The most curious sensation of impotence came over Ernest. He knew now that in spite of everything he had never conquered Martin. And he knew that he would never conquer Godfrey. He might strike him down, he might kill him. He might drive him off, might forget him. But never would he conquer him. He had fought and overcome the strong many times, but he knew now that he had never overcome the weak.
He heard himself saying tonelessly, out of his impotence: “I suppose your mother means nothing to you? I suppose you don’t care whether you see her again or not?”
Then Godfrey, still looking at him, said: “I don’t care what happens. I’m not going home with you. You needn’t lift your cane to me. You can’t change anything. No matter what you do to me, you can’t change anything.” He paused. “I never want to see you again. I hoped that I would never need to see you. If it hadn’t been for my mother, I would never have come back here. All my life, I’ve wanted to get away from you. You—you made me sick,” he added simply.
And again their eyes held. Finally, it was Ernest who looked away.
All at once, quite suddenly, he was no longer enraged. All at once, he was only tired to the point of collapse. The strangest feeling came to him, as though he had lost something, and as though the loss was causing him intense pain and grief. There was a dry taste in his mouth, a sort of turning away of his whole mind and spirit in a weariness not to be endured.
“I’m going away now,” he heard Godfrey’s voice saying. Surely, all his life he had heard Godfrey saying that! “I’ll see my mother again, sometime. You can’t prevent that, even if you try. I’m not sorry this happened. It’s so good to get away from you at last!”
The young man went into the bedroom, came out with his hat and coat. Then, without looking at his father or his wife again, he went out of the room
Ernest listened to the sound of his son’s footsteps going down the stairs. He strained to hear their last echo. And then there was no other sound for a moment or two.
Simone got up, shook out her sleazy dress. She was still smiling a little.
“So, that is all, M’sieu,” she said. Ernest looked at her but he did not seem to see her. “And you will not forget your promise to me?”
Ernest stirred. He sighed, picked up his hat. He put it on his head.
“No,” he answered. “I will not forget.”
CHAPTER LXXXVII
Lucy herself opened the door for Ernest when he arrived home. He did not notice that her face was white, with traces of tears on it. She murmured something to him about Gertrude and Elsa having put May to bed, and that she wanted to see him for a moment. He made a vague, almost distraught gesture, but she followed him.
He went into the drawing room. A fire had been kept up, and its handful of coals burned gold and red behind the grate. A single lamp glowed on a teakwood table, shone softly on all the crowded confusion of a Victorian parlor. Ernest stood before the fire, his hand on the mantel, his head bent. He kept drawing deep hoarse breaths.
The velvet curtains that separated one room from another stirred, and Lucy, in a lacy cream dressing gown, her hair on her shoulders, entered. She was crying distractedly. Ernest put up his hand. “I’m not interested in anything else, Lucy,” he said to his niece. “I’ve got my hands full.”
But she came up to him. “Uncle Ernest,” she said brokenly, “you’ve got to listen to this. It—it’s very terrible. When I came home I found a telegram from Paul—”
“Paul?” He turned to her rapidly. “Paul?” If he had been pale before, he was ashen now.
“Yes. You see, Uncle Ernest, he wanted you to get the news first, before everyone knew it. Before the papers knew it, and Aunt May heard. So he sent it to me.” She handed him a sheet of yellow paper, covered her face with her handkerchief and sat down.
Ernest slowly smoothed out the paper. He read the telegram:
“Lucy, am sending telegram so you can tell Uncle Ernest and others won’t know immediately. Guy shot and killed this morning by miners during riot. Am bringing body home at once.” It was unsigned.
Very carefully Ernest refolded the yellow paper, bent, pushed it between the coals. Lucy slipped the handkerchief from her face. She stood up and went to her uncle. But he stood regarding the fire, which was flaring into a fan of swift light. It burst over his face, which seemed to have shrivelled into gray folds.
