Never Victorious, Never Defeated

  Allan broke in on his father’s confident boasting about his land, unaware that Tim had been speaking. “What is this letter from Mike?” he asked. “It sounded very mysterious, his knowing we were coming.”

  Tim’s broad red face lighted up. “Ah, it is the saint he is! He knows everythin’, our Mike.” He fished in a pocket of his black coat and proudly produced a crumpled letter and gave it, with a flourish, to Allan. “I could tell you many things he wrote to us; it is the second sight—a miracle, he has.”

  Allan recognized the round neat writing of his brother on the cheap paper. The first page or two recounted his life in North Dakota among the Indian children, whom he taught and nursed and loved. Then there were family items, the thanking of his parents for the clothing for the parents of his charges, the food they had sent him, the prayers they had said for him, the money given to his Mission in his name. He promised to send them a “spiritual bouquet” from the children very soon, and he prayed for them constantly. He prayed for his brother, he wrote with simplicity. He charged his parents to do likewise.

  Then the short and homely sentences ended. Michael wrote: “We were taught to love God and man, for if we love God and not man our prayers are unacceptable to Him. If we love only man, and not God, then we have fallen into the error of mere ‘humanism.’ However, I find it infinitely easier to love God than man, for one has only to look about him in the world of nature, the world of sunsets and sunrises, the cry of a bird in the forests at twilight, the springing of a flower in thick grass, the white winter hills under the moon, the glitter of a tree in the noonday sun, the scent of fields in midsummer, the blaze of lightning cracking asunder a black and stormy sky, to see and know God in all His majesty, to adore Him with humility, rapture, and awe. He is the Allperfect, and He less commands our love than inspires it. By His excellent works He is manifest. And that is the trouble.

  “For it is by man’s works that we find it hard not to detest him. At the altar, love for God comes to me in a flood, effortless, without struggle, a grace given to me freely and by no special merit of my own. But observation of man can easily lead to impatience, weariness, anger, loathing, and despair. The visible and the invisible God is there for him to see and to know and to worship. Yet he is blind, not with a physical blindness, but with a spiritual one. Man, the conscious, the aware, cast in God’s image, has the darkness of hell in his soul, and almost everything he does is sinister. He is the relentless enemy of his brother, the tyrant of his brother, the oppressor of his brother. He is the sword lifted eternally against his fellow man. He is the hunter who craves blood; he is the creator of war, the burner of cities, the despoiler of the fields. He is forever in conflict with the world and the creatures of the world, and where he treads all things flee from him in terror. He, little lesser than the angels, is the only ugly thing in the spaces of Creation, for he shapes his spirit with his thoughts, and his flesh reflects the distortion.”

  Allan held the letter in his hands and thought: Yes, yes. He no longer felt the sheets in his fingers; he felt the roundness of a precious ball leaving them, sailing through the sunlight into the hands of a gross-faced enemy who had been bribed not to inflict pain. Tim was watching him, forgetting the children and his wife, and he thought: There is something terrible in the heart of my son.

  Allan continued to read.

  “These are the thoughts which come to me, unbidden at my prayers, unsought at my studies, uncalled at my work. I had no power, at first, to resist them. I prayed feverishly for delusion, for a blindness that I might not see what man is, for an illusion which would reconcile me to my brother. At last, I spoke to my Superior of it, without hope. And he told me there was a key to the black door which I had shut, in my knowledge, against my brothers. But I must find the key myself, with the grace of God. ‘He who does not know that man is evil will never understand him, or love him,’ he told me, for he had traveled this wasteland of rejection himself.

  “So I prayed without rest, without sleep. I fasted; I prostrated myself. I wept to the silences. For I knew that without enlightenment I could not rid myself of my bitterness and grief. Once it came to me confusedly that I had once possessed the key, and had lost it. In a simpler day, when I did simpler work and had less contact with men, I had had the key and had not known that it was valuable beyond everything else to me. I had heard it a thousand times, turning in its lock; I had seen it imprinted on the pages the saints had written; I had seen it shining on the altar at Mass. Without knowing, I had watched its bright flicker in the eyes of tired Sisters, and priests, and unlettered men, in the eyes of my mother.

