Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Taylor Caldwell

  The elevator had risen to respond to a bell on an upper floor, and now it was descending with muffled creakings and groanings. Allan saw the ladies and gentlemen emerging, greeting those already in the lobby with measured smiles and little bows. He touched Michael’s arm and advanced to the elevator, murmuring “pardon me” as he was forced to find his way through the thickening groups. The ladies and gentlemen divided to let the two young men through, and they stared in affront at Michael’s plebeian appearance, his rough brown greatcoat and mud-stained boots. A workingman, a rough laborer, a coachman! And with that young Mr. Marshall who had been on the point of being accepted One old gentleman murmured to another: “I don’t know what the world’s coming to. I never thought, in the Philadelphia House—we must really speak to the manager—insulting to all that the House represents—incredible. …”

  Serenely unaware of the general disapproval, Michael, who had a slight waddle when he walked, trundled at his brother’s side. Allan was frowning again. He marched into the elevator with Michael, and in silence, the two were slowly wafted to the third floor. Allan fumbled for his keys as they emerged into a dimly lighted and carpeted corridor. The floor silenced their footsteps and the gaslights flared in a draft. Allan opened a dark mahogany door, and the young men entered a firelit sitting room, small but warm and intimate, all crimson and dark blue velvet, monolithic furniture, and heavy draperies. The fire chuckled under a mantelpiece of black marble. On the walls hung some very fine but dreary engravings, and everywhere, on the furniture and the curtains, fringe dripped and rippled. An opened door revealed a bedroom as sober as the sitting room, with a walnut headboard which touched the high yellow ceiling and with a dresser and commode weighted with brown marble.

  Allan turned up the globed lights on the walls. “Sit down, Mike,” he said. Michael obediently sat down in a red velvet chair which folded itself about his rounded contours. Allan threw off his fine coat, tossed it onto a huge blue sofa, hurled the cane and his hat after them, and removed his gloves. As always, he glanced at his mutilated middle finger. Then he put his hands in his pockets and stood before his brother. “Good to see you,” he said ungraciously. “After all, it’s been two weeks, hasn’t it? How are Dad and Ma?”

  Michael smiled, and his plump and ordinary face lighted up affectionately. He replied, “They’re in good health. They miss you, of course. You look quite the gentleman.” He smiled directly into Allan’s eyes, and added, “Aloysius.”

  Allan grunted. “Why ‘Aloysius’? Or are you being nasty? It took me five years of steady punching and kicking to make our playmates call me Allan. Even Dad and Ma haven’t called me by that damned name since I was twelve years old.”

  Michael was suddenly sober, and he sat in his chair and stared at the fire abstractedly. “Never mind,” he said. “I wasn’t being nasty, so forgive me. I was just trying. … Never mind. It’s very nice here, Allan: Very genteel, and everything else you always wanted.”

  “Is there any reason why a man shouldn’t want things?”

  Michael’s face showed a very real distress. “Did I say he should not?”

  He laced his short fat fingers together, leaned forward, and studied them. Allan fished in his pocket for his new and expensive cigarette case, which was all silver curlicues and glitter. He opened it. “Have a cigarette? Or are you too holy, or old-fashioned? Tailor-mades,” he added. The cigarettes had his name engraved on them in discreet gilt. Michael regarded both case and cigarettes with unfeigned admiration, and gingerly lifted a small white cylinder. Allan thrust a taper into the fire, and lit the cigarette for his brother, and another for himself. Michael puffed distrustfully and carefully for a few moments, while Allan, leaning against the mantelpiece, the cigarette held with the proper elegance in his left hand, watched him.

  “They’re very good,” said Michael.

  ‘Turkish,” said Allan. His face was half-turned away and so he did not see Michael’s glance of compassion and pain. He continued: “I suppose you had some reason for coming, not connected with mere brotherly solicitude.”

  “Yes,” admitted Michael hesitatingly. “I did. I came on my own, too. I wanted to know if we could expect you at home on Christmas Eve, for dinner, and if we’ll all go, as usual, to Midnight Mass. Together.”

