Never Victorious, Never Defeated

  The medicine and the tonic slowly relaxed Stephen’s cramped and aching body. He saw the faint pink flush over the mountains deepen into a brighter rose, cold and without warmth. The mountains turned a darker purple, came into sharper focus. The river took on clearer tints of silver and scarlet. Mists began to rise on the narrow and hurrying waters, and they reflected the sunset in their passage through the close blue chasm.

  The sleepless agony quickened in Stephen. He turned his head in a spasm of suffering. His eyes inadvertently fell on his father, sitting so quietly smoking by the fire. For the first time Stephen’s absent gaze did not move away from Aaron. Reluctantly, he continued to observe his father, and now there was the dimmest stirring of anxious curiosity in him. Why was Aaron here? Why did he come, day after day, to remain hour after hour, rarely speaking, not reading, not moving?

  Aaron suddenly turned his head and the two men looked at each other in a long silence. The room was darkening, though the sky outside was a flow of brilliant magenta over the mountains. The window flamed in it; red shadows struck the white ceiling, so that it seemed afire. Across the breadth of the room Aaron and Stephen gazed at each other through the dusk, and did not speak.

  Then Aaron got to his feet and deliberately put down his pipe. He thrust his little hands in his pockets, teetered on his heels, and regarded the window reflectively. Stephen might not have been in the room at all. Aaron began to hum, hoarsely, a mannerism he had when he was alone. Then he pursed up his lips and whistled softly, a wandering tune such as a man makes when his mind is deeply occupied. He started to walk up and down the room, his head bent, his steps short and slow and feeble. His pointed beard caught the firelight as he passed to and fro before it. There were gray hollows in his face, but Stephen could see the alert gleam of his eyes as the firelight struck them.

  Then he felt his father beside him. Aaron stood near his son’s shoulder and looked at the sky also, rocking on his heels, his mouth pursed up soundlessly. Stephen wanted to ask about his health, with awkward uncertainty, but he was too tired. However, some discomfort came to him as his father continued to stand so near him in the thickening twilight.

  There was a sound of carriage wheels outside, and Aaron shrugged. He said casually, “Well, Job, I see your three comforters have arrived again for their weekly visit.” He laughed shortly, and then chuckled to himself. He went back to his chair, dipped a lucifer into the fire and relit his pipe. He had crossed his small legs, and he swayed one of them up and down. He appeared deeply amused. Stephen’s hands moved restlessly on the arms of his chair. He wondered why his father often remained when Jim Purcell, Joseph Baynes, and Tom Orville visited him. He would not comment, or speak, unless appealed to directly, but he listened, and he would laugh soundlessly, to Stephen’s embarrassed discomfiture.

  Job. Aaron had called him Job. Was not Job the man of many afflictions, whom God and Satan had tested, and who had triumphed over his sufferings and his disasters? Why had Aaron spoken so jocularly of Job? What had Job to do with him, Stephen deWitt? Had there been cruelty, as usual, in Aaron’s remark, or mockery? Stephen knew that his friends were not at ease in Aaron’s company, or at least, Tom and Joseph were not. It was impossible to know what Jim Purcell thought, and it was even more impossible to know why he came to see Stephen at all. What few words he grunted added nothing to the general talk; he would sit, thought Stephen, startled into opening his eyes, as Aaron sat: listening, sometimes oblivious, and swinging one big leg as Aaron was swinging his small one now.

  They were coming down the long wide corridor now, three dissimilar men. Tom Orville and Joseph Baynes were old friends and, with Stephen, they formed a close companionship. Like Stephen, they had known Jim Purcell all their lives, and they did not like him. He had been a big lump of a boy, and he was a huge lump of a man now, very rich, unmarried, coarse in his manners, grotesque in appearance, and in so far as his acquaintances knew, he had little wit and no subtlety. His life was restricted to the one urge of becoming the wealthiest man in the community. He had attached himself to Stephen when Stephen had been only nine years old, and he twelve. Even the very young Stephen had wondered why, and he still wondered.

  There was a discreet knock on the door, and Aaron said jovially, “Come in, gentlemen, come in.” The door opened, and the three men filed soberly into the room, glancing at Aaron with strained politeness, and, in the case of two of them, with constraint and fear. Aaron nodded at chairs; his yellow teeth glistened in the firelight.

