Never Victorious, Never Defeated

  Allan tried to rise, then shook his head as if dizzy. “Right there, right-hand compartment, in the breakfront. Glasses, too.” Tony opened the bottom door and took out the brandy and a small glass and concentrated on pouring. The firelight struck the books on the walls, the draperies, the ghostly windows. The boy sat down on the other side of the hearth and began to sip. Was this the wrong day? Was this the time? Other men were made amiable and complaisant by alcohol, but not Allan. Irascibility and intolerance were the least effects of his desperate drinking. But Tony was impelled to speak in spite of his fears and doubts.

  “Dad, it’s about my future,” he said.

  “Good God, is that all?” exclaimed Allan, almost infuriated. “I thought it was something important, and immediate. Your future! Isn’t that all settled? Harvard, then the office. What else?”

  Tony held the small glass tightly in his fingers, and prayed again. His grief for his father was like a dark and scattering wind among the bright straws of his prayers. “Dad,” he began, feeling his way, “there is something else. I should have talked to you about it a long time ago, but you were ill, and I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  Allan suddenly became sober, the alcohol lingering in his brain only as a stormy and waiting emotion ready to break out disastrously. “Well?” he said, and Tony was alarmed at that quiet word. Allan’s eyes were fixed on this most beloved son, but there was no expression of tenderness in them now, but only a look of furious waiting, of gathering together, of a catapult lifted.

  “I can’t go back to Harvard, Dad,” said Tony, looking away from that picture of violence. “I can’t go into the railroad business.”

  Allan did not speak. He poured his glass half full of whisky and drank it thirstily. He put down the glass and stared at it. “I knew all the time, I suppose,” he muttered at last, just when the silence was becoming intolerable to the younger man. “It was in my bones, the knowing. Sure, and it was in my bones like an aching.”

  What little remained of Tony’s courage sank away. His father did not revert to this brogue and this phraseology of his childhood except when under insupportable stress. But Tony had to say, “Yes.” He tried to smile into his father’s eyes. “We always know about things not spoken of, we Irish, don’t we?”

  Allan threw up his head, pierced again in a wound which had never healed. His face subtly changed. Again he watched his son, and he licked his lips. Tony said gently, and with a tone of loving mirth, “We shanty Irish, grown up to be lacecurtain Irish. You and I, Dad.”

  Allan’s dry lips fell open. “Tony, you never considered yourself ‘Irish’ before, did you?”

  “Yes, Dad, from the day you took us to see your parents.”

  Allan said, “I should never have taken you. It was wrong.”

  “Why? I’d never have known them, and Uncle Michael.”

  Allan got to his feet and began to wander up and down the room, distraught. He made pointless gestures; he knotted his fist and rubbed the side of his thin face with the fierceness of despair. Aimlessly he walked about, while Tony watched him with profound and miserable compassion and yearning.

  “I learned so much from them. I learned about the victims of intolerance and cruelty and malice. They told me of the Irish Rebellion; they told me of the Famine, and the ships we wouldn’t let into our harbors, and the degradation inflicted on hopeless men, and the social contempt, and the persecution of. the Faith not only in America, but in Australia and England and many other places. They told me of the oppression of other men, too. …”

  Some word had immobilized Allan. He stood where he had been walking, and all his body had become stiff and paralyzed, caught in the midst of a gesture, a turn of the head. He said huskily, “The Faith?”

  Tony got to his feet and went to face his father. “Yes,” he said very gently. “The Faith.”

  “You?” whispered Allan. Then he cried, “No! No!” He began to curse savagely, striking his fist into the palm of his left hand. “I knew it was wrong, taking you! Wrong, wrong! They influenced you, behind my back, treacherously—”

  “No, Dad, no. They gave me a heritage, roots. They gave me something to hold to. I had never had it before. I never had any frame of reference, or anything to be proud of, or to identify myself with.”

  With a disordered upflinging of his hands, Allan threw himself away from his son. He shouted, “It’s always the same, everywhere! The children reproach their fathers, and the children’s children reproach their fathers, world from the beginning, world to the end! ‘You never gave me—you never did this for me—I asked, and you didn’t answer!’” He stopped abruptly, his hands on the back of his chair, and he glared into the fire as if struck by some blinding thought.

