Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  "Do you remember when you came to see Jonas recently, when I was so afraid of him? Well, after you left, he went up to his bedroom and closed the door and I don't know why I should have listened to him telephone. I never did before. He was calling Senator Campion, and he said they should have a talk, a little talk. And then he said, 'But we have to make very, very sure, Kent, and build up quite a case, here and there, so Ferrier will be finished once and for all.' That's what he said, Jon. 'Finished once and for all, not only in the state but in the whole country, too.' " She gave a little dry gasp. Then she took out a little golden case in which she kept her violet-scented Turkish cigarettes, and Ion lit one for her. Even over his anger and consternation he remembered the odor of those cigarettes in Prissy's little house, in her tasteful and gracious parlor where she met her friends, and friends they were.

  "Oh, Jon, what did you ever do to the old son of a bitch that he should try to hurt you? Oh, you've joked with him and made fun of him to his face, but he always laughed and seemed to enjoy it."

  "I don't think he did, Prissy, and I never intended that he should. I let him know that there was one in this town who knew all about his pious lies and sweet mouthings and Christian tolerance and soft pattings-of-arms, and tender voice." He got up, walked about slowly, then stood behind his desk, staring down blankly at it, rubbing a little dust with one dark finger. Prissy watched him with acute and loving anxiety. "A man will forgive you if you catch him in larceny, or even in a great lie, or if you best him in business or undercut him or rob him, or even if you run off with his wife or ravish his daughter. But he'll never forgive you for catching him out in hypocrisy, or calling him a psalm-singing rascal to his face. After all, he's spent a lifetime polishing up his public image as a saint, and garlanding it, and gilding it with a halo, and he washed that image's feet until they are as white as snow and arranged every damned fold in its heavenly toga. From childhood he has practiced the saintly voice as sedulously as a singer practices, until every modulation is full of music and prayerful sanctity and as round as an organ note. Then comes along a suicidal idiot like me and knocks the plaster image over and it cracks, and out crawl the black smelly worms of pure iniquity for everyone to see. No, Prissy. A man never forgives that."

  "But, Jon, I've known a lot of bad men, and they even enjoyed being told they were bad—"

  "But not one who pretended that he had the personal Ear of the Lord Himself. Old Jonas is a disaster, as I don't need to tell you. He's destroyed more people with his sweetness and light and loving voice and ways than a maniac will do with poison or a gun. And even his victims will tell you, with tremolos, that 'Jonas is such a good man, such a saint!' It wasn't his pawing fault that catastrophe happened to you, or you are sick at heart, or undone, or broken, or despairing, of scared out of your wits by menacing shadows. Oh, no. It was really your own fault. Jonas did everything he could to help you. Wasn't he always there, purring and fondling and sighing, and advising? Yes, indeed."

  "I wish there was a way of getting away with murder!" said Prissy through her clenched white teeth. She beat her small knees with her gloved hands. Her large blue eyes flashed.

  "So do I. I've thought the law was most unfair about murder," said Jon. "Murder is as deep an instinct in the human soul as self-preservation, or sex, and just as valid and perhaps just as healthy. After all, our cave ancestors practiced it with fervor and thought nothing of it. That still lies under our civilization, in spite of religion, and those who deny it are cowards afraid to face the truth or ashamed of it."

  Jon came back to her and sat down.

  "Jon, what do you think the old—scoundrel—is trying to do to you?"

  "I don't know, my love. I wish I did."

  "Why don't you go to him and ask?"

  "And cause you trouble? No, Prissy. Besides, he'd just give me that darling haunted look of his, his precious innocent look, and be all bewildered and heartbroken. He might even burst into tears! No, Prissy, don't even think of leaving him. He can't live forever. Even the Devil gets impatient for his own at last and one of these days, soon I hope, you will be a rich and happy widow."

  She was so deeply distressed for him that he made himself smile and he took her hand again. "Dear Prissy, I can fight my own battles, and what you've told me is not news to me. They can scheme and plot, but they can't hurt me, dear."

