A Tender Victory

by Taylor Caldwell

  Now she was serious, and her gray eyes misted. “Why, any time—Al,” she murmured. “After the minister and Miss Lorry. Did you think I’d leave you?”

  He held out his clever hand to her and she took it. He hesitated, then he pulled her to him roughly and gave her a hard kiss, and then another.

  “I’ve got another reason, among many, why I want to marry you,” he said, pushing her away from him. “We’ll all be together in the parsonage, and we’ll have to console Johnny a lot. Lorry won’t give up her work; she’s been writing me to prepare Johnny for what she called her ‘decision.’ I didn’t. That’s her business, and his. And I think they’ve solved it. What did she think Johnny was, anyway? Besides, you’re going to be president of the Ladies’ Aid soon; I’ve heard hints. What would Lorry do to fill up her time?

  “And another thing,” he said irately, “I’m tired of those lists. Consider yourself engaged to me, madam, and stop the lists, and buy what you need for the accursed new parsonage. Just charge it. I’m tired of having them tucked under my bedroom door at night, like billet-doux. It ain’t moral. At my age!”

  The children had their dinner in the breakfast room that night. Lorry, at the darkly gleaming dining-room table, sat in the old doctor’s chair at the head. Her shining hair, her sparkling green-blue eyes, her long white neck and white hands, were the loveliest picture in the world to Dr. McManus, Johnny, and Mrs. Burnsdale. Her voice had lost its old harshness; when she laughed now, it was the laugh of a girl.

  Johnny brought out the statuette he had acquired that day. “A friend of mine carves these things,” he said, with studied carelessness. “What do you think of it, Lorry? Just a child, carved out of a fragment of mahogany, I think.”

  Lorry took it in her hands and examined it, then raised her eyes slowly to Johnny’s. “Why, it’s miraculous,” she said. Her eyes moistened. “I see them every day, these children,” she murmured. “Every day. What is the name of the genius who caught the very expression of a lost child, and all its misery and pain?”

  The doctor peered to see. “Well,” he said, “I’ll be damned. I know about such things. Swipe it, parson, out of some rich man’s home when he wasn’t looking?”

  Then Johnny told them of Howard Thorne, and they listened in wonder and incredulity. “I can’t believe it!” exclaimed Lorry, holding the statuette in her hands and marveling. She stood the little object on the table and as the candlelight lit it, it caught life and full expression, and seemed to move. “A man like that!”

  “Yes,” said Johnny, “a man like that. And who knows what our neighbor is, after all? A saint, an angel unawares, a genius, an artist, a devil, a dreamer of great dreams, or an abscess in the form of a man? Who knows? We never really see each other, and that is at once the mystery and the terror of living.”

  Lorry listened, and then studied the statue again, awed. After a moment she said, “Johnny, may I take this to New York with me? I know just the right people who would be more than interested. How many does he have on hand now?”

  “A few. But he won’t give up the Christ. However, you must come with me and see it.”

  “A man like that,” said the doctor, “needs all the backing he can get to start with. And I’m just the sentimental, stupid, profligate, money-tossing old bas—I mean fool, to do it!” He touched the statuette with a very gentle finger. He thought of Jean, he thought of all the other children. This was the essence of them. He added, “And he’d better come down to my clinic for a complete examination. There’s things we can do about all this, not too much, but we’ve got some clues. And maybe if we can jolt the citizenry a little more we’ll get enough money to lick this thing. Maybe. I’ve been doing some work on it myself.”

  Lorry got up and went to him and kissed him, and he blinked and put his arm tightly around her waist. “The way you all work me,” he said angrily. “One of these days I’ll be bankrupt.”

  “Too bad about you,” said Mrs. Burnsdale with a fond smile. He turned his fierce eyes upon her and shook a finger almost in her face. “That’s no way for my fiancée to talk!” he admonished her. “A nice beginning you’re making.”

  “What?” cried Lorry with delight, glancing for more delight at Johnny. But he was leaning back in his chair, ostentatiously bored.

  “It’s no secret,” he said. “I guessed it months ago. I’m surprised at you, Lorry. Doctor and Mrs. Burnsdale have been kissing behind doors for weeks.”