“Uncle Ernest,” whimpered Lucy, touching his arm. He put his fingers over her hand.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said, “for not alarming your aunt. She has had a very—exciting night. We must, of course, leave for home as soon as possible. I’ll have to have your help. You may tell her, if you wish, that you have had a telegram that Guy had to return to Windsor, with a sudden illness.”
“Won’t you tell her, Uncle Ernest?”
“No, I am afraid I can’t. This—is a little too much, for me.”
“But won’t she think it odd that the telegram was sent to me, instead of to you?”
“True. I don’t seem able to think very clearly, Lucy. True. I can see no way out of it, unfortunately. I never thought I was a coward.”
“Uncle, I think you had better sit down,” said Lucy in alarm. “Let me pour you some brandy.” She began to cry again. “Oh, how terrible this is! Poor little Guy! How could it have happened? It is like a dream, not real at all—”
Ernest, haying sat down, laid his arms along the arms of the chair. His chin fell on his chest.
“If you intend to return to Windsor, Lucy,” he said, “I would prefer that you waited until we left. I would rather May did not know about it at once, and if you came with us she would suspect something immediately.”
“Yes, certainly, dear Uncle.” She wondered at his very calm voice, his thoughtful expression. Was it possible he was not very much disturbed, she thought resentfully, all her instincts offended.
“And to hear of this, to have this happen, just when Frey has made such a success, when everything is so wonderful—”
Falling coals rattled in the fireplace. Ernest did not move. His arms still lay along the arms of the chair. Lucy could see the dull sparkle of the signet ring on his little finger.
Lucy sobbed aloud. “Poor little Guy! Poor little Guy! And Frey, too, married to that awful woman! How dreadful to have children! Oh, clear, dear me, how shall I tell Aunt May? I really can’t do it—her heart will break—”
In response to her ring a sleepy and resentful maid brought in a silver tray with a decanter of brandy and a glass. Lucy poured the glass full of the amber liquid and held it out to her uncle. “Dear Uncle Ernest, please drink this! It will do you such good.”
He glanced at it and waved it aside. “No, thank you, Lucy. I always hated it. This is one time when I need not be polite and drink it down.”
Percival Van Eyck, who had lurked in the upper hallway, too kind-hearted to have been present when his wife broke the news to her uncle, now came downstairs timidly, to offer his condolences. Lucy glanced at him with tearful impatience; Uncle Ernest was certainly not the kind to bear the condolences of kind fools with any good grace, she thought. But to her surprise Ernest seemed touched when Percival stammered out his broken and sorrowful words. Perhaps it was because it was so evident that this young man, who had never seen his wife’s cousin, could be overwhelmingly affected by the griefs and the calamities of others. Nor was it mere sentimentality; he was genuinely distressed by the sorrows of absolute strangers, and Lucy often declared that it was a good thing that he had married a woman with sense or certainly his inheritance would soon have been dispersed in a thousand charities.
The three sat together drearily, in silence, in chill and gloom, until the morning silvered the sky over the houses opposite. For over an hour Ernest had not spoken; he had half hidden his face with his hand, while Lucy, not his wife or his daughter, had sat in silence beside him, and Percival, sad and sleepy and dishevelled in his dressing gown, had poured coals frequently upon the fire.
It w
as definitely light when Ernest said quietly to his niece: “I would like to send a telegram, Lucy.”
A servant was aroused and came downstairs carrying a lamp. Ernest sat down at the secretary and wrote quickly yet without hurry, a telegram to Paul in Windsor.
“Give orders all miners be evicted from company houses, and driven from county. Hire all detectives needed. Leaving for Windsor today.”
Lucy and Percival watched him write, watched the motion of his steady hand, the squareness of his compact shoulders. His impassive face was as quiet as ever.
The servant was just carrying out the message when the raucous voices of newsboys sounded down the silent snow-filled street. “Twelve Knights of Labor killed in riot in Pennsylvania coal regions! Son of Armament King murdered by striking miners!”
The voices were like the voices of avengers, enormously loud and threatening in the deserted morning quiet. Every house rang back the shouts; windows began to open and voices to call in return. The yellow street-lamps were dull flares in the white glare of the dawn.
