The Final Hour

by Taylor Caldwell

  But, all in all, to Antoine’s complete amazement, the American people remained in odd mental health. Moreover, there was not that universal resentment and anger which had been expected against the Selective Service Act. Hundreds of thousands of young American men entered the Army and Navy with singular calm and interest, even willingness. The great war plants, partly financed by British money, drew the best of the mechanical workers.

  All over America there was a strange but determined expectancy, a grimness and a sane preparedness for the worst.

  ‘The imponderables of the people’s conscience.’ The phrase came back to plague Antoine and his faction with increasing threat. There were warning signs that Catholic, Protestant and Jew no longer considered themselves as separate camps, but as Americans, faced with the final and desperate hour of choice between the things by which men die and the things by which they live.

  The ‘donkey-people’ were most unpredictably beginning to act like intelligent human beings, plagued by liars and thieves and rogues, by malefactors and mountebanks from all sides, only occasionally confused and annoyed, but also steadfast. It was infuriating. Certain venal priests, certain mad Protestant clergymen, might harangue their people with rising hysteria and hatred. Certain writers and newspapers might shriek aloud against Britain, against the ‘war-mongers,’ and weep copiously over the ‘mothers of America.’ But the people remained calm and expectant, and were daily growing more grim. More and more diatribes appeared in certain newspapers against ‘Communists who were endeavouring to force us into war, and foreign agents who wished to lead us into a conflict that could only bring ruin upon America.’ But their words reached only the eyes of the insane and the haters and did little damage.

  Like a terrifying dream, this began to permeate the consciousness of Antoine Bouchard. For the first time, he began to doubt.

  ‘The imponderables of the people’s conscience’! Was it really possible that there were such things, that there actually were tides of intense and passionate feeling among the peoples of the earth, which might urge them to rise as one man and destroy the universal enemy? Was this feeling instinctive, or were the forces of counter-propaganda stronger than the propaganda disseminated by Antoine and his kind?

  Antoine preferred to think it was the latter. It was against all his aristocratic instincts to believe that the people actually had a heart and a soul, that they might be inspired by just anger and noble indignation against murderers. He had some evidence for his determined belief, though he could not see the faces of the shadowy foe that opposed him. The counterpropagandists were doing excellent work in Washington, and in the country at large. That was easily to be seen. But, could they have done such excellent work if the people had not been prepared, even eager, to listen and to follow them?

  There was organization among the foes that opposed Antoine, and money, and power. He saw this. But, again, all this would have come to nothing but for the ‘imponderables of the people’s conscience’!

  The people, apparently, were dimly but strongly beginning to discern and feel the presence of those who would enslave and murder and exploit them. They might not, in their simplicity, be able to name names, or catch glimpses of the faces of their haters, but they felt their presence, heard the murmur of their secret voices, saw the fleeting shadows of them on the walls of the world.

  Antoine began to doubt his very colleagues. He had never been entirely sure of Christopher Bouchard, his uncle. He had never been wholly certain of Hugo Bouchard. Of his family, he was sure only of Jean Bouchard, brother of Hugo, Alexander Bouchard, Robert, and Nicholas. Jay Regan, for all his affable promises, and deep friendly interest in the increasing momentum of the plans, had still done nothing very important. Only Hiram Mitchell, and Mr Morse, Mr Boland, and Joseph Stoessel of the Schmidt Steel Company, and certain potent others, could be relied upon. There was, of course, Joseph Bryan, Junior, Regan’s strongest rival, and certain Senators and members of the State Department. But in Antoine’s own family, only Jean, Alexander, Nicholas, and Robert were beyond question. Emile and Francis were definitely part of Henri’s faction. Was it possible that Christopher had been playing a double game, and that Hugo had been working in sly secret among his colleagues in the State Department?

  And, if so, in what horrible jeopardy had Antoine, himself, placed his faction!

