Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  "Home," repeated Mrs. Morgan. She sighed with her discontent. She was really impressed by the house, but it was not in her nature to approve of anything. "Very well," she said in a grudging voice, "if it pleases you, it'll have to please me, I suppose. But I know I won't sleep well living so close to a murderer— I told the ladies—"

  "Mother!" Robert spoke harshly. "For God's sake, I hope you haven't been calling Jon Ferrier a 'murderer!' My God! That's libel. Not here in Hambledon, for God's sake!"

  She saw that he was genuinely aghast. She smiled knowingly. "I do hope you can trust my discretion, Robert. I'm not a fool. And many important people think well of him, and I wouldn't offend them, for your sake. Don't take the Almighty's name in vain; that's blasphemy. I don't like your new manners. But not everyone admires him as you do, and I gathered, from a word here and there— Well, it doesn't matter."

  "Mother, don't lend yourself to gossip here. That would be the one thing that would ruin me forever."

  "Robert, you forget that though I am the mother of a physician, I was the wife of one, too. But I can hardly shut my ears and pretend that I don't hear. That would be most impolite."

  She uttered a faint shriek and Robert turned quickly. A large fawn and brindle dog, almost as big as a mastiff, was entering the room, sniffing alertly, its pointed ears high and quivering. "Oh, that's just Jon's dog," said Robert, and squatted on his heels and snapped his fingers at the animal.

  "Take the brute away!" cried Mrs. Morgan, forgetting that she had arthritis, for she sped briskly to the windows and almost crouched there in extreme terror. "Robert! Don't touch it! It may be mad. It may have fleas. It may kill us!"

  "Nonsense," said Robert. The dog had now thrown its great front legs and paws about Robert's neck and was kissing him with enthusiasm, its big liquid eyes shining delightedly. "Look at the boy," said Robert, parrying the kisses with not too much success. He laughed. "A boxer. Jon imported him from Germany. His name is Montgomery Sears Ward Roebuck. That's one of Jon's little pleasantries, because Monty came in a Sears crate, when he was three months old. Now, boy," he said to the dog, who was taking a sudden interest in Jane Morgan. He had never heard such curious sounds before, a shrill bleating. Moreover Jane was fluttering her handkerchief threateningly at him, and with terror. Robert held his collar tightly, for Monty had decided to investigate this interesting phenomenon. "Do stop screaming, Mother," said Robert. "Jon must be around someplace; he never roams without Jon."

  At that beloved name Monty lost his curiosity about Jane and opened his mouth in a great grin and looked at the door. He barked commandingly. Jon, dressed for riding, strolled into the echoing parlor. "So, there he is," he said, and he bowed briefly in Jane's direction, and then smiled at Robert. "He must have heard your voices; he shot off like a bullet There's nothing so inquisitive as a boxer. They're terrible gossips and such, and always want to know what's going on everywhere."

  The dog was standing on his hind legs now, his paws on Jonathan's chest, and he was licking Jonathan's cheek with passionate love. Jane shuddered. "I do wish, Dr. Ferrier, that you'd put him out. I feel quite faint. I'm terrified of dogs."

  "Are you? Sorry. Here, Monty," and Jonathan led the dog to the door, expertly pushed him out, and closed the wide double doors. "He wouldn't hurt a mouse, honestly. He makes a big noise about rabbits, but since he tangled with a skunk a year ago he's wary of anything in fur. But a wonderful watchdog."

  Jane had partially recovered. "I do hope he isn't permitted to roam freely. I'd be frightened to go out into my own garden, and I'd feel that the home was threatened."

  Robert winced. But Jonathan was smiling smoothly. "You mustn't worry. Besides, he'll be going away with me eventually." He looked at the woman and tried to conceal his dislike and contempt for her. He turned to Robert.

  "You'll be glad to know I waved old Mrs. Winters out this morning," he said.

  "Did you?" Robert's face was still warm. He said to his mother, "Mrs.. Winters was a patient of Jon's. She died this morning."

  Jane was horrified at both Jonathan's "levity" in the face of death and his look of satisfaction. "One of your patients?" she asked in a meaning tone. "She died—and you're glad?"

  "Very, very glad, Mrs. Morgan. I was very happy for her." His eyes were flat and expressionless as he glanced at Robert's mother.

