Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Taylor Caldwell

  He listened with wonder as if to an astounding philosophy which he would never understand, which astonished him. He pondered on what his wife had said, then shook his head in bafflement. “I hear you, but I don’t feel a single response to it, Cornelia. I never enjoyed living, I am afraid. Nothing excites me; nothing is. an adventure.” He did not speak for several long moments, then answered in a low tone, “Life is not enough for me.”

  “I was afraid of that,” she said, and now her voice was full and hard in the room. “I suspected it, these last few years. And so did my father. You see, in a way, we are simple people, not complex, like you.”

  Cornelia was laughing now, and the laughter was not sympathetic. “Damn it, Allan, take off that infernal blazer and dress for dinner. You see, after all, one has to eat.”

  PART THREE

  36

  Cornelia wrote to her son Rufus Anthony in March, 1905: “We are all well, and the Riviera has been unusually warm and pleasant, and has done your grandfather a great deal of good. He has almost entirely recovered from his pneumonia, which he had in Paris. He appreciated your somewhat frantic cables, my dear, but really, they weren’t necessary; he was never in much danger. Of course, he is seventy now, and one has to be careful. He hopes to be with us at Groton, when you are graduated this spring. Incidentally, we hear very seldom from DeWitt, but as he is with you there, I assume he is in good health.

  “Jon and Norman are spending two or three weeks with us at our château here, or, I should say, they are spending them with their mother. She says she is quite exhausted over your grandfather’s recent illness, but we had a very grand soiree last night. Jon invited quite a number of his weird friends from Paris, young American painters all supported by indulgent parents in America, and French painters who are being supported by the young Americans. His friends are ‘avantgarde,’ he says, and I am at a loss to know what he means. If it means daubing, striking poses, letting one’s hair grow long and shaggy, arguing on peculiar political points of view, and hating everybody, especially those with money (including parents who support them), and deriding the great painters of the past, then these young gentlemen are indeed ‘advanced.’ And perhaps it is ‘modern’ of them to dislike girls, and prefer each other’s company. That is a subject, I believe, about which ‘well-bred’ people do not talk, or write; one just ignores it and pretends it does not exist. Well.

  “Norman has not patched up his old quarrel with Jon. He is becoming more and more the lap dog for Grandma Estelle. He seems happier since Jon has gone in for ‘art,’ and spends less time with his mother. Jon is twenty-seven, with an aversion for women, and Norman is twenty-five, and has an aversion for everybody except Grandma Estelle. There is a famous Austrian doctor visiting here, a Dr. Sigmund Freud, who has written several weighty books about strange mentalities, and I precipitated a furious row with Grandma Estelle when I suggested that her sons visit him for treatment. Now she complains to your grandfather that I have spread the scandal that her sons are ‘insane.’ This is quite untrue; my private thoughts are my own. The more one knows of life, the more amusing it becomes; sometimes it is hilarious.

  “I am sorry that you still don’t like Miles, who is in your form. After all, he is your second cousin, and you do like your Aunt Laura. Miles always seemed to me to be an especially intellectual and realistic young fellow, and I had hoped he would have a good influence on you, my dear, for there are times when you go off into dreams that have no substance. You do not mention Fielding, but, of course, you young men despise those in lower forms. You speak of Mary Peale’s affection for you, and you sounded annoyed in your last letter. Well, the child is only fourteen, isn’t she? And very pretty, too. You are both very young, but I am still hoping that you and Mary will come to an ‘understanding,’ as we said in my day. Possibly three or four years from now.

  “I was more than a little surprised to gather from your discreet letter that you are disillusioned with Uncle Pat, of whom you were once so fond. Frankly, I was not censorious about this; I laughed. I know all about Patrick Peale, and he has grown more difficult with the years. But you still love Aunt Laura, and I am glad of that.

  “We are sorry to hear that Grandpa Purcell has shown no improvement since his stroke last Christmas. But, after all, he is in his middle seventies, and one has to expect these things. You are always too hurt about too much.

