The Eagles Gather

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Oh, it is so lovely,” said Adelaide. She turned to look for Celeste. The girl was standing with Henri at the other end of the garden. She was listening, holding a rose, and seemed to be absorbed in the odor of it. The young man’s voice was almost inaudible; he was bending his head towards her as though what he was saying was of the gravest importance. Adelaide turned away from Thomas, who was prosily discoursing on the newest varieties which his “children” had introduced into the gardens. As she did so, she caught the eye of Christopher, who was standing a little distance away with Edith. Her mouth had already opened to call her daughter, but when her son’s eye caught her own, no sound came from her lips. It was as if he had seized her arm and had commanded her not to speak. She could not even move for a few moments; she had the sensation of being struck violently and deliberately, by an enemy.

  She stood in silence, a coldness running over her body. “Are you cold, Adelaide?” asked old Thomas solicitously, seeing the faint rigor of her face. “No,” she murmured, not looking at him, but only at Christopher. “No.” She forced herself to move. “Let us go in,” she added, feeling a nightmare weight on her limbs.

  Thomas led her out of the garden. They were in the grove again, alone. Adelaide was forced to sit down, for her knees were shaking. Thomas stood beside her, quite anxious. “What is it, Adelaide? But you are really cold!”

  “No,” she said again, trying to smile. “It is just old age, Thomas.”

  He gazed at her earnestly before saying: “We are both old, my dear. I suppose we should regret it. But we don’t, do we?”

  “Regret it?” she repeated. She began to laugh, thinly, bitterly. “Regret it! Who would want to be young, always, or live, always?”

  He did not answer. He glanced slowly over the austere magnificence of the great gardens. He looked at the trees, in which a deeper scarlet was caught in the upper branches. The sky was paling to a misty heliotrope in the east. The light was already fading from the earth, and mauve shadows began to fly over the grass. One robin, high in a tree, began to drop slow silvery notes of infinite melancholy.

  “Still,” said Thomas at last, after a long time, “the world is very beautiful. Isn’t it, Adelaide?”

  Adelaide lifted her head, and watched Christopher and Edith emerging into the grove. “Is it?” she asked, looking at Christopher. “Is it?”

  Henri and Celeste were alone in the rose garden. Henri had picked a white rosebud, and was trying, with exceptional skill, to fasten it in Celeste’s hair. She stood still under his fingers, which seemed to burn her scalp. Her face was flushed; she fixed her child-eyes resolutely on his chin. They were both laughing. Finally Henri had finished; the white bud seemed to glow in the dark hair. They laughed more than ever. “You look Spanish,” said Henri, taking her hand and putting it on his arm. A pang, inexplicable and dividing, passed through the girl.

  “You don’t belong here,” Henri said. “Not in nineteen twenty-five, or in America. Are you real?”

  He went on: “French girls are like you. But you aren’t French. You are American. An anachronism, too.”

  The world looked very strange to Celeste. Everything had a febrile brilliance about it; everything seemed close and sharp and too clear. Colors burned and the wind seemed intimate and personal. But she was almost ecstatically excited. Her breath did not seem to fill her lungs. Her forehead felt damp under her hair. When she tried to look at her cousin she felt giddy, experiencing a confusion which was both painful and pleasurable. She had read many romances, the greatest romances of literature, and had dreamt many dreams. But masculinity had never before impinged upon her consciousnes. She had perceived it through the distorting gauze of a protecting veil. Henri had moved aside the veil, and she saw a man fully for the first time in her life. A feeling of utter nakedness obsessed her, a kind of delicious shame and delight. Henri studied her profile intently. Yes, she is a virgin, he decided, amused and more interested than ever. A girl of nineteen, who was a virgin. It was astonishing. Girls like this were to be found only in French convents. He could not forget how she had blushed when he had put the rose in her hair, a silly gesture which could only be appreciated by an awkward school-girl just approaching adolescence. Yet, there was something more than adolescence in the young curve of Celeste’s breast, and the lift of her throat.

  “Where did you go to school?” he asked, stopping to light a cigarette. He did not offer her one, for he knew it would be refused.

  “I didn’t go to school,” she answered. “Christopher thought I should stay home. And besides, my mother would have been lonely, too.”