  These were the thoughts that so bedevilled him. He, himself, was impotent until his father died, and he knew the contents of his will. He had little fear that Armand would abandon him. Had it not been Armand, himself, who had forced his son into Bouchard & Sons, had literally compelled Henri to accept him? After all, Armand was his father. He had said nothing that might lead one to believe that he would betray his son.

  Antoine had never been such a one as Henri, believing in his own personal star, his own personal potency. For Antoine was too subtle, too intellectual, not to know that there are certain imponderables that work with, or against, a man. Nor had he, in himself, that enormous lust for power which had operated so gigantically in the lives of Ernest Barbour, and his great-grandson, Henri Bouchard. There were times when Antoine simply wondered why he bothered at all. He had always been intrigued by the legend of his grandfather, Jules, and had, quite consciously, been a real ‘understudy.’ But there were many times when he was bored to complete ennui at the efforts he was making to become the power of the Bouchards.

  He had only his light and humorous love for intrigue to keep him active in his plots. Intrigue was his genius. But even this sometimes bored him. He had the soul of a seventeenth-century gallant, and he found the ponderous and unprepossessing plotters of the twentieth century too ugly and colourless for endurance. They had no heart, no gaiety, no light and delicate touch. Above all, they were without humour and zest. They wanted only money.

  Money, as such, had no peculiar charm for Antoine. It is true he had the Bouchard avarice, but it was an artificial one, at best. He wanted it because it was the visible sign of potency, because it apparently appeared valuable to others. His own personal fortune was so enormous that he needed no more.

  Sometimes, he suspected he was a romanticist

  He enjoyed the spectacle of humanity for itself, alone. He was the eternal dilettante. He was the sleepless manipulator. He knew that others, even the dull ones, suspected this, and distrusted him for it. Henri had called him a ‘play-actor,’ and though others had laughed at the remark, Antoine had not laughed. In fact, he had, with surprise, eyed Henri with more respect than at any other time. Who would have suspected that the Iron Man possessed such subtlety?

  Antoine, in short, was a plotter for the sake of the plot, itself. He was beginning to lose enjoyment in a plot whose protagonists were so dull and drab. There was no one, anywhere, who had such vitality and power except Henri, and even he had no passion. He was a glacier, and glaciers were notoriously without brilliant colour.

  Antoine had always felt an alien in the world. He felt more alien than ever, in this year of 1941. He had only his endless interest in humanity, in its less desirable emotions, and his natural hatred for Henri, to keep him from becoming one vast yawn.

  And then, quite suddenly, Armand died.

  CHAPTER LVI

  ‘When the Bouchards die, it takes them years to make up their minds,’ someone had once said.

  In Armand’s case, this had been particularly true. He had suffered from diabetes for over ten years. Insulin had saved his life, had preserved him from the swift death which otherwise would have overtaken him. Moreover, he had the strong tough peasant constitution, that can survive unbelievable assaults, and the peasant obstinacy which frequently balks death of an immediate prey. Terror of death, too, had kept him alive. In the midst of increasing comas (from which only huge doses of insulin could rescue him) that stubborn and resolute terror had withdrawn him from the dark gates, had lifted him again above the shadows and left him, gasping, on the thin reef of life. He clutched existence desperately. In the confused recesses of hi
s mind he had come to believe that the resolution not to die would defeat death indefinitely. In his case, strangely, he had demonstrated this over a period of years.

  He had known that only the most careful of diets and constant hypodermics of insulin could keep him alive. But he had not had the courage to resist the table, and often, he forgot the insulin. When he did so, he was seized with terror. He never knew what made him forget. Dimly, he remembered that a man forgets those things he wishes to forget. Why did he wish to forget to employ the insulin, the elixir that enabled him to dodge man’s final enemy? Finally, in his bewilderment and fear, he came to think of himself as his own foe, and, at last, to believe that he was two persons: one bent on death, one bent on life.

  Sometimes the struggle exhausted him, filled his mind with vague nightmare shapes and forms. He found himself thinking the strangest and most terrible thoughts. Sometimes he felt himself a clear transparency, a mere consciousness, poised over dark pits, over whirling chaos. At these times he would struggle from his bed, stagger into his bathroom, and swallow a bromide with desperate haste.