  She swallowed, then put her handkerchief daintily to her eyes for a moment in acknowledgement of what she called "the Grim Reaper."

  "She was in much pain, perhaps?" she suggested.

  "Not really. Except the pain of living, and now it's all over for her, and I haven't been so pleased for years."

  "A poor woman?" said Jane.

  "No. She had been an heiress and had inherited a lot of money." It was evident to Robert, who was flushing again, that he was enjoying himself at Mrs. Morgan's expense. "And she wasn't very old, either. Probably your own age, Mrs. Morgan."

  "And you're glad she's dead!" But Jane looked with import at her son.

  "Very. I'm usually glad when people die. Dying is nothing. It's pain that is intolerable."

  Jane considered death the ultimate of terrors and superstitiously never entered a house where it had recently visited and never went to cemeteries. She stared blankly at Jonathan and then her eyes squinted as if she were confirming something she had long ago guessed about him, something exceedingly unpleasant and unspeakable. She nodded, quite perceptibly, agreeing with herself. This dreadful man! she thought This, really, monster. What had she heard recently from some newly met ladies? He had had another patient, a little girl, and there had been something quite mysterious about her death—Jane shuddered again and now it was not pretense.

  "I do feel faint," she said to Robert, and then quickly simpered at Jonathan as though trying to placate him as one would attempt to placate a demon, before fleeing. "You must really take me back to the hotel."

  "Yes, Mother." Robert sighed. "Well, is it settled about this house? I must let the lawyers know this afternoon."

  "I'm not overly pleased with this home," said Jane, cautiously edging around Jonathan, tapping her canes smartly. "But I am only your mother, Robert. What pleases you must please me. You mustn't consider me in the slightest"

  Robert gritted his teeth. He did not know whom he detested more at this moment, his mother or Jonathan. Jonathan was smiling idly and striking his leg with his crop. He went to the door and opened it for Jane, but she shrank back. "Coming, Robert?"

  "Yes, Mother," he said. It was extraordinary how he was quite regularly, these days, desiring to hit something very hard. He gave Jonathan a murderous look, but Jonathan merely raised his black eyebrows questioningly. "I hope your dog won't annoy my mother," said Robert. "Where is he now?"

  "Monty? Off inspecting squirrels, I suppose. I'd better go first and corner him. When you hear me whistle, it will be safe. Safe." Jonathan touched his bare head with his crop, in salute to Jane, and went quickly from the room.

  "Oh, dear," said Jane. "I can't stand him, I really can't stand him. He frightens me half to death with his peculiar smile and—"

  "His smile isn't peculiar, Mother. He is just trying to get a rise out of you, and he's succeeding. I'll take you back to the hotel at once." He heard a sharp whistle.

  Jonathan was waiting, holding his dog. The broad steps, farming out, shone like marble in the hot sunlight. It was a charming house, laced with the frail shadow of the leaves, standing calmly alone on its lawns and among its trees. Jonathan said, "I thought you might like to see another patient of mine, Bob. My very last one, the last I'm taking. You ought to look her over."

  He smiled at Robert with broad innocence. But his black eyes were tired and appeared dissipated. "Where shall I meet you?"

  Robert was curt. "At the hospital. St. Hilda's?"

  "Not this time. The Friends'. My patient isn't rich."

  Jane made a mouth at Robert, commanding him to refuse, but he said, "In half an hour, then." He did not look back as he led his
mother down the long and winding walk to the street and his buggy. Jonathan watched them go. Poor devil, he thought. We'll have to work on this very strenuously. He studied Jane's gaunt black back as she hobbled painfully beside her son. A fraud. If she had arthritis, he, Jonathan, had leprosy. He was quite accustomed to these hypochondriacal women who ruled their families with pretended illness and, unfortunately, usually succeeded. One of these days, he said to himself, as he patted Monty, who was showing a desire to accompany Robert, we'll have to expose her and that will be very pleasant. One good kick in the ass and she'd be cured. But we must do it more diplomatically.

  He took Monty to the white fence below the lawns which separated the house from the offices, thrust the protesting dog through the gate, and closed it. "Go on home," he said. "I think Mary's got a bone for you. Stop grinning at me." He reached over the gate and pulled one high ear affectionately. Then, whistling, he went down to the street, where he had tied his horse. It was a great black gelding who remembered more puissant days, for he arched his neck, showed large teeth, and stamped when he saw his master. "You're another fraud," said Jonathan, who mounted dexterously and rode off to the hospital.

