Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  "And you probably think these things about your sons, too."

  "Jon, don't sound so hard and unforgiving."

  The dinner bell chimed softly, and Marjorie rose and Jon with her. Once he staggered a little. "I only know this," he said, "you were closer to Harald than to me, and yet you imply that Harald is more like my father. Inconsistent. Are you coming?"

  Neither Marjorie nor Jonathan was notable for loquacity even when they felt no strain between them, merely passing pleasant remarks or none at all during the hours they dined together. In this, Marjorie had once reflected, Jonathan resembled herself. Harald was more like his father; they both liked conversation. It was as if words protected them in some manner, kept a bright and defensive barrier between them and what it was they had always feared. What had they feared? Marjorie had been reared in an atmosphere where it was considered unpardonable even to speculate about those deep and hidden sanctuaries of the human spirit in others, and worse even to comment about them. The retreats of a beloved child, or wife or husband, were inviolate and it was indefensible to assault them. It was the lowest vulgarity and outrage of all, it was a Peeping Tom voyeurism engaged in only by the obscene of heart. Therefore, if Adrian Ferrier had obviously feared others—though Marjorie admitted that it was wise to fear your fellowman to some extent—the fear had been out of proportion, invariably, to his routine run of living and circumstance.

  But then, she had thought, we always turn a facade to others behind which we watch and wait, hope or fear, love or hate, pray or curse. That is our privacy, that facade. We all have our individual approach to the world, and if Adrian fears that is his particular response to life, and no stranger than belligerence, suspicion, amiability, trust or mistrust, responsiveness or unresponsiveness, exploitation or charity. Even animals have their particular reaction to their immediate life and environment, and none is the same as another's.

  Tonight, as they ate their dinner together and drank their wine, Marjorie and Jonathan were unusually silent even for them. The thunderstorm had burst out from its lair beyond the mountains and was assaulting the small city and the river with fire and great explosions. Mother and son were not aware of it. Marjorie was already regretting that she had so violated her code as to speak intimately of her dead husband to Jonathan. It was disgraceful. She had held her husband's secret—which he had never guessed she knew, just as he had lived unaware that there was anything at all to guess about him—to herself alone. To reveal Adrian as he had been, even to his son, was particularly shameful, and she was disgusted and appalled at herself. She recalled every word she had said. What had been the matter with her, to descend to such betrayal, such vulgarity? It was all those months of strain, which were not ending but only mounting, and the dread in which she lived and the daily terror, and the obvious decay of Jonathan and his increasing addiction to drinking, and the wild beast which he denied existed but which was mangling him. And Harald, too, and Jenny. The world was full of menace. Of course, she reflected, it always had been full of menace, for it was a mysterious and dangerous place despite all the songs of its "wonder" and sweetness and "love," and all its ridiculous slogans concerning the "progress of man," but its threat remained faceless until it entered one's own house. Then, as the door opened to admit it, one saw the abyss just beyond the garden, the innocent, lying garden.

  She saw that Jonathan's exhaustion appeared to be growing. His color was extremely bad, the sallowness accentuated. He was drinking the good wine not with pleasure but with grim absentmindedness. He had told her nothing of the operation he had performed not very long ago, nor who had so suffered. That was not unusual; he rarely mentioned his cases. But Marjorie saw that he had totally forgotten who had lain unconscious under his hands that day, and this was indeed unusual for him.

  She wanted to say to him, "Forgive me for telling you what I knew about your father. I have no excuse; it was degrading of me. Why did I tell you? I don't know, my dear. I never told anyone else. Malice didn't inspire me, nor indifference, nor dislike. I liked your father as a person to the day he died, and was often fond of him. I still don't know why I told you. It was very wrong, for you loved him dearly and believed in him."

