The Listener

by Taylor Caldwell

  “If necessary, and the jury wants it, we’ll go to Alice. She will tell. Yes, she will tell.”

  He stood up, still white, but resolute. “The simplicity of the people is much wiser than any philosophy, their sympathies quick and certain, their pity instantaneous. Yes. The jury and I — we will save John Hathaway together.”

  He smiled a little. “I must go home to Helen now. It was she who begged me to talk to you. She knew. Didn’t she tell me that Ruth did not begin to get well until she came here too? I wonder if she saw your face. The mercy of your face.”

  SOUL FIFTEEN

  The Destroyer, and THE MAN WHO LISTENS

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold:

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  W. B. Yeats: “The Second Coming”

  Dr. Atino Kadimo looked through the window of the jet plane and saw the Rockies far below — the Continental Divide. To conventional planes, even now, the Rockies were not something to pass over lightly, with a mere, abstracted glance. The captains and the co-pilots were very alert at this time because of the enormous updrafts and down-drafts. But it was quite different in a jet plane, Dr. Kadimo noticed with great interest. He was fifty-nine years old, yet he had not lost his sense of profound wonder, his awesome wonder, at everything. The Rockies, he saw, seemed a mere long rib of anthills, topped with infinitesimal dabs of snow, apparently the size of his palm. The great red buttes which had fascinated him when he had driven by them years ago appeared now to be but crimson wedges scattered on a smear of yellowish earth; they were hardly, from this perspective, more than an inch high.

  For two hours now he had floated almost soundlessly over the brown, yellow, red, and tan-colored earth. Everything was diminished, flat, formless. Even an occasional small city was a mere twinkle. Rivers had disappeared or were mere wandering cracks. Roads, of course, could not be discerned at all. Man had diminished everything, removed the contour, swell, valley, rise, and fall of everything. There was something terrible in this diminishing, this reducing of mountain, hill, stream, city, and field to a flat and sterile monotony. Some nations had tried to accomplish this flattening and sterility among men, notably in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, and there was a strong and deadly movement under way in America today to diminish man, to remove his contours of individuality, his variety of coloring, to make him, as they were doing to his earth, a frightful anonymity, with all his fruitful rivers of the mind vanished, his soul not distinguishable from his body, his passions one with the yellowish desert, his aspirations merely ant heaps, his spirit an irrelevant crack that led nowhere and died against a wall of stone, the bright cities of his mind hardly a faint flash in the eternal wilderness.

  Where were the forests now, from this high perspective in the plane, or in the psyche of man, the green and living forests, full of strange paths and unexpected vistas, sudden bright pools in the glades, a startled and ecstatic cry, mysterious innocent jubilation, song, untrodden revelation? Dr. Kadimo could see no forests through his small and insulated window, not even a blur of green; all was sear, level, the color of dead dunes that looked on a lifeless sea.

  In leaving the earth, thought the doctor, man has really left himself.

  The stewardess, smiling, came with a tray on which stood glasses of champagne. The doctor took a glass, smiled at her gently, and sipped the wine. Why, excellent! Sparkling on the tongue! Grapes touched with fire and ice! He could see the vineyards of Europe; he could feel the fat warm bunches of grapes in his hand, opaline, white, faintly pink, swelling with hot juice. He sat back in his extremely comfortable seat and smiled almost with happiness. Man, who could create the golden fire in this glass, had not been diminished — yet. His soul had not been flattened — yet. Somewhere in the world, even in the concrete cities as well as in the vineyards and the forests and the fields, there lived men of passion, joy, prayer. Noble anger.

  These men must be saved. Now the clenching fingers of chronic agony began to relax a little about the doctor’s heart. Something came clear and sharp to him, like the shatter of a trumpet on a battlement, like a call on a lonely ocean, like the ember of a camping place on a desert. They did not live in America alone, these men; they lived on the islands, in Europe, even in Russia, and in the farthest desperate outposts of the world, guarding their precious passions, their dreams, their poetry of being, their souls which sometimes could, for a rare instant or two, encompass God. They guarded these things dearly, as a jeweler guards his treasures, as a lion guards his mate, as the vessel guards the Host. They had altars in their hearts, even if all altars were forbidden; they had sanctuaries of the spirit into which no destruction could crash its fist. It was for these men everywhere, Dr. Kadimo knew between one sip of champagne and another, that he must find a way to save and preserve what they sheltered so jealously and with such reverence. He did not know how. He only knew that he must.

  One of the young stewardesses hesitated by his seat, another tray in her hand. She had been trained to regard her passengers not just as passengers but as human beings, subject to pain, fear, eccentricities, and even to dangerous gestures. Dr. Atino Kadimo; that was his name. He had boarded the plane in Los Angeles. He had looked sick and gray in Los Angeles, though he had smiled courteously and had given his name in meticulous syllables with a faint accent and had moved like a young man. She remembered that he was extremely tall, his height accentuated by his thinness. But he had very large blue eyes, absent yet penetrating, as if he were thinking of something else but leaving a soldier on guard to challenge, if necessary, or to alert him. He had seated himself and had not spoken to his companion on the other side of the table between the seats. He had spent most of his time looking down through the window. It must be his first flight in a jet. She could tell them.

