This Side of Innocence

by Taylor Caldwell

  Amalie was crying again, and Jerome could not comfort her. She was remembering Mr. Lindsey, and his love and kindness. She was certain that she could never enter that house again, where all those frightful things had taken place, and where Mr. Lindsey had died of the shock. She saw the old man clearly, his gentle smile; she heard his fond words, his subtle understanding silences. She and Jerome had killed him, had filled his last days with horror and misery.

  “No,” she said to Jerome, “we shall never be able to forget. That is our punishment.”

  “I tell you, my darling, he had no reproaches for us. He said his only regret was that he would not see our child, his first grandchild. You must know, Amalie, how kind he was, and how happy, at the last. When I asked him to forgive us, he laughed a little, as if I were absurd.”

  He did not tell Amalie that his father had said almost at the last: “If you will only understand, Jerome, that no man can injure another with impunity, that cruelty done with malice and deliberation is its own punishment, that when a man strikes at another he strikes, not only at himself, but at those he loves, then all this will have been worth the suffering.”

  No, there was much he could never tell her, even to the day of his own death. He and his father had been alone, and Mr. Lindsey had talked tranquilly, quietly. He had thought only of his son, and not of himself and his own anguish, and that had been the hardest of all to bear.

  He could not tell Amalie of the funeral, of how he and Alfred had stood opposite each other, over the open grave, listening to the words of the minister, and of how the rain had streamed down unrelentingly in that dark and lonely cemetery. That was something he could not dwell on too long as yet.

  Alfred had stood there, a figure of gray stone, looking down, at the grave, his arms folded on his chest. Dorothea, weeping and desolate, had stood on one side of him and Philip on the other. No one had so much as glanced at Jerome, leaning there on his cane, his arm in a sling. No one but Philip. Jerome had met the boy’s sorrowful eyes, and he had seen that there was no reproach or disgust in them but only compassion and fondness. Behind the mourners stood their friends, but not behind Jerome. He had stood alone, as though he were a leper. No one had spoken to him, br appeared aware of his presence. No one but Philip. For, after the ceremony, Philip had somehow managed to reach him and touch him, and had whispered: “Please give—Amalie—my love, Uncle Jerome.”

  Philip had then drifted back to his father and the others, and Jerome had been abandoned. The friends had followed Alfred and Dorothea and Philip and the minister. Jerome was alone. The gravediggers, waiting to shovel the wet black earth on the coffin, had looked at him with curiosity and uneasiness. Then they, too, had wandered away to a discreet distance, whispering among themselves.

  Jerome had stood there, looking down at the coffin. The rain had poured steadily into the gathering darkness. The bending willows were fountains of green water. The wet and heavy air was full of the deathly scent of the funeral flowers. The gravestones near by glimmered spectrally in the streaming dusk. The intense and mournful silence of a cemetery deepened all about Jerome, and he heard the dripping water, the hiss of wet and uneasy trees.

  He had turned away at last, but not for a long time. He had gone back to the gates of the graveyard. Jim was waiting for him in the buggy. There was no one else.

  He had returned to his desolate home. He had gone directly to bed. The next morning, when the first light of the dawn had come, Jim came to him to whisper that Alfred and Dorothea and Philip were leaving that very day. They would not remain under that roof with the man who had brought such catastrophe to them and to this house.

  No, there was much he could not tell Amalie, and never could tell her. He sat beside her, kissing her gently, smoothing her hair, and she clung to him, weeping. But he was barely conscious of her now. His pain was still too great and too new. It would take years for him to forget, even in a small measure.

  He thought: How is it possible for me to take up life again here? What will happen to us? The whole township is full of hatred and vengefulness. He thought of leaving, of abandoning everything to Alfred.

  And then he put Amalie aside and went to the window again. He looked out at the warm quiet twilight which had succeeded the violent rain. He thought: I will not go away. There is work here for me to do. He shall not drive me away. If there is any driving away that must be done, then I shall be the driver.

