Then he saw the first live oak with its hoary gray beard waving in the gentle wind. His eyes feasted on it, and his excitement grew. He saw trees strange to him, and flowers whose names he did not know. He saw red earth as well as white, and ancient houses at a distance. And there—there was a palm! A scrubby palm, somewhat wilted and brown, but a palm. Now he was filled with an emotion he had forgotten he had ever felt; exultation. More and more palms were appearing. Windows were being opened in the train, and no one minded the billows of soot and grit which blew in. The voices had changed hour by hour, as people came and went. These voices were soft and lingering, and Durant listened to them with eager pleasure.
The train stopped at a small station, and Durant, forgetting that he had ever been tired or hopeless or driven, ran out onto the platform. He lifted his pale face to the hot sunshine. He breathed in the silken air. Why, I’ve come home, he thought joyously. He smelled the tang of salt, and he turned to two men who were standing on the platform. “Are we near the sea?” he asked.
They were about to board the train, ragged men carrying parcels wrapped in newspapers. They were young, and as pale as he. They smiled, and one of them answered: “Yes, sir, we sure are. And this here is Florida. Where you from, sir?”
Durant had his answer ready. “From Chicago,” he answered. “I’m going to buy a farm down here.”
They smiled at him again, with sympathy. They, too, were on their way home, one from Cleveland, the other from Louisville. They had been conscripted labor, working in the war industries. One of them had been traveling for several days, due to the confusion on the railroads. They offered Durant cigarets. One of them sighed. “Sure is fine to see home again, away from that goddamned snow,” said the man who had worked in Cleveland. “Thought I’d never get out. Well, sir, it’s all over, and we Americans are free again. We’ve got a new world to make.” He glanced at some Negroes who were working on a track, and said sheepishly: “Reckon we’ll understand about the colored folks, now. We know all about it, ourselves.”
“That’s right,” said the other young man. “Sometimes you got to die, almost, ’fore you know what it’s like to live. Well, like you said, Jack, it’s over. Won’t be any more cons of bitches ridin’ us.” He turned to Durant. “I see by the papers this morning they got that bastard up in New York. That Chief Magistrate, Carlson. He was sure a bastard, wasn’t he?”
The sun was no longer hot, the air no longer like silk. There were no flowers and no palms, no live oaks, no light. Durant’s throat had thickened. He said, very faintly and slowly: “The Chief Magistrate? What happened to him?”
The young men laughed delightedly, and shifted their parcels. “Why, sir, didn’t you hear? It happened yesterday afternoon. Reckon you didn’t get no papers on this train. He was in New York, disbanding that lousy Picked Guard, and he walked out of the City Hall, and was just going down the steps, and someone shot him. Never rightly found out who. Saw a photograph of it in the papers. There he was a-lyin’ on the steps, with his head shot away. Served the son of a bitch right, didn’t it, after all he had done—”
After all he had done.
The train whistled. The young men jumped aboard, and Durant, feeling broken and sick, and with a fluttering darkness before his eyes, followed them. He stumbled back to his seat, automatically felt under it for his coat and his box of gold. Then he sat there, immobile and stricken to the heart, as the train began to move.
The two young men were sitting across from him. They were talking of Arthur Carlson, and Durant listened. “Reckon we’ll never forget that dog,” one was saying. “We don’t never dare forget. He was worse than the others. Thought up all kinds of bitchy things—Yes, sir, worse than all them others put together. I’ll be a-tellin’ about him to my kids, when I have ’em, and they’ll tell it to theirs, too. We’ll never forget.”
After all he had done.
Anathema. A symbol of terror and slavery and death, which America would always remember. She would remember that symbol at every election; she would listen for Carlson’s accents in the voice of any ambitious politician. If there were, ever again, any rumors of wars, of “emergencies,” of “crises,” America would remember Arthur Carlson, and there would be a swift end to mountebanks and hysterical screechers in the night. Anathema, forever.
More and more palms were darting by the windows. There were hedges of hibiscus, but Durant did not see them. There were turquoise lakes and avenues of live oaks and flashing glimpses of aquamarine seas, but he did not see them. There were white beaches, and beyond them, the dark purple ribbon of the Gulf Stream, but still he did not see them. He saw Arthur Carlson on the steps of the City Hall, a dead and bleeding and shattered symbol of all that was most horrible in the memory of America.
Now a wave of the bitterest hatred swept over Durant. They aren’t worthy of him! he thought. They never deserved him. He clenched his fists; it was not until he tasted blood in his mouth that he became aware that he had been biting his lips savagely. There was salt on his cheek and a red mist in his eyes, and a hard lump in his throat.
There would be paintings of that shameful death on the stony steps. There would be novel written about Arthur Carlson, and biographies, and there would be moving pictures featuring the monstrousness of his regime. He would be in all the history books in the schoolrooms. He would be the Horror from which America had escaped. He would be a symbol to all the world of what could happen to men if they became, once again, lethargic and indifferent, careless of their liberties, greedy, envious and stupid.
Those who had known what he was would never dare speak. They would never dare, in exonerating him, lift the blackness and fury of that symbol from the minds of the people. They would keep silent when he was cursed and reviled. They would only listen when his crimes were recited. In themselves, they would honor him, and remember, but they would hold their tongues forever. For the sake of America, for the sake of him who had delivered America. He had willed it, in his love for his country, and in his courage.