  Her thought suddenly stopped as she remembered that Jonathan had had no objection at all to her removing the absurd and stylized painting of "The Storm" after Adrian had died. In fact, he had remarked—he had not yet been twenty-three—"I've always despised that thing. It's ridiculous and pretentious and a dozen other things, though I suppose our Harald would call it well-drawn." Marjorie put down her coffee spoon in surprise, and stared at Jonathan, who sat in his father's place in the thunder-vibrating soft light and subdued glitter and pale elegance of the dining room. Certainly, Jonathan had said that, and how strange of her not to have remembered. It had been Harald who had always laughed at "The Storm," but not Jonathan. Adrian had disliked Shakespeare and had read poetry to Jonathan by the hour in his secluded library, but it had been Keats and Whitman and Emily Dickinson and Wordsworth and Browning and Tennyson and Longfellow—particularly Longfellow. He had read prose to Jonathan from the latter's earliest childhood, but it had been Dickens and never Thackeray, Dumas never Zola.

  There had been plays, too, but Sheridan never Molière or Gounod—and, back to the poets, Byron, with the exception of Don Juan, Whitman but not Milton. Music was his particular adoration, he would say, but he preferred Mozart to Wagner, Schubert to Beethoven, Liszt to Bach. In short, he had lacked an awareness of grandeur and terror. It was as if they had been only alien words to him, accepted in the dictionary and in books but never in reality.

  It was Jonathan who loved Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Molière, Gounod, and the mighty Teutonic composers. It was Jonathan who, even as a child, had glimpsed the abysses of life and rarely the gardens, who had known the terror of living and the presence of evil. His father had told him nothing of these, yet he had known. Why, then, had he so loved his father and had resentfully turned away from the most amiable, if jesting, remark his mother had made about him? Marjorie nodded to the girl who assisted the cook and accepted fresh tea. Jon had not touched his dinner, but he was filling his wineglass again, and his face was exceptionally gloomy even for him and exceptionally closed. There was a glaze over his eyes. He was almost drunk. His food was congealing on his plate, and the thunder drummed against the tall and shining glass of the windows and the lightning illuminated them at frequent intervals.

  I know, thought Marjorie with sadness. He considered Adrian a child, even when he was a child himself, and he thought he must protect him from his family and from living. But perhaps more than anything else he thought that Adrian was kind, and Jonathan has always been particularly vulnerable to kindness in others, because even as a child he knew that kindness, true kindness, was a very rare thing in this world, and he could not bear the knowing. Poor child.

  What had Father McNulty said of him only a few months ago? "Jon is not really a complex man, Mrs. Ferrier. Once I thought so, but now I know that is not true. He is very simple, in the most august and touching way possible. He appears complicated to people, and ambiguous, because he is not a liar, and isn't that a terrible commentary on people and unworthy of a priest? But, it is true. The devious man is always spoken of by his friends as being 'candid' and 'frank,' whereas the exact reverse is correct. People just can't believe simplicity like Jon's. It's labyrinthine to them and I'm afraid that is a sad comment on the state of human nature. Jon just is, and no one accepts a man for what he shows the world.

  Men believe that others, like themselves, are always hiding. But Jon never turned a false face and a lying one to his fellowman. He has the attribute of both the saint and the simpleton—he is himself. And that is the cause of his misery, and probably the cause of his unhappiness as a child, as you have told me yourself. That is why he cannot accept lies in others or contemptible behavior in others, and forgiveness is not in him."

  Marjorie had had to agree, after some thought "And he does
n't know what fear is," she had said.

  "True," said Father McNulty. "The man who is utterly himself before the world, without guile and cruelty and artfulness, thinks he has nothing to fear. But he has. He has his fellowman. I'm afraid Jon is beginning to suspect that he should fear, but he rejects the very idea. He couldn't live in a world of fear; it would choke him. He didn't fear the judge and the jury because, in his simplicity, he believed that lack of guilt would prove itself overwhelmingly. The wounds he carries now are the result of the actions and words of others against him, and he can't forgive them."

  "And why should he?" Marjorie had asked with deep bitterness.

  Jonathan had never confided in her in all his life but twice, and she still did not understand why. He had told her of two events. Was it possible, she thought tonight as she sipped her tea, that he instinctively understood that only she would understand his indictments of humanity and that his father would not?

