Testimony of Two Men

by Taylor Caldwell

  "Darling Beth, I love you. You are a treasure, a true treasure. I wish I could tell you how much you've helped me." He kissed her. She pushed him gently away so she could examine his face.

  "Howard, are you perfectly well?"

  "Bully, as Teddy Roosevelt would say. Fine, as he'd also say. Last November, you say it was, when you sent Mary Snowden to Claude Brinkerman?" He paused. "You would not, by the most remote chance of course, know a Louise Wertner, seamstress, would you?"

  "Indeed I do," said Beth. "She is a friend of Mary's. Not so talented or so original, so I give her only ordinary sewing, alterations on old clothes, mending linen, and such. Why, Howard, she often comes here to use our sewing room, especially in the spring and fall. You must have seen her yourself, once or twice, at the least, a very meek, quiet girl, always keeping her eyes down and moistening her lips, poor thing. Neither girl is exceptionally prosperous, though I do encourage Mary, who should be more appreciated—"

  "Beth, you did say that these girls know each other? Well?"

  "I believe so. Howard, what does it matter with that class? Why are the girls so important to you?"

  "Beth, has Louise Wertner ever suffered from female trouble, too?"

  "Now, Howard, don't be ridiculous! How is it possible for me to know? Mary only mentioned it to me last November, when I remarked that she looked a little ill." Beth hesitated. Howard, she thought to herself, had one thing in common with all other husbands: a certain thriftiness. But she had had something on her tender conscience for several months, and so she sighed. "Howard, I bought four hats from Mary, and the bill wasn't as large as I said. I had Mary 'pad' it, as we say. You see, she needed fifty dollars, and so I helped her out. I hope you aren't going to be cross? She did go to see Claude and that was his fee for a slight, a very slight—correction—in his office. Exorbitant, for the poor, but he does have a reputation. Are you cross?"

  "I couldn't be more delighted," said Howard with fervor. So the girls did not know each other, did they? "Buy yourself a dozen hats, my darling, tomorrow. Or at least one."

  That night Martin Eaton died peacefully in his sleep. There was no autopsy, but his condition was known, and it was his physician's opinion that he had suffered another stroke. Only Howard Best, of all in Hambledon, wondered a little, and with sorrow, and then with relief. All that was Martin Eaton had abandoned this world, which had brought him small comfort and had left him bereft in his final years.

  It was not expected that Jonathan Ferrier be present at the funeral services nor be a pallbearer. Nor, indeed, was he there.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  "I am afraid to leave you, Jon," said Marjorie Ferrier. "I don't know what has gone wrong, but something most certainly has. Is it Jenny?"

  "Sweet Jenny? No."

  "I don't believe you. You have been a different, even a terrible person since the day you told me you were going to see Jenny and arrange—"

  "Mama, I don't want to talk about it, if you please. I'm a grown man now, or hasn't it crossed your mind?"

  Marjorie looked at him with deep worry as he sat opposite her at the breakfast table. For three days he had eaten almost nothing, but he was drinking again and with gloomier determination than ever before. He had spent his time on his farms, had put up two for sale, had not gone to the hospitals more than once, had seen Robert Morgan but twice and then only briefly in the offices. But at night she heard him walking up and down in his room. His bedroom furniture was laden with clothing and other things and there was a huge trunk in the hall upstairs which she had used on her honeymoon. His wastebaskets were heaped each morning, filled with torn letters, old records, notebooks. Suitcases and bags stood around the walls, half filled. There was a growing pile of cast-off clothing in one corner. Marjorie had thought with dreariness, if it weren't that it meant that Jon was definitely leaving, I'd be glad to see all that rubbish cleaned out of drawers, wardrobes, closets and attic at last!

