Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  She was joyful and bent with him for a closer inspection. "Four leaves!" she cried. "I don't know how I missed them! It's such a wonderful bush; the roses are like little cabbages, and their scent is much deeper than the others. My father loved it best."

  He saw her profile now, childlike and radiant and softly smiling. She cut expertly. Her lips were parted and he saw her teeth, small and pearly, unlike Mavis', which were so large and so lavishly displayed in her wide laughter, and which just narrowly escaped being called "buck" or "horse teeth." Jenny's were like white ivory, barely showing between her lips, yet perfect and feminine. Too many girls these days were producing teeth as big as a young mare's, and they seemed to be proud of them, which was mystifying, and flared them out on all occasions. Jonathan thought that it was very inexplicable that two such arrant vulgarians as Myrtle and Peter Heger had brought forth such a daughter.

  Jenny's hair fell over her cheeks as she bent for a last clipping, and she seemed clothed in that brightly black cloak, living and soft and shimmering in the sun. Then she stood up and flung her hair back unaffectedly and laughed at Jonathan with delight, as if he had given her a priceless gift. The sound of her laughter rang through the gold and frail green quiet of the spring gardens, and it was laughter unlike Mavis' boisterous and bursting mirth, for it was very musical and shy.

  Jenny, Jonathan had thought, as he stood there easily and smiled at her with his chilled hands in his pockets and his polished boots already muddy. Sweet Jenny. He had forgotten, since his marriage, that there were such girls as Jenny in the world, tender, simple, honest, gentle and diffident, who could be so happy when a dead bush proved it was not dead at all but was importantly and exuberantly alive. Here was no avaricious flirt, no schemer, no liar, no grasping woman with tiny eyes and a huge grinning mouth, which could express the utmost in callous cruelty. Jenny's mother was rich, yet Jenny was unaffected and her joy in a rose could never have been known to a Mavis.

  She stepped back from the rose bed and her shoe stuck in the mud and she hopped on one foot. Jonathan retrieved the shoe and he never noticed it was several sizes larger than Mavis' dainty slippers. He scraped the mud off on the new green grass, then gallantly insisted on putting it on Jenny's foot again. To support herself she leaned her hand on his bent back, and all at once a fiery thrill ran through his shoulder and then through his body. For an instant he could not move. Then, his hands shaking, he put the muddy shoe over the coarse brown stocking and he saw that though the girl's foot was large, it was also miraculously slender and beautifully molded. She was murmuring something, but he did not catch her words. He was still stricken by his response to her touch, and now felt the heat in his flesh, and a sudden incredulousness, and a sudden rush of happiness and buoyance. He had never known these before, and he was dazed at his own beatitude.

  "Thank you, Uncle Jon," said Jenny. He stood up, his face darkly flushed. He said, "I wish you wouldn't call me 'Uncle Jon,' Jenny. I'm not really your uncle. Call me Jon."

  She studied him seriously. Then in her shyly blunt way she said, "But, Uncle Jon, you are so much older than I ami I'm only sixteen. It wouldn't be respectful."

  "What's fifteen years between friends?" he asked, trying for lightness because his breath was coming too fast. "You call Harald 'Harald,' and he's only two years younger than I. Come on, Jenny."

  She considered him with that young solemnity of hers. The blueness of her eyes seemed to fill her face, that immaculate face of absolute purity and without any guile at all. Then her expression changed after long moments. It became startled, very frightened and confused, and she turned her face aside and her cheeks were suddenly awash in brilliant scarlet. Without a word she flung herself away from him and ran back to that ridiculous castle. Her long black hair floated behind her like a mantle, catching the light.

  Jonathan watched her go. He was too involved with his own emotions to wonder why the girl had run like that and why she had colored so and had been so silent.

  He did not see her again that day. But as he lay awake that night with Mavis sleeping blissfully beside him—she had not as yet moved to another room—he could not forget Jenny. Academically, he knew much that was to be known about humanity and human emotions, for he was a doctor, but as young Father McNulty was to later say, he was essentially and amazingly a simple man who could not, as yet, translate his knowledge into personal objectivity. If another man had told him of this experience, he would have said with a broad smile, "There's nothing mysterious about it. You've fallen in love with that girl, and probably you've fallen in love for the first time, and never mind that you're married."

