Ceremony of the Innocent

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Ain’t you done yet?” Mrs. Jardin’s girlish voice shrilled down the stairway. “It’s four o’clock. Need your help in the kitchen.”

  Ellen came to herself. She finished ironing a handkerchief; the cellar was pervaded now not only with the smell of gas but with the sweetness of beeswax. She was amazed to discover that all the ironing was finished, for she had moved automatically. She ran up the stairs and announced that the baskets were filled; she carried one, thrusting herself upwards and panting with the weight. Mrs. Jardin was skeptical; she critically examined the articles within the basket, and said with grudging, “Well, you’re good for something after all. Wouldn’t have believed it, a flighty miss like you.”

  Ellen was set to work helping with the dinner, which would be at half past five, for this was a weekday. Now she was aware of smarting eyes and pulsing arms and heaviness in her legs. Her hair was a shimmering and glowing mass of tendrils about her face, which had lost its color and had become ghostly with exhaustion. But she was not hungry; her nausea lingered. “You’re all sweaty, and you smell, and you can’t go into the dining room tonight looking and smelling like that,” said Mrs. Jardin. “Better wear something clean tomorrow, I warn you.” The pink cotton frock was stained with perspiration and cobwebs and dust, and Ellen looked at it with dim dismay. She wanted only to fall down and sleep in some lightless spot, and now she would have to wash and iron this dress tonight.

  She faintly refused the scraps tonight; the odor of roast beef sickened her and she had to clench her teeth against a vomitous urge when she smelled the roasted onions and the hot apple pie. However, she concealed a wedge of pie and some slivers of fat and meat and a roll or two in her apron for her aunt. Something uneasily stirred in her at this pilfering which had never stirred before.

  The sweltering streets seethed with people, as usual, when she left at nearly seven. She did not run this evening; she did not pause to look at the distant mountains drifting in a purple mist, nor was she exhilarated at the smoldering ball of the sun. She walked slowly, her head bent, painfully pushing one foot ahead of the other, and never heard the customary jeers and obscene whistles. Her hair fell like copper silk about her face; her lips were colorless. Her feet were not flesh; they were molten metal and each step was an agony.

  May Watson was industriously sewing in the parlor, the treadle machine squeaking and protesting. The room was dusky, for kerosene was expensive. But she looked up, startled, when she saw Ellen, and blinked.

  “Did they dismiss you, Ellen?” she cried. “You were supposed to work ‘til ten!”

  Ellen leaned against the settee and said in a voice so weak that May could hardly hear it, “No, Auntie. Mrs. Porter said from six to seven was all, and she’s going to give me a dollar a week, not just seventy-five cents.”

  May was stunned by this magnanimity on the part of a woman she both despised and reverenced. She blinked rapidly, then rubbed her scorched eyes. “Well, then!” she exclaimed. “You must show your gratitude, Ellen! Go back at once and work ‘til ten. You didn’t leave Mrs. Jardin to finish up in the kitchen all alone, did you?” She was shocked and alarmed.

  Ellen closed her eyes in complete despair. “No. We were all finished. Mrs. Jardin—she was pleased. She said I was better than Alice, and worked real fast and deserved the dollar. Oh, Aunt May! I can’t go back, not even if they needed me tonight! I—I feel sick. I just want to lie down, somewhere.”

  May peered at her niece and her sense of what was “right” fought with pity. “You do look peaked,” she said. “That’s because you stayed up, chattering last night.” She had another thought. “Did you get your supper? That was agreed.”

  Ellen whispered. “Yes. And I brought you something, the way you bring me things. It’s in the kitchen.”

  She looked down at her frock. May uttered a sharp sound. “How did you get so dirty and wet? You’re real careless, Ellen. Now you’ve got to wash and iron it right away, to wear tomorrow.”

  “Please,” said the exhausted girl. “Let me wear the blue tomorrow. I—Aunt May—I just can’t stand up any longer. I’ve got to lie down.”

