The Final Hour

by Taylor Caldwell

  ‘I’d like to see the author’s “sources of facts,” which he mentions so passionately. I don’t believe they exist. I don’t believe any intelligent American will credit it, either.’

  It was rare that a critic answered or attacked a critic. But one courageous man wrote in rebuttal: ‘The famous critic of

  The — — Times has pointed out the heroic resistance of the

  British and French and Polish and Belgian and Dutch and Norwegian peoples as a definite denial of the facts in The Fateful Lightning. He eulogizes, and quite rightly, the dedicated, humble but fearless acts of the obscure clergy in the cities and villages and towns. But he overlooks the obvious and insistent fact that this epic of wild and grim resistance is being written by the obscure and helpless and anonymous people, and not by their leaders, not by the powerful, the masters. The little peasant fighting to the death with his pitchfork, the starving saboteur striking down Nazi soldiers in the black streets of Paris or Brussels or Copenhagen or Warsaw, the little hungry priest standing so gallantly at his bare altar in his miserable little church and fearlessly denouncing the bloody invader: these are the inarticulate and voiceless people who have been so foully betrayed by the powerful of their own nations. When they shall have driven out the murderers, and destroyed them, it will be their epic. Their betrayers will have died, or fled into exile.’

  Another reviewer said: ‘It is disappointing to see an old and respected firm like Thomas Ingham’s Sons publishing such incredible fantasies as The Fateful Lightning, and other murder mysteries. One has come to expect only the finest in contemporary literature from this House, and it is very disillusioning to your reviewer to find it descending to clap-trap and spectacular cheap lies for the mere sake of sensationalism. It can’t have descended like this for the sake of money. I predict that The Fateful Lightning will be the year’s worst flop.’

  Mr Hawkins read these reviews with a wry smile. His consultations with the sales manager of the company were comforting. Reviewers or no, orders came in by letter, telephone and telegraph for The Fateful Lightning. He saw Peter’s face, and quite involuntarily, he smiled his encouragement at that vision, as if he had heard a question.

  ‘You can’t sue a dead man for libel,’ said Antoine, indulgently.

  But Robert Bouchard, his cousin (son of Emile and Agnes), replied hysterically: ‘But we can sue Ingham’s! Good God, is the family going to stand by and let them publish this stuff about us?’

  ‘If we sue, we identify ourselves with the “Brouelles,” Bob.’

  ‘But everyone knows who the bastard meant!’ cried Robert.

  Antoine shrugged, lit a cigarette, and eyed it with interest. ‘Remember: “If the cap fits, wear it”? Our only attitude should be one of ignoring the thing. Dignified silence, and all that. Being above the cat-calls of the monkey-men. The newspapers wouldn’t dare identify us with the “Brouelles.” They’d face a libel suit, and they know it. As for the people: who cares? Who reads books, anyway? A few hundred thousand impotent nincompoops with eye-glasses and dandruff on their shoulders. But the American people read nothing but the sports and financial news, the murder stories and the comic strips. The one way to focus the interest of this nation of morons on us would be for us to sue, so that the suit would be big news in the papers. If we keep our mouths shut, the nincompoops may read, and draw in big deep breaths of awe and fear and indignation, but the mass of the people will remain brightly innocent and ignorant of everything.’

  He smiled. ‘I shudder to contemplate what would happen to all of us if the American people ever acquired the intelligence of a superior dog! But there’s no fear of that, fortunately.’

  But Robert looked at him with his little, restive pig-eyes. ‘Well, it says here in the Times that the book has been bought by an English publisher, a Swedish publisher, and a publisher in Buenos Aires. And these people read, even if Americans don’t.’

  Antoine shrugged again. ‘We won’t need to worry about the English—soon. Nor, about the Swedes. As for the South Americans: the priests will take care that the book doesn’t have very much of a circulation. What is wrong with you, Bob? You are always looking under beds and into closets for the bogyman.’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Robert, querulously. ‘And I don’t think England’s done. They’re holding up damn well. And now we’ve got that cursed Lend-Lease to contend with. Why couldn’t you fellows stop that?’

