Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  "No one sent for you?"

  "No. Father McNulty was told by Tom that I had treated you for a couple of months when you were seventeen—when your regular family physician was off in Europe, and Father McNulty asked me to come to see you. To be perfectly candid, Francis, I don't know why I am here. Auntie doesn't want me. Auntie didn't call me. If she weren't a lady, she'd ask the gardener and his sons to come up here and drag me out and throw me on my ass outside. She'd be quite within her rights. I'm an intruder. I have no status. I'm not even a very good friend of your father's, in spite of what you may have heard. Auntie hoped to keep all this quiet and in the family, but Tom had to interfere."

  Francis' young face trembled all over. "You came just because Father McNulty asked you to, Dr. Ferrier?"

  "That's right. That's the kind of simpleminded idiot I am."

  "Why did you come, really?"

  "That's really none of your infernal business, but, as I said, I don't know myself."

  The quick smile jerked at Francis' mouth again. "Just your sense of responsibility?"

  "Maybe. After all, you did have a bad case of ulcerative colitis when you were seventeen, and I did pull you out of it after the hacks had almost killed you. The Chinese say that if you save a man from death or suicide, his life is on your neck as long as you live, and he is your personal responsibility. Harsh but realistic people, the Chinese, and very intellectual, and they do have a point. After all, when you interfere with a man's manifest destiny, as ordained by mysterious Entities, then the curse is on you for interfering. So, perhaps I was cursed for saving you when you were seventeen, and Tom is now cursed for saving you, and it is possible that he and I together can work out a deal with the fates."

  A curious darkening touched Francis' overly eloquent eyes, and his white lips hardened. Jonathan watched him without appearing to watch.

  "As Auntie says, I don't pry," he remarked. "But, as it is a long time ago, just what did give you colitis? I'm not one of those New York and Boston doctors who are listening far too much these days to that Austrian hysteric and medieval witch doctor, Sigmund Freud, who appears to think that every ailment of the body has its seat in something he calls the unconscious or maybe it's the Id, or perhaps the Superego. Frankly, I prefer to believe that a great many illnesses arise from what I call the Underego—to coin a term. A man just doesn't have enough manhood, or courage, or self-esteem, or pride, to face life and kick the offal out of it but lies down under all the battering, and cries and works up an illness to get out of the fight. Freud has another weird idea, too. He thinks a lot of mental ills, which give rise to physical ills, too, are caused by refraining too much from tossing in the hay with some willing doxy. He hasn't too much respect for what we call Judeo-Christian morality. Can make a man sick in his Id or something. Now I think that continence, if not carried to the point of absolute absurdity, or if undertaken with the full consent of the will, has a lot to recommend it."

  Francis was listening with that intensity of his which Jonathan had deplored as excessive three years ago.

  "So," said Jonathan, "what in hell was really troubling you when you were seventeen? Say I'm inquisitive."

  Francis looked away from him and stared down at his fingers, which he slowly began to flex and unflex. He said, "Will it help you 'work out a deal with the fates' if I tell you?"

  "Maybe."

  Francis thought for a few moments and then said, "You know we are not supposed to reveal another's sins—"

  "I'm not up on doctrine lately, and besides it is no longer any concern of mine—"

  Jonathan was a little astonished when Francis lifted his head very sharply and stared at him with a kind of fierceness and passion. But the youth's voice was oddly quiet when he said, "It's no concern of mine any longer, either. I've left the seminary. You asked me about what ailed me when I was seventeen. It was something that had gone on for a year. Perhaps more. Will it be much of a surprise to you to hear that I adored my father—up to then?"

  "Frankly it would." Jonathan was more than ever astonished. "I never admired Daddy."

  "I know." And again Francis smiled. "I heard you call him the Marzipan Pear and even worse. I think I hated you when I was a child for that. Didn't you also call him a mountebank?"

  "Probably. It sounds like me."

