Testimony Of Two Men (27 page)

“He is perfectly all right,” Adrian had replied with his usual complacent buoyancy. “He had many interesting experiences. Very, very pleasant, and most edifying.” His big blue eyes, as usual, were artless and serene. But, then, Marjorie had remarked to herself, Jon really never tells him any-

thing. “Edifying. Yes,” Adrian had continued, with that sweet musing look of his which Marjorie found most infuriating. “We shall look at my Audubon collection tonight and try to identify the birds which Jonathan saw on his very enlightening excursion. Most instructive.”

Adrian, Marjorie thought with fearful clarity tonight, abandoned me when I finally stopped protecting him, and found him out, and turned to Jon, who fervently received the burden and who still carries it! My God, why don’t we see and understand things before it is too late? And how did Jon get the idea tonight that I “implied” that Harald was very like Adrian?

There is so much of me in Jon and so much of me in Harald, thought Marjorie, tonight. Had she been wrong in believing that Harald’s easy conversation, so like his father’s, had risen from fear, as his father’s had so risen? Or did Harald simply keep up a brighter chatter to fend off the dangerous inquisitiveness of others, because though he liked people he did not trust them? Or found them too ridiculous to take seriously? Jon was always taking people too seriously, though he would be the first to deny that, with angry contempt. Who was it who had said, “Life is a tragedy to the man who feels, and a comedy to the man who thinks”? If that was so, then Jon was really a man who “felt” and did not absolutely think, and so Father McNulty was quite correct, and was that not odd in a man so young? Or was wisdom to be measured solely in years? Marjorie recalled many who were old who were still fools.

It had been an unusually warm spring for Pennsylvania. Secretly, Marjorie had always worried about Jonathan’s health, for he was overtall for his age, almost emaciated in appearance, and his sallow complexion seemed dimmer. Compared with him, Harald, the full-blooded and well-colored, appeared offensively healthy and hearty and slightly plump, at fifteen. Jonathan seemed to be irritated by Harald’s light and amiable chatter more than customarily, and accordingly Harald was brighter than ever and more loquacious and deliberately annoying. He could not restrain his pleasure that Jonathan would be away for two weeks and he made his pleasure obvious. Marjorie could not help smiling at this. Jonathan, she had thought, was really too serious and preoccupied and took his studies with a firm intensity, and he was only seventeen. His temper, never well restrained under the best of circumstances, was much worse. But his father, who almost frantically refused to acknowledge unpleasantness or troublesome matters, said, “My dear, you are always too concerned about Jon. He is fit as a fiddle. Fit as a fiddle,” he repeated, for he loved cliches and found his sanctuary in them. Marjorie thought to ask him, “And what makes a fiddle fit, or what is fitness in a fiddle?” but she recognized the remark as childish and refrained from it. Let Adrian have his platitudes and aphorisms and cliches. They protected him against life and reality and so their existence could be endured.

Jonathan was gone for the two whole weeks and returned thinner than ever, duller of complexion than before, and with a mature darkness on his face which was never to leave it for the rest of his life. Though even for him he was unusually silent, Marjorie saw that he was thinking deeply and fiercely, for the white ridges, newly arrived, kept springing out about his mouth. Marjorie could hear him talking with his father in the secluded study, but his voice, as always when in conversation with Adrian, was agreeable, even soothing. He sounds like a father talking to a child! Marjorie thought with exasperation, and not for the first time. Adrian’s voice, in reply, was grateful and mellow— Oh, the damned mellowness of it! (She could abide unctuousness, for one knew at once that unctuous men were hypocrites and liars and inclined to be dangerous, and so one was warned, knowing the fraudulence. But mellow-voiced men were either fools or cowards. In a way they were much more dangerous than the unctuous men, for they could easily and disastrously betray, not out of malice or design, but out of sheer panic.) •

Marjorie waited. Jonathan had not confided in her since he had been nine. She had no hope that he would this time, either. But one morning he came abruptly into her sitting room, where she was discussing the Easter dinner with the cook and, on seeing him, Marjorie asked the young woman to leave. She knew instinctively that Jonathan wished to talk to her and not on an idle matter. But she smiled easily at him and said, “Good morning, dear. Have you had your breakfast? I see you have your bicycle clips on; out for a run?”

