Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Worship idols, don’t you?” jeered another boy, rubbing his knuckles hard against Michael’s wet cheek. “Think you can take over our country, don’t you? Well, we’ll fix that, and right here and now.”

  Children of God! These grimy and dirty wretches who were frightening a very little boy! Unhappy, were they? Their faces were alight with evil laughter and gloating.

  “And it’s still there, all of it,” he muttered. His hands clenched in his pockets.

  Allan had been outnumbered, and he was not a boy who fought with all the odds against him. He had learned guile in the barren streets of the slums. As he came closer to the group he began to whistle, that peculiar sweet and tuneful whistle of his, so familiar to hostile ears. The boys started, drew away from Michael, regarded Allan, in his new clothes, with fear and hate. He had smiled at them broadly. “Looking for a fight?” he had asked in a soft voice. “Well, I like fights, too.” He had smiled at them with open friendliness as they stared at him with glowering caution.

  ‘Tell you what,” said Allan. “I’ve got a new big red ball. For my birthday. There’s four of you fellows here. Just suppose you divide up, picking your friends. Then two of you fight the other two. And then the winning two fight, and who wins gets the ball.”

  Four pairs of eyes began to gleam suspiciously and with avarice.

  “And I’ll referee,” offered Allan grandly. “You know I’m a fair fighter, and I got all the rules.”

  The big boys would have preferred to attack Allan in a body. But there was that red ball. The avarice brightened in their eyes and they wet their lips. Their hatred was less than their greed.

  “It always is,” commented Allan dully, thrusting at a burning coal with the toe of his boot “It is always greater than anything else—greed.”

  But in some deep and intuitive way Michael understood that his brother was not thinking of himself, and he sighed.

  The boys, shouting eagerly and excitedly now, had picked their partners. In a moment the street was abrawl, the Sunday peace gone. Allan had dodged about the fighters, admonishing, threatening at an unfair blow, laughing aloud at the sight of blood. Michael crouched on the curb, still whimpering softly, the tears still on his cheeks, his eyes, preternaturally horrified and aware, fixed on the combatants. But he looked at Allan more than at anyone else, Allan dancing lightly on the balls of his feet, Allan with his young face gleeful and alert, his black curls tumbling on his wet forehead. There was a gleaming look about him, a sort of brilliant vengefulness.

  The fight was soon over, the bloody victor stretching out his hand demanding the ball. Allan nodded, raced into the little house of his parents. His father and mother had not as yet returned; every small room echoed to his pounding footsteps. He found his ball, ran out again into the street where four boys were wiping away at their gory noses and scowling at each other. Allan looked at them, grinning, for a long moment, then tossed the ball to the winner. It flew through the air like a great clot of blood, catching the sunlight. The winner caught it, grunting with satisfaction, and the others crowded about him, pleading for a chance to throw it, forgetting their fighting rage in mere slavering desire to touch the fruit of battle. He was no longer an enemy. He was one to beseech, for he was rich.

  “Damn their souls,” said Allan. “They’re always like that.” He turned from the fire and his eyes focused on his brother. “I learned my lesson that day. And I’ve put it to good use. You wanted to know my ‘method.’ That was it. Divide and rule.”

  Michael watched the tormented face of his brother, and he thought: He has gone a long way back, into hell, into disillusion, into hatred. And he has returned with it, and perhaps he’ll never forget. “Where’s that damned whisky?” asked Allan, but he did move from the fireplace.

  “Perhaps I will remember to include my ‘vaingloriousness’ in my next confession,” said Michael almost humbly. “There is so very little I understand.”

  Allan smiled gloomily. “Especially about those you and Dad always call the ‘robber barons.’”

  Michael laughed a little, lifted his hands in a surrendering gesture of resignation. “Well. They steal prodigiously, on a grand scale. But nearly everyone is a thief, one way or another. The small thief envies the big thief secretly, and so he berates him righteously.”

  “What talk for a coming monk!” said Allan.

  Michael became serious. “The Church does not deplore personal wealth, if gotten by honesty and hard work and intelligence. She is just alarmed when that wealth becomes more important to a man than his immortal soul.”

