There Was a Time

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  There was the dried up little bachelor, Mr. Roberts, head bookkeeper at the Bethlehem Steel, and reputed to be quite “well-off.” He was in his late sixties, a quiet, courteous old gentleman, with extremely old-fashioned ways, very polite, dimly friendly, and a great reader of Walter Pater, Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He and Miss Woods often engaged in edifying and spirited discussions of these worthies.

  There was Miss Ethelinda Shaw, principal of a high school, a tall, lanky and very stylish woman of forty, with very advanced opinions and a very dogmatic manner. She was a suffragette, and she and Miss Woods, who was, astonishingly, also a suffragette, were almost intimate. Miss Shaw reminded Frank of a heron, and he disliked her very much, especially when she would turn her shrewd and scrutinizing schoolteacher eyes upon him. Then he felt like a truant, a misfit, and though he wore good clothing, Miss Shaw made him feel that he was attired in the scanty and patched garments of his boyhood. Miss Shaw had only to turn the blank blaze of her spectacles upon him for him to wince. He was certain that she saw through him, which she did. He did not know that she was sorry for him.

  Her assistant principal, a pale, buff-colored, shapeless little woman of forty-five, a Miss Ida Stengel, was also a roomer at Miss Woods’. In fact, she and Miss Shaw shared a large double-room, behind the star-boarder’s room. Miss Stengel parroted all Miss Shaw’s vigorous opinions, so that everyone considered her very tiresome with her unchanging, eager smile, and her fixed gaze at her superior. She even tried to affect Miss Shaw’s smart clothing, with disastrous results, and Miss Shaw had only to say contemptuously: “Why, Ida!” to have the fat little woman shrink like a snail receiving a bath of vinegar.

  Then there were the Crimmonses, husband and wife.

  Frank might despise Irving, and ignore him, overlook Mr. Roberts as a tedious pedantic old fool, smile ingratiatingly at the formidable Miss Shaw and her companion and feel awkward in their presence. But he really feared none of them, with the exception of Mr. and Mrs. Crimmons. He was safe from all the others. But he was not safe from Mrs. Amy Crimmons.

  For Mrs. Crimmons was one of the hated “knowing ones.” She had “found out” about Frank Clair.

  There was always that one, that two, or that three, wherever Frank went, who had only to look at him to “find him out.” To find him out, in spite of that bitterly achieved look of normality, that specious, that lying, that false-face of a look! They could find him out, despite the carefully arranged features which—almost always—expressed the blankness and emptiness of the prevailing fashion, the vacant nothingness, the amiability or reticence or blandness or politeness. The commonness of the undistinguished, the faceless face of the multitudes of men who filled the earth. Yes, they would find him out, these sharp-eyed knowing ones, penetrate beneath his disguise, his eager pretense that he was one of them, was like them in speech, in dress, in averageness. They seemed to know, almost at once, that it was only a disguise, only something assumed in order that he might be accepted by them, admired by them in a brotherly spirit. And they knew, all the time, in some animal-like and instinctual way, that he was afraid of them and all that they were, and that he believed, shamefully, that they were superior to him, and had power to hurt him.

  They were delighted when he truckled to them, when he sought to appease them, when he assumed their accents, their mannerisms. They had conquered the visible “difference” of him. And they rejected him always.

  They were so sharp, these “normal” knowing ones. They were so clever, these parasites on the vines of life, these smug beetles in the heart of the living rose, these blighting lichens on the leaf, these strangling mosses on the trees. They were not harmless and ox-like, amiable and good-natured, as were their more stupid brothers and sisters. They were a potential danger to the world, for they had all the words of virtue, all the gestures of rectitude, the smooth plump cheeks of the self-indulged and the self-loving, the tight little smiles of the haters of men, the careful manners of the cruel, the tact and the superior phrases of the devourers, the serenity of the malevolent.

  Even when Frank tried to discuss baseball games, football games, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford and Francis X. Bushman of the screen, or to express the conventional opinion about President Wilson, the knowing ones listened with vicious, half-smiling intentness, and then exchanged glances. They knew he lied, that he dissembled, and that his remarks, clothed as they were in the adjective-less, sterile speech of the familiar and accepted, were an assumed language through which he was attempting to reach and please them, and when he suffered shame at his conversation—cleansing, all-saving shame—he thought it was merely detestation of himself, that he had failed to reach and to please.