  Tony, almost weeping, said, “I’m not reproaching you. Dad.You see, you didn’t have anything to give. You lost it before I was born.”

  “It’s always the same,” Allan repeated feebly. Inch by inch, he crept around his chair and then fell into it. Tony came to stand beside him. I have made him worse; I’ve done something awful to him, thought the boy, distracted. After a long time Allan lifted his head and looked at his son. “I lost it,” he said. “It was a long time ago; a June morning. A red ball. My First Communion. Mike. A long time ago.”

  He spoke as if speaking to himself, and it was like looking on nakedness. Tony glanced away. There was something here of supreme agony, which the most gentle hand dared not touch.

  The fire fell away into dull crimson embers and the gale soared up into renewed ferocity as the earth dimmed outside. Then Tony, sunken in his own wretchedness, heard his father speak almost normally: “Give me another drink, Tony. Half a glass.”

  The young man obeyed, and his father took the glass from him and drank just a little. The firelight danced on the amber fluid and the tendoned hand holding it.

  “Never mind,” said Allan, overpowered with weariness. “What you’ve done is your own doing. I have nothing to say, no questions to ask. I’m too tired, and all at once it doesn’t seem to matter. The railroad; you don’t want to be part of it. Never mind. There’s always DeWitt. I’m too tired. What do you want to do?”

  Tony’s lips parted, and then he could not speak. He sat down near his father, and he was very afraid. Allan began to study him, moving the liquor in the glass. The wind screamed at the windows, howled in the chimney. Now everything in the room retreated in the dusk.

  “Well?” said Allan, not angrily or impatiently, but with sudden tenderness. “Don’t be frightened, Tony. Tell me.”

  Tony sat there in all his blond splendor and strong young manhood, but his face was anguished. “Dad,” he said, “we’ve always been so close.” He faltered. “Dad, I want to be a priest.”

  The glass fell from Allan’s hand and crashed into firelit splinters on the marble hearth. Allan clutched the arms of his chair, began to rise. Then he dropped back as if he had received a blow which would kill him. He said, stammering weakly: “You came here—it’s mocking me, you are. You know—sure, and you’ve been knowing all the time—to strike me down.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dad, before God, I don’t know!” cried Tony in simple terror. “What are you trying to say, Dad? What have I done?” He jumped to his feet, wavered, then collapsed on his knees before his father. He took one of Allan’s hands, and was horrified at the cold clamminess of it. Allan’s eyes burned down on his son, and his breath was raucous. But he was otherwise silent looking deeply, listening.

  All at once he was very still. His body relaxed like that of a dying man. Tony’s head was bent, and now he began to sob dryly. He pressed his forehead against the wing of the chair, near Allan’s head, and he cried like a child.

  Then, to his incredulity, he felt Allan’s hand on his head, a comforting hand, the hand of a father. Allan’s fingers began to move down his son’s face, turning it to him so that he might see the tears. Allan was smiling, an exhausted but loving smile.

  “It’s cryin
g, the great boy is,” he said. “It’s crying, the boy who’s wanting to be a priest! And what will he do, the great boy, when he has a parish, or is in foreign fields, and must see all the pain, and administer the Last Sacrament, and console the bereaved? Will the tender heart of him break, then?”

  Tony, disbelieving, sobbed and stared at his father. Allan smiled into his eyes, and his mouth was shaking. Then, with a loud cry, Tony flung himself into his father’s arms and they held each other in a convulsive embrace.

  40

  “Bourgeois” had become Estelle deWitt’s most contemptuous epithet, under her sons’ secret tutelage. To her superficial mind it meant not only a class of people whom one did not invite, of course, to dinner or tea, but the whole deWitt family. Uneasy about her own background, she had fortified her self-assumed position as an aristocrat by dainty sneers and simpers at those she stigmatized as “soulless grabs” and “coarse and vulgar boors engrossed only in their trades and businesses.” Allan, to her, was the very archetype of the “family-less” and low-bred scoundrel with no interest in life but money.