  Robert was still sullen when he met Jonathan in the lobby of the large grim building. It was bad enough to have a foolish mother; it wasn't very courteous, however, to make game of one's mother to one's face. Jonathan greeted him kindly. "Miss Meadows will be glad to see you," he said, and tucked Robert's stiff arm in his.

  The Friends' Hospital was strictly utilitarian, but thanks to Jonathan it had become what the older doctors said was "entirely too modern and stark." Jonathan, it was, who had reformed the somewhat archaic system of teaching nurses and had established a nursing school under rigorous discipline. He had also insisted on halving the wards so that none contained more than twelve patients and he had opened windows, ordered dark brown walls to be painted in more cheerful colors and had commanded clean white linoleum on all the floors. The four operating rooms had come under his critical eye, also. Witnesses to operations, he said, must be gowned, capped and masked to avoid contamination of the air. This was all folly to the Chief-of-Staff, Dr. Humphrey Bedloe, and the others on the staff, but as Jonathan had offered to pay for the modernizing of the operating rooms, they consented with smiles of indulgence.

  However, as in St. Hilda's, he had not been successful in his insistence that some of the older surgeons must discard their traditional frock coats and striped trousers and that they should use modern methods of asepsis. The younger ones, trained in better schools, sympathized with him and assured him that time would take care of their elders. "In the meantime these hacks literally get away with murder," he had said. "We should call this place the Morgue."

  The hospital had no spacious grounds as did St. Hilda's. Its hard granite walls jutted straight up from a busy street, and its windows were tall high slits, rounded at the top in an older style. But it was clean, or as clean as Jonathan's constant nagging could make it. It had two floors of private rooms, small but sun-filled now; the other two floors contained the wards, the laboratories, the operating rooms, the kitchens, and the offices and a meeting room for nurses. The doctors had their own quarters, and they also had a restaurant of sorts, forbidden to interns who were usually given a meager tray by student nurses—if the latter happened to remember.

  When Jonathan came here now, he came, he felt, as a stranger, no longer involved. He was not as popular here as he was at St. Hilda's, possibly because he and his family had given the private hospital more money. Very often he encountered resistance and sulky hostility and watchful eyes. He ignored it all. He said to Robert now, "One of these days hospitals will be worse than this. Oh, they'll be cleaner and more modern and very, very big. But they'll be totally indifferent and impersonal. We are already beginning to think of patients as stomachs, livers, colons, uteruses, Tectums, gall bladders, and what all, and not as people. You can't ignore a man's manhood without making him less than a man. You can't insult his humanity by thinking of him as a mere collection of organs without injuring him spiritually and even bodily. An anthill is a fine place for ants, and collective effort is fine for ants. But man is not an ant. I've been reading H. G. Wells recently. He approves of ant life. He also admires Karl Marx, who thought ant communities the most desirable way to live."

  He and Robert were approaching one of the big elevators. The wide corridors hummed with activity. Jonathan pursed his lips. "Remember Shakespeare's eulogy of the bees?

  " 'The singing masons building roofs of gold.' Well, there'll be masons in the future, millions of them, but they won't be singing and the roofs won't be golden. I don't think I'm going to like this century. It already has the combined stink of a hive, or an anthill, where 'man is diminished and he dies in the shadow of the work of his own hands.' But it's not a new story. The ant heaps of Alexandria, Athens, Rome, Thebes, and the others went the way of human ant heaps because man is not an ant and he will never be one. That is, if he takes very good care in the coming decades. He never did in the past. He probably won't now."

  "Cheerful," said Robert, still feeling resentment.

  "No. Just a historian. And I've seen the old crowded ruins, built one cell upon another, like a hive, with all the land around them. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps man is, after all, only a bee or an ant. Sometimes I wonder. 'Creatures that by a rule in nature teach. The act of order to a peopled kingdom.' Shakespeare's darling little bees again. But the 'act of order' declines into chaos; always does. There's something anarchistic in man, and I, for one, don't denounce it. It's our only guarantee against tyranny."

  They went into one of the large elevators. "That reminds me. Here, in Hambledon, we have very lively Fourth of July celebrations. In the square. With a band and flags and howling politicians. You might enjoy seeing how the peasants enjoy themselves."

