There was a sudden crimson flare at the windows and a roar from the sky. The trees, which had been whispering together, now threshed wildly, like a sea struck by a cyclone, and from the alarmed earth rose a strong and pungent breath like an exhalation of fear. Allan went to the windows; the mountains started at him out of blackness in a new flare of lightning, then disappeared in a crash of thunder. Rain, mingled with hail, flew down at the land, and Allan could hear the deep groaning of the trees.
The telephone rang. Another voice came to him, that of the young and energetic Milton Richberg, one of George Richberg’s three nephews, who worked with him on his newspapers. “I knew you’d still be up,” said Milton accusingly. Then he chuckled affectionately. “I’ve been trying to reach you since six, but all the circuits were busy.”
“How’s it in Washington, Milton?” asked Allan. “There’s a storm here.”
“Oh, I suppose you shouldn’t be using the phone then. But I wanted to tell you something. I talked with Martin Dies today.” He paused. “I think it’s worse than we know. It’s appalling. They’re moving in more every day; no one’s challenging them. They’re taking over. That’s what Martin told me. Got a pencil? Here are some of the names.”
Allan incredulously wrote them down, one by one, and stared at them. Impossible. “Doesn’t he—the President—have the slightest idea?”
“Martin’s not exactly a silent man, Mr. Marshall.”
There was a silence. Then Milton went on: “Incidentally, the President is a very sick man. I have a feeling, myself, that when he does know all about it, it will strike him down as if he’d been shot. In the meantime—they’ll have moved in completely. It’ll be too late.”
“No,” said Allan, swallowing a sudden burning sickness in himself. “History is full of epidemics which killed a half or two-thirds of a whole continent. But man survived, and the epidemics were conquered, finally. This is a disease of the mind. …”
“And millions might die because of it,” said the younger man quietly.
“No doubt. But it is their fault because they took no measures in time to preserve themselves from infection.”
Milton sighed. “Martin’s suffering from prematurity. The American people aren’t yet ready to believe what his committee is trying to tell them. After all, their enemies talk so nobly about ‘human rights’ and ‘social justice.’ Aren’t they the clever ones? They use the terminology of virtue to destroy virtue.”
“They always did, from the first page of recorded history. What shall I do with these names?”
“They’re just for your information. We have three writers now, who are doing books on them. God knows if any publisher will publish the books; if not now, then later, perhaps.” He sighed again. “Martin’s going to be martyred. But someone else will come up, in the future, in Washington. He’s bound to; and he won’t be martyred, for the people will be ready for the truth.”
“After Armageddon,” said Allan.
“After Armageddon,” repeated Milton Richberg. He added: “The only thing which worries me is that when the people do know, and go after the murderers, thousands of innocent people will suffer, too. People never do things by halves, or with any temperance, after they’re enraged.”
Allan was alone again. The storm was all about him now in a welter of fire and noise. It seemed symbolic to him. The room was stuffy, though the windows were still open. Allan found it hard to breathe. All at once he was overwhelmed with a profound physical weakness and inertia. He lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. He began, without volition, to think of his wife Cornelia.
He had loved Cornelia. There was no reason in it, for he knew what she was. Strange thoughts came to him. Perhaps if it had not been for Cornelia, Dolores, his daughter, would be alive. Someway, that marriage had happened; he had had nothing to do with it. If it had not been for Cornelia. … His mind began to wander, but he did not sleep. He could feel pain somewhere, devastating pain such as one feels under a partial anesthetic. My pills, he thought. The storm had retreated for him and he no longer heard it. A light was pulling at his eyes, and it took all his strength to open them. The storm rushed in on him again; the lamplight stung his eyeballs. He tried to reach for his pills but there was no power in his arm. Slowly, very slowly, he was able to pull the telephone to him. He called his son Tony in St. Louis, and then sat there, bent over his desk, overcome with agony.
