The Final Hour

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Celeste rang for tea, then subsided into her profound dull silence. She literally seemed unable to move without a terrible effort. A lock of her bright black hair fell over her petrified white forehead, and another ringlet lay against her colourless cheek. Her shoulders were bent, her whole body had the appearance of heavy collapse.

  Henri and Peter talked pleasantly, but Henri was aware most acutely of Celeste. He saw her flaccid white hands in her lap, the fallen curve of her thigh and calf, the sunken line of her breasts. She seemed ill. He smiled to himself again. She sat so near him that he could have touched her, and he knew that she was as aware of him as he was of her, and that she dared not look at him directly.

  Annette turned to her young aunt, and exclaimed: ‘Darling, you look so tired! You know, I’m really provoked with you, refusing my persistent invitations. And so, we’ve come to insist upon you and Peter having dinner with us tomorrow night. Or tonight would be better.’

  Peter looked from his wife to Annette, and smiled unpleasantly. ‘Celeste thinks I’m a monk, I’m afraid. I only found out today that the reason we have been so apparently ostracized is because she has barred the doors and pulled in the shutters. But, I suppose it’s my fault, too. I must have given her the impression that I was a Trappist at heart.’

  ‘I see,’ said Annette, softly. She gazed at Celeste’s motionless profile with the strangest expression, compassionate, sad, and very mournful, though she smiled brightly a moment afterwards, and sighed. ‘You don’t know how happy this makes me to know that you two are coming out of your retirement. I was going to be very disagreeable today, if you had refused our invitation. Tonight, dear? Or tomorrow?’ Celeste said listlessly: ‘Tomorrow, if Peter prefers it.’

  ‘Yes, tomorrow,’ he answered, quickly. That horrible weakness was assailing him again, however sternly he fought it. He could not have brought himself to leave the house tonight. He drew a deep breath. ‘It will be good to get out of this place! Not that we aren’t grateful to Christopher and Edith, of course. But it’s an appalling house, isn’t it?’

  For the first time, Celeste appeared fully aware of the conversation. There was even a dim flush on her cheeks now, and her eyes flashed with sudden blue fire as she regarded her husband.

  ‘I don’t think that is very kind, Peter,’ she said, and now her voice thrilled with its old resolution. ‘I never liked Endur, but it was once my home, and Christopher was very thoughtful.’ She thought: He is not himself. He doesn’t know what he is saying. He is frightened and distraught.

  ‘Of course, darling,’ Peter replied, with feverish contrition. ‘I’m sorry. But I can’t help it if it depresses me. It reminds me too much of your brother.’

  The tea was brought in now, and Celeste, without the slightest quiver of her hands, filled the delicate cups with topaz fluid. Her thin black dress made her white throat and arms gleam like polished marble. She gave a cup to Annette, and one to Henri, who accepted it with a casual smile and an inclination of his head. She did not look at him. She said: ‘Peter, oughn’t you to have your eggnog instead of tea?’

  ‘O God!’ groaned Peter, giving her an impatient look. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer it if I asked for a bottle and rubber nipple, Celeste?’

  She studied him a moment or two, and her fearful alarm made her heart beat fast. She momentarily forgot Annette and Henry was laughing with a sound that was not pleasant, and Annette appeared embarrassed. But Celeste was seeing only the hectic pallor of Peter’s face, his too brilliant eyes, his dry hot lips. All at once he began to cough violently, and Celeste winced visibly. After a moment or two, she filled a cup for him and gave it to him, as if nothing had happened and she had not heard his remark. Her air of haggard dignity and calm pride hurt Annette’s gentle heart, and her eyes filled involuntarily with tears. She remarked brightly, to Peter: ‘How is the book coming along?’

  The old hauteur and uneasiness of Peter’s appeared again at any mention of his work. He hesitated, shot a furtive glance at Henri, then replied with restraint: ‘Not too well, I’m afraid, Annette. I’m getting dry and dull and uninspired. Perhaps I’ve been too close to it.’

  ‘Or rather,’ said Henri, blandly, ‘perhaps you don’t know enough about your subject matter.’

