Tender Victory

by Caldwell, Taylor;

“Oh God,” said Mrs. Burnsdale simply. “Oh God!” The children were awake; Max had begun to scream in a terrible tone. Kathy was consoling him in a stern voice, and pushing him. Pietro shrieked once, then was silent.

  Johnny ran into Emilie’s room. The air conditioner was whirring steadily. The little girl slept, and did not awaken when Johnny turned on the light. Even then he could pause for an instant, looking at her small face; she was smiling in her sleep. He caught her up, rolled blankets around her, and before she was fully awake, he had covered her face. “It’s all right, darling,” he said. His heart pounded almost too frightfully for him to speak. “It’s only Papa.” He glanced at the air conditioner in despair. He ran to the door with the whimpering child, and shouted, “All right, everybody! Downstairs, outside, as fast as you can! Don’t stop for anything; run like hell!”

  He heard a crackling and snapping. The walls groaned. The fire was rushing up through them. But Johnny waited until he heard Mrs. Burnsdale run, crying, sobbing, coughing, with the other children. Then he flung open the door, rushed into the hall where the gray billows of smoke were now tinged with the faintest crimson. Emilie struggled in his arms, trying to breathe. He pressed her face against his chest as he flew down the stairs. Somehow, Mrs. Burnsdale had remembered to turn on the parlor light. She stood outside now, on the stoop, with the other four shivering children. He could see their faces, wild, ghastly, their bodies huddled in blankets and coats, their naked feet in any shoes they had found. From behind them, like another fire, the smog poured in, to join the smoke. The whole house was snapping now. And Emilie was curling in convulsions in Johnny’s arms, coughing stridently.

  In this nightmare, which Johnny told himself was not happening, he ran to Mrs. Burnsdale and thrust Emilie into her arms. Mrs. Burnsdale saw his face, and she said, “Oh, Mr. Fletcher! Mr. Fletcher!” He said, “Get off the stoop. I’ll be with you in a minute!” He pushed her, shouted at the children, “Down on the sidewalk, all of you! Take Emilie next door; they’ll let you in. Take all the children.”

  He ran to his desk. The nightmare was enhanced by the calm glitter of the little tree. He dialed the operator and croaked, “Fire! Church of the Good Shepherd parsonage. Fire! Hurry, hurry, for God’s sake!”

  He hung up and called Dr. McManus. He heard the ringing of the bell. Now the parlor surged with smoke. Johnny held part of his bathrobe against his face. The edges of the new green rug were curling in blackness, filled with sparks. Johnny coughed and choked, and prayed. Then he heard the doctor’s angry voice, “I’m not coming out for a bellyache at this time of night! Who the hell is it?”

  “Doctor!” groaned Johnny. “The parsonage. It’s on fire.” He looked up at the ceiling. A vicious red crack was opening in it. Then the lights went out. Johnny threw down the telephone and raced to the door. He had just reached it when the ceiling, screaming and tearing, fell in blazing fragments to the floor.

  It was nearly three o’clock in the morning, but disaster had brought hastily dressed people into the streets. Johnny, his lungs almost bursting, ran down the steps of the stoop. Lights were on in the house next door, and he hurried toward it. The smog made it unreal, shifting and blurring. His legs felt as heavy and lumbering as iron. Someone opened a door as he mounted the porch steps, and without glancing at his host or hostess, he darted inside. In a small neat parlor, under a glaring overhead light, Mrs. Burnsdale, with Emilie on her lap, sat with the children on golden-oak modern furniture. Her face was streaming with tears. But the children sat in a white and dreadful silence, staring emptily before them.

  “Emilie?” said Johnny, through a smarting throat. He went to Mrs. Burnsdale, lifted away the blanket from the child’s face. The child looked at him, and her eyes were distended and blank in a taut face. She did not recognize him; her gray lips sucked in and out. And then she coughed, over and over, cringing, cowering. “Baby, baby,” said Johnny, in a voice like a prayer, as she paused to catch her laboring breath. “Emilie, dear.”

  Someone had taken hold of his arm, and he turned feebly. An elderly man in pajamas, quite bald, was looking at him in concern. “Gee, Mr. Fletcher,” he said, “it’s awful. My wife’s in the kitchen, making some coffee.” He added anxiously, “Hope the engines get here fast. We’re awful close to your house at the back. Sit down, man.”