  Allan threw his cigarette into the fire. “I can’t,” he said flatly. “I have been invited to a very grand ball at the home of Mr. Rufus deWitt.” He turned to Michael in order to catch his brother’s expression of incredulity and awed amazement. But Michael’s eyes had become dark and sorrowful; he was again studying his clasped hands. “That will hurt our parents terribly. We’ve never missed a Midnight Mass—the whole family together. You always extended them that consideration before.”

  Allan’s voice rose angrily: “What nonsense! Yes, I humored them, because it was Christmas. But you know damned well I’ve never believed—anything—for years. Did you hear what I said? I’ve been invited to—”

  “I heard you.” Michael spoke very softly. “And you have my congratulations. I’m not surprised; I’ve always known you would be very successful some day. I just wanted to be able to tell Dad that you would be with us, as usual. After all, I soon leave them, forever, and you and I probably won’t meet again. It will be a lonely life for them, after this last Christmas; I’d like to know that you and they had become reconciled and that they had one son left to console them.” He added: “It will be a comfort to them, if you are with them.”

  “Sentimentality,” said Allan. “Black Irish sentimentality. Have you forgotten Dad’s thundering when I told him I was moving here, and when I offered to buy him a decent house out of the city, away from that stinking neighborhood?”

  “He has his standards,” said Michael mildly.

  Allan’s eyes were glittering irately. “What did he expect me to do? Bank my money, and continue to live in that rat hole with what he calls his ‘people’?”

  “He believed what you have always led him to believe—that you were exclusively concerned with labor, and that you were its spokesman. I think it was not just your leaving which broke his heart. It was something else.” Michael lifted his eyes, and they were very bright and steadfast. “Dad, you see, is a very simple man, with very old and simple standards.”

  Allan’s mouth became furious. “And what are his standards? He innocently believes that all wealthy men are malefactors, and all poverty-stricken wretches, by very virtue of their poverty, are saints. If a man, by effort and imagination and work and intelligence manages to lift himself from the gutter, he becomes, per se, in Dad’s eyes, a kind of traitor and rascal. But you think that, too, don’t you?”

  “Did I say so?” asked Michael.

  Allan stared at him. The fire flickered in silence. “But you believe it,” said Allan at last.

  Michael shook his head slowly. “You are wrong. Men are the same, whether rich or poor. They differ only in degree. I agree with you that few understand this, and that is why the world wallows in envy and hatred and malice. Our neighbors are no different from Mr. deWitt, for instance, except for money. And those who tell them lies to the contrary are trouble-makers, and dangerous. Such men are the real ‘enemies of the people.’”

  Allan’s eyes narrowed vindictively. “You are speaking of me, of course.”

  Michael nodded. “Yes, of course.” Michael regarded Allan straightly. “You see, you never deceived me at all.”

  “You are a fool, as you always were,” said Allan. “A man employs the material at his hand to get what he wants.”

  Michael said thoughtfully, as though Allan had not spoken, “In some way you exploited those poor wretches. You won’t tell me, I suppose. Dad understands you employed them, but he is as ignorant of the method as I am. You wouldn’t care to enlighten me?”

  Allan walked rapidly into the bedroom and returned with a bottle of whisky and two small glasses. He put them on the table near his brother. He smiled darkly. “Will you have a drink, Mike?”


  “I like beer,” said Michael. His plump face was full of sorrow. “But I’ll have a drink with you.” He noticed that the bottle was half empty, and a little knot of flesh thickened between his eyes. “You like whisky now?” he asked, as Allan filled the glasses.

  “Yes. It’s not a ‘gentleman’s’ drink. Sherry is.” He lifted his glass in a brief toast, and the whisky, at one gulp, disappeared down his throat. Michael watched him, slowly sipping, the pain deepening on his face. “Whisky,” he said, “is an Irishman’s drink. At least, so I’ve heard. And it isn’t the best thing in the world for him, above all other races.”

  Allan grinned. The whisky had loosened the tight lines of his face. “I’m an American,” he said.

