The Final Hour

by Taylor Caldwell

  He laughed contemptuously. ‘However, I could always talk to you with some stimulation, between your bouts of pouting and righteous indignation, and your attitudes. Yet, each time that I come back to you, you are there with blazing eyes and nasty remarks. Agnes once said you were a Victorian. I’m beginning to believe it.’

  Celeste said nothing. He saw that her throat was throbbing with considerable violence, and that her lips had parted as if she was finding it difficult to breathe. A look of extreme fury glazed her eyes.

  Henri stood up, leaned against the mantelpiece, and regarded the fire pleasantly. ‘Of course, you aren’t going to California,’ he said.

  Celeste’s repressed rage was so great that she felt a voluptuous impotence. As she stared at him, she was convinced that she hated him as she had never hated any creature before.

  ‘You are wrong,’ she said, thickly. ‘I am going.’

  He turned his large head to her, and asked casually: ‘Why?’

  But her anger had become too swollen for speech.

  He went on, still standing at ease, and still speaking casually: ‘I never made you any promises. That was understood, from the beginning.’ He paused, to watch curiously the flood of scarlet rush over her cheeks and forehead. ‘I did say, that when certain circumstances would permit, we would consider marriage. Or, rather, that I would consider it. You were quite agreeable, I think I remember.’

  She sprang to her feet, suffocating with shame, something tearing agonizingly in her chest. ‘Go away!’ she cried.

  He suddenly changed, becoming implacable and ruthless. He stared at her, and she saw the relentless discs of his pale eyes.

  ‘I don’t like dramatics,’ he said, coolly, eyeing her as if she were some offensive creature. ‘They’re always false, or hysterical, or whipped up for effect. Behave yourself, Celeste.’ She cried out, incoherently, lost to everything but her shameful suffering: ‘You said that when Armand—died—!’ His impassiveness increased as she lost control of herself. He watched her drop her head on her arms, which she had leaned on the mantelpiece. He heard her weeping. The two deep furrows between his eyes became deeper.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ he said. He took a step towards her, then stopped. ‘That’s quite true. But something else has come up. I can’t open Armand’s will—I can’t divorce Annette—until events make it safe to do so. It won’t be long. Perhaps a month, two months.’

  She lifted her head, and turned on him wildly. ‘You are such a liar, Henri! Did you know that Annette has been here, that she told me that she intends to divorce you?’

  He was startled. His expression was at first lowering, then it changed, and became thoughtful. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘And then?’

  Celeste pressed both her hands fiercely to her breast, as if to control the leaping pain of her heart. She looked into his eyes. ‘She said, however, that if the will specifies that you—are to lose if there is a divorce, then nothing will make her let you go.’

  Henri’s light thick brows drew together so that his eyes were only pale bright pinpoints under their overhanging ridge. He watched Celeste curiously, as she waited, and he heard the hoarse panting of her voice.

  He spoke quietly: ‘I told you, one time, that I couldn’t marry you until Armand died, that I dared not risk a divorce. I thought you understood that the things which I was trying to accomplish were more important than ourselves. After Armand died, I said, and the danger to my work was over, then we could consider the matter. You remember that?’ ‘Yes, yes!’ she exclaimed, with fervid and uncontrolled impatience. ‘I remember all that! But, you could open the will now, if you wished!’

  He shook his head with granite stolidity and slowness. ‘No. It is too early. I told you: in a month, two months—’ She suddenly regained control of herself, but her face remained white. She could actually say, with quietness: ‘And after the will is opened, and you have accomplished what is necessary—which I know is necessary—and there is still some codicil there which will cause you personal loss if you divorce Annette—’ She swallowed convulsively: ‘A loss that has nothing to do with the work you will have concluded but is personal—’

  He dropped his hand from the mantelpiece, and faced her fully. He said, with great slowness and emphasis: ‘Then, I shall not divorce Annette.’

  Her shock was so great that she appeared to dwindle, to shrink, to disintegrate. She stared at him with eyes suddenly grown enormous and dim. ‘I thought,’ she murmured, faintly, ‘that everything was delayed only because of the things you are doing, for the sake of America, and of yourself, and that when these were safe, you—you—’ Her voice failed her.

