But the Clairs never invited Mr. Farley to their miserable home on Vermont Street. It simply never occurred to Francis. Mr. Farley was his employer; it was the duty of employers to “keep their distance.” Employees never presumed on an employer’s humanity. Employers were a distinct and elevated race. Francis found no inconsistency in his profound conviction that Mr. Farley, being Irish, was his inferior, and, simultaneously, that Mr. Farley, being his employer, was his superior.
Maybelle, not having had the advantage of middle-class breeding, thought Mr. Farley a very nice man indeed. She was respectfully humble before him, as the source of her bread and butter, but sometimes he could make her laugh. He always listened to her when she bewailed her exile and spoke with tears of England, and though he privately thought England “a hell of a country,” he always sympathized with the poor woman.
If Maybelle was changing, Francis was changing, also, and just as inexorably. These changes were not apparent to Frank for at least two or three years. Francis, always apprehensive and anxious, with a tendency to cringe before any manifestation of the innate malevolence of fate, was beginning to know fear in its most crippling aspects. He never knew why. Years later, Frank sometimes wondered, with a determined access of compassion, if this change had not begun to take place on the day of the immigration doctor’s examination on shipboard.
But this imperceptible and implacable change in his parents was not as yet the most pressing problem in young Frank Clair’s life.
To Miss Jones, the children of the first grade were not a mass of anonymous afflictions who represented her livelihood. They were individuals, intensely set apart from each other, dissimilar souls endlessly exciting and new. Most of the children were the offspring of poor working-class parents, dull, insensitive and hopelessly inferior in intellect. For these, Miss Jones had a despairing compassion, not because they were poor and patched, but because their minds condemned them to a half-life, hardly superior to that of a beast of the field. They were eternal embryos, half-formed, expelled from the womb of life before final development.
CHAPTER 13
There were three teachers in Frank’s life who had a profound effect upon him, and whom he never forgot. Two were women, the other a man. They were entirely dissimilar in character, in appearance, and in age. Yet they had one thing in common: a certain heroic sensibility and perception.
Frank’s first teacher in America was a spinster of some fifty years, a thin little woman with a face like a raisin, and a huge, untidy black pompadour. In contrast with her diminutive size, everything about her was enormous, from her pompadour to her great boots, from her great hands to her watch, which was pinned on her shirtwaist. This gave her a rakish and picaresque air, which was increased by her sudden grin, wide, full of large white teeth, and delightfully humorous. This little cricket of a woman would rise with alacrity from her chair and race to the blackboard, her vast boots stomping the wooden floor like the boots of a grenadier, her pompadour a mighty swelling tumor over her miniature face, her immense watch flopping on her shrivelled bosom, her silver bangles clattering on her bony wrists. And, as she raced, she would give voice to a series of high, chirping notes, notes without words, which seemed the natural expression of her personality, and were as much a part of her, and to be expected, as the shrilling of the cricket she so much resembled. Her name was Emily Jones.
Frank was enchanted by her. He loved her from the moment she pulled his ears playfully, and called him her “honey.” She had a rough and sprightly manner, and would cuff the boys with heavy-handed affection, tug the girls’ ribbons into place and dismiss them with a smack on their gingham bottoms, and then look about her with an exhilarated and expectant air. She was all flash, all awkward running movements, all tenderness and understanding, and all discipline. The children laughed at her and adored her. Three boys and two girls attained varying measures of fame later in their lives, and they always spoke of Miss Jones with laughing love. Only one, and that one was Frank Clair, ever suspected that she was half starved on the four hundred and fifty dollars a year she received, out of which she supported herself, her mother, and a crippled sister. Only Frank sought her out later, to discover that she had died of malnutrition.
She would look at each new class of six-and-seven-year-olds, studying each babyish face, searching. Four or five times in the long years in which she taught she had perceived a certain flash of an eye, a certain turn of a head, a certain gesture, and heard a certain intonation, which filled her with a sudden energy and a great exultation. Here was one, not of this heavy clay mass, who was potentially a full human being, something to be sought out, cherished, guided, one to be prayed over and treated with respect and honor.
