Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Taylor Caldwell

  He doubted very much if Cornelia had been greatly “disappointed.” Perhaps her vanity had been mangled a little, but he knew, vividly, that she had too much robustness and humor for real vanity, and too realistic a common sense not to understand, finally, that Patrick Peale was not of her kind, and antipathetic to her.

  As he passed the blank and dripping face of an old warehouse, the wavering light of a street lamp struck on a fluttering fragment of a political poster. It was half torn from its position, wet and wrinkled. Allan stopped and examined it, and he chuckled again. He smoothed out the soaked paper, and it showed the features of a young man in the early thirties, a grave young man with a stern face and quiet, penetrating eyes. “Vote for Patrick Peale!” huge black letters exhorted. “U.S. Senate. Vote for the Man of the People! Justice for all, special privileges for none!” Allan ripped the poster from its last moorings, gave it to the raging wind. Old George Peale had done a great deal for that haughty son of his, with the subdued voice and the restrained manners. Allan had often heard Patrick speak at a political rally on a street corner. He had felt contempt for him. The imbecile actually believed what he had said with such fanaticism. At any rate, Patrick had been elected, though he had been an “unknown” up to five months before the November elections. He had put on an especially eloquent campaign, tireless and sincere. But, of course, his father’s fortune had helped him.

  “Good luck with your old man, Pat,” said Allan, watching the poster fly up against a wall, then settle in the gutter. “Something tells me you two won’t be so happy together from now on.”

  So, Patrick Peale would not be the husband of Cornelia deWitt. He would not be part of the enormously powerful and wealthy Interstate Railroad Company. Allan went on his way, whistling an Irish air again. He said inwardly, and some of the old phrases of his parents returned to him involuntarily: “Mavourneen, it’s not grievin’ you are now, for grief is not for you, I’m thinkin’. Life and joy and food and money, but not sorrow. Wine and dancin’ and shoutin’ and laughin’. Sure, and it’s a fine girl you are, and it’s mine you shall be.”

  He remembered the very few times he had seen Cornelia deWitt since that day on the terrace. He had seen her only at a distance, in her carriage, rolling through Portersville. There was some rumor that she had decided to go to live with her father, and that she had left her mother’s home permanently. It is the house that draws her, thought Allan. He remembered the last time he had seen her, in October, just as she had been about to climb aboard her father’s private car. Her father and her stepmother, a pretty little creature, had been with her, and her brothers; but like a fire, itself, she had been the center of the group, her maid fussing with her furs and her luggage and twittering like a sparrow. Allan had descended from his father’s cab and had leaned negligently against it, smoking a cigarette. He had not approached that group, surrounded as it was by lackeys and brakemen and conductors, all staring and eager to help. He had only stood there, willing her to look in his direction. She had; he would never forget the blaze of her robust smile, the lifting of her gloved hand, the mocking tilt of the head under the blue velvet bonnet. He had felt a proprietor’s pleasure in being part of the engine which was taking her in the direction of New York. His own run, and his father’s, stopped at Philadelphia.

  She had not forgotten him. He had never believed she had. When, one day, a large mysterious parcel had arrived for him at his home, and he had unwrapped a huge set of leatherbound lawbooks, he had only smiled. There was no message, but he knew. His parents had been overawed by the magnificent if nameless gift, and had reverently touched the leather. It was Tim’s conviction that the noble Mr. Peale had bestowed this expensive largesse on his son, and Allan did not undeceive him. It had shaken, for a time, Tim’s conviction that the “big interests” (a phrase he used vaguely to define anyone who did not employ his hands to make a living) were uniformly malignant.

  Cornelia would return home a few days before Christmas. Her family would join her a day or two afterward, before returning to New York for the New Year and then the annual pilgrimage to the Riviera. Allan was not too gloomy about this brief visit. If he did not see Cornelia during it, she would remember him.

