Miss Woods’ face changed. She said coldly: “Of course, you should have more than one cup, if you want it. What’s youth for, anyway?”
Frank was bewildered, as always when Miss Woods spoke to him in that tone and gave him such a disdainful look. How had he offended her? He had not even succeeded in appeasing the harpy, Mrs. Crimmons.
The torn morning light outside the windows darkened. Now the gale, which had briefly subsided, assaulted the house with a hoarse roar like thunder. Everyone looked uneasily at the windows, whose curtains and draperies stirred and moved. It was impossible to see beyond the clouded glass. A wall of shivering whiteness stood there. The old house groaned; the electric candles overhead flickered, and from somewhere, even into that warm snug room, came a congealing breath.
“A terrible blizzard,” commented Mr. Roberts, coming out of his contemplation. “Four feet of snow in less than twenty-four hours, and more to come, it seems.”
A maid brought in a platter of fresh bacon, sizzling and spluttering hearteningly. Everyone helped himself to a fresh supply. The brown coffee, steaming, hissed into cups, as if each man and woman wished to prove that he and she were still “young.” Miss Woods smiled, and filled a third cup for herself.
Mrs. Crimmons announced that she had received a special delivery letter from her daughter that morning. She simpered: “Dear Sally just begs me to come home for a few days. Of course, she and her husband, darling Billie, are taking such good care of our dear little house while we are away. Watching the pipes, and everything, and keeping up the furnace. But my dear children miss me and Mr. Crimmons so! They are married, and have children of their own, but they can’t get along without their Mommy and Daddy! Sally’s little Billie has had bronchitis. Such an intelligent little fellow! Not in school yet, but he can read and write as well as a ten-year-old. It’s amazing. Isn’t it amazing, Daddy?” she demanded of her husband, who had not participated in any of the conversation. As Mr. Crimmons had been devoting himself avariciously to the food, to the exclusion of everything else, he started, glanced at his wife, who favored him with a thin stare of her pale blue eyes, and stammered: “Eh? Yes, yes, of course. You’re right, my dear.”
Mrs. Crimmons accepted a fourth hot roll, and buttered it broodingly. Mr. Crimmons watched her with anxiety. Miss Woods’ huge fat upper lip lifted almost imperceptibly. With amazing good fortune, Mr. Crimmons spoke relevantly: “Do you want to go home for a few days, Mother?”
She smiled with deep tenderness, placated. “I really don’t know, dear. In this blizzard, and all. You know how trains are. And sometimes I think it is best for the children to get along without us, sometimes. They’re so dependent. Even their husbands are dependent upon Mr. Crimmons’ advice,” she informed the rest of the table with plump pride. “You wouldn’t believe it. Daddy must settle this and must settle that. He must decide upon a new automobile—they always get a new one every three years. The boys are doing so well, you know. Billie in the advertising business, and Mark in the wholesale grocery. Such fine, successful boys. But Daddy must decide everything for them. And the girls insist that I pick out every new piece of furniture, though they have wonderful taste of their own. When Sally wanted to have her sofa reupholstered—she paid four hundred dollars for it, the extravagant little girl!—I just put my foot down, and said: ‘Now, honey, the new linen just wouldn’t go with your drapes.’ And there wasn’t any argument about it at all. She just agreed, just as she always did, even when she was in braids and middy blouse, at school.”
Frank was the only one who listened, for the other faces had grown politely blank. He saw a vision of three comfortable middle-class homes, with canaries at the windows between ruffled white curtains, with cars in garages set in well-kept back yards, with big sunny bedrooms furnished with quiet elaborateness, with kitchens equipped with enormous white iceboxes filled with crowding chickens and hams, with lawns bright green in the summer, with awnings shading polished windows, with gushing warmth issuing from steam radiators in the winter. He saw peace, security and contentment, solid middle-class safety and pleasant, dignified lives. He saw happy amiable traffic between the three smug houses, and heard the fat laughter of well-fed children. And this was exactly what Mrs. Crimmons intended to convey to her audience. Detroit was a long way off. It was not possible that anyone at this table would go so far as to investigate, and to discover that Sally and Susan and their husbands and children lived in two-family flats of five rooms each on a very shabby side-street, that the sums of money tossed off so nonchalantly by Mrs. Crimmons were lies, that Billie and Mark were respectively, a clerk in an advertising house and a shipping clerk in a wholesale grocery house, and that the Crimmonses themselves lived in a little rear cottage near their children, a cottage hardly more desirable than the tiny house on Albany Street, and not quite so clean.