No one brought Frank to school that first day. Maybelle had merely pointed out the school to him, which was the distance of two blocks, on Vermont Street, and was numbered thirty-eight. She dressed him in his second best serge sailor suit, warned him to behave himself, tightened one of his garters, wiped his nose and tucked the handkerchief in his pocket, and told him not to linger on the way home. Then she dismissed him, and returned to her new occupation of brooding over her wretchedness and trying to remove at least part of the accumulated grime and dirt in her miserable rooms.
Frank entered the school at a quarter to nine in the morning. He was dismayed by the children playing on the sidewalks, awaiting the ringing of the bell. They were rough and riotous children, and they jostled him without thinking. He went into the dark hall of the old-fashioned brick school, timidly accosted a teacher, who took him in charge and brought him to Miss Emily Jones.
Miss Jones was busily writing the alphabet on the blackboard when Frank was pushed into her room by the other teacher. The splintered desks were empty, the gray windows admitted the cold March sunlight, and the room smelt of chalk dust, sweat and wood. Miss Jones turned rapidly from the blackboard, surveyed Frank with her tiny, restless black eyes, smiled at him hugely, and exclaimed: “Oh, a new boy! What’s your name, dear?”
She clumped over to him, playfully pulled his ears, and stared down at him searchingly. She saw his pale, slender face, his clouded blue eyes, his chestnut ringlets, and his tall, thin body. He smiled at her miserably, his wide mouth moving without real mirth. She saw his long pale hands with the smooth fingers and the strong knuckles. And then she felt once more that rare quickening and excitement in herself, that strange breathlessness, that acute recognition.
She took him by the hand and led him to her desk. She sat down, clasped her great hands tightly together, and stared at him for a long time. Oddly, Frank felt no embarrassment or shyness under that intense regard, but only a kind of urgent response. He told her his name, his address, the names of his parents, his place of birth. She listened, her head cocked, the mighty pompadour glistening in the spring sunlight. She seemed to be listening to something else besides his voice.
Miss Jones knew, from her few questions, that Frank belonged in a higher grade. The boy could read and write; he could figure indifferently. But she could not send him away. She knew she must keep him, that she must help him, that he was one of the rare ones. She assigned him a seat at the rear of the class, just as the children poured into the room.
They recognized a stranger immediately, and peeped at him all through the long morning. A few of his neighbors smiled at him tentatively, and he smiled back. But all at once their smiles unaccountably ceased, and Frank saw again that hard mask of hostility sliding over their features. He was familiar with that mask, and he experienced, for another heart-sickening moment or two, that conviction of guilt, that awareness that he was outside the pale. He felt, again, that certainty that he was repulsive, ugly beyond redemption, a monstrosity that must always be repudiated, oppressed and cast out. He braced himself for his inevitable ostracism, his exile from his fellows.
Always hypersensitive to environment, always possessed of an uncanny ability to “feel” atmosphere, and the very exhalations of human temperament, Frank spent the m
orning sensing the schoolroom, the teacher, and his companions. The antennae of his mind searched the dusty blackboards, the narrow, grimy windows, the faces of the little boys and girls around him. It was -as if he had no integument. The nerves of his body were acutely exposed, and they felt upon them the brief little winds of emotion that stirred all about him. Nothing was without personality for him. The walls were not only drab; they had a dull unfriendliness for him and possessed an inanimate soul which regarded him blankly yet with awareness. There was a long and jagged crack in the ceiling, blackened and peeling. He looked at it, and was overwhelmed with depression. There was a lithograph of a gentleman on one bleary wall. The gentleman had curious white hair, cut and shaped to resemble a pyramid, and he wore the most extraordinary garments. Frank did not know that this was a lithograph of George Washington, but he found himself absorbed in the steadfast quiet eyes, in the faint, enigmatic smile, in the lofty aloofness of the painted expression. He wondered if this were a portrait of the head schoolmaster. He was certain that this man would like him, and that he himself would respond to the strong kindness so evident in the calm face. He felt something like an urgent blood kinship between himself and the painted gentleman, an understanding.
