Bright Flows the River

by Taylor Caldwell

  The doctor, a young man with a keen smooth face and brown hair and eyes and a competent air, looked at him curiously. Now, where had he seen this big and frenzied man before? Or a photograph of him? “Mr. Turner?” he asked, tentatively, as he took off his coat.

  “No,” said Guy. “In here, please.” The doctor took up his bag and tried to keep from smiling. “A friend.” Now, where had he seen this man before?

  He did not even smile inwardly when he examined Beth. He said, tersely. “The flu. And pneumonia. It strikes fast. A lot of it around lately. She belongs in the hospital. I’ll call an ambulance at once. She’s a very sick lady.”

  “But, she won’t die?” Guy’s eyes were glittering and distended. The doctor said, “I hope not. But she’s got to go to the hospital at once. Where’s the telephone?” The doctor followed Guy into the kitchen, began to murmur into the mouthpiece. “Emergency,” he said.

  The world was like an ax blow in Guy’s belly. Dazed and shaking, blinking his eyes to clear them of a sick mist, Guy watched the doctor give Beth an injection. “She won’t die?” he pleaded again, and again the doctor replied that he hoped not. “But this is very serious.” They stood and watched Beth; she was starting to stop her restless movements on the bed. But her loud and anguished breathing was increasing in intensity. Once she opened her eyes and Guy bent over her and said, “Beth?” He saw the distant emptiness of her eyes, the lack of recognition, the grave withdrawal. She closed her eyes. Guy took her hand and held it fiercely. Now he himself was muttering her name over and over, pleadingly. He forgot the doctor. He and Beth were alone, fighting a terrible enemy together.

  The doctor studied him musingly, the big head with the black hair tumbled with a little white, the strong dark face, the hard mouth, the aquiline nose, the great shoulders, the expensive clothes. The poor bastard was almost out of his mind. Now, where? Then the doctor suddenly knew. Guy Jerald, the famous land developer and builder. Married, wasn’t he? Yes, his wife’s picture often appeared in the newspapers over a story of her charities and activities and social affairs. Mrs. Turner? The name was familiar. Yes. She owned this small farm. Not a young and pretty woman, but striking, even if she was almost moribund and disheveled and the long red hair was dark with sweat. The doctor was intrigued. His narrow nose twitched. He said to Guy, “I think you’d better have a drink, a big one, sir.”

  But all the power of Guy’s formidable mind was concentrated on Beth, holding her back from death, holding her hand with such strength that his knuckles paled. Beth, Beth! he shouted in himself, you can’t leave me, Beth! You must never leave me, Beth! If Beth died his life would be like a desert with a lost and broken fountain, waterless in the gray silence. He began to stroke Beth’s unconscious cheek. She opened her eyes. Was there a fleeting recognition there? Was she trying to smile? Had she heard him? Guy could not hold back a dry sob of panic and horror. “Beth?” he said aloud. But her eyes had closed again. He needed to relieve himself, badly, as he had so needed on that frightful day when he had learned that his father was dying. Stumbling, he ran into the bathroom. He crashed into the door. Then he was savagely nauseated. His vomit was tearing at his throat like a wild dog. He heard the siren of the ambulance, and stumbled back to the bedroom again.

  They wrapped Beth in a number of gray woolen blankets and covered her head. They lifted her on the stretcher, then one of the attendants said politely, “Mister, we’re taking her out now. You’d better let go her hand.” He glared at them with confused hate. The doctor took his arm and held him back, and gasping, he watched them carry Beth out of the room. The doctor put a glass of whiskey in his hand, and Guy stared at it confusedly. “Better drink it,” said the doctor. Guy put the glass to his lips, took a sip, retched, then drank the liquor swiftly.

  “I think we ought to have a specialist,” said Dr. Farmer. “Anyone you’d like me to call?”

  “I don’t know—no, I don’t know any. You’d better do it. A private room, too, of course. Nurses. Anything—anything—”

  The doctor went to the kitchen to call. Guy’s trembling almost made him fall as he looked at the empty bed. Would Beth ever lie there again, and he with her? The terror increased to the point of voluptuousness.

