The Final Hour

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  She pressed her thin white fingers against her cheeks. ‘Madness,’ she said. ‘Madness. The whole world is mad. There are only a few sane men left. Only a few like Henri. What does it matter if he is thinking only of himself? He can save us, all of us.’

  She turned quickly to Celeste. ‘Does Henri think we’ll get into this war?’

  ‘He doesn’t know,’ sighed Celeste. ‘A few months ago he was certain we wouldn’t. But, not now. He is trying to keep us out. He was sure it would mean the end of America, as we know it, if we were drawn in. Now, he almost believes it will be the end of America if we aren’t.’

  ‘Does he still hate Roosevelt?’ asked Agnes, with a brief smile.

  ‘I don’t know. The President once irritated him, terribly. But now he is indifferent. He says this thing is much bigger than politics. However, he thinks the Republican party has a fair chance of winning the election if it can find a good and spectacular man who will appeal to all elements. Of one thing he is certain, though: Roosevelt will run for a third term, against precedent, prejudice and tradition, and the Republican candidate will perhaps be defeated.’

  But Agnes seemed not to have heard this. She sat down again near her sister-in-law. ‘And now, Celeste, all this comes back to you.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘Yes. You and Henri. Henri’s enemies will stop at nothing to destroy him. They know, now, what he is trying to do. I don’t know what other things they have in mind, but they are ready to expose you. They’ll do it, too. You think the American people won’t be interested? Well, then, you must remember that bigger men than Henri have been destroyed by a peccadillo. The vast mass of American people are very childlike, easily swayed. They believe they are very virtuous, statistics to the contrary. Henri’s enemies can make such a national uproar over this—this little affair—that anything he tries to do thereafter will be smeared. You think that is childish? I assure you it isn’t. Every enemy clergyman in the country will harp on Henri’s “infidelity,” until the fate of America becomes a small affair in comparison. Of course, the more intelligent men will only laugh. But the mass of puerile, and fornicating Americans won’t laugh. In their stupidity, they will argue that a man who sleeps with another man’s wife must be a complete rascal, must not be trusted, and is capable of the most heinous and treacherous crimes, that everything he does must be suspect. Many a hero has failed, many a great leader of the people has been discredited, because his pleasant little private eccentricities were exposed, exaggerated, and branded as infamous. That is the way of the mob. And Henri’s enemies know it.’

  Celeste was as white as death. ‘I don’t believe it!’ she cried. The American people can’t be so stupid and ignorant.’

  Agnes nodded her head gravely. ‘I assure you they can. Like so many of our class, you believe that your mind, your reason, your intelligence, are shared in equal quantities by all other people. That is our fatal mistake. The little labourer, the little shopgirl, the little storekeeper, the little artisan, whose lives are in jeopardy in these days, will be titillated, made indignant and furious, because the man who is trying to save them from death and enslavement sleeps with another man’s wife occasionally. You think this incredible? I only ask you to look at history. Not only Cæsar’s wife must be above reproach, but in America Cæsar himself must be a eunuch. That is our Puritan heritage.’

  She hesitated. ‘And, of course, there is the matter of Armand, too. Have you forgotten that Annette is his daughter? What if she is told, and she divorces Henri? Don’t shrink so, my dear. You must think of all this. If Annette divorces Henri, then Armand will go out to smash him. Armand is a bulbous sick fool, but he is very malignant, also, and he loves his daughter. Remember, Henri is only president of Bouchard because of Armand’s power. Once he is thrown off centre, then the work he is trying to do is ended.’

  She stopped and waited. But Celeste said nothing.

  ‘You have only to wait a while,’ urged Agnes, putting her hand on Celeste’s shoulder. ‘Only until Armand dies, perhaps. At the worst, only until Henri has swung matters to a conclusion. It is a small thing, really, compared to all of America, isn’t it?’

  ‘What can I do?’ said Celeste, hopelessly. ‘Henri wouldn’t listen to me. He would say that it is ridiculous, that I must let him take care of things, himself. He would laugh me into speechlessness.’