  “The church?” said Johnny, and pulled away from him. He rushed to the door. There was a ripping anguish in his chest. Not conscious of the people outside, not conscious of his blazing house, not conscious of the smog or the deepening cold, he ran down the slippery sidewalk to the church. But though the very roof of his house was vomiting sparks and shafts of flame, and the walls were curving and buckling, the church was in no danger as yet.

  The fire lit up the thronging faces, the excited eyes, with scarlet. The air was acrid, and intensified the stench of the smog. People were gabbling and pointing. “There’s the minister!” someone cried. “Hey, it’s the minister!”

  Johnny looked at his house. And then he remembered the puppy in the kitchen. He started automatically for the parsonage. Suddenly one of the walls fell inward, and the whole street was lighted by the red flood. Johnny pressed his hands to his face, and a long shuddering went through him.

  Now the street clanged with bells, the roaring of fire trucks. Standing there, feeling nothing at all now, Johnny watched the helmeted men leap from the trucks, watched them unroll the anacondas of their hose. Police had arrived, bustling and efficient. They forced back the mobs of people. Then they saw Johnny, in his bathrobe, standing blindly on the sidewalk. He had lost his slippers somewhere. His naked feet stood in gritty slime.

  A policeman ran up to him, took his arm, and pulled him away. “You’re standing in the way, Buster,” he said. The whole street clanged and screamed. “Hey, you’re the minister, aren’t you? Better go in a house somewhere.”

  Johnny looked at him dumbly. He said, “It’s Christmas Day.” He swallowed, his throat in spasm. “It’s Christmas Day,” he said again.

  Johnny sat with Emilie in the crepuscular dawn. She lay in a wide warm bed in Dr. McManus’s best bedroom, under an oxygen tent. A nurse sat alertly near her head, watching, her fingers never leaving the child’s pulse. Dr. McManus stood in the shadows cast by the lamps; now and then his face worked, crinkled, squeezed. For Emilie was dying.

  The shock, the smog, the terror had been too much for her heart. Dr. Kennedy was downstairs, drinking coffee with Mrs. Burnsdale. He could not speak. His youthful face was bitter. Mrs. Burnsdale wept silently. The children were all in safe beds, but they were not sleeping. They cried for the puppy, their tree, their presents, for their own bewildered fear, their first, lost Christmas. “Look,” Dr. McManus had told them, “most of your stuff’s in the parish hall. And we’ll have our own Christmas right here, damn it. Got a house full of servants. Stop that yammering. You, Pietro, if you don’t stop squealing like a punctured rat I’m going to slam you, hard. Max, you shut up too. Kathy, help them get to bed. Jean,” and he looked at the silent, stiff-faced boy, with his canes beside him, “help Kathy, if you can’t do anything to stop these kids.”

  It was Mrs. Burnsdale who had looked at him with stark eyes and who had said, “It’s your fault. It was that old furnace, falling apart. I was always afraid of it.” He had not answered her, but had turned away to go upstairs again.

  Dr. Kennedy came up very shortly. There was no sound in the bedroom except the slight hissing of the oxygen. The sullen yellow dawn moved closer to the windows, and the lights became dimmer. Johnny sat like a statue, not moving, bent forward, looking at Emilie’s dwindling face, at her closed eyes, at her little, heaving breast. Her color was already bluish-gray; her lips stood open, and her nostrils struggled, pinching in, flaring out. Dr. Kennedy glanced at the nurse, who shook her head sorrowfully. She stood up to give Dr. Kennedy her place. The young doctor had dressed hastily, and his hair was rumpled. He took Emilie’s tiny wrist in gentle fingers, carefully closing the folds of the oxyg
en tent around his hand. Then he put his stethoscope to his head, leaned in under the tent, and listened to the child’s heart. Very slowly, he withdrew. He looked at Johnny and his own heart clenched with compassion. Dr. McManus came fearfully out of the shadows, and Dr. Kennedy lifted his shoulders in wordless despair.

  Now they could hear the unendurable panting of the dying child; her body stiffened, shivered. Johnny leaned closer. He could see the ripples of the water of death flowing over her fragile flesh. His face was expressionless. Emilie moaned, and it was as if the dolorous sound came from some depth in her, and not from her throat. Then she opened her eyes and looked directly at Johnny. They were filmed and dulled.

  “Darling,” said Johnny. “Baby. Darling.”

