She listened with absorbed attention. Her face became somewhat sad. “Yes, I see,” she said in a low tone. But there was uncertainty in her. She added: “I don’t believe you’ll ever hurt or disillusion me, Geoffrey.”
“That is sweet of you, and I am touched,” he said with sincerity. “But you are quite wrong, my love. I shall hurt you often and even more often I shall disillusion you. I shan’t be able to help it. Sometimes it will be my fault, sometimes yours. And, in the natural course of events, you’ll wound me, too, and sometimes we shan’t like each other in the least. There may be rare moments when we’ll even hate each other. None of this can injure the love between us, if we remember that we have all the faults of humanity in common.”
She was silent. Geoffrey waited a moment, then said: “Melissa, I can’t imagine anything worse for you and for me than for you to transfer to me the old unthinking worship you had for your father, your old belief that the one you love is beyond vice or malice or cruelty, your old conviction that the one you love is all wisdom and perfection. I don’t want that from you, Melissa. I only want you to love me, to understand me as much as you can, to forgive me very frequently. You’ll have need to do all of these, and I, also, shall have need for them in my life with you.”
“I’d die rather than hurt you!” she cried.
“No, Melissa. You’ll hurt me, and you won’t die. And there is another thing: “I’d like you to learn to laugh. Do you know, love, that I’ve never heard you laugh?”
She began to smile, and then, to his delight and astonishment, she actually laughed, though with uncertainty and shyness.
After a little, he said: “At the moment, you are sure that the new world waiting for you is going to be all light and joy and peace. You are wrong. You must not get any fixed notions about the world, in any way, any idea that what you see today or tomorrow or the next year is immutable. The intelligent human being passes constantly from old worlds to new, constantly discarding, renewing and inventing illusions. Mind, no less than external nature, is always in flux. So you must be prepared to shed your erroneous illusions and opinions, day by day, with complete flexibility. Do you follow me, my dear?”
“Yes.” She looked at him steadily. “It sounds very confusing though.”
“It is. That’s what makes life so unpredictable and interesting. Try to understand, darling. The trouble was that your first world remained, inflexibly, the one in which you spent twenty-five years of your life without discarding an illusion or an opinion. Be determined, then, not to make the same mistake again, or you will inevitably be condemned to a chronic unhappiness. You are too young for that. Such a state is reserved for the old, or for the stupid, who let their minds harden in a matrix of ideas from which they cannot, or will not, permit themselves to be freed. You are not old, and you are not stupid.”
Melissa became agitated. “Am I to have no opinions, no convictions at all?” she demanded, with a touch of her old arrogant impatience.
He was very pleased at this. “Yes, indeed. Have opinions and convictions all over the premises, like the trees in a jungle, if you wish. But don’t let yourself get the idea that these are the right ones, the irrefutable ones, the ultimate ones. Doubt, Melissa.” He smiled at her. “Doubt like hell.”
She laughed, suddenly and spontaneously, and he thought he had never heard so good a sound, so cleansing and so full of hope.
Now he put her to the test of the lessons he had been trying to teach her. “What are your thoughts about your father, Melissa?”
Her face changed abruptly, became pinched and quiet. She drew her hands away from his, twisted the gloved fingers together. He waited for some time before she spoke.
“My father. At first, I could not bear the thought of him. I made my whole mind empty of him. Then I was disgusted, and I hated him. When I remembered his face and his voice, it seemed more than I could bear. But now I think I am beginning to see that he was very miserable, that he was cheated, not by others but by his own limitations. He had wonderful aspirations. He did not have the ability to realize them in actual performance. And so I am very sorry for him. Sometimes I am so sorry that I can hardly endure it.”
It was much more than Geoffrey could ever have expected. He took her hands again, and stood up, pulling her to her feet. They looked at each other for a long moment.
Then Geoffrey said: “I think we can go home now, darling.”
A Biography of Taylor Caldwell
Taylor Caldwell was one of the most prolific and widely read American authors of the twentieth century. In a career that spanned five decades, she wrote forty novels, many of which were New York Times bestsellers.
Caldwell captivated readers with emotionally charged historical novels and family sagas such as Captains and the Kings, which sold 4.5 million copies and was made into a television miniseries in 1976. Her novels based on the lives of religious figures, Dear and Glorious Physician, a portrayal of the life of St. Luke, and Great Lion of God, a panoramic novel about the life and times of St. Paul, are among the bestselling religious novels of all time.
Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell in 1900 in Manchester, England, into a family of Scotch-Irish descent, she began attending an academically rigorous school at the age of four, studying Latin, French, history, and geography. At six, she won a national gold medal for her essay on novelist Charles Dickens. On weekends, she performed a long list of household chores and attended Sunday school and church twice a day. Caldwell often credited her Spartan childhood with making her a rugged individualist.
In 1907, Caldwell, her parents, and her younger brother immigrated to the United States, settling in Buffalo, New York, where she would live for most of her life. She started writing stories when she was eight years old and completed her first novel, The Romance of Atlantis, when she was twelve, although it was not published until 1975. Marriage at the age of eighteen to William Combs and the birth of her first child, Mary Margaret—Peggy—did not deter her from pursuing an education. While working as a stenographer and a court reporter to help support her family, she took college courses at night.
Upon receiving a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Buffalo in 1931, she divorced her husband and married Marcus Reback, her boss at the US Immigration Department office in Buffalo. Caldwell then dedicated herself to writing full time. Even as her family grew with the arrival of her second daughter, Judith, Caldwell’s unpublished manuscripts continued to pile up.
At the age of thirty-eight, she finally sold a novel, Dynasty of Death, to a major New York publisher. Convinced that a pre–World War I saga of two dynasties of munitions manufacturers would be better received if people thought it was written by a man, Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner—who also discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—advised her to use only part of her name—Taylor Caldwell—as her pen name. Dynasty of Death became a bestseller in 1938 and the saga continued with The Eagles Gather in 1940 and The Final Hour in 1944. Inevitably, a public stir ensued when people discovered Taylor Caldwell was a woman.
Over the next forty years, Caldwell often worked from midnight to early morning at her electric typewriter in her book-crammed study, producing a wide array of sagas (This Side of Innocence, Answer as a Man) and historical novels (Testimony of Two Men, Ceremony of the Innocent) that celebrated American values and passions.
She also produced novels set in the ancient world (A Pillar of Iron, Glory and the Lightning), dystopian fiction (The Devil’s Advocate, Your Sins and Mine), and spiritually themed novels (The Listener, No One Hears But Him, Dialogues with the Devil).
Apart from their across-the-board popularity with readers and their commercial success, which made Caldwell a wealthy woman, her long list of bestselling novels possessed common themes that were close to her heart: self-reliance and individualism, man’s struggle for justice, the government’s encroachment on personal freedoms, and the conflict between man’s desire for wealth and power and his need for love
and family bonding.
The long hours spent at her typewriter did not keep Caldwell from enjoying life. She gave elegant parties at her grand house in Buffalo. One of her grandchildren recalls watching her hold the crowd in awe with her observations about life and politics. She embarked on annual worldwide cruises and was fond of a glass of good bourbon. Drina Fried recalls her grandmother confiding in her: “I vehemently believe that we should have as much fun as is possible in our dolorous life, if it does not injure ourselves or anyone else. The only thing is—be discreet. The world will forgive you anything but getting caught.”
Caldwell didn’t stop writing until she suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of eighty. Her last novel, Answer as a Man, was published in 1981 and hit the New York Times bestseller list before its official publication date. She died at her home in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1985.
William Combs, Taylor Caldwell’s first husband and father to Peggy, aboard a naval ship, circa 1926.
A portrait of Caldwell at the start of her career in the late 1930s.
A portrait of Caldwell taken before Scribner’s publication of Melissa on June 21, 1948.
Caldwell at her desk in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1949. She spent many winter months at Whitehall, a resort hotel on the property of Henry Flagler’s former estate, which is now the Flagler Museum.
Caldwell’s second daughter, Judith Ann Reback, during time with her mother at Whitehall in the 1940s.
Caldwell receiving an award in Los Angeles, California, for A Pillar of Iron after its publication in 1965.
Caldwell with her daughters, Peggy Fried and Judith Ann Reback (Goodman), and Ted Goodman in 1969 on the MS Bergensfjord.
Caldwell at a cocktail party with her daughter, Peggy, and the hostess of a research world cruise on the SS President Wilson in 1970.
Caldwell with her granddaughter, Drina Fried, at her home in Buffalo, New York, winter 1975. Soula Angelou, her personal assistant, insisted on taking this rare family picture.
An invitation from 1975 to one of Caldwell’s many cocktail parties. She hosted at least two parties a year in Buffalo, New York, before she moved to Connecticut.
Caldwell with her fourth husband, Robert Prestie, who cared for her in the last six years of her life in Connecticut.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1948 by Taylor Caldwell
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5312-9
This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
TAYLOR CALDWELL
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