  ‘I would throw up everything, eh?’ he finished, with a smile so dark and ugly that she felt a hideous fainting sickness in herself. ‘I would throw up a lifetime of effort, and scheming, and planning, and struggle, and ambition—for you? For a woman?’ He began to shake his head, and his smile widened, became even more ugly. ‘Why do you think I returned to America? What do you know about me? Do you actually think, even after all these years, that I am the kind of man who would throw up his whole life for a woman? Do you think I am one of your movie heroes?’ And now he seemed obsessed by a cold and violent rage of his own. ‘Can’t you American women understand that to men who are not mere masculine copies of yourselves a woman is always only secondary? And that the sort of men you would have, fawning on your footsteps, abandoning all ambition and pride and accomplishment just so they might sleep with you, are caricatures, disgusting and contemptible and loathsome? Yet, how you damn women love ’em!’

  Far off in the dim and whirling recesses of her awful suffering and shame, Celeste could only murmur: ‘O God. O God.’ She could see Henri no longer; he was only a whitish shape in a blowing mist. Somewhere, she was conscious of a core of fire burning, searing her.

  Her lips, feeling gigantic and swollen, moved, and she said, hoarsely: ‘And the baby? What of the baby?’

  She could hear his voice, which came to her from some immense distance, but very clear and cold: ‘From the beginning, you understood that things were to be on my own terms, and not on yours. I made you no promises, but I thought you understood that we’d always be together, married or not married. Armand is dead. The work I have to do will soon be done. If it is possible to divorce Annette, without injury to myself, I shall divorce her. We can be married then. If I cannot divorce her without hurt to myself, then we canot be married. However, in two months, or perhaps less, it will be safe for you and me to be together again. It will be safe for me to visit you whenever I wish, and to see my child at any time.’

  Her senses came back in a vivid rush at his words, and to her they seemed so infamous, so terrible, that she was shocked into full consciousness. She reached for her chair: she fell into it. She could hardly believe what she had heard. She began to shiver, drawing her body together as if it had been touched by ice. She could not speak; her throat had closed.

  He watched her with that detached and cruel curiosity which was one of his strongest characteristics. ‘You are thinking,’ he observed, ‘about the boy. Don’t you know that we are all rich enough so that nothing else will matter? Besides, who would dare say anything to him? Who would dare blaspheme all this money?’ And he laughed a little.

  She looked at him from the pit of her indescribable suffering, and said, simply: ‘I don’t understand you. I never did. You are a liar. I—I thought you cared what happened to—to the baby, if not to me. But, you don’t. You care only for yourself.’ She caught her breath deeply, then exhaled it, a long and broken sigh of extreme and exhausted pain. ‘You haven’t seen him since the day he was born. You never wanted to see him.’

  He smiled, oddly. ‘You are wrong again, my darling. I see him very often. I’ve made it a point. Not in this house, of course. And now, I suppose,’ he added, with contemptuous impatience, ‘you will be very enraged with poor Edith, with whom you have left the baby frequently, at her request? You will scream in her face, I suppos
e? That would be like you, Celeste. And, no doubt, you will stop it.’

  But, to his great surprise, she was not enraged. Instead, her face changed. Tears suddenly rose to her eyes, and spilled over her cheeks. She turned her head away. ‘No,’ she said, very softly, ‘I won’t stop it. That surprises you, doesn’t it, Henri?’ After a little, she added: ‘I can accept it that I am not the most important thing to you, but I can’t accept it that the baby isn’t’

  He came near her then, and said, looking down at her indulgently: ‘Perhaps, in a way he is. It won’t do him the least harm if another Bouchard name isn’t added to the one he already has, but it will do him considerable good if I can leave him one of the biggest fortunes in the world, and a powerful position.’

  She stood up, and now her emotionalism was gone, and she could look at him directly, with dark calm. ‘I think I understand everything now, Henri. I won’t take the baby away. You can see him even more often, if you wish. I shall arrange it with Edith, who loves him quite a lot, herself. But, I don’t want to see you again. You’ll think I am a female egotist, and perhaps I am. But I do know this: No matter what happens, no matter if there is nothing in Armand’s will to prevent a divorce and a marriage to me. I don’t want you to come back. I don’t want you on any terms, yours or mine. Somehow, there is nothing left in me now.’