She continued, this morning, to flourish, to smirk, to gloat, to smile with tender humor, as she rehearsed her family saga. And Frank listened avidly and with respect. Mrs. Crimmons felt this, and despised him even more. Her head arched higher from the depths of her fat warm bosom. It was then that she caught Irving Schultz’ deep black eyes staring at her from behind his thick glasses. And what she saw chilled her, infuriated her.
It was seldom that Irving looked directly at anyone, and certainly rarely with that intense concentration. He said, with his eyes, to Mrs. Crimmons: “You are a fat old liar. You are not even a pathetic liar, for you are a malignant and stupid woman, with no charity in you. You are a poseuse, vulgar and cheap and pretentious.”
It was strange that Mrs. Crimmons was so impressed and so infuriated by Irving’s eyes. She had always ignored him. He never pretended to be other than he was, and he was not ashamed of what he had been. To Mrs. Crimmons, he was nothing at all, and she had often wondered why Miss Woods had permitted such a nonentity, such an ugly, unprepossessing young man, to so much as enter her house. She might despise Frank, for she had unerringly detected another pretender like herself, but at least she spoke to him at times.
She actually trembled. She felt shocked, right down to her fat, impervious heart. Suddenly she raised her voice with hard strenuousness, like a blow to beat down those steadfast black eyes:
“Daddy, I think perhaps I will go home for a few days, to our own darling house! And the children. Did I tell you that Sally wrote me that Mrs. Gregory St. John-Simmons was giving such a wonderful affair for a few select friends, and that she insisted that all of us attend?” She smirked, though a pulse beat heavily in her thick throat. She explained to everyone condescendingly: “I’m sure you’ve all heard of Mrs. Gregory St. John-Simmons. Connected with the Cadillac people? A wonderful house in the suburbs. Superb. And so very exclusive! Marion has been devoted to Sally since they were children, and nothing is complete unless Sally goes to every affair Marion gives.”
Then Irving smiled strangely, faintly. He returned to his bacon.
Frank, with his acute perceptiveness, realized that Mrs. Crimmons was angered. He saw the vibration of her brown silk sleeve, the shaking of her fat little hand with its cruel nails. He felt, in some odd way, that her hostility was directed at Irving. A quick look assured him that it was, for she was glaring through her pince-nez at the top of his untidy mop of Negroid curls. Of course, a woman like Mrs. Crimmons would resent the presence of such as Irving Schultz. It was to be expected.
He looked at Irving himself and detested him. He did not know from what in himself had sprung this detestation. He knew only that now something burned in him, strong and agitated. For the first time in months, he spoke to the other young man, with a smile:
“How are the studies going, Irving?”
Very slowly, Irving lifted his head and gazed at Frank. Miss Woods laid down her fork. She did not move. She only listened.
Irving smiled, a queer, crooked smile, almost sad. “Very well, thank you. Frank,” he added, meditatively.
Frank threw Mrs. Crimmons a protective and humorous glance. He said:
“Mental diseases. For heaven’s sake, why mental diseases? Why not anything else? Something tangible.”
Irving said softly: “There’s nothing more tangible than a mind. It’s the only real, tangible thing—Frank. My professor said yesterday that the external world is only the projection of the minds of mankind. Maybe he’s metaphysical, or something, but I don’t know. Do you remember, in school, that old question: If a tree fell in a forest where there was not a single ear, would there be any sound?”
Frank tried to speak. But something held him in a kind of enthrallment, as if he had heard a wonderful familiar voice which he had forgotten, a dear, a lovely, a noble voice, calling to him from across vast and ashen wastes. And something clutched him in a very paralysis of despairing grief, in a very desolation of loss, as he heard that voice. He could not utter a single sound. But the others stared at Irving in surprise. They could not recall that he had ever spoken as such length as this, and his voice was strange to them, a voice that was rough yet gentle, hoarse yet soft and compelling.
