Tender Victory

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  The doctor was in the living room when he came in, and suddenly Johnny remembered the children. With a new strength he rushed to the stairs and, followed by the doctor, he ran up to the floor above. The children were gathered together in a white-faced cluster around Mrs. Burnsdale in Johnny’s bedroom. When they saw Johnny they rushed to him, even Jean, pushing his wheel chair furiously.

  “It’s all right, kids,” said Johnny, gathering them to him. He wanted to soothe them with evasions, but when he saw Jean’s wise eyes and Pietro’s sharp smile, he knew he had to tell the truth. “People can be very stupid,” he said. “You already know that. Sometimes you’re stupid yourselves. But we had the law tonight, and the police came, and the people were sorry, very sorry. We must forgive them.”

  He looked at Kathy’s round pink face which was now very obdurate. He said, “Don’t I forgive you, all of you, no matter how impossible you get sometimes?” He turned to Max, who said in his uncertain voice, “Yes, you always have to forgive.”

  Jean said, mortified, “I am thinking about the knife. I am no better than those men, Papa. I am not a Christian. How can you forgive me?”

  Johnny bent down and put his arms about Jean. “It was St. Peter, dear, who cut off the ear of a soldier with his sword, when the Romans came to arrest Our Lord. It was St. Peter who denied Our Lord three times. God forgave him, for God understands the hearts of men. When you accuse yourself of your own guilt, as you did just now, you don’t need to ask my forgiveness. God has already forgiven you.”

  Pietro jumped up like a spring, laughing. “Oh, what I must tell the Father! He will make eyes, so,” and the gay little boy made his black eyes gigantic and rolled them to heaven, and clasped his hands together in a parody of holy horror. He was delighted when everyone in the room burst into uncontrolled laughter.

  It was Dr. McManus who, without comment, brought Johnny a copy of The New York Times a few days later and showed him an item. “Mr. Lars Swensen, director of the Industrial Relations Foundation, has resigned from his post with that organization. …”

  19

  Sunday was another day.

  It began about dawn, dolorously, with Johnny’s dream.

  First he was aware, in his dream, of a great sorrow in himself, which had no source he could discover, and a great yearning. All this was part of a gray and dark chaos in which he was standing. Then the chaos swirled away, and he discovered himself standing in a lonely wasteland, bleached and parched and empty, and utterly silent under a sunless sky. There was not a tree or a blade of grass or a flower. The wasteland cracked, here and there, in an intricate and meaningless pattern, running to the horizon. Johnny walked, and his steps were soundless. He looked for hills, and there were none. He looked for water, and there was none. All that I thought I had was only a dream, he said to himself in his dream. He bent and picked up a piece of earth; it was the color of whitish clay; it dissolved to dust in his hand, and it blew off in a wind he did not feel.

  He remarked on his extraordinary exhaustion, as if he had worked himself to the point of death. Finally he stopped walking and stood looking at the endless desolation to which there was no end. He had no memories; he did not think of any future.

  Then, all at once, a patch of brilliant and shining blue appeared on the horizon, a tiny patch no bigger than his hand. It is the sky, he thought, with joy. But it was not the sky. It was moving toward him, a strange and luminous color, and suddenly his heart pounded with eager happiness. He began to walk rapidly in the direction of the color, and then he saw that it was in reality a little figure, and it was waving to him, and he lifted his hand in a returning salute. He hurried. Then he noticed a most extraordinary thing. The wasteland, as if given a mysterious signal, was breaking out into herbage of a bright green tint. It reached his ankles, began to climb, rustling, toward his knees. In an instant or two more it was filled with flowers of every hue, red, yellow, white, lavender, pink and gold, and perfume rose in clouds from it. Johnny was filled with strength; he could actually feel the quickened flow of his rejuvenated blood.

  He could not take his eyes from the figure in the distance. Birds were singing now, and the sun came out in a burst of light. It shone on the figure, and it was a young woman with pale and luminous hair, and Johnny knew her, and he shouted, “Lorry! Lorry!” He broke into a run.