  “A big strong girl like you! Wait ‘til you get my age! Well, go along.”

  Drugged with weariness, Ellen moved with extreme slow effort out of the room and into her airless bedroom. She pulled off her clothes, not neatly as usual. She pulled on her wrinkled nightgown. She fell on the bed and was immediately asleep, curled up like a puppy.

  Two hours later May Watson turned down the lamp in the kitchen, and with her own weariness she moved towards her bedroom. But she paused at the door of Ellen’s room. The light from the distant streetlamp fell through the doorway and May saw the half-crouched motionless mound on the bed. There was something infinitely pathetic in the amorphous contour of the girl’s body, and May, her eyes wetting, said to herself, “Oh, Ellen, Ellen.”

  Through her opened window May Watson saw the moon, a huge fat white spider caught in a thin web of drifting clouds, and now it was not only her body which ached but her soul also.

  C H A P T E R 4

  JEREMY, THE SON OF THE MAYOR, returned today from his visit to the young lady in whom he had been interested. A vital young man, a business administration student at Harvard, he was both lusty and cautious, virile without undo pugnaciousness, intelligent and cynical, pragmatic and exigent. He concealed a formidable power of intellect under an abrupt and offhand manner. He had no use for fools, for the sentimental or the trivially expedient; his particular hatreds were for the maudlin, the endlessly smiling, the cliche-speakers, the average, the mediocre. He had no love or mercy for “the people,” which included, in his ruthless category, his own parents. Preston, the village of some five thousand “dolts,” appalled him, and always had. The house of his parents revolted him; their manner of living provoked him to execrations. The Mayor had always considered his son “difficult.” Mrs. Porter adored him, though often he bewildered her with what she called “crude remarks. They aren’t nice, you know, dear.”

  “Nothing is ‘nice’ in this world, Mama,” he would reply. “It is ruled by the law of the jungle, ‘The race to the swift, the battle to the strong.’ I don’t intend to be one of the weak. If we don’t watch out the weak will devour us, body and substance and country, and leave only bones behind. They have such appetites!”

  “You will learn,” she would remark. “After all, dear, you are only twenty-three years old, a mere boy.” She did not know that her son had never been a “mere boy,” not even in infancy.

  Once he wrote to a friend, “There are only two kinds of people in this world: Perpetual children, who are a terrible danger to civilization, and those who were born adult. When the ‘children’ take over this country and adults are in the minority, then it’s the end for this country. I have known adults who were chronologically only ten years old, and children who were seventy-seven. One of these days we will have to face the fact that men are not born equal in intelligence—which is the only criteria for mankind—and act accordingly, or we’ll all perish in a sweet swelter of sentimentality and brotherhood; what the Founders of this Republic established will be destroyed forever. America needs men, not diaper-wetters, no matter their age.”

  He was an ardent advocate of the Malthusian theory.

  Once a professor—whom Walter Porter would have called “lacy”—said to the young man, “We must have compassion for the weak, and help them.”

  “I think,” said Jeremy, “that our semantics do not meet. If you mean the persistently poor, who do nothing to elevate themselves, and neither toil nor spin unless they are faced with starvation, and have no intelligence at all, and are determinedly stupid and whining and mendacious, then I say: Let them die off, and the quality of our populace will be improved. However, if you mean those of intelligence who were born poor, then indeed we must have some compassion for them, though they are proud enough to angrily reject compassion. We must help them in ways they will never discover. For on these d
epends the future of our country.”

  To Jeremy, his mother was the prototype of a “new spirit” in America: the rich who mawkishly bewail the “plight” of the poor, either for their own sinister reasons or to elevate themselves in the estimation of their neighbors. Agnes Porter was not intelligent enough for the first, whom Jeremy blackly and bitterly suspected, and so she belonged to the latter category, which Jeremy called simpletons, not as dangerous as the first but a power behind them. Both categories exploited “the poor,” one for political purposes, the latter for public approval, especially the religious and social. “If anyone is the murderer of the helpless,” he would think, “these are the guilty.”