  “Welcome, good comforters,” he said serenely. He settled himself deeper into his chair, with an expression of anticipatory enjoyment. He pulled the bell rope. “Whisky again, no doubt?” he remarked affably.

  9

  Uncomfortable under the dancing eyes of Aaron, Joseph Baynes and Tom Orville seated themselves awkwardly, and glanced furtively at each other as if to say: Why does he have to be here? But Jim Purcell gave Aaron a long look and nodded slightly. His large and misshapen face resembled a mass of formless and colorless dough, all protuberances, swellings, and circular pits, in which his eyes were mere small lozenges of mud, so lightless were they, so without sparkle or expression. His lumpy nose was greasy, and seemed to have been stuck at a haphazard angle in the center of his face, and his mouth was a mere crease in the general doughiness. Above a very low forehead rose a thin but tough layer of coarse brown hair, which apparently was never combed or brushed, and his large ears flew out from the sides of his big head like crudely fashioned wax. He gave an unperturbed impression of absolute and deliberate coarseness, and his rumpled clothing, his badly tied black cravat, revealed his calm scorn for the niceties, as did his dark and enormous hands with their carelessly cleaned nails. His great boots were stained and coated with old mud, the color of his eyes. There was a quality of brutality about him, a nonchalant contempt.

  In contrast with him, the fastidious Joseph Baynes appeared a little too delicate, small, and fragile. Tom Orville, a middle-sized man in his late thirties, shrank before this giant of a man, and his candid, fresh-colored face and eager eyes became the face and eyes of a schoolboy. Jim Purcell drained maturity from the other two visitors. And though Baynes and Orville were men of presentable and pleasing appearance, it was paradoxical that this huge and ugly man could make them seem puerile and insignificant and without vitality in comparison.

  Once Tom Orville, a good-natured and kindhearted man usually, had remarked to Stephen that Jim Purcell was a “true prehistoric man,” both in appearance and in his blunted nature. Stephen, always uneasy when a depreciating remark was made about anyone, had found himself involuntarily laughing. He was sorry for the laughter later, though he had admitted that there was some truth in Orville’s flippant remark. But his perplexity over Purcell’s silent attachment to him, the seeking out of him by this dull-eyed and expressionless giant from their earliest childhood, increased rather than decreased.

  There was another bewildering circumstance which had occurred in 1863. Tom Orville possessed a modest but flourishing lumber business. In 1860, in anticipation of large war orders, Orville had taken widespread options on local timber tracts. Larger lumber companies in the vicinity, anxious to remove this small competitor, and enraged that he had outmatched them in his foresight, persuaded the bank in Portersville, and banks in other nearby towns, not to advance him any money when the options came due. Purcell, himself, was invested in two of the larger lumber companies, and his word was law among the bankers. He had given his orders: Orville, the presumptuous, was to be eliminated, forced into bankruptcy.

  Orville had come to his friend, Stephen deWitt, as Joseph Baynes had come to him later, in despair and frantic helplessness, threatening suicide, weeping for his wife and children. Stephen had anxiously searched his own financial resources, but saw that they were inadequate. He had pleaded with the president of the Portersville bank; he had visited other bankers in other towns. He had even gone to Philadelphia, and had offered the bankers there his collateral in behal
f of Orville. He had been received with warm, if sheepish, courtesy. It did not occur to him that his request would be refused, for was he not the son of Aaron deWitt, and was not Aaron the close friend and associate of these men? But the request was refused, with inadequate excuses; and Stephen, sensing the acute embarrassment of the bankers, had had mercy on them, in spite of his own heartsickness.

  He had then gone to Purcell, as a last resort, Purcell who was his mysterious familiar. He had gone with the deepest shrinking and reluctance, practically assured in himself that he would, of course, fail. He had sat in Purcell’s dusty, untidy, if luxurious, home, and he had advanced all the humanitarian and Christian arguments at his disposal, all the pleas for justice which could make his drab face so eloquent on occasion. And Purcell had listened patiently, but without expression. He had waited while Stephen made his promises to mortgage his future in behalf of his friend. He showed no quickening until this, and then he had fixed those lightless eyes upon Stephen with profound curiosity.

