There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  There Was a Time

  A Novel

  Taylor Caldwell

  To

  Phyllis and John Hall Wheelock

  PART I

  There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

  The earth, and every common sight,

  To me did seem

  Apparell’d in celestial light,

  The glory and the freshness of a dream.

  —Wordsworth

  CHAPTER 1

  He asked his mother: “How old was I when we lived in Higher Broughton?”

  “You were only two and a half years old,” his mother answered. “Then we went to High Town, and then to Reddish. You couldn’t remember Higher Broughton.”

  But he remembered. There were two things which he remembered with much more poignancy, and power, and clarity, than he could remember yesterday in his manhood. He said to his mother: “We lived in a house that was part of a row of gloomy, red-brick, semi-detached houses, with a stone yard, and a stone wall that enclosed the yard. I used to sit on the water-closet in that yard, and eat bread with currant jam, while you hung out the washing. In a house across the street there was a family by the name of Burns. They had a little girl named Nellie.”

  His mother was incredulous. “You weren’t but a little over two. You couldn’t have remembered that. You heard your father and me talking.”

  But he remembered.

  He was only two years old at that time, but he remembered the yard clearly. The wall had seemed enormously high to him. It could not have been more than six feet in height, but to him it appeared to touch the clouds. The green, wooden door was an impassable bastion, with the latch so high on its side that he could not dream, as yet, of lifting it. On the lower reaches, the dim paint was a mass of fascinating blisters. He spent hours pulling these blisters from the dark wood underneath. Hours spent in blister-pulling, and filled with vague ecstasy and the movement in himself which was so deep and profound, like the movement of slow and sleeping tides. The warm and gauzy sun would lie on his back and filter over his busy, abstracted fingers. He could feel it now, if he wished, and could see his grubby little fingernails, with their black tips, and experience the flowing ecstasy again. He hardly saw the blisters. They were merely something to divert his conscious mind from the quiet exaltation which submerged him.

  He knew himself to be waiting for something, but waiting without impatience and restlessness, and only with a kind of bottomless peace and still rapture. He did not feel young. He did not feel time at all. He was existing in a boundless timelessness, wherein there was nothing but that strange beatitude in himself, and everything outside himself was a diffused and swimming glory, gentle, harmonious, trembling with a shining and halcyon tranquillity. It was not joy, he now knew. Joy was something men know, after pain, after success, after attainment. This was only awareness, and bliss, beside which the joys of men were nothing and only petty and mean and shameful, entirely of the flesh. I was not young, then, he would say when he was a man. In losing what I had at that time, I lost maturity and became emptily young.

  His mother had been frightened by gypsies, who were lurking somewhere in the lanes, and so had compelled his father to add a bolt to the latch. Gypsies were inveterate child-stealers, though why they should bother with the only man child of lower middle-class people was something she never halted in her emotionalism to discover. The boy never saw the bolt consciously, but he knew it must have been there. That is why what happened remained forever inexplicable.

  By this particular day he had torn away all the blisters he could reach. He stood on the toes of his small boots and groped. There was a delicious blister just beyond his reach. It held a promise of retaining, and enhancing, his powerful serenity. He must have that blister, which was the grandfather of all blisters. He looked about him with hunger.

  The yard was full of soft English light. Insofar as he knew, nothing existed beyond those towering walls and that green door—no other human soul, no bird, no tree, no voice, no laughter, no being. Behind him stood the soot-stained brick outline of the house in which he lived. That, too, had no being, though he knew his mother was busy inside. His mother lived on the outer fringe of his consciousness, and did not impinge on his reality. He saw a plume of smoke wandering over the hard gray slates of the roof, which cut into a pale blue sky. Everything was silence. Everything swam in a flood of warm, floating light. He saw the crevices between the flags of the stone flooring. They were wet and green with moss. Restlessly, still hungering, he squatted, and rubbed his dirty little finger on the lichens; his frock pulled back over his thighs, he felt a cool wind on his round buttocks. He plucked at the moss, and looked about him petulantly. His eye fastened on the door and the wonderful blisters so far out of his reach.