  "Yes. It certainly does." Francis turned his head and looked through the window. He did not look at Jonathan when he said, "I adored him. I thought he was a—saint. I thought he had—magnitude. He was never exactly too conscious that I was around, but when he did see me, he was quite affectionate. I didn't discover for years that that was the way he treated everyone. Affectionately. Maybe he does really like people—That doesn't matter, though. I thought he was a man—"

  "Sun-crowned, holy, untouchable, heroic, Hercules in the guise of St. Augustine," said Jonathan, when Francis became silent. "I see."

  The thin cheek colored. Francis turned to him now with a little anger. "Didn't you think that of your father, too?"

  "No, thank God. I didn't. Even as a kid I had better sense. I thought my father pathetic, but I also thought he was a damned fool and a bore. That didn't stop me from caring about him, though. Apparently you found out something about Daddy that disillusioned you, and instead of being sensible and saying to yourself, 'My father is no better, or no worse, than other men,' you tried to kill yourself off with colitis and run away from your disillusion."

  "You make me sound like a weakling!" Francis' voice rose.

  "Well, aren't you? Never mind that you were sixteen or seventeen. You were a man, not a child, at that age. You had lived long enough to know this world has few heroes and saints and possibly none at all. What did Daddy do except be his dear old affectionate self, fully revealed to you at last as human clay? He's too cautious to do anything really heinous, that is, too cautious ever to be found out. Did you find out something?"

  "I did," said Francis through a tight mouth. "Several things. It doesn't matter how they happened, how I found out. It began when I visited him in his suite in Washington during a holiday when he couldn't come home. I decided to give him a wonderful surprise," Francis went on with old bitterness, "and so I didn't tell him I was coming. A surprise! It was, too."

  Jonathan put his hands to his head in mock horror. "Don't tell me!" he exclaimed. "You found Daddy in the Arms of a Woman who was not His Wife."

  "Laugh," said Francis. "It probably sounds very funny to you, Dr. Ferrier, but it wasn't to me. At sixteen."

  "Oh, my God," said Jonathan. "There you were, at sixteen, and probably had been experiencing your own 'carnal urges,' as the Church calls them, and doing some hot breathing and fiddling at night. Did you think your father was a monk? A hermit? He was and is a full-blooded bastard and has always been known to have a fiery eye for the ladies, and he isn't married. You did your father an injustice. Did you actually believe he should have devoted himself to Memories of Mama and kept himself immured from the world?"

  "You make me sound like a young fool," said Francis, leaning toward Jonathan now and showing deep offense.

  "Of course. You were and are. Didn't they ever tell you anything in that boys' school you went to in Philadelphia or even in the seminary?"

  Francis' face became cold and grim. "Yes. But that wasn't the reason—I mean, it was a shock at first, and then the priests talked to me, and though my father's conduct still seemed disgusting, I realized it was quite normal. No, it wasn't that. It was the other things I began to find out about him."

  "Things people told you?"

  "No. Things I found out myself. I made it my business to find out."

  "What a damnable young prig you must have been! And a little contemptible, too."

  But Francis' large dark eyes did not slink aside or wince. They were, at last, the eyes of a man. "I am not going to tell you what I found out. if they had been the average larcenies and manipulations of a politician, the usual skulduggeries, I'd have finally understood about them, too. There
's a hell of a lot of compromising we have to do in living and coming of age, isn't there? I would have compromised, as I compromised before, with all the facile philosophies of a cynical world if my father's—crimes—had just been the usual and accepted ones of a man and a politician. Or even if they had been what people call 'peculiar,' as a way of not mentioning the facts."

  Jonathan listened acutely. He was no longer smiling.

  Francis' expression was again grim. "No, I can't tell you. I thought when I was seventeen that it was absolutely necessary for me to tell—well, say important men, men in government. I thought it was a matter of my—country. My country. The country he speaks so roundly and richly about on the Fourth of July, and Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays, and Decoration Day. The things he has sworn to protect. You see, he never thought I was very intelligent; even when I was sixteen and seventeen, he thought I was a child. So—I heard. I overheard. In his flat in Washington."

