The Turnbulls

by Taylor Caldwell

  He said, almost faintly: “I have saved the Livingston mills, sir.”

  He thought that the old man had not heard him. Then, very slowly, the veined and withered hands dropped, and the sunken face they revealed was petrified and appalling in its expression.

  And out of those dry lips came a strangely quiet voice:

  “It is not only this. I have heard so many things. Terrible, frightful things. About you, John Turnbull. They have filtered slowly to me.”

  He paused. He lifted one hand and pressed it heavily upon his chest. But there was no faltering in his voice, no fading of his appalling look:

  “It is not only the Livingston mills. You have not stopped there, have you? I have heard about the ships in which you have an interest, which deal with the China Coast. I have heard of the Eastern Exporting and Importing Company.”

  John started.

  “Opium,” said Mr. Livingston, and his voice was a breath rather than a sound. Now his face had the aspect of a death’s-head.

  “From the first, I opposed the opening of Japan to trade. Why did we not leave Japan to her sleep of centuries? She did not want us. She hated and feared us, rightly. But the bankers, the industrialists, the usurers, the financiers, must have their way. Japan must be invaded by the giants of trade, for their advantage.” He paused, drew a deep and shuddering breath: “Not expansion, not progress, was in the sails of Commodore Perry’s invading ships. It was corruption that filled them, and cruelty, and murder, slavery and starvation, and exploitation. And death.”

  “Strange words for trade, and Occidental progress, sir,” said John, with a peculiar smile.

  “Progress!” cried Mr. Livingston, with fierce and shaking passion. “You call it ‘progress,’ this turning of contented and peaceful peasants into industrial slaves, this conniving with their powerful native enemies and rulers to enslave their people for the benefit and enrichment of American and English traders and merchants! You call it ‘progress’ to instil into the hearts of Japanese simple men military lust and the desire for conquest?” He rose again to his feet, and cried out in a loud and terrible voice: “For this, our children, and our children’s children will pay! They will pay for the enslavement of Japan by our merchants and our industrialists! You have brought a virus to Japan, a profound and destroying pestilence! You have infected them with our own corruption and greed and lust! In your ships you carried the rats of destruction and death to a peaceful and slumbering people who wanted no part of you. Yes, for this our America will pay, with blood and nightmare, and it is only just!”

  “This is extravagance,” said John, coldly. He did not rise this time in respect to the old man. This was partly because of the trembling of his own legs, and the devouring sickness in him.

  But Mr. Livingston did not hear him. His eyes were fixed in the distance, upon an affrighting vision.

  “Why did you not leave them alone? Why did you not refrain from infecting them with dreams of conquest in their own right? Do you not know that it is because of these dreams that a peaceful island people have now set out to enslave and conquer their neighbours? That they now have nightmares of their own, bequeathed to them by our own murderers? In the wake of ‘trade’ and ‘progress’ come plagues of the spirit. You have brought them to Japan, you and others like you.” He added, in a slow and terrible voice: “And they will return to you.”

  John had to swallow several times to moisten his dry throat. But he said steadily: “After the War between the States, we will have to find larger markets. We will have to find cheaper labour. We have them waiting for us in Japan. If we do not exploit them, England will. She has already taken advantage of this war. More and more of her fleet of ships sail for the China Coast, for Japan. We must do what we can, without nebulous idealism. Or, we shall go under.”

  But the old man did not appear to have heard him. He continued, his lips hardly moving: “Opium. The ships in which you have an interest carry opium to China. It was you merchants who suggested this to Japan, in order to enfeeble and destroy the Chinese, and thus lay them open to easier conquest. You have dealt in opium.”

  John was silent. He looked at his hands, first at the palms and then at the backs of them, as if they profoundly interested him.

  “There is a disease in the West,” said Mr. Livingston, in a whisper. “A disease of greed, pitiless and godless. You have taken it to the peaceful East. We will pay, in our death.” Suddenly he cried out in an anguished voice: “Is there no end to the cruelty of men, to the virulence of men, to the horror of men?”

