Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  How sorrowful it is that men cannot gather together, even on so innocent an occasion as this, without undercurrents of darkness, malice, hatred and bitter hearing and misunderstanding, thought the young priest, whose wise eyes had seen everything.

  "We might as well have our dinner now," said Marjorie, "before all those awful speeches begin."

  The German Brass Band sprang violently into "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!" For the mayor, Emil Schuman, was greeting fresh arrivals on the steps, ladies with big hats and parasols. There was Louis Hedler and Humphrey Bedloe and other members of the staff of the two hospitals, and several clergymen, and Colonel Jeremiah Hadley, late of the Grand Army of the Republic, sixty and gray but tall and stately in his Union blue and medals. He bowed to the ladies, and was seated next to the Senator and his sister, and then folded his military arms and looked at the veterans across the square from him. His severe face changed and he dropped his head for a moment.

  "I've heard," said Jane Morgan, giving Marjorie her usual cold and knowing look, "that there is a much more refined gathering today in the park near the river, without all this noise and these howling children and the more vulgar classes."

  "Yes," said Marjorie, laying the warm rolls on a silver dish. "But this is the traditional place and the traditional celebration. We in Hambledon have been meeting here for this picnic every year, from far back before the Civil War, ever since Hambledon was a village and not a town. You will notice that Senator Campion is here, and the mayor, and other important people of Hambledon, though I did hear a rumor they are joining the others near the river after the speeches."

  "And no wonder," said Jane Morgan. "Such a fearful noise! And that horrible band! Why can't it be quiet even for a minute?" The band was once again begging the noisy mob if "there are any more home like you?" and in falsetto the flutes were replying that indeed "there are quite a few, kind sir!" Firecrackers affirmed this in violent chorus.

  Last year I was sitting on those stairs with Mavis, Jonathan was thinking. I was one of the town's honored "dignitaries." Today I am the pariah, the outcast, the nobody, the despised and the rejected. A man may be innocent until he is proved guilty, but no one seems to have taken that seriously at any time. Mavis. He glanced at the City Hall steps and could see Mavis there among all that colorful gathering, shining and sparkling and laughing, nodding gaily to admirers, unfolding her white lace fan, laughing naughtily behind it while her small blue eyes twinkled and flirted. She had ignored him, as she always ignored him, but when her glance did touch him, it became full of ridicule and contempt and genuine dislike. It never failed to chill him, that glance, however much he detested her and knew her for what she was. It did not abash or cow or sadden him. It was just that he remembered his wasted years with Mavis, and his appalling former infatuation for her, his dismal love and passion, his hopes, his longings.

  Today, he did not feel his old hatred for his dead wife. He felt only miserable regret that he had endured those years in proud silence. Pride. Was it pride to keep silent and to do nothing? If he had done—something—Mavis might be alive, not in his house but somewhere else, and he would not be here now, still suspected of an enormous crime. He might even have divorced her. He had thought of that very often during the years with Mavis—but on what grounds? Or, had he been afraid of scandal? I was a coward, he thought. What was it that damned priest said to me one day? "Jon, you are a brave man, but you are not a courageous one. I remember an old poem—can't think of the author: 'Courage is the price that life demands for granting peace. The soul that knows it not knows no release—from little things.' "

  Perhaps he was right, thought Jonathan with anger. I probably never did have much courage, and that's a hell of a thing to recognize when you are thirty-five and your life is more than half over! I've backed away from things all my life, such as conspiring with my father that he was an intellectual man, and conspiring with him that my mother was brutal and insensitive—and all the other things that no man of courage would have endured for a second.

  The roaring of the crowd, the bursting explosions, the band—all the screaming and singing and laughing—disappeared from his consciousness, and he was again in the courtroom, before the judge and the jury, listening to the prosecuting attorney, seeing the dull averted faces, the harsh and cunning faces, against a background of grimy snow hissing against the dirty windows. He had not been afraid of any of them and had even smiled grimly at the prosecuting attorney's denunciation of him as a "ruthless, cruel, bloody-handed murderer of his young and beautiful wife and his unborn child. A calculating, callous murderer! Gentlemen, shall this man go free, and live, with that blameless blood on his hands? Dare you to dismiss him to laugh at you and our Great, Noble, Free American Justice?"

