The Final Hour

by Taylor Caldwell

  Edith hesitated. She glanced towards the fresh young nurses. They were smiling together. Nonsense, thought Edith, irritably, they probably are just having one of their obscure and obscene jokes, nurses are famous for them. They aren’t thinking of us, at all. She tiptoed towards her brother. At the slight sound she made, the nurses turned quickly, their young faces respectful. They came towards her, and she smiled at them reservedly. Under their frank clear eyes she bent over Henri and shook him. He opened his eyes and stared blankly at her. She whispered: ‘Henri, we want you to see the baby. There might be something wrong—’

  Now his eyes flashed suddenly. He moved stiffly in his chair, then glanced quickly at Celeste. He stood up, and bent over her. She slept peacefully. Edith, looking at the nurses out of the corner of her eye, saw them exchange a gleaming and significant glance, or, at least, she imagined that they did so. Her anxiety and anger quickened. She wanted to grasp Henri by the arm to hurry him, but he remained, bending over Celeste, for several moments longer, while she had to force her features into an expression of fond indifference.

  Finally, Henri straightened up, and followed his sister into the quiet corridor outside. Edith closed the door behind them. Henri turned to her, and said in a rusty voice: ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the baby. There is a baby, you know,’ answered his sister, ironically.

  Now Henri’s face changed. ‘Yes? What is wrong?’ he asked harshly.

  ‘Nothing.’ Edith sighed and shrugged. ‘But I had to get you out of there, Henri. I want you to do a little thinking, my pet. Do you know how long you’ve been here? Does Annette know where you are? I haven’t much time, my dear, but I want you to understand that you mustn’t come here alone again. Come with Annette—’

  The flesh about Henri’s eyes tightened and wrinkled. Then he turned away from her. ‘I want to see the child,’ he said, with abruptness.

  Edith, praying that one of the nurses would not follow them immediately, led the way down the hall to the bright airy room which had been prepared as a nursery. Henry saw nothing of the pictured walls or the white furniture. He saw only the crib, in a corner, far from the little night-light burning on a distant table. He went to that crib directly, and looked down in profound silence at his son.

  Edith was not given to easy compassion, but as she watched her brother, his broad square hands tightening on the rail of the crib, his head and shoulders bent over the baby, she looked aside, a thick lump rising in her throat. She moved a step or two away, her eyes dim, dazzled in the faint light. Henri stood there a long time. The baby slept and moved his tiny lips restlessly. One small fist lifted spasmodically, then fell in a restless movement. The light hair curled softly over the big round head.

  Edith heard Henri move. He had turned away from the crib, and he was smiling. ‘Ugly, isn’t he?’ he asked. ‘And isn’t he very small, or something?’

  His sister laughed softly and with a shaken sound. ‘No, he’s beautiful, dear. And very big. Even though he’s a little premature, he weighs nearly eight pounds. He’s thin now, but you won’t know him in a month.’

  The door opened and one of the nurses came in, her big brown eyes avid with curiosity. She rustled to the crib, and gazed down fondly at the baby. ‘He’s a darling, isn’t he, Mrs Bouchard?’ she ventured, in a whisper. ‘Such a nice clean healthy baby, even if a little early. Doctor says he’s doing fine.’

  Henri was about to speak, but he met Edith’s firm and warning eye. He followed her out of the room. Alone with her, he sagged slightly, and passed his hand over his head.

  ‘Go home, Henri,’ said Edith. ‘Everything’s all right now.’ She hesitated. ‘Things will be better soon, I know.’

  But he turned away from her without a word, and went down the stairway.

  CHAPTER LIII

  Inspired by the same sadism that animated the Roman mobs fighting for front seats at circuses in order to watch every expression on the faces of the tormented in the arenas, the Bouchards flocked thickly to the big house on Placid Heights to visit Celeste. They were extremely disappointed if Henri did not happen to be there when they called. Almost to a man, they hated him, and feared him. They wanted to watch his face as they talked about the baby, or Celeste, or ‘poor Peter, who’ll never see the little fellow.’