  His marriage took a change for the worse in the next few days and then he and Mavis had gone to Europe for the summer, on her insistence, and he had agreed in a last desperate hope that he could change Mavis and save the marriage and persuade her to begin a family.

  He had not seen Jenny again for nearly a year, and incomprehensibly he only saw her at a distance. In the following years he saw her exactly three times before her mother's death. He would have jeered to learn that he was a rigidly upright man in his soul, yet for a long time he not only tried to devote himself to Mavis and to change her but he suppressed that day with Jenny in his mind. He had removed himself from his Church, but the moral teachings and doctrines had sunk irrevocably into him. Whenever he remembered Jenny, he choked the thought at once and did not know that the heavy sadness he always felt was connected with that spring day in the castle's gardens.

  He had not known it until this Fourth of July, 1901, on a peaceful hot day in a peaceful and joyful and busy country. He remembered it now, with all its first poignancy and longing and sharp delirium and passion, and all its sense that something incredibly novel and beautiful had happened to him and had lightened his whole somber world, had made him young and expectant and unbearably happy, for a few hours at least.

  But the girl in the garden and the girl behind him in the surrey were not one and the same any longer. One had been innocent and beloved, and this one was besmirched and unclean. To him that had been long unpardonable and worth only his hate. For a second that afternoon, when he had caught Jenny at the table, it was Jenny of the garden again, Jenny of sixteen years, and the look she had given him had recalled that whole day.

  The surrey turned toward the river, and down the long street the dark water was glittering and the bulk of the island stood up in it against the sky and the opposite mountains.

  "You can let me out here," said Jenny. Her voice was rough and low.

  Jonathan said, "You heard my mother. I promised her to see you safely home, and on your island, with the doors all locked." He did not turn to look back at her in the dark. Jenny was crouching on the cushions as if deadly cold, hugging herself with her arms. She was crying silently, great noiseless sobs that shook her body and tore at her throat. This was an anguish familiar to her, for it was compounded of grief and despair, of longing and loneliness, of monstrous desolation. Her tears ran down her cheeks without a sound and dropped on the plain blue and white check of her shirtwaist She looked through the watery mist of them at the back of Jonathan's arrogant head and then she closed her eyes and pressed her lips together.

  The first flare of the evening fireworks rose in the sky at the left, above the houses and this long street to the river. It flowered like a huge rose in green and red, spreading with a thunderous roar that rolled along the water, breaking into vivid stars against the deepening dark of the sky, in which the ivory curve of the moon was embedded and in which the stars were beginning to tremble and change. Jenny was too absorbed in her misery to see, but Jonathan saw and remembered again the last Fourth of July when he and Mavis were guests of the gay party of dignitaries in the park near the river. Mavis, as usual, had been given the seat of honor and each blaze of the fireworks lit up her luminous face, her smiling face, her constantly tossing golden head, her quick and lively gestures. She had appeared to be enjoying herself, surrounded by love and adulation,
and her French perfume had been a cloud of delicious fragrance all over her so that it seemed not to appear extraneous but a part of her smooth and beautiful body and the white lace dress she was wearing. Jonathan's latest gift to her, a necklace of aquamarines and pearls, hung about her throat and seemed to gather color and warmth from her lucent flesh.

  Yet, that night, when they were alone in her dressing room, she had risen to cold and contorted fury. This was not new. Her rages were very frequent when with Jonathan. She had ordered him from her bedroom and dressing room. But he had stood there, somber and silent, just staring at her with a kind of incredulity which further outraged her, for she knew by now he still could not reconcile the lovely-lady-among-strangers with the uncontrolled virago who was his wife and who had the most cruel of tongues. He could not reconcile the lady-of-love with this greedy and empty woman. He was always in a state of desperate wonder.