  She was suddenly in his arms, and all the flowers, the songs of the birds, the sun, were emanations of her. He had never felt such delight, such fulfillment, such rapture. He held her face in his hands, and looked into her eyes, and they were not the hard and ruthless eyes he now remembered, but eyes of misty sweetness and tender beauty, and they regarded him with love.

  “I thought you had gone away,” he said. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  Lorry laughed and laid her cheek against his. “I never went away,” she said. “How could you imagine such a thing?”

  “I sent you away in my thoughts,” he replied, humbly. “There were the children—”

  She laughed at him, lovingly. “The children? Johnny, they are mine too. So many children, so many thousands of them. Listen to their voices!”

  He listened, holding her hand. Now the air was clamorous with the voices of a multitude of children, seeking voices, lost voices, infant voices, calling voices. Johnny looked about him in bewilderment, but there was no one else there but himself and Lorry.

  “Because of you, they are my children, all of them,” said Lorry, and leaned against him. “Because of you—”

  He awoke then, in his dreary bedroom. He could hear Jean breathing in the semidarkness. The autumnal rains, gray and unrelenting, poured heavily from dejected skies; he could hear them pounding in the streets, washing his one small window. Johnny lay still, trying to hold to his dream, but it slipped away from him, and he was left with an enormous sense of loss and grief. A dream, he said to himself, a dream that could never happen, because she could never want me or care about me.

  He did not sleep again. When he got up the house was just beginning to stir. In a state of mournfulness and sadness he dressed, went to the church, and glanced in. It was, at least, clean, in the leaden light from the sky.

  He ate his breakfast in an exhausted state of mind, and hardly spoke to the children, who looked at him soberly with large eyes. Kathy was dressed in a new plaid skirt and white blouse, ready for Sunday school later. She was already a power among the little girls of her class, and was not above correcting the rather pale young teacher in a precise voice when Miss Fair misquoted a word or two from the Scriptures. The other children regarded Kathy with awe, for she was so brisk and efficient, and handed the prayer books around with an air of no-nonsense-and-let’s-do-this-properly. Pietro had returned from early Mass, and was slightly subdued. Mrs. Burnsdale had caught a cold and was inclined to be brusque. Jean’s arm and leg were paining him this dank morning, and Max was too quiet, and little Emilie was in bed with a fever Moreover, Johnny’s sermon did not please him. He also had a premonition of more anxiety to come.

  This was a Communion Sunday, and Johnny was not certain how many glasses stood in the dusty cupboard, and whether they would be sufficient. The sacramental wine, he had discovered, was of a very cheap variety, and had a bad color. It also had dregs. He sat at the breakfast table and gloomily contemplated the rain. “There were many people at Mass,” Pietro said. Johnny answered with rare sarcasm, “I won’t have to worry about that in my church, I suppose.”

  Mrs. Burnsdale said sourly, “You don’t have enough candles. And those piddly little candlesticks! I suppose if you turn the lights on there’ll be complaints about the electricity bill.”

  “Our church,” said Pietro, with some condescension, “has many candles. On all the altars. Pretty statues, too. Our Lord has a new gold halo.”

  Johnny uneasily reflected on what Dr. McManus had told him. He said carefully, “Well, God hears us without candles, or with candles, provided we really pray to Him.”

  The telephon
e rang, and Johnny went to answer it. The caller was Dan McGee. “Say, Mr. Fletcher, terrible weather, isn’t it? Don’t suppose there’ll be many people in church this morning.” He coughed. “Wonderful, though, how everything went last night, wasn’t it? Lots of the miners called me to tell me how wonderful you were. Sorry they aren’t your parishioners, though.”

  Johnny waited. His premonition was very lively now.

  Dan went on, after another cough; “Guess, though, our own parishioners don’t like it. They called me too. They think the miners are pretty trashy folks, and never have anything to do with them. They wondered why the miners should march to your house and raise hell—I mean, the devil. They don’t think it was dignified.” He tried for a laugh. “Some of ’em have their noses in the air about it. I told them off.”

  Johnny still waited.

  “You can’t tell about people, Mr. Fletcher. They were all excited, and mad, about the miners. They—kind of think in some way it was your fault. I tried to explain. They said it never happened before, to any of their other ministers. Mobs, and things.”