  ‘Henri doesn’t mean to be rude,’ murmured Annette, in distress.

  But Peter ignored her. He regarded Henri with his old cold aversion and dislike. ‘No, the trouble is that I know too much, have too much material. I can’t seem to organize it. I’d like to put everything in. It’s so enormous, so grim and portentous. I would really have to write a documented library to do it justice. When I see how impossible it is to do more than suggest, condense, telescope together, I feel pretty desperate. It reads like a nightmare, and the innocent and uninitiated would hardly believe it.’ Now his look at Henri was harsh and sombre, and full of contempt.

  But Henri smiled. ‘Oh, come now, we aren’t as bad as all that. In fact, if you wrote the history of any industry or enterprise in America, whether it was dry goods or butchering or steel-making or brewing, it could be so presented, so high-lighted, so exaggerated and coloured, that it would sound like the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. For, you see, the human element is there, inescapably, and whatever the human element touches is likely to have a bad odour or some skulduggery. The end result, however, is usually quite harmless, and in the meantime quite a number of people innocently and happily prosper.’

  ‘I presume,’ said Peter, in a shaking voice, all his feverish colour gone so that his face was once again translucent and full of grey shadows, ‘that the “number of people” who have profited from your companies and subsidiaries have been only the Bouchards? What of the rest of the world? What of the world which is coming? Can you truthfully say it, too, will “innocently and happily prosper” in the kind of civilization you are creating for it now?’

  Henri laughed lightly. His pale eye shone on Peter indulgently. ‘Frankly, I don’t know. I have my business to attend to, and that takes too much time for me to have any odd minutes for philosophizing.

  ‘But, I can say this to you now: You cannot honestly declare to a people, “Look, here is your oppressor; you are the victim.” The victim, by the way, creates the oppressor. Nothing is apart from the rest of the world. The world as we know it now, and have known it in the past, is the visible result of total human nature, its work and its will. For instance, the German people invented Hitler. He was their desire made flesh, to paraphrase the Bible. So, if certain “bad” men have gained control of America, which I deny, it is because Americans have been too slothful, too greedy, too stupid and mindless, to prevent it, and so they have tacitly allowed it. They do not exist apart from their “exploiters,” nor do their “exploiters” exist apart from them.’

  Peter forgot everything now but his burning passion, his loathing and hatred and rage against this man. ‘You make it sound very simple,’ he said, his voice now trembling so much that he could hardly control it. ‘But it isn’t simple. Granted that the stupidity and sloth of the people make tyrants possible. That does not make the tyranny virtuous, or inevitable. Criminals take advantage of the trust of the helpless, or of the defenceless. That is your crime.’

  Henri was silent. But he still smiled. He looked at Annette, who had turned quite pale in her distress, and was twining her fingers together. He looked at Celeste. But she was staring at Peter, with a white still face, and was listening intently. Henri frowned thoughtfully, and tapped his fingers soundlessly on the arm of his chair.

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, in a quieter tone now. ‘I agree with you about one thing: that nothing exists apart from anything else, and that one must remember the human element. But there is an element, perhaps, that you don’t know anything about, Henri, and that element is the deeply buried desire of every man to believe that he and his work are important. The desire may be conscious or subconscious, but it is there, demanding that he believe that he, and his efforts, are necessary to his fellow
men and their welfare. You may think that very silly. I think it is the only noble thing in man. When that belief is killed in a man, and modern industry is fast killing it, by its monotony, its automatism and deadly mechanical pattern, then a man loses his will to live, which is always very precarious even in the strongest of us.

  ‘The men of power have either not known of the piteous human desire to be of significance to the world, and to improve it by work and voluntary effort, or they have not cared about it. It is nothing to them that this desire has the profoundest promise of good for the world, a promise of universal harmony and greatness and kindness, and that it has the power to cure much of the sickness and ruin of mankind.’

  He paused, and said in a lower tone: ‘Perhaps you are right in another thing. A long time ago you told me that war is one of the strongest instincts in man. I am beginning to believe it is. For war is the expression of the will-to-die of whole masses of people. The problem is to make life so adventurous, so vital, meaningful and important to every man that he will not, in his desire for death, resort to mass-suicide.’