  So, after breakfast this Thanksgiving Day, she had sighed with sweet resignation and had said, “I must now consult with our country servants—such creatures!—to be sure that they will be careful with the china and count the silver and not overdo the turkey. I feel quite the middle-class wife in Portersville.”

  Accompanied by Norman, she sailed into the pantry. Jon went up to his rooms, still chaotic with rage against Allan and his father. His loathing for them made his ears ring and his eyes blur when he tried to read by the fire. Middle-class swine! Who had permitted that class to emerge from their gutters? Before 1840, an aristocrat, a man of wealth and position, was the sole king in his world, a world composed of meek farmers and craftsmen living under the benign rule of the enlightened patrician. Then, with the revolting industrial revolution, had arisen the merchants, the tradesmen, the shopkeepers—the bourgeoisie, the employers of city labor. They had expanded industry to its present disgusting levels, had seized power from their betters, had built their bloated houses, and had piled up wealth which they did not deserve.

  They had invaded “business,” had seized it from white and gentlemanly hands and turned it into a vast empire. Their sons hammered at the gates of the genteel professions. Their shouts were enormous in the cloistered places, and their fat faces leered at the marble gods. They shouldered aside the dethroned and ancient masters of men.

  They must be destroyed. Only then would power revert to the proper custodians of it—the aristocrats by birth and tradition, and only then would farmers and artisans and shopkeepers, and the “little” man, be returned to their ancient state of innocent happiness under the rule of their natural leaders, joyously content and obedient.

  Jon and his friends in America and Europe were very careful not to be honest with each other about their real aims. Most of them were not even honest with themselves. Their one passion was hatred for the middle class, the “exploiters.” Though the bourgeoisie were responsible for compulsory education of the masses in Europe and in America, and though this same bourgeoisie had shown an insolent interest in building hospitals and art galleries and orphanages, and though they had regarded labor unions with a more or less friendly eye and had even assisted in their formation, this was never admitted by Jon and his friends. The fact that they were vehemently and proudly patriotic, whether American or English, French or German, was another manifestation of their “vulgarity.”

  The “aristocrats” were few, and helpless. The battering ram they needed to force the iron-hinged doors of the bourgeoisie was “labor.” And labor could not be made one single battering-ram unless it was convinced, in these burgeoning times of both the middle class and labor, that it was “exploited” and dispossessed and enslaved. Labor needed a voice. They had first heard that voice in the works of Voltaire and Rousseau; they had heard it more thunderously in Marx and his contemporaries.

  It was odd that Jon and his friends did not count among the bourgeoisie the men who had amassed fortunes beyond credulity in the earlier days of the industrial revolution, and who now lived, apart from trade, in châteaux in France, and in mansions in Scotland, and in great houses on Fifth Avenue, and who now were aristocrats in their own right. Many of their memories had become very tenuous. Their lusty ancestors had emerged vague and patrician-colored in their minds, delicate figures moving in a mist of spinet music and softscented air, intellectuals, patrons of the arts, gentlemen, administrators of law, grand seigneurs.

  There were times when Jon deWitt’s mind was torn open by his hatred of men like Allan Marshall, and then he saw the truth and saw it clearly. But this only increased his hatred. Nothing was too mad to say, to write, to do, so long as it clouded over reality and relieved the painful tumescence of truth, and promised power.

  He threw aside the book he had been attempting to read, and snatched up a New York newspaper to reread a large item on the society pages which had, this morning, infuriated him. “Mr. and Mrs. Rufus deWitt have returned to the family home in Portersville. Pa. for Thanksgiving. They were accompanied by Mr. Allan Marshall and Mrs. Marshall, daughter of Mr. deWitt, and Rufus Anthony and Dolores and DeWitt Marshall, children of Mr. and Mrs. Allan Marshall. The family intends, as usual, to remain in Portersville until after the Christmas holidays, when they will return to New York.”

