Frank smiled, and the smile wasn’t pleasant. But he still listened. Mr. Farley cleared his throat and continued earnestly:
“Well, it could of ruined my life, just hating them and thinking up ways to get even. And then the old priest of our church had a talk with me. He showed me how Uncle Pat had a game knee that pained him all the time; he explained that Uncle Pat had been a fine broth of an ambitious lad in the old country, and had come here full of hopes. But he had only his muscles and his two hands, and like Rockefeller says, a man’s worth only a dollar a day from the neck down. Uncle Pat didn’t have no education, and no time to get it, because he brought a bride with him, and the kids come one after another. Uncle Pat worked for a brewery feller, and drove his wagons. One dollar a day, and the kids never stoppin’ comin’. And there was Aunt Bridget; prettiest girl in Cork, they said. Could have done better than Uncle Pat, but it was love, or something. They come here, going to conquer the whole world. One dollar a day, then, for Uncle Pat, and Aunt Bridget takin’ in washin’, between kids. Maybe she’d been pretty. She was an old hag when I first saw her here, and she not thirty, with most of her teeth gone, and no money for a plate.
“Both of ’em were sick, hopeless and tired, pulled down by babies, and nothin’ to hope for. Maybe there wasn’t no excuse for them to treat me like that, you might say. But they couldn’t help it, the old priest told me. It wasn’t that they was naturally mean and bad. They wasn’t no worse than other human critters, I’m thinking. But they needed my money, and so they took it. There was no way out for ’em, out of what they’d gotten into. They just, hit out at anythin’ they saw, and I was a big husky lad, and could take it. They hit out, like a dog, when he gets run over, starts bitin’ every hand that comes near him, even the hand of his master.”
Frank stood up. Mr. Farley, puffing, bent and helped him untangle the blankets from his legs. Frank stood in the sunlight near the edge of the porch, and the bright light seemed to go through his white and transparent flesh. He did not look at Mr. Farley now.
Mr. Farley put his hand on the bony shoulder and smiled feebly up into Frank’s face. “You’ll remember that, won’t you, Frankie? I’d like to think you’d remember it. Look, Frankie,” he continued desperately, “think of it like this. The minute you feel sorry for someone you think’s hurt you, then you’re saved. And before you feel sorry, you got to understand first. It just takes a little doing, and then you understand, and then you’re sorry, and then you’re saved. And you’re free, too.”
He waited. Frank did not move. He only stared at the warm quiet street.
Mr. Farley, sweating more profusely than ever, went on: “There’s all kinds of people in the world. You don’t have to love ’em. You see bad and good, mean and nice, kind and cruel, stupid and bright. You see hundreds of different faces. It’s more than human nature to expect any feller to go around, lovin’ every son of a bitch in the world; there’s some you just got to avoid, and steer clear of. But there’s one thing you can do for everybody. You can feel sorry for them. See? And why? Just because we was born, that’s why. Life ain’t easy for anybody, good or bad. It’s just bein’ born we ought to be sorry for.”
He walked to the door with Frank and stammered as he opened it, staring almost passionately at the young man: “Charity. That’s it. That’s what Our Lord says was more important than faith or hope. Just charity. See?”
“Yes,” said Frank politely. “I see. Thank you.”
They went into the cool dark cave which was the dank hall of the house. The “guests” were filing timidly and pallidly down the oaken staircase. They nodded to Mr. Farley and Frank, then slunk or slithered towards the back dining room. Mr. Farley watched them go.
“God help you,” he murmured. “May God help you.”
CHAPTER 44
Much of Frank’s lassitude and apathy lifted as the train approached Cincinnati, though the gritty day coach this late May day became increasingly hot and fetid with the sweat of the passengers. He had never been far from home before. Now, as he passed through towns and villages, and saw a portion of America for the first time, a normal human curiosity and interest awoke in him, he forgot his physical weakness, and his dark and heavy despair subsided in considerable measure.