  “That’s a damned lie!” shouted the doctor. “I resent the implication. Look at that woman’s blushing face and you’ll know you’re fabricating. I sprung it on her tonight.”

  Mrs. Burnsdale said, as she critically examined the dessert, “And that’s a fib too. He’s been running after me ever since I came here, I had to give up, finally.”

  It seemed to Lorry that this was the very happiest time of her life, this weekend. There was nothing to mar it, no anxious undertone anywhere, in spite of Debby’s measles, in spite of the other children importantly showing signs of the same disease. The blizzard might continue, intermittently, mingling with the lessened smog, and the last ferocious gale of the winter shake the very walls of the old house. Inside there was only peace, only contentment, and all warmth and laughter and love.

  She slipped into a side pew, inconspicuously, to hear Johnny’s sermon on Sunday. Today she would tell him of Barry. And then she would call Barry and ask him to come. She smiled up at Johnny, and listened to his sincere and sonorous voice.

  Perhaps the statue of the child had stirred him too deeply. Perhaps some awful foreboding had fastened on his heart. He spoke of the Soldiers of the Lord, “who must be forever militant against evil, and evil men, who are, even now, plotting the death of all our hopes, the shattering of our cities, the dying cries of our children, the ruin of our capitals, the murder of our youth. They are plotting a desolate wasteland of the earth, soundless to the desolate seas. We dare not be too complacent. The men of good will are delinquent. The men of evil are full of passionate intensity. The very air clamors with the conversation of devils.”

  His sermon was reported in the Press, on Monday. Lorry, helping with the children, who were now definitely in the full flush of measles, did not read the paper until the afternoon. There was her father’s editorial, and never had such a denunciation been so malignant, so distorted, so full of hatred and contempt.

  “For a man who speaks so constantly of peace,” Mr. Summerfield had written, “it is strange that he has now become a warmonger, a rouser of ignorant and inflamed emotions. What would he have us do? Drop the atomic bomb indiscriminately on any nation that might even be suspected, though without definite reason, of ‘plots’ against this country? These are the days when men must use reason, and be calm and judicious and tolerant. Yet this minister would lead a mob against anyone, anywhere. This paper has long been suspicious of his real motives. It is time for him to go.”

  Lorry slipped from the house, and her face was harsh and white.

  34

  “Why, no, Mr. Fletcher, I didn’t see Miss Lorry go out,” said Mrs. Burnsdale anxiously. “Is her car gone? I thought I heard a car drive out of the garage about forty-five minutes ago. Maybe she’s gone to visit friends, or somebody.”

  “She hasn’t any close friends in Barryfield,” said Johnny, disappointed. He had just returned from some sick calls. He felt somewhat hurt; tomorrow, Lorry would be leaving. He glanced in at the children at their studies; their heads were bent studiously over their books, so he merely smiled and nodded at Miss Coogan. The house was warm and dim in the winter afternoon, and very quiet. This was the hour when the servants were resting in their rooms on the third floor. He decided that he might as well work on next week’s sermon and do something on his Easter sermon. The latter was giving him some trouble. He reflected that probably everything had been said about the Resurrection. Besides, the Bible said it much better. How could one dare compete with such grandeur?

  He went upstairs to his big b
edroom and looked with distaste at his neat desk. He glanced surreptitiously at the bed, then sternly walked to the desk and sat down. Happiness, he thought, was almost as exhausting as unhappiness; a man needed solitude to digest joy just as he needed it to restore himself in grief. He looked at the heading of his sermon: “Be still, and know that I am God.” He mused on that, staring, unseeingly, through one of the big windows. “Be still.” But no one seemed to be still, these days. “Be still!” reminded him of the large, full motion of an evening sea, its tide unhurried, its ancient way undisturbed, unchangeable even in storm, even under the moon. It spoke of eternal verities, of eternal movement yet eternal rest. “Be still.” Where could stillness be found in these days of fragmentation, of tiny little frantic pieces which could never seem to fit in a pattern that was meaningful? The more activities, he thought, the less accomplished, the less serenity, the less significance. Movement in itself, frenzied movement, louder and faster voices, more clicking heels moving rapidly but without a real purpose or real goal, more clatter, more pounding, more, more, more, always more, always “new”—these had become the frenetic cacophony of the feverish way of modern mankind. Where, in this mechanical confusion, could man be still, and “know that I am God”?