  But Henri had never possessed a ‘vivid’ countenance. No one had ever been able to guess his thoughts. Even his rare violences had been gloomy, or dull, like a heavy November day. He had never displayed any conspicuous delight, enthusiasm or pleasure to the casual observer, and what little of these had ever broken through his stony reserve Celeste alone had seen. His native impassivity, therefore, protected him from the furtive malice of his family, as it had pro tected him in intrigues, plots and multitudinous machinations. It was this impassivity which had given him a kind of terribleness, a potential violence which no one ever desired to evoke.

  He came with Annette, now a gallant as well as a pathetic figure to her relatives, who often stared at her with the unwinking speculativeness which passed as admiration with the Bouchards. He came as an interested relative, standing beside his wife as she laughed and murmured over the baby, touching the child gently with her little hand. But Edith saw, to her surprise, that he looked at his wife with a curious intensity, rather than at the baby, that he seemed strangely fascinated by her sweet and radiant face, and that when she turned to him, smiling, her eyes filled with bright tears, his features would take on an oddly moved expression. He was very kind to her, studying her openly, and when she would glance at him, with some remark about the baby, he would reply with gentleness and slowness. Edith observed that he would sit beside her, as he had never done before when not compelled, and that often he would reach for her hand, to hold it. And Annette, not looking at him, would sit very straight, like a child in her chair, her eyes brilliant with joy and rapture. Her voice, always diffident and soft, would take on a more confident and merry note, and her relatives, staring, would be amazed at her gentle wit and volubility.

  Edith, who had always felt some aversion for her sister-in-law, now was quite worn out with her pity and admiration. He’s grateful to her, she thought. Now that gratitude seemed like an insult to the tender and valiant Annette, for her courage possessed a noble grandeur too lofty for compassion. Edith noticed that she never visited Celeste alone, and Edith, who had admired her before, now felt completely humbled in her understanding. But she was also overwhelmed with wonder. How could Annette endure this? How could she look at her misery, her betrayal, her loneliness and sorrow, with such an unflinching eye, and with such fortitude, and smile with such steadfastness as she did so? Of course, she loved both Henri and Celeste; Edith understood that. She intended to protect them, and their child. But, Edith thought sourly, there were heights to which love could mount which were hidden from more dull and selfish eyes.

  Beside this gallantry, Celeste’s courage seemed thick and obstinate, even sullen, as all defensive courage must be. She received the congratulations of her relatives with her slight stern smile, and listened to their praises of her child with pleased silence only. She appeared to be engrossed in her thoughts, and Edith, very wryly, wished her good luck with them. For Edith, these days, was blown about by a dozen different emotions, and was exhausted and made irascible by these conflicts. Sometimes she was enraged with her brother, and hated Celeste, because they were both a constant drain on her compassion. But always she regarded Annette with humility and tenderness.

  Henri, who must have understood that he was a danger to his child, never came alone, though he had plenty of opportunities to be unobserved. However, he wrote to Celeste constantly. Edith knew that. She saw how eagerly Celeste searched through her volume of mail, and how she would flush at the sight of a certain square envelope, and how eager she would be to be alone in order to open it. In the afternoons, she would sit up in bed, writing copiously, thanking her friends for their gifts and letters. Edith would come in, later, and unconcernedly carry off t
he mail, and stamp it. Celeste knew, of course, that Edith would see the thick envelope addressed to Henri at his office, but when the two women met again they did not speak of it.

  Henri was often away from Windsor, making short and frequent trips to New York and Washington. He appeared very preoccupied after these journeys, and the thick seam between his eyebrows would be more pronounced, and the lines about his heavy mouth would be more gloomy than ever. Christopher told Edith that Henri had another gay love in Washington, a happy and vivacious young widow who was the owner of one of Washington’s larger newspapers, but he apparently derived little permanent pleasure or relaxation from the lady. Upon his return, he would visit Placid Heights with Annette, and sit in abstracted silence while Annette chatted joyously with Celeste, or admired the baby.