  He stared blankly at the upturned palms of his hands. "And there was the trouble. My conscience. My country. Above all, my country. Yet, he was my father. What does a person do in that case?"

  My God, thought Jonathan, who had a shadowy revelation. Yes, what does a person do in that case? He said, "I don't know. And so you were torn apart inside, and you bled inside, and you almost died."

  "You should have let me die," said Francis, and closed his thin hands.

  "You never told him?"

  "No. To tell him—I'd have blown apart. I'd have had to do what I was afraid to do. It took me a long time to get over loving him. A very long time. Suppose you had found out something very terrible about your father, Dr. Ferrier, something really—monstrous. Something so criminal that in your country's interest it should be revealed, and that if it weren't revealed, he'd go on and on, doing the same thing and maybe much worse? Would you have—"

  "Exposed him?" Jonathan shook his head. "I don't know. I don't think so."

  Francis sighed. "Well, there it is. I carried that to the seminary with me when I was seventeen. And—don't laugh at me now—I prayed. Anyway, I put it out of my mind."

  "You couldn't have been mistaken? You couldn't have been making a mountain out of a molehill? After all, you were hardly more than a kid, and politicians do some very expedient things."

  Francis shook his head. "Give me some credit. I tried to tell myself that for over a year. I tried to think he was not doing what other politicians were not doing, only for much more money and that it was a sort of nefarious game with them, only. Like playing dice for high stakes. But men came to that flat in Washington—Senators—others."

  "And he let you stay around to absorb it?"

  "No, he wasn't that much of a fool. I kept on visiting him at times he didn't expect me. I had to know. And I always arrived at night. Finally he must have suspected something, for when I did arrive, he was always ready for me. My aunt wired him that I was coming. I found that out, too."

  "Christ," said Jonathan.

  "And now I don't know anything. I do know he made a lot of money out of the Spanish-American War. I do know he goes abroad a lot. That's all I will tell you, Dr. Ferrier. Except that I've been doing a lot of reading the past three years, a great deal of reading on a very frightful subject. Have you ever heard of Zaharoff, Doctor?"

  "Yes. He's called mysterious and sinister. I've heard his name. Something to do with munitions, isn't that it?"

  But Francis did not answer. He leaned back on his pillows in utter exhaustion, and Jonathan watched him and respected both his honor and his suffering, and with that he was greatly disturbed. What a thing for a boy to have carried about with him for years! Worse still was that boy's realization that in not betraying his father he was betraying something infinitely greater.

  Jonathan said with unusual gentleness, "Look at it this way: If your father were not doing it, and others with him, there would still be a man in his position to do it. I know that isn't much consolation, and when it comes to affairs like this, the individual is pretty impotent, but—"

  Francis' eyes were closed. He said in the quietest voice, "You don't understand, Doctor. I don't care about that any longer. I don't care about anything. I haven't cared about that for nearly a year. I haven't cared about anything for that long or longer."

  Jonathan was more disturbed than ever. He stood up slowly and went to the bare window and stood and looked out at the long sweep of lawns, the fountains, the arbors and the flowers, and then raised his eyes and looked at the deepening mountains, calm and splendid and remote. Jonathan frowned. The room behind him was too quiet, as if the dead lay there. He said, without turning, "You say you haven't cared about anything for a long time. You have been in a seminary, studying for the priesthood. Don't you care any longer about—well—let's say, God?"

  "No," said the emotionless voice behind him. "How can I? I no longer believe He exists. Or if He does, He is not concerned with this fleck of dust on which we live. What faith I have is gone. It took a long time dying. Over a year. It died very slowly, Dr. Ferrier. But it did die. I can't be a priest. My faith is dead."

  And that's why you tried to die, too, thought Jonathan, and he thought, "What a rotten, disgusting, revolting and sickening world this is, to be sure!"

  He walked slowly back to the bed and stood beside it, looking down on the spent and suffering young man who lay there. He said, "If every man who lost his faith, if every man who was an honestly convinced agnostic or atheist, died of it, then there'd be few people left in this world. I'm not saying that wouldn't be an excellent thing. I am merely stating a fact. 'Men have died, and worms have eaten them,' but not for God."