  "You really hate this place now, don't you?" Robert was still surly.

  "Well, let's put it this way: I don't believe in unrequited love."

  His nonchalance infuriated Robert for some reason. The younger man tugged at his reddish mustache and gave Jonathan a sidelong look. He never saw and talked with Jonathan without feeling heated, disturbed, confused, bewildered, sad or angry. There had been times when he had felt awed and touched; there were more times when he had wanted to punch Jonathan. He no sooner felt admiration but that he immediately felt rage. Jonathan was much too protean for him. He was afraid of the day when he would be alone, and the next moment he could not wait for Jonathan to leave. There was no getting close to Jonathan, no way of approaching him. The slightest effort in that direction was met with sudden coldness or a sardonic remark.

  The back of the old man who was operating the elevator had stiffened, and as Jonathan and Robert left the operator he gave Jonathan a look of intense hatred intensified by the cunning knowingness of his curled mouth. Robert was not feeling entirely friendly toward Jonathan, but he paused a moment to stare with haughty rebuke at the old man, who immediately ducked his head and closed the elevator door. "What is it?" asked Jonathan, but Robert said nothing.

  They walked down a long corridor, then Robert said, "I thought your patient was in a ward,"

  "She was. I took her out and put her in a private room, at my own expense. She has never had real privacy in her life, but now she deserves it. I didn't tell you about her. She has a terminal case of cancer—rectum and colon. The poor old soul could not afford earlier treatment, though I frankly say that I don't think there is any cure for that disease. You can arrest it—sometimes—and in some cases of skin cancer it can be eliminated—sometimes. They disagree with me, of course, but I think it is a systematic disease and not local, not local even when it appears confined. If Miss Meadows had come a year ago or even six months ago, we might have been able to do something, at least to prolong her life. But eventually it would've caught up with her. What are a few more years of life—when one is old and has never lived at all?"

  "Another like Mrs. Winters
?"

  "No, the reverse. She must have been pretty once; she was my first-grade teacher and I remembered her as pretty and as plump and warm as a muffin right from the stove. She must have had what our parents called 'admirers.' But she had younger brothers and sisters, and parents, and somehow teachers get tied in to support the whole damned family. 'It's their duty,' everyone says, when even elementary common sense, not to mention religion, should teach people that their first duty is to satisfy themselves as individuals before they can march off to do something for anyone else. But teachers, I've noticed, are born martyrs. Otherwise, they wouldn't be teachers. Dedicated souls. I wonder why? I can pick kids out who will end up teachers. They just foam with a quiet sense of responsibility.

  "So Miss Anne Meadows, the dedicated, responsible soul who loved everybody, and wanted to 'serve' everybody, in the ineffable way of teachers, supported her parents and put her brothers and sisters on their feet. Nobody was grateful; no one ever thought poor Anne was entitled to a life of her own. She was only doing 'that which was proper.' No one even dreamed that perhaps Anne might like to marry and have her own children and retire from the damnable weariness of struggling with obdurate young things who didn't want to learn anything in the first place. She was just Anne Meadows, a teacher, with a 'duty.' She never complained.

  "Well, the brothers and sisters went off, after an education provided by their sister, and insofar as they were concerned, the parents were still Anne's responsibility. She must have agreed. By this time she was fifty and I've noticed that the

  parents of schoolteachers seem to live to be incredibly old. Then she was sixty, and the parents were still alive, hut they were pettish and complaining and senile, and Anne had to endure them after a full day's work. Then she was sixty-five, and God apparently became aware of her—belatedly—and took her parents off her hands.

  "One brother and one nephew came to their funerals. My mother and I were there—but I was the only former pupil. I'd seen Miss Meadows over the years and tried to convince her that she had a duty to herself, first of all, but the poor soul was honestly shocked. That's another symptom of the teacher-malady. Now she is sixty-eight. Her eyesight failed; she had to retire. On the most miserable little pension you ever heard of. I did hear of it. I sent her a cashier's check anonymously every month; otherwise she'd have starved and done scrubbing or something to make ends meet. She never hears from her family; they've forgotten she exists. After all, don't schoolteachers make such 'large salaries'? Anne was never able to save a cent. But, again, she never complained.