Testimony Of Two Men (28 page)

Jonathan smiled very bitterly. “You never did have much faith in people, did you? Never mind. I don’t either, not much. But you haven’t told me what was the matter with those people down there.”

“It’s very simple. And very human. They were totally selfish, primitively human. They were exultant and victorious. The fact that others had lost their children and were grieving and despairing just added an extra fillip, an extra gratification, to the mean pride they felt because their own children were not dead. And because they were so delighted and so elated, and so stimulated by the agonies of the others—you see how bestial we really are—they were outraged at the agonized rebuffs they received from the parents of the dead children. Most people, you see, are involved with no one but themselves. It’s a kind of wickedness— But, it is understandably human.”

“And forgivable?” Jon’s face had become taut and derisive.

“No,” she said. “Never forgivable. Never to be condoned. Never to be smoothed over and ‘explained’ in mawkish words. We must just look at our fellows starkly, accepting them for the appalling creatures they are— We have no choice. We few who see without syrup in our eyes and without tremulous throbs in our hearts, and without being liars.”

Jonathan sighed, and to Marjorie it was the most sorrowful sound. The boy said, “Horace Mann proclaims that children can be taught goodness and pity and mercy and kindness—”

“The poor man was a fool, a really dangerous fool,” said Marjorie. “I haven’t any hope for mankind. I haven’t had any since I was fourteen. You see, my father was a very intelligent man and refused to he to me, and he told me all he knew about humanity.”

“Was it painful for you?”

“Very. I never got over it. You can never get over a mortal wound, you know. You have to live with it, and there, I’m afraid I have made a contradiction in terms. But there it is. You have to live with your knowledge all the days of your life. That does not exempt you from feeling pity, though, even for the creature that is man. His very terribleness should inspire compassion.”

“From whom?”

Marjorie hesitated. “From God, perhaps. From the few of us who refuse to accept sweet lies and fantasies. We very few.”

Then Jonathan said the most pathetic thing he had ever said in his young life, and the most pathetic thing he would ever say: “How can a person go on living, knowing what people are?”

Marjorie sighed with sadness, and tried to smile. “What else can we do? You can’t escape from the formidable truth except through drink, perhaps, or in moments of rare personal happiness, or in music or poetry, or in the sights of nature—far from men. I’ve read some of your books concerning the saints of the Church. Many of them ‘fled the world,’ it is written, in order that they might contemplate God more clearly and live lives of chastity and austerity. I suspect those poor men just couldn’t stand their fellowmen any longer. They had to leave them and the world they made if they were to save their souls and their sanity.”

Jonathan stood up. But he looked long and hard at the floor between his feet.

“There’s another thing, dear,” said Marjorie, aching for him and his introduction to reality. “We few who know what men are must rarely let others know that we know. They have a way of going for—for—”

“The jugular,” said Jonathan. “Yes, I can see that. They’ll try to kill you, one way or another, if they know you’ve caught on to them and know all about them.”

“Yes. That’s the unpardonable sin you can commit against your brother: Letting him know that you know exactly what he is. Hell hate you forever.”

Jonathan moved slowly toward the door. Then Marjorie said, “Will you tell your father about your experience, dear?”

He turned and looked at her and again she saw that dark and warning look in his eyes. “No. He wouldn’t understand. It would hurt him. He’s—kind.”

“Damn this storm,” said Jonathan in a slurred voice, and he set the wine bottle thumpingly on the table. “How long has it been going on; anyway? Look at that lightning.”

Marjorie’s mental return tonight to her pale and shining dining room was almost traumatic in its violence, for she had been so engrossed in her memories. She started. “It does seem pretty wild, doesn’t it?” she said.

The fresh strawberries and cream and tea had come, and had been partially eaten and removed, Marjorie observed, though she had not the slightest memory of them. The wine bottle was empty. “Are you ready to leave?” asked Jonathan. His face was very sunken in appearance, and his eyes were glazed with alcohol, and there was a tremor about his mouth and in his hands.

