And now it was very tall. Its trunk was thick and strong, as full of vitality as a youth. Its branches spread far above Frank’s head; its long wide leaves murmured and were blown in a blur against the stars. In the spring, he remembered, it carried cones of sweet blossoms. It was strange that he remembered those blossoms, for he could not recall that he had seen them for the past few years since Paul Hodge had gone away.
He put his hand on the trunk of the tree. My tree. I planted it. It is part of myself. If it were not for me, this tree would not be here, full of leaves, living in the earth, straining to the sky. There would be no blossoms and no shade—but for me. Paul and I would examine it carefully in the spring to watch for the first buds. I would tell him when the blossoms were out. He would pluck a few, but they would always drift through his fingers. It is funny that I don’t remember them blooming since I was fifteen years old. I will watch for them next year.
The tree whispered to him. When he had been a boy, he had imagined that the tree talked to him and told him stories and the strangest tales. He had heard actual whispered words, soft and deep. But he could not remember the stories now, and if the tree spoke, it spoke in a language forever alien to him, forever lost to him.
“Where do you go in the winter?” he had asked the tree. How old had he been then? Eleven? Twelve?
“The same place where you go, when you sleep,” the tree had answered, rustling mysteriously. “The same place where I shall go, when I die, and where you will go, when you die.”
“Where is that?” he had asked the tree, his young hands clasped about the bending trunk.
The tree had told him. It had been so clear and so satisfactory and so wonderful. But he had forgotten the answer. He could remember the question, but not the answer. How glorious the world had been then! So full of magic, of wonder, of complete and unquestioning awareness and understanding! Now the golden light had gone, and there was only bleak stark noon around him, the dull light of “common day.”
For those few moments while he stood under the tree, he was young again, as he had once been young, and there was the faintest echo of the magic and wonder in his ears. He plucked a large cool leaf of the tree. How often he had held such leaves in his hands and had felt the dim mysterious pulsing in them, the faint leaping answer to his own pulse! Was he actually feeling it again? No. He tossed the leaf away. Kids have such damned imaginations!
Suddenly and reluctantly he thought of Paul Hodge. He would write to Paul. Somehow, he would have to explain his curious attitude. Would Paul understand?
Frank shrugged. He was conscious of tiredness and depression. He had forgotten Myrtle and the fifteen dollars. He went to the back door of the house.
He heard a deep and aching sobbing in the front room. He closed the door behind him and ran into the “parlor,” which was also his parents’ bedroom. Francis was lying on the bed, his face as white as death, the sheets drawn up to his chin, his eyes sunken and closed. Maybelle sat beside him, flanked on the other side by Mrs. Clair. Maybelle’s apron covered her face. It was she who was sobbing. But Mrs. Clair was grimly silent and gray. She saw Frank as he entered.
“Where have you been, when we need you?” she asked, sternly. “Your pa collapsed in the shop today. The doctor says it’s consumption, and that he’ll never be able to work again. A fine son you are, traipsing the street when your pa and ma need you!”
CHAPTER 35
Frank was now face to face with the leaden image which was late November, 1918. He wrote to Paul Hodge, who was, apparently, still at the Great Lakes Training Station:
“I have written you five times, but you haven’t replied once. Why? Well, I’ll still go on writing, Paul. I know my letters don’t rouse any echo, but I can’t help it. I only want you to know—”
Know what? Frank stared at the typewriter keys, on which his hands rested, and then he looked out through the factory window at the lessened activity of the yard. It was his lunch hour. What did he want Paul to know? He could not remember. He added: “—that I think of you a lot. But you don’t seem to reciprocate. You didn’t even reply to the letter in which I told you that my father had died on October twenty-first.”
Frank paused. Why should he think, just now, of the time when he could not attend the graduating exercises of the ninth grade of School Eighteen, which had been held at Lafayette High School? He knew only that he remembered he could not attend, for the reason that his parents had refused to buy him a blue serge suit, and had insisted that his old brown one, shabby and too small, was quite good enough for “Yankee nonsense.” So he had not attended the exercises, and Miss Bendy had arranged to have his diploma sent to him. His heart burned with sick rage as he remembered.
Then the rage died away, however hard he tried to hold it. I am not really sorry, he thought, and he was empty and weak with depression.
“I think I told you my father had tuberculosis. The doctor had told him, in September, that he could never work again, or, at least, not for a long time. He was seriously ill, but he might have lived. He died of fear, in the end, and of the dread that his ‘savings’ would diminish. He wouldn’t listen to the doctor. After his first hemorrhage, he insisted upon going back to his job. Then he collapsed. Two days later he died.”
Frank’s eye-sockets filled with a dark heaviness. He lit a cigarette. Suddenly, without any reason at all, he thought of his father’s violin, lying in the cellar of the house on Albany Street, covered with mould and dust. An acute pain struck him in the chest. My old weakness, he thought, bearing down savagely on the pain until it left him. It was a different pain from the old one, in some way. He resumed his tapping on the keys in the deserted office:
“You will notice that I have a different address, and a pretty swell one, too, says he! My mother is now living with my grandmother, on Porter Avenue. They talk of returning to England in a year or two. I made the break with the family, for I can’t stand my grandmother, and, of course, I won’t go with them to England. After my father died, the doctor examined me for tuberculosis. No sign, thank heaven. But Ma has taken to coughing, apprehensively, though there’s nothing wrong with her.