  So, he was leaving, and very soon, and there was no more talk of Jenny. Marjorie had written the girl just recently that she was to be in Philadelphia for a week or more, and that, as Harald was also leaving, it would be safer for Jenny to be in the Ferrier house in Hambledon. So far, Jenny had not replied. A lovers' quarrel? It was absurd to think that of either Jonathan, who was nearly thirty-six, or Jenny, whose natural restraint prevented her from overt quarreling. Then, it must be serious, and Marjorie felt faint and sick when thinking of the matter. Were her hopes again to come to nothing? Was this house always to be desolate? She saw it boarded up, shuttered, lost in snow and wind with dark windows, silent, abandoned. Even worse, she saw it inhabited by strangers.

  It had been a strong but ugly house when she had come to it as a bride. The ugliness had been in the furnishings, in the small if high boxy rooms, in the lack of many windows in the too-stringent pattern of the gardens. She had removed walls and painted wooden paneling; she had deftly, over a few years, rid the house of its ponderous furniture. She had created windows in gloomy little pockets of hallways and in many of the rooms. She had brought grace and style and color and elegance to the house. But until these last few days she had had no particular feeling with regard that years can make their own pathways through the heart and through unsuspected places, and the thought of leaving this house brought her astonishing pain. There had been all the months since "the trouble," as it was daintily referred to by her friends, and she had known—and welcomed—Jonathan's intention to leave Hambledon forever. But in a way which seemed very strange to her these days, she had not truly believed that Jonathan would go and that she would be left bereft in this house, which she had loved all the years without once suspecting it. It was no longer a house to her but a home, and the transition had come as silently as an evening mist. Her earlier fears, and her conviction that Jonathan, for his own sake, must leave Hambledon, were almost forgotten.

  She could not remain here alone. For weeks she had been studying the house with a secret joy and anticipation. There would be the new suite of rooms for Jenny and Jonathan, a new white marble fireplace in their bedroom. There were rooms she had looked at with delight, hearing them filled with the cries and laughter of young children. She had planned a nursery garden, sheltered and fenced, with swings and sandboxes and wooden rocking horses and dolls. Now it had vanished like all her foolish hopes, and the house seemed a mournful weight on her spirit and a reproach. To leave it shuttered, bolted and shrouded would be impossible, for it was a living thing with a personality of its own, serene, calm, soft yet steadfast. Yet, to know it known to strangers, in all its nooks and entries and passageways, and to think of strange eyes peering from the windows, was intolerable.

  But even more intolerable was the change, physical and in personality, in her son. In an incredibly short time he had become even more gaunt than when he had been released from prison, more taciturn, shorter of temper and sardonic when forced to speak. He appeared very ill. In the worst years with Mavis he had not seemed so tense and distracted and his eye had not had so hard a glitter of incipient violence. That violence was there, even when he was answering the most commonplace question, or asking such a question. It was like something held in him but not held strongly enough. There were times when Marjorie stammered when speaking to him for fear of unloosing that tiptoed savagery.

  She had spoken of her worry about him on the day she was to leave for Philadelphia, and he had returned to the old jeering "Mama." She did not speak of his drinking, which he had resumed with more recklessness than he had shown even during his marriage, and since the trial. It was a somber drinking and brought him no relief; rather, it appeared to increase that waiting violence in him. She dared not protest even in love. She was too afraid.

  Marjorie left that afternoon after the first futile effort to reach him. She came down the stairs fastening her white kid gloves slowly, her pale traveling suit trim and slender, her broad hat veiled. The station hack was at the door. Jonathan was walking restlessly up and down in the h
all, which was hot in spite of the quiet coloring and space. She said, "Jon, dear, seeing you are packing, I have put something in your room for you, to take with you, something very dear to me, which I want you to have."

  "Don't be sentimental, dear," he said, but he bent, and kissed her briefly on the cheek she raised to him. That cheek was delicately scented with her French packet of papier-poudre, the only cosmetic permitted a lady. It recalled to him the days of his childhood when he had stood at a distance and loved her but was too proud to approach her as she sat in the garden or in the morning room with young Harald on her knee. When she would hold out her hand to him, he would think, She's forgotten me until now, and now I don't want her! He would run away with a black darting glance at her as he did so. There was always his loving and foolish father to run to, and Jon always did so run, but the clasp of those undemanding arms, the sound of that gentle, unreproachful voice, never quieted his thirst for his mother.