  The first incident had been when he was nine years old. He was leaving his school grounds when he saw several large boys tormenting a smaller one, a sniveling, disliked, groveling boy, advertising his apprehension of his mates at all times and his frightened desire to placate them so that they would not hurt him. Marjorie knew the boy and his parents, and had once asked Jonathan why he was not kind to the lad. "He is such a measly coward," Jonathan had replied with scorn, and yet with pity.

  But on that wintry day, he had seen the tormenting of the boy and it had enraged him. Without thinking at all—and how often did Jonathan even now pause to think of himself? —he had lunged at the youths, who were all older than he, and his frenzy of disgust for them, and his hatred that they could torment one weaker, had given him abnormal strength and fury. He had driven them off a distance and had rescued their victim, who was sniveling and weeping, as usual, and crying for his mother.

  The momentarily vanquished soon became aware that a single boy was responsible both for denying them their victim and their present smartings, and they advanced on Jonathan like a phalanx and had roughly beaten him up, including blackening his eyes and bloodying his nose. Among his attackers, and the most gleeful, had been the boy he had rescued. When he tore away from his schoolmates and ran— prudently, for Jonathan—the loudest and most derisive catcall had come from the lad he had saved from pain and blows.

  "Why?" he had asked his mother, standing before her with his thin legs apart and his torn and bruised face both challenging and furious.

  She had said, "You had become the unpopular minority."

  He had shook his head fiercely. "That don't—doesn't—explain why Timmy kicked me, too, and jeered at me. Why didn't he just run away? Why did he just stay, and—and—"

  "Make common cause with his enemies? Against you? Jonathan, that's hard to explain to you now. It's both subtle and ordinary. Human nature isn't a pleasant thing to think about-—"

  But unfortunately Jonathan's father had just then entered the morning room and he, after one appalled exclamation of sympathy and astonishment, had swept Jonathan to him and had held him richly to his heart, murmurous and clucking. Marjorie had watched and her features, so like her son's, had closed and tightened. She had waited in silence while Jonathan asked his questions of his father. Adrian held the boy on his knee now, and was stroking his head tenderly, and his blue eyes, a little vacant and protruding, were misted. He had stared musingly into space, considering what Jonathan had asked him. Eventually, a radiant smile—the one which Marjorie particularly loathed—suffused his face like a beaming halo.

  "It's very simple, Jonathan," Adrian had said. "The children aren't yet civilized, gentled. They don't understand. Children are so dear and so innocent! So pure, so good. If they do what others consider evil, it really is not evil. It is only lack of understanding or perhaps wicked teachings from their parents. You must think of them kindly and forgive and forget, knowing that Man does Progress, and Man does become Good, when reaching maturity."

  Marjorie had felt a little sick, as she always did when her husband emphatically and resoundingly affirmed his faith in humanity. Jonathan, on his father's knee, had looked at him oddly—and why hadn't she, Marjorie, remembered that either until now? Then Jonathan had smiled as if at a child who must not be hurt, and then he had given his mother one of his fierce looks as if warning her not to speak.

  The thunder seemed to have picked this old and beautiful house for its particular enemy tonight, for there was a stunning crash. Neither Marjorie, sunken in her revery, nor Jon, growing more drunk by the moment, was aware of it. Marjorie was saying to herself, "I was always getting those looks from Jon, but, God forgive me, it wasn't until just now that I remember them and understand them. It was always my damned reticence—I never explored. I thought it unbecoming and indecent. But still, Jon even as a little boy was always protecting his father. He would have resented it if I had let him know that I, too, knew that his father was a fool. How strange is human nature! We guard what is least worthy of guarding and leave vulnerable what it is most necessary to protect—for our soul's sake."

  Jonathan never spoke of that incident again, but for a long time he would watch Marjorie acutely until he was convinced that she had forgotten it and was therefore no longer a danger to her husband and his serene convictions that if one just ignored the ugliness of the world, or smoothed it over with platitudes, it would not exist.