  “It’s name is compassion. A simple key, it is said. But it is the heaviest of all objects, the hardest to hold, the most painful to use. It can move a world; it can slip through the fingers like a straw in an angry moment. It has the power of an army, the fragility of a butterfly’s wing. It is the way to all knowledge; the way of the saints. It is the imprimatur of God, set on the book of life. Without it, man is a devil; with it, he is an angel.

  “I have found the key. But I must pray constantly, in dark moments, that I may not lose it again. For to lose it is to lose faith, to be shut out from the presence of God, to be an exile forever at war with all things.”

  Allan thought: To whom was this written? To me?

  There was only a short ending to the letter, but it came vividly to Allan’s eyes.

  “On the next Sunday Allan will come to you, with his children, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, I think. Expect him, Dad, and be kind, as if he were a frequent visitor. He has not forgotten you, just as you have never forgotten him. There is a furious river between you, which began to flow when he was a child. You never understood, and neither did he, but I am beginning to know.”

  Very slowly, Allan refolded the sheets and laid them on the table. He stared at the floor, controlling himself, for the cold sweat was on him again, the trembling of his bones, the sense of weakness all through his body, the horrible depression and hopelessness. He had a sudden and awful craving for alcohol. He passed his damp hand slowly over his face. Tony and Dolores were watching him with anxious foreboding, but DeWitt was eating a cake. Allan had the conviction that his younger son had been regarding him closely for a long time, and that he was derisive.

  “A very good letter,” said Allan dully. He must have a drink; he must have it at once. He never drank in the presence of his children; he believed Tony and Dolores were unaware of his driving addiction, but he was convinced now, that no matter how careful he was, that DeWitt knew. “A very good letter,” he repeated. He stood up, and Tim, greatly alarmed, saw the sweat on his son’s forehead. “May I see you alone a moment, Dad?” asked Allan, and without waiting for a reply he walked from the kitchen into the small parlor, where early twilight, luminous and blue, was already filling the corners. He looked about him, alone for a few moments, at the round table his father had made, at the horsehair furniture, burnished into a soft glow, at the little fireplace ready with logs of apple wood, at the crude holy pictures on the violently flowered walls, at the oil lamps. Through the windows, carefully draped with his mother’s lace curtains, he could see the mellowing fields, the first stain of scarlet in the sky over the darkening mountains. Now the silence was sweetly disturbed by the voices of birds, the movement of a cool breeze against the shutters, the cluck of fowl, the lowing of the cow coming home to her barn.

  Tim entered the room, and he was carrying a bottle in a napkin, and a glass. He stood a moment, and he and his son regarded each other without speaking. Then Tim put the glass on a table and opened the bottle. The tawny whisky splashed noisily into the glass, and Tim did not control his hand. Still not speaking, he extended the liquor to his son. Allan took it, and his fingers were so eager that he almost dropped it; he put it to his lips and drank it all, without once pausing to breathe. Tim watched him, his face heavy with sorrow and understanding.

  Tim lifted the bottle questioningly as Allan looked into th
e empty glass. “Another?” he murmured. Allan hesitated. A deep color came into his face, settling into the emaciated hollows of his cheeks. But finally he extended the glass speechlessly, and Tim refilled it. This time, standing in the center of the parlor, Allan drank more slowly and gratefully, keeping his eyes averted from his father.

  “I always have a drink or two at this time of day,” said Allan. “It—it gives me a lift when I am tired.” He paused. Tim said nothing. “You don’t know how damn tired I get,” Allan went on. “So much responsibility. …” He glanced furtively at the older man. “Aren’t you having a drink with me?”

  “Sure, and I am,” said Tim. His voice was slow and old with grief. He went back into the kitchen and returned with another glass. “A man should never drink alone. It is a sign of despair, and despair is one of the mortal sins.” He set his short bulk on a stiff chair, and his belly rolled out. His blue eyes were strong and bright in the shadows. “And won’t you be sittin’ and joinin’ me?”