  His invention was coming along very well. “Patent pending.” His strength was without limit; he could work twelve hours a day and study law six hours a night, and feel very little fatigue. All in all things were going splendidly. But he must move fast now. There had been a silly and deliriously proud item in the local papers that Miss Cornelia deWitt was seeing a great deal of a certain middle-aged marquis in France, and that the patrician gentleman intended to visit America next summer for the purpose of continuing suit for the hand of the heiress. The marquis was described as a nobleman of immense wealth, which Allan doubted. Too many of the exquisite but impoverished noblemen were pursuing American young ladies of fortune these days, and marrying them. Cornelia was not the type for elegant Continental living, with its formality and restricted mode of existence, and Allan was convinced that Cornelia had the wit to see it. Still, Allan did not believe that any divinity looked on him with too much favor, and he knew that Cornelia was ambitious.

  Snow began mingling with the rain, rapidly and thickly. The cobblestones were becoming slippery. He moved faster over them, whistling louder than ever. He turned down a wretched and narrow street which smelled of refuse and boiled cabbage. Once there had been no slums in Portersville. But now the slums were spreading like some evil fungus disease over small streets once respectably clean and neat. Allan knew that the “foreigners,” which included his family, were being blamed for this deplorable development. The fact that the “foreigners” were paid much less than native labor did not occur to the hating inhabitants of East Town. Most of the area was owned by businessmen who had invested money in it, and the meager rents were collected by agents who refrained from reporting on falling plaster, leaking roofs, broken steps, cracked windows, and leaning walls.

  Potter’s Road was no less wretched than the neighboring streets. The small houses, mostly of clapboard, had not been painted for many years. What trees had once been planted had died. The yards were full of household refuse and garbage. As the area was subjected to the soot of railroads and factories, the cottages were uniformly caked with soot, so that they were of one blackish-gray color. The stench of decaying vegetation and acrid smoke hung in the cold wet air. Feeble kerosene lamps, glimmering dimly behind torn and ragged curtains, threw yellow blotches out onto the night. The Marshall house was distinctive: though Mrs. Marshall had to wash her curtains at least once a week, she kept them white and stiff with starch, carefully mended and patched. Tim had even planted a small elm tree on the tiny lawn, a thriving little thing, for Tim, at night, would take a basket and a shovel out onto the streets and gather horse manure for fertilizer, which he applied diligently. He had been able, in spite of the soot, to grow a small garden. All this was regarded with derision by his neighbors, much to Tim’s bewilderment. He firmly believed, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the poor are noble, superior to those who possessed money, and of another species, entirely distinct from “the scalpeens who live in them houses by the river.”

  Tim had brought some red paint from the railroad shops and had painted the door and the window-trimming last summer. This had provoked much hilarity among his neighbors. A man skilled with his hands, he had repaired his roof himself, had plastered cracked walls, had covered them with cheap wallpaper. As a result, the little cottage was neat and trim, a great contrast to the others. The neighbors, resenting all this prideful work, resenting the Marshalls for their selfrespect, called them “those dirty black Irishers.” When his “friends” were surly with him, Tim excused them on the grounds that they were tired and discouraged and “meant no harm, bless their poor souls.”

  Allan opened the red door and he could smell the wax his mother unremittingly used, and the soap she never spared, and the good scent of an excellent stew. The living room
and dining room and kitchen were one, warm and humid this cold night from the heat of a great black range along the farther wall. There was no money for floor covering, but Mrs. Marshall kept the floor scrubbed white. An old brown sofa stood against another wall; a table, covered with a white cloth, was set for Allan. There were two ancient rocking chairs and two straight chairs scattered about near the stove. On one flowered wall had been hung a cheap and gaudy lithograph of the Sacred Heart, very violent and gory, which made Allan wince each time his reluctant eye touched it. The family—Tim, his wife, and his son Michael—were sitting around the stove, Tim’s shoeless feet on the opened oven door, Mrs. Marshall knitting the family socks, and Michael poring, as usual, over some religious book.

  Tim threw down his newspaper as Allan entered. “It’s the boy!” he exclaimed with gruff affection. “It’s the fine lawyer we have! And how are the lawbooks, ye rascal?”