  She was looking up now with her beautiful hazel eyes, which he had always admired, but now he hated them, for they reminded him of his brother. She was examining his face, and her pale lips tightened with worry and melancholy.

  "I hope for happier news when I return," she said.

  He gave her one of his dark contemptuous smiles. "News of what?" he said.

  She sighed. "Very well, if you insist on misunderstanding me, Jon. Now, I must go. I wish you were going with me. You seem so—tired. Harald is already in Philadelphia, as I've told you, arranging for a new show near Christmas."

  "Bully for Childe Harald," he said.

  She hesitated. "Jon, I'm concerned about Jenny alone, with the servants. Would you please go over a few times while I'm gone and—"

  "No, dear."

  "Oh, for heaven's sake, Jon!" She went rapidly from the hall to the blazing yellow day outside, her head bent. As she climbed in the hack he saw, through the hall window, that she was dabbing at her eyes. He cursed aloud. He knew he ought to have taken her to the station; he knew that at the very least he should have helped her into the hack. But he was filled to the very brim with black hatred and seething violence. He went upstairs to his rooms, even hotter than on the ground floor, and there, laid enticingly on his bed, was a portrait of Jenny.

  He approached the bed slowly and looked at the lonely and longing face of the young girl his brother had painted, and the lifted, halted hand, at the quiet and desolate eyes. She had run to a window as if to answer a beloved call, or to see a beloved face, and then had found nothing but emptiness and cold bright chaos.

  "Jenny," he said. He sat down near the portrait on the bed and looked at it. He touched it gently with his hand. Then he said, "Jenny, how could you have believed that of me? You believed so fully, didn't you, after knowing me all those years, since you were a child, a tittle girl? Yet, for no honest reason at all, you were willing to believe the worst, to fancy the worst, out of a sort of innate viciousness, or an insane fantasy. You don't believe the worst of anyone unless you secretly detest them. Love, or even kindness, impels anyone, though adverse evidence is there, to hope, to believe, the best, or to give the benefit of the doubt."

  He did not, even for a moment, while looking at the portrait, think of applying the same argument to himself. He did not remember the lies he had believed of Jenny, the unspeakable calumnies. He did not remember the silence he had kept in the midst of lewd laughter he had heard directed at her. Not once had he defended her or given her "the benefit of the doubt."

  So he looked at the portrait at first in sadness and despair, and then the violence boiled out in him. He grasped the portrait and smashed the canvas across his knee. It ripped, tearing the still and painted face. He stood up and threw the ruined painting across the room and it struck the wall and the frame shattered. He could hear himself breathing, fast and noisily, like a satisfied animal. "I wish I could do that to you in the flesh, Jenny," he said. He picked up the bottle of whiskey on his chest of drawers and drank it deeply. He was panting heavily, running with sweat, his heart roaring, moisture showering down from his forehead into his eyes. He toasted the portrait lying destroyed on the floor. "Sweet Jenny," he said. The violence was now out in him, the violence which had been rising for many years, ever since his childhood. He had known it with Mavis, had often known it with his brother, and even more often had known it with his colleagues. But it had never been so mad as now.

  Becoming drunk, he swayed on the bed. His mind began to heave with disjointed thoughts of grief, hopelessness, discordant crashes of music, rage, murder, longing, fury. Lines of poetry rushed through his thoughts, and he began to sing them raucously, with ribald extrapolations. Then a poem he recalled from his college years came clearly and sharply to him, and he said, "Milton, damn it, yes, it was Milton!"

  He began to declaim:

  "When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account—"

  He stopped, and said in a slow, hoarse voice, "My light is spent." He began to laugh loudly, slapping his knees, rolling on the bed in an ecstasy of terrible mirth, rioting in a kind of awful rapture of self-loathing and hate and foaming ridicule.

