Dynasty of Death

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Good evening,” said Jules, coldly and imperturbably. “Good evening, Elsa. I hope I am not intruding upon you?” His rapid hidden eye saw everything; his expression was dark and inscrutable.

  Elsa rose slowly. “Jules!” she murmured faintly. Then she colored and looked at her brother helplessly, wringing her hands with a gesture of unconscious fear and confusion. Paul, stupefied, could do nothing but stare, his arm still resting on the marble ledge.

  Jules laid a slim black portfolio upon a table. “May I sit down, Elsa?” he asked. “Thank you. Please be seated, Elsa. No, it is not necessary for you to go,” as Elsa started blindly for the door. She returned, slowly sank into her seat again, stared at Jules with a blank fascinated expression.

  Jules looked up at Paul, who had not yet moved. His eyes narrowed and glinted, and upon his brown cheek there was still a suggestion of a welt.

  “Your resignation was turned over to me tonight, Paul,” he said quietly.

  Now Paul turned a dusky purple. “And you’ve come to tell me it is accepted,” he said hoarsely. His shoulders straightened, his hands formed into fists.

  “You jump to conclusions,” said Jules coldly, after a moment’s silent scrutiny of his cousin. “Conclusions are almost invariably wrong. I have come here tonight because the matter is very serious. I have to come to ask you not to resign, and to bring you the information that we have voted only an hour ago that you be asked to accept the presidency of the Corporation.”

  Elsa cried out. She looked from Jules to Paul. The purple was fading from her brother’s face; he was blinking incredulously, and visibly swallowing. His clenched fists opened, relaxed.

  “At three times the salary you were receiving as vice-president,” added Jules, and now he smiled, not a pleasant smile at all. Then, as Paul, unable to speak, remained silent, Jules went on: “I hope you will accept. We should regret it exceedingly if you refused. Frankly, we need you. It is entirely a business arrangement, and sentiment, or justice, has nothing whatsoever to do with it.”

  Paul groped for a chair, found it, sat down. He averted his head. Elsa, wringing her hands, hardly able to breathe, watched him.

  Jules regarded the tip of his polished boot meditatively. His expression became gentler, thoughtful. “Not as a member of the Company, but as a man, I believe you were treated shabbily. Not for an instant did we doubt that you would be named president by our late lamented Uncle Ernest. It was a scurvy joke. But then, dear Uncle Ernest always had to have his little joke.”

  Paul slowly turned his head toward his cousin, and regarded him with astonishment and blank uncertainty. He wet his lips. He was utterly abased, but hope, shining, unbelieving, began to rise behind his eyes.

  Jules smiled. “You will accept? Honore and Leon are anxiously waiting to hear from me.”

  “I accept,” said Paul, in his hoarse and trembling voice. He caught his breath suddenly and loudly, as though an agony had been removed.

  “Good. Very good indeed. Uncle Ernest had his joke, but we’ve got the last laugh.” Nothing could have been friendlier than the tone and the smile that accompanied this. “We’ll get along much better, now that we are alone,” he added amiably. He drew Paul into the family circle of conspiracy and friendliness, and Paul, as if released from nightmare and torment and death, smiled in return, an odd wild smile. Elsa, smiling and weeping, beamed upon them both.

  Jules withdrew some papers from the portfolio. “Here they are, Paul. Please sign them, after reading them.”

  Paul went through the motions of reading, but in reality the neatly typewritten pages were a blur to him. It was only toward the last that a significant item caught his attention. He glanced up at Jules, becoming pale and shaken again.

  “It says: ‘Bouchard and Sons.’”

  “Yes,” replied Jules unemotionally. “Bouchard and Sons.” He fixed his hooded eyes intently on his cousin.

  Paul, after a prolonged gaze, turned back to the papers. His pen hung motionless over them. They were no whiter than his face. Elsa put her handkerchief to her lips; her fallen lashes touched her cheeks. Then she heard a scratching. Paul was signing the papers. The pen fell from his fingers. Jules gathered them up swiftly and put them back into the portfolio.