  Her mood tonight. She was ill, and he had been offended at something she had said. What was it? Christ, what did it matter? He had been on the point of leaving. What would have happened to her then? She would have died here, alone. He cursed himself, hated himself. Why hadn’t he seen at once? But no, he had been offended, and he was going to leave her. Just as he had been offended with his father, and had neglected him, and had not seen at all. His self-hatred became an agony. When the doctor returned he commented to himself that Mr. Guy Jerald looked as though he had gone insane.

  “Better wait until morning before you see Mrs. Turner,” said Dr. Farmer, intrigued. “They’ll be busy with her all night; you’d just be in the way.”

  Guy came briefly to himself. Prudence. They’d know him there, in the hospital. Prudence. He said, “Yes. I’ll—call—in the morning. I’ll visit her, of course. A friend, a very good friend. I bought some land from her.”

  He saw the doctor’s face, condemning, suddenly antagonistic.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Farmer. “I’ll go to the hospital tonight. Where can I reach you, sir, in case of an emergency?”

  The cold caution quickened in Guy. “I’ll call you. Every day. I’ll call the hospital.” The doctor shrugged, put on his coat and hat, and went away. Why, that son of a bitch, he thought. That poor woman might not make it, and he was already protecting himself! But all the big businessmen did that. Nothing must be permitted to rumple up their cautious lives. Their safe powerful lives.

  But the doctor was pleasantly surprised, the next morning, to hear that Mr. Jerald—Mr. Jerald!—was already in Mrs. Turner’s room, and that nurses had been ordered for the patient. He had said he was an old good friend of Mrs. Turner’s, and that nothing must be spared to help her recover. Well, well, thought the doctor. He began to plan how to protect the name of this most important man, and to stifle any gossip which might arise, as it probably would. Still, what was more natural than a friend aiding a friend? The doctor chuckled.

  Beth was under oxygen for three days, and on several occasions she nearly died. And Guy came every morning and every evening, and stayed for at least an hour, sitting silent and motionless beside the bed, his eyes fixed on the sick woman.

  On the fourth day Beth became conscious. Guy was with her when this happened. She opened her eyes, in that light, airy, and sun-filled room, and looked at him in astonishment. She tried to say his name, but she was too weak. He bent over her, and when he saw that the nurse had her back to him, he quickly kissed Beth on her poor parched mouth. She smiled and sighed. He held her hand.

  “You’re in the hospital, Beth,” he said. “You’ve been very sick.” Her head moved in a feeble assent on the pillow. Her dry cool fingers wound themselves about his. She looked at him and her sunken eyes, in their dark shadows, were filled with love and contentment. Her hair had been braided into long red plaits. Her slender body was now very thin. Her skin was more transparent than ever, and revealed the delicate purple veins under it. She lay languidly, like one who had been rescued from death.

  A week later Guy was alone with her. She could speak more now, but he would not let her. He said to her, “Beth, if I were free, would you marry me?”

  She smiled, then gravely looked at him, long and thoughtfully. She wanted to say, “Yes, of course.” But she knew she must not do this. Guy had far to go. The time was not now. So she said, “No.” He said, “Why wouldn’t you marry me if I were free?” And did not want an answer.

  He patted her cheek, and smiled. Was he relieved? Beth smiled in return, sighed, and closed her eyes and fell asleep. But never again was she to doubt his love for her, and this knowledge hastened her recovery. From that time on she knew him more clearly and more intimately than ever before.

 
; Guy looked at James, as they sat together in the suite. “I should have done it then, three years ago. I shouldn’t have waited. Three more years. But—I was afraid. I had too many—commitments.” His face expressed contempt for himself. “I could have saved both of us so much.”

  James knew he was speaking of Beth Turner, and he was exultant.

  “Oh, we all have regrets, some of them horrible, Jerry. We’re blessed if we have time to rectify our mistakes.”

  “Platitudes again,” said Guy. “You don’t know about commitments, Jim. You never had any.”

