There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  Paul colored furiously, and snatched back his treasure. Then Frank knew that he had wounded his new friend, and was abjectly sorry. He said: “Well, I don’t know anything about these things. Bet you’ll have a fine one, one of these days. That’s good enough to practice on.”

  Paul looked at his brother, ignoring Frank. “Shall I play the Spanish Fandango?” he asked disdainfully.

  “You might as well,” replied Gordon, pulling a small apple from his pocket and beginning to chew on it. “You do that best of all, Mouse.”

  Paul tucked the violin under his chin and lifted his bow. He began to play.

  He played miserably, and with absolute correctness. Under his bow the sprightliness of the simple Spanish folk song became dead and cold and perfect as a wax flower, the bright and childish life of it beaten out under those small stiff hands, which were without passion or feeling. It was not that Paul made a single error or faltered once in his playing. He played with exactitude and precision. And because of these, he made a hideous thing of a little dancing song that was created for young feet, the feet of those who love life and are innocently happy and gay. It became a melancholy dirge, amazingly played in a quick tempo. There was no emotion or laughter in it, no fire, no ardor. It was a reproduction, in gray and dun-white, of a riotous scene of color and joy.

  Smiling faintly and amusedly, Gordon chewed on his apple. He chewed contentedly, occasionally glancing at his brother, and idly hummed an accompaniment to the selection. He had no particular opinion as to Paul’s ability, and merely supposed the boy played rather well.

  He gave Frank a curious look, and was surprised. Frank’s face was an exaggerated mask of utter incredulity and astonishment and pain. His eyes blinked as he listened, and once or twice, as Gordon watched him, he shook his head sharply, vigorously, as if to clear something away. He frowned, jerked his features, thrust his hand into the pockets of his tight trousers. Finally, as the selection labored towards its end, he moistened his lips. His expression became grave, his eyes full of adult pity. Why, he can’t play at all! he thought, and there was sadness in his heart.

  The last note shivered into silence, and Paul relaxed. He did not look at Frank; his face had become blank and impassive again. He lifted his bow and examined it critically. “I thought so,” he muttered, angrily. Then for the first time he looked at Frank, with something like smugness. And Frank looked back at him, without speaking.

  Paul was languidly rubbing his fingers over the strings. It was as if Frank no longer interested him, or, as Frank guessed, his opinion of Paul’s ability was too unimportant to affect his friend. But Frank was not offended. He had little real conceit, and he was only sad. He said, nervously: “That was awful pretty, Paul.” But he winced inwardly. It seemed to him that the very air was still quivering from the insult of Paul’s music, and that the hard notes, the acid vibrations, would remain forever suspended in space, and he could not bear it.

  He suddenly took the violin from Paul’s limp hands and grasped it feverishly. He drew the bow over the strings; he was trembling. But only a harsh and whining note rewarded him. He could not bear it. He had no power to evoke what he heard in himself. The instrument was only wood in his hands, and he was agonized with the terrible necessity to externalize his inner music. He had only words. He looked up, and his eyes were shining vividly. He would write a poem! He would force words into harmony to express, to some small degree, the unutterable.

  “That kid looks crazy,” commented Gordon, wiping his mouth. “Say, Frank, you look dippy. What’s the matter with you?”

  Edward was still lying in his stupor of exhaustion in the fetid bedroom. But he had heard his son’s playing, and his dark smile was peaceful in the gloom. He was certain that Paul had great genius. Now the pain began to ebb from him, and the voices in the other room came to him clearly, and they gave him peace.

  “Nothing. I—I’m going to w-write a poem about that song Paul played,” Frank stammered. Then he seemed to sink into revery, and a brooding shadow covered his face.

  Gordon laughed lightly. “I like your poems, you little plagiarist,” he said. Frank looked at him, as did Paul. “Plagiarism,” said Gordon, smugly. “Know what that is? You take what someone else wrote and call it your own. How could a kid like you write poems; or anything? You don’t know enough.”

  Frank stared at him, and his eyes were heavy with dreams. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “Words come to me. Sometimes I—I don’t know just what they mean. But they come. Like music. As they did to me last night, and I got a pencil and paper and went to the window and wrote one down, just by the light of the lamp outside.”