While he waited, he could hear a rough and rapid sound in the room; he did not know it was his own breath. He listened to it with a vague curiosity. Then Tony’s voice, sharp and disturbed, came to him, and Allan smiled. He must not alarm his son. He gathered what force he had left and tried to make his own voice cheerful and assured. “Tony? I know this is an ungodly hour to call you, but I wanted to hear you. No, nothing in particular. Tony.”
“Yes, Dad?” The voice in the receiver was urgent and full of fear.
“Nothing, Tony. I only wanted to hear you.”
“I can hear you breathing. Dad, are you ill?”
Allan was silent. All at once the pain was gone and there was a lightness in him, almost a gaiety. “No, no! There’s nothing wrong with me. Tony, I just wanted to talk with you a moment. It’s good to know you’re there. That noise? There’s a storm, but it’s subsiding now. Tony, you rascal, my boy. Tony. …”
Tony controlled himself and spoke evenly. “Old Betsy’s there, isn’t she? Call her, Dad. Take your medicine. Go to bed. Don’t be alone. Promise me.”
Allan looked about the room, and all at once it was filled with joy and comfort. “I’m not alone,” he said. “There’s something, someone—I can’t tell you. Good night, Tony. God bless you, my boy.”
He hung up very gently. The sense of lightness and gaiety filled him so completely that he almost cried with the delight of it. He leaned back in his chair and fell asleep. But Archbishop Rufus Anthony Marshall did not sleep. He was calling long distance. “Give me the Reverend Joseph Hogan of the Church of the Holy Family, in Portersville, Pennsylvania. At once, at once; this is an emergency.” While he waited, the archbishop was no longer an ascetic and quiet man. Tears began to run down his cheeks. His lips moved; he prayed. Even after he had completed his call, and summoned his secretary out of bed to prepare him for a journey, he did not think of his mother. The secretary was at the telephone, making reservations on the next train.
Allan dreamed. He was a young man again, and a hoe was in his hand and beside him stood a young girl with fierce golden eyes and hair like a fire. They were looking up at a house far above them on terraces. Flowers clustered all about them. The girl said, “I live there.” She turned to him, and smiled, and it was a sad smile. “You think you’ll live there. But you never will. Never.”
“No,” said Allan thoughtfully, “I never will. At one time I thought it was what I wanted; all I could ever want. But now I know it isn’t what I wanted at all.” He moved his hoe along the ranks of the flowers. They were so large and fragrant. “It took me a long time to see them,” he said. “It took me almost a lifetime.” He turned to the girl, but she had gone. He was sorrowful at this, and shook his head.
The hillside darkened, and all at once the house far up its flank burst into flame. The sky blackened behind it. The whole world was full of thunder and red flashes. Near at hand someone moaned, over and over, but Allan could not see him. “There’s a storm,” said Allan in his dream, “A frightful storm. Millions will die in it. I have done all I could. Perhaps it wasn’t enough. But it was all I could do.” He tried to see in the red-lighted darkness of utter chaos. Then he was shouting, “Don’t give up! Fight, fight! We’ll win. We always have!”
Allan opened his eyes. The sound of the storm was still in his ears, but it was not over the living land. He heard trees dripping; pale lightning occasionally lighted up windows turning gray with dawn. The room was swept with sweet cool winds. Birds were calling and leaves rustling. Allan shook his head dazedly. He could reach for his pills now, but it was v
ery hard to swallow. Something like an iron collar was about his throat. He pushed himself to his feet, and it took much of his strength. I worked and slept the night through, he thought. He did not remember calling his son. I'm getting too old, he thought angrily. A man reaches wisdom when it’s too late to give it to others. He had a sudden urge to go into his garden in this dawnlight and sweetness. But he found that he had to lean on furniture as he left the room and went into the dusky hallway. “I must go out,” he said aloud. Now some strength returned to him; he could feel his heart beating weakly but steadily. He pushed open the outer back door and let himself carefully over the sill; he could not remember that it was so high. It was like stepping down over a wall. Then he was in the garden.