Durant could again hear Carlson’s voice, grave and strong: “I, like my brethren, offer up my life and my body for the laws of our fathers: calling upon God to be speedily merciful to our nation.”
A Biography of Taylor Caldwell
Taylor Caldwell was one of the most prolific and widely read American authors of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned five decades, she wrote forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Caldwell captivated readers with emotionally charged historical novels and family sagas such as Captains and the Kings, which sold 4.5 million copies and was made into a television miniseries in 1976. Her novels based on the lives of religious figures, Dear and Glorious Physician, a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God, a panoramic novel about the life and times of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time.
Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in 1900 in Manchester, England, into a family of Scotch-Irish descent, she began attending an academically rigorous school at the age of four, studying Latin, French, history, and geography. At six, she won a national gold medal for her essay on novelist Charles Dickens. On weekends, she performed a long list of household chores and attended Sunday school and church twice a day. Caldwell often credited her Spartan childhood with making her a rugged individualist.
In 1907, Caldwell, her parents, and her younger brother immigrated to the United States, settling in Buffalo, New York, where she would live for most of her life. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, when she was twelve, although it was not published until 1975. Marriage at the age of eighteen to William Combs and the birth of her first child, Mary Margaret—Peggy—did not deter her from pursuing an education. While working as a stenographer and a court reporter to help support her family, she took college courses at night.
Upon receiving a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buf
falo in 1931, she divorced her husband and married Marcus Reback, her boss at the US Immigration Department office in Buffalo. Caldwell then dedicated herself to writing full time. Even as her family grew with the arrival of her second daughter, Judith, Caldwell’s unpublished manuscripts continued to pile up.
At the age of thirty-eight, she finally sold a novel, Dynasty of Death, to a major New York publisher. Convinced that a pre–World War I saga of two dynasties of munitions manufacturers would be better received if people thought it was written by a man, Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner—who also discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—advised her to use only part of her name—Taylor Caldwell—as her pen name. Dynasty of Death became a bestseller in 1938 and the saga continued with The Eagles Gather in 1940 and The Final Hour in 1944. Inevitably, a public stir ensued when people discovered Taylor Caldwell was a woman.
Over the next forty years, Caldwell often worked from midnight to early morning at her electric typewriter in her book-crammed study, producing a wide array of sagas (This Side of Innocence, Answer as a Man) and historical novels (Testimony of Two Men, Ceremony of the Innocent) that celebrated American values and passions.
She also produced novels set in the ancient world (A Pillar of Iron, Glory and the Lightning), dystopian fiction (The Devil’s Advocate, Your Sins and Mine), and spiritually themed novels (The Listener, No One Hears But Him, Dialogues with the Devil).
Apart from their across-the-board popularity with readers and their commercial success, which made Caldwell a wealthy woman, her long list of bestselling novels possessed common themes that were close to her heart: self-reliance and individualism, man’s struggle for justice, the government’s encroachment on personal freedoms, and the conflict between man’s desire for wealth and power and his need for love and family bonding.
The long hours spent at her typewriter did not keep Caldwell from enjoying life. She gave elegant parties at her grand house in Buffalo. One of her grandchildren recalls watching her hold the crowd in awe with her observations about life and politics. She embarked on annual worldwide cruises and was fond of a glass of good bourbon. Drina Fried recalls her grandmother confiding in her: “I vehemently believe that we should have as much fun as is possible in our dolorous life, if it does not injure ourselves or anyone else. The only thing is—be discreet. The world will forgive you anything but getting caught.”
Caldwell didn’t stop writing until she suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of eighty. Her last novel, Answer as a Man, was published in 1981 and hit the New York Times bestseller list before its official publication date. She died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1985.
William Combs, Taylor Caldwell’s first husband and father to Peggy, aboard a naval ship, circa 1926.
A portrait of Caldwell at the start of her career in the late 1930s.
A portrait of Caldwell taken before Scribner’s publication of Melissa on June 21, 1948.
Caldwell at her desk in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1949. She spent many winter months at Whitehall, a resort hotel on the property of Henry Flagler’s former estate, which is now the Flagler Museum.
Caldwell’s second daughter, Judith Ann Reback, during time with her mother at Whitehall in the 1940s.
Caldwell receiving an award in Los Angeles, California, for A Pillar of Iron after its publication in 1965.
Caldwell with her daughters, Peggy Fried and Judith Ann Reback (Goodman), and Ted Goodman in 1969 on the MS Bergensfjord.
Caldwell at a cocktail party with her daughter, Peggy, and the hostess of a research world cruise on the SS President Wilson in 1970. (Ken Parke)
Caldwell with her granddaughter, Drina Fried, at her home in Buffalo, New York, winter 1975. Soula Angelou, her personal assistant, insisted on taking this rare family picture.
An invitation from 1975 to one of Caldwell’s many cocktail parties. She hosted at least two parties a year in Buffalo, New York, before she moved to Connecticut.
Caldwell with her fourth husband, Robert Prestie, who cared for her in the last six years of her life in Connecticut.
To read more about the life and work of Taylor Caldwell, please visit www.taylorcaldwell.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1952 by Taylor Caldwell
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4292-5
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
TAYLOR CALDWELL
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