Never Victorious, Never Defeated

by Taylor Caldwell

  Jon moved in his chair. Norman was laughing lightly. “Jon. He and those unspeakable friends of his in Paris. They talk of ‘revolution’ and the ‘rise of the proletariat’ and their modern art, and the ‘new world.’ But they’re only babblers, really. The work which must be done will be done by men like me, and though we’ll use the—the—”

  “The what, darling?” asked Estelle innocently.

  Norman smiled. “Well—odd—people, like Jon. Don’t bother your beautiful head about it, Esty. We have to employ the strangest characters, and we will in the future, too. Any means to the good end.”

  Estelle was genuinely puzzled. “Jon is not exactly ‘strange.’ He does run off at tangents, I admit. But he’s my boy, too, you know, though not as close as you, sweetheart.”

  Her face darkened, and the soft hands on the table clenched, “Oh, I do wish things could move fast, Norman! Men like your father, and that dreadful Allan Marshall, should be taught, finally, that they are no longer the masters of the world.”

  Norman’s smile was indulgent He repeated, “Don’t bother your beautiful head about it. Well, now, I suppose I must leave you to rest. That goddamned awful family! I can’t bear Thanksgiving Day, or any other holiday, when the clan gathers and glowers at each other.”

  “I do hope Jon won’t precipitate another fight, as he did this morning,” said Estelle crossly. “He only antagonizes his father, and each time he does so, I see Rufus making another will, leaving him less and less. You, dear, have better sense. You agree with everybody, and never quarrel with anyone. So discreet.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Norman. “After all, it won’t be Jon who will be in the thick of things. We move quietly, without noise, behind the scenes. We have a plan, now, about the schools, which we won’t be able to put into operation, probably, for a few years. I’ve already had many long talks with educators … but there, I’m boring you, and you must rest.”

  He gave his mother another kiss, and left the room. Alone, Estelle deliberately relaxed her taut face. She stood up before her mirror, ran her fingers lovingly over her whole torso. She began to make soft and cooing sounds to her image in the mirror, the murmurs of a lover. Jon watched through his frightful sickness of body and soul, and his mouth and hands and feet were cold and numb. All at once he could no longer endure the sight of his mother. He said over and over to himself: Bitch, bitch, ugly perverted bitch. Treacherous, selfloving bitch. His body became slack and weak and immovable.

  He had known that he had always been in competition with his brother for the sole affections of his mother. But he had not known this, this deliberate setting of brother against brother for a shallow woman’s vanity. He had thought himself the chosen one, the confidant, the protector, the guardian. He had thought of Norman as an eager and docile student of an older brother’s teachings, a follower, a somewhat childish and petulant demander of a few maternal kisses. He and Estelle had often laughed fondly together about all this, as they had sat cosily together in this very room. Estelle had sometimes complained about Norman’s “immaturity,” and Jon had soothed her with remarks that time would take care of that.

  He was not enraged, now, against his brother. He saw himself and Norman as victims of this woman’s conceit, repulsive superficiality of soul, and resentment against all the other members of the family. They were her coming revenge against the deWitts and the Marshalls; they were her secret weapons which she sharpened with murderous words of love and incitement in the seclusion of her rooms. And while she sharpened these weapons she made them thin to the point of ineffectuality, as thin as tinfoil. Revenge had not been enough for her. She must destroy her sons, too, in her devouring greed for power.

  Estelle rang for her maid, and her tug at the bell rope was vicious. She went into the bathroom, and Jon, gathering what remained of his volition, slipped from the chair, ran into the sitting room, and let himself out into the dark corridor. His one instinct was flight, and he went into his rooms and pulled on his fur-lined overcoat. He fled down the stairs only five minutes ahead of his nephew Tony, and went outside into the roaring chaos of wind and snow. It was hard, walking against the gale and the heaped snow of the unshoveled walk. He did not stop until he was panting and his chest was a painful constriction. He stood near an enormous spruce, which was already so weighted with the dull grayness that it bent sideways. The softly lighted windows of the house rose some distance behind him, its outlines blurred against the ghostly sky.