The bleak March sunlight poured into the classroom, and Frank was again overcome with melancholy. He saw, outside the window, a projecting brick wall of the school, and the rough faces of the dark red bricks were alien to him, remote from him. His melancholy intensified. The nerves of his body ached with the impact of new awarenesses.
Miss Jones did not call upon him, nor give him pencil and paper, or a book. She let him soak in his environment, wishing him to become accustomed to all this strangeness. But she watched him, even while she read to the children, or scrawled large letters on the blackboard, and she saw his bewildered eyes, the way he studied the others about him, and his absorption in the crack on the ceiling, and in the lithograph. She also saw the glances the other children gave him, and she sighed.
Her cheerful and chirping voice rang all through the morning. She had a genius for holding the most childish attention. After an exercise with the alphabet, she added eyes, a nose and mouth to the fat A and B on the blackboard, made a squirrel’s face on the C, a witch’s leer on the E. The children laughed happily. Then Miss Jones, with a glance at the door, hastily wiped away the gay little caricatures.
She knew that Frank was condemned to unhappiness by his own peculiar character and strangeness. She knew also that children will admire and respect even the ostracized, if the latter demonstrates an unusual ability. She knew that Frank could read well. So, at eleven o’clock, she said, in her high crisp tone: “My dears, I usually read you one or two of Grimm’s Fairy Tales at this hour. But we have someone new in the class, who can read as well as I, and so I am going to ask him to read to us.”
The children stared in astonishment. Miss Jones smiled brightly and gayly, and, carrying the book, walked to Frank. When she paused by his desk, he gazed at her in fright, guessing her intention. She looked steadily into his eyes, and now her expression was grave and quiet. She laid the book on his little desk. “Francis Clair,” she said, clearly, “will you oblige me and read to the children? We have reached page 157.”
Frank was numbed with terror and confusion. But he could not look away from Miss Jones. She was telling him something with her birdlike eyes, and what she said to him gave him courage. He bruised one of his trembling knees as he stood up. He took the book in his shaking hands. Miss Jones retired to her desk. Her smile, her faith in him, struck him like a beam of light over the heads of the staring children.
Frank began to read, at first almost inaudibly, then with gathering certainty. The story was familiar to him, and one of his favorites. His young voice, clear and well-bred, filled the room. The children listened. One or two snickered at his broad English “a’s,” his careful enunciation, so different from their own gobbling and careless speech. Now Frank forgot his audience. He saw dark forests, drenched in golden sunlight; he saw the red roof of a witch’s house crouching under twisted trees; he saw the white faces of terrified children, the blue and white of their garments in the shifting gloom. He heard the songs of strange birds in the leafy roof, the whisper of small animals under flowering shrubs, the stir of wind in the high cold sky. He imparted to the story his own emotional response to these things, so that the children, despite themselves, listened breathlessly, straining towards Frank so as not to miss a word of the adventure of the lost babes. The clock ticked on the calcimined wall; the March sunlight paled yet brightened, and illuminated the brick wall outside, the window. A wagon rumbled heavily on the cobbled street below. A dog, in the distance, emitted a hollow bark. The children listened and did not stir a muscle.
The story was finished. Frank sat down, dazed. He had transported himself to the forest, and the song of the birds was still in his ears. It took him several moments to orient himself.
Miss Jones was speaking, brightly and firmly: “Children, I hope you listened carefully to Francis’ reading. I hope you will remember how English should really be spoken. Try to remember how Francis pronounced his words, clearly and distinctly, and not as if his mouth were filled with bread and butter. English is a beautiful rich language, and it deserves to be spoken well, as Francis has spoken it.”