  “Well, let’s hear it,” suggested Gordon, winking at his brother. “I still think you pinched it from somewhere. I’ll have to look it up.”

  Edward, in the next room, smiled contentedly. In some odd way, the mysterious threat which he had felt in Frank Clair was gone. He listened. Now Frank was reciting his poem, and his young voice came clear and rich and exultant, yet tender and meditative, to the man on his bed:

  “I stood alone where green-limbed Neptune plowed

  Dark furrows in a lambent sea of gold.

  The black rocks, drowned and wet, and yet uncowed,

  To heaven turned foreheads rimmed with scarlet cold.

  The sky was like a silence, filled with light,

  A hope of joy before the march of night.

  “And yet, thou wast not there. The fire of eve

  In her great beauty had but power to grieve.

  “I saw the pulsing beauty of the stars,

  Like drops of dew upon the robes of night.

  The moonlight lay on earth in shadowed bars

  Of mingled darkness and of whisp’ring light.

  The world was but a cup of shadow, tipped

  To catch the silver wine that in it dripped.

  “O lovely night, that stilled the cry of care!

  It stilled me not, for lo! thou wast not there.”

  Edward raised himself on his elbow. There were painful little pulses all over his body, in his neck, his arms, his legs. He was a devotee of poetry, and understood it. He knew that this poem he had just heard was childish, crude and awkward. But he felt the grandeur of the images which it expressed, even in its crudity. He sensed the mind which could feel and evoke them, and a kind of jealous terror, overpowering and reasonless, seized him.

  “You never wrote that poem,” said Gordon, accusingly.

  No, no, he never wrote it! said Edward fervently and wildly in himself. His gripping hands clutched the bedclothes, and he felt anguish all through his body. How dared that little wretch come here with his stolen lies and so affront Paul! My boy, my boy, he murmured prayerfully.

  The early winter twilight was already thick in the-room, and now it seemed to gather itself into mists of unbearable pain. Edward pushed himself to his feet. He stood on the threshold of the other room. Then, slowly, as he looked at the boys, unaware of his presence, something like a bitter and deathly cold crept over his flesh.

  The strange boy was vehemently defending himself against the charge of plagiarism. He was shouting: “T’isn’t so! I don’t have to copy! I can write things myself! You’re a liar, Gordon Hodge! I—I’ll k-k-knock your damn head off!”

  Gordon laughed delightedly. He imitated Frank’s angry stammer.

  Edward rubbed his hands over his eyes. He knew. He knew that Frank was no plagiarist, and that what he had tried to tell himself was a lie. He dropped his hands, and looked at Paul with a dreadful yearning, as if to throw a protecting arm about him. And then he paused in amazement.

  For Paul had become alive, shakingly alive, like a glass flower miraculously blooming into color, and bending before a wind. His motionlessness had become motion, his pallor had become tinted. He was gazing at Frank, as if the other boy’s poem were still ringing in his head, and the more he gazed the brighter the life glowed on his hushed face.

  Then Edward started, as if licked
by flame. Here was the Enemy, in the shape of a young boy he had never seen before this day. Not like the ordinary enemies, familiar and contemptible, but an enemy, alien and powerful.

  Edward put his hand to his throat. He tried to speak, and his voice emerged as a croak.

  “Isn’t it late, boys?” he said. He leaned against the doorway, faint and sick. He heard an obscure scurrying, and a match flared as it was applied to the gas-jet. It came to Edward that the sudden scratch of the match, the low muttering of the wind against the windows and the doors, were obtrusively loud, significantly loud, fatefully loud. All sound, for a few moments, had in it something malefic.

  Paul was not looking at his father. He was looking at Frank. And his face was full of shy laughter, moved and poignant and eager, and something more which suggested worship and love.

  Frank was awkwardly tugging his cap from his pocket and smiling shamefacedly. “Guess it’s time for me to go,” he said, uneasily aware of the frail shadow of the man in the doorway, and aware, too, of a suggestion of enmity in him. Paul sighed. He put his violin in its case. Always acutely aware of anything his younger son did, Edward felt that in Paul’s gestures was a renunciation, not without bitterness and pain and rebellion. Edward closed his eyes in a spasm of intolerable suffering.”