  There was another thing, too, which he would never forgive: his sister, Dorothea, had appeared on the witness stand and had testified to her brother’s guilt and to his adultery.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Amalie Lindsey acknowledged that the landscape below Hilltop, while quite lively and animated and exuding an air of bustle and enterprise, had not exactly been improved, esthetically speaking. The rural silence and symmetry, the grand proportions of land and tree masses (so reminiscent of European landscapes) had been jarred and changed, and the change was not entirely for the better, still esthetically speaking. America was in the process of scarification and while doubtless this was bringing prosperity and excitement and new anticipations to millions of people, it was an offense and a sadness to those who believed that beauty (for perhaps a few superior souls) was preferable to large wages and hope and a steadily increasing rate of employment.

  Where, for instance, there had been a thickly wooded section of streams and trees near the base of this hill, there was now a flourishing factory, owned and operated by the enthusiastic King Munsey, who manufactured farm implements. Its four chimneys spouted an offensive smoke, of a particularly obnoxious odor, against a once untroubled and gentle sky. The stream had lost its blue clarity and was stained with oily purple, brick-red and poisonous yellow, and the vegetation along its banks, once all bending willows and wild iris and yellow waterlilies, was dwindling away into masses of sooty weeds. Mr. Munsey, in his eager haste, had done nothing about the hundreds of tree stumps surrounding his factory, stumps which had once borne the proud trunks and the clapping leaves of noble trees. Yes, the once lovely woods were now an eyesore. Amalie acknowledged that. But she also acknowledged that, due to Jerome’s inexorable insistence, the broken shacks which had once stood near the edges of the woods were gone, and that these were now replaced by miraculous little white stone and wood cottages, surrounded by neat small gardens, wherein lived the workers of Munsey’s factories. Mr. Munsey had been implacably advised that he was to bring no “Homestead” scandals to Riversend, and that his workers were not to live in a kind of prison stockade such as had been the reason for the ill fame of various Pennsylvania manufactories. He and Jerome were now good friends, but there had been a severe battle in the beginning.

  “These brutes don’t know no better,” Mr. Munsey had protested, almost in tears, and with more passion than grammar.

  “I don’t care if they don’t,” Jerome had replied. “I have myself to think of.”

  This had been a little too obscure for Mr. Munsey, but he had finally complied. Had he not, he would have been deprived of this perfect site. However, when newspapers, even in the City of New York, had praised this “innovation, this new and Christian respect for the rights of man, however humble, this humanitarian regard for the welfare of the worker and his family,” Mr. Munsey posed for metropolitan photographs and modestly allowed himself to be eulogized as a “benefactor of man.” He had had another desperate, and private, struggle with Jerome over the matter of unions, which he called “nihilistic and an infringement on the rights of capital, leading to anarchy and insolence and oppression by the ignorant masses.” But Jerome had succeeded again, and when tearfully questioned by Mr. Munsey, had again made the bewildering remark that he “had himself to think of.” However, when Mr. Munsey was further eulogized as representing the “new industrialist, who knew that fair play and fair dealing and a proper regard for the dignity of labor furthered the cause of amicable and prosperous relationships between the worker and the em
ployer,” Mr. Munsey did not mention Jerome.

  The south end of Riversend now boasted a small but flourishing steel mill, a manufactory of harness and hardware, a big railroad shop, a wheat-flour mill, a brewery which found the spring water in that locality excellent for the “demon rum,” and a carriage factory. Extending far beyond these business buildings lay the pleasant “garden” sections occupied by workers and their families, rigorously policed and kept in neat physical and moral order. Each of the new owners of the factories had had their passionate but fruitless struggles with Jerome. However, as he brought agreeable notice to them as “benefactors of mankind,” they swallowed their indignation, gorge and natural hatred, beamed resplendently for photographs and graciously granted interviews to the reporters of metropolitan newspapers. Riversend, therefore, had become a “model manufacturing community.”

