Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  "All right!" shouted Mavis from behind the shut door. "You can come in now if you want to! I'm finished with the bathroom."

  He went into the bedroom, shamefully aware of the aching in his legs and back. He was only thirty. He felt like an old man.

  Mavis had hung up her suit and put away her hat and gloves, and now she stood before him, a pillar of gold and white in her silk nightgown and peignoir, her hair hanging long and flowing down her back. She smiled at him, and she was neither nervous nor shy. Her scrubbed face shone rosily and her teeth were like young ivory, big and wet. She was freshly perfumed, and, weary as he was, he thought how tireless she was, how young, how adorably alive and greedy for life, and again he hoped.

  When he had bathed and undressed in the bathroom, he came out. Mavis had dimmed all but one light in the big hot bedroom and was lying high on the pillows in the bed, contemplating something mysteriously. She turned her little eyes to him and said with affection, "I never saw your hair mussed before, Jon. I like it." She held out her arms to him like a child eager for a doll. Her hair was spread over the pillows in a golden stream. All at once he wanted to devour all that juicy life, all that verve and simplicity, and to forget that life was complicated and full of pain, and mostly joyless.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and took one of her cod smooth hands and looked down at her. He quoted:

  "Ah, love, let us be true to one another, For the world which seems To he before us like a land of dreams,

  So beautiful, so various, so new, Hath neither joy nor hope, nor help for pain—"

  She opened her small eyes wide at him. "I don't like that," she said. "I don't like poetry, anyway. It's too gloomy. Aren't you coming to bed? You wanted that, didn't you? What's the matter? Oh, I didn't understand that poem, eh? Well, I didn't, and don't. Turn off that light. It's nearest you."

  He lay beside her in the hot darkness. It was some time before he heard her muffled chuckling, and he turned toward her and she buried her face in his shoulder, and her young and gorgeous body was under his hands. She was laughing at him, and he was happy. "What is it, love?" he asked with tenderness. Now she would tease the weariness from him.

  "I'm just thinking," she said. "Old Betsy Grimshaw, one of my bridesmaids. You know. Twenty-five if she's a day, and never a beau! She caught my bouquet, and she almost cried! She'll never get a husband."

  He drew away his hands from her. She lifted her head from his chest and tried to see him in the darkness.

  "What's the matter?" she demanded. "Too tired? Or afraid of hurting me? You needn't be afraid. Aunt Flora told me all about it. It's something a woman has to stand, she said. And Uncle Martin gave me a book. I'm not scared."

  Shallow, mindless, he was thinking with a rush of deadly new despair. There's nothing for me in her. It's not her fault, the child. The fault was in me and my fantasies. All my life has been full of fantasies, and I never knew it until now.

  Her hair brushed his cheek. "Poor old boy," she said, and laughed. "Well, you go right to sleep. I'm sleepy, too."

  The marriage was not consummated until the second night in Saratoga. Mavis' lack of passion and enjoyment devastated her bridegroom. He told himself that this was new to her and would pass, and she would eventually respond. He did not know for a long time that Mavis was incapable of responding to anyone but herself and that if she were ever to feel passion, it would not be with him. She had submitted herself to him, not with resignation and frigidity, but with indifference. He had been only her means to a larger and fuller joy in life, away from her uncle's home. He had been only a way to adventure, and the adventure did not include him. He was her "old man."

  Her easy affection for him lasted nearly a year. She had nothing to give him and never would have anything. She had nothing to give anyone except pleasure in her laughter and her verve and teasing. But, being the man he was, that was not enough.

  He continued to love her for a long time, from a distance, but a terrible, yearning distance, and did not know when it also became hatred.

  Before the hatred finally arrived—though the helpless, hoping love long stayed with him—Jonathan would take Mavis to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and New York, and even Chicago and St. Louis with him, for conventions and consultations—and there, as usual, she would charm everyone and awaken envy of him on the part of other physicians. Jona- than could even enjoy her then, and her cheerfulness and her cuddling coyness, and her sudden bursts of affection for him, though he soon learned that that affection was also mocking. Her beauty was like the sun, inciting adoration even on the part of women. When alone with Jonathan, she was like a golden kitten, purring, coaxing, promising delights which never materialized, promising hope of understanding where there was no hope, promising subtlety where there was only animal enjoyment of living, promising adventures of the mind where there was only adventure of the senses.