  He never knew why Miss Woods watched him with curious sternness while he spoke to Mr. and Mrs. Crimmons, or why she answered him so curtly when he turned to her. He thought that it was because Miss Woods had found him out, too. But why did she then turn to Irving Schultz, who never tried to appease or to be accepted or to chatter in accepted manner, and smile at him so tenderly, and as if with relief?

  Frank found these knowing ones to be female, more often than male. More often than not, they were women of low birth and inferior breeding, of lower middle-class heritage. However it is, men of a better class often married these well-bathed, these talcum-perfumed, these daintily apparelled vulgarians, these creatures who had a profound tenderness for themselves.

  They even had countenances in common, these harpies, or, at the least, identical facial expressions. Their skins were fresh; their hair shining, their chins childlike. Most of them had round faces, comfortable and lightly powdered, with little plump pursy mouths—the mouths of the eaters of great quantities of food. They usually had fat little snub noses, tiny, non-descript eyes glinting cunningly behind rimless glasses with gold nose-pieces. Their clothing was dowdy, if excellent; they liked frou-frou of lace foaming over fat bosoms, though sometimes they affected a severity of dress. Their hands were dimpled, with sharp-nailed little fingers, exquisitely clean and rosily polished by vigorous buffers. They were complacent and well-satisfied, ate daintily, enormously, and with much delicate care.

  To Frank, they represented his first social step out of the pit of the poverty-stricken, the ignorant, thp despicable and the hopeless, the stupid, with their soiled workmen’s hands. They were his betters, from whom he craved acceptance. So it was that he catered to Mrs. Bennett Crimmons and to her husband, and wistfully prayed to become intimate with them.

  Mr. Bennett Crimmons was a semi-prosperous supplier of office equipment to retail outlets. As dear Amy did not care for hotels, and he had known old Miss Woods from his earlier permanent residence in Bison, he and his wife usually stopped with her for the two or three months a year when he was in the city. These two were the only guests who ate all three meals with the elderly spinster. She, apparently, accepted them without mental reservations. They occupied the large front bedroom, nicely furnished, and as Mrs. Crimmons always brought with her a few pieces of good bric-a-brac, some heavily embroidered plump cushions, and some photographs of her two uncomely daughters and the latter’s flat-faced children, not to mention a painted Japanese box holding a constant supply of bon-bons or little cakes, the room literally became theirs for the length of their stay. Mrs. Crimmons dominated her short stout husband, with his fringe of blond hair, his glasses like her own, his almost identical physical characteristics, his same atmosphere of frequent baths and talcum powder and passionate attention to dress and to food. He called her “Mother.” She called him “Daddy.”

  But there was something about Mr. Crimmons, tenuous and uncertain though it was, that set him apart from the upholstered monster who was his proper and meticulous wife. He saw Frank as a well-dressed and quiet young man with a prepossessing face and good hands, well-spoken and polite. But then, he was a rather stupid man, and did not understand, immediately, that Frank wore a false-face, and that he was Utterly impossible and suspect.

  Frank no lon
ger entered a room with the intent penetrating stare of his childhood, for, though he did not yet know it, he had lost the capacity for wonder and the intense interest in all things which had once made of the world a place of excitement and magic. He had lost all that; he had retained only his instinctive shrinking. So, when he entered the dining room this wild Sunday morning, he smiled tentatively and politely, and did not look with directness at anyone. But he had not entirely lost his acute sensitivity of perception, so that the glances turned upon him seemed to scrape some raw surface of his spirit. Without appearing to do so, he saw the dim vague smile of Mr. Roberts, to whom everyone was only a thin shadow, the swift, schoolteacherish blaze of Miss Shaw’s glasses, the mild empty stare of Miss Stengel, the bent, bemused head of Irving Schultz, Miss Woods’ bright cool nod, and Mr. Crimmons’ affable smirk. He saw Mrs. Crimmons’ elegant bridling, the stately inclination of her head, the polite lifting of the corners of her fat persimmon of a mouth. He saw Mrs. Crimmons more acutely than he saw anyone else. He sat at her left hand, and he took his place with a slight and awkward stumbling.