  The fierce cold penetrated through the fur, and Jon was one long trembling. Suddenly he began to retch. He grasped one of the prickling branches of the spruce in his bare hand to support himself. Acid poured from his swollen throat; it seemed to pour from his very soul in a burning stream. He did not try to restrain it; it was as if he were purging himself of poison.

  His shoulders, his uncovered head, whitened dimly in the howling gloom. His mouth was filled with fire and sickness. He put his hands in his pockets and stood with bent head. But his shivering became a constant spasm all through his flesh.

  Too late for me, he thought. I can never be a man again. Never a man. She has killed the manhood in me; she has turned me into a—a thing. Perhaps it was latent in me, but without her it might never have come to the surface. I could be a man, now, with a wife and with children. I could be a son of a father who respected me, and who wanted my help. I could stand with Allan, without his sneers. There could have been health in me. I could never have been used by the hating whisperers in London and Paris and New York, for I would have been a man.

  The gale shrilled through the spruce. Too late, too late! He listened to the dolorous words, and knew they were true.

  Die. He caught the wounding spruce branch again, and stood very still, his body still heaving. Die. Of course. Somewhere, deep in him, had lain the awful alternative to what he was; it had lain there ever since he had been a youth.

  He pulled out his watch and strained to see it in the falling darkness. Almost five o’clock. In another hour the family would be arriving. Jon closed his eyes convulsively. The time had arrived for what he must do. He went back into the house, struggled against the heavy door, let himself into the warm hall with its fire-shadows on the ceiling. He closed the door, and stood panting. He shrank when he heard the door of the library open. Tony was crossing the soft-colored carpet, deep in some engrossing thoughts of his own. Without willing it, Jon whispered his name.

  Tony, startled, came to a halt and peered at his uncle in the dusk. Jon saw that he was unusually grave. When Tony identified Jon, he colored, and began to turn away, but Jon followed him and caught his arm. “Tony,” he muttered. “Listen to me, just for a moment. I’m asking you to forgive me. Forgive me, forgive me.”

  Tony stiffened, then turned fully to him. His eyelids were red, but he studied Jon earnestly, and in silence. He saw the snow on Jon’s shoulders; he saw the blueness of his hands and the strange set of his face. He said very gently, “But I already forgave you, a long time ago. Don’t think of it, Jon. Try to forget it.”

  He drew his arm from Jon’s grasp, nodded, smiled kindly, and went up the stairs. Jon watched him go. He thought: If he would just turn, once, and smile at me again, and let me know he forgives me. … But Tony, preoccupied with his own urgent problems, did not look back.

  Jon, climbing the stairs after his nephew and, moving like a dying man, fixed his thoughts on only one thing. In his rooms, finally, he rang for a servant and said that he would not be down for dinner, did not feel well, and would ring when he wished a tray. But the family must not be informed until they were all assembled at the table, and Mrs. deWitt must be begged “not to bother” until after dinner. Mr. Jon had “one of his headaches” and would join the family later. Jon had no fear that his mother would come anxiously darting to his room, for he had given many messages like this before, especially on days like these. She would excuse her son prettily. He could see her now, coquettishly tilting her head, smiling her sweet and avaricious smile,
her brown eyes shining with that artificial ardor of hers, her manner bravely buoyant to cover the inconvenient whim of a son.

  He closed the door after the servant, to whom he had spoken very quietly. He neatly hung up his coat and shut the wardrobe door. He brought out a set of keys and unlocked a drawer in his chest. There, among perfumes he used for his own delight in his rooms, and other miscellaneous objects, was a small box. On the lid he had written, many years ago, in a light mood of bravado and fond amusement at himself: “For future reference.” How quaint, he thought. How damnably quaint I was, how naughtily droll and sophisticated! His disgust for himself renewed his sickness. He glanced at the mirror on the chest and saw his face, drawn, cloven with lines of suffering, contorted with self-revulsion.

  He opened the box and looked at the deadly little gray tablets in it. When he had been twenty he had strained his back in some absurd way, and had had considerable pain. “Warning: one tablet every eight hours.” The tablets had relieved the pain, had bestowed delicious drowsiness on him, had enabled him to sleep. Sleep, he thought. He went into his bathroom, drew some water, and swallowed all eight of the tablets. Then he returned to his room, stirred up the fire, and sat down.