“Yes, thank you,” said Marjorie. He came to her chair and drew it back for her. He walked to the buffet then, leaving her standing. “I think,” he said, “that I’ll take a bottle of bourbon upstairs with me. A nightcap. I’m tired.”

The thunderous rain was washing the tall bright windows and the wind was howling in the eaves. Jonathan was laboriously and with considerable careful difficulty fitting a crystal glass over the decanter. He was absorbed in the delicate task. Then, walking with slow caution and putting each foot down tentatively, he left the dining room. His mother heard his heavy and uncertain step on the stairs. She listened, during an interval when there was only the rain and the wind. Jonathan had gone into his father’s study. She heard the solid bang of the door.

She said to herself, “Yes, dear Jon, I always told you the truth. I never lied to you. Would it have been any better if
I
had? I don’t know. In spite of all you knew and all I told you, you became a good man and a doctor who simply could not bear pain in others. You did all you could to alleviate it It was your personal enemy. Was it because the pain was always so awful in you yourself, and you were trying to exorcise it?

“I never lied to you. Except once. By silence. But it was for your sake, Jon, for your dear sake.”

It seemed a century, this evening of inner revelation and discovery, a dreadful century. Marjorie wearily climbed the stairs to her own room. She could not face downstairs tonight the lonely sofas, the empty chairs, the brilliant, lonely furniture, the glittering windows which would reflect nothing but a despairing woman’s face.

By silence, I lied. Was that the better way? By not speaking I saved you so much, Jon, so much more than you have already borne. I wonder, if you knew what I know, if you’d be grateful to me? Perhaps. Would the ultimate have been better than this?

She could hear Jonathan speaking on the telephone in the study. She paused, then went to the shut door and listened. “Good, good,” he was saying in the precise voice of drunkenness. “Don’t let anyone in. Little sips of ice water only, or, better, little pieces of ice on her tongue. Don’t let anyone in.”

You never did, dear, thought Marjorie. No, you never did. Except for Mavis.

Before she fell asleep, after a long while, she repeated to herself, as if for consolation:

‘“He is wounded, but not slain. Hell lay him down and bleed a while, then rise and fight again.’ “

Would he? He had not forgotten Mavis, and only Marjorie knew that, Mavis the dearly beloved, and the hated.

Jonathan stood drinking in his fathers study, drinking slowly and steadily, and he looked about him at the brown, golden and ruddy room, so calm and sedate under the soft light of lamps. He thought of it as an autumn room, for it was warm and quiet and gleaming, the walls hidden by bookshelves and the books, themselves, chosen, he had suspected even as a child, not for their content so much as for their tawny shining leather and their gilt. There was no dark wood here but only fruitwoods and unstained mahogany, russet and polished and lacquered, so that it glowed like brown glass. The rug was a precious Chinese Oriental, in shades of yellow, ecru, cinnamon, copper and buff. The curtains were of gold silk; all the ornaments were of bronze and very masculine in cast, and the lamps were bronze also with parchment shades. The fireplace was of brown marble, veined with yellow, and so was the hearth.

Yes, it was very quiet. It had always been quiet and staid and spacious. Yet, curiously, in spite of the deep leather chairs, the beautifully carved old desk, the bright tables with their little Chinese boxes and ivories, the books, the general air of warmth, the broad mullioned window with its window seat covered with velvet cushions, there seemed to be no real invitation to rest here, to think, to meditate, to browse, to study. Adrian had called it his “retreat,” and had spent most of his leisure here among “my beloved books, my dearest companions,” yet it did not possess that peculiar atmosphere of contemplation and profound communion and repose that distinguishes the true library, the true study, of an intellectual man. In short, it was empty. It always shone; it was always beautiful; it gave the impression of invitation. The shining beauty remained after one entered here, but the superficial invitation soon vanished, for it had never been truly given. It was a harmonious shell that had never contained life even in the beginning, for Adrian Ferrier had never possessed that life to give. It was no more lifeless now than it had been in his own period of existence. It was not an abandoned room; it just had never been inhabited.