  "Truly, Jon?"

  "Truly."

  She kissed him, and he kissed her pleasurably in return, and saw her out, veiled again, and Miss Forster stopped her typing and was full of curiosity. Before Jon went back into his office, she said, "Doctor, I deposited two large checks in your .account three weeks ago for examinations you gave to two ladies last November—before—-before—"

  "Before my trial, dear. Yes. When did the money come in?"

  "Oh, I forgot. They weren't checks. They were cash. Should I have put it in Dr. Morgan's account, seeing he bought your practice?" She looked as if she were about to cry, for she was very devoted to Jonathan.

  "Well, no. They were old accounts. How much?"

  "One was for fifty dollars, the other for seventy-five." She consulted her books. "A Miss Louise Wertner, and a Miss Mary Snowden. I receipted the bills and they took them away. Then I wanted to make a note in their folders, but there were no folders in your files." She frowned worriedly. "I know you throw away old cards and folders, Doctor, but you should wait at least three years. You never know."

  "Never know what? We don't have income tax any longer, dear heart, to pay for any war. No use cluttering up your files." He recalled that he had thrown away Edna Beamish's record, too, and for some reason he felt a vague disquiet.

  "Well, anyway," said Miss Forster with disapproval. She was very meticulous. "Do you recall those young women, Doctor?"

  "From last November, with this place crowded to the eaves every day? And I also had other things to think about, if you recall. It was a time that could be lightly referred to as trying.'"

  "Yes. But you must have seen them often, to have such large bills."

  "They do seem large, don't they? They were typed on my letterhead, were they?"

  "Yes, indeed, Doctor. I typed with this very Oliver. The 'd' is always crooked. It spoils the look of letters, reports and—"

  "Take it up with Dr. Morgan and nag him into buying you a fine new Underwood. You deserve it, dear, after all these years with the Oliver."

  She smiled at him dryly, and he went into his office and sat down and began to think. He forgot Miss Forster and her worries. Jonathan went over in his mind what Phil Harrington had told him, and Prissy. Vague but disagreeable. There was no doubt that his enemies were plotting something, and he could find no area in which he was vulnerable. Then he thought, But who is invulnerable to malice? He shrugged. Now he found an acid pleasure in speculating on what his enemies were up to, including Kenton Campion. They knew that the town was driving him out or that he could no longer endure living in it. What more did they want? His license had been restored to him the moment he was acquitted. (They had had no right, the State Medical Society, to insist on its revocation before the conclusion of the case, and he could have caused them some unpleasant moments, or he could have sued for malicious mischief and punitive damages, but he had been only too glad to drop the matter, even though the newspapers had been gleeful enough to print the news of the revocation of his license in large type, and be damned to the unlawfulness of it.)

  Malpractice. Was some unknown former patient, man or woman, about to sue him for malpractice? The procedure, in such a case, was for an attorney to approach a doctor and ask for an out-of-court settlement first, "to save notoriety and money and fees and costs." Besides, he could not recall a dissatisfied patient or one who had complained.

  Jonathan's uneasy mind tried for ease, and he remembered that he had wanted to be a priest when he had been a boy. His mother had thought it absurd, and he had agreed within a year or two after she had expressed her outright opinion. Now he thought abo
ut it. It would have been a life, even in a leper colony or out in darkest Africa with the missions, far more tranquil than the one he had known since boyhood. There would have been no uncertainty but only certitude. No love for Mavis but only love for God. Had he not married Mavis, she would be alive now, probably the curse of some other man's life—or, ironically, probably that man's delight. He had loved God in those days, with a deep and almost terrible love, profound in its intensity. He recalled the quietly passionate transports he had experienced, the unquestioning knowledge, the fiery faith, and longing, the instants of ecstasy at Mass at the elevation of the Host, the depthless gratitude at receiving Holy Communion, the inner grieving cry, "Lord, I am not worthy that You come under my roof—" The High Masses, the rolling music, the incense, the unearthly colors on white walls as the sun struck through the stained-glass windows, the majesty of the ritual, the awe, the kneeling, the bowed head— Yes, there had been absolute certitude, beyond doubt, beyond skepticism.