  The tradesmen had come to town, and if they were ignored by the old aristocrats, and bitterly resented, they were obtuse enough and prosperous enough not to know they were being snubbed and ostracized.

  Jerome, of course, had his violent and unsleeping enemies, and among them were numbered nearly all the clergymen of the community, who declared that he was “flying in the face of Providence by encouraging rascals and the humble to rise above their God-given station in life.” When Jerome managed to make the manufacturers disgorge a certain sum of money every year for the building and maintenance of several small but well-attended schools for the benefit of the workers’ children, this was considered his most heinous, un-Christian act He was a “revolutionist.” Soon, with all this gratuitous schooling and “impudent” supervision of their lives, the nameless and the coarse and the vulgar and the traditionless would believe themselves as good as their betters. But his worst and most unpardonable act was when he, by undiscovered and doubtless reprehensible means, aided in the suborning of various gentlemen in the State legislature, with the result that compulsory education to the age of fourteen years because a State law. This, cried the appalled and the horrified, usurped the rights of parents, deprived said parents of the fruits of employment of their young, and encouraged idleness and irresponsibility on the part of boys and girls who had better be at work in the factories, in their parents’ homes, or in the fields, rather than acquiring an education which would unfit them for their future stations as domestic workers, farm hands and patient manipulators of machines for twelve hours a day. But the workers, sending their children to school, were apparently oblivious of the doom about to fall upon their offspring, and upon themselves, which confirmed the dire apprehensions of those born to educate their children and to pass on to them fat estates and comfortable houses.

  There was not a spot upon the erstwhile tender landscape which did not steam or smoke, reflected Amalie, with a smile that nicely combined both ruefulness and satisfaction. And this was all the doing of Jerome, her husband. He had accomplished it all, not without fury, threat and blackmail on his part, and with the aid of those who had, at first, declared their undying hostility to him, and their determination to punish him for his “crime” against moral society, and his effrontery. But when he had demonstrated to these enemies the sound profits which would accrue to them, their love for rusticity and their edifying morality had suddenly vanished.

  There had been a very bad time, during the panic of 1873, when it seemed that the flourishing but still precarious industrialism of America must collapse. Then the enemies of industry had been triumphant. The land, they had declared, was never subject to fluctuations, was never sterile. A civilization based purely on agriculture was a civilization which never went hungry. But a raucous and rootless civilization, dependent on the churning of the “devil machines” within brick walls, was vulnerable to every sensitive wind that blew from Wall Street.

  “The fault,” said Jerome, “lay not in industry, but in those who manipulated it without ever dirtying their hands, or condescending to understand it.”

  He had almost bankrupted himself to keep the new horde of workers in food and under roofs. He had bought huge blocks of stock in the youthful industries of Riversend, in order to keep them from going under. He had emerged, somewhat shaken, at the end of the panic, with a fortune quite depleted. Within five years, however, he was an enormously rich man. He was on the board of directors of every factory in the township. This wastrel, this loiterer on the fringes of a more sober and industrious society, this drinker and carouser had become a power in the community.

  But this community, though accepting him with new fondness (tenderly aware of profits), drew the line at Amalie. He was invited, fawned upon, adored, respected, treated with the fondness accorded a precocious prodigal (who had returned, not from the swine, but with pockets full of gold). But Amalie was not invited, save by her old friend, the Widow Kingsley, and the stout and bedecked wives of the vulgar “commercialists” who had invaded Riversend at the invitation of her husband. Neither Jerome nor Amalie resented this. They thought it hugely amusing. Amalie was a “divorced” woman, once openly convicted in public courts as an “adulteress.” Jerome had not been divorced, and adultery was the natural prerogative of the unattached man. The Widow Kingsley, however, quoted Benjamin Franklin very stoutly: “Where there is marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.” But then, said her resentful friends, the Widow had always been eccentric, and loved to attract attention by startling aberrations. If she wished to attract attention by her devotion to the “scarlet woman,” and even to stand as godmother to her first ambiguous child, and to the second, then it was the duty of her friends to ignore her activities as one generously ignored the fact that there had been a hanging in a family.