Then Ernest went to the window and, holding aside the draperies, looked out. The newsboy, passing slowly and shouting, waving his papers fresh from the press, saw this face, gray and immobile, with fixed eyes, against the glass. The boy paused hopefully, made a gesture. There was no answer. The fixed eyes looked at him and did not see him.
The boy passed on, shouting.
Book Three
THE FIRST CHESSMAN
“Our first chessman is Stupidity, in the terrible game we play against mankind.”
CHAPTER LXXXVIII
Among the many things, and they were many, which Jules Bouchard (“the Jesuit”) detested was his cousin, Paul Barbour.
He was thinking of Paul one morning as he sat in his small office in the bank. He could afford to take time off to think, for he worked swiftly and smoothly and without effort and accordingly had plenty of opportunities to think at leisure.
His thoughts about Paul were not pleasant, but the brown narrow face of this twenty-one-year-old young man was inscrutable. He had a small narrow head, bony-looking under the sleek black hair, and a high narrow forehead. His cheeks, mouth, prominent nose, and pointed chin, all had a wizened and puckered look reminiscent of old Armand Bouchard. His ears, stiff and large, protruded from the side of his head. His eyes were usually puckered and narrowed and gleaming, but when he infrequently opened them wide it could be seen that they were full and black and very brilliant. He was not more than five feet eight, but because of the stringy slimness of his body, his litheness and swiftness, he appeared taller. Though not at all vain about his appearance, he was invariably dressed in the finest and most conservative style, with never a wrinkle or a bulge or a badly tied cravat. He had feet almost as tiny as his mother’s, and his boots glittered like mirrors. Ernest, with affection and distrust and appreciation, and a little touch of derision, called him “that dried young eel of a Frenchman, that Jesuit!”
Jules was a complete stranger to everyone in the family except Ernest and his brother, Leon. Only these two could see even a little way behind the withered brown face, the hooded and averted eyes, the polite coolness, the smooth infrequent speech, the more infrequent smile, the courteous reserve. Jules despised most people, was indifferent to the rest, hated only a few, of which the chief was his Uncle Ernest, respected only one, which was also Ernest, and loved in all the world only his brother Leon. If Jules, the secretive and the supple-minded and the subtle, had any confidant, it was Leon, and even Leon did not progress beyond the little ante-room that stood before his real self.
Jules was now one of the vice-presidents of the bank. He was respected for his ability, for his alertness and swift decisions. It was impossible for him to do anything badly, and even though he had decided that banking was not for him he gave it the best he could, which was considerable.
His thoughts having come to a head, he tapped the bell on his small polished desk, and when a clerk replied he asked that his brother, Mr. Leon Bouchard, be sent in to him. Then he waited for Leon, nervously yet smoothly turning a pen over and over in his long bony brown fingers.
Leon, “the deep one,” came in. He was much like Jules, except that he was broader of face and shoulders, and slightly shorter. He was inclined to plumpness, and later on would have a soft paunch. Moreover, his complexion was lighter and pinker, and his face had a surface merriment at times which had nothing to do at all with the static quiet brutality of his mind. Jules, when necessary, could use hypocrisy as delicately as a spice, but Leon considered hypocrisy a waste of time and preferred the thrust of a short wide knife.
“Good morning, Leon,” said Jules, as politely as though they had not seen each other for at least twenty-four hours, though it was only two hours ago that they had had breakfast together and had driven to the bank. “Sit down. I want to talk to you. Is that door closed?”
Leon tried the door, shook it, sat down. “Well, what is it?” he asked. “What has the Jesuit got on his mind this morning?”
“Nothing sacred, you can be sure. Besides, don’t call me a Jesuit. It reminds me too much of poor Philippe. And he’s been running through my mind this morning very prominently.”
“Philippe? But he is perfectly well. You know Mama just got a letter from him yesterday, saying he was quite splendid. God! A leper island! There must be a taint of insanity in the family! But why Philippe?”