  Even when men were alone at night with themselves, escaped from the endless exhortation to “do something,” they could not rest. Nameless anxiety filled them; they wondered, with a book idle on their knees, or in their beds, if they had left something important undone that day.

  And they certainly had left something undone: prayer, communication with God. The bright shadow of His wing hovered on their uneasy spiritual horizon, but they did not see it.

  Or perhaps they did see it, and were afraid. To contemplate God would negate that howling insistence from press and pulpit and books and magazines and radios to be up and doing, no matter how useless. Just to be doing. “Keep busy!” exclaimed the psychiatrists, looking disapprovingly and with suspicion on the reflective man, who sat alone in blessed silence, and thought. More, more, more. No longer were men’s consciences perturbed about evildoing or neglect of God. Conscience, too, had been perverted. Now it demanded how many “contacts” a man had had that day, how much money he had been able to make, how “adjusted” he had been, how “social-minded,” how “warm in human relationships.” To be deliberately idle, to be deliberately alone and contemplative, was to be considered antisocial, a mark of emotional disturbance. Johnny said aloud, “Yes, the world is definitely going mad. The ‘new values’ are the new dementia.” Was there a sinister pattern in this, too, so to fill a man’s life with enormous trivialities and stupidities that in the house of his mind there was no room for God?

  He was writing rapidly now. The afternoon began to darken. He did not hear the children, released, chattering in the living room below. He did not hear a bell ring. A maid knocked softly on the door, opened it, and told him that Mr. Barry Lowell, Miss Summerfield’s brother, had unexpectedly arrived for a few days. Dr. McManus and Miss Summerfield were not at home. Would Mr. Fletcher see him?

  “Why, of course!” said Johnny with excitement. So Barry was here as a surprise for his sister! He put on his coat, smoothed his hands over his hair, and ran eagerly downstairs. Barry was in the library, standing near his suitcase. He was smoking rapidly and glancing over the bookshelves. He turned as Johnny entered.

  Johnny was smiling, his hand outstretched. He began, “I’m John Fletcher.” Then he stopped. He was astounded at Barry’s resemblance to his half-sister, for all the young man’s greater height and broad shoulders. The same oddly colored eyes, the same shape of face, the same pale gilt hair, the same nose! It was remarkable. And then Johnny’s mind shifted, and his expression became bewildered. Somewhere, at some time, he had seen this man before. Something prodded insistently at his memory, something that frequently prodded him, without a name or a clue, when he looked at Lorry in a certain light. He said uncertainly, “Haven’t I met you before, Mr. Lowell?” He came farther into the room, puzzled.

  Barry stood as still as a tree, looking at Johnny, the cigarette smoking unheeded in the corner of his mouth. The wan winter light outside made him appear extremely pale. His eyes fixed themselves with a strange intensity on Johnny. He put up his hand and removed his cigarette, put it back. He took a step toward Johnny, and Johnny could feel the fierce concentration of his look. “Johnny, Johnny Fletcher?” said Barry huskily.

  “Why, yes. Didn’t Lorry tell you about me?” asked Johnny, mystified.

  “Lorry,” said Barry. “She knew all the time! Lorry! What did you say? Yes, she said she was going to marry a minister, but she didn’t give me your name. Why?” His voice broke. “Why didn’t anyone tell me, old Al, Lorry—?”

  “I don’t know,” said Johnny. He felt even more puzzled. “Anyway, it isn’t important. Lorry told me about you, about your changing your name. But still, I know I’ve met you somewhere before. Haven’t I?”

  With extreme slowness and care Barry snuffed out his cigarette in an ash tray. Then he merely stood and looked at it, his head bent. Johnny studied him. He asked Barry’s own question of himself: Why hadn’t Lorry told her brother his name? She had let him believe that Barry had been told. Johnny’s face flushed with mortification. He said, “Perhaps Lorry had her own reasons. Names don’t matter much anyway, do they? I do remember that at one time she asked me if your name meant anything to me and I said I didn’t recall it.”

