The Turnbulls

by Taylor Caldwell

  He heard angry voices about him. “Unfair! This isn’t a fair fight, Turnbull. You can’t strike a man without giving him a chance to defend himself!”

  He heard the outrage and disgust in those voices. He knew that they thought him a man without sportsmanship. In other words, he was no longer “English.” Even as he clutched the half-fainting Andrew, he knew, with a dim and childish wonder and bewilderment, that he was not “English,” that he had never been “English.”

  He cried out: “‘Unfair!’ Was this snake ‘fair’ to me?”

  Then he lifted his fist once more, and struck again, and again.

  Andrew made no attempt to defend himself against those blows. To have done so, to have been inevitably defeated in a physical contest with this superior enemy, would have struck at that unfathomable vulnerability in himself. If he did not resist against superior force, that vulnerability would remain intact. He never resisted when inevitable defeat faced him. He never attacked if he knew he could not win. If John Turnbull was not “English,” Andrew was the very epitome of “Englishness.”

  He felt his senses slipping away. To the last he thought: If I do not resist, I remain unconquered. It was this final thought that made him smile faintly before he collapsed.

  John’s hand opened convulsively. Andrew crumpled at his feet. But even if his body lay there, silent and bleeding, he was undefeated. John had not touched him in the slightest. He began to sob aloud, drily.

  CHAPTER 9

  James Turnbull read the cold and peremptory note sent him by his niece, Eugenia:

  “If it please you, Uncle James, I should like to have a moment or two alone with you this evening, during which we can discuss certain matters of importance.”

  He smiled sadly, and turned over the stiff little sheet of paper in his thin fingers. The note brought Eugenia’s small and indomitable face before him, and he saw those brilliant large gray eyes, so like his own. He understood her; hence his fondness for her. John had never been a true Turnbull. But all of the characteristics of the true Turnbull were in this frail female creature. She was lucid and reasonable. Subtle appeals to emotion would only bring a pale and scornful smile to her lips. James’ sadness increased. He knew how truly vulnerable the reasonable were, immune to the warmth and passion of emotion, and with only the bleak bitterness of logic to sustain them. Theirs, no psychic intuitions to console; theirs, no sudden swellings of the heart in nameless rapture. They were never seduced or bewildered. But neither did they hope. The emotional could be reconciled, led to beautiful renunciations. But the men of reason never truly acknowledged defeat, however loud and clear their philosophical protestations of acceptance of it. For their very reasonableness prevented them from sublimating defeat into spiritual glory. No wonder, then, that the reasonable never became leaders of men, never conceived crusades, never overturned worlds or invented gods!

  James felt more compassion for Eugenia than he had felt for his son. John would never be hopelessly befuddled by reason. He would proceed by his emotion. He would never be able to see both sides of a question. On this knowledge, then, James based his hope for his son. But for Eugenia there was no hope. Her reason would compel her to see the ugliness of facts and living, uncoloured by passion and faith. The emotional sometimes became cynics. But skepticism was reserved for the unfortunate who were afflicted with true reason. It was theirs at birth.

  Understanding this, and how he must make Eugenia, whom he loved so dearly, unhappy and embittered, James sighed, and sent a note with a messenger to her.

  “I will be alone tonight, my dear,” he had written, gravely.

  But not more alone than I have ever been, he reflected. And not more alone than any one else. Those who wrote, or said: “I shall not be alone tonight,” did not know they were guilty of unconscious irony.

  At eight o’clock, precisely, Eugenia was admitted to the vast dark library where her uncle awaited her. Here the ponderous gloom was only accentuated by the scattered oil lamps, by the dark fire at the farthest wall. Hundreds of forgotten books looked down in their dust and leather upon the heavy oaken furniture and the crimson rug. James sat before the fire in his leather chair, smoking with an appearance of thoughtful tranquillity.

