There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  “Shut him up, or I’ll clout him!” he exclaimed, with thin ire. “You’ll have the house down around our necks. What’ll the lodgers think?”

  “I don’t care about the blinking lodgers,” replied Maybelle, aroused. “I’ll not have the little thing mithered, just because he ain’t—isn’t—too bright. There, there, lovey,” she crooned to the child, who was writhing in her arms as if possessed. She pumped him up and down in her arms. Her auburn pompadour had come loose and was falling into her eyes. Her hot wet face was the color of a poppy, her eyes suffused with easy tears, her thick little lips trembling. Her breath came fast and noisily with her indignation. “There, there, it’s Mama that’s got you, safe and sound. Would you like a Shrewsbury tart, lovey? A nice sweet Shrewsbury tart?”

  “There are no Shrewsbury tarts to be had. Just enough for the lodgers’ tea,” remarked Mrs. Clair with pointed indifference. “He can have some bread and gooseberry jam.”

  “He hates gooseberry jam,” protested Maybelle. She waddled up and down the room, agitatedly tossing the boy about in her arms. His cries were becoming feebler, but his hands were pressed convulsively over his eyes.

  Mrs. Clair shrugged her lean shoulders. The pleated black silk of her shirtwaist crackled. She gave her son a prolonged and deadly glance, which called upon him to accept his fate with fortitude, while she, his mother, knew he was foredoomed to defeat.

  Maybelle’s anger against her mother-in-law was subsiding. She knew that she would be “in for” a berating from her husband later for this show of rebellion and for her “language.” Now she began to feel annoyance and impatience with the frenzied child. “Hush, hush,” she said, with something of shrewishness in her voice. “Stop your skriking, or I’ll thrash you, that I will. A big lad like you!”

  In her fast perambulations up and down the dark parlor she paused momentarily before the mantel. There was a suspicious dampness against her forearms. Surreptitiously, turning her back to her mother-in-law, she felt of the small trousers. There, he’d done it again, and what would Mrs. Clair and Francis think? They would be confirmed in their opinion about the child. Now she was angered, and shook the cowering boy. “Do you want a clout?” she demanded fiercely.

  The boy was abruptly silent, but his whole body shivered violently. He opened his eyes. They were not wet, but they were stark and wild. He glared about him. Then his mouth fell open. He was on a level with the mantelpiece, and he suddenly pointed a finger at it, mumbling thick sounds in his throat.

  Maybelle followed the little finger, craning her tousled head over her fat shoulder. “No, no, mustn’t touch. Grandma’s things.”

  “What does the lad want?” asked Mrs. Clair, unexpectedly and with alertness. In truth, she was somewhat disturbed at the passion the child had displayed, for he had always been so silent, so docile, so lumpish. “He can’t have my vases, or my bric-a-brac, not even to quiet him.”

  Maybelle moved backwards, still craning. Frank’s hand shot out and clutched a large pink shell, all convolutions. He clasped it to his breast like a precious treasure. His white little face glowed.

  “It’s the shell,” Maybelle surlily informed her mother-in-law. “No, no, lovey, mustn’t touch. Give it back to Mama, and she’ll put it back in the right place.”

  She tried to wrest the shell from the moist small fingers, but Frank screamed again, with so piercing a note that Maybelle recoiled involuntarily, and Francis again sprang to his feet as if touched with a hot iron, doubling his fists savagely. Mrs. Clair’s ears deafened. Her voice rose over the tumult; firm and harsh: “Let him have it, for God’s sake. He can’t hurt it. It isn’t worth anything; a lodger left it.”

  She added, “Put the brat down on the hearth, May. I’ve got a lot to talk over, and we can’t waste time with him.”

  Maybelle set Frank down with a thump. She viciously hoped his wet trousers would soil the Brussels carpeting. Then, frightened, she snatched him up, looked about, met Mrs. Clair’s eye, hastily dropped the boy on the hearth again.

  He forgot everything, the voices, the faces, the smart in his cheek. He held the shell in his hand. He tipped it towards the fire.

  CHAPTER 3

  The shell was about six inches long and four inches wide. The outer surface was rough and ridged. But the interior was shaded from the most delicate pink at the edge to the softest, brightest rose-mauve towards the center. Moreover, the inner surface had a smooth cool feel, and was streaked with living silver that flashed and changed in the firelight.

