Captains and The Kings (83 page)

Chapter 51
Elizabeth Hennessey had not died in six months after all. She lived almost a full year. She visited Joseph in New York and other cities only occasionally during the last few months of her life, for she was increasingly exhausted and neither lip rouge nor tinted powder could hide, any longer, the pallor that had come to her fine-boned face. Many lace ruffles at her throat and wrists, and the soft silk dresses she wore with their embroidered bodices, did not conceal too well her increasing thinness and fragility. The big hats, with their flowers and plumes, set high on her proud head, seemed too heavy for her strength. She endured the mounting and ruthless pain in silence, and when she met Joseph she was as reticent, calm, and smiling as always. She explained her few visits lightly. After all, she was growing old, and tired. After all, she had, as well as he, suffered a poignant loss in her only child, her only living relative except for a few distant cousins. She was a woman, not a man. She could not control her emotions, she said, as a man can control them. He had worldly affairs; she had nothing but her house and her gardens and a number of casual friends to take up her time. "I am bored, I think," she said once, and laughed. I am too tired to live any longer, she would say to herself, and in too much pain. The doctors had given her lozenges to suck when the pain was more intense than usual, and she took them sparingly, for they dulled her senses. She wanted to gather all the beauties of the world within the orbits of her eyes, and hold them, and the lozenges made her drowsy so that she slept and missed sunrises and sunsets and snow and rain and wind and the way a breeze turned a long lawn into the semblance of a sea, full of changeful colors. She was crushingly weary, and bereaved, but still the world was beautiful and it was all one could know and mysteries-or empty silence- lay beyond. Joseph listened to all her explanations of her dwindling appearance, and her excuses, and insistently forced her to repeat what her doctors had said last about her "condition." She would lie easily then, saying that the "condition" was only aging, that she had never been of a strong constitution, but otherwise her health was reasonably good. He would listen, watching her closely, and then appeared satisfied. However, he would remark on her lack of appetite, apprehensively, and she would lightly change the subject. She could never tell him, she thought. He had had enough suffering. She would die alone, and quietly. At the very least, that would be her last gift to him. She had never troubled him with her anxieties and her personal problems or her midnight fears, or any tempers or petulances or alarms, and she would not trouble him now. Then it came to her one day in their suite in New York, as he sat beside her chaise lounge and held her hand, that he knew, and that he had known for some time. She was startled deeply. She looked earnestly at his somber profile, suffused with the softened light that came through the lace curtains. He seemed sunk in himself. Yet she was aware that he was thinking of her with absolute concentration. The street noises were muffled; the shrieks and the howls of the elevated cars seemed far away. The hotel was quiet, for it was late afternoon and none was dressing for dinner yet or had returned from outings and shopping. It had been a warm early spring day and Joseph had bought her a bunch of yellow daffodils and narcissi from a street vendor, and they stood in a green vase on the velvet-covered round table where they often ate their meals together. They had not spoken for some time. He sat like a devoted husband at her side, his opened book King on his lean knee. He was staring at the opposite wall. Yes, he knew. She did not know how he had come to know, but he knew. The intuition of love had told him. It could never be deceived. Tears came into her eyes. But I am glad that I will be the one to go first, she thought. You are strong, but I am weak. You will bear this as you have borne other tragedies, but I could not have borne your dying. For that, if for nothing else, I thank God. All our lives are a giving up, one by one, of the things we love and enjoy, and finally there is the last abandonment and we are empty. But I have the memory of our love which I will take with me, if I may, for you are the only joy I have ever known, the only contentment and delight. And so, I am rich after all, richer than most. Others live lives of no color or vitality, and their existence is like nursery porridge, and as bland. But I have known all the heights that can be possible for a woman, all the raptures and the faith and the