He sat down opposite her and did not answer. He only stared at her, and she knew that defiant and challenging stare.

She folded the newspaper on her knee and put it aside, and said nothing and only waited.

He said, with a note of accusation in his boy’s voice. “You aren’t the least damned interested in my walking tour, are you?”

She could not help being tart. “You haven’t mentioned a word about it, Jon, except for talking to your father, a conversation to which I was not invited. What’s wrong? Did something disagreeable happen to you?”

He regarded her sullenly and crossed his long thin legs. He folded his arms across his chest. The white ridges were out around his mouth again. “I don’t see how anything I saw or did could interest you.”

“You might try,” Marjorie said. “Did it interest your father?”

“I didn’t tell him. Yet. But I will.”

Marjorie waited again. She did nothing to encourage his confidence. She sat relaxed and handsome, with the morning light on her dark hair and the jet buttons on her severe bodice glittering. The light was full on the wretched boy’s face, but hers was in shadow.

Then he told her.

The rains that spring had been notably heavier than usual in the southern section where the walking tour had taken place. The company of boys, and one of their teachers, could walk only two or three hours a day and then had to run for shelter to the nearest town or village, hoping to encounter a small hotel which was reasonably clean. Some were not too intolerable; some were chilly and grubby. They had not taken the mountain route but just the foothills, very muddy and slippery in the almost constant water and the breaking of recently locked springs, creeks, rivers and brooks.

One day they found the narrow road blocked off with a ” warning sign. Part of a small muddy hill had begun to slide, and travelers by foot or horse or carriage or wagon were warned to keep off the road for at least a mile in either direction for fear of a landslide. The boys, led by their teacher, cautiously left the road and walked parallel to it at a distance of about a hundred feet, in the meanwhile curiously surveying the brown and leaking and glistening hills on the other side of the road. It was a dreary and monotonous scene against the somber gray sky, and very deserted, for the nearest town was half a mile away and hidden to the west behind another range of hills.

Then the teacher shouted and halted and began to point. At a little distance, and right in the middle of the road, at least a dozen children were playing, for the earth all about was soft and soggy and spongy, and the road offered the only firm ground. Above them leaned the brown Up of a slowly sliding side of a hill.

“Oh, my God!” cried Marjorie with horror, and sitting upright. “I read about that in the papers a week ago! Were you there, seeing it yourself, Jon? Six children were buried in the slide and died, and eight were rescued!”

“Yes,” said Jonathan. “I was there. I saw it. We had little shovels in our knapsacks, and it was a good thing we did. We sent one of the boys to the village and the rest of us dug into the mud. The eight were lucky; we could pull them out because just their legs or their arms had been buried. But the other six kids were deep under tons of mud and rock and water. The men from the village and the farms worked all night digging them out—and they were dead. All the lanterns were around and lamps, and the parents, the ones whose kids had been saved and the ones whose kids hadn’t. And they had fires going, and firemen working and digging, and the police, too. It was kind of terrible.”

“Dear God, it must have been,” said Marjorie. “I saw drawings of it in the newspapers. Those poor parents.”

“Yes,” said Jonathan. Now his look at her was fiercer than ever and tighter. “It was bad enough that their children had been smothered to death in all that mud. It was much worse because of the other fathers and mothers. Much worse.” He struck his bony knee with his brown fist. “God—damn— them,” he said in a low voice, and it was the voice of a man and not a youth.

As each dead child, muddy and lifeless, was lifted from its wet grave, the cries of the bereaved rose harshly in that cold spring air, and they were the cries of tortured animals. The parents of the children who had been saved huddled together and stared at the distraught parents whose children had died. Then when the last child was brought out, white-stained face under the moon, and the weeping became more anguished, the parents of the rescued children moved into action. Their faces split into wide and exultant smiles. They pushed their children to the grieving mothers and fathers, their eyes glowing radiantly and with inhuman satisfaction in the mingled moonlight and lantern light.

