white and dusky areas of the hall, and its echoes bounded back somberly in every room. Allan started, and thought of the Vanderbilt dinner and drearily reminded himself that he must dress. He rang for his valet, and when the man entered the library Allan said, “Please prepare my bath. No, I’ll have no time for it. Just lay out my clothing; I’ll be in my rooms in a few minutes.”

  He stood up and looked with dull anxiety around the booklined walls, as if he had become aware of them for the first time. Then he went out quickly and ran up the stairs; he was always forgetting the elevators in this house. The house was lighted from top to bottom and was filled with silence. Allan paused on the second floor; a very fine Aphrodite, which had first known the brilliance of a Grecian sun, stood near the landing, and in her white cupped hands glared an uninhibited electric bulb. The stark light flared upward on her serene and smiling face, and Allan looked away as if he had encountered an obscenity. He went down the marble hall swiftly, knocked like a conspirator on the door of Rufus’s apartments. The door opened very cautiously for a few inches, then widened as his identity was established. Allan nodded at Rufus’s man and went through the warm sitting room into the bedroom, where Rufus was resting in his ornate French bed before his dinner.

  “I had just begun to worry about you, my boy,” said Rufus, lifting himself away from his orchid-tinted satin pillows. “I was going to send to inquire where you were.” He held out his hand, so thin and transparent now, and smiled fondly at Allan.

  “I had a talk with Cornelia first,” replied Allan, seating himself precariously on a purple satin chair near the bed.

  “Bad weather,” commented Rufus, letting himself fall against his pillows again. His smile had gone; he looked, now, what he was—an old sick man, dwindled and very tired.

  “How are you, sir?” asked Allan. “You look a little stronger today.”

  Rufus smiled again, and glanced at the fire. “When I was a very young fellow, probably about four, I told myself that I must always give a cheerful answer to every damn thing. I found that it spared me tedious questions and had a nice effect on other people and gained me popularity.” His face became very serious and more tired than ever. “Now I don’t care a damn. So, in answer to your question, whether it bothers you or not, or depresses you or not, I will say, ‘I feel like hell. I am certain I am going to die very shortly.’”

  Allan did not laugh. He said, “I hope you aren’t going to die ‘shortly.’ I’m sorry you ‘feel like hell.’ I know you do. And do you know, I think that dying is the least unpleasant part of living, and probably the most relieving.”

  Rufus turned his head and studied Allan reflectively. After some moments he said, “It’s really incredible, but you are reminding me more and more of old Steve every day. Steve was the right man in the wrong place; I always believed, and sometimes still do, that you are the right man in the right place. And at other times I think you are the wrong man in the wrong place. Something happened to you. But I thank God you never told me, and still have the decency not to tell me.”

  He folded his hands over his sunken stomach and again studied his son-in-law. “Tell me about Portersville,” he said. “No; not business. Just about the city, and the house, and. …”

  “We are going to the Vanderbilts’ dinner tonight, sir, and Cornelia is already dressing. We’ll be late; not that it matters very much. This is more important. I went to see my father this afternoon; he’s old and failing, and I haven’t seen him since Christmas. He wanted to go down to the yard and talk with ‘the boys.’” Allan paused and looked at the floor.

  Rufus said, “Yes, yes, I understand. I also want to talk with my own ‘boys.’ It’s very natural. Tell me.”

  What could Rufus deWitt, mighty president of the Interstate Railroad Company, have in common with an old and weary Irish engineer who had merely loved his engine? Allan glanced up and understood all at once that these old men had everything in common.

  He began to talk, avoiding a single look at the clock on the mantel over the shouting fire. He had driven out to his father’s farm early this day, and was pleased, as always, to see that Tim Marshall was being more than adequately cared for by the comfortable middle-ag
ed couple who ran his farm and coddled him outrageously:

  Today, he had seemed very frail, for he had only just recovered from a severe grippe. Yet he boomed as usual at Allan, kissed him heartily, pounded his back with his fist, shouted for tea, “and mind you heat the pot first and put it on the fire afterward,” and then had sat with Allan to talk about Michael and Tony. Michael, in India, was very happy at Tony’s decision to become a priest. He was writing Tony regularly; he himself was very well. The old man went on and on, proudly, about his son and grandson, and his round Irish face had turned scarlet with his pride and enthusiasm. Then he had stopped and had peered at Allan intently.