trust, all the excitements and the wonders, and even grief was bearable in your presence, my darling. I must not be greedy and try to cling to what I have had-for it is all fulfilled, full and overflowing. Nothing can be added. Nothing taken away. For the first time since she had known of her mortal illness she was resigned, tranquil, no longer rebellious, no longer afraid. He turned his head and looked down at her then, as if he knew this also, and their eyes met and held and everything they had been to each other, and all the long years, lay between them. They did not look away. Joseph's fingers tightened slightly on her hand, and that was all. She had accepted. He had been forced to accept. There was the difference. Finally he said, "Elizabeth." No, he must not speak. She put her hand to his mouth lovingly, and closed his lips. "It's all right, darling," she said. "Please don't say anything. It's all right." She was so relieved that she almost cried. There was no need any longer for her to pretend, to paint her face, to try for soft animation, to force herself to laugh when the pain sprang upon her. So, she was granted this great mercy, knowing that he knew, and she no longer felt isolated in an iron cage of torture, afraid to cry out lest she hurt him. She had thought nothing could be added to what she had already had, but now she had this. She fell asleep, like a dying child who has been eased of suffering, blissful in the absence of agony, but prostrated, and he watched her until it was dark in the room and the street lamps outside began to bloom. Her peace of mind made her seem stronger the next day, and they went to the opera for the last time together, and they knew it would be the last time, and so the music and the arias and the costumes were all the more intense to them and full of meaning. But they knew it was Elizabeth who sailed away in the swanboat and not Lohengrin, and they looked at each other and their hands tightened together. Yet never, not even in her youth, had Elizabeth looked so beautiful to Joseph, so translucent, so full of dignity and peace. He could not violate this courage by a single word, and he knew it. He took her back to Green Hills himself the day following and she did not object, though this was the first time the had traveled home together on the same train. She was gathering last impressions as a gleaner gathers wheat against hunger and the night of hunger. "In two weeks I u ill come back for a whole month," he said, when he left her at her door and her maid helped her across the threshold. "Yes," she said, and her great green eyes were full of love and not sadness. She had chosen her grave a month before, not near Tom Hennessey, who lay beside his first wife in a sunken grave under a heavy stone. She had bought a plot of land, and had even ordered her monument, to be graved simply with her name, the year of her birth and the year of her death. Oaks had always been her favorite trees. One stood there, ancient and mighty, and its branches would bend over her grave. She stood in the spring wind and was at peace, looking at the place where she would lie and sleep. When she had been young she had been horrified that people could casually choose their graves and what would be on their monuments, and could visit the spot. But now she felt comfort. It was beautiful here, and quiet. A week later she died alone in her bed, at dawn, as she had hoped, and no one was with her. As the light increased a bolt of golden shadow shot through the window and lay on her sleeping face, and it was the face once more of a girl who had come home. Bernadette telephoned Joseph in Philadelphia, to tell him that Elizabeth Hennessey had been found dead by her maid, that morning, and that the funeral would be held on Thursday. Bernadette's voice was subdued, though she was full of elation. Would Joseph return for the funeral After all, he was Elizabeth's executor, and had managed her affairs. "Yes," he said. "I will come." That was all. He began to work again. There was no feeling in him at all except a vast hollowness, a far desolation. He could not believe, in spite of all he had known for some time, that Elizabeth was dead, and that he would never see her again. His mind froze at the very approach to that reality, and then fell away. It was the l, way she had wanted it, he said to himself. He would go to Green Hills but I there was no longer anyone there for him. Once he had been a stranger, ' staring at a stranger's house, and again he would be a stranger, and he i would look again at a stranger's house, and as he thought that he threw I his pen from him and went to his apartments in Philadelphia and did not leave them until it was time to go to Green Hills.