  Jonathan had had an encounter when he was seventeen, even before the episode of the hiking trip through the state, when he had come violently face to face with the God he so adored, and all the questions, and his faith had died at once, not dribbling away in a sickening little stream as it had been with Francis Campion. Could one call that faith, indeed, that it should have been murdered outright in one single hour or two? Or had it been only adolescent infatuation with the idea of God, a frequent affliction of adolescence? In every man's life, he had read in some pious book, there comes one appalling encounter with God—an encounter never to be forgotten —and thereafter a man adores more profoundly to the very death, or he gives only lip service to a lost and beloved memory—such as one gives the dead for whom one no longer sorrows.

  Father McGuire had told him that his faith would not have died so abysmally, so abruptly, had it been faith indeed. But the priest was wrong. The irrevocable deaths come to the most vaulting love, the most vehement love, and the most intense faith. It is the lukewarm, contrary to general acceptance, who casually endure in love and faith, and if that love and faith are only coolly milky and faintly heated, they are at least viable, which was more than one could say of the shattered corpse of love and faith, the rotting corpse.

  It was only recently that the world had taken on three dimensions again, had rounded out, had become fervent with color and vitality and youth. It had been resurrected with Jenny.

  Love was of one piece. It was impossible to love, to know love fully, and then deny any part of it, whether it was love for God or love for a human being. A woman dearer than life, to a man, a beloved woman whom one could trust with one's life, inevitably brought the grandeur of God within the vision of a man again, and he saw again that the endless universes were charged with His glory. There lay all peace of mind, all invulnerability, all power of spirit, all fortitude—the "Shadow of a Great Rock in a weary land."

  I wish I had it just now, thought Jonathan. But as if in the corner of his eye, he saw the eternal garden of tranquillity again, and this time there was no chasm at the end of it.

  "The hell with the Campions and all the rest of them," he said, aloud.

  He thought again of Jeffrey Holliday, and then he wrote out a check for Father McNulty and added a note: "You knew Jeff, I believe, and he is dead now, and so I am enclosing my check for twenty-five dollars as an offering, and hope that you will mention him in your prayers. By the way, I have inherited a large old house on Fordham Street, near St. Leo's, from a former patient, a dear old friend and my teacher, Ann Meadows, and it is yours—for that residence for nuns you are plotting to bring in for your confounded parochial school, if you can raise a bank loan. This is no incitement for you to harass me for further funds."

  The mere writing of that flippant note to a young man of whom he was truly fond, and whom he respected, unaccountably lifted Jonathan's spirits. Now he would really have to corner Jenny and persuade her into a quick marriage, and then leave Hambledon with her.

  Softly whistling, he went into his examination rooms, clean and empty and white. There, in the left corner of the second room was one of his big shining cabinets. It was filled with' instruments, including the most complex for operations. These had been the gift of his father on the occasion of his entering medical school, and each fine steel instrument was engraved with his name in a flowing script. In those days every surgeon had his own personal instruments, engraved like these, which he carried with him, but since then the majority of hospitals supplied their own for surgeons, a progress toward asepsis in the operating room. Now these glittering instruments, for which his father had proudly paid a considerable fortune—they had silver handles, many of them, and silver sheaths—were unnecessary, including the large Morocco leather bag in which they had originally been carried. Jonathan had used them but four times in his surgical practice. They were anachronistic. He had often thought of sending them to some poor priest-physician-surgeon, and now was the time to think of donating the whole expensive outfit to the missions.