  ‘And how do you propose to do that?’ asked Henri, with the same bland and infuriating look, as if he were talking to some raving fool.

  Peter hesitated, and now his look was stern and steadfast. ‘Perhaps, as I said before, by letting men believe, again, that they are important to the world. Religion has a strong hold on man only in direct ratio to the amount of importance it confers on him. You wish me to be practical, I see. Can you show me how modern industry allows a man, for a single moment, to believe he is of importance and that he, and he alone, gives some peculiar touch to his work that no other could? Our machines have removed the personal joy from handicraft, from individual workmanship, from creation. What joy is there in making castings or strips of metal identically the same, at an identical machine, by an identical human robot? When modern industry removed the personal element from its giant shops and plants and factories, it began to destroy man’s will-to-live, which is based on his individual sense of importance. And so, it laid the groundwork for devastating wars. I believe that is why fascism inevitably leads to war. It is the last convulsion of a despairing people.’

  He added: ‘War, in the end, is delightful to people, because war is now the only thing which allows a man to believe he is individually important, and that something depends on him, personally.’

  His thin and exhausted face was suddenly illuminated by passion, by pity and sorrow. ‘It is a terrible thing,’ he said, in a still lower tone, as if to himself.

  Now, he looked only at Celeste. She was smiling at him, and her eyes were dilated and shining. Henri stared at each of them, slowly, in turn.

  ‘You are putting all that in your book, too?’ he asked.

  Peter became aware of him, after that long exchange with his wife and he frowned a little. ‘There is so much,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am trying to tell it. The whole thing is so—enormous.’

  He was listless again, exhausted, the brief and burning fire gone from him. He was desperately ill once more.

  Annette spoke now, and her voice was trembling, her hands twisting in her lap: ‘O Peter! I wish there were something I could say now, that would let you know how you’ve stirred me. I never have the proper words for anything. But I know you are right.’ Her lashes were wet, her lips tremulous.

  ‘It ought to be interesting at any rate,’ said Henri, with that superior and pleasant condescension which is so enraging to any author, and which puts him nicely in his place. ‘You can count on me for a copy. Ingham’s are to publish it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, curtly. He drank his tea with abstraction; it was cold and nauseating to him. His despair was a bleakness and windlessness in him. How impotent he was! How clearly Henri had shown him his impotence, in the face of his own great power and physical strength and compactness.

  During his abstraction, he was unaware that Henri was scrutinizing him intently. It would have amazed him to know how important he now was in Henri’s thoughts, and that the other man was engaged in rapid reflection.

  ‘Look here,’ said Henri, with abruptness. ‘You say you have too much material. Are you aware, for instance, with your damned documented proof, that a certain group of men in Washington, and other places, are determined to overthrow the Government and install fascism in its place? With the actual help of Hitler?’

  Peter looked up with such a start he almost dropped his cup. He could not believe what he had heard. Henri was nodding, with a grim smile.

  ‘I assure you it’s true. And I’m not one of them, I promise you. That surprises you, doesn’t it? I imagine you’ve had your suspicions. How would you like verification?’

  Peter was astounded. His glazed eyes looked instinctively at Celeste. But she was gazing at Henri with a rigid expression of shock, and fully for the first time.

  ‘I imagine,’ said Henri, regarding only Peter, ‘that you have given some vague intimations in your manuscript. But vague intimations can always be attacked and disproved. Facts can’t.’

  But Peter was without the power to speak.

  Henri leaned back in his chair comfortably, and raised his eyebrows with a quizzical expression. But his eyes were fixed with unusual intentness upon Peter.

  ‘I mean, it is an actual plot, which has only recently come to my attention. I’ll be frank with you. I’ve wanted America to keep out of the coming war because war will destroy the status quo, and I’m rather attached to the status quo. I don’t give a damn what Hitler does in Europe. But I want to keep him out of America. Unfortunately there are some men, and it would surprise you who they are, who want Hitler here, or at least, want his influence here. They’re working for it. A gentleman very close to some of us said only recently: “We need Hitler, and his efficiency. Put the damned mob back in its place. I say: Bring him over!” You may think that very brash and crude. But it isn’t. They’ve drawn up the actual plans.’