  Allan sat down on the small horsehair love seat, and it pricked him through his clothing. But the trembling had stopped; the spasms had left his stomach; his brain was no longer fiery; the depression had begun to warm away. He sipped at his drink now, in order to prolong his sensation; he drank it as one drinks an anodyne. Slowly, one by one, his taut-strung muscles relaxed, and the aching in his neck and shoulders soothed itself into nothingness.

  Embarrassed now, Allan said with an attempt at lightness, “You never kept whisky in the house, Dad, except at Christmas. Are you taking to the bottle?”

  Tim swirled the liquor in the glass and answered in a low voice, “No, my son. But I knew you were comin’ and I knew you’d want it.”

  Allan began to laugh a little. But Tim did not look at him. Silence came again to the room, like an observing presence. They could hear the children talking with Mary in the kitchen. Even DeWitt was speaking, and asking a question, and Mary’s voice, tenuous and gentle, answered. Allan’s laughter stopped abruptly. He put his empty glass on the table.

  Then he said very softly, over and over, “Oh, my God; oh, my God, my God, my God.”

  The children talked little on the way home through the purple and crimson twilight. The twins seemed unusually thoughtful and perceptive in their attitude toward their father as the victoria rolled through the dimming landscape. Dolores held Allan’s hand. When DeWitt said, “I don’t think I like that place,” Allan did not hear him, and only Tony’s stern look quieted the little fellow.

  They were almost to Portersville when Tony said, “Grandpa told me you had a fine voice, Daddy. He said you could sing like the angels, and when you talked everyone had to listen. I never heard you sing. He said you knew old Irish songs that told stories.”

  “Eh?” said Allan, turning his dulled eyes on his son. “Oh. Yes, I used to sing, when I was young. As you grow older you find less and less to sing about, and then you stop altogether. Long before you’re dead, you are mute.”

  It was late when they reached home, and Allan climbed heavily up the stairs to his wife’s rooms. Cornelia was sitting before her crystal, gilt, and silver dressing table, which was softly lighted. Lamps bloomed on French tables and glimmered on the pale gold rug and white walls and carved white ceiling. Her chaise longue, heaped with coral pillows, showed where she had rested in the afternoon; beside it was a heap of papers, and her own special brief case. Windows opened on the darkening chaos of mountains and river. She turned her head and smiled affably at Allan when he entered. “Late, aren’t you, darling? Did you have tea at the Peales’ or at the Purcells’?”

  “No,” he replied. “We didn’t go to either place.” He sat down on one of the gold-velvet chairs, and his body sagged. Cornelia inspected him more closely. She said quickly, for something had both startled and disturbed her, “Allan. Where did you take the children?”

  He told her, speaking as if to himself. She listened, without interruption, to the lifeless recital, which was brief. Slowly, toward the end, she began to smile, her eyes round and mirthful, her mouth opening over her glistening teeth as though what she was hearing was both childish and ridiculous.

  He lifted his head when he had finished, and when she saw his face, she became grave. There she sat on her rose satin stool, her mauve dressing gown falling away from her heroic white neck and shoulders and arms. Her breast, halfrevealed, had a pearly sheen in the lamplight, and her flowing red hair, cascading to her hips, gave her a gaudy appearance that was yet striking and magnetic.

  She said, and her voice was light and bantering, “Well, it was a change, wasn’t it, for the children?”

  He was vaguely surprised. “You don’t mind?”

  “Good heavens, Allan, why should I?”

  He knew, by now, all about her mendacious democracy, and so he was more surprised to see that she was absolutely sincere in her exclamation. “Am I a snob like Pat Peale, or a pale aristocrat like my mother, or a carrier of Christmas baskets and clothing to the poor like Laura? Or a hard, simpering fool like Estelle?” Her voice was genuinely impatient. “I know all about my ancestors, the deWitts. I think they were a sturdier race than the Fieldings, my mother’s. They lived. I suppose your parents do, too. It’s time the children learned there was something else in the world besides ‘blood,’ as Estelle calls it. Blood!”