  How long would it be? A deathlike calmness had come to him. He hoped that the tablets had not deteriorated with time. He would dislike to hang himself, or cut his throat. Melodramatic, and ridiculous, and sordid. He laughed silently in the warm stillness of the room. The storm was rising in ferocity. The draperies swayed out a little from the windows; the fire crackled hungrily. One had only to wait; he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  Then, without warning, a most appalling loneliness took hold of him, a desolate sorrow, keen and piercing. The locked door of his room seemed symbolic. He was alone. He had always been alone. He would be alone forever. Imprisoned in the earth, the suns and the centuries would mean nothing to him. The earth would be blown into chaff and would whirl in its empty orbit, and he would not know. Soon he would drop into the tunnel of blackness, and all that he was would be lost until the end of time.

  All that I am. But I am nothing, nothing. I was never anything. For the first time he thought of his father, and the sorrow became more poignant. His father had been cheated—first by wives and now by a son. He said aloud, “But it’s better for you. I never thought of you before; I saw you through the eyes of my mother. I am not sentimental, and I do not say you are a good and injured man. You are no better, no worse, than others. But you are better than I. I’ve seen you shudder at me, and you had a right to shudder. I could not wrong you by dying; I could only wrong you by living. You’ll know that, for I don’t believe you ever lied to yourself. Forgive me—for having been born.”

  Loneliness had him in advance of death. It was a parching on his lips, a grievous aching in his bones. It was a despair in his heart. Slowly, a numbness began in his feet and crept upward, but his thoughts became more intense. Men were born alone; they lived alone. But most terrible of all, they died alone. And died impotent. The impotence was worse, in the last hour, when a man realized that his life had been one endless insult against life and nature and his fellows. Then there was no consolation. There was only the looking down into the abyss. For this loneliness, there was no hope.

  The numbness had reached his knees, and suddenly he recalled the cherished letters from his friends which he had kept in another locked drawer. He remembered that the police would come, as they always came at a hint of unnatural death. There was also his diary, with damning names garlanded with an affection like rotten flowers. There was Miles Peale’s letter on his table. He could do one decent thing. He would burn it all, so that what he was and why he had died would not permanently mar others and throw filth upon them. His mother’s name was in the diary. That, too, would vanish. He forgave her with a rush of pity that was like a convulsion in him. He, alone, was guilty, however much she had cajoled and perverted him. At the end, each man was guilty of what he was.

  He tried to stand up. The numbness had taken his knees. Crawling, then, like a wounded animal, he pulled himself to his chest of drawers. Curiously, it seemed a long way, acres away, retreating into mists. His desperate fingers sank themselves into the carpet, which had become a yielding rubber floor. The sweat of dissolution was on him now. He could feel death rushing at him on black wings, a buzzard eager for decaying flesh. His eyes were filming; coils of wispy darkness floated before and about and over him. They were winding themselves in his throat, and stopping his breath. Inch by tortuous inch he dragged his body over the carpet. The chest was becoming a tiny object, infinitely far off, dancing on its legs. He whispered aloud, “God, help me to get the letters, the diary. Don’t let me die until they are burned.”

  His breath had so diminished that he had to stop, weaving his head back and forth to clear it. God. But there was no God. Had not he and his friends laughingly and contemptuously agreed to that? Superstition; the mumbo jumbo of a church which used God like a whip to subdue the masses. God was a materialistic and mechanical force, mindless, sightless, operating like a gigantic machine whose end was inevitable in a storm of cosmic dust. He gasped, and his voice was stronger, “God, help me. Only a short way. Help me.”