  He had assiduously read all the works of Karl Marx and Engels, and was an intense student of the French Revolution, which had destroyed France as a civilizing principle in the world. He had aroused the sly mirth of his professors because of what they called his “inconsistency.” He spoke with contempt of the enormously rich: “They have only the cunning and greed of a weasel”; and he had spoken with equal contempt of the weaklings who depended on charity for their existence. “Let them prey on each other—but not on us,” he would say. “When both devour our flesh, brothers in voracity, America will fall into the long twilight of bankruptcy, slavery, and despair. Somehow, these monstrous brothers will find a way to tax us into oblivion and chains. They are of one mind. But be sure they won’t be taxed!”

  He detested, above all, politicians. He had not enlisted in the war against Spain, but not for the reasons his cousin Francis cherished. He thought wars, except in self-defense, atrocious, though by nature he was a fighter.

  Sometimes the complacent Mayor thought uneasily that he had begotten a bear cub, all powerful sinuousness and emphatic charges. He did not understand in the least what Jeremy asserted. He could only think that Jeremy was “young” and therefore too vehement. Once he had said to Jeremy in a grave and pious tone, “You must remember what Christ has said of the least of His brethren,’ and that we must help them.”

  Jeremy had stared at his father in incredulous and caustic mirth. If there was anyone who was less interested in the “brethren” it was Edgar Porter, who treated his servants and his employees with contemptuous haughtiness and dislike, and was merciless and pettish in his demands on them. So Jeremy said, “God also condemned the lazy grasshopper who did nothing but sing and dance and eat all summer, while the industrious ant worked and prepared for the winter. ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard,’ He said. Now, the Bible is not inconsistent. God permitted the gay grasshopper to die whimpering that fate had been unjust to him.”

  He found Preston intolerably boring, and his parents even more so. But as a conscientious young man he felt that it was his duty to endure them for a few weeks or so during the holidays. However, even then he found it absolutely necessary to escape occasionally, to New York or Philadelphia or Boston or even Pittsburgh. Here he found men like himself, of the same mind, who were already beginning to express fear for their country and its future. “The new Populism,” they would say, and looked with a derision, not without fear, at William Jennings Bryan. “He’ll go away, and his ideas with him,” they had said to Jeremy. But Jeremy had shook his head. “Remember, we are not alone in this benighted world. Scandinavia, and to some extent France and Germany, have adopted a number of Karl Marx’s ideas.”

  Jeremy had inherited, on his twenty-first birthday, a large estate from his maternal grandmother. With this—though he did not considerably deprive himself—he helped support orphanages in Scranton, and privately contributed to the salaries of various ministers. He kept these matters anonymous, however. Francis would not have understood this of a young man he called selfish and “an enemy of the people” and an “exploiter.”

  Jeremy had been amused when his father had run for the office of Mayor. “What for?” he had asked.

  Edgar Porter had made a grave and pious face. “To help make the world better—in my small way,” he had replied.

  Jeremy had laughed uproariously, but had never explained his laughter. He was fond of his short and massive father with the sanctimonious eyes and the air of one who believed himself a servant of the public weal. “What this country needs is muscle, Dad,” he had said. “Muscle and brains. They are not mutually exclusive.” When Edgar had looked hurt, Jeremy kindly continued, “I am not speaking literally. We need the muscularity of intelligence, and not the flab of social reformers. I have never seen a reformer who was handy with his fists or who could express a sensible and realistic opinion. It is all tears and simpering and shrill and acid denunciations, and envy. Envy, above all.”