With Bison behind him, he began to wonder about Kentucky, and the romantic notions of the North with regard to the South recurred to him. Tim Cunningham had written him of the huge and comfortable tent in which he lived. Frank saw gracious blue-grass meadows surrounded by great and lofty mountains, majestic white-pillared homes scattered about in bowers of blooming trees and brilliant gardens, stately and distinguished families gathered on purple-shadowed piazzas in the cool of the day, and beautiful Southern towns filled with easy and happy folk. A little excitement was aroused in him. He found that he could eat the dry sandwiches and could drink the strong hot coffee, sold on the train, with some return of youthful appetite. He went back into the steaming smoker for a cigarette, just before the train pulled into Cincinnati.
Had he taken this journey some months earlier, his reactions to the passengers in the day coach would have been milder and more tolerant. But now he had nothing but hatred and sick revulsion for them. He feasted on his hatred. The dirty children who squalled and swarmed and ate oranges and bananas, and filled the coaches with acrid smells, and dirty and slatternly women, the shirt-sleeved and work-stained men, to him were all symbols of what he must escape at any cost. He went to the smoker frequently, where he had to be afflicted by the presence of male passengers only, and where he could avoid the sight and sound of the filthy children and animal-faced women of the working class. When, at certain stations, the Pullman passengers had alighted on the platform for a brief leg-stretching, Frank had stared at them through his dusty window and had thought: I am one of you, though I am here in this coach. And some day you will know me and recognize me, and receive me in your cool and pleasant houses, and be proud of my presence.
When he thought these things, he was stimulated and became so restless that he could hardly endure the confining walls of the coach. So he would get up and go into the smoker, until he was too excited to remain there, and would return to his own coach. He had slept on the train all night, upright on the uncomfortable green plush seat which reeked of dust and grit and smoke, but, to his surprise, he was not exhausted. His heart was beating faster; his weakness was disappearing, and he coughed hardly at all.
Though the windows were open, it was not possible to see distinctly in the smoker. Smoke poured in from the engine, accompanied by stinging soot, and smoke poured out from the pipes and cigarettes of the passengers. Every man was in his shirt-sleeves; almost everyone had taken off his stiff high collar and tie, and pale throats glistened with sweat. Newspapers were scattered about. There were many demobilized soldiers, playing dice and poker, and drinking strictly prohibition gin and whiskey with open gusto. Civilians watched the games in progress, cheering or making rude derisive noises. The coach was filthy and pervaded with various stenches, but it was a rough male atmosphere.
He sat down beside a quiet passenger who was reading a book. Frank did not look at the man. He lit a cigarette and stared beyond his seat-mate at the smoky suburbs of Cincinnati. Then his eye fell on the book: Folklore and Culture of Rural America. Surprised, he glanced up at the reader and discovered an old Evening Sessions classmate, Jim Watson, a mulatto.
Jim Watson, a tall, silent, young Negro, was a mill-hand. He rarely spoke, his smile was whitely brilliant, and he had gentle brown eyes and a grave, courteous manner full of dignity and self-respect. Some few of the students had been contemptuous of Jim Watson. He had freely admitted that he had not gone beyond the second grade in grammar school, never having attended any high school whatsoever, but he had admitted all this as if it were only a casual and insignificant matter. No one knew exactly why he was attending the Evening Sessions. It would always be impossible for him to obtain a degree, no matter how distinguished his record, and distinguish
ed it was. He was taking six subjects, including French and German and Music Appreciation, a prodigious feat, but he had not entered the college through the narrow gate of any high school. Therefore, though he was always at the head of his class, and though his papers were miracles of neatness, mental clarity, logic and intelligence, a degree would always be denied him. His poetry had aroused Mr. Mason’s genuine and passionate enthusiasm, for it was superbly simple and almost perfect, and written in the unaffected language of America. Some of it, he had confessed to Mr. Mason, had been written expressly for the purpose of setting it to music. Jim intended to do this, eventually, another thing which much amused certain of his fellow students.