  He began to speak, impatiently, then stopped. He had never seen Celeste like this, so strong, contained and resolute. The thin white lock in her dark hair was no whiter than her face. Her eyes were intensely blue, and very still. He saw that she looked at him with no passion, no anger, no outrage or pain.

  ‘You mean,’ he said quietly, ‘that you couldn’t bear the trum?’

  She shrugged; she was very tired. ‘Perhaps. I can even admit that. But no: I think it is because you are cruel. I always knew you were both brutal and cruel. But I knew it with my mind. I didn’t know it with my heart. Now I know it with everything, and I can’t bear to have you near me again.’

  While he watched her with narrow intensity, she continued, with immense simplicity: ‘When I was young, I was always afraid of cruel people. I’ve been trying to find out, lately, why it is I ran away from you, and married Peter, when I did love you all the time. But I know now. It was because I instinctively sensed you were cruel, and not just cruel in a relentless and impersonal way, an ambitious way, but in a personal way, also. That is something I can’t forgive. I’ve believed, all these years, that your cruelty was an essential thing, a necessary thing, for dominance in a thieving and predatory world. But I didn’t think it could extend to those you might think you loved, that you could strike down, in sheer viciousness, those who had no defence against you.

  It is a cowardly thing, Henri. It is not cowardly to strike down enemies who will destroy you. But it is terrible to strike down those who love you, or are weaker than you, and for no other reason than a deep sadism. You are a sadist, Henri.’

  He was silent. He leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece, and gently bit his index finger as he watched her with blank thoughtfulness.

  She sighed, lifted her hands, and dropped them. ‘So, that’s all, Henri,’ she said.

  She turned and walked away from him. He saw her straight proud back, the fine and delicate lines of her slight figure. She did not hesitate or stumble. In a moment, she had passed through the archway, and he could hear her soft unhurried steps mounting the stairway.

  Once up in her room, she sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness, staring blindly before her, her lips and eyes as dry as dust. She felt no pain, only a profound and sinking desolation of spirit beyond anything she had experienced before in all her life, and it was like death to her.

  CHAPTER LXIV

  Annette wrote to Celeste: ‘Can you ever forgive my rudeness and boorishness and bad temper, darling? I know that I said things to you which are really unforgivable, but I am hoping that you will overlook them, and remémber how much we have always loved each other, and what friends we were. Can you bring yourself to forget that wretched afternoon, and go on as if nothing had ever been said?’

  Celeste wrote back, immediately: ‘I have already forgotten. Nothing was said, really. Even if there was, how can I weigh it against our whole lives? There are bound to be disagreements and misunderstandings in every human relationship, but these aren’t of any importance, dear.’

  But she knew that nothing would ever be the same again between herself and Annette, and, in its way, this was as terrible a circumstance to her as her final break with Henri. In actual fact, as Celeste implied in her letter, nothing had been changed. Fundamentally, this was true. But Annette had broken the brittle pretence between them that Celeste’s affair with Henri was unknown to her. Deep in her heart, Celeste had believed that Annette had always known, but she had refused to think about it. Henri, from the beginning, had been aware that his wife was not really deceived. But Annette’s silence had been like a concealing garment over a nakedness of which all were aware. She had torn aside that garment and revealed the nakedness. Neither she nor Celeste would ever forget that appalling moment of revelation.

  In her own way, Annette was as friendless as Celeste. But Annette’s friendlessness was even more painful to her, for there was a deep and vulnerable necessity in her for love. Her life had not cured her of this. Her attachment to Celeste was much stronger than Celeste’s attachment to her, for Celeste had a core of hardness which withstood the final shock. Soon to be deprived even of Henri’s casual presence. Annette felt herself bankrupt, now that she had smashed the painfully poised relationship between herself and Celeste. She had no one but her brother, and him she had never trusted.