He looked to the east. Black storm clouds were flying westward, tinged with purple. They boiled over him like smoke from giant caldrons. Below them streamed a reddish-purple river of light, swelling into brightness, and below this river was a pool of gold, seeming to palpitate on the top of a mountain. It became more radiant each moment. The mountains stepped nearer, black and silent, but sharper. All the trees about Allan rippled with fragrant moisture, like fountains. The willows swung their long green tresses in the morning wind; birds ran about over the grass, they whistled on brown branches. But all the flowers were still white, their color not yet restored. A long blue shadow flew over the earth, melting into a heliotrope mist under the trees.
“The morning,” said Allan, “is always new. It is the first day of the earth’s creation.” He walked with infinite slowness along the banks of flowers. He reached the rose bed; from it rose a cloud of perfume; here and there a rose was turning yellow or pink. Tenderly, he touched a few buds. Birds hopped near him, watching him. Men so seldom see the morning, he thought. The air rang with gentle crystal; the grass sent up its incense. A rabbit scuttered along a gravel path and stopped to twitch its nose and stare at the old man. Allan turned his head to smile at him, and then stopped. He was not alone.
Two men and two women were standing at a little distance from him, and he strained to see them, for the mist was rising about them in brightening clouds. He felt no wonder; the joy he had experienced earlier returned to him. It was his father, there, and his mother, and his brother Michael, and Dolores. The dawn became concentrated in them. “But, of course, you never died,” said Allan. “None of you ever died, my dears, my darlings. It was just a terrible dream.”
“Just a terrible dream,” said Michael, and he smiled. Now they were all smiling. Allan moved toward them. “Wait,” said his brother. “Someone is coming down the path.”
The weight of clay was on Allan’s body, but he turned obediently. An old priest was hurrying toward him, and Allan saw how he was dressed and what he carried in his hand reverently. With incredible effort he began to walk toward the priest. But his strength dropped from him. He fell to his knees and lifted up his hands. “Bless me, Father,” he whispered. The old priest knelt beside him, there on the graveled path.
49
Tony saw that his mother, in spite of her jauntiness, looked pale and sunken. Her voice might be practical and rousing, but sometimes she paused to stare emptily into the distance.
“We kept it out of the papers, that he died right here on a garden path, like some tramp,” she said. “The old priest who mysteriously had appeared, and his old servant, Betsy, didn’t have the strength to carry him into the house, after he died. So they had to wait for help. Imagine, Allan Marshall, former railroad magnate, dying like that!”
“Does it matter where a man dies?” asked Tony absently. His mother glanced at him with rare solicitude.
“Well, after all, he was an old man,” she said. “It was to be expected, I suppose. But I’d just seen him; he looked in the best of health.” She turned her eyes from her son, and he noticed they were furtive. However, he was not interested in that final conversation between his parents. His own grief was too great.
“Don’t look as if the end of the world’s come,” said Cornelia. “It’s strange in a way. You—officiated, is that the word?—at his funeral, and everyone came. You were magnificent, and the choir sounded like a host of angels. Touching—comforting. …”
Tony gave all his attention to his mother. “Yes, dear,” he said gently. “All the services of the Church are so. I have been praying you would come to the conclusion—”
Cornelia gave an echo of her usual robust laugh. “Tony! You know me better than that. Don’t be ridiculous. I never believed in anything but myself in all my life, though once I believed in your father. That was when he was young. He had such power, such force.” She drew in a quick breath, then grinned at her son. “I was proud of you. Why aren’t you a cardinal yet?”
Tony said, “Alex has asked me to come to England in August to perform his marriage. I hope I can do it.” He added, “Did Dad leave no written word, or anything?”
“No. Only some letters to that Izzy Richberg; editorials or something. We mailed them, and then his desk and his house were all cleaned out, before you arrived. Did you ever hear of such an outrageous will, leaving almost all his money to his newspapers and Foundation, and practically nothing to me and his sons? If—if I didn’t have some regard left for your father, I think I should contest that will.” But Tony knew that she had never had any such intention. Her eyes had a dim film over them, and her conversation was disjointed. Was it possible that she still loved his father?