“Well, the war’s over, and you’ll probably be out of the Navy any day. Armistice Day was queer in Bison. I went downtown to see if there would be any celebration. Just a few kids with whistles, and a few adults wandering around, looking aimless. Didn’t the end of the war mean anything to them? It didn’t seem to. I know only that there was gloom around here, in this war plant. The war workers were very much depressed.”
Frank’s own depression and misery settled heavier upon him. The yard darkened, and a few flakes of snow drifted in the grayness. How he hated November, that leaden image with the legs and the arms melted together, and static! He went on:
“I suppose you will be returning to your father and Gordon. Couldn’t you stop in Bison on the way home, and see me? Just let me know, and I’ll be waiting. I have a nice room, at the address on the top of this letter.
“I’ve been going to night school at Hutchinson since September. My difficulty, as usual, is with mathematics. They tell me I must master it, or I’ll never get my diploma, and couldn’t go on to college. I’ve begun to think that the best way would be to take all the studies I need, and want, for my writing, then go to the University of Bison as a special student. That seems the only solution. They discovered, at Hutch, that I couldn’t even grasp long division, and though I learned enough mathematics to graduate from Eighteen, I’ve forgotten it all.
“I have a wonderful teacher in English, though, a Mr. Mason. Our first assignment was a composition, but I wrote a short poem in blank verse.”
Again Frank paused, and he heard Robert Mason’s gentle voice: “Remarkable. Excellent. But something is missing. I don’t know just what. All the essentials are there: color, vitality, originality and vigor. You have a great talent, if we could only discover what is missing.”
Frank frowned. “Missing!” Nothing was missing,
nothing at all, except, perhaps, sentimentality. He ended the letter abruptly, put it into an envelope. His noon hour was over. The other office workers returned, talking and laughing. One was a young fellow with whom Frank had become rather friendly, a tall, stooped, smiling Southerner from Kentucky. He said: “Hi. Writin’ ag’in?”
Frank sealed and stamped the envelope, dropped it into the mail basket. “Nothing important. Say, what’re we going to do now, Tim? Did you get your notice, too?”
“Yep. I’m agoin’ home, back to the hills. My three brothers say there’s oil there. Only a dollar and a half a barrel now, but oil’s flowin’ like water. You ought to git in on it, like I told you. Come on back home with me. Why, sir, you kin make yo’self a barrel of cash!”
He really likes me, thought Frank, with faint surprise. He looked up at the tawny face, so slender and good-natured, at the pale blue eyes and the shock of tan-colored hair. He felt the easy manner, the mildness, of the other young man. As for himself, he was perfectly neutral with regard to Tim Cunningham. He neither liked nor disliked him. Something had atrophied in him. His responses to others were negative, indifferent. He hardly saw them. He congratulated himself on this “normal” attitude. He had learned to look at the world dispassionately, without much feeling.
“Maybe I will,” he answered, suddenly bored with Tim’s presence. Tim eyed him curiously. A funny cuss. A big, likely feller, though, with an “American” face. Not like these damn Hunkies and Germans and Wops one saw all around in this crazy city. He wasn’t a “Yankee,” either. Born in England. Tim warmed. The old friendship and affection of the Southerner for the Englishman shone in his eyes. Why, we’re the same people, he thought. He put his hand on Frank’s shoulder, pressed it, went to his desk.
Kentucky. Frank played with his pen. What had Mr. Mason told him? “You’ve got a lot to learn, Mr. Clair. A very great deal. Years and years of learning. But if you have faith in yourself, and learn, and travel a little, you can be a writer.”
Frank had investigated the writing profession thoroughly. He had discovered that only a few could really make a living, writing. Only these few were truly professionals, receiving all the rewards. There were hundreds of others who wrote the many other books, which enjoyed so small a success, bringing to their authors sums ranging from fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred dollars annually. A man couldn’t do much on that. At the top, there were the shining prizes. But the top was a long way up. He wanted money much quicker than that. And there was no guarantee that he would reach the top eventually. Writing, in contrast to his younger efforts, had become a strain and a chore to him, a labor. Once, he had written with smooth and eager delight, the phrases rushing from his pen like liquid fire, entrancing even himself with their imagery, their power, their beauty. They had been like a pouring, a magic pot tipped to spill out the smooth, effortless gold. There had been wonder in the world then—now it was labor, a dull, mechanical labor. Something had happened, to him, he felt a psychic exhaustion running down his legs and arms, draining away his strength, a prescience of failure.
Kentucky. “You kin make yo’self a barrel of cash.”
If I could get a lot of money, he thought, I could really study, really travel. Then, when I was freed from the burden of making a living, I could get back that “missing something” Mason spoke about. It’s just the anxiety of having to make a living that holds me back. Besides, I would see something of the country.