  In the long days and nights of her increasing suffering, she told herself the agonizing truth, over and over, that no one is safe from the assaults of living so long as he is not a fortress in himself, so long as he must rely upon another creature for love, understanding, or even for companionship. If his own company is not the most desirable, if another’s hurt must also be his hurt, then he has opened some of the gates of his fortress, and made himself vulnerable to attack. He has deprived himself of that impregnability which is necessary for peace.

  Why, all my gates are open! she said to herself, with wry sadness. But, in revolt, she also thought: Yet if one withdraws completely, he is like a snail, a bi-sexual snail, procreating in the narrow confines of a shell and producing only its own image, retreating always, blind always, and never admitting that anything exists beyond itself.

  As always her sad reflections came to only one conclusion: she must make herself needed, somewhere, somehow; she must make herself useful. The habits of a whole lifetime shrank from this. But, she thought, with unusual grimness, I have a soul to save—my own.

  She refused to listen to the complaints of her fragile body when she began to take an active part in the local Relief Organization. She learned to knit; she learned to roll bandages. She was the organizer of the local blood bank in connection with the Red Cross. She mended clothing and learned to make simple garments. She contributed huge sums of money to the American Freedom Association, and to relief societies who sent vast amounts of clothing and medical supplies to Britain and to Russia. Later, after her divorce, she intended to take part in the relief efforts in England. If she was exhausted at night, she also experienced the anodyne of weariness. I am actually working, she would say to herself, with ironic surprise, as her maid undressed her and prepared her for bed.

  The family watched her with amazement, and with a reluctant compassion. Her brother protested. But she would only smile and declare that she felt first-rate. And, strange to say, her frail health did not decline. In fact, her fragility became that keen wiriness so often found in small and active people. If it had not been for that cancerous ache in her heart, she would have been happier than at any other time in her life.

  Thanksgiving Day, 1941, was approaching. Annette and Celeste had not met for several weeks. But the whole family in Windsor, and some of the Cha
ndlers in New York, were invited to dinner at Emile Bouchards’. Celeste’s impulse was to refuse. Then she saw the ridiculousness of the situation. She, alone, would be absent. There would be many sly comments. Worse, Annette would believe that Celeste had not ‘forgiven’ her.

  It had been hard enough in the past two years for Celeste to meet Henri and Annette in public with casualness and poise, aware always of inimical and curious eyes. Now, it would be much more terrible. The family, informed, naturally, by its own peculiar grapevine, must surely know of her break with Henri, and her quarrel with Annette. Unreasoningly, she believed this. She would stand alone, open to contempt and laughter, now. Nevertheless, she must go to that dinner. Each member of the family took his turn in the holiday entertaining of the rest, and it had become a tradition despite the fact that it had never yet occurred that every member was on speaking terms with all the other members, at the same time. This lady and that had been avoiding each other for several weeks; this gentleman and that hated each other malignantly, and had not met since last Thanksgiving Day. Enmity, intrigue and plotting might be going on among factions and sub-factions. Yet, on Thanksgiving Day, or Christmas, they met with open geniality, shook hands, drank together, joked, gossiped, and laughed heartily.

  Peter and Armand were dead. They would be more present, in their absence, than they had actually been in life. Peter had almost always sat beside Annette. Jean (‘deadly little Jean’) would be there now. Armand, gormandizing next to his sister-in-law, Agnes, would have his place taken by Henri. In a way, thought Agnes, laying the place-cards, there was a great deal of irony in this situation.

  Agnes, who was a subtle woman, felt a kind of vast fatality in the air at this Thanksgiving. She, like almost everyone, believed that America would soon be involved in the roaring conflagration that sent its long flames across the Atlantic. How long would it be before laden Thanksgiving tables would be lighter, and certain chairs would be empty? As she filled flower-vases all over the rich and profuse mansion which she and Emile had built together (robbing Europe of many of its treasures) she felt a deep and spiritual malaise. She felt also that she was not alone in this. Millions of American women were looking at their tables, and wondering, with sadness, as she was wondering. The fruit or flower centre-pieces were trembling continually in the cold gales that swept across the oceans, and no tight walls, no locked doors, could keep out their deadly breath. The windows, so heavily covered with rich draperies, shivered with the unheard reverberations that reached America from the great vomiting guns in Russia.