  “And now,” he said, “let us briefly discuss business. Before long, I am reliably informed, we shall declare war against Spain. But hot until we have finished armor-plating a few ships for Spain, and Robsons-Strong can make their own deliveries to her, and we can ship arms and explosives to Cuba. But this is now an old story. There are now Japan and Russia to consider, and the eternal Balkans, and an idea that has very recently been taking form with us and Robsons and Kronk and Schultz-Poiret and Bedors and Skeda and Sazaroff. It probably won’t materialize for about ten years, but we need to start it at once if it is to happen as we wish it. In fact, I am informed that it has already begun in Germany, where they are talking of ‘Der Tag—’”

  EPILOGUE

  There is a peculiar inconsistency in the minds of men, which allows for, and approves, the conduct of one group and opposes the same conduct in another group,” said Jules to a reporter from the New York Times, during a heated official investigation concerning the business dealings of Bouchard and Sons during the Spanish-American War. “International trade of all sorts is conceded to be above national and racial prejudice, to be above war and blockades and private quarrels. It is the Esperanto of modern industrial life. With one inexplicable and notable exception: the armaments industry. This industry, so international, so necessarily without bias and local quarrels, suddenly, during war, is declared to be a circumscribed and solely national industry, and it is demanded of it, neutral and passionless though it is and must be, that it take sides. This attitude, stupid and arrogant, is a murderous attack on commercial life, a violation of the seller-customer relationship, which is the basis of free and prosperous international trade. Not only is this an assault upon the liberties of one group of men, liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, it is also tyranny of a distinctly dangerous type, auguring a dark future for other liberties of the people. You cannot burst one door of a house without laying the whole house open to pillage.”

  He spread out his hands simply. “‘If this be treason, make the most of it.’”

  This interview was much admired, particularly among armaments makers and their stockholders all over the world. But the Government and the majority of the people were quite cynical about it, refusing to be impressed. One Senator said: “I would advise Mr. Bouchard to read the Constitution carefully before he undertakes to quote it so movingly another time. He is in the position of the devil quoting scripture. We admit that his grave warning against enemies of the people’s liberties, and his anxiety about them, is very touching. But we would like at this time to point out, with the assistance of history, that the people will have very little need to worry about this, on the day that the armaments industry all over the world is outlawed, and the real enemies of the people are called out from behind their judicious and lofty masks, and shown to be who they are: the armaments makers.”

  At this time, Paul Barbour was indiscreet enough to make, as Jules Bouchard so trenchantly put it: “A complete damn fool of himself.” The particular moment when he accomplished this difficult feat was a delicate one.

  He, too, gave an interview, which went the rounds of the world. He recalled the fact that Peter, to defend himself and the righteous, used a sword “with good effect.” After this pious quotation, he went on:

  “John has revealed to us a vision of the binding of Satan and the thousand years of peace which will follow. But there will be war before that time.

  “War is a sickness of nations, the most fatal and the most dreadful of all pestilences. No one realizes this so completely as the armaments makers, who work hand in hand, admittedly, with science, for the production of more efficient weapons and gases of death. War, the sickness of men’s minds, can only be cured by war, and the more dreadful it is, th
e more mercilessly it is waged, the more widespread, the greater will be the health of nations after the universal and bloody purge. War must be eradicated by the sword, by ruthlessness cultivated by the civilized nations against the uncivilized, the greedy-for-conquest.

  “The armaments maker, by assisting in the elimination of the warlike and the barbarous, is the friend of peace, the destroyer of the sick. His guns and his explosives, his gases and his bullets, are the physicians that will heal the afflicted.”

  He added: “To ask peaceful and civilized nations to defend themselves with friendly words and conciliatory gestures is to ask a man to protect himself against a mad dog with a smile and an outstretched hand.”