  After all his pleas had been made, Stephen had sat exhausted, waiting for the inevitable refusal. And then Purcell had said, in his hoarse voice, “You want him to get the money from the banks? All right.”

  They all sat about Stephen now. Purcell, after his first grunt of greeting, and his first muddy contemplation of Stephen, seated himself, swinging his great leg, and smoking an excessively foul pipe. He regarded space without expression, while Joseph and Tom asked Stephen about his health, and Aaron listened, silently chuckling.

  Stephen tried to arouse himself from his lethargy. Not to speak, not to show some interest, would have seemed an unpardonable discourtesy to these kind and anxious friends of his. So he replied that he was improving; his voice was very weak and dwindled.

  Joseph and Tom smiled at him with encouragement, but there was a crease of good-tempered impatience on Joseph’s forehead.

  “This has been a fine day,” he remarked. “You ought to have aroused yourself and taken a drive, Steve.”

  He and Tom exchanged one of their mutually supporting glances, and Tom nodded. In their opinion “Steve” was making a fool of himself by his prolonged sorrow over his wife. True, Alice had been a “nice” young thing in her way, and it was all very tragic. But a man couldn’t die because his wife had died, especially not a man Stephen’s age.

  “The doctor,” Aaron placidly remarked from the fireplace, “said today that Steve’s not even well enough to sit out on that balcony yet.” He waved in the direction of the western window where a small terrace, guarded by wrought iron, jutted out over the abyss.

  Joseph moved uncomfortably on his chair. Like Orville, he was afraid of Aaron. He said, with almost too eager an attempt at placating, “Well, perhaps the doctor is right. But all these months. … Poor Steve. Never knew lung fever to last so long. Three months at the most. He should be getting his strength back now.”

  Jim Purcell said hoarsely, “Maybe he doesn’t want it back. Maybe he’s got reasons for not wanting it back.”

  This seemed utterly ridiculous to the other two men, who, howeyer, dared not argue for fear of Purcell. Joseph leaned toward Stephen, trying to capture that sick and wandering eye, and he said with gentle earnestness, “Steve. What has happened is the will of God. Who are we to quarrel with Him? It’s an affront to Him to question His decrees.”

  “Who says so?” Purcell asked. He turned in his chair and looked Joseph up and down with brutish dismissal.

  “The Bible says so,” Tom replied uncertainly. “Our churches teach so.”

  Joseph, who was superintendent of the First Methodist Church of Portersville, and who had long ago forgotten his own despair from which Stephen had saved him, said in a deepened and solemn voice, “‘Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty.’”

  “Job,” said Aaron, nodding in his glee. “It was one of Job’s comforters who said that, didn’t he? Eliphaz.”

  Joseph was astonished that one such as Aaron could know the Bible. He stammered, “You’re quite correct, Mr. deWitt.”

  Jim Purcell nonchalantly emptied the contents of his odoriferous pipe in his hand, then tossed the brown mess into the fireplace. He very seldom remarked on anything, but now he quoted: “And Job replied, I kind of remember, ‘What is my strength, that I should hope? And what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?’ And if I remember rightly, it wasn’t Eliphaz who spoke in the name of God, who heard God. It was Job. Funny, isn’t it?”

  Stephen moved his head in pain. The voices came to him from a gathering of shadows, and he could not distinguish one from the other. But an echo repeated itself over and over in the desolate and hollow places in his mind: “What is my strength, that I should hope? And what is mine end, that I should prolong my life?”

  The others were too amazed at Purcell’s rumbling quotation of the Bible to do anything but stare at him blankly, with the exception of Aaron. How dared this powerful rascal, this lumpish giant and brute, quote Holy Writ? It was blasphemy. Joseph ducked his head with apprehensive politeness toward Purcell, but had the courage to say, “Job said that when he was in the very pit of his lost faith in God. Later, he understood.”

  “You’re wrong, Baynes. He never lost faith in God. It’s just you mealymouths who never had faith in Him, and that’s why you can quote Him so readily.”