  There were many things to disturb him these days, and not all of them were connected with Placid Heights, Edith knew. The frightful ‘blitz’ had broken out in the Battle of Britain, and the newspapers carried appalling stories of the devastation of English cities.

  Edith did not love England. But, as England stood alone in an indifferent, hating or terrified world, her head high, bleeding from countless wounds, her eyes open and strong and full of desperate but unshaken courage, she inspired, in enemy and indifferent friend alike, the admiration that can be accorded only the heroic and gallant. ‘Will she stand?’ asked the world. ‘I will stand,’ said England. ‘I will stand! Not by the help of God, not by the hands of fearful friends, not by the grace of heaven! But only by the help of my valorous heart, my intrepid blood, the grace of my unshaken people. I stand alone, but I stand undaunted, and neither fury of men nor the desertion of God can throw me down.’

  This was not the epic of kings, of captains or gentlefolk. It was the epic of the small people, the little shopkeepers, the starveling farmers, the factory and mill fellaheen, the streetwalker and the shopgirl, the old flower-woman and the newsboy, the bedraggled mother in the tenements, the driver of drays, the shabby mechanic and the children in their ruined schools. It was even the epic of desperate thieves and gutterrats, of miserable little scoundrels and drunkards, of chimneysweeps and window-washers. It was the epic of the betrayed and bewildered and anonymous people. The Trojan heroes, the Wagnerian posturers, the captains with their swords and their braid: where were they now? The Greek chorus of the people, lifting their dim voices in one long swell of undaunted tragedy, shouted down the tinsel voices of the useless and the gilded. This was the agony of a whole people and it possessed a grandeur and a loftiness beyond that of any king in torment, of any army in desperate retreat, of any Napoleon on St Helena. It was the agony of a world, betrayed, abandoned and stricken by a hundred men who sat in every great capital of the world, and communed secretly together in growing consternation and wonder.

  For it was slowly becoming evident that the people of England would not die, that England would not fall. Their king might possibly flee, their Parliament disperse in disorder, their ships steam away in the night with their freight of the treacherous, the frightened and the cowardly. But England would stand. The people would not die.

  For a while even the foul enemies of the people of the world were silent. The treasonable broadcasts over the American radio were temporarily stilled. Only the voice of Winston Churchill was heard, a loud and strong and lonely voice, in the darkness and the fury, rising over the roofs and towers of a thousand cities, sounding clear and firm above the crackle of the flames and the scarlet of the hundred fires, above the shattering thunder of falling walls, and the weeping of a bleeding people. And the world listened to that voice of heroic resolution, of passionate faith and exultant if sorrowful pride.

  ‘We stand alone,’ he said.

  No, thought Edith, you do not stand alone. There is an unseen power in the passion of the hidden people, there is an unknown power in the prayers of lightless masses, streaming up from every dark boundary of every dark land.

  Henri returned from Washington, and called Christopher to come to him from Detroit. Henri was fagged, but grimly content. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve put it through, with the help of our friends. The President will sign the Selective Service Act tomorrow. Our next job will be to put through greater and more effective aid to Britain, a kind of lending, or leasing, of matériel of war. She can’t keep up the pace, and the resistance, without it. That’s why we’ll be up against a terrific fight in Congress, to prevent any such aid. The boys are certainly determined that the Fascists must win—especially in the State Department. But Hugo’s working hard at it.

  ‘By the way, there’s a friend of his, Senator Anthrusters. Remember him? His broadcasts, his rallying of the Mothers against Conscription, his denunciations of “the international bankers, and the Communists, the war-mongers, and Jews, and British imperialism,” and all the other shibboleths and slogans, will be something to remember, later. Hugo’s thrown the fear of God into him. Hugo long suspected his tie-up with German Intelligence. At any rate, he’s suddenly grown rich, and very vicious against any sort of American rearmament, conscription, support of Britain, and so on. Now, something’s terrified him; I think Hugo helped. He’s flying from his home State to Washington, today, for an interview of J. Edgar Hoover. Hugo’s given him forty-eight hours, and then public exposure if he doesn’t comply. Hoover’s sent three men to guard him on the way, though I hardly think it necessary. Well, things are under way, though I can’t see much light or hope yet.’