  But Jules, usually so astute, was Wrong this time. His French logic had no influence with the sentimental American mind, but Paul’s speech, so sentimental, appealing as it did to simple ignorance and hoary, platitudinous beliefs, did more to placate public resentment than all of Jules’ sophistry and bitter reason. Realizing this, Jules gave vent to an unprintable but succinct remark that was quoted, with enjoying laughter, among his kinsmen for years. It had something to do with Paul’s bestowing an intimate salute upon the more secluded part of the public’s anatomy. Thereafter, Paul was referred to, among the irreverent Bouchards, as “Cousin Ass.”

  All this was on the occasion of the discovery that the Spaniards were using “thousands of rifles resembling very closely the Kinsolving rifles issued to our own soldiers.”

  Another and renewed uproar occurred during the Russian-Japanese War, when it was discovered that the Kinsolving Arms Company had supplied the Japanese with 30,000,000 cartridges, tons of explosives, 200,000 gun slings and one hundred cannon. The simple Russian Government made a representation to Washington, and the people of California indignantly demanded another investigation. Paul, encouraged this time by Jules himself, made another speech, and everything subsided.

  Bouchard and Sons now found that it was exceedingly profitable to bestow a lot of attention on re-purchasing, at a good price, explosives, guns and ammunition sold in the past to the great Powers, and reselling this old and sometimes obsolete equipment to poorer, smaller nations. Ernest had done some trade in this manner, but Bouchard and Sons enlarged on it, issuing catalogs, guaranteeing equipment, and advertising discreetly. In this edifying manner, a nation, eventually falling from first place, sometimes re-purchased goods it had formerly sold back to this remarkable Company after a first purchase. Jules Bouchard had discovered that the principle of the human circulatory system could be applied very nicely to the armaments industry. Bedors, Schultz-Poiret, Robsons-Strong, Kronk, and Sazaroff, expressing their private admiration, soon followed.

  By 1905, Bouchard and Sons had greatly enlarged its fortunes, and Ernest himself might well have been amused, admiring and gratified.

  An interval of comparative peace now came upon the world, though the Balkans rumbled as usual and there were minor disturbances. The Bouchards sold huge supplies of explosives to the United States Government for the purpose of railroad expansion and other peaceful improvements. Robsons-Strong yawned, after counting the profits of the Boer War, in which it had admirably demonstrated its patriotism by supplying both the British and the Boers with Maxim guns and other equipment. Bedors yawned, Schultz-Poiret yawned.

  But Sazaroff did not yawn, neither did Kronk.

  And eventually Schultz-Poiret stopped yawning, as did Bouchard and Sons, and Bedors and Robsons-Strong. For a pestilential whisper had come out of Germany, out of the Balkans, out of Russia. The Kronk plant at Essen was smoking nicely, and all at once the munition works of Schultz-Poiret at Le Creusot in Burgundy, began to smoke and show edifying activity, Robsons-Strong became mysteriously active, Skeda’s eye brightened, Bedors wore a grave face, and Sazaroff moved about Europe with a speed and suppleness surprising in a man of his age.

  The newspapers began to simmer. There was a report that a group of high British naval and military men were entertained at a large dinner by German government officials, and that one German proposed a toast to “Der Tag,” the Day when Germans and Britons would be engaged in mortal combat. Guarded yet inflammatory articles against Germany appeared in the French papers; the same articles, almost word for word, appeared in the German newspapers against France. They were finely and subtly written, expressing vague but poignant suspicions, asking impersonal and rhetorical questions, insinuating abstract but ominous accusations. The Russian press also published similar articles, as did the British and the Austrian, the Bulgarian, the Greek and the Roumanian. Serbian papers uneasily whispered and looked apprehensively at Austria.

  The strange thing about it all was that the group of men who wrote these articles were paid with a fine impartiality by Kronk and Schultz-Poiret, Skeda and Bedors and Bouchard and Sons.