  ‘We tried.’ Antoine’s voice was still smooth, but there was a sharp and venomous glint in his eye. ‘We spent half a million dollars in propaganda fighting it. We had three hundred fat middle-aged sows parading around in front of the White House carrying placards against it. Mothers of America against Lend-Lease. Used to be Mothers of America against Conscription, wanting to keep their baby-boys at home. We gave Jaeckle, alone, ten thousand dollars and stirred him up to a fine frenzy. We put out three hundred thousand dollars to various gentlemen in Washington, where it would do us the most good. We put full-page advertisements in every prominent newspaper in the country. We bribed newspaper columnists and radio commentators. We had hundreds of thousands of monkey-men and women writing their Congressmen. We had professional patriots bellowing at the top of their lungs. We had priests and ministers speak against it as an instrument to draw us into a “foreign war.” Nothing,’ he added, with a dark and glittering smile, ‘was left undone in the way of coercion, bribery, hotair and suborning politicians to defeat the measure. I’m damned if I know why it passed.’

  ‘There’s something going on under cover that I don’t understand!’ ejaculated the dull and sluggish Robert with unaccustomed energy.

  Now Antoine was not smiling. He rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. ‘Yes,’ he said, musingly, ‘there is something going on. I suspect it’s coming right from the warm bosom of this very family. I think think I smell a stench from Robin’s Nest. Yes, yes indeed.’

  Robert stared at him affrightedly. ‘You mean Henri?’ he said, and his voice was almost a whimper of fear. His big broad face, flushed with torpid blood and fear, turned on Antoine with acute apprehension. And then when he saw Antoine’s fixed silent smile, so sinister, so full of detestation and hatred for his pusillanimity, his fear sharpened to terror. He lifted his pudgy little hands, overgrown with short black hairs, as if to defend himself from that lethal regard.

  From early childhood Antoine had fascinated him, had led him, had subjugated him with refined and graceful brutality, had told him what to think and what to do, had even chosen, by suggestion, the wife for him. For Antoine he had always had a dull thick adoration, an open-mouthed and speechless passion, and that stolid and somewhat hysterical loyalty found only in the stupid man. No matter how Antoine maliciously betrayed him to the laughter of others when they had been children, no matter how Antoine had ridiculed, neglected, slighted or lightly insulted him, Robert had followed at his heels like a fat and lumpy puppy, regarding it as the height of joy if Antoine condescended to notice or to speak to him. Antoine’s grace, wit, brilliant smile, and air of assurance and savoir faire enchanted Robert, who had no grace, who had been cursed by a stature abnormally small and a breadth abnormally wide, and who had been born with natural fear already one of his major characteristics.

  They were cousins: their fathers, Armand and Emile, were brothers. They had attended the same schools and universities, where Antoine had always been the gay leader and vicious contriver of escapades. He had remembered, at times, to include Robert in some of the escapades and less dubious events. Otherwise Robert, so stagnant, so stolid, so phlegmatic and obtuse, would have been the butt of the school if not completely overlooked. For he had not the slightest imagination, originality or colour. He crept painfully through his classes, and only his own dogged and flat-minded persistence, his own obstinate drabness that could never imagine defeat, and Antoine’s irritable coaching, kept him from total failure. He graduated with an average of C minus; even this surprised his parents: Emile, who loathed him, and Agnes, who felt for hi
m only an indulgent and contemptuous pity.

  His slow wit was reflected in his small red-veined brown eyes, sunken in rings of suffused flesh, in his pudgy oily nose squat against his face, and his sullen slack mouth. Emile sometimes declared that his son resembled Armand, his uncle, but Robert did not have Armand’s look of wary shrewdness, and the occasional cunning and watchful flash of the eye, nor the swift crafty mind that had been part of his, Armand’s, youth. Nor did he possess that frightened intuition, that aching perception and uneasy conscience that had so bedevilled the younger Armand. Besides, Armand had been auburn. Robert was muddy brown in colouring. It was true that he had Armand’s short and trundling legs and little feet, but the body these supported was enormously wide and heavy, solid as stone rather than fat, with shoulders fantastically broad and beamlike. He swayed ponderously when he walked. Even in childhood, he had had no swiftness or any sinewy quality. His brownish hair was rough, coming forward like a shelf over his low brow, giving him a somewhat apelike appearance, emphasized by two large and outstanding ears.

