Captains and The Kings (70 page)

Chapter 41
For the first time in his life, as he crossed the tumultuous and angry gray Atlantic on his way home, Rory Armagh felt the need of a confidant. It was not so much the thought of the bankers and giant financiers-including some noblemen-whom he had met in Europe, which so disturbed him, but the implications and ramifications of their growing power. He remembered that the Committee for Foreign Studies was mainly an American establishment, with a branch in England, and that the Committee was only part of a whole, under different names in different nations and with different nationalities. In America, there were at least five generals who were members of the Committee. The vast interlocking organizations, with their one aim and their one mind, were what was so appalling to Rory, and their brotherhood control of politicians. Where had he heard: "In hell, there are no disputes"? This whole apparatus had begun with the League of Just Men, of which Karl Marx had been a member, but the apparatus was not Communistic or Socialistic or Monarchist or democratic or anything else. They merely used these political ideologies as weapons against mankind, to confuse it and tame it and enslave it. They were not involved in philosophies or metaphysics or ideals or any other of the intellectual toys with which so- called intelligent men beguiled themselves and persuaded themselves of their mentality. They were above politics as such. Let the rabble pretend happily that it had influence on its government, so long as that rabble never guessed who indeed ruled their government! It was their very dispassionate ruthlessness and almost inhuman drive which admittedly
frightened-yet stirred up-Rory Armagh. It was indeed beyond good and evil, and had nothing to do with normal ambition, of which Rory possessed more than the average measure. Why, he thought, the bastards would destroy their own countries, their own families, their own sons, to get what they want! Rory could understand passion and vehemence and downright wickedness and human plotting and deviltry and treachery and lies and thefts, and even murders. But he could not understand the men he had met in America and abroad, and so they challenged the very blood in his body, his very humanity. Somberly and jerkily walking the tilting decks of the ship, he recalled some of the things he had heard in London: "We must now have prudently scheduled wars all over the world, for they will be more and more necessary to absorb the products of our growing industrial and technological society. Without them we will have a glut of products-and a glut of populations -leading to stagnation, poverty, and natural crises, which could well undermine our ultimate objectives. In short, wars and inflation can proceed only under planned auspices which uncontrolled disorders jeopardize. "The middle class, in all nations, as we know, must be eliminated, for they tend to stimulate and encourage and invent chaotic liberty. They stand in the way of our Plan." Rory knew what the Plan was: Wars, confiscatory taxes to destroy the middle class, inflation and national debt. When these became unbearable even the most docile populations had the propensity for rebellion. It was then that the anonymous plotters came into their own and seized ultimate power, in the name of law and order. "Without a Federal income tax in America our objectives remain uncertain there, and frustrated. We must, all over the world, have entire control over the people's money. Such taxes are necessary for wars and inflation and the mechanization of humanity, the dependence of humanity on what we shall decide to give it. Without war, we cannot have a planned society, anywhere in the world. We are succeeding, without war and only through, taxes, in the Scandinavian countries, but that is not possible in such immense countries like America and Russia, where revolutionary tactics, peaceful or violent, are absolutely necessary, and which need to be financed through taxation." Rory's only confidant now was his father, who was also his teacher, however wry and derisive in his remarks concerning his colleagues. Rory no longer asked Joseph why he belonged to the Committee for Foreign Studies, and the infamous Scardo Society in America, composed of intellectual radicals. For he knew that in a distorted way this was Joseph's revenge on a world which had so frightfully abused him as a child and youth, and, worst of all, had forced him to deny his very intrinsic identity. This had been an assault not only on his physical survival but on his spirit. Was this true also of the other men? Rory did not know. Sometimes Rory asked himself: Doesn't our own government know? If they do not, then they are fools. If they do know, they are traitors. Which is worse? His other confidant, besides his father, who had warned him not to speak to anyone of what he had superficially learned in London, was Courtney Hennessey, in whom he had usually confided more than in anyone else, even Marjorie. But Courtney was immured in Amalfi, damn him! and even if he were not he must never know what Rory already knew. However, he would have been a "comfort." His normality, his cool common sense, his lack of hysteria and impulsiveness, would have been soothing to Rory, might even have given him some assurance that the normal people far outnumbered the villains-which Rory frequently doubted anyway.