  Frank cradled the wondrous treasure in his hands, breathlessly, worshipfully. There was a religious ecstasy in him, an awed bliss. He felt his little heart swell with a kind of nameless exaltation. His body was held rigid, lest he disturb the flow of frail silver that darted in little streaks and rivulets over the lovely pink-and-mauve sheen. His hands shook; the silver flowed, brightened, became moons and rivers in microcosm. A rosy island rose momentarily between silver streams, fell and was lost.

  Something like a suppressed sob choked the boy’s throat. His chestnut ringlets brightened to flame in the firelight as he bent his head over the shell. His cheeks flushed, his lips quickened with color. A dreaming and rapturous light drowned his features, which had suddenly become beautiful.

  Even Mrs. Clair was not insensible to that sudden and incredible beauty of the crouched child on the hearth, the shell trembling gently in his hands. She said reluctantly: “He should have been a girl. I never knew he was so pretty. If he’d ’a’ been a girl, it wouldn’t matter that he wasn’t bright.” She added, in a softer voice than usual: “Francis, put the shell to your ear. You can hear the sea.”

  The boy started. He glanced up, dazed. But he had heard her. Obediently, he put the shell to his ear, though he knew nothing of the sea, and to him it was only a word.

  He heard a long sonorous note, a miniature thunder, a soft majestic droning. Entranced, not daring to move, he listened. There was a faint singing sound rising over the deeper notes, a sound of fairy music, sweet and compelling. It was a voice full of joy and tenderness and glory, and now other voices joined it. The universe was filled with the singing, with long bassoons in accompaniment, with tremendous drums from a distance, with the far blazing of celestial trumpets.

  Frank forgot time and place. He forgot his newly discovered entity, the world, his parents, the room, his being. He was only a core of consciousness, acutely burning, concentrated passionately on the music which swelled ever louder, so that the utmost limits of space were drenched with the power and the force of the overwhelming harmony.

  Clouds of light flowed over his vision. Dark abysses rolled towards him, were cleft asunder with swords of fire, filling up with swimming radiance. Mountains, chaotic and tumbling, rose in gray majesty before him, blazed blue, purple, scarlet, gold, until he could no longer look upon their brilliance. Oceans of flame whirled dizzily away from him, burning with apocryphal colors; incandescent rainbows, shedding lightning, flashed over the bottomless depths. And everywhere was the music, ever louder and louder, like a thundering and universal paean of triumph. It was more terrible in its splendor and grandeur than the music he had heard in the yard at Higher Broughton. Then it had been the faintest and noblest of echoes. Now it was an unbearable rapture, a wild glory, almost terrible.

  Such a joy seized him that he could not endure it. He seemed to know everything, to understand everything. His unseeing eyes stared at the firelight, reflecting the flickering light. His expression was transfixed. There was a sound of bursting in his chest, as if something had been released, had been freed. He sat in a trance, his soul in the music, the visions.

  The thunder became shattering; it was like great wings, beating, palpitating, frightfully imminent. Then, all at once, he saw a hand emerge from the fire and the crashing radiance. It was a most enormous hand, yet delicately fashioned, long and slender and strong. It held a ball of clay in its palm. The fingers closed about it, lifted, thrust forward, opened. The ball of clay spran
g as if alive from the fingers, and went hurtling forward and downward into space, into the rainbows, into the dissolving mountains of light and conflagration. It was illuminated by them; tinted lightnings flashed about it. A brilliant halo encircled it. It disappeared into darkening space, spinning like a top, dizzily and helplessly spinning, but pregnant with meaning.

  The hand extended, the fingers spread, lifted a little, as if giving a blessing. It remained for a time like that, the light shining through it, falling like beams from its palm, falling in golden cataracts through the gathering darkness, so that their rolling and tumbling were momentarily illuminated.

  The hand withdrew, slowly, reluctantly, yet with finality. The light flowed in after it, and everything dimmed and paled. The voices sank lower, became sonorous and diffused thunder again. It retreated like a melodious and meditative tide into the far reaches of the universe from which it had come. Now it was only a murmur.

  And at last there was only silence and darkness and emptiness, and the crushing wild grief and sense of dreadful loss in the heart of the child.