  Robert’s character, though trustful of Antoine, and slavish towards that sparkling cousin, was yet furtively virulent and secretly vengeful. He knew he possessed no prepossessing physical qualities. He knew that he was a vaguely ridiculous figure, with his big broad body and short trunk-like legs, his lack of neck which set his big ball-like head squarely on his shoulders. For these physical traits, which he sometimes believed were actual deformities, he hated all the lovely and graceful and well-formed of the world, with the exception of Antoine. Finally, when he was in his thirties, the hatred had extended to everyone and everything, again with the exception of Antoine, and sometimes, of his little stupid wife. But the hatred was never violent or explosive, or even occasionally articulate. It lay in him like a thick, black and viscid pool, a pool of slow hot pitch.

  Dimly, he must really have known he was a fool and a dolt, despised of everyone. In consequence, he became arrogant and vain, dogmatic, cruel and sluggishly resistive. His obstinacy became a byword in the family. Only Antoine, and he not always, could sway him from a preconceived notion or plan. All his attributes were brutish and obtuse. He delighted in brutality, especially those aspects of that quality which were gross and obvious. He had finally convinced himself that he was very clever, a deep fellow, with very profound thoughts, and extremely subtle and aware. ‘They’ll not put anything over on me,’ was his constant thought. ‘I don’t say much—but look out!’ He saw himself as one of those silent men of history, misunderstood by contemporaries but revered by posterity. Besides these charming qualities, he also possessed the Bouchard avarice and voracity. He was sullenly violent, his expression was almost constantly glowering, and he had a craven and cowardly heart, fearfully fawning on those he suspected of the power to hurt himself, overbearing to inferiors and those at his mercy.

  He was pathetic. He had the capacity for a slavish adoration, an attribute common to the stupid and secretly hysterical. No one had ever discovered this but Antoine. Even though he had married Elsie Mitchell, granddaughter of the malignant and pious old motor magnate, Hiram Mitchell, he had never felt for her more than a vague and suspicious affection. Elsie had recently presented him with a small daughter with eyes like shoe-buttons but with the prettiest auburn curls, and Robert, very furtively, was beginning to show the child the first signs of uneasy adoration.

  Robert was his father’s secretary, and to Emile’s surprise, he had displayed a certain dogged tenacity, a certain bull-dog devotion to details, a lack of imagination that secured him from doubt and hesitations, a certain bulky integrity and persistence, which made him quite invaluable to his father, who was vice-president of Bouchard & Sons. He would sit in his office like a fat and brooding toad, disposing of a mountainous daily mass of tedious details, dictating tirelessly to batteries of stenographers, attending to the endless routine of telephone calls and orders, never indicating any weariness or blunted exhaustion. He was like a mole, grimly digging. Emile was indeed happily surprised, and though he did not despise his son the less, he appreciated his peculiar talents. Moreover, he could be trusted, a most unusual characteristic among the Bouchards. But even Emile did not know that Robert could be trusted only when he did not adore. And he adored Antoine.

  Robert hated practically everybody, but more than anyone else in the family he hated Henri Bouchard. Like all those who are the rejected of the earth, Robert had an almost insane egotism, a passionate belief that he was rejected because he was superior and misunderstood. He even welcomed overt dislike. But he could never endure complete neglect. Henri did not neglect him. He simply forgot the younger man’s existence. He never saw Robert without staring at him momentarily and blankly, before recognizing him. He seemed to have difficulty in placing him. This was not all sincere. Part of it was deliberate contempt. Robert could have overlooked the latter, but he could never overlook the first sharp stare, the sudden drawing together of Henri’s thick light brows before the recognition.

  Robert feared Henri more than he had ever feared another human being. He had never had any encounters with Henri that were even slightly tinged with violence or disagreement, but Henri had only to enter his office, had only to glance at him, had only to pass him, to fill the younger man with a quite unreasoning terror. In Henri’s presence he was completely dumb.