  I must not blame her, he would repeatedly tell himself. She is what she is. But what Mavis was he did not entirely know for a considerable time. He had told himself since he was twenty that there was nothing to expect from others and that it was cruel to expect more than they had to give in love and perception. But when he finally realized that Mavis was not only mindless and shallow, except where it concerned her demands and appetites, but avaricious and hardhearted and callous toward suffering and intolerant of need and loneliness, and greedy beyond measure, he came to hate her while she still fascinated him and continued to make him believe that if he could but penetrate her shining avidity and triviality, he would find a pulsing core of gentle humanity and tenderness.

  She said to him once, cuddling against him in bed, "When are we going to move to Philadelphia or New York, Jon dear?"

  He said, "We are not. What gave you that idea, Mavis?"

  She was outraged. "You can hardly expect me to live in this miserable little town all my life, can you?"

  "I am satisfied here." He was astonished and freshly shaken. "This is my home, isn't it?"

  She became sly. "Jonnie, Jonnie. Don't you know nearly everyone hates you here? I hate it, for your sake."

  "How can they hate me?" He was surprised. "I give all I can of myself to my patients and to the city, in charity—"

  "That's the reason why," she replied, and chuckled knowingly. "People who give everything"—and she held out a giving palm—"get nothing. People despise them. You've got to take everything you can in this world, and then people will respect you—for your money and your position." She clutched her hand greedily to her breast and grimaced happily.

  He was both sickened and revolted by her then. It never came to him that Mavis had an animalistic but pragmatic knowledge of mankind, which not all his intelligence could ever acquire, and that she lived on a level of vulgar realism which he had rejected in childhood as unbearable if one was to live. He did not know that Mavis was fearless because she had accepted life for what it was, and men for what they were, and asked no concessions. He did not know that though he was brave, he was also expectant and too vulnerable.

  Mavis continued, for at least two years, to insist that they leave Hambledon. When he gave her his final refusal, she became sullen and withdrew from him and came to hate him with real and resentful hatred. He loved her as helplessly as always and would listen for her laughter in his house and the rustle of her dress, and her quick footstep, which never stopped at his door. As far as Mavis was concerned, Jonathan ceased to have meaning and verity for her and was only a means of supplying her with handsome gowns and jewels and position. She joked with him on occasion and laughed at him always, but she lived apart in a joyful world of her own, which was full of admiration for her and had nothing but love for her.

  Finally, total desolation came to him when he fully realized what Mavis was, and would also be, to the very end of her life. It was then that he began to muse on ways of killing her and removing her from the heart of an existence which was becoming intolerable to him. She had betrayed him, he would think, betrayed him in the on
ly way which mattered to a man like himself.

  Mavis was primitively astute. They had been married only two years when she realized he hated her. She was infuriated.

  A short time before the tragedy of Mavis' death, Harald said to his mother, "Jon will never get over Mavis. He thinks he hates her, and perhaps he does, and I'd not blame him, but he is also still infatuated with her, like a kid trying to solve an old puzzle and never giving up. He's the kind of a man who thinks that perseverance will solve everything. It won't solve Mavis for him. Why doesn't he accept her for what she is, idle, selfish, good fun though she has the intelligence of a china doll, and is only a laughing, grasping, dense imbecile with the mind of a kitten and just big sensuous lusts? I suppose he can't accept her, our self-engrossed laughing female animal. He's sure that in some way she has what he'd call 'depths,' though she is about as deep as a strawberry soda. He can't take it in that the omniscient Jonathan Ferrier could ever marry a woman with such a low but cunning intel-

  lect. It hurts his pride. So he still digs away, buying her books of poems and taking her to gloomy plays in New York —Ibsen, for God's sake!—and symphonies and operas!"

  "I never knew why she married him," said Marjorie. "He is not her kind."