  “It was the great German poet Goethe who said that a man cannot escape the mold in which he was cast,” said Michael.

  Allan laughed shortly. “And it’s the poet we are,” he said. “And it’s proud of my brother, I am. I never knew he was so educated.”

  “You never knew very much, and probably never will,” replied Michael almost inaudibly. “That is your greatest misfortune. The ignorant man despises his fellows; the comprehending man pities them. How is it possible to live in the world,” he continued, with a kind of tragic Wonder, “and not see what there is to be seen?”

  Allan filled his glass again, threw back his head, and swallowed the whisky. He set the glass down with a thump, leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece, and stared somberly into the fire.

  Michael said musingly, “It is when we are children that the world is a magic place, where anything can happen, when there is a marvel over the hill and an enchantment in the morning and the end of the world at sunset. It is when we are children that we glimpse the blinding core of life and guess all the other mysteries. We lose that when we leave our childhood behind us. But there are a few of us who were never children, and so, not even in our young years did we have any understanding.”

  “Meaning,” said Allan, “men like me.”

  “Yes,” said Michael.

  Allan was silent. He glanced at the bottle of whisky again, then glanced away. Finally he said, “You speak with authority, Mike, but what do you know about me? I think you’re arrogant and presumptuous, and what Father Tobin calls ‘vainglorious.’ Isn’t that a sin, eh? Remember to include that in your next confession.” For an instant his jeering eye glinted on his brother.

  Then he thought suddenly, and without warning, of an incident which he had not consciously recalled for many years. Now it was illumined, not only in the fresh and vivid colors of that long-ago warm and early summer day, but with the apocalyptic and sinister lightning of later adult comprehension.

  He had always been a fiercely proud and lonely little boy, the son of immigrants tormented by the sons of equally bewildered and hungry immigrants. He had learned to fight for himself, and even when very young he had been fearless, ever ready with his fists, fighting fairly but without mercy. His brother, more placid and complaisant, or, perhaps, more gentle and tolerant, had escaped much of the childhood persecutions inflicted upon Allan.

  Truculent, imaginative, and contemptuous of weakness and ignorance, Allan had been feared, finally, by his schoolmates, and left alone, never invited, for dread of his eloquent scorn and his fists, to engage in any play or adventures. Though so young, his solitude had forced his thoughts to grow into larger dimensions; he borrowed or stole books which gave him insight into the lives and drives and purposes of men. By the time he was ready for his First Communion, it was a man, rather than a child, who approached the altar, in a mood of resistant cynicism, indifference, and disdain.

  “I was never religious; I never believed in anything,” he said morosely to Michael, and this time he did not glance at the whisky bottle. He lifted it and poured another drink for himself and drank it down. Then he stood by the fire and stared emptily at his glass.

  “No?” said Michael gently, leaning forward with his hands on his round brown-clothed knees.

  But Allan did not hear him. He was still in his memory of that day. The present was dissolving in a blur of alcohol.

  He had impatiently learned the catechism, and had absorbed the pre-Communion teachings of old Father Gallagher, not because of interest but for fear of the strap. And then that Sunday had arrived, all golden warmth, sweet young trees, gleaming sky, and quiet. Portersville was not as yet overhung with the clods of industry, cinders were not so numerous underfoot, noise had not yet invaded every crowded street. It was still a rather provincial city, lying below its amethystine and blue-green mountains. In spite of himself, Allan had been stirred by the peace and tenderness of the day, which had further been enhanced by a new pair of knee britches, black cotton stockings, and cheap shining boots.

  He knelt with his young enemies and acquaintances. He listened idly to the priest. The hot sunlight fell in a colored cataract through the few cherished stained-glass windows of the shabby little church, and each small face became a moving prism. Father Gallagher, a thin and wizened man with fiery and earnest eyes, spoke gently to those children at whom it was his custom to roar in discipline. They knelt before him, and his sentimental heart was touched and saddened. He said, “Dear children, you wish today, for the first time, to partake of the Table of the Lord. Before you are admitted, I demand your profession of Faith. …”

  Allan was bored. He moved his lips silently as the children recited the Creed and the Our Father. The warmth and slumbrous peace in the church, the flickering of the candles, the shadowy corners, the chorus of mechanical young voices, induced a sleepiness in him and a yawning ennui. “Do you renounce Satan, and all his works, and all his pomps?”

