“You have confessed your sins,” said the Man. “You know your sins. The way will be bitter and terrible, but it is the way you must go. For you are not a child; you are a human soul, a woman, and you have brought your responsibilities upon your head. If you have no bravery now, no fortitude, then you are utterly lost and delivered forever to evil and death and agony.”
The girl whimpered like a wounded child. “They’ll take the—they’ll take what I need away from me. They say it’s awful. You can’t stand it.”
“There are horrors worse than that,” said the Man. “You have already experienced them. That is why you came to Me.”
“Maundering fool!” said Lucifer. “Why do you babble to yourself? There is none speaking to you but me.”
“He lies?” said the girl to the Man.
“Yes. He is the father of lies. Child, will you take the way of pain and penance and repentance?”
She implored him with all her strength.
“You will help me?”
“You have only to call and I will hear you, and stand with you, for I am your Guardian who neither slumbers nor sleeps. But you must call Me in the worst of hours, in the most hopeless of hours, for they will be many.”
“They will laugh at me,” said the girl, “even when things are awfully bad.”
“They laughed at Me also, but I endured.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “I—I heard of you, at Christmas and Easter. But I didn’t know very much; I didn’t want to know. My parents tried to take me to church, or a guidance counselor—they knew something was the matter with me. But I wouldn’t go. I was afraid.”
“But you will do as you know you must do?”
The girl laid her head on His feet and crouched before Him. “Yes, I will go,” she said. “I will honestly go.”
“It is your own choice?”
“Yes, it’s my choice.”
The Man looked at Lucifer and said, “You are rejected again, by this poor child. Does it wound you so greatly?”
Lucifer smiled. “What do tradition and rumor and ancient men say of me? That I have fallen but when men reject me, any man at all, I rise one step toward Heaven. Must I regret that?”
The Man’s mighty face was full of musing. “You are His son, and you stood at His hand and He called you ‘Star of the Morning.’”
Lucifer retreated from Him and he lifted his hand as if to shade his face from the glory of the light. And as he retreated he became fainter and fainter and at last there was nothing of him at all in the room, where the walls were bathed in radiance.
The suffering girl was not aware of Lucifer’s departure except that some appalling weight left her body and her shoulders. She said to the Man, “I can do all things in Him Who Strengthens me.”
She fell into a dazed dream for a little while. When she awakened she saw that she lay at the foot of the Crucifix. She was refreshed; the sweat still rolled from her face but there was a calmness and stillness in her in spite of her pain and her great trembling and the twitching of her deprived muscles.
“I had a dream,” she said to the silent Man. “But it was a wonderful dream! I dreamed that You spoke to me.” She quivered. “And I dreamed that—someone—else was here. I was so frightened.”
She pushed herself to her feet. But she was crushingly weak; her knees shook under her.
“If it was a dream it was the best dream I ever had. I must believe in it. I’m going now. I’m going to tell Mom and Pop—everything. It’ll be terrible. But I must do it.
“And I know You will help me.”
The madness was gone from her eyes. There was a peace in her wretched body she had never known before. She went out into the summer night and lifted her eyes and for the first time she saw the stars.
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 suffe
red 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. (Ken Parke)
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.
To read more about the life and work of Taylor Caldwell, please visit www.taylorcaldwell.com.
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 © 1966 by Taylor Caldwell
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4297-0
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10038
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TAYLOR CALDWELL
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Taylor Caldwell, No One Hears but Him
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