  The weighted eyes gazed at him, mutely. The long tangled curls lay on the pillows like bright floss, enhancing the deathly appearance of the little head from which they fanned. Then the most exhausted expression, hopeless, blind, and seeking, stood on the child’s face. She moaned again.

  “It’s Papa, darling,” said Johnny. “See, it’s Papa. I’m here.”

  The child panted and moaned. Then, suddenly, her face flooded with light and joyful recognition, and very clearly, in that silent room, she said one word. “Mama.”

  The smile remained, though the child died in that instant, and the eyes still gazed off in an entrancement of recognition and delight.

  Johnny threw aside the oxygen tent. He lifted the little body in his arms. He sat down with it, and held it to his breast. He smoothed the long, pretty hair. He closed the blue and filmy eyes. He rocked back and forth, soundlessly.

  He did not see Father John Kanty Krupszyk and Rabbi Chortow enter the room. He did not hear them when they spoke to him. The priest knelt down, crossed himself, and prayed, the tears streaming down his cheeks. And Johnny rocked and rocked, and held Emilie to him.

  Dr. McManus came to him speechlessly and put out his arms. Johnny shook his head, and then could not seem to stop shaking it, as he rocked. It was the priest, after a long time, who gently took the child from him, laid her down on the bed, and covered her face with the sheet.

  Johnny stood up. He looked at them all, and suddenly his face was terrible.

  “Father,” he said, “do not forgive them, for they knew what they did.”

  “Johnny,” said the priest, pleadingly.

  Dr. McManus stood in a trance, and his face was no less deathly than Emilie’s. Once or twice he sobbed, dryly. The rabbi sat in a chair and murmured the prayers for the dead.

  Johnny repeated, in a louder voice, “Father, do not forgive them!”

  He did not feel the sting of the needle in his arm, or the rubbing of the alcohol. He did not feel anyone leading him from the room and into the yellowish morning light of another bedroom. Someone pushed him down on the bed; someone put his flaccid arms into the sleeves of Dr. McManus’s pajamas. Now he was swimming in gray and black shadows. When his legs were lifted to the bed, and his head fell on the pillow, he still did not know.

  The nurse stayed with him. The doctors and the clergymen went downstairs. The scared servants were already in the kitchen. Mrs. Burnsdale was gone. Coffee steamed, and bacon fried on the big stove. The men sat in the ugly Victorian parlor and stared between their knees at the floor.

  An hour later two police detectives came to the house. They had a brief message. The old furnace had not set the fire. Johnny had known, from the deeps of his agony. There was evidence of arson, evidence enough for anyone. Only Johnny and the criminal had known.

  It was Christmas Day. In ten thousand homes in Barryfield children were singing and laughing and playing, and in the churches the choirs sang, “Joy to the world!”

  26

  Lorry drew up before Dr. McManus’s monstrous house and then sat in her car, looking at the distant doorway with utter numbness. She had felt nothing for the past ten minutes, when, stopping for gasoline, a station attendant had told her of the tragedy that had fallen on Johnny. She sat and stared, tearless and without emotion, at the cluster of pure white lilies and white ribbon which hung on the door, a lovely and sorrowful declaration that in that house a dead child lay in her coffin.

  Children ran joyously up and down the street, playing with their Christmas toys, still elated over the holiday of yesterday. Their voices rang and shrilled and laughed on the otherwise quiet street. Lorry began to watch them, automatically, as detached as if she were paralyzed in a nightmare. She saw that many automobiles were lined up and down the streets; a cluster of people were quietly coming from the house now, and another cluster was making its way up the circular driveway to the door. She averted her head; she did not want to be recognized. She lit a cigarette and blew a large cloud of smoke before her face and pretended, as the group leaving neared the sidewalk, to be idly waiting for a passenger. But the group, absorbed in genuine sadness, did not notice her. She rested her head for a moment or two on the steering wheel, overcome with the exhaustion of shock and grief. Finally she left the car and walked up the gravel walk to the house, her high heels slipping on icy patches.

  It was Mrs. Burnsdale, and not the doctor’s “man,” who opened the door for her. Mrs. Burnsdale’s face was swollen and blanched, her eyes reddened with weeping. “Miss Summerfield,” she murmured in vague surprise. The doctor had forgotten that Lorry was to arrive today, Thursday, the day after Christmas, and had told no one.