  “His pomps”—what were they? The great houses along the river, the carriages that glittered as they rolled through the streets, the pretty faces under umbrellas, the genial complacency of the gentlemen, the fine boats and the sailboats, in summer, on the water? Allan became interested, and began to listen. “Do you believe in Jesus Christ His only Son Our Lord, Who was born in this world and Who suffered for us?” Did the Lord “suffer” for the fabulous ladies and gentlemen in those houses, the people who strolled on rolling green lawns and laughed under dark trees that sparkled in the sunlight? The young Allan began to sneer inwardly, and then all at once he said to himself: Yes. This new and intriguing thought sobered him, and Father Gallagher saw the hard eyes of that “black Irish rascal” fix themselves on him with passionate intensity. The old priest was namelessly stirred, and he spoke even more earnestly. “Will you always live according to the Faith you so solemnly profess today?”

  “We will,” said the children, and the loudest, the most emphatic of all, was the voice of Aloysius Marshall.

  Father Gallagher prayed: “O God, Heavenly Father, mercifully look down upon Thy little ones here prostrate before Thee. … We commend them to Thy Paternal care and love. … Divine Redeemer! through Thy love these children are children of God—Thou art the truest Friend of children, and on earth didst love to be with them. …”

  Allan, enormously uplifted and excited, glanced sideways at the faces of his youthful enemies and all the hatred left him. In its place there was exaltation and something strangely close to love. He would not challenge them any longer; he would not strike or despise them. He would extend friendship to them, convince them that he could become their friend. He would forgive them their persecutions of him; like a vague cloud it came to him that only the unhappy persecute others, and he was filled with pity. They, too, were aliens in an alien land, children of immigrants, derided by those who could boast of a longer ancestry in this country.

  “It was stupid,” said Allan to Michael, who was watching him piercingly. His eyes were ablaze with mingled alcohol and rage and gloom.

  Michael could not know his brother’s thoughts, but he said in that same gentle voice, “How could you judge?” Something was happening to this brother in his sleek broadcloth, with the gold chain across his brocaded waistcoat, this elegantly barbered
brother who leaned against the mantelpiece.

  The taste of the bread and wine was still on his tongue as Allan emerged from the church into the light of the street. He began to run as if his thoughts drove him. He must tell Michael, the despised little brother, what had happened to him today. He must then find a quiet place in which to examine what he had experienced.

  “But I really experienced nothing,” said Allan. He looked for the whisky bottle with glazed eyes. It had disappeared. In a fog, he automatically began to look for it, while Michael watched him with profound compassion. In the midst of his fumbling search he forgot the whisky. He forgot that Michael was there. He stood on the hearth before the fire, his back to his brother, his hands thrust into his pockets, and the fire lighted up his tense dark features and his bitter mouth.

  He was running through the hot streets again. He would be a priest! That would make his parents happy. Dad would rejoice as he cut up the tough Sunday chicken. They would go together to Father Gallagher. …

  Allan had raced down Potter’s Road, dusty, sun-swept in the Sunday quiet. He heard a sound of crying, and stopped. Little Michael, even then brown and plump and gentle, was sitting on the curb, surrounded by four hulking boys slightly older than Allan. They were laughing at him, threatening him, thrusting dirty fists under his fat little chin.

  “In a way, it is all because of you, Mike,” said Allan in a thickened voice.

  “Tell me,” said Michael with pity.

  But Allan was approaching the group at the gritty curb, and now his hands were tightening into fists and the glory was receding, and all the understanding and joy. There was a black seeping into his heart, and his scalp prickled. No one saw him as yet. He listened to the voices: “You dirty Irisher! What you doin’ in our country? Where’s your brudder? Thinks he’s so smart! Well, he ain’t here now, and when we get through with you. …”