  Peter pulled himself out of his paralyzed lethargy of amazement, and stammered:

  ‘Why do you tell me this? Now? You?’

  Henri shrugged. ‘Because,’ he answered blandly, ‘I don’t want Hitler here. I’m very well satisfied with things as they are. I’m not too interested in what Hitler does in Europe, but I’m determined he shan’t do it with any of our matériel—if I can help it. I’m not sure I can help it. I’m working towards that, of course. I have coerced,’ and he smiled a little, ‘or better, persuaded, some others to join me, for I am sure that I have no desire to be any Thyssen to Hitler. It’s not patriotism. I’m only giving you an outline.’ He paused, wondering if he was being indiscreet, stupid and naïve. ‘I may succeed. As it looks now, I might not. You can imagine the rest.’

  Peter suddenly got to his feet, and in a deep silence, he walked up and down the room with shaken steps. He kept putting his hands to his face, and then dropping them with a quick gasp. The two women were frozen in their chairs, Celeste watching Peter, Annette watching Henri. Annette’s cheeks were bright red, her eyes too bright.

  Then Peter stopped before Henri. His lips moved with an effort. ‘Somehow, I believe you. I don’t know why. I understand, though, why you’ve told me. It’s no—not patriotism, or decency. You want to protect yourself. That doesn’t matter. What can I do?’

  Henri was very grave and serious now. He leaned towards Peter. ‘Your book will be finished too late, I’m afraid. Suppose it is published a year or more from now? It won’t be much good. The damage will already have been done, probably irreparable damage.

  ‘However, I have just had an idea. Suppose you write for the radio. You can’t, of course, deliver any such addresses, yourself, for reasons which are very obvious. But, I can have such addresses, warning the people, delivered by two or three competent commentators. I have such commentators in mind. Two have recently been removed from the air for lack of “sponsors.” I happen to know why they haven’t any sponsors now. I think you can guess that, too. They don’t need sponsors. I will
pay for the broadcasts. None of the chains will dare to keep these men off the air when I give the word. They’ll have plenty of facts, too, which I will give you. Remember, there’s an election coming up next year,’ and the grimness of his face relaxed for a moment. ‘Frankly, I don’t care if Roosevelt or any other man equally of his opinion is elected. I am thinking of a man who was mentioned to me lately, by a certain old gentleman. He may not be nominated. If he isn’t, and the Republican Party puts up some dolt, some ventriloquist dummy, then, we must have Roosevelt. That surprises you, doesn’t it? But I tell you now that not even the greatest of the New Deal’s asininities are important any longer. The only important thing is the preventing of these schemes of which I’ve just told you. Everything else can wait.’

  He continued, when Peter again could not speak: ‘Go on with your book. But these addresses on the radio are more necessary, more immediate. What do you say?’

  Peter’s eyes were blazing in his gaunt and sunken face. He was alive again, burning and passionate. He almost cried aloud, exultantly. After a little, he said: ‘My God! I can’t believe it. Of course, I’ll do it! You have only to give me the facts, a lead now and then!’

  He could hardly breathe with his newly awakened sense of potency. All his senses were awake, crying out. But Henri was quite calm, his smile smooth as ever.

  He rose. ‘Good. You’ll be discreet enough, of course, not to give the slightest hint where you get your information. That would be disastrous. I must work behind the scenes. I must find out all the plotters, and do what I can, myself, to stop them in their tracks. In the meantime, you might arouse quite a portion of the people to their peril. Study the commentators who are subsidized by the American Association of Industrialists, one of our own organizations. Wright Benson is the ablest. You can get many leads from his propaganda, which is very adequate, to say the least. You’ll see the fine Italian hand behind what he says. Study the newspapers, especially that powerful rag in Detroit. You’ll have your work cut out for you, and it isn’t going to be easy.’