  Then he said: “It’s almost five o’clock. What did you boys buy for supper?”

  There was something in his voice that dismissed Frank contemptuously, and Frank was overcome with mortification. Again, he was inferior, cast out; and his cheeks turned hot. Edward’s manner, that vague smile, the thin, unseeing light in his eyes, struck him down.

  He went towards the door. Paul went with him. They stood, silently staring at each other a moment, then Paul smiled. It was a smile without fear, utterly natural and young. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Frank muttered, defiantly, going out into the winter twilight.

  “Funny little fellow,” murmured Edward amusedly, as Paul came back to him. “Where on earth did you pick him up, son?” Always before, this attack had been attended with success on the few occasions when Paul had struck up a feeble friendship with another child, and Edward waited.

  But Paul flung up his delicate and narrow head and looked squarely at his father. He said, with gentleness, almost as if he understood, and warned: “He’s in my class at school. I told you, Dad.”

  CHAPTER 23

  How ineffably lovely and palpitating with color and light were the days and the weeks and the months! Now the earth was an orb of gold afloat in rainbows, and it spun in rings of music. Everything was lost in harmony and radiance. Everything had become resolved and exalted, full of tender and majestic meaning. Everything widened and contracted in a kind of shouting incandescence. Angels stood in the morning, and God walked in the stars. Luminous figures moved in tinted dreams, and the glory that lay upon the world deepened and brightened with every hour.

  “I don’t know what’s come over the lad since he began to traipse around with that Paul Hodge,” complained Maybelle to her husband. “He never was normal, but now he’s worse. It won’t do any good to warn him to keep away. He’s gone, right after school, and doesn’t come back until tea.”

  “He needs a good belting,” said Francis. “He needs to go to work. How old is he? Fourteen? Old enough for him to go to work. He doesn’t do anything in school, anyway. And we need the money.”

  “I was earning my own wages when I was his age,” agreed Maybelle. “I just got a note from his teacher. She says he never gets his homework, or anything, and that he’s impossible. Never obeys. Sneaks away from school at lunchtime, and sometimes never comes back. Threatens me with the truant officer, or something. But she says he has a good mind,” added Maybelle with wan pride. “He could do wonders. He’s interested in ancient history, she says. But he’ll have to stay in the seventh grade again, because he can’t even do his sums right, and there’s something called civics which she says he doesn’t know a thing about. And doesn’t try to learn.” She hesitated. “The teacher seems a decent sort. Says Frank’s sure to get the gold medal for an essay in June. It’s a competition, she says. And she wonders why he doesn’t do well in the other things.”

  “He needs to go to work,” repeated Francis. “Gold medals!” He snickered. “Wonder if it is a five-dollar gold piece? That would be more like. What a lot of rot! A job—that’s what he needs and is going to get. Take the damned nonsense out of him.”

  But Maybelle was uneasy. “The teacher says he could get a scholarship, if he only tried. Go to college.”

  Francis was frightened at this potential threat to the possibility of an additional wage in the family.

  “College! It’s work for him, curse it! When can he go to work? In England he’d be working in the mills at his age.” He went on: “I don’t know where we got him. He was wished on us. No sense, no intelligence. Just a big gawping fool, stumbling around over his big feet, and writing his damn poems. Didn’t I tell you to stop him, take away his paper and pencils when he comes home from school?”

  “I did,” Maybelle defended herself angrily. “Then I found him writing on toilet paper. What can you do? There’s no stopping him.”

  She was pricked by an obscure pain and misery.

  Francis clenched his teeth on his tongue. “Just let me catch the ruddy beggar writing anywhere!” he shouted. “I’ll hammer the nonsense out of him, and damned quick! It’s work for him. These cursed Yankees! They won’t let him leave school until he’s sixteen, but he can work this summer, and perhaps we can keep him going if nothing’s said.”