They pushed their children around and even over the little bodies on the dank earth, which lay there so pitifully. In fact, they moved with eager excitement toward the bereaved. Exalted cries rushed from their mouths, and joyous whoops. They pressed their living children against the grieving, impatiently. “Look, look!” they exclaimed. “My Susie, my Mary, my Tommy, my—my—my—my—I They’re all right! Look at them! Isn’t it wonderful! Look, look. They’re alive. Susie, shake Mrs. Schwartz’s arm so she’ll notice you. Look, Mrs. Benson! Susie’s all right! Look at my Elsie! Look, look! Why don’t you look?”

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Jonathan. “There they were, milling with their kids, shoving them at the fathers and mothers of the dead, demanding that those poor things look and rejoice and hug and congratulate—and their own kids lying there as dead as, as dead as—” He stopped. He stared before him. “We walked away. We didn’t say anything. I—well, I wanted to kill. It’s the second time in my life I’ve felt that way. I just wanted to kill, I tell you!” and he glared at his mother.

Marjorie said nothing. Her hands were folded tightly on her knee.

“What’s the matter with people?” asked Jonathan, after
a
long silence. “What in hell is the matter with people?”

Marjorie said, “Did you boys and your teacher talk it over together that night?”

“A little. I think we were all kind of sick and shaken. Then the teacher said that the parents of the living kids were just —just hysterical, and just happy, and they didn’t mean anything cruel or brutal—” Again he stared at his mother. “I don’t believe that. The dead kids were lying there, huddled up and broken and wet and dirty and smashed. You could see them. And you could hear their parents crying and praying and you could see them tearing desperately at each other, and trying to comfort each other, and screaming— What the hell is the matter with people? And those animals, shrieking with joy, as if they were triumphant, and shouting to their friends to look at the living kids, and jostling them, and angrily demanding—”

Marjorie was silent again, suffering for her son. Jonathan said, “There’s a lot of silly stuff being printed these days in books about ‘understanding’ people. And the ‘innate goodness’ of people. We are getting them in school. Maudlin books. You are supposed to ‘understand’ everybody—and love everybody. A sweet, sentimental, gooey drip and stench—that’s what is being written now. Putrid stuff. Horace Mann. We read what he wrote, and the things he said, and’ what he did— Warm pudding. ‘Humanity rising, progressing to perfection.’ Other bilge. He was a Whig. A Humanist. He bawled over mankind. He loved, loved, loved, the swine!” Jonathan struck his knee again, in a kind of desperation. “What was wrong with him, and all the others like him? Couldn’t they see the facts, the truth, about people? Didn’t they ever honestly say, ‘What in hell is the matter with people?’ And that is what I ask you now. Tell me about it.”

Marjorie thought of her husband, Adrian Ferrier, and his song of man, his constant, unremitting, terrified song of man, his imploring song of man, his implicit and eternal and anxious demand to be assured that all was fair in the world, all men were brothers, all men instinctively loved each other, all men were good. She shook her head slightly. She looked at Jonathan.

“I’m not going to lie to you, dear. I’ve never lied to you. I’ve always told you the truth. Men are not good; they are not kind; they are not just and tender and compassionate by nature. We are the most evil species this world has ever spawned, and I doubt well ever be any better. Men like Horace Mann are just—frightened. They really know what their fellowman is, in spite of the oratory and the sweetness and the insistence. They don’t want to know. They are frightened to death of the world they know exists—and so they invent a pretty one instead and try to five in it. They should be pitied. But it should be remembered that as they live in fantasy they can extend their insanity to others, too, and help to divorce them from reality.”

Jonathan, young and thin and intense and sick at heart and newly embittered, considered what she had said for a long time. His face became darker and darker.

Marjorie said, “I would be doing you a wrong, dear, to say soothing, lying things to you, to ease your mind and send you away with pretty delusions and confidences. That would be the kind thing to do. but I prefer truth. I also respect the fact that you are no longer a child, to be put off with fairy stories and patted on the head and given a cup of hot cocoa and a plate of cookies. But we should tell even very young children the absolute truth so they will be armored against life and be able to endure reality. Lies are always wrong.”