“I don’t know. For some reason whenever I think of our nice Uncle Ernest I think of Philippe. I don’t know why. Unless it is because Philippe once had an infatuation for Gertrude. I’ve been thinking of Gertrude. She’s quite conspicuously enceinte now, poor girl. And for some strange reason, thinking of Philippe has led me to Uncle Ernest, then to Gertrude, then to that bull-on-skis, Paul. I’ve done some thinking about Paul, quite a lot of thinking.”
“Well, that’s more than he ever does—think.”
“Don’t be so sure, my Leon, don’t be so sure! These Aryans may be dull and slow-witted and hammer-like and thickly powerful and may not think often. But when they do think—God help us! It’s a convulsion of nature. Whereas when we think, it means nothing at all. We’ve already worn ourselves out thinking, and have made a complete circle of the world and left no more impression on it than the whisk of a feather. Thinking, Leon, can certainly polish the mind, but it also wears it down to a very bright but brittle shell. Like very old silver that’s been rubbed for generations.”
“Did you ask me to come here to listen to your philosophies? Remember, it’s the first of the month tomorrow and I’ve got more god-damn books to go over—”
“The trouble with you, Leon, is that you are all exigency. To be successfully exigent you must have brains, or you are just a noise and a nuisance. Sometimes I don’t think you have much brains. Uncle Ernest is the perfect type of an exigency that had brains. But don’t try to be Aryan like him. There’s too much Latin in you. Which leads me back to Paul Barbour, who is a blind man’s mailed fist.”
“All right, you are now back at Paul. I’m exhausted, following you. What about Paul?”
“This: Uncle Ernest is the kind of a man who would defraud and rob his brother without any conscience, on the theory of let the best man win. He would have no illusions that what he was doing was correct and gentlemanly and guiltless. But he would not care. The ethics of the thing might be very clear to him, but I believe that he would enjoy doing it for that very reason. The conscious villain, and pleased over it. Greedy and rapacious, and bland about it. But Paul, there, is quite different. He wouldn’t even see the ethics. He wouldn’t even know that you had a little right to live, and that what you had belonged to you. Uncle Ernest would recognize those facts, and enjoy taking from you what you had—a case of dog eat dog. But Paul would not recognize that you had any right to live, or any right whatsoever to what you have. In fact, he would resent the fact that you dared try to retain your property if he wanted it. He would become your enemy, if you remained stubborn. He
sees what you have, and develops a voracious appetite for it, and goes after it, smashing you in the process if you are so impolite and silly as to get in his way. Juggernaut in trousers.”
“It’s very nice, hearing family history so early in the morning. But what has this to do with the books waiting out there for me?”
“More than you think. Because, if we don’t watch out, there won’t be any more books with our name in them.”
“I see now where you get your reputation of silence: you babble on but you never really say anything. I suppose I’m pretty stupid, but would you mind telling me everything?”
“I’m disappointed. Haven’t you ever studied Paul?”
“Studied him? You mean, do I think he is a burglar? Yes. I think so. But how can he burgle us?”
“He’ll find a way. He already resents the Bouchards. He sees what we have, and is very indignant that we have anything. Soon this pouting-bear-that-walks-like-a-man will decide that he ought to have it, and nothing will stop him, unless—”
“Unless what?” Leon’s saffron face had lost its specious look of amusement and had become threatening.
Jules leaned back gracefully in his chair and delicately touched the fingers of his left hand with his pen. He studied his brother thoughtfully.
“Did you ever read about the ancient Roman gladiator combats, Leon? They’d arm one gladiator with breastplates and helmet and put his legs in armor and give him a shield and a powerful short sword. He was usually the heavier and the stronger man, and the more brutish. And they’d give the other gladiator, the lighter, swifter, more intelligent one, just a net and a spear. No armor, just nakedness and a net and a spear. And they’d set them fighting to the death. And usually the man with the net and the light feet and the quick brain would win.”
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