“Have you seen old Laura?” she asked, and now her face hardened into viciousness.
“Mother,” said Tony earnestly, “you’ve always hated Aunt Laura. You had no reason to hate her. There was never—anything—such as you may have suspected, between them.”
“Oh, I know your father never really cared about her,” said Cornelia, holding out her cigarette for her son to light. They were sitting in her sitting room in the house in Portersville. “But she thought so. She’d look at him with sheep’s eyes; she made poor old Pat wretched. Well, how is she? I thought she looked very complacent in church, as if she’d won something.”
“She won peace, a long time ago,” said Tony. “She isn’t lonely, though she doesn’t see her children and grandchildren often. There are some people who never know peace among others; Aunt Laura is one of them. She showed me her garden, the day after the funeral, and she talked a little of Dad and said he had won a great victory.”
Cornelia laughed now in open raucousness. “What victory? He gave up everything. If he hadn’t worked so hard over his damned Foundation and newspapers, he might be alive now.” She stared suddenly at her son. “How did you know he was dying? You arrived late that night. I’ve been wondering.”
“He called me; it was about three in the morning. I knew there was something wrong, though he sounded cheerful. It was as if he had called to say good-by. I seemed to know.”
Cornelia studied him shrewdly. “I see. And that is how the old priest got there. You must have asked him. Such a doddering old man. Did you actually think it was of such importance to your father to have a priest before he died? Don’t look so stern. I suppose it was a comfort to him. Dear me, how I hate funerals.”
And then she was crying, covering her face with her ringed and mottled hands. “I can’t remember him as he was, lying in his casket in the church. I can’t remember him as he was these last forty years.” She was stammering almost piteously. “He was a stranger to me. I can remember him only as I knew him before we were married, and the few years after that. He was such a man! My father adored him. And then something happened to him; he began to drink and get morose and made our lives wretched. I sometimes think something happened to his mind. I’ve talked with psychiatrists. They agree with me. His childhood, perhaps.”
“Yes,” said Tony. “His childhood.”
He went to his brother DeWitt, who was sitting alone on an upper terrace. DeWitt watched him come, in silence, his black eyes like bits of jet. Tony sat down near him in a chair. Then DeWitt said, “We could have used the m
oney he spent on that damned trash of his. I can’t forgive him.”
Tony said, “You never forgave him from the time you were a very little boy, DeWitt. You never forgave him because you could never be like him.”
DeWitt shrugged. “That’s true, though I’d never admit it to anyone else. I was a ‘real railroader,’ he once told me. That was a lie. I never was, in the sense he meant, the old sense. The road is something to run for profits. Never mind; you’re a clergyman, and you wouldn’t understand. You wouldn’t even know the market quotations on our stock.”
“How many millions have you, DeWitt?” asked Tony quietly. ‘Twenty? Isn’t that enough?”
DeWitt smoked nervously. “Not for me. I once had over forty. It’s dwindled.”
“No doubt you now think of yourself as a very poor man.” Tony could not help smiling a little. “However, there’s Mother’s money, which will come to you.”
“She’ll live forever,” said DeWitt gloomily. “But she’ll leave some to you, and Alex. I don’t mind you, but I do mind him. His father got plenty from the family.”
“His mother was our sister,” Tony reminded him. But DeWitt merely shrugged again. “I’ve left you a quarter of my own money,” he said grudgingly. “I suppose you’ll build churches or schools or hospitals with it, or something equally valueless.” He eyed his brother, and the wizened face changed and the black eyes became coldly violent. “Why did you have to go into this thing? Don’t you know I’m all alone, that I have nobody? I never had anyone but you. Looking back, I think I never cared about anybody but you, in spite of your priggishness and all that religion. I’m all alone, I tell you! There’s nothing—”
Never Victorious, Never Defeated Page 74