  He shook the match slowly back and forth until it was out, then dropped it. He regarded her with furtive attention. Ah, Christopher. Then he smiled. Celeste, for some reason, did not like that smile, though she could not have explained why. All at once she felt tired and drained, and looked about for her mother. She and Henri walked back to the grove, and found Adelaide sitting on a bench, with Thomas and Christopher and Edith standing near her. Celeste left Henri with sudden quickness and came to her mother. They all looked at her in surprise, wondering at her precipitate movements, and their eyes disconcerted her. Then Christopher glanced behind her and saw Henri sauntering up indifferently.

  Once Christopher had said that it was the business of survival that forced the “disinherited” to be shrewdest judges of men. Inability to acquire judgment, and the inability to use other men, caused the “disinherited” the final defeat. So he had made it his gravest and most important business to understand men, and understanding them, to use them. Armand had no need of this protection (for protection it was). Of all the family, Christopher alone had need of it.

  And so it was that as Henri sauntered up, walking with his firm and deliberate tread, his light inexorable eyes quite indifferent, Christopher scrutinized him more acutely, and with more passionate gravity, than he had ever scrutinized any other man. He missed nothing, from the heavy lips and the short dilated nose, to the eyes and the broad square forehead above them. He read the faintest signals about mouth and eye-socket, in the turn of Henri’s head and the mature movements of his body. So intense was his concentration that everything else in the world was shut out from his sight but Henri Bouchard. His own eyes left the mere surface of flesh and insistently penetrated to the mind and the thoughts and the emotions behind it. It all took but a few moments, yet Christopher felt that it had taken an incalculable time. And at the end of it, an almost prostrating sense of elation possessed him.

  Adelaide rose, and they all turned towards the house. Celeste showed an inclination to stay near her mother. Christopher maneuvered it skillfully. Edith, with disappointment, found herself walking with her stepfather. She wanted to turn back to Christopher, but when she paused at the edge of the grove and looked back, Christopher and Henri had disappeared.

  The two men had turned back to the rose-garden, silently, as though by a mutual consent arrived at a long time ago. They sat down on a bench and smoked without comment for some moments. They appeared to be at ease with each other. Beneath this ease they faced each other, negotiating for position, studying and watching.

  Christopher, who was never one to underestimate another, knew that this was no inexperienced young man, who had played about in the capitals of Europe and who snobbishly despised the mighty industries which supported him. He was more than twelve years older than Henri Bouchard, yet he understood that this was no advantage to himself, and no disadvantage to the younger man. Christopher could spare a moment or two to be amused. Jules Bouchard had made the children of his brother impotent; he had made helpless the great-grandson of Ernest Barbour. Yet out of this impotence and helplessness Ernest Barbour, resurrected like the phœnix, appeared to have come back for vengeance and final victory. For now Christopher knew quite clearly the truth which he had shrewdly suspected a few days before.

  To have come back with this idea postulated a plan, or at least, an outline. It meant that Henri Bouchard’s first effort
s must be to discover all he could, and to understand his adversaries first of all, and thoroughly. This is what Christopher himself would have done, and had been doing since his father’s death. Not underestimating Henri, he knew that the young man had been pursuing precisely this very plan. But how much did he know? And how well-formed was his plan?

  And all the time Christopher was thinking this, he knew that Henri was following his thoughts and understanding them. Between them, he realized, there could be no deceit, for they could not deceive each other. There had been no “exclusiveness” on Henri’s part, Christopher acknowledged with delighted admiration. He had come back, had allowed it to be known that he had returned. But he had made no move. He had sat in this great Georgian mansion, patiently waiting. He had seemed to know that there was some one in this formidable family who would see it was to his advantage to approach Henri Bouchard. For this some one he had been waiting, making no first move, not knowing who the one waited for would be, but sure that he would soon identify himself.

  He had had to wait longer than he had expected. But he had not been uneasy. In the meantime, from a thousand intangible sources, he was learning everything there was to know about his relatives. He had received much information in New York. While he waited, he analyzed all the information. Just before Christopher had written to him, Henri knew he would be the one who would come.

  And simultaneous with this enlightenment came the conviction that Christopher knew what his cousin was waiting for, quite clearly. Behind the wall of silence and distance, they both waited, hearing each other breathe, aware of each other’s movements. Then, at last, Christopher had opened the door in the wall, and had spoken.