  No, he had not been afraid. I should have been afraid, he thought now. I should have been scared out of my wits. Had I lacked fear because I heartily believed that innocence would never suffer unjust punishment? I've called others naive. I was the naive one. This is a disastrous world. I always knew it was, even when I was a child, yet I did not believe it until now.

  He looked at his mother, so smiling, so calm and attentive to her guests, so proud and graceful, and he saw her sick paleness, the shadows under her eyes, the lines of patient pain about her patrician mouth. He was ashamed. He had no words to say to her to ask her forgiveness. He had never listened to her, rejecting her even before she spoke, yet she had always been right. Had her very rightness antagonized him, her very serene acceptance of the enigma of living—which he had found it impossible to accept, though he was not blind and not stupid?

  I am my father's son also, he thought with scorn. I had to have my shiny little playthings too, my sweet little delusions. I am pretty much of a mess.

  The band crashed into "Hail, Columbia, Happy Land!" and the crowd rose in a mass of hot color and cheered and sang lustily and waved small flags and saluted and lit fresh firecrackers, and the sun beat down and all the air was heavy with the smell of food and beer and dust and crushed grass and gunpowder.

  Jonathan, too, stood up. In doing so he accidentally lurched against the rising Jenny at his side, and he instinctively caught her as she stumbled, and his arms was about her waist and her cheek near his hps. They stood like statues, stricken into stillness, and then, very slowly, she looked at him, lifting those enormous blue eyes to his, and turning even whiter than before. They could not look away. He felt the girl's body trembling under his hand, and then, to his amazement and tremendous emotion, he saw a blaze of light pass over her face and he saw her lips part.

  He dropped his hand. He muttered, "Sorry." But he, too, was trembling. He looked at her again. Her face was now averted from him. She was looking at the courthouse stairs. Jenny, he thought. I must have imagined it. Not Jenny! Not Jenny, his brother's doxy. There was a sick and broken disintegration all through his thoughts and body.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Senator Kenton Campion, in all his florid handsomeness, his chestnut handsomeness, followed Mayor Schuman to the lectern, and everyone cheered and clapped, for he was very popular. "The friend of the people." The town loved him for his appearance, his money, the little scandals about him, his smiles, his geniality, his repeated stories—and his constant excellent press. He bowed to the crowds, gravely acknowledged the salutes of the veterans, bowed to his fellow dignitaries, lifted his hands like a loving father to still the shouts and the screamed greetings and the flurry of flags. His sister, Beatrice, glowed like the sun behind him, proud to the point of tears, which she wiped away with a lace handkerchief.

  The Senator shone upon his acclaimers when they became smilingly quiet. He wore a long frocked coat and dignified striped trousers and an old-fashioned soft, white rolling collar and a broad black tie, neatly fastened with a diamond pin. His bare head, with its smooth chestnut waves, was vivid in the sun. He was every inch the Senator, the dignitary, the beloved native son, the son of his people, the one who preferred to live in little Hambledon in
stead of Philadelphia, where he rightfully belonged. The crowd loved him dearly. He, the familiar of Presidents and Governors, yearly condescended to speak to them here, not as their superior but as one of them, a prince among his subjects, not patronizing them but honoring them in himself.

  His voice, big and mellifluous, filled the whole square, and it was rich with emotion.

  "Dear friends," he said, "dear neighbors, dear brothers and sisters! Again, on this glorious Fourth, this noble Day of Independence from an old tyranny and oppression, I come to address you, your servant, address you humbly and with gratitude for the love you have shown me, the support you have showered on me, the trust you have bestowed on me. How can I express to you what this means, what this does to my heart as a man, to my immortal soul, to all my emotions and sensibility?" He struck his broad chest with his fist.