  He rose slowly when Eugenia entered, holding his pipe in his hand, his tasselled cap giving his long ascetic face a look of frivolity. Eugenia advanced into the room, clad in black silk with a black fur jacket, a wide plumed hat on her haughty and gallant young head. There was nothing disordered or hasty about her appearance. The cold serenity and sternness of her pale face, the aristocratic lift of her head, and her “indestructible calm,” inspired, as always, James’ admiration and respect, and his love. Also, strangely, his pity. Always, he pitied his niece: the unbending were capable of such enormous and hopeless suffering. Their tears were heavy with iron, and as slow and reluctant.

  She gave him her gloved hand, rose on tiptoe to touch his bent cheek with her cool lips. Then, seating herself, after he had removed her jacket, she regarded him steadfastly. He sat near her, smiling painfully. Their bright gray eyes were reticent.

  “I believed it was time that we had a talk,” said Eugenia, in her firm light voice.

  “Yes, my dear?” murmured her uncle, affectionately. He leaned forward to poke the fire into a warmer blaze. Eugenia watched him indifferently. Her composure was amazing.

  James continued his murmur: “It has all been so very sad, so unfortunate. I am glad, my love, to see you endure this unpleasantness so calmly.”

  She did not reply. He glanced at her with some timidity. Was that a grim faint smile on her young mouth?

  Then she looked at the fire. The shadow of that suspected smile gave her an expression of implacability and sardonic strength.

  “I have been wondering, dear Uncle James, just how much I must endure. And by whose guilt.”

  “Guilt, my dear?”

  She turned to him fully, with quiet bitterness.

  “Yes, Uncle James. Your guilt. John has told me how you have refused to help him. I have come tonight to persuade you to reconsider.”

  James stood up. She had not said: “I have come tonight to try to persuade to reconsider.” In the small omission of two words was the whole key to her character. He had always known she was hard. He had sometimes thought her hardness came from pride, which might at times be vulnerable. But now he saw that her hardness was no product of another characteristic, but a strong characteristic in itself.

  He felt his tired heart sink. This was going to be very bad indeed. Poor child. His own harshness emanated from wisdom. But hers came from a bottomless egotism. He remembered his grandmother. Eugenia was much like that terrible woman, who had ruined a number of lives. But James was not concerned with that. His whole fear was that Eugenia might ruin her own life. There was a terribleness in her, too.

  He knocked his pipe carefully into the fire, bending forward so that his lean and emaciated figure was lighted by the incandescent coals. He was trying to find words to say, gentle words, reasonable words. Then he knew he must be cleanly brutal.

  “I am afraid,” he said, gently, seating himself again, and looking at her with forthright sadness, “that everything is too late. Matters are out of my hands. John, and his wife, are already on the way to America. They left this morning.”

  He watched her with tender closeness. Would she weep? Would she cry out? Would she rise, full of exclamations and wild denunciations? She did none of these. She only grew very white, and her features froze into a look of desolate hatred and despair. Her gray eyes blazed. Her lips turned to stone. But she did not clench her hands, nor move even slightly on her chair. Her straight and narrow back did not, even for an instant, bend or tremble. In truth, she seemed to gain in stature, and become more rigid.

  There was a long silence between them, while they regarded each other. There was no sound but the dropping of coals in the room.

  Then, not looking away from him, and with the blaze sharpening like
lightning in her eyes, she said, very quietly: “So. You refused to help him. You ruined him, after all. Why? Did you hate your own son so much?”

  There was a malignancy in her voice. But that did not deceive James. He knew that she was suffering the agonies of the reserved, so much more poignant than the loud emotional. How could he have ever thought that her affection for John was coolly indulgent and indifferent?

  Overcome with his pity, he stretched out his hand to her, and said: “My poor little love. Believe me, it was for the best. I would have spared you this; I would have done anything in the world to spare you. Except to destroy John’s only opportunity to become a man.”

  She did not glance at his hand. But her face darkened and grew more still.

  “I don’t understand you, Uncle James.” There was a cold scorn and an increasing hatred in her tone. “You imply that if John had married me he would have been destroyed. Is that what you mean?”

  James was silent. He rested his hands, palm down, on his knees. He regarded her with sorrowful intensity. Now a certain tenuous implacability, matching her own, appeared sternly about his mouth.

  “I did not imply that, Eugenia. But now that you have said it, I see that it might have been true.”