  ‘Yes, I know, dear. That’s why you mustn’t tell him what I have told you. He is such a damned egotist. Frankly, I don’t know how you’ll manage it. Tell him anything else. Tell him Peter needs you. Tell him you can’t see him again while Peter lives. It’s up to you now, Celeste.’

  Celeste was all resignation, all renunciation. She sighed, over and over. She murmured: ‘If he goes, he might never come back. He told me that once, himself. He will never come back. I know that. Once I send him away—Later, when he understood, he might not want to come back.’

  ‘That’s what you must risk,’ said Agnes. ‘I know how you feel, darling. But all this is nothing, compared to the larger things.’

  She stood up, and began to draw on her gloves. She looked pityingly down at Celeste, so broken now, so despairing, so drained and lifeless.

  ‘Oh, my dear, my dear,’ she said. And went away.

  Celeste listened to the labouring of the car as it roared away into the early night. She listened with intensity, as if to shut out her own thoughts. Then, when everything was silent again, except for the wind and the crackling of the fire, the wave of desolation and grief and agony which swept over her could hardly be borne. In the extremity of her pain she could not move. She could only stare at the fire until her eye-sockets were a glare of reflected light.

  It was a long while before she could rise and climb heavily and weakly to her room. She turned on the lights. She heard the soft pealing of the dinner gong. But she sat down at her desk and drew a sheet of paper towards her. She began to write, and every word was like a knife in her heart.

  She began without salutation: ‘I have come to the conclusion that we cannot meet again under present circumstances. Please believe that this time my decision is final. Don’t try to see me, please. It is useless. Perhaps some day you might be able to understand.’

  She sealed the letter, addressed it to Henri at his office.

  BOOK THREE: THE ABIDING EARTH

  ‘One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.’

  —Ecclesiastes, 1:4.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  Annette Bouchard suffered from the common sadness of the gentle and unassuming: she was consistently neglected and forgotten, even if she was loved by many. For even the cruel and the malicious had nothing evil to say of her, and if they were guilty of disparaging remarks about her patience and sweetness, they made them with regret and pity.

  Her mind was unworldly. It was not that she was unaware of suffering and wickedness and all the foulness that is inherent in mankind. But she had a steadfast awareness of the flow of eternity. And she was endlessly compassionate and understanding.

  The late February day lay over Robin’s Nest like a gauzy grey curtain of smoke, in which everything was indistinct. But there was a warmth and peace in the great old house which had never known the birth of a child. So old and strong a house, she would think, with so many rooms upstairs which might have been made into nurseries! Could there be such a thing as a sterile house? Children had lived there, yes. Henri and Edith had played in these grand still rooms, had run up and down the wide spiral staircase, had seen Christmas trees in one corner of the larger drawingroom, had watched the rain running in quicksilver drops down the diamond-paned windows, had slept in quiet rooms, had fought, wrangled, laughed and wept within these walls. But only two children, after all. Annette had wanted to adopt children, but Henri had been enraged at the very idea, and had given her such a malefic look that she had never spoken of it again.

  It gave Annette a wistful happiness to know that she lived within the hou
se where Henri had had his early childhood. She liked to think of him as a child. She tried often to think of it. But her efforts evoked no image in her mind. When she tried to imagine him as a little boy her uneasy thoughts returned to the portrait of his great-grandfather, Ernest Barbour, which hung in the larger drawing-room. Then a curious compulsion would come over her; wherever she was, in whatever part of the house, she would be compelled to go to that room and look up at the portrait. Several times this compulsion had come upon her after midnight, and she had had to creep downstairs, light a lamp, and gaze at the painting for a long time.