  "No," said Francis, still lying there with shut eyes. "You forget the martyrs who did die for Him and the saints who believed to the death in Him. That seems the worst tragedy of all: To die for nothing."

  "We all do," said Jonathan. "We live and die for nothing that we can discern, nothing that honestly makes sense to a rational man. Martyrs, saints, heroes, ordinary men, men like you and me, men like your father: we live and die for nothing. We invent gods when we can't stand the thought of the nothingness, the barrenness, the unreason, and we worship them when we can't bear living in a void any longer, when something piteously human cries out in us for consolation for what we see and suffer. Religion is the real Unreason, but, God help us, we can't be absolutely sane for too long at a time or too often. There's a worse agony than faith; there is a lack of faith. There's a worse madness than believing; there is nonbelief."

  Francis' eyes slowly opened and they looked at Jonathan straightly.

  "You believe that, Doctor?"

  Jonathan hesitated. His perturbation was like a storm in him. He did not know what to say, so he said, "I believe that. At times. You will remember the cry of a man to Our Lord: 'I believe! Help thou mine unbelief!' "

  Francis smiled drearily. "I have lost even the will to believe, so I don't need any help."

  So that is why he would not speak to Father McNulty. Jonathan drew his chair to the bedside. He said. 'Have you talked with the old priests at the seminary about this, Francis?"

  "No. I didn't want to hurt them."

  "You should have talked with them. Do you believe for a moment that those dedicated and blameless men never have their long periods of dryness and despair, of unbelief? Do you think they never knew doubt and still don't know it? St. Teresa of Avila had thirty years of dryness, and she was only one of the many saints who confessed that they were frequently torn by doubt and tortured by the despair of un-faith. Yet, they persisted in the heroic virtues. I've heard it said that their doubt and dryness were a testing to see if they would persevere in the desert of their agonized souls, in spite of everything."

  "Do you believe that, Dr. Ferrier?"

  "I don't know," said Jonathan. "You see, when I was seventeen myself, I, too, lost my faith, and it never came back. Not once, not for a moment."

  "But how can you live, then?"

  "I am not a coward. The worl
d is filled with brave men who have no faith. We find ourselves in a senseless maelstrom, and the only thing that has verity is man himself. His very doggedness, his very patience, his very persistence, his very hope, in the face of apparent senselessness, gives him an awful dignity. He is the observer and the participant. He is the builder. He is the artist who makes order out of disorder, brings some frail light to chaos. I don't usually have much respect for my fellowman, knowing him for his weaknesses and crimes and stupidities, and I rail against him for them. But there are moments when I feel an awe for him, that he survives and will not let himself die. He is tragic, and that makes him a heroic figure in the midst of his blind predicament."

  "And you think just living is enough to justify living?"

  "What else can we do? Curse God and die? Is that the only thing a man can do? It is, if he remains a child, and if he insists on kicking and destroying everything when he discovers there is no Santa Claus, just out of sheer baby rage and vengefulness."

  "Dr. Ferrier," said Francis, "I built my whole life, from childhood, on God. I knew, even when I was a kid, that my father didn't really care about me. I knew my aunt didn't. No one did. I couldn't make friends easily. I was too shy, too timid. I liked to read too much. I had—fantasies. I loved to look at the world, and I loved it, and I loved its great Lover for making such a beautiful world and for creating me so I could enjoy it, too. God, to me, was father and mother, brother and sister, friend, companion, teacher—all the days of my fife, from the very first day I heard His Name." He lifted a hand, then let it drop. "And now I have nothing, nothing at all."

  "You have your youth, and your world is still here, and you have a life before you to be endured if nothing else. As I endure it."

  Francis gazed a long time on the dark and weary and dissipated face that hung over him. Then he said, "You only endure it—Jon?"

  "I only endure it. I've only endured it since I was seventeen. By the way, what happened to precipitate this crisis in you?"