  John muttered: “You are extravagant. You condemn America and England. Did you not know that Germany is competing with us, that if we had not opened Japan to trade, Germany would have done so? There was no stopping this. Had we, out of some silly squeamishness, not done it, Germany would not have been restrained by our own ‘idealism.’ Prussia has wicked dreams of her own. I know. I have heard. Do you want to see the world enslaved by Germans? I tell you, it would have happened.”

  He continued: “The Germans are ingenious. One of their more famous chemists has invented a way to make narcotic derivatives from opium, which take up less than one-fourth the bulk of opium, and are more deadly. This chemist has offered the formulae to Japan, and has suggested that they will be unbelievably valuable in the destruction of the morale of the Chinese. I tell you, nothing could have stopped the opening of Japan! We got there first, that is all. And it was necessary to our existence to get there first.”

  Mr. Livingston slowly turned the glacial fury of his horrified eyes upon John. He said: “We are not talking about the same things.”

  He sat down again, and stared emptily before him.

  He said, in a deceptively quiet tone, full of despair: “I heard that your agents stole the formulae for the derivatives, that you are engaged in this now, yourself. You see, I know everything.”

  Now his voice mounted, and he cried out: “I know that the patents which you brought to me were stolen, also! I know that my company is part and parcel of this horrible conspiracy against mankind! My company, built by my fathers in honour and justice and decency!”

  John glanced quickly at Mr. Wilkins, who was smiling gently as if engaged in contemplating the most innocent and rosy of dreams. Feeling John’s glance at him, he lifted his head, and now the glassy hazel eyes pointed with glittering light. John drew a deep breath. His brow knotted as if in extreme pain, and blue lines sprang out about his mouth.

  “Not your company any longer, sir,” he said, softly.

  The old man looked at him, and very slowly, he took on the sharper aspect of a death’s-head. The fragile bones of his face seemed to pierce through the parchment skin; the bony forehead glistened as if flayed; the blue mouth sank in, and where the fiery blue eyes had been were only lightless holes. The silence in the room was full of dreadfulness.

  John clenched his fists to control the rigours that raced over him. He could not look at the old man. He fixed his gaze on the desk.

  “I did not want to tell you this, yet. I even thought you might never need to know. With the money I inherited from my father I bought up the mortgage bonds of Livingston from Mr. Jay Regan.” He paused a moment, and the silence in the room became even more dreadful. “I am now Everett Livingston & Company.”

  Mr. Wilkins smiled sweetly, looking from John to Mr. Livingston as if the gentlest and most sentimental of words had been said, which touched him to his heart.

  “In a way, sir,” continued John in a stronger voice, though his brow gleamed, “this ought to be a relief for you. You are no longer connected with subsidiary activities which can only bring you pain.”

  A dry gape appeared in the death’s-head, where a living mouth had been. There was a rustle of a whisper: “You—have stolen my company, my father’s company.”

  John suddenly lifted his hand, and dropped his head on the back of it. His whole attitude strangely suggested deathly illness and weariness.

  “I bought it,” h
e said, dully. “This ought to bring you relief, and joy, under the circumstances.”

  Mr. Wilkins stared at him, and for a moment or two the most complete expression of contempt and disgust passed over his jovial countenance. This fool, this weak and shrinking fool, this craven and sentimental imbecile!

  Mr. Livingston, too, stared at John. The young man seemed to have forgotten the others in the room. He was not aware of the silence, of the regard of the two men, one so old and broken, and the other so evil. And as Mr. Livingston stared, the strangest look came over his stricken and dying face, a look of compassion, of fright, of understanding, of ghastly and frantic despair. He half lifted his frail hands as if to touch John, to lift him from the abyss of mortal illness into which he was sinking.

  “My God!” he whispered. “Why have you done all these things? John. John! Why have you done it? Did you want money so much? Did you want power? Did you want power more than anything else?”

  John abruptly dropped his hand with a distraught gesture. He sprang to his feet. He began to pace up and down the room, as if in disordered flight.