  She remembered that when she had first come to that house as a bride the portrait seemed to regard her with cold and indifferent curiosity, even remote enmity. Those pale basilisk eyes would stare down at her with a strange fixity, and once or twice she thought that they were contemptuous. Later, they were merely indifferent. When she believed her heart was breaking (and this was often) she imagined there was an alert liveliness in those eyes, as if the painted face harboured thoughts and interest. But never had she imagined pity in them, or kindness. Fury, yes, icy anger, evil disdain, and sometimes aversion and contempt, but never pity. Sometimes they appeared to understand her, and to scorn what they understood.

  She had never, in the beginning, believed what others maintained: that Henri was a replica of his great-grandfather, that the eyes were identical, the planes of the large colourless face, the crest of the virile rising fair hair. Sometimes she would concede that there was a physical resemblance, but the expression was different.

  But now, in this last year, she had, with fear, been forced to acknowledge to herself that Henri was now precisely as Ernest Barbour had been. There was the same deep thick furrow between the eyes, the same heavy indomitable folds about the brutal mouth, the same blunt strength in the short nose, the same look of inexorable determination. Sometimes she was sure that the portrait slowly turned its head with Henri’s own gesture, and sometimes it seemed to her that the lips tightened as Henri’s did, just before he opened them to speak in his monotonous voice. Ernest Barbour had been about Henri’s age when the portrait had been painted, and there was the same shadow of premature grey in the light dull hair.

  For some mysterious reason, this growing resemblance frightened her. Often, she had the confused thought that it was no longer Henri Bouchard who lived in this house with her, but Ernest Barbour. She would then wander through the quiet and empty rooms, feeling a stranger, a strange woman who had no right here. The curtain would part, and May Sessions, Ernest’s first and last wife, would appear, in her thick crimson velvet gown, bustled and looped, her auburn curls high on her head, a jewel on her white plump throat, her pretty round dimpled face about to break out into the pleasant and gracious smile which was a legend in the family. (There was a small portrait of his great-grandmother in Henri’s room, and it had such a kind expression, so humorous, so twinkling and perceptive, that Annette had felt a nostalgic grief that she had never known this great lady.) Ernest had divorced May, who had loved him with such strength and passion, and had married her cousin, Amy Drumhill, widow of his brother, Martin. There was also a portrait of Amy in one of the bedrooms at Robin’s Nest, and she had been lovely, Annette thought. Amy had had a sweet and gentle face, dreamlike and unearthly, with large soft eyes and brown ringlets. The portrait had been painted when she was a girl, and the slender white shoulders were fully revealed above the faded ivory satin of her gown. But she had no reality for Annette. Annette was glad that, after Amy had die, Ernest had remarried May, and that they had both died in the old Sessions house that had been the inspiration and the ruin of that terrible man. The old Sessions house had long been rubble, had long been carted away in ignominious ruin, and May had never lived at Robin’s Nest where her daughter, Gertrude, had known such agony. Nevertheless, it was May that Annette always expected to see, entering through a shadowy arch, gliding up or down the great staircase. If Ernest Barbour was the evil and sleepless haunter of this house, May was its kind and beneficent spirit.

  Annette would sigh. She would think, mournfully, that Henri ought really to have married a woman like May Sessions, always gracious and beautiful and strong and lively. A woman who would have given him children. No wonder then, that the portrait looked down upon her with inimical contempt, and that the pale fixed eyes were often minatory.

  It would have amazed Henri had he known of Annette’s thoughts. For in her weary and idolatrous love for him, she had often pondered over the thought of giving him a divorce, of enabling him to remarry and have the children she would never have. (She could often hear those shadowy children racing in the upper halls, laughing in the distant rooms, hurling themselves down the staircase, demanding, caressing, crying.) Then it was that her pain became unendurable, and she would be thrown into fits of weeping that made her ill for days. But after a year or two of her married life, she knew she could not give Henri a divorce. Not while Armand was alive. Annette knew so much that no one else knew, or of which no one else dared to speak.

  Once she had heard her cruel relative, Rosemarie Bouchard, say to her sister, Phyllis: ‘That horrid little twisted creature will never divorce poor Henri. She has her claws in him very properly. She knows that he can’t divorce her, because of that smelly bloated old Armand. So, she gloats smugly over him, knowing she has him trapped.’