Irving, having spoken, looked at Frank and waited. And knew.
Behind his glasses, his eyes glowed. Come out, come out! they cried to him. Come out into the light where you belong. Where you lived, once. Come out!
Mrs. Crimmons tittered, arched her head. “Well, I only went to one of the best finishing-schools, of course, but I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Schultz. Maybe I’m not so bright, so maybe you’d explain it.” She tried to catch Miss Woods’ eyes for a humorous and malicious exchange. But Miss Woods, gaze bent on the shining round silver of the coffeepot, was oddly absorbed in her contemplation. “Maybe I didn’t go to the right school, after all, Mr. Schultz,” continued Mrs. Crimmons in a voice corroded with amused hatred, “though my dear papa paid nearly two thousand a year for my education. Maybe I ought to have gone to the schools you did, Mr. Schultz, and had your background.”
But Irving apparently did not hear. Come out, come out! said his eyes, imploringly. Come out, Frank, with me.
He said aloud, in his slow, strong but uncertain voice: “Would there be any sound if there wasn’t an ear, and a mind behind the ear, to hear the noise of the tree falling—Frank? And if you go on with that, would there be any world of sound or sight, if there wasn’t a—a comprehending—ear and eye to hear and see it? That’s what my professor meant when he said that the human mind was the only real and tangible thing, and that only when it projected itself did the world become a reality.”
Mrs. Crimmons tittered again. But no one heard her. There was a brightening on Mr. Roberts’ old faded face, an eagerness. Miss Shaw and Miss Stengel listened, their mouths partly open. Mr. Crimmons had returned to his food. Miss Woods smoothed the hot silver of the coffeepot with a meditative forefinger. Frank sat motionless in his enthrallment, in his deep pain.
Irving said softly: “That’s why I am studying mental diseases. If the minds of men are distorted and don’t see clearly and straightly, the world they project will be distorted, and it will be a nightmare of wrong—angles—and delusions. A nightmare. That’s what it is now, you see. Just a nightmare. It’s been getting that way a long time.” He paused. “You look through a warped piece of glass, and the world you see is all out of perspective. We’re all looking through warped glass. What we see is the projection of our sick minds. Remember what that old German philosopher called man? ‘The sick animal.’”
“The sick animal!” Yes, yes, it was true! Something was moving, stirring, passionately in Frank. A sick world waiting for the healer, not of its misshapen body, but of the mind within it which had given that body its distortion. A world waiting for the healers, for the physician of the soul, for the great writer, the great artist, the great prophet, who would remove the warped glass from the ailing eye and allow that eye to behold a world of beauty and compassion, of joy and excitement, of love and peace and God!
Once, he, Frank Clair, had known this, had known it with intense pity and love and clear sweet anguish. He saw himself in the old Church of the Nativity, and the candlelight on his fingers as he looked at them. They had seemed to shine, as if some holy oil had been poured on them in consecration. In memory, he felt the beating of his heart, exultant, humble, terrified yet joyous.
The memory of that heart-beating became a dark pounding in his mind, an upheaval, a clamorous movement. Something was surging in him, a giant pain, a sorrow, a piercing sweetness.
He heard a shrill rasping sound and started. Mrs. Crimmons had thrown herself with plump restraint against the back of her chair, and was laughing viciously. “Oh dear me, dear me!” she exclaimed. “Such intellectual talk! I never heard the like, on a Sunday morning, just before church! And from you, too, Mr. Schultz! Maybe it’s your mind that’s sick, my dear boy. I’ve often thought it. Just kind of—of—And is that the sort of thing they teach boys in school now? That the whole world’s sick, this nice, comfy world where everybody’s happy now that the war’s over?”
Frank heard her. He heard her dull and stupid hatred, raucous and venomous. He heard her smugness; he saw her twinkling fatness. He saw her cruelty and mediocrity, and knew her and her kind for what they were. The Enemy. So many of the Enemy, the liars and the poseurs, the sadistic and the mean—a whole evil, seething, maggoty world of them, like a foul and squirming hill blocking the bright road! His fists clenched. He turned to her abruptly, and his eyes were a still blue fire of rage and disgust.