  James’s face became almost somber. He said, after a moment, “I’m afraid you are right, old boy, too right. Now, I’m going to make a commitment. Two, in fact. One I know, the other I don’t know. Yet. But I will.” He thought of Emma.

  “Remind me to applaud when the time comes, Jim.” The surliness had returned to Guy’s voice. “Now run away and play with your toys. I’ve got some thinking to do.”

  “And I, too,” said James. “The trouble is that most of us don’t start to think until it’s too late. Yes, a cliché again. But what was it Spinoza said? We are twice guilty if we feel remorse. I think he meant that we should not do anything to cause us severe guilt for to feel guilt, after the act, is indeed to be twice guilty. Once committed, we should stop feeling remorseful, and go on with the business of living, understanding that guilt can be crippling, if we allow ourselves to feel it, after accomplishing what started the guilt in the first place.”

  “I don’t think you have any morals, Jim.”

  “Perhaps true. And aren’t I fortunate?”

  “Nor any sense of duty and responsibility.”

  James said, “You are quite right. Of course. Again, aren’t I fortunate?”

  He took himself off, laughing. When he reported to Emil, Emil congratulated him. “Don’t praise me,” said James. “I didn’t do a damned thing. He did it himself. As we all have to do.”

  23

  That night James dreamt of his father again. His father appeared young and vital and his passionate blue eyes regarded his son reproachfully. They seemed to be in the library of the house in London; his father was in his favorite brown leather chair, which rocked under his great weight. James was filled with happiness that his father was alive and that his death must have been only a dream. He himself was a youth, and strong, in the dream.

  He heard what his father said now; he heard it in full—precise, unbending, commanding. He listened. He shrank at the indictment. He had an impulse of weakness, of denial, of self-absolution. But his father’s voice continued implacably. When he was silent, waiting, James said, “Yes, Dada. I will. I promise you.” And he was inundated with fear; but also with resolution. My pleasant and guarded life, he thought, looking at his father. La dolce vita. The careful and tolerant and smiling life which he had lived since the war. Loftily removed from the struggle, living only for the immediate: That was a most awful indictment. To be amused when terror engulfed the world: That was to be accursed. If a man’s life had any meaning at all it was to fight evil. Even if he died in the battle, he had truly lived. But the amused and disengaged, watching the battlefield from a safe and comfortable distance, were not alive at all. What had John Donne said? “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

  James awoke in the darkness. Never had he felt so alive, so clear, so clarified of vision, and yet so quaking. At heart, he thought, all men are cowards when their ease is threatened, their fortunes, their cozy ruts, the safe life they have made for themselves. They might not be completely enamored of that life, but it was all they knew and they trembled at the thought of abandoning it for the cold and violent winds of engagement. But if a man was not engaged in living he slumbered in a warm tomb, where voices were only memories of past pleasures, and hopes for more pleasures to come, with no burnings of the heart, no pain, no clash of arms, no untidiness. The “order” they spoke of was not of law. It was a plea not to be disturbed, not to be involved. In short, they were really saying, “Let me die comfortably, after my comfortable life.”

  He thought of the aristocrats and nobility of France, during the French Revolution—the first Communist Revolution, the appearance of the first Jacobins, who were later to control and terrorize the people in every country. The aristocracy, the whole urbane class of patricians and civilized men, had not only not fought against the monstrous enemies of their country but they had laughed—laughed!—at the earlier dreadful signs of the cannibal conspiracy. They went in their prison-worn finery to the guillotine, not contemptuous or stern or in prayer, but coquettishly, giggling in the tumbrils, as to a festival. They were dying, but not as men, but as silly women who chattered of amours and perfumes. Ten years before, they might have saved France, and in saving her would have saved future generations from the Socialist disease, from the red terror of spiritual, moral, and economic collapse of all the world. Their girlish laughter foretold the slavery of men. Their twittering witticisms in the carts which bore them to their death were not only depraved and shameful, but mocked the agony which was to come.

  They had had swords; they had had allies; they had had power. But they were too slothful, too pleasure-loving, too detached, to utilize these. They had refused to believe. They had lacked the imperative to be men, to be warriors.