  Barry still looked down at the ash tray. He said very quietly, “No, why should you? I was probably just one of dozens, to you. It was an everyday thing—for you, then. But not to me.” He lifted his head swiftly, and turned to Johnny. “But I looked for you for years; it meant everything in the world! They told me you had been killed.”

  Johnny, more bewildered than ever, thought confusedly to himself, It’s only my imagination. Why should he have tears in his eyes?

  “I was killed?” he asked. He tried to laugh a little. “No, I was wounded very badly in the Battle of the Bulge, but I’m a husky customer, and I recovered. I was in an out-of-the-way makeshift hospital for a while. Is that where we met?” “No,” said Barry. He stood and looked at Johnny, as one looks at a miracle, stupified.

  In a few moments Johnny became increasingly uneasy at that intense regard, that pale face turned to him in a silent and inexplicable passion of remembrance. “I’m afraid my memory isn’t as good as I thought it was,” he said apologetically. “But I do seem to find you familiar, in a way. Perhaps it’s your resemblance to Lorry.” Somehow, he felt that Barry had put Lorry on an unpardonable plane, that Barry was actually hating his sister for an incomprehensible reason.

  Then Barry came to him and put his hands hard on his shoulders and looked into his eyes, and smiled. “Johnny, Johnny Fletcher!” he said, and his voice shook. “Old Parson Johnny! Old Holy Joe! Why should you remember me? You only saved my life, you only dragged me out of a hole on the Normandy beachhead, and carried me on your back under fire! You only stuck by my bed when I was dying, and you only prayed me alive! That’s all, Johnny Fletcher!”

  “No!” cried Johnny incredulously. He grasped Barry by the arms. “No!” he repeated, with an almost wild delight. “Why, sure, I remember now! I’d have remembered at once if you’d have been wearing a uniform. Barry! I can’t believe it. It’s impossible.”

  “You’re alive!” shouted Barry. “God damn it, you’re alive! After all these years, you’re alive! Let me look at you. Same old Johnny! I’ll murder Lorry, I’ll kill old Al for not telling me! I looked all over Europe for you. They said you were dead.” His voice broke again, and now there was no mistaking the tears in his eyes.

  Johnny was both embarrassed and touched by the young man’s emotion, which appeared to him to be getting somewhat out of control. “Well,” he said, “I’m definitely alive. So you are Lorry’s brother! She’ll be back soon; she’ll explain why she kept my name from you.”

  “Any explanation she has will be idiotic. Ho
w could Lorry do this to me? She knew I looked for you; she knew how wretched I was when I couldn’t find you. She knew how I felt when I heard you were dead. Yet she could do this to me.” Johnny flushed again with mortification, and Barry, always perceptive, understood. His hands pressed harder on Johnny’s shoulders. “It’s nothing against you, Johnny. It’s some kind of coy trick she’s been playing on me, though it isn’t like her to be coy. Maybe she does have a reason, and I’m going to know it!”

  “Let’s sit down,” suggested Johnny. “I see you still limp a little; that leg. I remember it. They wanted to amputate it, and you raved that they might as well amputate your head.” He tried to smile, though his face had become dark with humiliation. “I remember that I stood with you, and they did save your leg. Does it bother you much—Barry?”

  “The hell with the leg,” said Barry impatiently. He sat near Johnny. Then he took out his wallet and carefully removed an old snapshot perpetually sealed between two layers of plastic. “Look at this,” he said. “Remember old Nie Nichols and his little camera? He took this of several of us in Exeter, before D Day. There you are,” and Barry smiled through his emotion, “looking more of a GI burn than any of us!”

  Johnny looked at the snapshot, tried to smile again, and then was grave. Eight young American soldiers stood there with their chaplain. Only he and Barry had survived Normandy beach. Nie Nichols, from Tennessee, with his four little children. And his bag bulky with the photographs he had taken of them—towheaded youngsters whose wide grins split their thin faces. And that young Negro with the majestic face cast in bronze who had assisted Johnny at services; he had been in his second year at medical school, and he had also been a poet. “I could have begged out of the draft,” he had told Johnny, “but I’ve studied enough, on my own, to know that we’ve come into the age of tyrants again. Hitler may be the first, but he isn’t the last!”