  “I know you miss Dolores, but she is doing very well in her school in Switzerland. We saw her a month ago, when she ran down on a holiday. She is very anxious about you, naturally. As she is seventeen, I have been seriously looking about for a suitable husband for her, preferably one with a title. I know this will make you angry, but I am more and more convinced that, because of her old-maidish, shy ways, she will cost us a pretty penny to marry off. I agree with you that she has some sort of beauty, but noblemen in Europe want something more than that, preferably American dollars. When she was here we had as a house guest Lord Gibson-Hamilton, who is a distant relation of King Edward’s. A rather birdy young man, with no chin and a big nose and a feminine Oxford accent, but a great catch, with a castle in Scotland, another near Windsor Castle, shooting boxes, a huge crest, distinguished noble and royal ancestors by the gross, and some kind of honorary position at Court. Forebears teeming under the floor of Westminster Abbey, too. He writes poetry, but that can be overlooked. Dolores dislikes him, and your father is quite violently opposed to him. These are small difficulties to overcome, and I never allowed difficulties to get in my way.

  “And that brings me to your father, about whom I am considerably anxious. No, he is not ill, and shows no signs of another breakdown, though he drinks as much, or more, than ever. He was always moody, as you know; he is becoming moodier. He goes off on long walks. When he is not walking, he sits in his rooms overlooking the sea, and reads constantly. I can’t imagine what he finds so absorbing in his books, for they are all about, or by, queer foreigners with such names as Hegel, Kautsky, Marx, and Engels. Jon has a similar library, and that is understandable, he being what he is. But why your father reads about these creatures is beyond me. Dinner sometimes becomes intolerable; he and Jon often engage in the most savage and obscure quarrels, which I confess bore and irritate me. Jon takes the stand that these writers are ‘messiahs,’ and he looks at your father in a very sinister way, as if your father were responsible for something which Hegel and Company appear to denounce endlessly in their books. Once he called your father ‘the prey of superstition, a product, of oppressive centuries.’ Your father threw wine at him, not in the gentlemanly tradition of a mere glass, but a whole bottle! I almost collapsed with laughter; it was really very funny, and I was delighted that Jon suffered an enormous purple lump on his forehead as a result. Grandma Estelle had hysterics.

  “Your father sometimes charges into your grandfather’s rooms, armed with the books, and goes off into harangues in which the word ‘danger’ occurs frequently. Fortunately, Grandpa has a sense of humor.

  “I have written you at great length because I loathe letter-writing, and this makes up for the many weeks you have not heard from me. And it will have to last you until we go home to America in time for your graduation. Now I must really return to the huge stack of business papers which have just arrived.”

  A man adopts a philosophy suited to his own personality and needs, thought Allan Marshall. Now what, in God’s name, has spewed up these philosophies, and these personalities, in the past fifty years or so? The red flags of warning fly from every page of these books, but those who should be terrified smile with wondering smugness at me, and yawn. If and when the bloody dawn stands over their grand houses, it will be too late. I may be dead then. Why should I care? Possibly because I am an Irishman, and above all things I hate slavery and love freedom. Rufus calls them “abstracts,” and when I read to him certain pages in these books, he looks at me as if I were not only amusing, but more than a little insane. He does not seem to understand that a fire lighted somewhere in Eu
rope could devour the whole world. This is no longer an insular planet, and contagion spreads by wire, by the movement of peoples.

  He sat upright in his chair, and suddenly remembered what Rufus deWitt had said only today, and with a comfortable and indulgent smile: “My dear boy—and you still seem only a boy to me—I am sure that if any of these philosophies ever engulfed the world, which you appear to believe, we, as very wealthy and powerful men, could come to terms with the propounders of them. We always do, all through the world’s history. Do you remember what Frederick the Great said? ‘I take what I will. There will always be enough professors to justify me.’ And there will always be enough greedy madmen, in any kind of government, to protect us—if we grease their palms sufficiently.”

  Allan had cried, “But what of those who are not so powerful and so rich? What of the world of men who might be ruled by devils?”