  Mrs. Marshall lifted her lined cheek for Allan’s damp kiss, and smiled at him proudly. Michael, twenty-three, looked in unsmiling silence at his brother. “The stew is hot,” said Mrs. Marshall, getting stiffly and wearily to her feet, and limping toward the stove. “And the coffee is boilin’. Ye’re late tonight, Allan.” Her thin body, clad in pallid gingham, was as curveless and worn as an old stick, and her masses of curling gray hair made the tired face below them almost corpselike. She was hardly fifty; years of endless deprivation, suffering, and grinding work, had aged her beyond her time.

  “And how is that fine gentleman, Mr. Drummond?” asked Tim.

  “The fine gentleman is—fine,” replied Allan, looking at his stew-filled plate with pleasure. He moved aside the lamp to make room for the plate of bread his mother put near him. The coffee was poured into a cracked mug; Allan added bluish milk to it and one lump of cherished sugar. As food was considered too important to be spoiled by conversation, the family did not speak to Allan until he had finished the meal. Michael had returned to his pious reading, but Tim and Mrs. Marshall sat in docile silence, watching their older son with expectant love and complacency. He was their hero, their crusader, their deliverer; with his “law” he would free “the workers” from their ill-paid slavery. He would be their champion; he would use that deep and powerful voice of his against the mighty who exploited the defenseless. “A Clan-na-Gael it is,” Tim would say with pride. There was nothing this lad of his could not do, eventually. Perhaps even the Senate, where he would fight for the rights of man. Tim beamed at his son, and then, as if ashamed of his pride, scratched his thick thatch of white and waving hair. For good measure, he rubbed his round and bristling chin, then tugged at his big nose. His striped engineer’s shirt, always clean, crackled with the stiff starch his wife used. He stared at the stove, and his strenuous blue eyes brightened with eager thoughts. He was a small man, but he carried himself with dignity, and with high-footed determination. Not for him the dispirited slouch of his neighbors. He returned his eyes to Allan, and he said to himself: It’s the voice like the harp he has, with many strings; it’s the Irish voice he has. Our Lord made that voice, I’m thinking, for His own good work.

  The possessor of the “voice like the harp” finished the large plate of stew and drank the hot coffee. His lifted eyes did not turn to his parents first; they turned on the “muddy lump” of his brother. Michael, who was as short as his father, gave the impression of complete brownness, from his thin and scanty hair and his large brown eyes to his skin and his hands. But it was a brownness like that of an autumn leaf, a fact which Allan never saw. It was the brownness of the patient and fruitful earth from which all life grew, and in which it flourished. His features inclined to roundness and sobriety and thoughtfulness. His hands were big and square and almost stiff with fire scars. Like his mother, he spoke very little. He had wanted to be a priest, but his mind was slow and too pedestrian and too wanting in force and anger to please those he had consulted.

  Allan had a sort of contemptuous fondness for his parents. For Michael, the inconspicuous, the silent, the obedient, and apparently ambitionless, he had only disgust and, strangely enough, a sometimes violent and nameless hatred. To him, Michael was the voiceless and anonymous prototype of the plodding worker, satisfied with crusts, respectful to employers, willing to live on a pittance as long as it permitted him to read his “infernal” religious books at night and to pray endlessly.

  Now that Allan had completed his meal, his parents looked at him excitedly. “It’s Mike we have to be proud of tonight,” said Tim. “It’s our Mike. The rascal did it behind our backs! He is joining the Franciscan brothers. It’s off to missionary work he is, helpin’ the good fathers in foreign fields.”

  “No!” laughed Allan, leaning back in his chair. Michael did not look at him, but he was blushing. “And what the hell can Mike do in those ‘foreign fields’?”

  Michael did not lift his eyes from his book, but he said quietly, “I can do any kind of handy work. I can cook and mend. I can nurse; I learned that taking care of the injured men, in emergency. I know a little carpentry. I can grow a garden of vegetables. I can do what God calls on me to do.”