  “The lad’s fallen asleep, thank goodness,” said Mrs. Clair. “No, don’t disturb him, May. Let him sleep. He will only skrike again. No, let him keep the shell, if he wants it. He’ll drop it and break it soon.”

  “He’s anaemic,” said Mrs. Clair, uncomfortably. “Why don’t you give him iron? He looks as if he has the rickets.”

  “He gets good food,” replied Maybelle, defensively. She was frightened by the boy’s pallor, by his flaccidity.

  Mrs. Clair shrugged eloquently. She turned her attention to her son. “So, it’s settled, then. I leave for America in January. I’ve got a good price offered for the furnishings of the house, and the lodgers have had their long notice. Francis, you’d best go to America, too.”

  “What’d I do in America?” asked Francis Clair, with a weak attempt at facetiousness. “Work as a navvy on the streets, sweeping up the gold that’s supposed to be there?”

  “I dislike levity,” said Mrs. Clair, with grand sternness, and rocking herself a little in her rockerless chair. “You’d do just as you do here: work in a chemist’s shop. You’re a good chemist, if I do so say, myself, from what Mr. Sawyer says. Then, you’ve got your fiddle. You might have opportunities for it there.”

  Francis was silent. His hand squeezed his knee; he stared into the fire. His face was still, blank, frozen.

  “I fancy they have public houses there, too,” went on Mrs. Clair inexorably.

  Francis Clair did not move, yet he appeared to jerk violently, as if twisted with despair. He said in a low voice: “I wouldn’t play in the public houses in America. Just as I won’t play here.”

  Mrs. Clair tossed her head impatiently. “You don’t play it at all. Does he, May? After all the money I spent, trying to lift him above himself, though a lodging house is no disgrace, I can tell you. It’s given us bread and butter, and good clothes, and a roof over our heads, for years. It’s honest and respectable. I have no regrets. I had no one to turn to—”

  “I’m not saying anything, Ma,” said her son. But his thin tones were abstracted.

  “And it’d be a caution if you did! And ungrateful. Well. I had high hopes for you, Francis. Your father kept a shop. That’s respectable, too, and I’m not one to think different. But I wanted something a little better for you. You wanted fiddle lessons. You got ’em—”

  “Violin,” murmured Francis, wincing.

  “Fiddle. Fiddlesticks! What does it matter? It was called a fiddle in my day, before people got fancy. Fiddle. Well, you got your lessons, and what do you do with them? Nothing. You don’t even practice, do you?”

  “It’s been years. I’ve been busy.”

  What could he tell his mother? What could he say to her? My teacher told me I had no real talent, and could only memorize, in spite of what I heard inside myself. I couldn’t make it come out! It came out in wheezes and dribbles. My teacher told me I would do well in a public house, or perhaps in a cheap music hall, or perhaps I could teach. That wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough for what I heard inside me! I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. With me it was all or nothing. It’s nothing. The case is covered with dust. That’s me. Covered with dust. I haven’t any soul; that’s what’s the matter. No soul.

  “Busy!” snorted Mrs. Clair. “A body’s always got time to do the things he wants. It’s just an excuse. Well. Do as you wish. I’m not one to impose my opinions on anyone else. Mind your own business, is my motto. Live and let live. Do right, and don’t bother about your neighbors. Anyway, you’d do well in America.”

  “You’re right, Ma. It’s a fiddle.”

  Maybelle looked up quickly. She knew that tone of voice, which was almost malignant.

  “Eh?” said Mrs. Clair. “Well, then. A fiddle’s a fiddle. No use despising any way of making a living. Then, you’re a chemist, too.”

  Rolling little white pills, green pills, red pills, for sluggish bellies, for dull aching heads, for all the chronic and nameless ills that afflict the human body. Capping, wrapping in striped paper. String. Looking at great glass jars, and sometimes seeing crystals like sparks of yellow and red and blue fire. A chemist! He thought of the great pioneer chemists of history. Once he had dreamed of being one of them, of discovering a cure for consumption, for cancer, for sick hearts, for tumorous intestines. He thought of kneeling before the Queen—it was the King, now. “Rise, Sir Francis Clair.” Silk breeches and silk stockings, and a ribbon on his chest, and newspapers and the noble of the world paying him honor! My God, a chemist! A chemist on a side street in High Town, with lamplight blinking in his eyes, and the bell tinkling on the door, and the smell of dirt, dust, rain and sweat and dripping umbrellas! His hand clenched his knee so that it bit into the flesh.