  In America, Jay Regan the Younger conferred with his associates, among whom were Jules Bouchard and his brother and cousins, as to the amounts which might be lent to Britain and to France, or possibly to Germany. Finally, after long debate, study of many papers, consultations with statesmen, bankers and politicians, a decision was reached.

  An odd thing happened shortly afterwards. American histories, newspapers, orators and patriotic societies, suddenly ceased their baiting and ridicule of England. There was much unexpected talk about Hands across the Sea. Pleasant visits were arranged between prominent Britons and Americans. Anglo-American sentiment became warm and very close and understanding.

  The wine in the vats began to ferment.

  A Biography of Taylor Caldwell

  Taylor Caldwell was one of the most prolific and widely read American authors of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned five decades, she wrote forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers.

  Caldwell captivated readers with emotionally charged historical novels and family sagas such as Captains and the Kings, which sold 4.5 million copies and was made into a television miniseries in 1976. Her novels based on the lives of religious figures, Dear and Glorious Physician, a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God, a panoramic novel about the life and times of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time.

  Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in 1900 in Manchester, England, into a family of Scotch-Irish descent, she began attending an academically rigorous school at the age of four, studying Latin, French, history, and geography. At six, she won a national gold medal for her essay on novelist Charles Dickens. On weekends, she performed a long list of household chores and attended Sunday school and church twice a day. Caldwell often credited her Spartan childhood with making her a rugged individualist.

  In 1907, Caldwell, her parents, and her younger brother immigrated to the United States, settling in Buffalo, New York, where she would live for most of her life. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, when she was twelve, although it was not published until 1975. Marriage at the age of eighteen to William Combs and the birth of her first child, Mary Margaret—Peggy—did not deter her from pursuing an education. While working as a stenographer and a court reporter to help support her family, she took college courses at night.

  Upon receiving a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buffalo in 1931, she divorced her husband and married Marcus Reback, her boss at the US Immigration Department office in Buffalo. Caldwell then dedicated herself to writing full time. Even as her family grew with the arrival of her second daughter, Judith, Caldwell’s unpublished manuscripts continued to pile up.

  At the age of thirty-eight, she finally sold a novel, Dynasty of Death, to a major New York publisher. Convinced that a pre–World War I saga of two dynasties of munitions manufacturers would be better received if people thought it was written by a man, Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner—who also discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—advised her to use only part of her name—Taylor Caldwell—as her pen name. Dynasty of Death became
a bestseller in 1938 and the saga continued with The Eagles Gather in 1940 and The Final Hour in 1944. Inevitably, a public stir ensued when people discovered Taylor Caldwell was a woman.

  Over the next forty years, Caldwell often worked from midnight to early morning at her electric typewriter in her book-crammed study, producing a wide array of sagas (This Side of Innocence, Answer as a Man) and historical novels (Testimony of Two Men, Ceremony of the Innocent) that celebrated American values and passions.

  She also produced novels set in the ancient world (A Pillar of Iron, Glory and the Lightning), dystopian fiction (The Devil’s Advocate, Your Sins and Mine), and spiritually themed novels (The Listener, No One Hears But Him, Dialogues with the Devil).

  Apart from their across-the-board popularity with readers and their commercial success, which made Caldwell a wealthy woman, her long list of bestselling novels possessed common themes that were close to her heart: self-reliance and individualism, man’s struggle for justice, the government’s encroachment on personal freedoms, and the conflict between man’s desire for wealth and power and his need for love and family bonding.

  The long hours spent at her typewriter did not keep Caldwell from enjoying life. She gave elegant parties at her grand house in Buffalo. One of her grandchildren recalls watching her hold the crowd in awe with her observations about life and politics. She embarked on annual worldwide cruises and was fond of a glass of good bourbon. Drina Fried recalls her grandmother confiding in her: “I vehemently believe that we should have as much fun as is possible in our dolorous life, if it does not injure ourselves or anyone else. The only thing is—be discreet. The world will forgive you anything but getting caught.”