  Allan uttered a contemptuous sound. His eyes were not so dulled now, and Michael was emerging from a blur. “Do you remember Dad telling us how he and Ma, and hundreds of other Irish people, were not permitted to land in this country for a long time, but were shifted about from port to port, starving, sick, and cold, until the gracious authorities finally allowed them to come ashore into a grudging land? Like cattle they were, the immigrants. Ma lost her first child, then, on shipboard, in the stinking underdecks. On a dirty bunk. She almost died. But who cared?”

  Michael thought with vivid understanding: I wonder how often a man’s success is revenge?

  Allan’s thoughts, though intense, wandered still in the cloudy haze of whisky. “I want you to listen, Mike. I’m just on my way. And do you know? I am going to marry Cornelia deWitt.”

  He waited for Michael to exclaim, to laugh at him incredulously. But Michael was silent. He was torn by his compassion, and there was the weight of tears behind his eyes. A sharp and bitter sword it is, my brother.

  Michael’s hand furtively touched the top of the whisky bottle that he had hidden in the depths of the velvet chair near his thigh. He sighed. It was folly to say to a man: Don’t you care what happens to you, in the drink? Michael understood that a man drank to excess for the precise reason that he did not care what happened to him. A man who hated living used any method to destroy his thinking mind, and his body.

  He answered Allan at last: “Yes, you will probably marry Miss deWitt, if that is what you want. You always will get what you think you want.”

  Allan’s thoughts veered. “And the house for Dad and Ma. They must have a decent place to live. …”

  “Tell them about it,” said Michael quickly and eagerly. “Come to dinner Christmas day. A fine dinner it will be, with a goose.”

  Allan frowned. Then he threw out his hands. “Yes. I’ll go. If Dad”—and he smiled—“doesn’t kick me out when he sees me.”

  He added abruptly: “Where is that damned whisky,” and he stared about him with bleared eyes. Michael stood up. “It’s food you’ll be needing, and wasn’t that the bell I heard?”

  Allan was bemused with the whisky and the emotional storm through which he had battered his way. So he offered no resistance when Michael took his arm affectionately and led him to the door, and then out in the corridor. Some last few groups were gathering for the entrance into the lofty dining room, with its chill silver, its cold plates, its white walls, white tablecloths, and austerely painted gold and white columns. Allan said, “You must dine with me, of course.”

  Michael smiled obsequiously, and said very loudly, “Thank you for the offer of the job, Mr. Marshall. I’ll think it over, but I don’t believe I’ll suit.”

  Allan started at him blankly. Michael, in the approved fashion, pulled his brown forelock, bowed, and holding his hat meekly in both hands, and keeping his head bent, sidled away. Allan’s mouth dropped open. He watched his brother creeping across the lobby, and he was dumfounded. But when Michael reached the door and glanced back, Allan had begun to smile, a dark but understanding smile.

  The little group of ladies and gentlemen had paused at the doors leading into the dining room. They were exchanging glances, and then they looked at Allan and smiled faintly. A very old and venerable man with a white beard said with gracious reserve, “A bad storm, isn’t it, Mr. Marshall? I am Mr. Blakely, and these. …”

 
; Yes, thought Allan, a bad storm. He was bowing and acknowledging introductions in the best manner, and murmuring.

  30

  One blizzard after another had assaulted Portersville during the last few days, until the city’s houses and buildings resembled monstrous heaps of snow pierced by jagged patches of windows and narrow tunnels. The railroad yards steamed with idling locomotives, and the men smoked in the roundhouses restlessly, and other men, with fires, tried to thaw out frozen switches. The mountains rose above each other in chains of immutable whiteness. Only the river, sheathed here and there with ice, moved in sullen blackness through the valley.

  But on the day before Christmas the blizzards stopped. The mountains flamed in alabaster incandescence under a cold and blazing sun set in a pale blue sky. The river ran, a bright cerulean passage, through the white land. The air became crystal, and shining with light.

  On Christmas Eve the stars crackled and pulsated in a dark purple sky. Every great house along the river, and on the mountains, throbbed with yellow light. Roads had been cleared, and Cornelia deWitt, who had been afraid for her party—which had no particular purpose now except festivity ―rejoiced. The guests would not be prevented from coming.