  His breath had returned a little. The numbness had engulfed his thighs; he dragged them behind him, for they were already dead. His thoughts became confused. He had been crawling for eons; he had never done anything else in all his life but crawl, crawl like this on his belly. Caverns opened in his brain, caverns full of emptiness and noise. Was that the sea he was approaching? It was pounding in his ears; it was surging about him. Mother sea, lightless depths of her, cloudy deeps of her, moonless and bottomless. He reached out his hand to touch the water, and touched the chest. His thoughts cleared again. He struggled against the chest as Hercules struggled against mountains. The letters and the diary were in his hand. Now he was breast-deep in the breakers. “I must throw them, before the waters wet them.” He said again, “God, help me,” and strength was in his arm and he threw everything into the fire. The numbness retreated though the ocean was frothing about him, surging into his throat. The table was nearby, and grasping it, he reached Miles’s letter, and then it, too, was in the fire which danced in its joy of feasting.

  The last and dying strength went from him. He lay down on the rug. Combers rolled over him; he could hear them hissing. He breathed deeply of their substance, drew it into his lungs. Now they rolled him about, tossing him back and forth strongly yet gently. They hummed and thundered with music, wild and majestic music, and he thought of God again as the sea took him with love. The sky was without a moon, but a beautiful milky light poured down on him. It flowed through the waters in which he was sinking. He thought: There really is no horror in it. But there is God. How does one address God? Words from his childhood, taught briefly in forgotten years, returned to him. Only a few; he wished he knew them all; he could see the bright tails of them slipping away fishlike in the cold curl of the breakers. “Our Father, Our Father. …”

  “Our Father,” prayed the sea, and sucked him down.

  He lay on the rug, curled in a fetal position, the fire on his drained face and open eyes. And they were full of peace, the peace of a child who had reached home after a terrible journey among monsters in a twisted jungle.

  41

  Cornelia glanced furtively at her watch. Half-past seven, and the dreadful yearly dinner almost over. In another hour and a half, perhaps earlier, considering the storm, “the family” would be gone. So far, she thought with relief, though there had been the customary tensions, the half-hidden glowers, the ambiguously sarcastic words, the meaningful glances and smirks—as usual—there had been none of those “explosions” which had sometimes broken out during and after such dinners. One of the “triggers” was absent, of course: Jon deWitt. Everyone seemed somewhat distrait and unusually silent, which was a blessing. Allan hardly spoke; though she knew he had been drinking, he had appeared at the table in complete s
obriety. Lydia Purcell, straight and slender as always, though her hair seemed to have whitened perceptibly, spoke only of the most ordinary things, smiled at everyone with her characteristic cool and kind aloofness, did not mention her dead husband, and murmured about the storm which had become worse during the past hour or two. No one ever really knew Mama, thought Cornelia, and thought this, too, was a blessing, and very considerate of Lydia. There were no people more tedious than those who insisted on baring their souls to you, preferably in antagonistic or sneering or maudlin voice.

  Laura, Cornelia noted with pleasure, looked less attractive than ordinarily. Pinched, thought Cornelia. Like her aunt Lydia, Laura had the decency not to become confidential or “warm” at any time.

  Cornelia did not want to know in the slightest why everyone at the dinner was so quiet and indifferent to everyone else. It was enough for her that they were. But she had her own inquisitiveness, which was, however, very mild and fleeting. That dreadful Pat Peale looked sick and broken; good. Cornelia’s half-sister, Ruth, was silent near Allan, her translucent face grief-stricken over the death of her father. Such a pretty thing, but such an old maid, thought Cornelia idly. Ruth’s head was bright yellow silk in the candlelight, and she kept it bent over the table. The “children,” Tony, Dolores, DeWitt, Miles, Fielding, and Mary, had nothing to say to each other, though Tony and his sister sometimes exchanged gentle glances of some secret understanding about which Cornelia was not curious. She did, however, smile at Mary Peale affectionately when she caught the girl’s vivacious eye. Mary had “common sense,” and a high and mischievous humor. She would be excellent for Tony, who was too grave.

  Estelle, dressed in baby-blue silk, and jeweled and perfumed, prattled. She was the only one not caught up in her own thoughts. It did not matter to her very much that the others merely muttered or murmured at her foolish remarks. She was all radiance. Let the surly deWitts simmer in their bad tempers; she alone knew that a hostess, and her guests, should be “enthusiastic” about anything and everything. Beside her sat her courtier-son, Norman, watchful of her every beam and glow.