  Harald laughed at her amiably. "She got what she wanted! The Ferriers are more important than the Eatons and have more money. She is now the whole life of Hambledon society, and that's what women like Mavis just love, and she made a splash in Philadelphia and New York, and last year, I heard, she was quite the toast of London while our Jon was there lecturing on a new technique in brain surgery. Yes, she got what she wanted, all that he could give her, though she didn't want him, himself. She's made that plain enough."

  "What do you mean?" asked Marjorie, but Harald seemed only to be annoyed with himself for having made that remark, and he faintly flushed. "No, he'll never get over her unless he really falls in love, and that I sincerely doubt. But because of her he hates all women and suspects them of everything mentioned in the capital sins, except old ladies and sick people and children he thinks are so damned innocent. Do you know what he is? A sentimentalist, a silly, yearning sentimentalist, and ever since he was a kid he was out to remake the world and its people in the image he had of them."

  "He's so unhappy, so dreadfully unhappy," said Marjorie. "Poor Jon. I wish that horrible girl had never been born."

  "Now, is that nice?" asked Harald genially. "Don't blame Mavis for just being Mavis and not having the capacity to be a grave and sedate and intellectual matron after she married Jon. The world's full of grim women. Why didn't he marry one? No, he has to marry Mavis, and then you blame her and not him! He could have had a hundred bluestockings to choose from—but he chose Mavis. More and more, I am compelled to believe that in many ways we are our own hell and our own devils. I pity Mavis far more than I pity Jon, but she at least knows how to make a fine thing out of a bad bargain. She never even knows when he is around, while he has a habit of haunting her. It's enough to make a girl call for her smelling salts. Phantom of the Opera: that's Jon."

  Four months later Mavis was dead, and Jonathan Ferrier was arrested for her murder and the murder of his unborn child, and the house never heard Mavis' laughter again.

  Now, on this hot July day Jonathan and his mother sat in his room while he drank the last of the brandy eggnog and they both thought of the years of Mavis and her death, and bees struck the screens at the windows and the last of roses sent their fragrance through the open window.

  Marjorie thought: Why can't a man recognize love when it comes to him? Why must he suspect love above all other things and shy from it, and doubt it and perhaps never even know what it is? He never really loved Mavis. He was only terribly infatuated and bewitched, and he still is. Sometimes I believe in spells.

  Jon stood up. "Thanks," he said. "Now I've got to go to the hospitals. Young Bob will be moving into my office in a day or two. About time he takes the calls and treats patients directly. It'll be nice to see the waiting room full again." He stopped near the door, came back and kissed his mother on her forehead.

  "We have to get used to everything," he said, and she knew that he knew that she was thinking of how bitter it would be to have a stranger in the offices she had built for him, and how helpless people were before pain and change.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When Jonathan Ferrier arrived at St. Hildas, he found a harassed Robert Morgan, who glanced at him resentfully. Jonathan, to him, appeared too insouciant and careless, and Robert had no way of understanding that this was the pose Jonathan assumed when matters were too stressful for him or he was too exhausted. Jonathan said, "Well, how are you managing our mutual patients?" He did not wait for an answer. "After the Fourth, you know, you will take over my offices and outpatients entirely. I've persuaded old Miss Forster to be your assistant, and she will be there on the fifth. Yes, I'll be around, introducing you. The whole town knows the offices will be open on the specified day. By the way, I hope you won't entangle yourself in the hospital war going on in this town."

  "Hospital war?" asked Robert.

  "Between St. Hilda's and the Friends'. They are overcrowded now and desperately need new wings, but still they compete for patients! And denigrate each other. Don't get embroiled in it all. St. Hilda's wants the well-paying patients, though it has to take the other kind, too, and the Friends' would love the affluent to make up their deficits and charity list, and has a preponderance of the poor. They are constantly puffing up their staff and gilding them. Don't tell me that you haven't heard rumors!"

  "Well," said Robert. He looked into Jonathan's darkly sparkling eye, lit with derision. "I hate controversies," said Robert. "I prefer to compromise."