  As they were so costly, Jonathan kept the key to this cabinet among his other keys. He stood before the cabinet and stared at the brave and shining array. That instrument for opening the skull: Its form had not been changed for thousands of years and was almost a replica of the instrument the ancient Egyptians had used. Fine old boys, the ancient practitioners. Modern medicine had hardly improved on them. They had had a high forceps of a sort for difficult births. These had been reinvented again only a few years ago. Christianity had done marvels in raising the moral stature of men, for helping to abolish slavery, for lifting degradation from women, for showing concern for children, for advancing education to the lowest common denominator—a debatable thing at the best—but it had certainly knocked hell out of the legacy of ancient medicine. It had debased the physician, for centuries, to a mere midwife, or a bloodletter, or a brewer of herbs and nostrums—-a scurvy and starving servant fit only for contempt. The art of medicine had been relegated perilously close to the practice of witchcraft or, at the worst, considered as a survival of "Paganism." "Good" Christians did not become ill unless they were also "sinners," and the worse the illness the worse the sinner. You'd have thought, Jonathan reflected now, that the Black Death would have thrown that into the garbage pail, but it did not—until almost within recent memory. We probably owe the fact that there are any human beings left at all to the skill of the "perfidious" Jewish physicians throughout the centuries, who religiously and with loving kindness had disastrously decided to keep humanity alive. For that they had been repaid with hatred, and that was probably a just fate, at that.

  What was that from Genesis: "For the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth." Yes, and William Hazlitt, in the same context of thought, had said, "There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, ungrateful animal than the public. It is the greatest of cowards, for it is afraid of itself." True. It was that "public" which had condemned him, Jonathan Ferrier, before he had even been arrested or convicted, and had shown not only extreme disappointment when he was acquitted but in resentment was now driving him from his native town. He still did not know why. It had been hinted to him, time after time, by those who cared for him, that perhaps a little diplomacy was needed by him, a little tact, a little evasion, a little creaming-over of obvious ineptitude and stupidity, "in the name of Christian charity." But that "Christian charity" would have cost the lives of many helpless patients at the hands of diploma-mill hacks or it would have permitted some outrageous social wrongs.

  For Jonathan Ferrier was the organizer for, and the sponsor for, the Hambledon Association for the Abolition of Child Labor. He had cared for many little children who had been wounded and smashed in the local mills and yards. He had come to them when they had been weltering, dead, in their own blood. He had not used "loving" language to the mill owners, nor creamy words to soothe their sensibilities, nor had he exercised "Christian charity." He had only called them the Assassins of the Innocents.
He had spent a large part of his own money to establish other associations throughout the state and had hounded Senators and Congressmen and Governors, and had put huge advertisements in many great newspapers. The associations had grown enormously, and it was predicted that within a short time child labor would be illegal. Needless to say, Jonathan was not loved by those whom he had so deeply offended in their purses—and their morals.

  When he had been younger, he had honestly believed that a good cause carried its own good strength with it, that a righteous idea could never be suppressed but must be ultimately victorious. He was not so certain about that now—but unfortunately he still had remnants fluttering about in his

  mind, and that kept his tongue abrasive, his manner openly contemptuous when among hypocrites, and his temper finely honed.

  He came to himself in his examination room, before his glass cabinet of instruments.

  Then he noticed a little gap on one shelf. He bent closer. Some instrument was missing. He tested the door; it was locked. But someone had taken an instrument from the cabinet. He went into the other examination room, frowning, wondering if Robert Morgan could have done this, and then he searched the other room, also. It was foolish to suspect Robert. He had high instincts of privacy, and besides, he did not need these particular instruments. The other examination room had a host of ordinary ones for office procedure, though not for major surgery? Jonathan frowned. When was the last time he had opened this cabinet? A year? Two years? Once a year he carefully dusted the instruments himself, because of their value and their association. Had he done that last year? He could not remember.

  He stood and frowned and considered, looking at the empty space. Someone had tried to move slender instruments together to conceal the spot, but its impression was on the original white satin which Adrian had insisted be laid on the glass shelves. A narrow long depression. Now. what was it? Jonathan slowly turned over in his mind all the instruments, counting them, thinking of them. Then he knew. It was a curette.