  The green door was opening softly, without sound, almost without perceptible movement. He watched it incuriously, his mouth open, his large blue eyes staring vacantly. The door was opening, despite latch and bolt. This did not seem odd to him, for in his universe there were no latches and no bolts, and queer things happened for which he had no question and no answer.

  The door stood wide ajar. A lady entered the yard and closed the door soundlessly behind her. Frank stared emptily, his small finger still rubbing the moss, the wind circling about his bare bottom, the frock and the pinafore slipping back completely. The lady was extremely tall, or so she seemed from his squatting position. She was very beautiful. Even his infant intelligence recognized that. She was slender and young. She could not have been more than twenty, and her hair, falling heavily over her shoulders and far down her back, was as yellow as daffodils. She wore a long and glistening robe of pure whiteness, massive, delicate or stiff by turn, as the sunlight struck it. It was impossible to guess its substance, so changeable was it in its texture. Her white arms were bare and very soft. Her red lips smiled; there was a pulsing and ebbing rose in her cheeks.

  She came close to him, and he pushed himself awkwardly to his feet, rubbing his dirty hands together to rid them of soil and the moss. He stared up at her, still incuriously, his mouth still gaping. He felt nothing of fear or embarrassment, and nothing of his usual shyness when in the presence of strangers. He sniffed loudly. He wiped his hands on his filthy pinafore, which was already stained with jam and soup, and which he had busily used as a handkerchief.

  “Do you know me?” asked the lady kindly, in a soft and vibrating tone.

  He did not answer. He was not a baby who had learned to talk early in his existence. He knew only a few words. None of them seemed appropriate at this time. He continued to stare at her vacantly. The sun was warm and bright in the silent yard. But there was another light about the lady, a concentration, a beautifulness, which was akin to the rapture he felt when tearing blisters from the door. He smiled at her tentatively. She smiled in return; her smile became audible in gentle, murmurous laughter. He began to laugh too—timidly, eagerly.

  She put her hand on his rumpled mass of thick chestnut curls. She pulled the ringlets through her fingers. He felt the caress; it ran all through him like a tongue of flame. He came closer to her; he pressed his head against the white gown. He felt its texture: it was like the touch of sweet and silken wind, like the surface of a lily petal. He smoothed it timidly, enchanted by it. The lady was murmuring; she stroked his cheek. She bent down and kissed his forehead, and sighed, and the thin tongue of fire widened all through him to a sheet of hot joy, extended beyond him, became part of the beauty and the light. He looked up at her lovely face; it was still smiling, but now it was sad also. She had the most vivid blue eyes in all the world, and they swam, now, in what could only have been radiant tears. She pressed him against her body almost convulsively. The whole world throbbed with brightnes
s, with tenderness, with rapture, with fulfilment, but the throbbing was all in shining silence, too intense for movement or even for breathing.

  Somewhere, there was the sudden thunderclap of a door opening and shutting, and a peevish voice cried: “Baby! Baby! What are you doing? Don’t you want your tea? Didn’t you hear me calling you?”

  He heard his mother’s footsteps on the flags, quick, impatient, rapping footsteps. He saw his mother with the outer circle of his eye, beyond which she never entered. He clung to the lady. She was very pale now, and tenuous, and the robe he held in his fingers had no substance at all. He cried in himself: “Don’t go! Don’t go!” He glanced at his mother with rage. He screamed: “Go ’way!” He tried to grapple the lady closer to him. But she had gone, gone completely, like sunlight, and the green door was closed again and firmly latched.

  His mother grasped him by the arm and shook him. “Oh, you dirty baby!” she exclaimed. “Look at your frock and your hands! It doesn’t do any good to wash you. Soap is useless. Look at you! Into the closet with you, and then I’ll have to wash you all over again before you can have your tea!”