  Lorry said faintly, “I just heard, ten minutes ago. I didn’t know anything. The doctor expected me. I—I wonder if someone will drive the car in and get the luggage out? I—” she stopped, and closed her eyes tightly for a moment. She whispered emptily, “Oh, God.”

  Mrs. Burnsdale took her arm and gently drew her into the huge dim hall with its polished floor and Oriental rugs. A murmur of voices, so low that it seemed but the slightest rustling of trees, pervaded the house. The reception room at Lorry’s right was filled with sitting and standing men and women, Johnny’s parishioners and friends. She could see the blurred shadows of them in the early dusk, the gleam of dark mahogany here and there, and the wan rectangles of windows. To her left the wide sliding doors of the huge Victorian parlor were shut, shut with a palpable finality.

  Mrs. Burnsdale was crying again, helplessly. She said, “The minister’s in there just now. He just comes in once in a while, and he won’t let anybody in there with him, except Father Krupszyk and Rabbi Chortow. But he doesn’t even talk to them. He doesn’t talk to anybody, not even the children, poor little things, and he won’t let them go into the parlor. He hasn’t had a thing to eat since last night, and here it is after five. Miss Summerfield, I’ve seen grief before, but this is worse than grief. The only people he talks to are the police. He keeps going to the telephone every half hour or so asking them if they got the man.”

  She led Lorry upstairs to a back bedroom, chill and dark. “I’m terribly sorry,” she faltered. “The doctor didn’t say anything. So we’ve got the children in some of the rooms, and I’m here, and here’s Mr. Fletcher, and this is the only room left. I’ll put Kathy in here tomorrow, and you can—”

  “No, no,” Lorry murmured. “No, no, no.” But she was not saying this to the room. She sat on the edge of the narrow tester bed and her blue-green eyes were clouded and expressionless.

  “I have to chase the people out, when I hear him coming downstairs,” said Mrs. Burnsdale. She pressed a wet crumple of handkerchief to her eyes. “That’s the way he wants it. He doesn’t want anyone to console him or comfort him. He doesn’t even speak about—that poor little baby. Mis Summerfield, maybe if you just slip in quietly he wouldn’t notice. I think the priest’s with him now.”

  She helped Lorry take off her heavy mink coat, and Lorry removed her hat and gloves. Then she stood in the center of the room, forgetting where she was. Her dark-blue woolen dress appeared too large for her, for she had lost weight. Her beautiful face had a gaunt look and there were sunken places under her wide cheekbones, and her mouth was without color. On
ly the pale gilt of her hair lightened her weary appearance. Poor thing, she’s awfully tired, thought Mrs. Burnsdale, and worn out.

  She pulled the bell rope that would arouse attention in the kitchen. “Will you have some tea?” she asked. “You look so tired, Miss Summerfield. Or,” she added awkwardly, remembering the rumors of Lorry’s drinking, “perhaps you would like some—some—”

  “A Scotch and soda,” said Lorry absently. Then she started. “No, tea will be fine. Anything. I don’t care.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed again and covered her face with her hands. She said behind them, “Yes, I am tired. You see, my brother, who is a publisher, is in Europe, and won’t be back until March, and I have to help with the business in New York for three days a week, and I work in—Philadelphia—for four days.” Her voice was abstracted and indifferent from behind the thin white wall of her hands. Mrs. Burnsdale could see the hollows in the long slender neck, the weight of exhaustion on the broad shoulders.

  “Won’t you lie down?” asked Mrs. Burnsdale compassionately.

  “No. Please, no,” said Lorry. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.” She dropped her hands and again stared emptily before her. Oh, Johnny, she said in herself. Oh, God. Oh, Johnny. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny.

  She jumped violently at the clatter of the tea things. When she saw them she became suddenly nauseated, and stood up. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t—could I just go down now? I—want to see him.”

  Her dry eyes implored Mrs. Burnsdale, who took her arm again and led her downstairs, as if she were blind. They halted a moment on the shadowed stairs until a group left the house, closing the doors silently behind them. Then Mrs. Burnsdale rolled back enough of the parlor door to admit Lorry, and she left her.

  The crimson velvet draperies had been drawn over the immense windows, and the parlor was lighted only by the two great candelabra which had been brought in from the church. In the aura of one stood a small white casket on a bier covered with white velvet. Every available space spilled with white, pale yellow, and pale pink flowers, delicately scented, in baskets, in pots, and in bouquets.