As the days passed on the ship Rory's usually easy and imperturbable mind was greatly disturbed, thrown into disorder, conjecture, and apprehension. On the one hand his natural cynicism made him shrug, for did not mindless men deserve any fate plotted for them? On the other hand was his natural rebellion, born of his Irish nature, against any group of men who would "guide," as they called it, the free human soul. That was the province of religion, and guidance there meant discipline and elevation of the spirit beyond its own mean instincts. But the "guidance" of the anonymous men meant serfdom, not for the advancement of men but for their human disintegration and reduction to animalism. Rory was not an idealist; he did not believe that man could be better than he already was, for the nature of man was immutable except through religion, and even there the mutability was precarious and unstable. But at least in a more or less free society a man had a choice-to a limited extent -and to Rory that freedom of choice was precious. To be a rascal or not to be a rascal, to be responsible or irresponsible, to be good or evil: That ability to choose made man more than a beast even if his choice was disastrous. His mind was his own. Admittedly, sometimes the choices of men made for an uneasy and changeful society, but that was preferable to the hell of monotony where men had no choices and were duly fed, bred, put to planned activity, deprived of decisions concerning their lives and their recreation, and fell to the status of domestic creatures. There had been little vexation, little change, little anxiety, in Rory's life so far, no alarms except for the catastrophe to his sister, little brooding or melancholy, little Weltschmerz or Weltanschauung. Now, to his mortification, he felt that he had lived in a silky nest, his only aspirations to be successful, to pursue pretty women, to dance and cavort and make himself generally agreeable-for he liked the world very much indeed. He had always disliked gloomy men, though, paradoxically, he had liked gloomy poetry. He disliked scholars, but was scholarly himself, in a very objective way. lie had a fine mind, analytical and cool and reasonable, but it had never been much engaged in subjectivities, which he had usually suspected. "I am no Jesuit," he would tell Courtney. Naturally without illusion, he had been tolerant of the world of men. But during these days at sea that equable nature, that laughing skeptical nature, came fully into its second duality, which had heretofore not been dominant. He discovered crevices, hidden caverns, deep rivers, dark and somber places, silences and ponderings, in himself, and was not happy over it. For they forced him to be aware, not only of Rory Armagh and his immediate concerns and ambitions, but of the world he lived in, and to be as responsible to that world as it was possible for him to be. lie knew, without any doubt at all, that he must keep this new and frightening awareness to himself, and from his father, who, he suspected, had his own dark places. He began to drink, not only at the table in the great dining room on the ship, but in his stateroom. He began to brood, and all the deep melancholy of the Irish mysticism invaded him. But when he appeared on the decks and in the public rooms there was none gayer, more voluble, more full of jokes and twinklings and laughter, than Rory Armagh. None of this was simulated, but was genuine as of the moment. Yet his character became more and more firmly knitted, and much of the amiable embroideryof it was slowly but steadily discarded from the fabric. He felt this change I in himself, and was not certain he liked it. He knew the potentialities for this change had always been in him, but he had kept them under control until now. He discovered a complaisant and fairly well-known young actress on board, accompanied by an enormous amount of trunks and a personal maid, and within four days he had found himself happily admitted to her bed. They drank champagne together, and laughed, and romped, and for hours, sometimes, Rory could forget the "deadly quiet men," as his father had called them, and what he was nebulously deciding to do about them in the future. Never once, as he lay entangled with the pretty young actress, did he feel that he was unfaithful to Marjorie. Marjorie lived on a different plateau in his life. In New York, he said a loving and joyful fare' well to the actress and proceeded to Boston and to Marjorie. His mind had been taken up with its unique glooms and dismays and horrors on the ship, with the exception of the hours of interlude with the actress, and so he had not given too much thought to his predicament concerning Marjorie. Indeed, the predicament was really his father. He never once considered giving up his young wife, whom he adored. Now, as he entered the miserable little flat in Cambridge this new problem asserted itself with black anxiety. Marjorie