  When his son had diligently supported unions, the Mayor found this baffling and paradoxical. “Why?” demanded Jeremy. “I will support any union or organization which will protect the hard-working and the industrious and the proud. But I will fight to the death the weak who would prey on them, to fill their bellies without work. I think unions may eventually be the only things which will stand between America and despotism. If they don’t fall into the trap of power, too.” He shook his head. “The fault with humanity is that it is human.”

  To his parents, Jeremy was an enigma. To himself, he was of one sound piece—an American. He did not ‘trust” anyone, and especially not a politician. Once he had hoped that his cousin Francis would understand and be on his side, but Francis had disappointed him. “All air and foam and idealism,” he had said. “One, at the last, must be pragmatic, and deal with things as they are.” He found an ally in his Uncle Walter, who often secretly wished that Jeremy was his son. “No dowdiness there,” Walter would say to himself. “Just common sense.” On Jeremy’s suggestion, Walter had bought many copies of Elbert Hubbard’s pamphlet A Message to Garcia, and had distributed them widely.

  Jeremy thought the self-styled intelligentsia hilarious. “Mediocres with pretensions of brains,” he had called them. “There is no blood or vitality or reason or manliness among these little white worms. They are like the people they champion—witless, covetous, sniveling. And dependent, and poisonous. In more strenuous times, in this millennium, nature dealt with them ruthlessly. In circumventing nature we haven’t been compassionate.”

  Many of the more milky by temperament thought him “cruel,” though they were the most cruel of men themselves. Jeremy understood them at once; they were hypocrites and wanted a reputation for civic and humanitarian virtue. He avoided them when he could, but he found them increasingly prevalent in the universities. He would attempt to reason with them; they possessed no reason, and only emotion, which latter Jeremy suspected. He also suspected the zealous.

  Though by character he was incisive and vivid and strong, he had no flamboyance nor was he ebullient. Yet in appearance he was impressive, being tall and sinewy; he had a look of stalwart vigor, invincible and potent. His mother was correct in considering him manly. Women, therefore, found him fascinating and completely masculine. He had no affectations, but possessed a hard and forthright look, not bold, if frequently challenging. His voice was vital and incisive, somewhat loud but never dogmatic. He invariably meant what he said.

  He had not inherited his mother’s pallid eyes, which often bulged like unripe grapes, nor her general fairness of coloring. His eyes were a forceful and penetrating brown, rather demanding and so very intriguing to women. They were fixed deeply in his swarthy rectangular face. His nose was bony and prominent, if well formed and aggressive, his brow square, his chin somewhat set, his mouth sensually full and skeptical, with the marks of quick humor about it. His dark hair was very coarse and plentiful, but never disordered. Women loved his hands, large and very male, with very clean square nails and big knuckles. As well as being exceptionally scholarly, he was quick of movement and of mind. He did not resemble either of his parents. “He looks like my dear papa,” Agnes Porter would say with a fond simper. Jeremy was popular with most of his peers though anathema to those who considered themselves more temperate, or kinder, gentler, and, above
all, more civilized. Those who prided themselves on their “tolerance” whispered sneeringly that he looked “foreign,” even Slavic. In athletics, he had earned a prodigious reputation.

  If he had one weakness it was his propensity for women, but he was very discriminating. He did not like vapidity and sweetness and pretenses of helplessness. But he admired spirit in a woman, self-reliance, courage, as well as beauty. Not for him the “common” and the unintelligent, not even in a prostitute. He had, unknown even to himself, a sense of delicacy and taste. He had not been the obvious reason for little Alice’s dismissal, though the infatuated girl had more than hinted he was. He had never even noticed her in his father’s house. He was not Mrs. Jardin’s favorite gentleman, though she was obsequious to him, and it had been she who had spread the rumor, for, though he treated her with politeness, he had a way of looking at her which unpleasantly revealed to her, for an uncomfortable moment, her own character.

  He had decided that the young lady from Scranton had her amusing facets but that she was not consistently bright. He was contemplating going to New York again before he had to return to Harvard. The thought of remaining in Preston until term depressed and bored him.