Frank, whose reactions to people had long ago been blunted, had been entirely indifferent to Jim Watson. He was only a dark-skinned nonentity in a room full of nonentities. Frank had experienced impatience and jealousy when Mr. Mason had read some of Jim’s poetry and compositions aloud to the class. Frank thought them banal and without significance. However, reared as he had been in a British atmosphere and in an unrelentingly British home, he had not acquired much of the racial and religious prejudice which was so rampant in America. Even his father, Francis, who had the Englishman’s contempt for the Irish (similar to the Southerner’s contempt for the Negro), had rarely uttered a word of prejudice in his house, and Maybelle had never been known to express anything but a diffused antagonism to “Yankeeland,” and that solely because America was not England. So Frank had listened to expressions of racial and religious hatred in his schools, in the offices in which he had worked, and among his few acquaintances, without responding to them with anything but boredom and indifference. It was not that he was immune to reasonless passions, but it seemed silly to him, as an American of English stock, to condemn a man because of his race or color. He had discovered, too, that the more intelligent and gently bred a man, the less prejudice he harbored against men of other races and creeds, and he had come to the conclusion, not entirely fallacious, that such prejudice was part of the general depravity of the ignorant and mentally inferior. Those of his office mates who had come from respectable middle-class families, and could boast at least a high-school education, merely smiled at raucous ejaculations of hatred, but those who had risen from a laboring background were viciously insistent upon their superiority to Negroes, Catholics, Jews, Poles, Italians, and all “foreigners” in general. Therefore, to have succumbed to the stupid and unlettered prejudice so ominously prevalent in America would have marked Frank, in his own mind, as a member of a class he despised with overwhelming passion.
So it was that Frank’s indifference and even dislike for Jim Watson had not stemmed from any racial aversion, but rather from his increasing indifference to all humanity and from his jealousy. His first impulse was to get up and leave the seat. But just as he made the first motion, Jim glanced at him and smiled with a radiant flash of his white teeth.
“Why, hello, Frank!” he exclaimed, surprised. “What’re you doing here, going down South?”
Sullenly, Frank subsided on his seat. “I’m going to Kentucky,” he answered, curtly. “Where are you going?”
“Farther South. Tennessee. I came from there, you know, when I was fifteen years old.” Jim’s soft voice was rich with inflections, and had a sonorous quality which Frank had unwillingly liked.
“Going to live there now?” asked Frank indifferently, already bored.
“No.” The word was low and vibrant, and, vaguely aroused, Frank looked at Jim with more interest. “No, Frank. Never again. I’m just going back to get—material.”
“Material? For what?” Now Frank’s curiosity became stronger, though more derisive.
Jim hesitated. He looked down at the book on his lap. Then, as if he had persuaded himself that it was humiliating to have hesitated at all, he said simply: “I want to write songs, the words and music both. I can do it. I intend to stay down South for a few years, and refresh my memory. I want to listen to the songs of the Negro cotton-pickers and farm hands, and to adapt them. Their songs are wonderful!” The gentle brown eyes glowed eagerly as they stared at Frank, became radiant with dreams. “They’re—melancholy, and—and—haunting. They’re an expression of the black American’s—soul. They’re part of America, and all Americans ought to know them. You see,” and he spoke more slowly, as if to find the perfect words with which to embody his thoughts—“you see, Frank, there’s a quality in the black American’s songs, a mixture of despair, lightheartedness, gaiety, misery and fatalism, which can’t be found in the songs of any other racial group. And yet—and yet—they sort of make—articulate—the feelings of every man. Universal, as Mr. Mason says.”
Frank said nothing. Then, after Jim had waited for a few moments, Frank spoke: “I don’t know very much about Negro songs. I suppose I’ll hear them down in Kentucky. I’ll remember what you said.”
Jim replied gently: “Kentucky. Whereabout in Kentucky?”
“In Lawrence and Johnson Counties, I think.”
Jim shook his head. “You won’t find many Negroes in the mountains. And there aren’t many of them in the mountain villages and towns. Where you’re going, is almost like the North, in some ways.”
Frank was disappointed and annoyed. “I don’t know.”