  “Terrible day, isn’t it?” he asked, through the old familiar stiffness of his throat. Everyone agreed. Mrs. Crimmons, daintily and sadistically dissecting her prunes, said nothing. Out of the corner of his eye, Frank could see with what cruel relish (as if the prunes could feel) she delicately tore out the hard bowels of the fruit and pushed them aside. When she pushed the dark flabby flesh into her mouth, he felt a momentary sickness and disgust. More than hearing it, he could sense the soft smacking of her lips, the rich enjoyment of her palate. He looked at the prunes in his own dish, and was revolted by them. But he ate them carefully. He could smell Mrs. Crimmons’ talcum, her skin perfumed with Cashmere Bouquet soap. Something moved in him, which he could not recognize as honest hatred. He thought it resentment because Mrs. Crimmons patronizingly ignored him, as was her custom except when he addressed himself directly to her.

  Mr. Roberts had been arguing sedately with Miss Woods about Darwin and Huxley. He had been claiming gently that Mr. Huxley’s defense of Darwin had been in the nature of irony and satire and not truly sincere. Miss Woods had been defending Huxley from this craven calumny. They spoke as if both these eminent scholars and gentlemen were alive, as if the ancient argument were still current in the newspapers of the world.

  Frank listened, as he awaited his cereal. Only recently, Mr. Mason, his teacher, had introduced him to both Darwin and Huxley, and it was with the freshness of discovery that he listened to the amiable discussion going on exclusively between Miss Woods and Mr. Roberts. He said, as Miss Woods paused to pour coffee: “I think you are right, Miss Woods. Huxley was sincere in his defense of Darwin. I’ve never heard that he was sarcastic.” He paused. Miss Woods gave him a smile, as if she approved, not so much his words, but something else in himself. “Scientists,” added Frank, “are usually without humor or even satire. They defend or they attack without lightness of any kind.”

  “Yes,” said Miss Woods. She gave him his coffee with a curious glint in her eyes, as if she had caught a new glimpse of him. Frank, delighted at her kindness, took the coffee with some emotion. He did not see that Irving Schultz had lifted his dreaming head and was gazing at him intently.

  Mrs. Crimmons laughed with dainty amusement. Miss Woods favored her with an inquiring glance. “Oh, please excuse me, Pollie,” said Mrs. Crimmons, with some malicious meaning in her affected voice. “I’m not laughing at you, truly. But it does seem so—so—”

  “Irrelevant,” suggested Miss Woods, who was very subtle, and who now assumed a bland expression.

  Mrs. Crimmons coughed in an aristocratic way. “Yes. Ir—elvunt,” she agreed, without the slightest understanding of the word. “I mean, it don’t seem a part of what’s going on in the world today.”

  Frank’s lean flat cheeks began to burn. But he was delighted at the mispronunciation of the borrowed word as it had come awkwardly from Mrs. Crimmons’ refined lips. Parvenu! But he immediately crushed down the epithet and was angry with himself. He turned to Mrs. Crimmons attentively and with the utmost deference.

  “I think you are right, in a way, Mrs. Crimmons,” he said. “It isn’t pertinent to the modern world. All that is dead and gone.”

  Mrs. Crimmons smirked, without looking at him. There was a kind of evil satisfaction in her at his capitulation, another mean triumph. But Miss Woods, with some tenuous sternness in her voice, said: “Nothing is without pertinence or without relevance. The past and the future and the present are all inextricable parts of a living whole.”

  Mrs. Crimmons understood not a single word of this, but she was clever enough to understand that the reproof had not been administered to her, but to that horrible young upstart, Frank Clair. Why, she did not know. She thought only that dear Pollie was putting the creature in his place, as he deserved, and this gave her further cause for complacency.

  “Frankly,” said Miss Shaw, in her strident and direct voice, “I’m not interested any longer in either Darwin or Huxley. What I want to know, without emotionalism or anything else, is when do women get the vote? Never before, in the history of the world, has it been so necessary that women be enfranchised. Men have made such a frightful botch of the world. Wars, religious, international and internecine. Massacres. Political anarchy. Governmental nefariousness, chicanery, treachery, and bungling. Look at our political attitude towards Russia.”

  They looked at him politely, and with confusion. It was evident that not even Miss Woods had caught the drift, and as for Mr. Roberts, he had retired silently to his contemplation of Darwin and Huxley as being more comprehensible and a great deal more worthy of the scholarly mind.