  And Mr. Wilkins watched him with a malignant smile. But Mr. Livingston watched him with mute pity and profound compassion.

  “No,” he said, gently, “it was none of these things. Was it? I know it was not.”

  Then his old face grew fixed with overwhelming terror. He grasped the edge of his desk and cried out sharply and loudly: “It was because you hated, John! You have become corrupted with hatred. You hate all men! That is so, isn’t it, John?”

  John did not answer. His hurried pace became more feverish, and his look more frightful.

  “My God!” cried Mr. Livingston, with the omniscience of the old and the dying. “My God!” he repeated, and his voice sank into a deep whisper, as if he could no longer endure seeing what he had seen.

  Mr. Wilkins stood up. He sighed, gently. He looked from John to Mr. Livingston with the sweetest and most benign of expressions.

  “This is very painful to me, sir,” he murmured. “Very painful. I gives you my word. I wouldn’t ’ave ’ad it happen for the world. But now it’s all been said. Wot’s spoken can’t be sucked back. Perhaps it’s best, like.”

  At the sound of his voice, John halted abruptly in his tracks and turned to him. He looked steadily at Mr. Wilkins.

  Mr. Wilkins, undisturbed, drew out his watch, visibly started, shook his head. “Time’s passin’,” he said, sadly. “We’ve concluded the business. I think me and my young friend had best go, with all regrets to you, Mr. Livingston,” and he bowed humbly to the old man.

  Johns picked up his hat, cane and gloves, and went with Mr. Wilkins to the door. He walked like a man in a trance. Mr. Wilkins opened the door. And then came Mr. Livingston’s voice, strong and ringing and passionate: “John! John!”

  The two men turned to him slowly, so impelling was his voice. The old man was standing up, leaning across his desk towards them. His face was living and flashing with light. He looked at John, but pointed an unshaking finger at Mr. Wilkins:

  “John, leave this man at once! In the name of God, leave him!”

  John did not answer. His dark face was closed and stony.

  “For your own sake, leave him at once! Never see him again, before it is too late!” cried Mr. Livingston. “In the name of God!”

  Mr. Wilkins chuckled gently. His eyes dwelt on Mr. Livingston with a fond and cunning expression.

  “I allus gives ’em what they wants,” he said. “You, too, sir, got wot you wanted, and no questlons asked.”

  The door closed after him and John, and the old man was alone.

  CHAPTER 33

  Mr. Everett Livingston sat for a long time, alone, in the office which he had visited so rarely during these past two years.

  He did not move. He hardly seemed to breathe. His long patrician hands, veined and almost transparent now, clutched the arms of his chair rigidly. All of his elongated old body was transfixed in that rigour. He stared before him, and his eyes were as empty and glazed as the eyes of the dead, as they peered out under his white and frosty brows.

  His thoughts were more like voices speaking to him than conscious activities in his own brain:

  He said to me, that feller, that “I always give them what they want.” It is true. All my life, I have been given what I wanted most. And in contemplating my friends, I know they have also been given what they wanted in their long and devious lives. No one can reach a great age without confessing to his inmost self that never has he been deprived of what he truly desired. That is our punishment. That is our tragedy. If there is a God, and if He cared for us, never, never would He give us our heart’s desire. For in the fulfilment of our wish is our destruction, our endless agony, and our death.

  Never have I believed in a Spirit of Evil. Now I know it exists. It is born in our hearts. It is invincible. What is its source? Does it come from the primordial depths from which we have emerged, from the dark jungles of unremembered antiquity, from our brute heritage which we share with other brutes? Is it part of our consciousness, and is that consciousness one with the nameless evil which permeates the sunken places of the world, the swamps of the world, the stony and bottomless abysses of the world? I do not know. But I know it floats in our minds and engulfs our hearts. We call upon it, we evoke it, when we desire one thing above all others. It is the cloudy genii of our souls.