He began to think of Jim Watson’s presumption. The mill-hand setting himself up as a song-writer! It was as presumptuous as his own past dreams, his own folly. Remembering those dreams and the folly, Frank was resentful and contemptuous. He said: “Jim, I hate to depress you, but I think you’re on the wrong track. Nobody wants songs like yours. You’re wasting your time. I know. Just as I wasted my time in the Evening Sessions.”
Jim glanced at him quickly and piercingly: “You think that? Why, that’s terrible! Mr. Mason said you were a potential genius, Frank. You don’t believe it?”
“No, I don’t.” Frank’s voice was flat and bitter. “Mr. Mason was a pedantic fool. He thought every scribbler in his class was a Dickens or a Bronte or a Tolstoi. Something ought to be done to men like Mason. They give tyros and mediocre idiots wrong ambitions, and keep them forever from achieving small successes. I’m glad I came down to earth, myself.”
“You mean,” asked Jim, in a low voice, “that you’re not going to write any more? That you’ve given up?”
The phrase made Frank furious. “Oh, don’t be a fool! I didn’t ‘give up’ anything but silliness and a pack of foolish dreams. I didn’t have anything else, when you come down to it, so I didn’t ‘give up’ anything at all!”
Jim was silent. He turned his head and gazed through the dusty window for a long time. The demobilized soldiers were shouting at each other above the clamor of the engine. Smoke belched into the coach. The heat and sunlight became more intense. Frank was conscious of nausea as the coach swayed and jolted. He leaned back and closed his eyes, swallowing the salt liquid that welled into his mouth. He was frightened and fought his fright. Again, he was exhausted and sick, overwhelmed with gray misery and hopelessness. Apparently he had not completely recovered from his illness, after all. He felt weakness creeping like water all over his body, cold and penetrating water. He shivered a little, in spite of the heat. Restlessness and torpor simultaneously overcame him. His head throbbed. Now, behind his closed lids, there was a prickling and a burning, and something ached and twisted in his chest, like the memory of a wretched grief. What did it matter where he went, whether he did or did not go? What did anything matter? The world retreated from him like a livid tide, and the shingle was strewn with stones. Should he get off at the next stop? Should he go on? What did it matter? If only I could die, he thought. But he knew that he lacked the will to die, just as he lacked the will to live. If only there were some way to forget—what? He could not remember what it was that he wanted forgotten. He knew only that somewhere in him was a great and deathly sickness, but whether it was of the body or the mind he did not know.
He felt his hot palms sweating against the gritty green plush; he f
elt the painful rolling of his head. Every jolt of the coach wrenched every bone in his body, and went beyond his body. The heat beat against his flesh, yet he was cold. The noise in the coach became a distant vague clamor. He was no longer conscious of the young man beside him. Now images formed and floated against the red and burning background of his closed eyelids, sick wanton images, grotesque faces, visions of pain without surcease, dark lakes surrounded by blazing scarlet mountains, flashes of black lightning, crimson abysses palpitating with anguish.
Something stirred and pushed against his knee. He opened swimming eyes to a roar of heat and noise. Jim was getting up, carrying his heavy book under his arm. “Got to get back to the Jim Crow coaches, Frank,” he said.
Frank sat up, blinking. “Jim Crow coaches?” He had heard the phrase, and now he remembered, and he frowned. He let Jim pass him, saw the young Negro pulling his bags from the rack. And now he felt shame and mortification and anger.
“We’re in Kentucky, you see,” said Jim, in a pleasant and casual voice.
He picked up his bags. Several other Negroes were rising from their seats. Frank glanced at them furtively. Now he was alive, aching in every cell with humiliation.
“Good-bye, Frank,” said Jim, standing in the aisle. He hesitated. There was no resentment in his handsome dark face. He bent over Frank, and spoke softly: “Frank, you mustn’t give up. I—I’ve been watching you, for about an hour. You can’t give up, Frank. You—you won’t live, if you do.” He paused. “I’m terribly sorry. You said you didn’t give up anything. But you did, see? And you know it. Good-bye.”
There Was a Time Page 39