The children stared with round eyes at Frank. Their unfriendliness was open. But he could feel their admiration in spite of this. He was a stranger, but he had learned that even the stranger can be tolerated and respected, if he be superior in some manner, though he may never be able to win affection. He must use his superiority to compel admiration, and now Frank understood that, from one’s inferiors, admiration and respect are more desirable than acceptance.
Maybelle, instructed by Mrs. Watson, her landlady, had put up a small package of sandwiches and an apple for Frank. The other children had also brought their lunches. They went into the dark basement to eat them, sitting on gritty benches in full view of the furnaces. Frank found a quiet spot, and began to eat. His isolation closed about him like the walls of a-small fortress. The other children ate, screamed, ran and played about the furnaces. Frank was content. He had come to hope that he would always be ignored. He listened to the voices of the children, and he thought that they sounded like the squealing of pigs, the baaing of young lambs, the mewing of kittens.
Then he became aware that a large and lumpish boy about eight years old was standing stolidly before him. He recognized the boy, who sat near him in the classroom. Frank glanced up, first with his usual preliminary shrinking, then with distaste. The boy had a big stupid face, vicious and dull, a cropped yellow poll, a fat body and big brutish hands. He was the largest child in the class, this Herman Kolzmann, for he had been obliged to remain in the first grade for two years. He malignantly resented this, so had appointed himself the class dictator and bully. The children hated, feared, admired and followed him, aware of his strength and his cruelty and the potential menace of his fists. He was one of the incorrigibles.
He glared down at Frank, his hands on his hips. “Bloody, bloomin’ Englishman,” he said, with derision. “Vat you doin’ in our country? Ve beat you in sefenteen-sefenty-six. Remember?”
Frank looked at him, fascinated. He felt the presence of something blindly malevolent before him, something that could crush with inhuman brutality. His acute ear detected the unfamiliar accent. He said: “You speak in a funny way.” What had his father told him only yesterday? “This is an English country, Frank. We’ve got more right here than all, these blasted foreigners living around us. Remember, you’re English, and this is your country, too.” Frank said: “You don’t speak English very well. This isn’t your country, then.”
The boy’s large and bloated face turned crimson. He doubled up his fist and thrust it under Frank’s nose. But Frank, for the first time when in contact with strangers, did not wince. His great blue eyes widened, dilated, with scorn. He felt something surge up in him, something rise and
fill him like a power. He pushed aside the meaty fist, and stood up. He was tall and thin, and his eyes were almost on a level with Herman’s. Now he was trembling, not with fear, but with a desire to strike that dull and savage face, to beat it down and away from him.
“Get out,” he said, quietly.
Herman stepped back a pace or two, his little empty eyes, hazel and lightless, blinking. Several of the other children, smelling danger, gathered about them. Herman was enraged, but his naturally cowardly temper was taken aback at Frank’s bitter scorn and fearlessness. He chewed his lip and stared at the strange little boy, and one could see his uncertain and fragmentary mind trying to orient itself.
“I could beat you all to hell,” he growled, but his voice was thoughtful, almost whining.
“Try it,” suggested Frank. For the first time in his life he doubled up his fists and felt a hot red rage in himself, and a certainty that in combat he would be the victor.
Herman felt this certainty also. He tried to grin. “Tryin’ to pick a fight?” he said. “Vat’s de matter wid you, anyway? Bloody, bloomin’ Englishman.”
The children, surprised and delighted, began to chant: “Bloody, bloomin’ Englishman!” Several of the little girls clapped their hands and jumped up and down. More children gathered.
“Beat him up, Hermy,” suggested one bloodthirsty little boy.
Herman would have liked nothing better, but animal caution kept him still. “Aw, I vouldn’t dirty my hands wid him,” he said, scornfully. He had another thought. “Vat’re you, anyway? A Mick?”
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