Before Rory Armagh had married Claudia Worthington he had attended informal classes in Fabian Socialism at Oxford. Had he not already been somewhat aware of the truth, as his father had told him and the "quiet, deadly men," the financiers, great industrialists, European and American aristocrats, bankers and the enormously rich, he would have been confused, incredulous, and then finally appalled, in spite of his natural cynicism and realistic approach to life. For it was confirmed to him that the so-called "class struggle," of which he had heard in his secular schools, was an artificial struggle, created and manipulated by the "Elite," in their drive to power and control of all the world. There was really no quarrel between the American working-classes and their employers-the middle-class-for they had a common objective, which was work and survival and a small measure of happiness in a world that offered very little to anyone. They did not want power. They wanted peace, shelter, sufficient food, a sum left over for tiny pleasures, some area of privacy, families, and personal dignity. Above all, they wanted freedom to choose their lives, their God and their modest ambitions. They were not warlike or contentious. They were simple men. They did not particularly yearn for immense riches, and so were content. In their simplicity, in their great numbers, in their common beliefs and desires, in their native decency, they had weight and were formidable. Therefore, potential tyrants were impotent to use them, for they had the forthright man's skepticism of "ideals" and ideologies and "causes," and mass protests. If their lives were hard, it was the way of life itself, for competition and the struggle for survival were innate in all nature, beast, plant, man, and they knew this. Millions implicitly believed in their religion, that man was born to eat his bread in the sweat of his face, and labor itself, however onerous at times, had the dignity of natural causes. The admonition of Judeo-Christianity, as reuttered by St. Paul, was honored and understood by them: "He who does not work, neither shall he eat!" If they thought of their "betters" at all-the men of inherited great wealth, and the bankers and the financiers and the "robber barons," it was not with envy or resentment, but with a sort of respectful amusement. William Jennings Bryan had not overly impressed them. But this normal health was only in America now. Socialism had eaten into the heart of France and Germany, into England even under King Edward, and into Italy in some quantity. France, therefore, had lost her status as a first-class power, Bismarck had almost destroyed Germany with his Socialism, but the Germans had hard-heads and had begun to recover by 1900 under a more intelligent Kaiser. Russia had been untouched by Socialism, due to the vigilance of the Czars and the Duma, always suspicious of West European fantasies and confusions. But the disease of Socialism was not easily eradicated, for it was the weapon of the "Elite" against all mankind, and was supported by "intellectuals," full of envy and greed, and opportunists. The "Elite," through their prophets, Marx and Engels, had created the "class struggle," in order to divide, weaken, and finally conquer all nations. They were very clever. Tell the working people that they were unbearably oppressed, incite envy in them and lust, and you set them apart from their employers. On the other hand, secretly tell the employers that unions would destroy their profits, their very survival, and that the working class was bent on Socialism, anarchy, indolence, and loot, and you divided the employer from his workman. You created a climate of hatred, distrust, exigency, and enmity-the class struggle. You had prepared the field for dragons' teeth, for wars to deplete a nation's strength, for exploitation, for final despotism, and the "tranquillity" of slavery under a benign "Elite. There were very few who knew that Socialism, and its daughter, Communism, were the oldest, most primitive, forms of government in the world, and had been invented in the Stone Age by cave-dwellers who lived in communes. Mankind, through eons, had advanced from Socialism- Communism into a dignified civilization where men were comparatively free. There were inequities, certainly, and injustices, for man was imperfect and would always be so, but left alone in an air of increasing freedom and choice and these would be more or less corrected, though not to an impossible Utopia. Human nature remained, and it was the one immutable in the world. America, though afflicted by child labor and untenably low wages, mostly imposed by the great barons of industry, was feeling her way surely if slowly out of the major injustices. She had laughed at the Socialists, the Mugwumps and the Populists, though admiring them I for their frantic vehemence and color, and had realized their ideas were absurd and dangerous to the survival of the human race and the free spirit. Accordingly freedom was growing in America, and the desire for peace, and her prosperity stunned the world. Where men were free they could ' make a choice, and when they chose with common sense and awareness- as most did in America-they had natural power and liberty and mobility and strength. So America was the huge impediment in the path to power of the "Elite." She must be infected with Socialism, and the "class struggle." How could this be accomplished, when Americans were the least revolutionary people in the world? Through wars, as well as through insidious and fiendishly intelligent propaganda from the capitals of Europe When Rory returned from Europe, after his sister's death, he had a long and quiet talk with his father. "I attended a session of Parliament in England, a full-dress session. It was said that Germany, with her superior industry and mechanical genius, was 'invading' the British 'traditional world market.'" "Yes," said Joseph. "So," said Rory, "there will be a war." "Not immediately," said Joseph. "Perhaps by 1914 or 1916. I have seen the blueprints. But America can't be got into a war without money. So- there must be a Federal income tax. You have known this for years." Rory nodded. The underlids of his eyes relaxed, artlessly. "The big move," he said. "Wars and taxes will create dissension in America, and weaken her. We've talked about this often, haven't we?" "Yes," said Joseph. He stared at his son gloomily and did not pursue the subject. But Rory said, "And eventually we will be bankrupt. Very clever, isn't it?" At the opening of the campaign to secure the nomination of his Party for the Presidency, Rory said, "I know all the objectives. I agree with them without reservation." "Good," said Joseph, and his face was gloomier than ever. "I don't think I will get the nomination."