  “In other words,” said Johnny, “I’m in the doghouse.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Mr. Fletcher.”

  “Well, what would you say, Dan?”

  The union president hesitated. “Just take it easy, and don’t worry, sir. If the church isn’t filled this morning, just let them get over it. Most of the board members will be there, with our wives, to give you moral support.”

  “So I need moral support?”

  “Say, Mr. Fletcher, you don’t sound very cheerful. You mustn’t take it that way.”

  “It’s Communion Sunday,” said Johnny.

  “Well, so it is! Maybe lots of people forgot.”

  Johnny went back to the kitchen in less than a happy state of mind. He picked up his coat and trousers which Mrs. Burnsdale had carefully pressed. “They’re pretty green,” she said reproachfully.

  “Mildew,” said Johnny, and went to dress. It was almost time for the service. The little room behind the altar smelled of mice and dust and old wood, and the raw bulb in the ceiling seemed particularly dreary. Johnny counted the glasses. There would be quite enough. The organ had begun to whine dismally, faltering stiffly over a few notes, for it was second-hand and had been cheap originally. Johnny winced, waiting for the reedy-voiced choir of elderly folk to begin. They did. And then, to his surprise, he thought he detected a happy note in the hymn. He put the glasses on an old japanned tray and carried them into the church.

  Then he stopped in astonishment. On each side of the altar had been placed huge baskets of golden chrysanthemums, shining like ragged golden balls in an amazing display of candlelight. The little candlesticks had been replaced by two giant seven-branched candelabra, each of the many sockets blazing with stately white candles, the carved silver glittering, the bases gleaming with reflected light. The altar seemed to be a focus of incredible shifting brilliance in the dark church, casting bright shadows on the close old walls, and stretching up long fingers of radiance to the groins of the wooden ceiling. There was no need for the mean chandelier, and only a few small electric lights burned in the rear. It was magnificent.

  Johnny’s eyes filled with tears. The grace of light had been given him. He had seen those enormous candelabra in the doctor’s Victorian mansion, standing on an immense bureau. He put the glasses on the altar with trembling hands. He looked at the flowers; they exhaled a scent of the living earth. The fourteen beeswax candles, each fully two feet tall at least, sent out their clean odor as their golden tips illumined the cold air. Johnny slowly turned to his congregation. Dr. McManus was sitting lumpily in his first pew, staring at nothing, refusing to meet Johnny’s eyes. “Bless you,” said Johnny to himself, in a mist that almost blinded him. All at once it did not matter that there were only forty people in the church, the nearest pews filled with resolute middle-aged ladies and their upright board husbands, and behind them a straggling of uncertain folk. And Lon Harding, with his parents.

  Johnny stood in all that vast aureole of light and did not know that he had a youthful majesty and that his face glowed and that his eyes were filled with an intense blue. Now the voices of the choir, for all the chronic laryngitis which usually afflicted it, rose in exaltation and the nearly empty church enhanced the music until it shook with power, for all the banality of the hymn. The rain could pound against the windows, and the autumnal winds howl dolorously. The hymn took on some of the grandeur of a Gregorian chant.

  His sermon, finished yesterday under appalling circumstances, was not in keeping now, he knew. So he lifted his hands a little and said in a voice of loud and triumphant passion, “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light.”

  The choir murmured softly into silence, and there were only the rain and the wind and the great candelabra with their fourteen slender columns of resplendent flame behind the minister. And now the women’s cheeks were touched by tears, and the men’s mouths moved in a trembling. Dr. McManus raised his eyes and regarded Johnny fixedly.

  “There is always the light of God,” said Johnny, and his voice broke. “The eternal light which, when created, was commanded never to darken again, not anywhere in the universe. The interstices of space are illuminated with it; the stars roll in it, in their mysterious passage; the galaxies drift in it. The soul is bathed in it, shut though it is in the darkness of the flesh. The light which is the love of God for all He has made can never be extinguished, nor can the grave hide it, nor the hatred of man dim it, nor sorrow, nor war, nor blood, nor death, nor pain diminish it. It is the boundless ocean which flows through all things, and blends the suns and the hearts of men into one body and one being, with God.”

  He paused, and the mighty candles rose on a wave of effulgence.