  "Oh, God," muttered Jonathan, and refilled his empty glass with beer. But no one heard for the crowd was cheering thunderously again and the flags were again flurrying and the band struck up an exultant chord, and everyone was clapping. Even the Senator's cynical friends on the courthouse stairs were applauding and beaming at each other in approval, and Jonathan, seeing that, snorted. He leaned his cheek on his hand, not in the boredom he affected, but in order to control himself, to understand that bounding passion he had felt when he had held Jenny, and to swallow down his wretchedness and horror and dismay and revulsion, and to analyze that sense of sorrow he was knowing beyond any sorrow he had ever known. Jenny was sitting near him again, rigid and unseeing as before.

  The Senator, having overcome his sensibility and his natural delicate rapture at being home with his dear friends again, had resumed his speech, his arms lifted for emphasis, his white hands fluttering to accent a point. He was eloquent and powerful, and the crowd became utterly silent. Jonathan had missed some flowery periods.

  "—and so, on this glorious day, dedicated to our freedom, our liberty, our sacred honor, our nobility and heroism as Americans, our ancestry of proud and fearless men, our vows to our God and our country, our pledges to all humanity of peace and love and tranquil relations, I speak to you, dear friends, out of the depths of my overflowing spirit, to prepare you for the destiny awaiting you in this magnificent, exciting, sunlit century, your destiny, beyond which the world has never known before!"

  "What's that?" muttered Jonathan, and now he forgot everything and concentrated on the Senator's speech, which was oddly unlike any he had given before on this day.

  "Our destiny!" sang the Senator, and his voice broke, then rose to glorious heights. "Our immutable destiny, written in the stone of ages, inscribed from the beginning in the heart of God, prophesied in sacred books! This is our nation, the new Jerusalem, land of milk and honey, the new Israel, the new world! Oh, what glories await us, what prides, what accomplishments, what accolades, what ecstasies of selfless progress, what inventiveness, what leadership—in this new century of ours, this newly minted century pressed into our hands by the Hosts of Heaven!"

  "What the hell?" said Jonathan, moving quickly on the bench. But no one heard him. Robert Morgan was still staring raptly at Jenny, who stared at nothing, and Jane Morgan stared at her son, and Maude stared at Robert, and Marjorie, overcome by heat and noise and illness, was quietly dozing on the bench, leaning against a tree trunk, and the Kitcheners were politely and dazedly listening, trying not to sleep and trying to be polite to the resplendent Senator, and not caring or understanding a word. Only Jonathan listened, and the priest, and the priest's face was uneasy and grave.

  "Are we ready for our destiny?" demanded the Senator, turning from side to side to pierce the crowds with his burning eyes. "Have we prayed humbly enough, have we dedicated ourselves enough, have we understood enough, have we sacrificed enough, to be worthy of this, our destiny before the face of history, our destiny which throws into shadow the empires of Greece and Egypt and Babylonia and Persia and Rome? And, yes! The passing empire of Great Britain, the challenging empire of Germany, of Austria-Hungary, of the little yellow men beyond the Pacific? Have we prayed, friends? Have we comprehended the scepter extended to us by the Lord of the Ages, the crown offered to us by endless millions of the oppressed and homeless in expectation, the jeweled path laid before us by the Russian Empire, the palms spread at our feet by the pagan Spice Islands, the pleas raised to us by the toiling masses—everywhere in the world?"

  "My God!" said Jonathan aloud. He looked about the table, at the glazed Kitcheners, at his dozing mother, at the still profile of Jenny, at the staring Robert, the staring Maude and the staring Jane. But no one replied. Then his eyes encountered the alarmed golden eyes of Father McNulty, and for a long moment they gazed at each other in mutual perturbation. They still looked at each other while the somewhat puzzled but enthusiastic crowds roared in response to the Senator's words. They disliked the word "empire," which they had been taught in their schools was a noxious and suspect word, synonymous with European and Oriental despotisms, and from which America had escaped in 1775. They knew they should show their disapproval of the fatal word, and they did, and leaned raptly toward the Senator.