  Two hours later, Henri, listening to the broadcast of news, heard a bulletin that brought him upright in his chair with a loud exclamation. The air-liner in which the pusillanimous and subversive Senator Anthrusters had been flying to Washington had crashed mysteriously only two hours’ flight from the Capital. With him had perished several other passengers, including three agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. No cause for the crash had as yet been discovered.

  CHAPTER LIV

  By the end of September, Peter’s book had reached nearly four hundred thousand copies in sales, which were increasing rapidly. While all the critics had been unanimous that it was a ‘startling and sensational’ piece of work, the majority were incredulous, and some were vulgar and full of ridicule in their comments.

  A typical criticism of the latter sort was this: ‘In Part Three, the writer exceeds the bounds of public credulity. He calls this Part The Plot Against America. He ought to have called it The Plot Against Common Sense. Who are these Brouelles, these Maynards, these Uptons and these Crawfords, who are supposed to be involved in an international plot with others like them, in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, Vienna, and New York, to guarantee the success of Adolf Hitler in his alleged dream of world-conquest? Who are these fantastic financiers, these great industrialists, these bloated bankers, these gilt-and-scarlet clergy, these mad statesmen and politicians and liars and plotters, these hinted members of our own State Department and Congress? The author implies that all these names are fictitious, but the facts are true and dreadful. One has only to observe the stalwart and passionate resistance of the British people, led by their socalled upper classes, to feel nothing but disbelief in the allegations in this book: that Britain is part of the huge international plot to make Hitler the supreme dictator of all the world. One has only to look at the furious resistance of the conquered but unconquerable French peasant and workingman and small shopkeepers and farmer, who will not accept the frightened dictates of Marshal Pétain, to know that France was never in a plot to become a vassal of Hitler’s. Though Mussolini has stabbed fallen France in the back, one can be sure that the Italian people had no part in that act.

  ‘Then the author’s attack on the clergy is cowardly and unjust and scandalous. The Church has always opposed Mussolini and Hitler, in spite of the Concordat. Thousands of priests have already perished at the hands of Hitler’s madmen, thousands of humble priests trying to protect and save their flocks, whether in Poland or Norway or Belgium or France. This vicious attack on an obscure but
valorous body of dedicated men is one of the ugliest things this critic has encountered in twenty years.

  ‘The author implies that the plot goes on in South America, where many Falangists are now living, and to which Franco did, admittedly, send many Spanish priests. Just at the very moment when our President is trying to consolidate South America in a Pan-American bloc, this book attacks the very people who are capable of achieving this bloc. The Argentine particularly is attacked. It is unfortunate that the author has made this glaring error. For last news reports state definitely that Argentina will lead all the other South American nations in an accord with the United States, and that, in the event of any unbelievable attack upon us, Argentina will be the first of our sister nations to declare war upon our attacker.

  ‘The author goes on to say that Russia will soon be aligned with Britain and any other democratic allies against the Nazi murderers. It would be interesting at his point to know just how sheepish he would feel now in the face of the German-Russian Non-aggression Pact of August.

  ‘The names of the great American industrialists, bankers, newspaper owners, manufacturers and politicians are admittedly fictitious, he says. But does he actually believe that any sane American might suspect that the famous Bouchard family, Mr Hiram Mitchell of Mitchell Motors, Mr Morse of the Morse National Bank, Mr Jay Regan of Wall Street, and all our other famous and vigorous men who have advanced American progress, are actually in a plot to deliver us over to Hitler for their own purposes? The Bouchards are now turning out huge quantities of armaments, chemicals, motors and other materiel of war for the use of Britain, and ourselves. Does this look as though they were plotting with Hitler for the conquest of America?