Captains and The Kings by Taylor Caldwell

Author:Taylor Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-17T06:12:38+00:00

Chapter 30

Joseph received an interesting letter from Mr. Spaulding one cool September day, addressed to the house in Green Hills. After its effusions of friendship and attachment, it said, with the utmost delicacy: Our friends accepted the contribution to the Party with grateful astonishment for your unequaled generosity, which, they declared, demonstrates your concern for the Commonwealth and her weal. They will at once attend to the other matters which 1 earnestly brought to their attention, and trust you will be gratified at the result. After loving inquiries concerning Joseph's family, Mr. Spaulding added the following: I should not be surprised if a mutual friend visited you almost immediately. If so, extend to him my obedient regard. Joseph immediately destroyed the letter. But he sat and considered the import with black and vengeful satisfaction. He needed that satisfaction for his life had become barely tolerable since Regina's "desertion," which was now but one piece with Sean's cruel accusations and flight. He felt alone as he had never felt alone in all his life before, and had some sentimentalist archly pointed out to him his wealth, his wife and his children, he would have burst out laughing and the sound would not have been pleasant. He had never before thought of using his family as a source of revenge, but in these days he thought of it constantly. Often, in the past, he had contemplated suicide, but only as a random if acute and very brief impulse. Now it intruded several times a day, and with it a passing but enticing sense of relief. He knew at last that a man should find his motivation for living in himself and not for others who could and would betray without any hesitation at all, and even with malevolence. Some men lived for their country, some for some incredible God, some for their families. But Joseph had come to realize that all these were externals, and had no identity with a man's own identity, except, possibly, he would think with wryness, that God who had-or the myth of Him- seduced his sister from her brother's house. That, to Joseph, was the utmost madness and the utmost secret betrayal of one's integrity. No abstract had verity in man's immediacy of needs and hungers and survival. Call this animalism, if you wish, Joseph would think. But what is there in man's history-except for a few demented saints who never knew the world anyway -but animalism? He had come to hate himself in that he had deprived his own youth of any joy or adventure or investigation into available pleasures, for his family. He wondered, sometimes, if he had not been a little mad, himself, in regarding his own existence as valuable only as it related to Regina and Sean, and that, in his personal individual self it was worthless. He would often think of Mr. Healey, who had lived only for himself and so had found life interesting, exciting, and rewarding, and had died in bliss.

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