  She was sitting at her dressing table in a peignoir of white lace and satin, with her golden hair streaming over her shoulders and her face as ugly as death, and livid. She screamed at him and beat her fists on the table and her eyes were full of glittering hate.

  "You are such a fool! Such a bore, bore, bore! Do you know how boring you are, sitting like a clod among your friends and not speaking or, if speaking, making some disagreeable remark! Bore! Bore! Old man, old man, old stupid man! If you weren't so stupid, you'd have left this dull and silly town long ago! They can talk about your 'brilliance,' bah! but I know how stupid you are, how boring, how tedious, how tiresome, with no conversation and no fun. You keep me here in this horrid town, in this horrid old house, among these horrid people, and all you can say is that it's your 'home,' and these are your 'people,' and I'm like to die of ennui and yawn myself into a stupor! What fun is there for me, here—and with you? Tell me! Just tell me!"

  He could speak now, slowly and without emotion. "I'm sorry I bore you. Yes, this is my 'home.' This is my city. These are my 'people.' You know it. You've known it from the beginning. I take you to New York and Philadelphia and Boston and Chicago on medical meetings. You know of the offers I've had, in great hospitals and clinics—"

  She had listened to him, her furious breaths making her breast lift and fall rapidly, and her rage rising. Again she beat her fists on the table. "How long do you stay in those wonderful cities? A few days, a week or so, letting famous men flatter you while they are laughing at you out of the other side of their mouths! They know what you are, a small-time, small-town fraud, with no ambition, no imagination. You can't even dance properly. You hardly ever laugh. You're a clod, a farmer, a dullard, a fool! I wish I'd died before I married you!"

  "So do I," he said. Now his voice was heavy and full of thick anger, murderous anger he rarely felt—and then only with Mavis. "I wish you—or I—had died before we were married. Indeed."

  She became silent then, her hands unclenching on the table, and she looked at him and what she saw frightened her and made her turn very white. She half rose. The mirror reflected her pale and fallen mouth. Her tiny blue eyes opened as wide as they could and they were sharp with wary fear. She clutched the edge of the table, and then her pink tongue darted out to wet lips suddenly dry. She blinked and she watched.

  "Do you know how many times I've wanted to kill you, Mavis?" he asked. "Do you know what I think at night when I can't sleep? I think of ways of killing you. Poison? Cutting your throat? Smothering you? Strangling you? You tempt me all the time, Mavis, you tempt me."

  She knew it was true and she let out a deep gasp, and then, inch by inch, she moved away from him backward, her dressing gown glistening in the lamplight, her hands pressed tightly against her smooth thighs. She began to whisper. "I—I didn't mean what I said—it's just that I'm so bored here—I'm alone at night—you are out on call, or the hospital. I know you're a doctor—I know—I know— But I'm young!" Her whisper lifted to a thin and venomous wail in spite of her fear. "I'm not an old crone, ready to die. But I'm withering in this house, I'll be old before my time. I'm only twenty-three, but I feel ages, ages. I go out, but it's the same old thing, among the same old people, and the same old talk. No fun—"

  "Life isn't 'fun,'" he said. He swallowed the sick and infuriated lump in his throat. "You should know that. You aren't so very young any longer. You knew when you married me that you'd never be able to coax me away from Hambledon. I've given you all I could, bought you everything you wanted, have taken you abroad and to the big cities frequently. That wasn't enough for you." But nothing would ever be enough for the Mavises of the world, nothing would ever satisfy them or fill the gaunt lust with which they had been born. "Fun." They lived only for that. Some said the Laughing Girls had a tremendous "lust for life." But it was an empty and superficial lust, demanding tinsel and endless amusement and endless mirth, and dancing and rich food and wines and money. Above all, money, and adulation and flattery and fawning.

  What made them think they were worthy of all this, of worship, of jewels, of fine carriages and furs and silks and masculine attention and adoration. Or were they capable of asking themselves this merciless question? To them it was sufficient to desire. The world was their servant, created just for their pleasure and entertainment.

  "You won't even give me a child, you trivial, mindless wretch," Jonathan went on. "You selfish imitation of a real woman. But, then, I should be grateful. What kind of a mother would you make? What kind of a human being would you produce? Yes, I should be grateful."