  Annette had been terribly ill for six months after that, so ill that she had almost died. No one knew why; her physicians were puzzled. It was only the thought that if she died Henri might be ruined that had brought her back to life. Shortly after she had been able to rise from her bed, she had visited an obscure lawyer and had made a will leaving to Henri everything of which she might die possessed, and had enclosed a sealed letter to her father in which she prayed that her share, or more, be left to her husband, that Armand would remember him and do justice to him. But she still feared that with her death Henri might be destroyed.

  It had been only a few months ago that Armand, taken ill again, had whimpered the truth to her, from what he considered his death-bed. She had felt such joy, such release, that she forgot her fears for her father. Later, doubt and fear came to her again. If Henri divorced her, or the capricious sick Armand changed his mind, the threat of ruin would remain. Armand had forgotten that he had told her in his semi-delirium, but Annette did not forget. There were three, now, who knew; Armand, Henri, and his wife.

  It was only lately that a strange and terrible thing had occurred to Annette; she hoped, with sad impatience, that her beloved father would die, and that with him would die the threat to Henri. With horror, she caught herself searching for signs of dissolution in Armand’s sick face, and she shuddered inwardly when the hope of his immediate death invaded her thoughts. Time was so short, she would say despairingly to herself. Henri was no longer young; if he was to marry a real woman, and have children, he must do it soon. And Armand lingered on with his needle and his List and his complaints and his misery.

  Her horror at her thoughts, her impatience, her sorrow and sadness, were eating away her last strength, were making her flesh more transparent, her large light-blue eyes more haunted and weary. She felt that all evil was in her. But she could not control her passionate desire that her father would soon die.

  Though the Bouchards pitied their daughter for a bemused and invalid fool, Annette had never been unaware of Henri’s frequent derelictions. She had followed the courses of his love affairs with painful and absorbed interest. Oh, not that one, she would say to herself, with terror, when one affair or another seemed to be unduly prolonged. Not that woman with her shrewd little green eyes and avaricious mouth, not that woman with her cruel sweet laugh and her fluttering stretching hands, not that woman who loved no one but herself. And, dear God, never, never Rosemarie Bouchard, that svelte smart Parisian evil! Even if Armand died, she would never give Henri a divorce so that he could marry one of these. They would bring him only wretchedness and hatred.

  Each time that h
e began another affair, she would manage to meet the woman, to study her. And in all these years, she had never met one to whom she would relinquish Henri. Not until lately.

  Always, from the beginning, she knew that Henri had loved Celeste, that he would never forget her. But when Celeste had returned, Annette had experienced only anguish. For Henri could not marry Celeste. Celeste was Peter’s wife, and Celeste would never divorce him. Never did she dare admit to herself, not even in the dark recesses of the night, what she already knew. The thought was too much agony. Henri would marry no other woman, this Annette now understood. But he could not marry Celeste. And Annette, with the guilt of the hope that Armand would soon die, could not extend this same hope to include poor Peter, whom she loved tenderly.

  Had the liaison brought Henri joy Annette would have derived a sad contentment from the fact. But it was bringing him no joy. Often, she would study him from a distance, and she could discern no new freshness in him, no new vitality or pleasure or life. Instead, these last two months, he had become grimmer, older, more savage, more coldly violent. And it was not because of the unremitting work he was doing; Annette understood that. It was something else.

  She had realized, for the last few weeks, that he was not meeting Celeste any longer. She was confused and bewildered and frightened at this. She could not believe he had tired of Celeste, nor she of him. Why, then, was this?

  Sometimes she would think to herself with sad surprise and humility: Perhaps they are disturbed about me. Perhaps they think it is ‘wrong.’ She took a strange and inexplicable comfort from this, felt a sudden aching of her heart in tenderness, all of which she could not understand though she was past-mistress in the art of self-analysis. There would be a sudden relief in her, a softening and dissolving that would bring tears to her patient eyes.