  He smiled in ripe satisfaction. "Let me quote America's great poet!" he shouted. "Walt Whitman—about America. T hear America singing, the varied carols I hear!' Ah, most moving words, most triumphant, most glorious words! T hear America singing!' How poignant they are, a great democratic empire singing, from coast to coast, from border to border, in exultation of power and glory in the name of freedom for all men! Have we been deaf to these exalted words? Have we sunk in personal aggrandizement that we are deaf to our destiny?

  "No! No! A thousand times No! We know what we are, we know our manifest destiny, and let the cowards shrink, the puling whimper, the weaklings hide! We know what path we must take! Shall we recoil, heed clinging hands, hear treasonable voices, pause in our mighty giant stride into the future? A thousand times No!"

  The crowd, more puzzled than ever, but enchanted by all the ringing periods, roared a thunderous "No!" But the veterans were sitting up now, and Colonel Jeremiah Hadley was upright, and he stared at the Senator as if at a basilisk or a Gorgon.

  The Senator was rolling again. "We are a great, tremendous, peaceful country. The land has not been recently disturbed by war except briefly for the Spanish-American conflict, which we fought only under the most awful provocation and to free Cuba and the other oppressed. But that is past history. William Jennings Bryan and his sixteen-to-one, Single Tax and fiery exhortations, have come to nothing, though the corpse will twitch now and then. The dawn of the new century has come. The day of multitudes of automobiles, which will soon crowd our roads and demand of us greater roads, greater than the roads of Rome, which led everywhere. The dawn has arrived when a weak government in Washington must rise and undertake new responsibilities, for the new empire, for the new America!"

  "Christ!" said Jonathan in a loud voice, but only the priest, and perhaps Jenny, heard him.

  The Senator was shining like the sun at all the plaudits he was receiving, and if he saw hundreds of baffled faces, he did not care, nor did he care for Colonel Hadley's deep frown nor the perturbation of the veterans. He had the public ear, the naive and accepting ear, the easily deceived ear which loved grand sounds and mighty slogans.

  The Senator resumed. "Let the world beware! America is on the march! The growth of our nation can be heard like mounting thunder. The gawky and bashful maiden has grown to gigantic stature, and is looking with arrogant confidence at an amazed Europe. Behind her millions of mighty acres, smoking mills and foundries, tremendous cities whose like has never greeted eye before, the power of our mighty right arm is visible! In our veins is the tumult of resistless blood. In our hearts is the strength of centuries. Little wonder now, when we raise a jubilant shout, challenging and joyful and young. Europe listens!"

  "I bet," said Jonathan. "And she'd better listen hard. The whole damned world had better listen to this mountebank, whose name is legion in Washington n
ow."

  "Yes," said the priest, and looked with greater alarm at the Senator.

  Jonathan thought of what young Francis Campion had told him, and a hot thick rage rose in his throat and he said to himself, Is it really possible that a man will conspire against his own country for power, for money, for lust of position, for hatred of the human race? Yes, it was more than possible. The wrecks of ancient civilizations were littered with the names of such evil men, who had brought down their world to destruction and death and had reveled in it, out of some diabolic ambition or mad enthusiasm. Satanism. Jonathan had always jeered at the word. Now, reluctantly, in his disturbance, he wondered.

  "What an inheritance is ours!" exultantly shouted the Senator. "I have spoken of humility. But let us not be humble any longer! To pretend to be so is to reject our God's plan for us! And what is that plan? Let me quote a great British poet— though I do not admire the British. Tennyson is his name, and he was very prophetic, though he wrote several decades ago:

  " 'Men, my brothers, men the workers, ever reaping something new;

  That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do.

  " 'For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

  Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

  " 'Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

  "'Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew,

  From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;

  " 'Far along the world-wide whisper of the southwind rushing warm,

  With the standards of the peoples plunging through the thunderstorm;

  " 'Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd,

  In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world!'"

  The sonorous music of the poetry delighted the crowds except for the veterans and Colonel Hadley, and Jonathan Ferrier and the priest. They delighted, simply, in resonance and harmony. They roared their approval and did not understand in the least. To the simple American the music was enough, and they did not hear anything ominous.