  America. The gripping fingers slowly relaxed. There was money in America. Money made up for a lot of things. What was that chap’s name who came back to Manchester for his wife and children? Francis couldn’t remember. But he had a pocket full of pounds—dollars. He showed them lavishly. He was making three pound a week in some shop in a place called Philadelphia. Bragging. His clothes were good. Money to burn in America, he had said. Pubs flowing with cheap beer, and “vaudeville” houses, and a chance for everybody. America was the land of money; jobs were to be had for the asking, for four or five pound a week! Francis calculated. He was lucky to bring home three pound ten every Saturday night. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen a sovereign. There might even be hope in America. What had the chap said? Beastly hot in the summer in Philadelphia. But there was the sun. One never saw the sun in Lancashire. All at once his thin blood and his meagre body strained, turned urgently towards the sun he had never seen. And he heard the rain running down the spouts; he heard it in the eaves. It was washing the windows in yellow-gray streams. Fog pressed against the glass; a dray rattled on the bricks outside.

  “America,” he said, aloud. “I’ll give it thought.”

  “Oh, Frank, you’d never leave dear old England!” cried Maybelle, incredulously. Her lips pouted; her eyes filled with tears. “Among strangers!”

  “Don’t be a ninny, May,” said Mrs. Clair. She nodded approvingly at her son. “That’s the ticket, Francis. Assert yourself. You know best. I’ve got it all planned. I’ll open a lodging house in America. There’s my friend—you remember her, Mrs. Blossom that was. She’s a Mrs. Jones since she married in America. She lives in Bison, in a place called New York. You remember me telling you. She’s got a lodging house, and charges the lodgers fifteen shillings a week. Think of it. My best front room brings in only eight. And she’s not got a fine place, from what she says. Just working-class. I’d do it up much better. Clerks and bookkeepers and shopkeepers. I could charge more. I’d make a fortune. Haven’t I got the best feather beds money can buy? And good linen sheets and feather pillows? I know quality. People’d appreciate it in America, where they’re little better than savages. Give them a taste of good old English cooking
, too. Dashes of sage and onions and thyme and sweet marjoram. I fancy they don’t have such things there.”

  Maybelle rubbed her eyes with her moist knot of a handkerchief. Frank always listened to the old devil. She had him in a spell. Maybelle heard the rain, too, but it was a friendly and familiar voice. She shrank from the thought of America.

  “It’s settled, then,” said Mrs. Clair, who always settled things at once, so that her audience was helplessly swept away with her. “You’ll follow me. What have you in the bank, Francis?”

  He cringed. “Well, Ma, you see there was Maybelle’s bronchitis last winter, and the lad had something wrong with him, so there was cod-liver oil in wine, and I had to buy a new coat, the old one was patched—”

  Mrs. Clair gave Maybelle a baleful glance, as if these things were all her fault. “I see,” she said ominously. “You’ve got nothing.”

  “Two pound three shillings.”

  “I see. Sometimes a man can’t get ahead. I’m not blaming you, Francis. I know what you have to buck up against. If nothing keeps you back, what could you save in a year?”

  Francis smiled wryly. His face was gnomelike. “Two pound three shillings, if I’m lucky.”

  “When you sell your furniture, that will bring you in something. You’ve got some good things there; I gave ’em to you, and I know their quality. Get a good price.” She paused, struggled with herself. “I’ll send you the difference. You can pay it back so much at a time. Without interest,” she added, battling her instincts.

  Without interest, he thought. But life is never like that. The interest piles up, and then it is more than the principal. It becomes a mountain. A man can never climb it. He is buried under it.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said again.

  “Well, I’m glad it’s, settled,” said Mrs. Clair firmly. “I’ll get the tea. I’ve got a treat for you tonight. Cold sliced ham and fresh tongue, sliced thin. Brown bread and butter, and some plum preserves. A bit of raisin cake. Water-cress—the last. You always liked water-cress, Francis. Good hot tea. You can put a few more coals on the fire. But be careful. Waste not, want not, is my motto.”