  When we desire passionately, we forget honour and goodness and virtue, we forget noble strength and abnegation. For these are the things of God, and are so feeble against our desires. Each man gets the thing he covets.

  In all my life, I have desired one thing most: that never should I be humiliated and left to the laughter of my fellow-men. Why did I feel so? Because in common with all others, I hated my fellows. I dared not expose myself to them. One builds fortresses only against those he hates. We all build fortresses of one kind or another, but mine has been the most ignoble.

  My life has been most frightfully lonely, cut off from living. Sometimes, I have pitied myself, commiserated with myself. I did not see, then, that that was the thing I desired above all others, which would protect me from other men.

  Because of this desire, I plunged into dishonour. I used fine words and heroic gestures, but I knew in my heart that I had embraced that dishonour.

  Now I am an old man, and I am dying. I am broken and left desolate. There is no hope in me. Because I got what I wanted.

  He raised himself a little in his chair, and he cried out in a loud and terrible voice, which rang back from the walls of the room:

  “My God, my God, have mercy upon me!”

  Miss Hamlin had taken the girls to a picnic on this fine and golden September day. The sky had a dark blue brightness, the air was like warmed silk. Lilybelle leaned from her window to sniff the spicy air, and look at the trees, the tips of whose leaves were already rimmed with dry yellow. The pungent grass spread below her, rustling a little in a wind that whispered of far palms and glittering seas.

  Lilybelle, though no one had ever thought to ask her opinion, loved New York. She loved America. The warmness, strength and generosity in her responded with passionate joy to these things in this new country. She did not analyse her sensations, for all Lilybelle’s thoughts and reactions and emotions were sensations. She had never heard of “consciousness,” for that is left to those who torture themselves with self-analysis. She only knew that she lived, that she loved and enjoyed. She had no more “consciousness” than a very young child. She was like the cup of a flower which is filled with the universal rain or sun. She accepted, not by will, but because that was part of her nature. She never questioned anything.

  She was very happy that the girls were gone for a day. She did not reproach herself for this happiness, as would have a more sickly and sentimental woman. She was alone. She had the air and sun and house to herself, and that was cause for contentment. She did not consider the servants an intrusion, nor more of actual presences in
the house than herself. In fact, she preferred their company much more than the company of the few people who visited her and her husband formally. She was uneasy in the presence of these “grand folks,” and knew, without thinking about it, that John was also uneasy. Vaguely, she understood that his uneasiness sprang from another source than her own. She only knew that he was taut and sombre when the house was invaded by “friends,” and that he had a dark and glowering look which he turned slowly from one to another. She was glad when they went, and experienced a mental sensation similar to the physical one when she removed her tight stays and rubbed her plump compressed flesh. Once, and only once, she said to herself, with simple and shrinking surprise: “Why, he hates ’em!” She went no further. John’s hatred was an uncomplex fact, and she was incapable of questioning. The universe was full of iron-clad facts to Lilybelle, and there seemed no reason at all to her to ask the why and wherefore of them.

  She never asked why John seemed to hate his youngest daughter. It was very sad to her, but not really bewildering. He hated. That was all. She would have been astounded if it had been suggested to her that she attempt to discover why.

  But even this was forgotten today. She decided, guiltily, not to put on her stays. No one would come. Her home was never visited by gracious ladies during the day, “dropping” in during a leisurely ride in their carriages. She wrapped a blue dressing-gown about her, and humming hoarsely under her breath, picked up a mending-basket of the girls’ long white stockings. She felt another guilt. Miss Hamlin had reproved her genteelly for this homely task. It was not “fitting.” There were so many servants to do this. But when she sat like this by her sunny window Lilybelle was supremely content. The task gave her a sense of comfortable homeliness, of sturdy reality and affection. In truth, she would have preferred a much smaller house, where she would have had to do all the work herself. Sometimes the longing to feel hot bubbling soapsuds on her arms was as poignant and sad as another woman’s longing for a lover. To serve her family with her two strong hands would have been the ultimate delight to Lilybelle, and so, when she could, she engaged in such work as this.