  The vision of Michael in a cowl and a robe and with a rope about his round middle made Allan hilarious. Tim and his wife were affronted, but Michael calmly ignored the laughter. “The heathen Chinee!” exclaimed Allan. “Or maybe the lepers, eh? Or watching the blackamoors dancing around their fires in darkest Africa? A wonderful life.”

  “Yes,” said Michael, “a wonderful life.” His voice, low and without sonorousness, aroused his brother’s inexplicable ire. “You haven’t considered that your wages will be missed at home, have you?” asked Allan.

  For the first time Michael turned his head, his brown eyes shining in the lamplight. And, in silence, Allan returned that strange and penetrating regard. Tim said angrily, “The wages! God guards His own. It’s not missin’ the wages, we’ll be. It’s the joy we’ll have in our son.”

  Allan got up and shrugged. “That’s very nice. But we’ll be missing the wages for all that.” He was annoyed that Michael, who lived so obscurely, almost forgotten at times by his parents, should tonight have acquired importance. He yawned, ran his hands through his hair. Tim and his wife watched him, hurt and baffled. They could not understand Allan’s scorn and brutality at this fine news. “I think I’ll go to bed,” said Allan, yawning again. “I’m tired as hell, and I still have some studying to do.”

  Tim made an effort to overcome his anger against his favorite son. He smiled. “And ye’ll be preparin’ that speech at Union Hall, a week from Toosday. Sure, and it’ll be the speech to set off the fireworks!”

  Allan touched his father’s shoulder carelessly, and smiled down at him. “The fireworks,” he promised. He kissed his mother again, and left the room.

  He shared a bare and tiny bedroom with his brother. The room contained only a double iron bed, a table heaped with neat piles of lawbooks and papers, two kitchen chairs, and a single battered chest of drawers. A crude wooden crucifix hung over the bed; a curtain of faded gingham concealed the scanty clothing of the brothers. Allan lit a lamp; the room was deathly cold, though Mrs. Marshall had left the door open from the kitchen. Allan put a woolen garment, which his mother had knitted, over his coat, rubbed his hands, and sat down at the table. He sharpened some pencils, examined his pen and ink. There was no sign of any of Michael’s books in the room; he kept them in a corner near the stove.

  Allan stared at the green and scarlet wallpaper, and thought. Then he drew a sheet of paper toward him, dipped his pen in ink, and started to write. The letter was addressed to Rufus deWitt, at his Portersville offices. It began: “Sir:”—Allan paused; He smiled grimly, and then his pen raced over the paper in his small, compact writing.

  “I feel it my duty to inform you that a certain person with some education—a rabble-rouser—is to address the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers and other workers at Union Hall on December the eighteenth. He is a young man who has been encouraging rebellion among your men f
or some time; they have come to trust him absolutely, and to look upon him as their savior. He is a dangerous character, for he has the gift of persuasion. I understand that his speech on that night will have repercussions, and might lead to another disastrous strike against your company. I suggest that you have some trusted employee, with discerning intelligence, present during the meeting, in order that he may report adequately and fully to you.”

  Allan reread what he had written, then added, “Though the Brotherhood is not of much influence at the present time, as a result of punitive laws against labor in this Commonwealth, this person of whom I write now will urge the men to demand what they call their ‘rights.’ He will also demand that all the men be unionized. Are we to have the Molly Maguires again?”

  He signed the letter, “An Indignant Friend.” He put the letter in an envelope and sealed it. He slipped the letter into a pocket, and smiled again. The first quick step had been taken. He sat and contentedly listened to the wind and the rain, and the sounds of his parents getting ready for bed. The door opened and Michael came in. Allan frowned at him as at an intruder, but Michael sat down on the creaking bed and fixed his eyes on his brother, not with his usual shyness and silence, but as if he knew everything and was sternly, if quietly, prepared to speak. The brownness of his face was somewhat paler than usual; he folded his hands on his knees, and Allan could vividly see him in the cowl and gown. A monk. That was all he was fit for, a drawer of water and a hewer of wood in the midst of some wide and endless desolation. Allan’s upper lip rose. “Well?” he asked irritably. “What is it?”