  The door of the water-closet creaked loudly, and a flood of sunlight entered into its narrow dank interior, which smelled heavily of paraffin and chloride-of-lime. He was plumped on the wooden seat, and his mother stood over him, bewailing the lot of a woman with a tiresome child. He sat there, and the tears ran down his cheeks, and made wide white paths in the grime. He wept as he had never wept before, with a sense of overpowering loss and endless sorrow, while his mother scolded and wiped his face with her apron.

  He could remember nothing more of that day, or of any other day in that yard, save one, and he could not remember whether he had ever reached the blister, or whether blisters had ever played an important part in his life again.

  Had it been a dream? But he had been too young, he recalled later, to have created such a lady in his own mind, and to have clothed her in garments so dissimilar to those worn by his mother and her neighbors. How could he have dreamed such a visitation? Years later, he was convinced that it must have been a dream, strange and lovely though it had been, and beyond all reason.

  He waited for the lady every day after that, for he recalled that there was in his mind always the emotion of waiting, deprived, restless and unsatisfied.

  He never saw the lady again in Higher Broughton, but she haunted him once or twice later in life, and always, afterwards, he asked himself whether it could have been a dream.

  Only one more memory of Higher Broughton, and it was less than a memory and really more of a sensation, an awareness.

  The day had been dim and cloudy, and now the sky was heliotrope mist, and a heavy still silence hung over everything, and filled the yard, with its stone walls. Frank had been playing with a chair and a doll, but now he had become listless and bored. He wandered about the yard. He touched the green door, wandered away again.

  Then he heard a sound, only the ghost and breath of a sound, immeasurably sweet and piercing. He stood still, head lifted, eyes staring at the sky, from which the sound seemed to drop like rain. It was not the call of a bird, or the singing of a human voice, or like the sound of any instrument he was ever to hear. Neither flutelike nor tinkling like a harp, resembling neither a trumpet nor a violin, it yet seemed to encompass all these instruments in one sustained and ineffably lovely note.

  Entranced, Frank listened. The music did not ebb and flow in any tempo or cadence. But it became louder, clearer, more imminent, until the sky, the yard, the walls, the flags under his feet, were permeated with it, echoed it back, were drenched with it as with light. Indeed, there was a quality of light and airiness about it, in spite of its surging and impelling quality, its triumph and power. Frank stood, and now all the world was filled with that almost intolerable majesty and sweetness, that profound and depthless music, at once impersonal and full of meaning.

  How long he stood there he had no way of telling. But slowly, imperceptibly, the music withdrew rather than faded or grew less. It was like the passing of a host beyond the sky. He held to it as he had held to the lady, until the last whisper of it was gone.

  He never forgot the joy and the solemn rapture that filled him that day. But, he asked himself, years later, had that, too, been a dream? He could never tell.

  CHAPTER 2

  He remembered nothing of High Town, though the family must have remained there two years. But he remembered Leeds, where his grandmother lived and conducted her “genteel lodging house for select guests.” Or, rather, he remembered his grandmother, and her house, the water-cress sandwiches on thin brown bread, sparingly buttered, the Shrewsbury tarts, stuffed with raisins and citron.

  His memory of Leeds was of stark, cold streets, endlessly gray in the day, flickeringly lamplit at night, of tall brick houses stained with soot, of ever-present coal gas floating in the speckled wet air, of small dim fires lurking under ponderous mantelpieces, of skies like wet gray blankets, eternally dripping, of colds in the head and scratchy clothing. And of hatred.

  He accepted hatred as he accepted his colds, his aching belly, and the omnipresent rain. He accepted it, with the placid knowledge that he had always known it; it was part of his life, and there was nothing else of particular vehemence. It was the one positive in an atmosphere of saturated negation. It did not seem to him possible that there was anything else, and he never wondered.