  Purcell swung his huge body cumbrously toward Stephen, whose head was bent on his chest. “Steve,” he called roughly. He waited. Stephen did not look up; he had not heard. Then Purcell lumbered to his feet, walked to the sick man, and pushed his shoulder none too gently. Stephen raised his head and tried to fix his glazed eyes on that doughlike face. “Steve,” repeated Purcell, and his voice was almost a roar. “Listen to me. Grieve yourself out. If you find it’s too hard goin’, do somethin’ about it. You hear? A man don’t have to stand more than he can. It ain’t expected of him. But don’t linger on, tryin’ to make up your mind. You got a kid here. Is she worth livin’ for? Is she, Steve?”

  That harsh and compelling voice caught Stephen’s attention, and he heard every word. “My child?” he muttered. “Yes, my child.”

  “Well, then, is she worth livin’ for, that young’un? She’s all you’ve got, from Alice. Who’s goin’ to take care of her? Want her out on the street, Steve? Want her left alone—Alice’s kid? Goin’ to desert her? Make up your mind, once and for all.” He waited, then went on, more roughly than before, “You got an idea, way back in that soft skull of yourn, about what the world’s really like, though you won’t admit it to yourself. Want your kid to face the world alone, knowin’ what it is? Like you faced it? Got no mercy on Alice, eh, or Alice’s baby?”

  Tears filled Stephen’s eyes. The room was utterly silent. Aaron leaned forward in the dusk, intently watching, but Joseph and Tom were looking at each other with carefully concealed and superior scorn.

  “Make up your mind, Steve,” said Purcell. “You’re the one to decide. If livin’s too much for you, do somethin’ about it. If the kid’s somethin’ to you, make up your mind about that. That’s what you’re tryin’ to do, isn’t it? Make up your mind?”

  Joseph was moved to say, “Jim, are you trying to tell Stephen that he’s deliberately—”

  Purcell turned his mammoth head and surveyed Joseph with contempt. “Yes. And what about it? It takes a brave man to die, not a coward, like you church folk are always sayin’.”

  He came back to Stephen. “What about it, feller? Goin’ to stay around and protect that kid from you-know-who, or goin’ to shuffle off? I’d kind of like to know, so I can select the flowers.”

  “I think,” said Aaron blandly, “that he’s made his choice. He’s moving away. Perhaps a good idea, considering everything. And Jim,” he added, laughing, “you know the child won’t be ‘out on the street.’ She’s got a very loving family left, her grandpa and grandma, and her Uncle Rufus. And her cousin, too. We’ll all take care of Laura. Steve, you can rely on that
.”

  The world had come back to Stephen with awful clarity, for the first time since Alice died. Alice. Alice’s child, and his, left to this world, this terrible and pain-filled world of loneliness and cruelty and hate! He had never thought of.it before. He could not remember the face of his child; he could not remember if she had ever been brought to him. He stirred in his chair, and the movement was like a convulsion. He lifted up his wasted hands and cried out feebly, “The baby! I must see the baby!”

  Purcell and Aaron exchanged a curious glance, then Aaron nodded and pulled the bell rope again. “Why do you torment him so, Jim?” asked Joseph, gaining courage in his concern for Stephen, so mercilessly attacked by this beast. “Let him rest.”

  “He’s been too long tryin’ to make up his silly mind,” Purcell answered. “If he’s got a mind at all, and not porridge in his skull.”

  Joseph hesitated. “Steve,” he said, with kind urgency, “you must get well; we miss you, boy. It’s been bad; but you still have your friends. …”

  “Why, yes,” grunted Purcell. “He still has his friends, don’t he?” He left Stephen and went to the wide western window and looked out indifferently. His big fingers filled his pipe with remarkable precision and economy of movement. He struck a lucifer on the heel of his dirty boot, lit the pipe. He leaned against the side of the window. The stark mountains bulked in black and purple against the brilliant gold and scarlet sky, and the narrow river between the clefts of them ran in fire.

  Tom joined Joseph. They stood on each side of Stephen, forgetting, in their distress for their friend, the two other inimical personalities in the room. They pleaded with Stephen; they exhorted, made small rallying jokes, laughed a little. They did not know that he did not really hear them at all. When they paused for a moment, he repeated in a thin, intense voice, “I want to see my child.”