  Amalie, standing slightly below Hilltop this hot and sultry August morning, could turn to her right and look at the western suburbs of Riversend. There, amidst thick and well-planted trees and excellent landscaping, stood the rococo and resplendent brick and stone homes of the new and resented industrialists and their families. Amalie could see the red roofs of the pleasant big homes, and see the sunlight reflected on minute windows far below. It was a community apart, blissfully and robustly unaware that it was apart, or not caring. It was called Hilltop Gardens, in deference to the man who had made all this possible.

  She turned to her left now, and far down on the hill which harbored Hilltop stood the quite new, severe but handsome residence of Alfred Lindsey. He had built this home some eight years ago, and there he lived with Dorothea as his dear sister-housekeeper and his son Philip. He had not married Dorothea. He had married no one. Dorothea was more than adequate as cousin-mother to Philip, who had lately returned from Harvard, and it had never occurred to even the more lewd-minded of the community that there might be anything even slightly questionable about Dorothea’s presence in her cousin’s home. Dorothea ably demonstrated that one could be as pure as ice and as chaste as snow and efficiently escape calumny.

  There were some, not without sympathy, who wondered why Alfred had built this house, half-way down the slope from Hilltop, within easy view of the home from which he had practically been evicted by his cousin and the latter’s paramour. Some said he did it to “remind” them perpetually of their crime against him. One or two others had their secret conviction that it was because he could not endure being too far away from Amalie and the house which he had loved. In any event, he never enlightened anyone. Dorothea believed he had built here rather than move too far from the town or be encompassed by the vulgar newcomers.

  But though Alfred’s house was less than three-quarters of a mile from Hilltop, Amalie had seen none of that household close by, nor encountered any of them, for ten years. Sometimes, on very clear days, she could see a toy figure or two in the gardens, but could not distinguish them. Once, on one of her very rare excursions into Riversend, she had seen Philip at a distance. Then he had gone away to school, and then to Harvard. Again, she thought that she saw Alfred only a street or two away, but he had suddenly disappeared, like a ghost. She lived apart from River
send, except for dining with the Widow Kingsley three or four times a year, in Jerome’s company, or entertaining, very occasionally, the wives of Jerome’s new industrial friends and associates.

  When she and Jerome desired diversion, they went to New York or Boston or Philadelphia, and twice they had gone to Europe for six months at a time.

  She lived immured, to the grim satisfaction of old Riversend, who believed her to be moping and drooping at Hilltop, from very loneliness, and wistfully hoping, day by day, that she might be forgiven and that one of the established, aristocratic ladies might come to call on her. It was well for the still lacerated sensibilities of these ladies that they did not know that Amalie existed very happily and comfortably at Hilltop, and desired nothing more than that she never encounter her old “friends” again, or that when she did think of them, she hoped fervently that they would continue to wall themselves up in their outrage against her. They could never understand that some natures are congenitally proud, reserved and self-contained, finding their world only among those they love.

  On the few occasions when she had been seen in Riversend, she had created talk for days. There she had gone “sweeping insolently,” decked out in Paris gowns and jackets and furs and feathered bonnets and lace parasols, and no one deigning to cast her a glance. There was absolutely no use, they said to themselves, in her ever attempting to ingratiate herself with them. Let her roll along in her carriage, meeting Jerome at a corner quite some distance from the Bank, and smiling out from under the shadow of her elaborate parasols. No one would speak to her or acknowledge her existence. Of course, they said, it was natural for so low-born a creature to be insensible for a long time to the contempt and scorn in which she was held. But eventually, without doubt, she would realize what a pariah she was, and that would most certainly overcome her with a complete awareness of her perpetual disgrace and throw her into the deepest melancholy. That would be her punishment.