  Miss Shaw shot a snapping and challenging look about the table. Miss Stengel murmured: “Look at our political attitude towards Russia.” Miss Shaw glanced at her with irritation. “Don’t be a parrot, Ida,” she advised. “Use your own mind. That’s the trouble with women. They allow others to do the thinking for them.”

  She challenged the company. “Has anyone any suggestion? Is there no one interested in the tremendous possibilities of women’s participation in the world scene? Is there not sufficient imagination here to grasp the significance of emancipated womanhood—”

  “Rampant,” said Miss Woods, who could not resist a joke even in the face of her private convictions.

  Mrs. Crimmons tittered. Miss Shaw flushed, and the glasses on her heron’s nose almost exploded in the electric light overhead.

  “I’m sorry, Ethelinda,” said Miss Woods. “Well, I quite agree with you, to a certain extent. Women should vote, if only because they are mature human beings. But I doubt very much that ‘participation in the world scene’ by women would result in a new and rejuvenated, or even much more virtuous, world. Women, like men, are still afflicted by human nature, which our pastor calls Original Sin. When women vote, we’ll have only an enlarged Republican or Democratic Party. The counting of noses will be that much more complicated and laborious. However, I want women to vote, and I’ll fight for that right. It’s the principle of the thing. I, myself, am mature, and, I think, as intelligent as most men, and have a mind of my own. I dislike being classed with children, criminals and idiots.”

  Miss Shaw, with restrained but passionate vehemence, brought her clenched fist down on the table, so that the near-by silver leapt. “Oh, Pollie! Such a short-sighted attitude! Surely you do not believe that men are as intimately involved in world affairs as are women? Men like war, I tell you. They like murder and rapine. It’s in their very natures. But women have a stake in the world: their children, their homes, their peaceful lives. They hate war and murder. They instinctively hate crime and dirtiness and filthy politics—”

  Miss Woods shook her large white head and smiled cynically. “My dear,” she said, “women, in the majority, may hate war. I concede that. But they are just as susceptible to propaganda as men, and, in a measure, even more so, for they are emotional rather than reasonable, and—th
ough I hate to confess it—they are more cruel haters. And as for women hating crime and dirtiness—” Again she shook her head, humorously. “My father used to say that for every fallen woman there is a fallen man. Unless history lies, many women have surpassed men in crime and viciousness. Virtue isn’t the exclusive possession of women. I’ve known many virtuous men whose integrity could not be attacked successfully. And, I confess, I have known many more virtuous men than I have known virtuous women.”

  “Oh, Pollie! How can you say that!”

  Miss Woods’ smiling face became grave. “It is the truth, Ethelinda. I’ve known bad men, but few vicious ones. And, a most extraordinary thing: the most vicious women I have ever known have been chaste virgins or matrons. But perhaps when we speak of ‘viciousness’ we are not speaking of the same thing. There is a viciousness of the soul which is far worse than the viciousness of the body, and in that viciousness women far excel their brothers.”

  Miss Shaw, a valorous but innocent soul, mulled over that with confusion. She was still undaunted. Her glasses blinked rapidly. Miss Woods watched her with a faint hint of amused compassion. She leaned across Irving Schultz to pat Miss Shaw’s hand. “Never mind, dear. We agree on essentials, don’t we?”

  Miss Shaw said, lifting her heron’s head valiantly: “Sometimes you do talk incomprehensibly, Pollie. I really don’t know what you mean, sometimes.”

  “Good,” said Miss Woods. “Keep your nice ingenuous heart, Ethelinda. It’s so refreshing in a very naughty world.”

  She turned to Mrs. Crimmons. “More coffee, dear?”

  “No, indeed, thank you,” said Mrs. Crimmons archly, with a pointed glance at Frank’s second cup. “I am so careful of my health, you know. A priceless possession.”

  Miss Woods smiled. “Excellent. We have to watch our health as we grow older, don’t we? We haven’t the resilience of youth. Ah, me.”

  Mrs. Crimmons looked at her sharply. Her fat smooth cheeks colored. Miss Woods’ expression was all friendly blandness. Seeing nothing inimical in that big, bland old face, Mrs. Crimmons favored Frank with a sidelong and malicious glance, full of resentment. He felt the poisonous touch of her eyes, and was miserable. He said placatingly: “I know I shouldn’t have more than one cup. But the coffee is so good.”