Jon had known that as a child. But from childhood he had indulged his father in Adrian’s conceit that this was the throne room of a dedicated and thoughtful and contemplative man, seeking refuge from a hot and exigent world into the caverns of his own brilliant mind. “Always I am refreshed,” he would say. “No matter how weary I am, I come to my retreat and think and muse and give rein to my fancy and let my thoughts soar, and soon peace comes to me and strength to bear the burdens of my life.” What his burdens had been Jonathan never knew, but he implied them, sighing, and would lift a plump white hand exhaustedly for a moment and then let it drop on the arm of his chair. He would then smile pathetically at Jonathan, his big blue eyes misty and wistful.

Jonathan leaned against the oaken door of the library tonight, drinking slowly and steadfastly, and then with the strange clarity of drunkenness he began to smile and he said aloud, “Dear Papa, you were a terrible but lovable farce, and I always knew all about you. I loved you dearly and still do, and you were kind. You loved me and I never let you know what I knew about you, because I pitied and protected you from sharp and perceptive Mama even when I was a little kid. Sharp and perceptive Mama. You knew she was on to you. She didn’t have the humor and compassion not to let you know. But I did. And you were grateful, and in a way you’d never understand you taught me a lot about people. You taught me, for one thing, to recognize a bore at once and to avoid him. Never mind, Papa. You were a little man, more ordinary than most, and you were very pretentious, and wouldn’t Mama be surprised to know I know all this! She thinks that I thought you an Intellect, and I let her think that because it amuses me and irritates her.

“You were weak and vulnerable, and for some damned reason the weak and the vulnerable get right inside my vest and cuddle up in my viscera. Mama despises them and is impatient with them, and probably with good reason, which leaves me in somewhat of a dilemma. Am I a little weak and vulnerable, too? Was that one bond between us?”

He frowned at the glass in his hand, then took a gulp of it. He uttered a particularly foul word. “Maybe,” he said. “I never thought of that before. Well, hell, Papa. Poor old boy.
I
knew all the time that your insistent kindness and solicitude for others was only your terrified defense against your fellow-man. You probably had a faint idea of what people are, and so you tried to fend them off, prevent potential attacks on you with declarations of your belief in mankind, that it really is good, decent, kindly at heart, bulging with the honey of goodwill and needing only encouragement to sprout wings. You gave money to every whimpering rogue, thief and lying mendicant who asked your help—so they’d think well of you and praise you for a sensitive and compassionate man. But charitable institutions, and even the Church, rarely got a penny out of you. There you were parsimonious. Sometimes you mortified me when the priest or the Sisters came around. Even though you sent them away with a few coppers or a little silver—poor devils—they thought you were the most benign creature in existence. The funny thing is, you really were. You weren’t a hypocrite at all, though I suspect dear Mama always thought you were. You dearly loved yourself, but it was an innocent love, like a child’s. God, Papa, you made me ache all over when I was a kid myself and you treated me as if I were your father. Did I like that? Probably. Perhaps that was a bond between us, too.

“I knew when I was still in knickers that you were incapable of dealing, foot to foot, fist to fist, with others. At heart, you were a woman, perhaps even a girl. I don’t mean that nastily, Papa. I’m a doctor, and I know that every woman has masculine qualities and every man feminine ones; that’s our duality. But your feminine qualities were greater than your masculine.

“I think it was your terror of people that made you love

harmless things, birds and trees and gardens. They never threatened you. Of what were you afraid, Papa? I don’t think you ever knew. I don’t think you even had the slightest suspicion. You just didn’t want to be hurt. Who does? Unfortunately, all of us can’t run away, as you ran away all your life. You did have loving and tender parents, so they never scared the hell out of you. You were born as you were born, with all your trembling genes and your fear. You couldn’t help it. But Mama thought you could.”