  Singing loudly and hoarsely, she allowed her maid to add the last touches to her toilette, and then she stood and surveyed herself in her long pier glass. She smiled with satisfaction, then hummed as she pirouetted and bowed and gestured in utter unself-consciousness. Her Worth gown, bought in Paris last spring, a triumph of silvery gray velvet, was draped lovingly across the front and looped richly at the back, caught here and there with clusters of velvet violets. It fitted her superb figure tightly, half-revealing her full white breasts, and completely revealing her strong white arms, shoulders, and throat. She wore her father’s gift, a heavy collar of yellow gold twined with pearls, diamonds, and aquamarines, with huge earrings to match. Golden slippers, glittering at the tips with diamonds, peeped from the gown as she walked. Her red hair had been elaborately dressed in a new Parisian style, all bouffant curls and fringes at the top, with one long roll over her right shoulder, and it, too, glittered with pins set with brilliants. She was quite aware that her delicate stepmother considered her “common.” But that, of course, was sheer envy. Dear Estelle considered color and strength vulgar, especially when displayed by a lady. “I am not,” sang Cornelia, almost in a shout, “a lady, a lady, a lady! Thank God! I am a woman, a woman, a woman!” As the words were sung to the tune of a sacred hymn, the elderly maid was shocked.

  Cornelia gaily patted the thin shoulder, bent and kissed the wrinkled cheek. “Sally, it’s Christmas Eve,” she said. “Don’t wait up for me. Go upstairs and say your prayers, and don’t forget me in them.” Cornelia sailed out of her room, which was all lamplight and firelight and warmth, shouting another song: “Damn you, Merry Gentlemen!” She tramped down the quiet hall to her father’s apartment, waving her jeweled arms in time with her singing. She banged on the door of Rufus’s bedroom, singing still other, and blasphemous, words to the tune of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing!”

  “Come in,” called Rufus irritably. He was standing before his marble dresser, and his man, sweating, was trying to tie Rufus’s evening cravat and not succeeding to his master’s satisfaction. “I wish,” said Rufus, “that if you have to sing so damned loud and raucously, Cornelia, that you wouldn’t offend others with loose and inappropriate words—You aren’t doing that right, John, for God’s sake!” He tried to glare at his daughter in the mirror.

  Cornelia waved aside the valet. “Run along, John. I’ll tie Mr. Rufus up. I’m clever at it.”

  The valet scuttled from the bedroom, while Rufus stood irately with the cravat dangling around his thick neck. Humming, and peeping at her father coquettishly and with obvious teasing love, Cornelia expertly caught up the end of the cravat and deftly tied it. “There, my pet,” she said, standing off with her hands planted on her hips, and critically studying Rufus. “You look grand. Really grand. Handsome as all hell.”

  Rufus turned and peered at his mirror exactly as his daughter had done in her own room, while she watched him fondly. “You do well at the cravat business,” he admitted grudgingly. He patted the satin lapels of his evening coat, and scrutinized Cornelia. “Isn’t that the gown Estelle says is entirely too sophisticated for a young, unmarried girl?”

  “And isn’t it the gown you helped choose for me?” asked Cornelia, kissing her father’s ruddy cheek.

  He scratched one eyebrow. “I paid for it, anyway. It’s Christmas Eve. Perhaps something in white—simple, girlish.” His eyes began to beam with pride and adoration. When Cornelia laughed boisterously he laughed also. “Still,” he said, “as this is also Estelle’s birthday you might have tried to please her, instead of annoying her.”

  “She’s always afraid I’ll outshine her, Papa.” Cornelia lifted the back of her gown candidly, showing her legs, and threw herself into a chair. “The devil with Estelle. Let’s sit down together, and you may tell me what is going on. And you may give me one of my cigarettes, which you are always trying to hide from me.”

  “You know very well that it’s abominable—it’s risqué—for a lady to smoke,” protested Rufus abstractedly, while he opened a drawer in a gold and mahogany chest and brought out a small box of cigarettes. “You’re a scandal, Cornelia.”