  Rufus had not answered immediately. He had only narrowed the still lively hazel of his eyes on his son-in-law and had contemplated him in a very strange silence. Then he had lifted his afternoon glass of port and had sipped at it reflectively. Finally he had said, “You have changed considerably, Allan, during the last ten years or so. I am not complaining of your work and your magnificent contributions to our company. Recall what you have just said: ‘What of the world of men,’ and so on. At one time you, yourself, would not have cared. Don’t explain; explanations are tedious, and never tell the whole story anyway.” He had sipped again, and again he had given Allan that curious long look. “You never knew my brother, who died when you were still a very young man. But you remind me of him, in some disturbing way. My brother Steve was a very good man.” Rufus had laughed heartily. “I hope you won’t become a ‘good man,’ too. I’m afraid, at my age, that I would find it overwhelming.”

  “We won’t be spared; we won’t ever be able to come to terms with these madmen,” Allan had answered grimly. “For you see, it is a kind of religion to them, and nothing shakes a man in his religion.”

  Rufus had closed his eyes, affecting weariness. “Granting some of your wild premises, what have these foreigners to do with America?”

  Allan had stood up, and had said slowly, “A great deal. Your son is one of their disciples, your son Jon. And there are thousands of young Americans, just like him, absorbing this poison in Europe, taking it home with them.”

  Rufus had opened his eyes, and he had stared at Allan incredulously. “You never gave him any religion,” Allan had gone on bitterly. “You never taught him respect for his country, but only respect for money, which, never needing, he derides. A man has to have some religion. …”

  “And what is yours?” Rufus had asked in the softest of voices.

  But Allan had not replied. He had only left the room. When he had closed the door, he had heard Rufus chuckle.

  The deWitt château, on the vast wide promenade overlooking the ocean at Cannes, was situated between two enormous hotels, surrounded by exotic gardens and palms and bright green grass, the garden walls overflowing with the cool lavender of wisteria. In architecture, it was a felicitous blend of both Spanish and French, jalousies protecting balconies against the sun, the white mansion reflecting back the pure light from the sky; the red-tiled roof brilliant as a rose. All floors were of colored tile: yellow, pale pink, soft blue or green, set in intricate designs and covered, here and there, by small Oriental rugs. A white stone and marble staircase, fully twelve feet wide, curved massively from the circular hall to the three upper floors. The mansion had originally belonged to an Italian prince, and so the furniture, dark and heavy, shimmered with green and old gilt overlays in elaborate design, against brown, gold, or pink marble walls, upon which crests and enameled shields and fine oil paintings and tapestries had been hung.

  The whole effect, to Allan, was singularly oppressive, in spite of the narrow but blazing shafts of sunlight which shot through the pointed windows from noon to sunset. Property no longer impressed him in itself; there were days when the very thought of the hugeness of the deWitt mansions gave him a crushing sensation, with the exception of the house in Portersville. The immensity of the deWitt holdings had the effect of disorienting his mind, so that there were times when his skull felt empty and loneliness invaded the very bones of his body. Sometimes, in a despair which was huge but amorphous, he would say to himself: I have come to my end. He was never quite certain what he meant.

  Though all the family walked every afternoon for hours along the gay promenade before the château, he rarely accompanied any of them. Sometimes he would excuse himself by wryly declaring that he could not endure the sight of the redfaced, sun-starved Englishmen grimly taking their constitutionals with tightly rolled umbrellas held in their hands as if in suspicious defiance of the Mediterranean sun. Cornelia would laughingly accuse him of being a provincial Irishman, and intolerant, and he would permit her to believe it. It was much less wearing than trying to explain to her that something was brewing in the world, something terrible and devastating, which he sensed with his uncanny Celtic intuition. Once, at a dinner in the mansion, he had committed the unpardonable offense of insulting a guest, a ponderous English nobleman, who, while smacking his lips over the after-dinner port, had elaborated on the growing industrial might of “The Empire,” and had paused, graciously, to give a condescending bow in the direction of America. Allan, drunk as usual, had struck the table with his fist and had shouted, “Wake up, you fool! Why don’t you read, instead of talking? Don’t you know we are all on the verge of wars that will destroy all of us, if we don’t begin to work at once?” Without waiting for reply, he had rushed upstairs and had brought down some of his books, and he had spilled them on the table before the alarmed guest, scattering silver and glasses in every direction. “It’s all in there!” he had exclaimed. “Devastation. Ruin. Slavery. The overthrow of constitutional governments. Through carefully calculated wars. Damn you, why don’t you read?”