  Then he had come to the place where he dared think no longer. He suffered enormously, but he also suffered dimly. He forgot the insulin completely. He ate his huge meals, and then would go to his bed, gasping, his face purple, his heart labouring, and his mind would become nothing but amorphous confusion in which he was faintly aware of a suffering that was more than the suffering of a dying body.

  And then, in the midst of his agony, he would open his suffused eyes and be amazed to discover that it was day, that the sunlight was streaming over his bed. Why, he had only just gone to bed, he had not slept for a single moment! Time, in a twinkling, had passed from midnight to noon. He would see the face of his stout nurse, and sometimes the face of his doctor, and he would be enormously surprised. He would try to speak, to express his incredulity. And then, suddenly, it would be Annette who sat beside him, white but smiling, her hand on his, or sometimes it would be his son, Antoine. He could only marvel.

  He would muse for hours on all this strangeness. Was there really reality? The peasant’s shrewd and exigent mind would retreat in awe before this puzzle. But he was not very frightened now. He felt very smug about this. Fear, he thought, came only with the consciousness that death was at hand. His fear having departed, he had defeated death again. If he was now too weak to leave his bed at all, if he was too weak to protest at the slight dabs of food fed to him by his nurse, he was not concerned. He was surely getting better.

  He was quite sure of this. He would listen as his nurse read the headlines to him, the headlines which were daily growing more frightful. And he would try to nod gravely, vaguely delighted that the news no longer had the power to overwhelm him with mysterious terror. And then, as he contemplated this happy thought, he would look about him, and discover that it was dark, the lamps gone, the nurse vanished. That was very strange. Only a moment ago it had been four o’clock in the afternoon, and the nurse had been reading the paper to him. He could even hear her last accents. While, again frightened, he studied this phenomenon, he would feel a flash on his eyelids, and the nurse would be there again, in broad morning light, a basin and towel in her hands.

  On this particular morning, his fear returned, and with it, his strength. He said to his nurse: ‘Miss Concord, where has the night gone?’ He heard his voice, frail as glass, and as tenuous.

  ‘You slept splendidly, Mr Bouchard,’ she replied, in her genial voice, as she prepared to shave him. He was heartened. He smiled at her, closed his tired eyes. He felt her shave him. Then, opening his eyes to thank her, he saw that the room was dark, a single lamp blooming on a distant table.

  Now, the hideous and oppressive memory of a dream recurred to him. He had not remembered this dream for many years. It came back to him in its full horror. Yet, it had not been an evil dream, only a strange one, and he knew, in a confused way, that it had carried comfort with it.

  He had been very young when he had had this dream. There had been no disturbing event to encourage it, or explain it. He had just returned from Harvard for the Christmas holidays. He could smell the scent of the balsam tree in the great old-fashioned drawing-room, and between the folding-doors he could see the twinkling of the gold, silver, blue and crimson ornaments on it. It had been an unusually satisfactory Christmas. Jules, his father, had been in one of his rarer benevolent moods, not lightly jeering, as usual. Adelaide, his mother, with her gentle brown eyes, seemed happier. It was long before the first World War. It was still in those halcyon early years of the twentieth century when one felt the vast strong growing of America, and hope was in the air. He was happy to be home. He was never happy at school, for his plumpness, his peasant secretiveness and suspicion, his awkward wariness and hidden vulnerability, made him unpopular with his classmates. He was even happy to see fat and jovial and big Emile, home from Groton, and little silvery Christopher with his venomous ‘Egyptian’ eyes. Celeste was hardly more than a baby, then, with bright-black curls and big blue eyes, always shy yet resolute. It had been a disagreeable term at Harvard, and home seemed very secure and pleasant. There were hints that the new automobile he had craved was to be his father’s Christmas gift to him. At any rate, he had not been permitted to enter one of the big stables behind the house, only recently converted into a garage. He could see the automobile in his mind’s eye; it would be very red and very shining, with crimson leather seats. He trembled with joy. He would be practically the only student at Harvard who would possess such magnificence.