  He found himself lying prone, his hands in his hair, his body shaking with his uncontrollable merriment. He gasped into the pillow, "All those wasted, stupid, God-damned— years! All those books, the hours, the weeks, the months, the years! A whole smirking procession of them. Gaggles of them, mincing, prancing, dancing. Oh, I'd do a lot, I would, against pain and disease! I would be dedicated, I would, like a priest, raising my holy hands on feverish flesh and calming it and curing it! What a—" He filled the room with shouts of obscenity until even the servants, resting in the noonday heat in their rooms, looked at each other in fright, hearing the shouts piercing up through wood and wall, and catching some of the riper expressions. The cook said to the young maid, "Cover your ears, do, dear, it isn't nice for a young girl to hear such talk, and if Doctor weren't almost out of his mind —and who can blame him?—he wouldn't believe he could yell so."

  "He's drunk again," said Mary, wiping her damp face with a sheet. "He's always drunk now."

  "He has his troubles," said the cook in a dark tone. "Worse than most. It's all broken out in him, all at once, after almost a year."

  The black and soundless hiatus of drunkenness fell over Jonathan, sprawled, sweating, on his bed. He never remembered those hours of utter, obliterated despair. The sun fell over his body, and he did not feel it. It left his body and touched his feet, lighted the wall for a little, then moved away, its scorching yellow radiance blasting grass and tree as it fell in the west. Eventually a hot and purple dusk succeeded it, then a warm velvety darkness filled with restless stars. Jonathan was unaware of it all, for dreams had come to him, frightful, chaotic, churning, terrifying, vivid with fear and hopelessness. He dreamt once of Jenny. He saw her in a desolation of gray chalkiness, near the side of a slipping mountain the color of ashes, and she was running down a twisting path which lifted and fell like the coils of a snake. Her black hair blew behind her and her arms were outstretched and her mouth was open on agonized screams. He tried to run to her, to seize her, to hold her, to quiet her, but she always a pace or two ahead of him, and at last he fell into a pit without a bottom and without a gleam of light.

  He heard a loud and imperative knocking, and someone was shouting, "Jon, Jon! I know you're in there! Wake up! Answer me!"

  "Go away," he groaned. There was a light in his eyes, and it stung them unbearably, and he blinked at the moisture. His head was like a drum, and someone was pounding it with iron sticks. He lifted his hands and held it, afraid that it would burst, and there was a dry and burning sickness in his mouth and in his whole body.

  "Jon! Let me in! It's important! Let me in!" Then the voice swore and said, "Damn it, he's bolted the door!" The door rattled. "Jon!"

  Jonath
an could see more clearly now, and what he saw in his dazed state stupefied him. He was in his lighted office, and not the house, and not in his bed. He could not remember coming here. Someone, something, had gone wild here, for books had been taken from his medical library and torn and thrown all over the floor. Files were open and emptied, the papers scattered. The patient's chair was overturned, and flung aside. His framed diplomas had been ripped from the wall and smashed. The etching his father had given him, a sentimental but moving thing called "The Doctor," had not only been wrenched from the wall, its glass shattered, but someone had shredded it. The soft green draperies which Marjorie had ordered had been pulled from the windows and lay in gleaming heaps in the light of the one lamp on the desk.

  "For Christ's sake," Jonathan muttered, looking at this mad destruction, this hatefulness expressed in ruin and violence and vandalism. A sudden turbulence rose in him, and he knew who had done this thing in fury. It had been himself. He did not remember coming here; he did not remember the hours when he had gone berserk, and a terror struck him that he had gone insane in some darkness he could not recall, and he-wondered what else he had done.

  "Jon!" the voice shouted, and the door rattled more strenuously.

  Jonathan pushed himself out his chair and immediately staggered helplessly. He came up with a crash against a wall and almost fell. He shook his head to recover. He began to pick his way slowly through the destruction on the floor, the shards of glass, the scattered books, the frames of pictures and diplomas, the overturned furniture, the confetti of paper. He reached the door, and was again stupefied that he had locked it beyond the waiting room, for though it had been there for years, he had never shot that bolt before.

  It took all his strength to release it, and then the door was flung open and there was Robert Morgan on the threshold. Robert stared at him, and then said in a subdued voice, "For God's sake."