  She nodded Iightheartedly. “Of course. We both are. And now, tell me all about it. I thought it was all settled, but you are worried.”

  “What makes you think I’m worried?” Rufus, lifting the tail of his coat, sat down with his daughter before the fire and lit a cigar.

  “I always know. Don’t we always know about each other? Isn’t it always just you and me?” In her tone was a dismissing contempt for her stepmother and her two little brothers. Rufus did not protest. He had some affection for his wife, Whom Guy Gunther, the astute, had frankly suggested to him. (“You may be a rich and coming man, Rufus, but you need a certain social éclat. All of us are rolling in money these days. However, many are called but few are chosen. Society can afford to be discriminating in America now. I have just the lady for you, somewhat ripe, about thirty, or even a little more, but impeccable as to family. You can’t do better than pick a Main Line Norwich woman. Best in Philadelphia; good as the Biddles. In fact, they’re related to them. They’ll overlook divorce, in spite of their propriety, when it’s coated with cash. Estelle Norwich.”)

  Cornelia continued: “I haven’t seen you for three days, and there was no time at dinner for talk. So, here we are. Out with it, my boy.”

  Rufus grumbled and glanced at his watch, shifting bulkily to do so. “It’s nearly half-past nine. We have to be downstairs at ten. Half an hour. Well.” His smile was gone, and he was frowning. Cornelia smoked lustily, and with enjoyment, and waited. She crossed her silken knees, and gently swung her glittering foot.

  “It’s still that damned bond issue,” said Rufus, beginning to relax. “We’ve got to have that heavy, latest type of locomotive. New York Central’s buying them hand over fist. They move longer freight and passenger trains, as you know, and they expedite traffic, and so save fuel. But I’m still not sure about the financing. Yes, yes, I know we’ve discussed all that, to your satisfaction, if not mine. But you know that whatever funds there are in the treasury are always being distributed to the stockholders and officers. …”

  “The bonds wouldn’t mature for twenty-five years,” said Cornelia patiently. “And they’d bear a. low interest rate. And our credit has never been better. Don’t be so cautious in your old age, Papa.”

  He smiled at her narrowly. “If we issued common stock, dear little daughter, it would reduce your profits on that block, worth over a million dollars, which I gave you on your eighteenth birthday.”

  “Naturally,” she agreed. “And I wouldn’t like it. And neither would the other stockholders. No, we must float the bond issue. And no more common stock just yet; dividends are dividends.”

  “The
re is always a bad chance—” began Rufus.

  Cornelia waved her hand. “Papa, you didn’t talk that way, at one time. Chances were your glory. Well? Do we issue the bonds, or not?”

  Rufus was piqued. “I’m not senile!” he shouted. “I’ve taken more chances than any other man! What the hell are you talking about?”

  “But you’ve started to eye Mr. Gunther and old Mr. Regan, those darling buzzards, very carefully lately, Papa.”

  Stung at this truth, which he had considered his own secret, Rufus flushed an unhealthy scarlet. “I know them better than you do, you little fool!” he exclaimed. “All right, we float the issue. I hope you won’t be sorry.”

  “I won’t.” Cornelia grinned at him, waved her cigarette with a frolicksome gesture. “What do the directors think? Not that it matters.”

  “It matters a lot, you idiot.” Rufus paused. “They think the bonds are all right. Purcell is all for it.”

  “And he is sweet Laura’s guardian. Papa, I suppose a little brandy—”

  Rufus got to his feet. “None for you,” he said emphatically. “You’re not going downstairs smelling like the gutter.” He opened his closet door, reached in, and brought out a brandy bottle. He glanced at Cornelia over his shoulder. “You’re a scoundrel,” he said. He produced two little silver and crystal glasses. “One of these days your whole dark past will be public property, and who the hell would marry you then?”

  “Anybody,” said Cornelia, taking her glass. She sipped, smacked her lips. “An English duke, if I wanted one, which I don’t. Besides,” she added, “I’m in love. That’s why I kicked out the little marquis.”

  “What?” cried Rufus.

  “You haven’t poured yourself a drink yet, Papa. Here, let me help you.”