  “Well, that’s Yankeeland for you,” whined Maybelle peevishly. “Keeping the kids in school to all years. Better off if they worked. Keep them off the streets, and give them something to do.”

  There were six thousand dollars in the bank now. Enough to go home on, thought Maybelle, with the sick wrenching in her heart. But Francis said it was not enough. “Ten thousand dollars, and we’ll go home, Maybelle. That’s my solemn word.”

  Maybelle looked at her husband. She heard him cough dully, and then with a heavy and choking paroxysm. His cough was getting worse daily. Honey and lemon didn’t help at all, nor did the cough mixtures he concocted for himself in the pharmacy. He needed a rest. But he would not take a single day off, though Mr. Farley had promised to pay him for a week’s vacation a year. Then Francis slyly, but with revolting pathos, had suggested that Mr. Farley pay him overtime for the vacation to which he was entitled but never took. Mr. Farley had stared, then shrugged, and had scowled. He paid for the vacation, and the one for next year, and the next. Francis exultantly carried the money to the bank. It made him wonder, though, why Mr. Farley was less friendly now, why he rarely spoke to his employee with his old geniality. Sometimes this frightened Francis, made him work harder in an attempt to appease this mysterious hostility. ‘Don’t know what’s come over the beggar,” he would say to Maybelle. “I do my best.”

  “You can’t trust the Irish,” Maybelle would reply, as if that settled everything.

  Francis’ fringe of dark hair had turned gray. There were thick gray threads in his mustache, which was not so jaunty now. As for Maybelle, only auburn streaks in her masses of hair revealed its once riotous color, for now it had faded and whitened, and her face was wrinkled, flabby and extremely sallow. But she had grown fatter and more shapeless, and an expression of chronic petulance made her mouth droop and twist.

  She had forced Francis to take her and Frank to Erie Beach a few times in the summers. They would take the little chugging ferryboat across the river to Canada, where the sight of the Union Jack blowing in the warm lake breezes would fill her eyes with scalding tears. Then they would wait for the tiny train which would lurch them, over tracks surrounded by woods and sand, to the beach.

  It was a pleasant beach, there on Lake Erie, with the blue waters shimmering in sunshine, and the bathers on the sand, and the concessions blaring away merrily. Sometimes she could prevail on Francis to give young Frank tw
enty-five cents, so that the boy could ride the merry-go-round or the “figure-eight.” She and Francis would sit on a grassy knoll near the beach, and comment acidly and vindictively on the strollers on the boardwalk below them. It was the day of huge, awning-striped skirts for women, and Maybelle would laugh endlessly at the wearers of this outlandish style. Once or twice they would even dine in the pavilion, where they discussed and disparaged the fifty-cent dinner, and compared it invidiously with the ones “at home.”

  Here, as in Bison, Frank would wander away from them, but would always appear just in time to go home. Where he went they never knew, and cared less.

  Sometimes, but again not often, they would go to Crystal Beach. The boat that conveyed them there, larger and more impressive than the ferryboats, made Maybelle think of the journey across the Atlantic, and when the shores of the lake disappeared for a short time she would imagine that they were homeward bound and that soon she would see the purple line of England rising like a cloud out of the ocean.

  Francis managed to force Maybelle to make up for these sinful and wicked excursions, which robbed the bank of extra quarters and dimes and dollars. On the journeys home, his face would become thick and dour with resentment and rancor, no matter how much he apparently enjoyed the day.

  Edward Hodge, with incredulous distress, read the note from Miss Gorman about his son, Paul, while Paul stood over him impassively.

  “Why, Paul!” said Edward. “I don’t understand. You playing truant! It’s impossible. There’s some mistake.”

  Paul said in his colorless voice: “I guess there’s no mistake. I did, Dad. I’m sorry.” For a moment bewilderment flashed in his eyes. “I don’t know why—”

  “I know,” said Edward, with pallid grimness. “It’s that Clair boy. He makes you do the most astonishing things, Paul; you know he does. Why? Why, for Heaven’s sake? What is the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered Paul. But again that sickening expression of imperviousness, of warning and shutting-out, appeared on his face, and seeing it, Edward was despairingly impotent.