  Allan’s shunning of the promenade, the gardens, and human company, rose from his despair and his growing fear and the unknowable sorrow which afflicted him constantly. He hung the black coat of his depression on every insignificant hook. He worked, with Rufus, on the daily accumulations of business papers, which arrived with almost every post. His last breakdown, which had occurred eight months before, could not be shaken off. He lived in a world pervaded by nightmares. Sometimes he was aghast at the apparent changes in his personality over the years, and sometimes he had an inkling that there had never been any change at all, and that his soul had been immutable and fixed from birth, and that only youth and ambition had obscured, temporarily, the real drives and urges of his spirit. Now youth was gone; ambition had been fulfilled over and over with enormity, and there was nothing left—but himself … and the alcohol and the sedatives which briefly obscured that self from his agonized awareness.

  If any place at Cannes gave him enjoyment, it was the balcony which ran before the windows of his apartment. At sunset, he would roll up the jalousies and sit in solitary somberness on the balcony. He could forget the promenade before him; he could forget the frenetic gaiety of Cannes, Juanles-Pins, Nice, Antibes, Monaco. He could even forget Allan Marshall.

  Today, after his latest talk with Rufus, he went onto the balcony and sat down in a cushioned rattan chair. Exhaustion fell over him like a desperate illness, and his hands dropped over the arms of the chair and the fingers trailed on the tiles of the floor. He said aloud, “Defeat. I am defeated.” Church bells began to ring over mountain and sea, and they were not sweet and entrancing to him, but a tolling.

  The arm of the mountains to his right, gray-blue blurred shapes, extended itself over the flat and dimming waters. The faded coral of the sunset spread cloudily above the sea, brought into more distinctness the shadowy quicksilver of a promontory to the left, tumbling with the golden-beige, white and pink and terra-cotta of villas perched on its slopes. All stood in utter silence; the voice of the ocean was muted. Then, as Allan watched, the low metalli
c sun strode from the tinted clouds, and a broken pattern of copper ran over brightening water to a crimson horizon, limitless and cold. He sat there, not moving, vaguely aware of the church bells that seemed the articulation of his own anguish. Slowly, the sun dropped to the edge of the world, the copper and restless path was extinguished, the sea fell away into colorlessness, and its voice rose with the sound of unquiet. Moment drifted into moment. Now all was only a painting in silvery and diffused grays, the sea liquid ash, the mountains pearly and without substance. On the horizon, a single red spark quivered for a minute or two; a single scarlet beam struck the mist. Then, this too was gone.

  Allan could not move, could not lift his fingers from the chill tiles. It was some instants before he became conscious that someone was knocking smartly on his door. It was a dreadful physical effort for him to speak in answer. It was even more of an effort for him to rise and go into his ponderous sitting room, which was steadily darkening. He struck a match and clumsily lighted a gilt wall bracket as his door opened. He began to shiver, and his clothing and body felt clammy with the evening dampness.

  “Well!” exclaimed Cornelia, on the threshold. “Aren’t you dressed yet, Allan? How tiresome of you. I saw you sitting on your balcony nearly an hour ago, from the garden. Have you been sitting there all that time?”

  “All that time?” repeated Allan dully. “I thought it was only a few minutes.”

  Cornelia said with brisk impatience, which hid her anxiety, “It was nearly an hour. Really, Allan, you should be dressing now for the dinner at the Sainte Germaine’s. Where’s Antoine, for God’s sake?”

  “I told him not to come until I rang for him.” Allan, though still not yet fifty, moved to the bell rope like an old and feeble man, and pulled it listlessly. Cornelia, compressing her lips, took up the box of matches and quickly lighted the lamps, which immediately flooded the big room with soft light. She said, “And sitting there in the evening chill in just your shirt sleeves. Do you want to be ill again?”