“Shut up, you fool!” he cried. “You silly, wobbling fool! You babbling, lying idiot!”
He jumped up so suddenly, and with such vehemence, that his chair fell down behind him with a crash. Miss Stengel squealed. No one else moved or spoke. But Mrs. Crimmons, her mouth fallen open, was glaring at him incredulously. He saw that, and was exultant. He felt as if he had received a clean and shining baptism. He wanted to strike that well-fed, quivering face, that ugly personification of all the huge mediocrities in the world.
“You God-damned stupid old woman!” he exclaimed. “And that goes for all the rest of the world like you! You—you dirty killers!”
He went out of the room blindly, crashed up the stairs to his own room, slammed the door behind him. He heard his own breathing, harsh and strident, as if he had been running. The room swam in dark mists. He sat down abruptly on his bed, and then involuntarily he gripped his knees with his hands, in Francis’ old gesture of uncontrollable emotion.
CHAPTER 38
Miss Woods, breathing stertorously, climbed up the stairs to the third floor. Her fat old thighs ached with the effort, and her great jowls were soon bedewed. She could feel her enormous flesh trying to burst through the armored stays she wore, and the thumping of her heart. None of this caused her any apprehension. She knew she was old, and she had no desire for youth. There was too much in her childhood and young womanhood which had been intolerably ugly and revolting, and she had known happiness only in her old age. She thought youth the most dreadful period of life, not pathetic, not amusing, except to obtuse and sentimental adults, not bright and gay, as the novelists believed, not filled with stars and shining marble towers and a light on silver seas.
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come—from God, who is our home.” Miss Woods paused on the second landing to wipe her jowls, to adjust a lock of her white hair, to pull down her corsets. The storm-locked old house creaked and snapped in the late afternoon gloom of this Sunday. She could hear the hissing of the snow against the spectral windows, the onslaught of the wind against the walls. There was no other sound. The roomers were either asleep or reading. She had seen yellow light under doors.
She thought absently: March is always the worst month of the year in this climate. She opened her large fat mouth in order to steady her heart. She disliked pain, either in herself, or in others. It was a humiliation, a reminder that no matter how the mind might soar, or philosophize, or meditate, or dwell upon the possibility of God, the body could always drag it back, like a flying hawk on a string, to huddle on the offa
l heap which was flesh. There was the indignity, that the mounting soul, fixed upon the sun, must be tumbled from its ascension by a hive, a gallstone, an itchy ear, or, as her generation delicately put it, by “a call of nature.” If there was a soul and it survived the decay of the mortifying flesh, how happy it must be when it was released and could flee not only the dark miseries of the world, but the secret ignominy of the body. The world was all wrong for mankind, because mankind could think. The world was all wrong for the young, because the young could remember a time before the soul had put on flesh.
Miss Woods, hearing rumblings in herself, patted her large, protuberant belly. “I’ll be rid of you soon,” she informed it, with satisfaction. “I don’t know if I’ll know anything about it, but at least I shan’t be aware of you, you swollen humiliation.”
On Sunday afternoons, though no one else in her house knew it, it was her custom to climb the stairs to visit Irving Schultz. There they would sit together, in the small room under the roof, with only the snow to see in the winter and the trees in summer.
She went up the last steep flight and knocked at the door at the top. She opened the door, and puffing, entered the little room.
Furnace heat did not penetrate up into this eyrie, but there was an adequate substitute in the way of a gas-heater, glowing redly and sturdily in a brick recess. It glowed and flickered cheerily in the dark-gray gloom under the pitched ceiling, which was further alleviated by a large lamp set on a wide cherry table, now serving as a desk for Irving Schultz. A few weeks after Irving’s appearance in Miss Woods’ house, she had placed one of her best Persian rugs on the polished floor, had hung rich yellow and green linen at the four tiny windows, had added an old comfortable rocker to the assembly consisting of a narrow tester bed, small, round pie-crust table at the bedside, a good lamp, and an extra old carved chair with a horsehair seat. Irving himself had built that large bookcase on the wall opposite the bed, and had expertly stained it mahogany and rubbed it down with wax. As a result, the room, this wild March afternoon, had a cosiness and dignity which made it more attractive than any of the other bedrooms.
There Was a Time Page 33