was waiting for him, for he had sent her a telegram from New York. She had lit fires and filled the dun rooms with hothouse flowers, from her father's own conservatory. She had arranged a fine dinner. When Rory saw her he felt a blaze of emotion in himself, delight, joy, peace, and wholeness. Her neat little figure, so trim and without a sign of fussiness, was clad in a white silk shirtwaist, very severe, even with cufflinks, and buttoned down the front with little pearls, and a black silk skirt. Her dark pompadour kept breaking out into trendrils about her saucy little face, with the smooth olive cheeks just touched with apricot, and her black eyes were huge and dancing. She threw herself into his arms and he caught the scent of lemon verbena, and the fragrance of her young body. He swung her up in his arms and danced about the rooms with her and she kissed him and laughed and protested, and clung to him. Immediately he forgot everything, or at least all he feared stood at a somber distance in his mind, not permitted to invade this beatitude of being with Marjorie. He must tell her all about his journey, whom he met, what he said and did-and, after a pause-how was his father? He evaded the answers for a while during which he triumphantly waved a long blue velvet box under Marjorie's little nose. While she jumped and struggled for it, and her mass of curls fell down her back, and she shouted, he laughed and settled the answers to her questions in his mind. It seemed that Joseph, to give his son an idea of the comforting feeling of wealth, had presented him with a cheque for two thousand pounds. Stunned by all these riches, Rory had gone shopping for a trinket for Marjorie on Bond Street. His first impulse was to spend it all on the trinket, but his natural prudence, hidden under all that generous outpouring of humor and laissez-faire, advised him that he might need some of that money in Boston, too. So he had spent one thousand juicy pounds on a beautiful opal and diamond necklace for Marjorie, with a pair of earrings to match. Capturing the box at last Marjorie opened it eagerly and screamed with delighted shock at the magnificence, and her little fingers trembled and her eyes glowed as she fastened the jewelry at neck and ears. Rory watched her with such an inner bulging of his heart that his eyes filled with moisture. "Where on earth, did you get the money?" cried Marjorie. "You must have stolen it!" "Hard though it may be to believe, Papa gave it to me," said Rory. Marjorie's face went blank. She looked at him slowly. "Oh, Rory, you told him then?" Her own eyes became moist with relief. "Yes, I told him-in a way," said Rory. "I had to break it easy to the old boy. I told him that I was practically engaged to a chit of a Bostonian girl, of fairly good family, and of some mediocre intelligence, and sometimes pretty." "Rory, behave yourself. You must tell me. What did he say?" "Well, my love, he reminded me I have to finish law school. I didn't tell him we were already married." Rory paused. "That would have been a little too much at that time for him to digest. So, I let it rest there." Marjorie's black eyes sharpened on him. "Just what does that mean, rascal?" "It means that we get him used to the idea that we have-plans." "Fiddlesticks! I know you, Rory. You are hiding something." Rory spread out his hands disarmingly and nothing could have been more candid and boyish than those light blue eyes. "You wrong me, sweetheart, you really do. I have told you all there is. I did tell Pa that your father was a distinguished lawyer in Boston, and he asked if he knew him and I said I didn't know. I didn't mention names. I thought it best; let him mull over what I'd already told him." Marjorie stood on tiptoe to kiss his mouth warmly. "Rory, you never exactly lie, but often you don't exactly not lie, either. You are a very wily Irishman. You tell people only what you want them to know, and not a word more or less, and let them make of it what they will. Even me." "You don't trust me," said Rory, with an air of injury. "Of course I don't! Do you think I am a fool? Never mind, my pet. Do let me see what I look like in the crown jewels." She ran to a dusty mirror and preened in the low lamplight and firelight, and the gems glistened and sparkled in a very satisfactory fashion. "But how shall I explain them to Papa?" she asked. "Hide them. Wear them just for me," said Rory, and took her hand and led her into the tiny bedroom, while she protested very mildly and mentioned roasting beef. Marjorie completely forgot to ask Rory what the business had entailed in London, which was just as well because Rory could never have told her. When he returned to his rooms at Harvard he found a telegram waiting for him, which had been delivered just that day. He read it over and over, disbelievingly, aghast. He actually trembled. Then he sent his father a cable: uncle Sean died this morning. cable funeral arrangements.