  “And here’s my fine lad, with all the money, and all the things he has done, and with the president job coming up, and it’s stupid, I am, not asking him what he is doin’, and tellin’ him that I am proud of him, too.” He said to himself, with a pang of sorrow: And it’s looking like death, he is, my boy, and with the agony in him he does not know about.

  “I think I am to be president after we return from France,” said Allan, and he said this without pleasure or satisfaction.

  “Sure, and that is fine, but it is afraid ye are,” said Tim gently. “Afraid all your life, I’m thinkin’. You mustn’t mind an old man who loves his children, and prays for them,” he added hastily, rubbing his thick mass of white curls. “And who is not afraid? There is our young priest, who’s that confident, and visitin’ me almost every day, and bouncing in like a schoolboy, and with the cheery voice, and his talk about the Fathers ‘gettin’ closer to the people and understandin’ their problems,’ and all the time the great blue eyes of him are scared. And I says to him, and me a man old enough to be his granddaddy, ‘Father, and what is the fear in ye, a young fine lad like you?’ And he says, ‘Tim, it’s not fear I have, for that is a sin, and Our Lord cherishes us all.’ And I says to him, crossin’ myself, ‘Be that as it may, and it’s sure I am that it is true, but we are all frightened, even as babies at our mothers’ breasts, and the fear gets stronger and stronger every day we live, and when we are old we are more frightened than ever. And why is this, and meanin’ no offense, Father, that we are all so afraid? Is it because we don’t trust our fellow man, or maybe knowin’ him too well, and ourselves, too?’ And I says, ‘I have had the time to read all these years, Father, history and such things, and sure, I have seen that men have always been afraid, and that, at the last, livin’ becomes a weariness because of the fear.’”

  “And what did Father Dugan say then?” asked Allan, not indulgently, but with intense seriousness.

  Tim rubbed his chin, blinked his eyes which were as bright as in his youth. “Well, now, it’s a very curious thing. The boy just sits where you’re sittin’ now, and it’s thinkin’ he is that he should just quote what he’s been taught, and answer like a priest. And then all at once he’s just a young feller talkin’ to his granddad, and there’s tears in his eyes, and he says, ‘Tim, fear is the absence of God, may our Blessed Mother forgive and pray for me!’”

  Allan thought of the ancient legend of Sisyphus, condemned forever to roll a monster stone up a hill, only to have it roll down again as he approached the summit. He could not remember whether the man had ever fallen, in his exhaustion, and had been crushed by the stone. He said, “This isn’t a very cheery conversation. Would you like to go out for a drive for an hour or so?”

  Tim had then expressed his desire to go down to the yards. “And perhaps for the last time,” he had said. “I’ve been readin’, and thinkin’ very strange thoughts, and I want to see if what I have been fearin’ is true.”

  They drove down to the yards, a long distance, in Allan’s carriage, under a gray-brown sky which pressed close over the barren earth and the shut fields and seemed to touch the duncolored roofs of the lonely farmhouses. Tim sat beside his son, swathed in the fur robes, and looked out at the gray silence and was silent.

  When they reached the yards, and Allan was about to order the carriage to approach the roundhouse, Tim stopped him. “No, it’s just lookin’ at the lads I want, or maybe just to speak to a few that pass us. They are strangers to me, and they don’t know me, and so we’ll sit and look at them and I’ll see it is true what I’ve been fearin’.”

  He had not been here for years, and he regarded the great mass of buildings with wonder, but without admiration. The yards were full of giant engines, bellowing and steaming and ringing and clanging; long freights pulled out, alert young or middle-aged engineers looking ahead, their hands on the throttles, their striped caps surmounting sharp and hardened faces. Fire ran along the grinding wheels; the pistons thrust and recoiled in titanic gestures of force. Hundreds of men ran about the yards; there was a constant bustle and calling, a constant marking on records, a constant coming and going. The men consulted each other, but briefly, not smiling, not talking casually, not pausing to look at the monsters they serviced without pride or content. No groups of young firemen stood about in knots, chewing or smoking or laughing or telling each other ribald jokes, or arguing vehemently, or shaking fists, as in the days Tim remembered. All was efficiency, timed movements, cold precision, and disinterest. Signals flared down the glistening tangle of rails; smoke rose in tremendous exhalations to the bitter winter sky; hands were raised, not in greeting, but in signals. More and more lights came on in the buildings, not with the slow mellow warmth of oil but with the violent blare of white electricity. A freight pulled in, slatted cars holding scores of cattle that groaned and called in bewildered voices of fear and pain. A passenger train, all light and length, glided into the station, the Pullmans gleaming. Conductors alighted onto steps placed at the doors by colored porters in trim uniforms; the trainmen, with eyeglasses and set faces, looked only at their records, and glanced only at their watches. The youthful engineer in his cab yawned, and looked at his watch, and did not call out to any of the men on the platform, nor did they call out to him. Passengers came briskly down the steps, carrying brief cases and small bags, and their faces were preoccupied. They had come a long way, safely, drawn rapidly by the locomotive ahead, yet they gave it not one affectionate smile. They were not even aware of it.