  It was on the first night, that he had that most apalling dream. He dreamt that he had been asleep, not for long, in fact, for only a very short time. But when he awoke, he was not in bed. He was lying in a long dim white hall, very narrow, like a great corridor, whose farther reaches were lost in vague bluish mist. On both sides of this corridor there were wide marble shelves reaching from the marble floor to the marble ceiling, which was lost in floating gloom. And on every marble shelf there lay a sleeping form, wrapped in what appeared to be a white shroud. He could not see the faces of these forms, though he dimly guessed that some were men, some women, and some children. They slept as if dead. The light that pervaded the corridor was not constant. It was very faint, and sometimes Armand could not see about him. And then there would be a quickening of the light, like moonlight seen under water, and there would be a flow of nebulous illumination all down the length of the corridor, a crepuscular shine that would permit him to see the calm sleeping faces of his companions for a brief moment or two. It was the luminous pallor of a dream. Then he would guess that the sleepers were numberless, extending into infinity.

  He was not frightened. He was only filled with wonder. And yet, there was a strange familiarity about the scene, as if he had been here many times before, had slept, had awakened. He remembered, very faintly, that sometime, somewhere, he had been very tired, so exhausted that he could not endure it, and that he had fallen asleep, to awaken a very short time later, rested, quite alert, and very calm, in this mysterious yet familiar place.

  Then he felt, rather than heard, that someone was approaching him down the corridor. He saw the slight form of a young woman, in flowing white garments, her fair hair piled high on her small head. In her hand she held a golden flaming candle. All the floating mist about her became a round aura of golden light. She paused beside him. Her face had an aloof calm about it, motionless, yet not unkind. The candle trembled a little in her hand, which was as white and lifeless as marble. He heard her voice, echoless and indifferent. ‘You are awake? Then, it is time to rise and begin again. You have slept very long, this time.’

  ‘But I fell asleep only a moment ago,’ he murmured.

  He saw her smile, inhuman, composed and withdrawn, and when he saw it he was filled with overwhelming terror. He felt the beating of renewed life all through his body, but that impersonal and stony smile repudiated him, despised his fear. He felt something inimical in her, yet it was not a personal enmit
y, but rather the enmity of a lifeless universe. She repeated: ‘You have slept very long, this time. Go, you are awaited.’

  He did not know where he was, who awaited him, or where he was going. But he did not want to go. Through all his consciousness he knew that pain and suffering waited somewhere for him in the outer confines of an enormous space, that heat and torment and death lurked there, and all weary confusion. He protested again. And the young woman only waited, a static and marble form now, unmoved as a statue, the golden candle in her hand. He could see her eyes, colourless and fixed, shining like white stone, implacable and inexorable, and her motionless frozen smile, and the endless shelves of the sleepers all about him.

  He awoke from that dream, drenched with the sweat of complete terror. He literally fell from his bed, gasping. He saw the cold moonlight on the floor of his room, and the gleaming snow on the window-sills. He fumbled for a chair, fell into it, still gasping. He said to himself: What does that mean? But his trembling soul knew, and knew too well.

  He did not soon forget that dream. He remembered it for years. It did not grow dimmer with time. Sometimes, in the very midst of his classes, or even among friends, he saw the white fixed shining of that woman’s eyes, illuminated by the golden candle. He began to hate her, wildly, desperately. He saw her as a horror, which had awakened him from peace and nothingness. She was his enemy.

  Then, in time, the dream faded, quite suddenly, and was gone. He had not remembered it again until tonight.

  And then, as he remembered it, it came back to him in full force. The quiet dark room with its blooming lamp retreated, yet was still about him. But closer than the room was the corridor with its endless shelves, and the waiting woman, and the prescience of waiting pain and torment and weariness.