  Antoine, then, found in Robert an eager and devoted servant in the work of ruining Henri. The very thought filled Robert with the wildest terror and the wildest joy and vengefulness.

  Because of his many dangerous if sodden attributes, Robert was a great favourite with his wife’s grandfather. His natural inclination to vicious hatred, his dull-wittedness, his stony vengefulness, his dogged tenacity and deep, innate brutality, endeared him to the psalm-singing, pious and deeply religious old motor magnate. The bent for sadistic cruelty and mercilessiness and ugly malevolence which seems part of the character of the fanatically religious man was very strong in Mr Mitchell, who compelled his many thousands of employees to sign a pledge to attend church at least once a week, to swear that they had never committed adultery or fornication, and to promise that they would never drink, smoke to excess, swear or practice birth-control. It followed, as a matter of course, that Mr Mitchell hated mankind. He loved to have religious men, especially clergymen, about him. He had tried to secure the friendship of the Catholic bishop of his diocese, but that bishop, unfortunately for Mr Mitchell, happened to be an honest and brilliant man. He rejected Mr Mitchell’s overtures with such firm and scornful incisiveness that Mr Mitchell later imported two Ku Klux Klan clergymen from the deep South to head two of the more important and fanatical Methodist and Baptist churches in his city. Mr Mitchell, in consequence, became a very violent anti-Catholic reactionary, and even the assistance of certain venal Catholic clergymen in Mr Mitchell’s own work of destroying American democracy did very little to alleviate his hatred for the Roman Church. He would use these virulent and misguided men, yes; but he plotted to destroy the organization to which they belonged when the convenient day arrived. When the bishop, suspecting Mr Mitchell’s machinations, removed one of the priests to a less vulnerable parish (and reprimanded him harshly in private), Mr Mitchell’s hatred for the Roman Church reached a new high pitch. He privately financed two of the most fantastic, the most sadistic and vicious anti-Catholic publications in America.

  Mr Mitchell was also one of the most lavish backers of the America Only Committee. Through Robert, he had met Antoine.

  CHAPTER LV

  There were moments when Antoine, amazed, found himself on the incredible edge of fantasy. In spite of the prodigious efforts of his faction, in spite of the enormous sums of money expended upon treacherous Senators and others in public life, including August Jaeckle, Bishop Halliday and many subversive organizations, in spite of venal newspapers and prominent magazines, in spite of prominent anti-British speakers who toured up and down America in increasing numbers, and radio and newspaper columnists who denounc
ed the ‘warmongers,’ the ‘imperialistic British,’ and ‘international Jewish bankers,’ in spite of many members of the State Department who adored Pétain and the Vatican and who crippled all efforts of the Administration to bring Pétain to a decent realization of what his cowardly perfidy to France might mean, the American people showed the most alarming symptoms of beginning to think for themselves.

  A certain public poll disclosed the fact that seventy-five per cent of the American people would assist Britain, ‘short of war,’ to defeat Hitler. A considerable portion of this percentage were Roman Catholics, a fact which disconcerted the plotters against America, who had fondly believed that at the final reckoning the Roman Church would be on the side of the destroyers of American democracy. In fact, many prominent Catholic churchmen denounced Hitler and Mussolini with passionate bitterness and hatred, and several well-known Catholic laymen published books and pamphlets urging America not only to assist beleaguered Britain to the fullest extent, but even to declare war upon Germany. The carefully planned disunity of America betrayed the most distressing signs of not coming to a head, of disintegrating. Even anti-Semitism, so meticulously organized had done nothing but raise a bad smell in politics. It appeared that the American people would have none of it, and that small fanatical bands of agitators aroused nothing but disgust and distaste, even in those inclined to be anti-Semitic. Only the lunatics subscribed to the suicidal doctrine, and aroused laughter.

  The ‘Negro Question,’ sedulously agitated in the South by the enemies of America, found few there to listen. It was in the Northern States that the evil problem was most mooted. Enemy agitators did succeed, in some measure, in creating resentment in the Southern States against the presence of Negro troops in certain sections.