He had saved many of his earlier poems and short stories. They were crude, he had found, and amateurish. They were dreadfully overwritten. They were redundant with adjectives. They boiled with repetition. Yes, he was learning. He knew what was wrong. He could write much better than that now. But he knew secretly that he had lost something which he had once had: power, strength, exuberance, the magical ability to create a gleaming metaphor. He shrugged. Let him be free of the necessity of earning a living, and it would come back. Suddenly he said to himself, passionately: “It’s got to come back! It must! It must!”
The vehemence of the thought startled him. It was like some voice crying from dark and smothering depths in himself. It was a voice that had been choked for years.
Tim sauntered over to him, offered him a cigarette. He winked, bent over Frank, and whispered: “Say, those girls kinda liked us, the other night. Want to try it ag’in? They’re safe, too, like I told you.”
CHAPTER 36
Frank lit another cigarette in the darkness, sat on the edge of the bed and smoked furiously. What was it Emerson had said? “Give no bounties, make equal law, secure life and property, and you need not give alms. Open the doors of opportunity to talent and virtue and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be in bad hands. In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from the idle and imbecile to the industrious, brave and persevering.”
He smiled grimly. I am industrious, he thought, I know I have bravery, and I can be persevering. Three spades with which to dig gold in a stony garden. There was something new in the world now, something ominous and suggestive of enervating influences, soft and weak. There were fools who were crying out that the stupid, the incompetent, and the craven had as much “right” to live as their betters, who possessed courage, and virtue and talent. Who gave them that right? Who were the fools who declared they had it? No man had the right to live who was not able to work and survive. The old iron adage of the Puritans came to his mind: “He who does not work shall not eat.”
Frank nodded to himself. Yes. Emerson was right. The Puritans were right. He felt their rightness. But there was something missing, and it was in himself. There was a sum left out of the equation, and he knew it, and was angry again. He felt that “something” behind Emerson’s somber words. Could it be that it was the same thing which Mr. Mason had said was “missing” in his writing? God-damn nonsense. Metaphysical.
He stood up and touched the switch on the wall, and light flooded his room. His thoughts paled away in the comforting glare, and he looked about his room with satisfaction. The last five years had brought a change to Linwood Avenue, in the first eight or ten blocks from the downtown section. Commercialism had caused the owners of many grand old houses to retreat towards the edges of the city. Those who had bought the abandoned houses had turned them into “private” rooming or boarding houses, and had demanded high rents for “superior accommodations.” Frank’s room in a house near North Street cost him ten dollars a week, with breakfast. But it was a handsome room, if small and old-fashioned. The ceilings were very high, and of molded plaster, and painted a soft old green, like the sides of a young apple. There was a faded Axminster rug on the floor, of good quality and of a reproduced Oriental pattern in dull reds, blues and greens. He looked at his furniture, and again was satisfied. They must be antiques, he thought, for his bureau was of old polished mahogany, with a rich grain, and a dimmed mirror.
He sat down in a rocker and smoked and stared before him. His gold watch, the only legacy from his father, showed that it was half-past ten. He would go out for his beer and his beef sandwich in a moment or two. In the meantime, he enjoyed his room.
Then he was uneasy. He had only another week or so of work at the Curtiss plant. Of course, he would soon secure another job, in spite of the rumors of growing unemployment now that the war had ended. He had been given notice in November, but here it was January, and he was still working. He worked well, he was intelligent and industrious. He had learned shorthand at night school, and male stenographers were in good demand. But he shrank a little from the depressing necessity of looking for another job, of fitting himself into another niche. Tim Cunningham had left in November, and had gone to “the hills.” He was working with his brothers in the mountains, prospecting for oil, and apparently with significant success. “We made two hundred each last week,” he had written Frank. “Why don’t you come and get it, too? I reckon I must like you, to keep after you this way.” His letters were marked Shortsville, Kentucky. It could not be found on t
he map, it must be a small country town.
Two hundred dollars in one week! That was almost as much as Frank had in the bank! He ground out his cigarette in a china dish. Two hundred dollars a week, he painfully calculated, was about eight hundred dollars a month. He calculated the sum for a year, two years, three. Why, he would be rich at the end of that time! But it would mean giving up night school. Hell, I can skip high school, he thought, and go on to college as a special student! Besides, I shall have seen the country.
He absently took out the heavy gold watch again and looked at its face. Quarter of eleven. He must go for his beer and sandwich at once, if he were to go at all. He stood up, went to the mirror, and straightened his tie. He saw his face. It was not the face of his boyhood.
He was a man now, almost six feet tall, with thin wide shoulders and long arms and legs. His suit fitted him well, and he had a fastidious air. He had been so untidy and gross when he had been a kid, he remembered. Now he cared for himself well. He reached out for the watch to return it to his pocket. It lay in his hand, and, curiously, it suddenly became heavy and pulsing, like a heart. He could not put it away. He stared down at it.
There Was a Time Page 29