  He was a coward, and I never knew it until now, thought Marjorie. Or did I?

  Jonathan was a very religious boy. He was also an altar boy. On a few occasions he had spoken seriously of the priesthood. "Oh, not that," Marjorie, the Protestant, had said with a light laugh before husband and son. "You aren't up to it, Jon. You'd be the terror of the Confessional. You'd have no patience with human nature. You don't really understand it at all, and you are now fifteen. Yon hate evil, hut you don't comprehend the causes of evil, and how deep it lies in the human spirit. In foro interno, to use Latin."

  Adrian spoke ponderously. " 'In foro interno.' I deny that, Marjorie. Evil is external to man, not in him. As Rousseau has said—"

  "Why don't you tell that to Father McGuire?" Marjorie had asked, losing her usual patience. "He would tell you that it is a doctrine of the Church that man is conceived in sin, born in sin, and has no merit of his own and can earn no merit. What merit he has has been given to him by God, and God alone. By himself he is incapable of being good or meritorious, incapable of his own salvation—because, as Solomon has said, 'Man is wicked from his birth and evil from his youth.'"

  "You seem to be well acquainted with the doctrines of the Church, Marjorie," Adrian had replied with his heavy irony, "and so I often wonder why you don't ask to be admitted. By the way, I've never heard those doctrines, or they are probably now outmoded. Man is Good—"

  "Then you believe that God lies when He says that 'None save God is good?'"

  Adrian was shocked. "I don't believe that is in the Holy Bible—"

  Marjorie nodded, smiling. "Yes, it is. In St. Luke, and you can find it for yourself. It is a strange thing, but I have noticed that at no time did God or His Son ever break into eulogies about the 'goodness' of man. On the contrary! There are constant references in the Bible about the infamy of man and his need for redemption, and his innate evil. But never goodness."

  "Nonsense," said Adrian. His well-colored face, so like Harald's, had deeply flushed and Marjorie, with sudden compunction, saw that he was afraid. "Didn't a man, recorded in the Holy Bible, say 'Am I my brother's keeper?' A magnificent question!"

  "It was asked by Cain," said Marjorie. "Cain, the murderer, the father of murderers, the rejected of God."

  The silence that had fallen in the room had had a little terribleness in it. Adrian had sat, and now his fright was visible, and he was hating his wife openly. Jon looked at him, and he put his hand on his father's cheek, again in that attitude of protection, and Marjorie, for a moment, had irritably despised her son. There was surely a limit to indulging fools and pretentiousness a
nd ignorance! She said, "The answer God gave to that 'magnificent question' was, I believe, 'Your brother's blood cries up to Me from the ground against you.' And so it always was, and so it always is."

  "You have no pity, Marjorie."

  And there, thought Marjorie tonight, was a perfect example of the perfect non sequitur. But people, when concerned in fantasies and sentimentalities, invariably resorted, with hatred and indignation, to it

  Jon that night, at fifteen, had said nothing. But once again he had warned his mother off, had demanded, by a long hard black stare at her, not to hurt his father. He knew, thought Marjorie, as she touched her napkin to her lips tonight and for once becoming aware of the storm outside, and the growing tension and heat in the long and beautiful dining room, indeed he knew, but he rebelled against my knowing that he knew. He's still not over his resentment against me for knowing, and for "hurting" his father, and that is part of his trouble. How singleminded he was, and is! How still he will not accept the obvious!

  And there was Harald, who had at first accepted his father as Jonathan had accepted him. But not after he was fourteen years old. Thereafter he had known Adrian for exactly what he was! Was that why Jonathan even today disliked him so? How very contradictory and intricate and secret and manifold mankind was, and how very, very strange! Jon, in these days, was frequently relieving himself of the most bitter comments on his fellowman, even beyond the bounds of decent pity, and he was speaking with cynicism and even hatred. How much of it did he believe himself, or was he speaking in despair and hoping to be refuted? Or at least hoping that it might be hidden from him, thus permitting him to live again in a little peace? Or what, or who, was he protecting? The memory of his father?