  They had looked at each other piercingly over conventional words. They knew they could never be friends, in the real meaning of the word, for neither was capable of true and disinterested friendship for any one. They had looked at each other, searching for a weakness which would give one of them an advantage over the other. So far, they had not found such a weakness. This inspired mutual respect, but had also increased their wariness.

  They sat and smoked in silence, watching the mauve and heliotrope light of the evening deepen and grow more dense in the rose-gardens. The air was full of the lonely evensong of the robin and the rush of the fountain in the grove beyond the gardens. The sky was a delicate lavender, against which the lofty trees were already blurs of dark and moving shadows.

  Then Christopher said coolly: “Do you think you will remain in Windsor, to live?”

  Henri did not look at him as he replied: “Yes. I think I’ll remain. After all, it is really my home. I’m fed up with the British. I don’t like the French.” Now he turned his large head and regarded Christopher fully. “I spent quite some time in France. Arnaud Poiret is an old friend of mine. He was a year at Oxford, during my senior year.”

  “He is the son of Eduard Poiret, of Schultz-Poiret, isn’t he?” Nothing could have been more politely interested than Christopher’s voice.

  “Yes. When I visited France I met every one of importance connected with Schultz-Poiret. M. Poiret is a far cleverer man than M. Schultz. He is also the more powerful. He is a director, now, of the Banque de Paris; only a year or two ago he became President of the holding company he founded—the Union Financière et Européenne Industriale, which is now capitalized at 150,000,000 francs. It is due to him that Schultz-Poiret is the real power behind the Comité des Unions et des Demi-Produits, which, I don’t need to tell you, is the world’s greatest organization of steel and iron manufacturers.” The young man paused, then continued: “I am convinced that Schultz-Poiret overshadows Robsons-Strong in Europe. In fact, as you know, it is the most powerful of the directors of Skeda. That is why I have already purchased three million dollars’ worth of common stock in it.”

  Christopher was astonished, but he did not reveal his astonishment. He merely listened intently, facing his cousin with his immovable eyes.

  “Compared to Schultz-Poiret, you Americans are children,” said Henri. “And yet, you, we, could be greater. We could control all the armaments industries of Europe. It is a matter of foresight, of planning. And we had better move fast. Schultz-Poiret is already storing up nickel, aluminum, chemicals and glycerin for sale to Germany in the next war. French iron mines and smelters are working madly day and night to supply Kronk with iron. After all, before Germany can do a good job of re-arming and violating the Versailles Treaty, she has to have iron and nickel and aluminum and glycerin.” The young man smiled slightly. Christopher smiled in return.

  “And when do you—think—Germany will be ready?” he asked, as though indulgently.

  “Don’t you know?” Henri appeared surprised.

  Christopher shrugged. “First of all, the present government of Germany must be destroyed. Under this government propaganda doesn’t seem to make much headway. Schultz-Poiret, Robsons-Strong and ourselves, and Skeda, have spent millions of dollars—literally millions—to stigmatize the gov-erament as Communistic. Mussolini has been active; you know he owns a lot of Robsons-Petrillo stock. Britain—good old Britain—has refused Germany a loan, though old Hindenburg has begged on his knees. But in spite of everything, the government seems fixed in Germany, and the damn country seems to be pulling itself up by its bootstraps.” He said thoughtfully: “And so long as the present German government is in power Germany won’t re-arm—can’t re-arm —sufficiently to pay profits to Schultz-Poiret and Robsons-Strong, and Skeda—and ourselves. With this government, there will be no renewed militaristic spirit in Germany—no militant nationalism. And without this nationalism there’ll be no re-arming, and no future wars.”

  Henri looked before him and said meditatively: “Have the damn Germans no pride? Have they no regard for our profits?” And he looked at Christopher and burst out laughing. Christopher joined him. He had challenged the younger man, and Henri had given the sign and the countersign.

  Christopher offered him a cigarette, and again they smoked. Pleasurable rapport grew between them. Then Henri said in a lower tone, yet still an indifferent one: “You know about Byssen?”

  “Byssen? The German steel manufacturers? Yes, of course. But they are interested mainly in rails and bridges.”

  Henri regarded him with derisive astonishment “Is it possible you believe that? My God, you are all more in the dark than I thought! Why, Byssen is expending a fortune to overthrow the present German government; it is practically subsidized by Schultz-Poiret and Skeda and Robsons-Strong and-Robsons-Petrillo.”