  He stood up and went to her, and put his hand on her shoulder; she gazed up at him with her usual expression of mockery and deep love. Then, after a moment, she turned her head and kissed the back of his hand lightly. After this, she pushed him away with good humor. “What an idiot you are, my pet. I believe, in your own way, that you are a snob, too, like that awful Pat. I, personally, wouldn’t give a cent to charity, nor does my heart bleed over the blessed poor, nor am I horrified at the thought of slums or unemployment, nor would I ever visit an orphanage or a poor farm or give a rag to cover any beggar’s nakedness. Every man for himself. That’s a law older than milk-sop charity. But, good God, what is wrong with your children seeing their grandparents, who are doubtless self-respecting and decent? Your father was an engineer; he might inspire Tony with some interest in what will be his holdings one of these days.”

  He put his arms about her big shoulders and pulled her head to his chest. He stroked the coarse and vital hair. “You make me ashamed,” he said. “I think you are a more worthwhile person than I.”

  Again, she pushed him away and laughed in his face. “Oh, no I’m not! I’m not a sentimentalist.”

  Her face glowed and shimmered with her mockery, and he caught, again, that puzzling wariness gleaming in her eyes, that derisive flash. But she only remarked, “I can smell that your father gave you something to drink. I suppose the children didn’t guess; they missed the lovely odor of your peppermints. Change to another flavor, one of these days, my child.”

  He moved away from her, humiliated and sickened, and she watched him in the glass. He began to wander about the room, in his speechless and helpless shame. He paused by the chaise longue and picked up a few of the neatly piled papers. Stock reports, quarterly reports, dividend reports, policy—he dropped them and they fluttered from his hands like old dried leaves. Dry and dusty, he thought, all at once. I am filled to the lips with dust; every crevice of my life sifts gray powder. I sleep with silt on my pillow; the air I breathe is gray. My footsteps crackle on old mortar fallen from the bricks of my hopes. He said unsteadily, “I am ashamed, but I must have another drink. No, I can’t leave it alone. It helps me to. …”

  “What?” asked Cornelia softly, as he hesitated. She rose and went to him and pulled him to her with strength, but his arms hung by his sides. “Allan,” she said urgently. “I love you. You, and Papa, are all I have. Isn’t my love enough? Isn’t your work enough? Isn’t your position, and all that you have done, and all that you do, enough?”

  He felt the warmth of her large arms, but they brought him no comfort. He looked into her eyes and he was too beset to be moved because they were full of tears. “I kno
w you love me, my dearest,” he said. “But it isn’t enough, Allan?” She dropped her arms and regarded him with deep consternation. “What is it you want?”

  He appeared very ill, with the livid shadows under his high cheekbones, with the heaviness of his eyelids and the anguish of his mouth. He thought over her question, shook his head slowly, over and over. “I don’t know, Cornelia. I want some meaning in my life, perhaps. You see, when I joined your father’s company, the empire was already made, consolidated. All that can be done now is some more monotonous expansion, more improvements, more piling up of money. Your father—he has a sort of splendor about him, for he was an entrepreneur when he was younger. He built the road which I can only help him conserve. He has memories full of excitement; he battled on equal ground with giants. I am not the kind of man he is. I don’t have the love for living he has. Once, I thought power was enough. I didn’t know, then, that it would never be enough for me, even if, and when, I become president of the company.”

  She was frightened as she was rarely frightened. She repeated, with an edge of fear in her loud voice, “What is it you want?”

  He turned away from her and whispered, “I don’t know. God help me, I don’t know.”

  He became aware that she was silent, not with her usual vibrating silence, but with a sort of stillness. The dinner bell rang with muted music through the house, and they did not move. He went to the window and leaned against it and saw the great white crescent of the moon standing like an uplifted sword on the black mountain below it. “Forgive me,” he muttered wretchedly. He looked at his wife and saw that the high color had left her face and that her features had a pinched look. “Cornelia, what is it you want? Tell me; perhaps it might help.”

  “I want what I have.” She paused a moment. “I find almost every hour wonderful and exhilarating; I never let myself become bored. Life itself is enough for me.”