  “In all the terrible centuries which have passed, and in this terrible day in which we stand now, and in all the terrible days to come, the light remains. The works of man and his confusions and his fears, his ambitions and his dreary hopes, his disappointments and his agonies, his griefs and his bitternesses and his lostness, are like a dark city, windowless and walled in black stone, closed against the sky and the love of God. We dwell in that dark city, and think of it as the only reality, and we look at the somber shadows and call them life.

  “And yet we need only leave that city, for the gates are not locked, though we believe they are. We need only walk a step, and open one door. And there is the light, and the dazzling thunder of its reality, and the endless realms of peace filled with its radiance.

  “No one halts us on that step; no jailer bars the door; no evil can challenge us. It is we, and we alone, who have set the chains on our hands and about our ankles; it is we, and we alone, who have said, ‘There is no light behond these walls, beyond these gates, beyond this door.’ We have bound ourselves with our gloomy imaginings, our faithlessness, our dejections, our terrors, our envies, and our greeds. The streets of the sunless city we have made are ghostly with our lightless forms, and echo with our lamentations. We cry for light, and yet we do not open that door.”

  The church stood in absolute silence. Dr. McManus bent his head and half covered his face with his hand.

  Johnny moved closer to the step that led to the altar. He held out his hands. “I too have done that, though I know the light is waiting for my asking, for my one step.” He smiled. “Only a short time ago I stood in the little room behind this altar, and I said to myself that nothing is waiting for me here, in this church, that I was abandoned, that I had failed, that I was utterly useless, and the work I have tried to do had collapsed about me. Like Job, I questioned the reason for my existence, and I had no answer, for the walls had closed shut around me, by my own faltering will, my own failing faith.

  “And yet—and yet I opened the door of that little room, and I stepped in here among you, and there was the light, the visible, shining light, and your trust, and the flowers; and my soul, imprisoned in its despondency and hopelessnes
s, turned again to the Eternal Light of God, and knew it was there, changeless, smiling, filled with everlasting love and consolation.”

  He could not speak for several moments. As if it had a life of its own, and was not stirred by human hands, the organ spoke in soft joyfulness, and the music lingered in the cold shadows of the church.

  Johnny said unsteadily, “I can say no more. There is nothing else for me to say, except to give you my benediction, and ask you for yours.”

  He turned to the altar and knelt before it, and the little congregation slipped to its knees. A woman sobbed, and a man or two cleared his throat. The candlelight soared, and the organ spoke again.

  Johnny was not at the door, later, to shake hands with those who had come courageously to be with him, and uphold him, nor would they have wanted him to be there. They walked outside into the rain, entranced, without speaking. For the first time in many years the communion service had not been a mere ritual to them; it had been a sacred rite, full of divine meaning, and happiness.

  The minister stood in the little room behind the altar, himself dazed and greatly moved, forgetting to take off his vestments. He stood with his hands clasped before him, his head bent. He started when he heard Dan’s subdued voice: “Well, sir, that was a real sermon. No, not a sermon. It was like someone talking, saying something we’d forgotten. Something we hadn’t remembered, away back, maybe when we were kids.”

  Mr. Schoeffel was with him, his gentle face blurred with emotion. He held out his hand to Johnny, and Johnny took it. Dan McGee passed his broad miner’s hands over his white drift of hair, and shook his head wonderingly. He and Mr. Schoeffel had brought in the two collection plates which had been used that day. “Look,” he said. “A sprinkling of big silver, and twenty one-dollar bills! But look what’s on top! Two one-hundred-dollar bills! Old Al just threw them in like they were nothing at all. And those candlesticks! He told us this morning, before services, to tell you he was loaning them to you, as long as you stay here. They don’t belong to the church, he says. Just to you, long as you’re here. You know, it was funny, Mr. Fletcher. At eight o’clock this morning my wife says, ‘Dan, I have a feeling the Ladies’ Aid should dress up the altar real nice this morning, with extra-wonderful flowers, in honor of Mr. Fletcher,’ and she calls up a couple of ladies, and the flowers got here just ten minutes before service, just when Al’s man Joe was bringing in the candles and the sticks!”