  At the very bottom of the article were a few insignificant lines: “Mr. Jon deWitt and his brother, Norman deWitt, sons of Mr. and Mrs. Rufus deWitt, are at present with the family in Portersville for the holidays.”

  It was these lines that had so enraged Jon. His egoism, always touchy and sensitive, writhed at the yawning indifference. He might deride “those fools who love to get their names in print for the delectation of the drooling and imbecile public,” but the fact remained that his insignificance in the eyes of newspapers struck violently at his self-love and his belief in his own importance. He said to himself vengefully, as he flung the paper into the fire: One of these days they’ll notice me. One of these days they’ll fawn on me and write of me with servility and terror.

  When his luncheon tray arrived, the very sight of the food sickened him, and he left it untouched. So secretly convinced of his own lack of potency, so secretly nauseated by himself for all of his rationalizing, the appearance of sustenance for his body, which was necessary if he was to exist, revolted him. All at once he wanted to talk with his mother, who was so sweetly understanding, and in whose comforting arms he could feel dominant again, and a man. He waited for over an hour, sitting by his windows, watching the crepuscular sky, the rising gray mounds of the desolate snow, the gray shadow of the deathly mountains. As he waited, he shivered. Once or twice he glanced at a table on which lay an opened letter he had received yesterday from Miles Peale. A kind, short letter, discreet and full of hinted promise. He could see the words again in his mind: “We must have a long talk. So many things are unresolved in me, but after all I am only seventeen, and you are so much wiser and experienced.”

  When Jon had received the letter he had been much aroused, and his heart had beat very fast. Now, as he looked at the letter, he could feel nothing but revulsion. He finally stood up, stretched wearily, and went in search of his mother. He expected to find her resting after luncheon, her pretty robe spread over her chaise longue, her youthful head pressed against satin pillows. But she was not in her perfumed bedroom, all pink and white ruffles and pink draperies and rosy carpet, nor in her sitting room, all gilt and blue and bright pink. Someone had stirred up her fire, and her scent was everywhere. Jon wandered about, touching lengths of silk and damask and ruffles lingeringly, opening her wardrobe doors to admire her gowns, picking up a small satin shoe to hold lovingly against his cheek. Then, in the dusk of the late afternoon, he sat down in a corner and waited.

  It was sometime before he heard her trilling girl's-laughter, and a response from his brother Norman. Jon uttered an angry oath, then subsided. Probably
Norman would merely conduct Estelle to her rooms, or remain only a few moments. Jon pulled himself smaller in his chair as the door opened. Estelle sailed in, giggling, with Norman beside her. She immediately sat down at her dressing table, and Norman lighted the candles about it. She watched him, then said, “How ridiculous! We still have candles in this dreadful place, and oil lamps. So anachronistic, not even gas! How wonderful it will be to get back to New York where one has only to press a switch and every room is flooded with electric light! But I suppose we have to humor your father and Cornelia, who like to think of themselves as simple countryfolk.”

  Norman leaned over his mother’s shoulder and admired her in the candlelight. “But you look so pretty, darling, in this flickering glow.”

  She preened, gave him a flirtatious look which was reflected to Jon in his hidden chair. He saw the look, and all at once it seemed monstrous to him, and not endearing as once it had appeared. He saw his mother’s eyes well with light, as the eyes of a mistress might well in the company of an unacknowledged lover. So his mother had always been with him: he had never really known that his brother was also the recipient of these glows; these lambent glances, these arch touchings of arm, hand, and cheek, these tiltings of head, these conscious or unconscious slipping of a robe on a shoulder. To him, they had been “lovely,” reserved for him alone in a secret and lonely communication of kindred spirits, untainted by ugliness, lighted only with tender beauty.

  Norman’s hands were moving slowly but firmly over his mother’s shoulders. He bent his head and kissed her full on the lips. She murmured, “Such a sweet darling. I don’t know what I’d do without you, dearest. You are such a comfort.” She patted his cheek and her distended brown eyes fixed themselves on her son. “The only one who understands me, in all the world.”

  Norman drew his hand yearningly over the sprightly curls on the top of Estelle’s head. “Yes, I know. Everyone else is so gross. Even Jon.”