  "For God's sake, don't! Take a stand, once and for all. Tell them both to go to hell, no matter what they offer you for favoritism. Sometimes staffs forget that they are there for the sole purpose of aiding the sick, and not for position. If you compromise, appeasing both, they'll both hate you. Just tell 'em that you are more interested in medicine than rival staff brawls, and make it clear. That's what I did."

  "I don't like animosities," said Robert with discomfort.

  "All right. Tell me how you propose to handle this, then?"

  They were sitting in the small sitting room on the fourth floor of St. Hilda's, and the hot July breeze did not cool them.

  Robert thought, his flushed young face disturbed, his blue eyes distressed. "Well, I thought I'd say—I'd say—that it is too early for me to—"

  "To do what?" Jonathan began to enjoy himself. He loosened his tight tie and crossed his legs.

  "I thought I'd say that as I am a newcomer, I'd prefer to remain outside of any local controversies and just do my— well, my duty."

  Jonathan contemplated him. "On the fence? Do you know what will happen to you if you keep putting them off? All at once you won't be welcome in either hospital. Where's your backbone?"

  Robert became angry. "I have a very good one! I just don't like warring factions, that's all! They're out of place in hospitals."

  "What an innocent you are! No matter where you go, you'll find warring factions. In any walk of life. You have to take a stand, and the sooner you take a stand here, the better for you. Let them see your guts. How many of the old fellas here do you think are devoted to medicine solely? They want position. Every damned son of a bitch in the world wants position, to crow over his neighbors. Your only hope, as it is the hope of any prudent doctor, is to tell the boys nicely that you are practicing medicine, not politics, and though they won't love you for it, they will at least tolerate you, if suspecting your true motives. Well, never mind. I hope you learn. How are our mutual patients today?"

  "You know Miss Meadows died."

  "Yes. That is good news. She's in the morgue, I suppose? I'll have to arrange funeral matters for her. What else?"

  I thought he was devoted to her, thought Robert with fresh resentment, yet he speaks of her death as if it weren't of an
y importance at all. He sullenly—and Robert was rarely sullen —gave Jonathan a brief account of the many patients. "By the way, a friend of yours is on the third floor, private room. Jefferson Holliday."

  Jonathan sat up. "Jeff Holliday? I didn't know he was even in town!"

  His face became darkly bright. "When did he get back?"

  "Two days ago. He said he tried to reach you but couldn't Are you his doctor?"

  "No. His mother is a fierce hysteric and likes old Louis Hedler, and he was always a boy who listened to Mama. We went to school together. He was one of the few friends I ever had. Old Jeff Holliday! Wonderful. Fine engineer, went to South America for the past six years, don't know why. But full of 'advancing our technical knowledge.' An undeclared hero. Or perhaps just in flight from Mama, who hates me as a 'bad influence.' What seems to be the trouble with him?"

  Robert frowned. "Frankly, I'm puzzled. He has darkish coppery patches on his skin, face, backs of hands, trunk. Roundish. Low fever. Says he gets them with a fever. I didn't try to intrude," said Robert quickly. "But as he was asking for you, he was told that I—was taking your place. I went down to see him. Just as a possible friend, and to tell you.

  But, as you say, Hedler is his doctor. I looked him over, anyway, just in curiosity."

  "Good," said Jonathan. "A doctor who loses his curiosity is a dead doctor, even if he tries to continue his practice. Does he seem sick?"

  "Well, not very. Just those reddish patches he gets when he has a fever. After the fever goes, the patches fade away. There's just one thing I don't understand. He showed me the sites of old patches—they are thickened and a little nodular but not painful. Now he has a fresh outbreak of patches and that low fever."

  "How long has this been going on?"

  "About a year. He forgot about the first attack and didn't make much of the second. Had no medical opinion in those South American countries. Thought his trouble was fungus. Was told in New York it was. Some fungus extant in hot damp countries. They gave him an ointment in New York, a fungicide. He was in New York for two weeks, consulting with his firm. When he arrived in Hambledon. he had a fresh —rash. Rash is all I can call it. I can't recall seeing anything before like this—defined, symmetrical patches, some as big as a quarter. Probably some semitropical disease."