  Her expression did not change, except, perhaps, to grow more stony and inflexible. If she had been abominably hurt, she betrayed no sign of it. She waited.

  He continued, in a lower and even more saddened voice: “I had often wondered, Eugenia, why you held Johnnie in some affection. Was it childhood propinquity? Was it an inertia on your part, which forbade you to search for a more congenial companion? I do not deceive myself that it was the result of any urging on your Mama’s part.” He added, with a hint of a grim smile at the corner of his melancholy lips: “You are not a young lady to heed tears or urgings when your own mind has made its decision. Then, what turned you to Johnnie?”

  James’ pity grew. However, he waited obdurately for her reply. She moved very slightly, and spoke in a dry pent tone which was infinitely pathetic to his ears with its evidence of a control beyond her years:

  “It did not occur to you, Uncle James, that I may simply love John, without reason or explanation?”

  Poor child, poor child, he sighed over and over in himself. Yes, she loved that rascal, Johnnie. And she was not one who forgot love, who gave love easily or loved lightly. Love became part of the very fibre of that tough heart, interwove itself with its muscles and its veins. To tear it away would be to tear away tendons, leaving a mortal wound behind.

  For her own sake, then, he must be ruthless, even cruel. Would the wound heal? Or would it leave twisted scars behind? He believed it would be the latter. He believed that Eugenia would be maimed forever. Now a real bitterness rose in him against his son, that foolish, turbulent wild young fool! How often the Johnnies of the world became the recipients of the strange and hard and reluctant hearts of the Eugenias!

  He interlaced the fingers of his hands together very tightly, as they lay between his knees, and regarded her with quiet but passionate earnestness:

  “You are hating me, my love. I am wounding you. But I have always been able to talk to you, not as an uncle to a young niece, but as one human being to another. We need not lie to each other.

  “Let us look at Johnnie: Here is an irresponsible, selfish, uncontrollable young barbarian, who has refused to become a man in spite of his nineteen years. He is the sort who is precipitated into manhood by some momentous event, not by natural growth, or wisdom. His cocoon must be rent by, force, external force, otherwise he must remain a silly and overgrown child until his beard is gray.

  “There are so many of such men in the world, who are a burden first to their parents and teachers, then to their wives, and finally to their children. They inspire contempt and laughter and scorn in others, even if they also inspire protection and love. Eternal children, Eugenia. Who desires them? Only the fools.”

  He paused. Eugenia did not speak or move. The ice in her eyes hardened, brightened.

  “Sometimes these men are lucky. Sometimes a kind fate deprives them of protective and maternal wives, such as you might have been, Genie. Sometimes that kind but harsh fate precipitates them into events which set their irresponsible heels on a hard sure road. Such an event has happened to Johnnie. I might have saved him, continued to keep him in swaddling clothes, inured against the consequences of his own acts. But I have not done this. He committed a grave folly. I have forced him to face it, to accept it, to profit by it, to learn by it.”

  He dropped his head on his breast. “I might have saved him, if I had earlier taken an interest in him. But I only wanted him to leave me alone, as I have always wanted to be alone. No matter. I did him a wrong. Then, after he had done this appalling thing, I saw that the final opportunity had arrived for me to save him. It was my guilt that he has to learn the lesson in one supreme and terrible hour, instead of over a period of nineteen years. Do you think it was easy for me, my child? But it had to be done. I have suffered, as he has suffered, as you are suffering. That does not lessen my guilt. In my heart, I have asked Johnnie’s forgiveness. I ask yours, now.”

  “And,” said Eugenia, with low bitterness and hatred, “you believe it is ‘saving’ John to force him to accept a—trollop—as his wife, to go away into exile, almost penniless, to abandon his friends, and the girl to whom he had given a solemn promise?”

  James was silent a moment, then he said steadfastly: “Eugenia, my love, I believe that.”

  She spoke with an icy passion: “You did not consider me?”

  He said, looking at her fixedly: “Yes, I considered you. But you were not as important to me as Johnnie.”

  He knew that she was strong, that she could hear truths calmly, even if with anger and hatred.