  I, at least, know and believe, thought James, in the darkness of his bedroom. But I have been like those Frenchmen also. I did not, at any time in England, or anywhere else in fact, raise my voice against l’ennemi sur la gauche (the enemy on the Left). I have been only a spectator at the ruin and the chaos. I preferred, with casual mirth and cynicism, to merely observe the destruction of my country. I shrugged. I was more than half convinced that there was nothing I could do, of myself. I wished to believe that. Yet, evil is never invulnerable. It flees in the face of strong and resolute men—armed men.

  It is time for me to leave my downy crevice in the rock of the shaking world. It is time for me to take up arms against the universal horror. I may die for it, but it is a better death than the life I have been living, among the millions who have lived it with me.

  By voice, by pen, by any other means, I will fight. What is it that the men who founded America had said, in the fullness of their true manhood? “We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.” Yes.

  He knew Emma would understand. But—had she not always understood and he had not heard? He recalled conversations with her. He had suggested flight, and she had not agreed. For, in reality, there was no place any longer, on the whole earth, to where a man could flee. There was not a handful of free soil remaining. There were only brave men, men like himself, he hoped, to confront the beast which was slinking, with death in its maw, in every area of this beleaguered planet. Perhaps it was too late. But one could only try, please God.

  At last the malaise left him, for he knew what he must do, and he felt like a youth who had been rescued from age, exhilarated and revived: He knew now what his father had meant, long ago, and perhaps, even now. The son must not be less than the heroic father who had fought his own fight against evil. It is possible that he had won, even in the gas chambers of Fascistic Communism. There is no death for the noble spirit.

  His half-conceived book, The Decline of Western Morale, leaped from his brain as Pallas Athene had leapt from the brow of Zeus. No more psychiatric books, for many psychiatrists had played a huge and terrible part in the corruption of men’s minds, from Russia, from Bismarckian Germany, from England, and now in America. They had attacked the very walls of rationality, and had breached them to admit madness. For only in madness could the disease flourish and survive. Sanity could destroy it.

  There was only one choice now: To stand as men or kneel as slaves.

  He had chosen. He experienced joy.

  “You seem very refreshed this morning,” said Emil Grassner, as they drove to Mountain Valleys.

  “I had a dream. No, it was reality,” said Jam
es. He told his friend. Emil listened with a severe face. He nodded, over and over. “But what the hell can I do?” he asked.

  “Think of it constantly. It is the most important thing in the world for yourself, your children, your grandchildren, for the whole world. It will come to you as it came to me.”

  He had called at the desk. But there was not as yet any word from Emma. He was now wildly impatient for her arrival, and to see her courageous face.

  “I forgot to tell you,” said Emil. “I read in the newspaper last night that the thief who had attacked you has been listed as a ‘juvenile offender,’ and has been relegated to the warm arms and love and compassionate tears of social workers. As he had been relegated before. After his ‘rehabilitation’ in some soft nest, he will be released to attack again, and then probably kill.”

  “We have the same thing in England. It is part of the modern conspiracy. Alas, that we have no Ciceros.”

  Emil smiled. “But you intend to be one, don’t you?”

  “I can only try, mate.” He added, “As soon as I can get Jerry out of his own sweet nest, I will go to war.”

  It had begun to snow again, a gentle patient snow, a snow immune from men’s madness, men’s bloody chaotic thoughts, men’s lust for power and murder. The only evil in the world was man. “I regret,” said James, “that I wasn’t born a lion, or some other innocent animal. At least they don’t kill, except for necessary food. And they never go insane.”

  James found Guy slowly pacing his sitting room, his head bent, his face dark with thought. When he saw James he said, “Are you here again, Jim?”

  “Yes, and I will stay until you make up your damned mind.”

  Guy turned on him and his eyes glared. “About what?”

  “You know only too well. Hurry up, Jerry. I have work to do.” He sat down. He told Guy of his dream. Guy had begun to pace again. Then he stopped, his back to James. He was lighting a cigarette. James knew he did not want his friend to see his face. He stood there, smoking, for long minutes. Then he said, with scorn, “Heroics.”