  And while he had looked he had become sicker, grayer, older. She had given him champagne, and he had thanked her. Most of the others rarely did, especially the silly, arrogant ones from Hollywood, who kept staring about them sharply and getting up and pacing the aisle, wanting to be recognized by the less important, demanding with insolent eyes that they be recognized. Some of the stupid gave them their insistently demanded accolade, with whispers of excitement, and they were pleased and immediately scorned their admirers as if they were impudent bumpkins. The more sophisticated or important pretended not to see them. This made them pettish with the stewardesses. The actresses were more pettish than the men, if possible.

  The doctor had fallen asleep. His face looked younger, refreshed, more relaxed. A change had come over him. This made the stewardess hesitate with her tray for him. A nice filet mignon with mushrooms, a Vichyssoise, a good salad. But he was asleep. For some reason she did not want to awaken him, though in less than one hour and a half the plane would land in Chicago. You were supposed to nudge passengers gently awake if they slept when a meal was ready. “I’ll take it,” said the man across the table from the doctor. “The old guy looks like he needs his sleep.” The stewardess gave him the tray. He immediately began to gobble voluptuously, with intense concentration, as if this were to be his last meal on earth. Why did so many people eat like that? It made a person ashamed for them, someway. It wasn’t that they were enjoying the good food and relishing every mouthful. It was as if they were hungry, which they weren’t. The man who was eating was very fat; he even bulged out of the large seat. “You meet all kinds,” murmured the stewardess to her sister stewardess. “I think,” she said, “that I’ll let that doctor sleep forty-five minutes before we land and then give him his lunch.”

  “Do you think he’s sick?” asked the other stewardess anxiously. She was a very conscientious girl. “May
be he needs oxygen.”

  “Well, he looked sick when he got aboard, but now he doesn’t. I’ll let him sleep a little longer. He seems to need it; it’s as if he hasn’t slept for a long time.”

  Dr. Kadimo was dreaming. He was a boy again in his eastern European country. His father was a lawyer; he was also the mayor of the small town; he was also the friend of the local priest, and together they solved the problems of the distressed. The room was all wood, even the ceiling. It was white and roaring winter outside. A bear rug, the color of cream, was spread before the fireplace, and a kettle began to sing over the fire. An oil lamp gleamed softly here and there; leather chairs or chairs of polished wood were scattered over the shining floors. An icon stood over the stone fireplace. The Corpus, made of bronze, glimmered like old gold. A dog whined sleepily near the fire. Odors of thick rich soup came from the kitchen. The wind thundered at the tight little windows, the strong oaken doors. The copper kettle was boiling now; its thin high song sounded over the wind. The dog moved restlessly, lifting his long nose toward the kitchen. The frost made the trees crack outside; they snapped like pistol shots. Darkness pressed against the windows, a darkness like an impenetrable weight, like an ominous presence, like a powerful threat. The room was an outpost in the winter and the dark.

  The boy, Atino, was sitting respectfully away from the fire at a broad and polished table, working over his books. He was twelve years old. He was growing drowsy; the fire crackled and he could feel its floods of warmth and could see its curtains of flame rushing up the chimney, which hummed with the wind. He could smell the fine fat smells from the kitchen, cabbage soup and roasting pork and the aromatic, spicy perfume of cooking apples. There was a scent of coffee in the air too. His father and the priest were drinking it before the fire. The priest had pushed his tall hat, like a black tube, off his forehead; the shawl, attached to the rear of the hat, draped over his neck and shoulders. He had lifted the skirts of his clerical robes so that he could warm his old sturdy legs in their long black woolen stockings. He had climbed through snow, and now the room took on another odor, of drying wool, of damp leather and felt. He was not a tall man, but he was a big one in girth, a man with authority as well as kindness, a man of God. Atino, shaking the drowse from his eyes, looked at Father Alexis Rozniak with deep respect. He could rumble pleasantly and thoughtfully, as he was doing now. He could also shout, and everything thundered about him then. He could grow angry, and his hand was hard. When he chanted in the church it seemed the very plaster angels listened; the rich and reverent response soared among the pillars and against the Byzantine roof with its gold leaf and its faces of the saints. The candles would flicker with the very power of that great chanting, and the cold winter sun slanted through high colored glass windows in beams of many hues. The priest was the heart of the town, durable, eternal, ageless, even though his beard was gray, the eyelids over the fine black eyes wrinkled like old silk.

  The priest and the mayor, Atino’s father, were talking very seriously now, and when men talked seriously, Atino had observed, it was usually of a dull matter. Their voices were low. Perhaps it was the quality of the tone of their voices that made the boy suddenly strain to listen. “Believe me, dear Jozef,” said the priest, “I am not needlessly alarming you. There is a stench in the air, an effluvium of violence and terror. I am a man of the country; you know how it is when we smell the wind, sniffing it deeply into our nostrils. Long before the storm breaks or the first flash of lightning is in the sky, or the first sound of wind in the trees, or the first mutter of thunder, a countryman knows what is approaching. Is it not so? Yes. And before the first long snow begins, a countryman can smell it, pure and dry and clean as starch. And so you must go with your family to America. At once. You are a man of substance, an accomplished man, a teacher, a man of law. They will admit you. But do not wait! It is almost upon us.”