  “Genie, let us be frank. It would not matter to you if Johnnie remained an eternal child. You would have marrried him, knowing what he was. In fact, you would have preferred it if he had continued to be irresponsible and weak. Why? Because you are an arrogant, dominant woman, who loves power. Johnnie’s weakness, his compliance, his yielding, to you, would have tickled your egotism, and would have finally made you a most horrible woman, a really terrible woman, a tyrant dominating and terrorizing your husband and your children. Deep in you, you love Johnnie less than you love power. That is what I meant when I said you might have destroyed Johnnie.”

  She looked at him, with all her cold naked fury in her eyes, all her indomitable resistance to him. But he knew that he had struck her to the heart, also.

  “I overlook your insults, Uncle James. I am not concerned with myself just at present. I am thinking only of John. Did you ever give a moment’s thought to his happiness? He will never be happy again!”

  As if she had said something heinous, something intolerably affronting to him, something most contemptible and indecent, he regarded her with a stern expression, even an outraged one:

  “Happiness! Are you a fool, Eugenia? I have been talking gravely and solemnly to you, and you insult me with idiotic prattlings about ‘happiness’! What a childish remark! What an absurdity! Only idiots talk of happiness, only dreamers and half-wits. Consider for a moment: Have you ever known a single man or woman who was happy? No! Only a child has flashes of happiness, because it lives in unreality, in dreams and folly. Perhaps a drunkard has those flashes too, or an opium eater. But that has nothing to do with the world of living. I am speaking of life, not the dreams of fools, drunkards, opium eaters and children!”

  He stood up, as if shaken to his very depths, and regarded her with dark and moved affront. “I thought you were a woman, Eugenia. Knowing the circumstances of your life, I thought the word ‘happiness’ would bring a bitter and disdainful smile to your lips. I would never have believed that such as you would mouth it, ridiculously. You are either a child, or a fool!”

  She did not answer him. But over her face passed a gleam like the flash of a sword, and he saw her enmity for him, her hate, her eter
nal vengefulness. He had caught her in a folly; she would never forgive him for showing her her own nakedness, her own ridiculousness.

  After a moment of the most intense silence, he continued sternly, even brutally: “I have forced Johnnie to sink or swim. What happens to him now is his own responsibility. I can do nothing else.”

  He looked at her with sudden warning sharpness: “There is nothing you can do, Eugenia. Nothing you dare do.”

  She rose, took up her jacket and put it on. She pulled on her gloves. All her movements were measured and calm. Only at the last, when she was ready to go did she look at him. And now he was overcome with pity again. This poor, poor child, so unbending, so implacable, but so vulnerable too, so pathetic. He knew only too well how she was bleeding in her heart, and what anguish she was enduring. If she would only weep, so that he might comfort her! But such as Eugenia never wept, repudiated consolation as the last and supreme insult.

  “Genie,” he began, then was silent.

  He saw her smile, dark and repellent. Then, without a word, she glided away from him. He watched her. Her narrow back was so straight, like steel enclosed in silk and fur. Her tread was unhurried. Her head was high and stiff. But if her attitude was indomitable, it was also unbearably desolate.

  When she had gone, he sank back in his chair, and a mortal disintegration seemed to pervade him. He covered his face with his hands. There was no sound in the room but the dropping of the coals, and long, painful, continued sighs.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mr. Bob Wilkins had not attained to his very satisfactory status in life without his shrewd and sly, and yet intrinsically good-tempered understanding of his fellowmen. If that understanding was leavened with malice, it also owed much of its validity to a boundless curiosity, and even to a kind of left-handed sympathy and foxy tolerance. Mr. Wilkins was a born scoundrel. He had a high respect for the nastinesses of law and the lack of openmindedness of the police. He was too intelligent to do anything which might bring him anything more onerous and disagreeable than a long and thoughtful stare from the gendarmery. At the crucial moment when that stare might be suddenly and violently transformed into action, Mr. Wilkins was simply not present, or, if forced to be present, his life and his activities took upon themselves the blameless innocence and blandness of a lamb cavorting on spring hills.