  Mrs. Jamie Clair had her house on a street that was like a score of others in Leeds, no more dank, no more chilling, no more dreary. But it was larger than the house in Higher Broughton. It had nine bedrooms, two water-closets, and a single bath, which no one used. It was thin, and it was three stories tall, crushed between replicas of itself, and its windows were narrow slits eight feet in height, and not more than thirty inches wide, and clothed in Nottingham curtains of coarse, intricate lace over which were looped draperies of dusty crimson velveteen. Mrs. Clair was an excellent and unremitting housekeeper, and her only assistant was an imbecile slattern of a girl of fourteen with a running nose, lank, wispy hair, and a perpetual grin. But in spite of torrents of soapy water, sedulous brushings, yards of unending cloths and bricks of whiting, the soot and the coal dust were everywhere, like a plague. The girl scrubbed the steps, and the walk before them, every morning. By night they were blotched with wet blackness. The brass knocker was polished daily; by night it was spotted and grimed. The sound of brushes went on far into the day, sometimes until teatime, but the dust gathered in crevices and in the folds of draperies. The Nottingham curtains were washed every fortnight. At the end of fourteen days they were gray webs, filled with black filaments. Each week the walls were dusted vigorously, with cloths on brooms, but by the next Friday there were nests of black threads in every corner, trailing downwards over the violent wallpaper. The carpets were brushed every day, after first being sprinkled with bits of paper soaked in water, but by the next morning their patterns were dimmed, and their nap felt gritty to a bare foot. Each Saturday morning the windows were made sparkling clean, almost invisible in their brightness. By the following Saturday they were opaque smears of flat light through which the street outside was seen dimly.

  If the sun ever shone in Leeds, Frank Clair did not remember this phenomenon. He remembered only the melancholy dripping of eaves, livid water in small pools on the brick streets, and the sound of low, wailing wind. He remembered umbrellas that showered grimy drops over one’s shoulders, and galoshes, and for some reason these things in Leeds always reminded him of fish frying, spluttering away in grim, damp kitchens.

  He must have been four years old when he first became conscious of Leeds as fixed in time and place. But he did not remember the trains that took him there and took him away. He could not have visited his grandmother more than five or six times. He soon became aware that his grandmother disliked his father, despised his mother, and hated himself. All this was inextricably involved with the lodging house.

  There was a long thin parlo
r, its incredibly high ceiling always lost in gloom, its corners dark as if the crimson roses of the wallpaper had been washed over with a gray paint brush. No sun ever penetrated in broad shafts into that room; it was always filled with a crepuscular light, as if filtered through a fog, as it often was. There was an imitation black marble mantelpiece against one wall, bulky, flaked and chipping, showing its bleached plaster flesh under the painted skin. The hearth was made of black flags, unavailingly polished. The mantelpiece itself, draped in dark crimson velvet, balled and looped, frowned at the room with beetling brows, and the tiny red fire far back in its recesses was a cold and cheerless snarl. But the brass fender and the andirons glowed as brilliantly as whiting, salt and vinegar could effect it. Above the mantelpiece glowered a somber portrait of the late Mr. William Clair, but soot had obliterated everything about it except a pair of fierce and beetling eyes. They followed little Frank everywhere, full of censure, indignation and umbrage. He hated the portrait, and was afraid of it.

  Brussels carpeting, red, ribbed and worn, covered the floor to the walls. The walls flanking the fireplace boasted two huge “Chinese” jars filled with drooping ostrich plumes, tinted a sickly violet. They were Mrs. Clair’s pride and joy. She dipped the plumes several times a year in a concoction of water and violet ink. The fronds were filled with frail dark webs strung with tiny beads of soot. (Frank would often surreptitiously rub the dry fronds between his fingers, and look at the black streaks with fascinated wonder. Again, when his grandmother was absent from the room, he would climb up on the steel stool beside the fireplace and minutely examine the red-and-purple vases on the mantelpiece, and insert his little finger tips in the intricate convolutions along the necks and around the twisted handles. It was his greatest ambition to have enough time, some day, to examine every other article on that cluttered, draped shelf.)