  He stared at her with his violent black eyes. "I should have killed you before this, when I found out what you were. One of these days I may do it. Don't tempt me again." She saw the hunger to murder her in his face, the pallid shine of his face, the glint of his teeth between his lips, the fire in his eyes. She backed away from him still farther, then suddenly whirled in a rush of gold and white and ran into her bedroom, slamming the door in real terror behind her, and locking it. Then she leaned against it and closed her eyes and breathed rapidly, listening for a sound behind the door. But Jonathan went away and she heard his own door close, and all was soft rosy lamplight in her charming bedroom, which she had decorated in pink and blue and silver. "I'll tell Uncle Martin," she whispered with vindictiveness. "I'm not safe here any longer." She was not afraid now. She was only amazed, horribly offended, aghast that he had dared speak to her like that. She wanted revenge for such an insult to her, Mavis Eaton, who could have married anyone—anyone. It was not to be believed! That wicked old man, that nasty old man, who had betrayed her by marrying her, and who was keeping her a prisoner in this awful dull town which she hated and where she was not appreciated!

  Tonight, as he drove Jenny down to the river, Jonathan fully remembered that night when he had wanted to kill his wife, when just a few more words from her would have precipitated him into fearful action. But she had had the cunning of an animal which she was, and she had not railed at him again.

  The rockets were blossoming in noisy and rainbow profusion in the dark sky, and the river carried the sound of music along the shore and far faint laughter. Ahead, at the end of the street the water moved silently and blackly, and the island stood there, not a single light in any window, not a light on its rising bulk. Jonathan said to the silent girl behind him, "You didn't have the sense to leave a light burning, did you?"

  Jenny did not answer. She knew if she said a word, that she would burst out into open agonized sobs. But she looked at the fireworks scintillating against the sky, and heard, even above the incoherent internal stammering of her old pain, the voices and the music. Jonathan, for the first time, turned his head and looked over his shoulder. He could barely see the girl as she huddled in the rear, but he caught the outline of her thin body and her face turned to the fireworks. She was only a mute shadow there, but he felt something very odd. He felt a lonely wistfulness in that shadow, a hunger, a silent yearning.

  Nonsense, he said to himself. But still he was surprised. Why should the grim Jenny Heger want to be part of that noisy cele
bration and to be among people she had rejected years ago and who laughed at her openly now and repeated lewd tales of her? Still, he was surprised, and with that surprise the old sadness and bitterness came back to him. She knows what I know about her, he thought, she knows what she is, and she knows what the town says of her. Above all, she knows what I think of her and that is why she is always crude and rough with me and runs at a look from me.

  They reached the water's edge and Jonathan left the surrey to tie up his horse. Jenny flew swiftly past him down the shallow bank; she was like a moth. In an instant she was in one of the three waiting rowboats. She was actually pulling away, after strongly shoving the boat from the shore, when he leaped over the widening black water, half fell into the boat, recovered his balance and raised himself on a knee. "You damned fool, you stubborn fool," he said. "Get over here. Give me those oars." The broad boat rocked from side to side and some water splashed in and Jonathan swore. He reached for the oars and the girl raised one and its wet side caught silver from the brightening moon. He knew she wanted to hit him, and knew that she would, so he pushed himself to the stern and said, "All right, I love a show of manliness."

  She rowed with firm young strength, bending and straightening, and the oars were urgent, and Jenny's body moved in perfect rhythm and the boat fled over the quiet water. Now, to the east, the bursting fireworks reflected themselves in the river in gaudy splashes of orange and scarlet and gold and blue, infinitely beautiful and weird, exploding into points of falling light. The boat creaked softly, the oars dipped with hardly a sound. A particularly elaborate fireworks display represented an enormous head of President McKinley, important and solid, and loud applause clamored over the water. Jenny turned her head toward the massive display, which was painted on the black sky in fiery color, and Jonathan saw her face, the smooth white forehead, under the brim of her great ugly hat. It was the face of a child.