  It was late February 1914. Jozef Kadimo smiled, tapped his pipe with a finger, smoked, became serious again. Atino sat up alertly. America? So far away, so mysterious, unknown? Why should they go to America? The men before the fire dropped their voices and moved their heads closer together, looking into each other’s eyes. Atino yawned. He started dimly awake when he heard the sweet singing of his father’s violin. Jozef was standing on the bear rug, his eyes half closed, his plump lips smiling, and he was playing. Ah, Chopin. The Polonaise. It was his father’s favorite selection. He could make his violin cry with resolution, dance deliriously, deepen to drums, march, weep, laugh, portend. He could hear it now, like a passionate voice calling to him, and he started awake in the jet plane with the sound in his ears.

  The plane was rushing into darkness against the sun, but against the purple horizon Dr. Kadimo, blinking, could see the lighter purple of the curve of the earth, tinged with dim fire. The beautiful, beautiful earth! The stewardess came to him, but he shook his head and said, “Coffee, please. Just coffee.” He sipped the coffee. The jet engines shrilled faintly, but above them the doctor could hear his father’s violin singing, urgent, like a chanted prayer. He put his lean fingers over his eyes and rubbed them and sighed. The resolution rose like a pillar of indomitable stone in his heart. He did not know — yet. But with God’s help he would know what he must do and what he must say.

  The mighty plane heaved and dropped, and the stewardesses hurried down the aisle to be sure that their charges had fastened their seat belts. “So soon?” murmured the doctor to the girl. She was such a pretty young thing, with a fresh face like a warm summer pear. “There’s a snowstorm over Chicago,” she said reassuringly. “Bad weather and a little bumpy, perhaps. We’ll be there in about thirty-five minutes.”

  The lights in the plane went on as they were gulped into the darkness. A terrible thing, this speed, thought Dr. Kadimo. I left California in a full hot day, and in just this little while I am in darkness, and it is winter in Chicago. What frightful forces men can now control! But they cannot control the most frightful things of all: their own hearts. They can speed with the sun, but they cannot speed mercy, or justice, or peace, for these are not in them. They can ban the midnight, but not the malignancy of their minds. They can illuminate the heavens, but not their spirits. They can climb the loftiest stratosphere and eye the moon, but they cannot climb the dunghill of their sins and their crimes against each other. They can divide and fission and fuse the atom — how dreadful! — but they cannot part themselves from the terror that lives in them; they cannot fuse God to their souls. “Man is inclined to evil,” said the Church, “and to darkness rather than to light.” But the Western ethic of the Reformation and of Rousseau declared that man was naturally good and was distorted and debased only by the institutions about him. What folly! He, and he alone, created his institutions, was then imprisoned by them. Tortured and murdered by them. He had made a hell of the green garden of the world. He had filled it with devils like himself. And now —

  But still, at the desperate outposts of this staring horror which man had made of his planet, the desperate outposts in the night, stood some men of goodness and charity, men who made wine and music, who worshiped secretly, who loved, who would even die to defend that which was sacred. When all the world had stood sheepishly silent before the massacre of Hungary and not a statesman had lifted his voice in a shout of rage and wrath, some very young Russian soldiers in their tanks had refused to fire upon men and women and little children in Budapest. Those young boys, who had been taught the litany of Lucifer all their lives, who had known nothing but fury and madness! Yet these few, these clumsy youths, had preferred to be shot than to do a monstrous thing. I salute you, said the doctor in his soul. For you, I will find a way. Even hell could not prevail against your sudden holy compassion, could not consume it in fire; knowing nothing of goodness, you re-created it in your hearts. I salute you, brave children. God be with you.

  The stewardess brought Dr. Kadimo his coat. She was the conscientious girl. She worried because the coat was so light.

  The st
orm in Chicago was tremendous, with a huge blizzard and freezing winds. She said to the doctor, “Why, the temperature is close to zero outside, Dr. Kadimo. And this coat — ”

  “I’ve lived in California and in the desert a long time,” said the doctor, touched at this gentle solicitude, which had come spontaneously and without a hope of money. “A very long time. When I visited the East before, it was usually summer. Please don’t worry. I know what winter is. See, I have a sweater, which I have just put on.” He wanted to kiss her cheek, as he had kissed the cheek of his dead young daughter, Stella, who had died of poliomyelitis when she had been as young as this child. Stella had always been so concerned about him after they had been left alone following the death of her mother. He was no longer grieved over Stella. She had died in youth and innocence, before man had increased his madness a thousandfold. She had died the day before the atomic bombs had been dropped on the defenseless cities of Japan. God forgive me, thought Dr. Kadimo as the stewardess helped him pull on his coat. If You can, Lord, forgive me. If You cannot, then let me, out of my most awful guilt, undo what I have done or make it impossible again.