  Christopher’s face tightened. He looked at his cousin narrowly. “How do you know this?” he asked, almost in a whisper.

  Henri smiled. “I told you Arnaud Poiret was my friend.”

  There was a silence. Then Christopher said in a low tight voice: “Thanks. You won’t regret this. I’ll put my order in for some shares in Byssen tomorrow. You don’t intend to tell any one else?”

  Henri smiled, still derisively. “No. But I never give without a return. When I come to market, I carry the price with me,” and he regarded Christopher with the same expression in his eyes which was depicted in the eyes of his great-grandfather’s portrait.

  They faced each other for a long time, and understood each other. Finally, they got up together. Nothing in Christopher’s thin narrow face revealed the exultation he was feeling. When they reached the grove, they found that it was empty, and full of vague darkness. They left the grove behind. Across the dim colorlessness of the lawns they saw the other four almost at the doors of the mansion. They descended the terrace. At this point Henri spoke again, very casually:

  “Have you heard of a man called Adolf Hitler, in Germany?”

  “Hitler? Isn’t he that Austrian clown, a sign-painter or something, who was thrown into jail for inciting to riot? Or treason? Or something else? Why? Of what importance is Adolf Hitler?”

  Henri replied: “I don’t know, yet. But I can tell you this: Byssen is interested in him. And behind Byssen—”

>   Christopher digested this in silence. But he was rather sceptical. He was not given to scepticism, as a rule, knowing that the sceptic is usually a fool. And yet, he could hardly credit any connection between an imprisoned maniac and Byssen, and through Byssen, Schultz-Poiret and Robsons-Strong. However, he knew the probabilities of the improbable, and his scepticism began to seep away.

  “You think—Hitler—” he said.

  Henri shrugged his big shoulders. “I know nothing, myself. But it is enough for me, and good enough for me, to know that Byssen is interested in Hitler. I have that from Amaud, too. Pressure is being brought upon the government to release him. And you can be sure that if he is released it is by order of some one greater than Byssen.”

  They had reached the door of the house now. Christopher would have entered, but Henri touched him on the arm. He turned, gazed at the young man, waited.

  Henri did not speak for a moment, then Christopher saw that he was smiling. “I like your sister. Celeste.”

  They went in.

  They were almost at the door of the drawing-room when Henri spoke again, smiling more than ever: “I saw old Jay Regan this week. He sends you his regards. Do you know, he seems to think a lot of you.” And then he added: “I told him you and I might see him in a week or so.”

  CHAPTER XVII

  Jean Bouchard, brother of Francis, entered the Bank of Windsor, smiling amiably and affectionately at every one, from the doorman to the old guards and the tellers and the clerks. He was adored by them, for his air was unassuming, his sympathy ready, and his interest in them invariable. The women, especially, worshipped him. He never seemed to be in a hurry nor in a bad temper. When he smiled, it was with candor, and dimples. His agility never unnerved the observer, for it was not erratic, but smooth and well-timed. The greatest egotist of all the Bouchards, his voice was never domineering, hasty or contemptuous. He spoke deprecatingly, patiently, humorously or frankly, as circumstances dictated. Moreover, there was a childlikeness about him that endeared him to women, a deliberate attitude of defenselessness and honesty which had deceived scoundrels to their everlasting discomfiture. No one recalled having been insulted by him, treated cavalierly by him, or having had to endure contempt, haste or impatience. His friends were multitudinous, for most men ask nothing more of their acquaintances than amiability, wit, charm, interest and intelligence, and all these Jean Bouchard (deadly little Jean) possessed in extraordinary quantity. Potential critics forgot his short stature, his tendency, now he was approaching middle age, to plumpness, and the opaque expression in his small sparkling black eyes. Even subtlety was blinded by him, because he was so very subtle himself; caution was disarmed by him, because he knew all the methods of disarming it; intellect was seduced by him, for his intellect was so brilliant. The evil were as easily deceived by him as the good. He wore the uniforms that appealed to each man. He made himself the alter ego of any associate, of any woman, any foe or friend, and even of any child or priest. A mountebank was delighted to discover another mountebank, a thief another thief, a reasonable man another man of reason, the tender-hearted one more tender-hearted, the kind, one still kinder, the ruthless, the most ruthless of them all, the evil, one who surpassed the worst.