  Allan, sitting in silence beside Tim, suddenly saw the great station and yards through his father’s eyes. It was as if he had been given another vision, superimposed on his own. “Not like the old days, eh, Dad?” he asked, and tried to smile.

  “No, and it’s not,” Tim replied. An engineer was passing, huddled in his thick coat, and carrying a sheaf of papers. Tim leaned out of the opened carriage window and called to him, and the man stopped. “Is that old Thirty-eight just pulling in now, and would ye tell me?” he said.

  The man was impatient, but he looked long at the fine carriage with its two black horses and its coachman, and his eyes lowered sullenly. He said with curtness, “Yes, it is. You makin’ it?”

  “No,” said Tim, “I am not.”

  He rolled up the window and stared heavily at the yards; the engineer shrugged and went on, muttering. Tim folded his hands in the fur robe and his head drooped. Allan said impatiently, “Well, Dad, would you have the old days back, with their inefficiency and their bad schedules and their rattling cars, and their danger and raucousness and discomfort? And the casualness of the men. …”

  “I am thinkin’,” said Tim, “what all this is doin’ to the men. I am thinkin’, too, of the great factories, with men like these at their machines, which go crash-crash and never stop, and the men movin’ their arms and their legs, themselves like the machines. I am thinkin’ of the faces I am seein’ now, out in the yards, and I say it is bad, very bad. It is worse than I thought; sure, and it is worse.”

  He went on, as Allan did not comment: “It was in the papers the other day. Old Sixty-two ran on a straight stretch of track near Ada, Ohio, and made three miles in ninety-two seconds, and there was much hurrah in the papers about the new record, and much talk about the future, and the speeds, and I says to myself, as I am reading, ‘And where
will they be goin’, all the people, that they must go so fast? The people with their faces with no light in them, and with their runnin’ feet, and no time to live?’ And I thought of that fine future they talk about, when all God’s sky will be full of the flyin’ machines, and the people going faster and faster to more and more places, and not stoppin’ to see where they have gone, and not carin’, just so they can go faster and faster and see less and less. Ah, and it’s the modern age acomin’, the papers say, and I say it’s the age acomin’ when men will not have the time to talk to each other, and comfort each other, and pray with each other. And when that day comes, I says to myself, then men will hate each other because they hate their lives, and there will be terrible wars in the despair which will have men by the throat.”

  Allan still did not speak. Tim turned to him, and the brogue was thicker on his tongue. “Sure, and it’s strikes we had in the awful past, and the people starvin’. But there was a conscience growin’ in the big men, and it is growin’ all the time, and soon there’ll be no starvation and no miserable wages, and maybe there’ll be what Mr. Ford says in the papers, that every man will have his automobile and run over new roads, and there will be comfortable houses for everybody, and no man will sit by his stove and wonder if he’ll starve in his old age. But there’ll be strikes, strikes such as old men like me never knew, I’m thinkin’, and the hate will be worse than in the seventies. And why will there by strikes? Because men will have no pride in their work, and no pride in themselves, for they’ll think of themselves only as machines, as their bosses will think of them; and the heart of man will not be able to stand it, for men’s hearts are not steel but only flesh and blood. And a man’s heart cries out for more than just good wages; it cries out for pride in itself, and in the work of hands, and fellowship, and the knowin’ that it has accomplished somethin’ each day. For a man is a spirit; he is a soul, and he must have the satisfactions of the spirit, Aloysius, and there is no room for man’s spirit in the world to come, which is dawning today.”