There Was a Time Read online

  Mrs. Clair’s parlor furniture was very “elegant.” It was all ponderous swelling mahogany, covered with black horsehair or red velveteen, sofas like big-headed recumbent monsters, rockers that creaked and rumbled, stiff chairs devilishly contrived so as not to conform to the human contour. A huge round table stood in the center of the room, covered with a dusty spread of crimson velveteen, balled and draped. It held a brass-and-china lamp, which smelled of paraffin, and its round shade was painted with viciously scarlet roses and poisonous green leaves. The lamp was never lit. The parlor basked in the pride of the hanging gas chandelier, which, when the Welsbach mantles were lighted, flickered and glared with stark ferocity. Sometimes, when a mantel was changed, Frank was allowed to take the discarded article to the kitchen, there to stand over the sink and crumble it finely into a china dish. The ashes were used to polish silver. He loved the feel of the delicate tracery dissolving into nothingness between his fingers.

  But he did not love the parlor. It was a horror to him. It had a dry smell of lavender, which he associated with his grandmother, and an overpowering stench of coal gas and damp cold. The carpet, he observed, gave off a peculiar woolly and dusty odor when he sat upon it. Sometimes the parlor was pervaded with the effluvium of boiling cabbage and mutton, of barley and onions, and, on the one Christmas he was there, with sage and the fat heavy smell of roasting goose. The parlor was airless; it held the ghosts of many meals within its sweating walls.

  He remembered nothing of the rest of the house, and of the kitchen he could recall nothing but the black iron sink, where he crumpled Welsbach mantles. But from his mother he learned that Mrs. Clair housed nine impeccable “ladies and gentlemen” of great respectability: anaemic milliners, dressmakers, clerks, bookkeepers and an artist or two, apprentices to lithographers. He never saw any of them; they lurked in their dark and cheerless cubbyholes. Mrs. Clair did not dine with them. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” she would say, with great unction and majesty. Frank could often hear them muttering and coughing in subdued voices in the dining room beyond the folded doors. Most of them suffered from “Lancashire catarrh,” and he would hear their choked sneezes, apologetic and meek. Later, slow dragging footsteps would creep up the back stairway; a door or two would open and shut with a long echoing boom. Then there would be only silence, settling heavily over the house to the accompaniment of the dripping rain. What these poor creatures did in the dim and voiceless misery of their rooms he never knew. It did not concern him in childhood. But in manhood he was often seized with a wild sense of desperation and sadness, as he remembered this, and a kind of hating fury.

  Memories of Leeds were all confused in his mind, flowing together like gray oily water, sluggishly moving and melting into one another. But he distinctly recalled one day, for on that day he experienced once more the ecstasy and exaltation of his babyhood.

  Remembering, he could feel again the scratch of the horsehair on his bare legs beneath the tight little serge trousers into which he had lately graduated. He was sitting in a monster rocker in the parlor, but he dared not rock. He must sit “like a mouse, and behave himself.” His hands were spread on the curved mahogany arms of the chair; the surface beneath them sweated and dimmed from the moisture and heat of his little palms. He vaguely rubbed those palms back and forth, feeling the polished chill of the wood, and constantly seeking for another cool spot when he had heated the current one.

  He could see his black ribbed stockings, which did not quite meet his trousers when he sat down, and his black buttoned boots, which had been vigorously polished that morning. The buttons winked at him in the bleak firelight. He moved his feet, so he could catch its light on the buttons, then extinguish it when he dropped his feet. His mind was all suffused, empty, vegetative, as it usually was. It was like something waiting, filled with nothingness, not even emotion or longing, but often huge formless shadows would drift through it, foglike, without outline or feature.

  He seemed immune to stimuli, he remembered years later. He could not remember any peevishness on his part, any sharp desire, any response to outside goads or stresses. Nothing provoked him, angered him, delighted him. He was, in his memory, a very obedient little boy, dull and silent, docile and hardly existing, though doubtless, considering his grandmother’s aversion to him, he must at times have been very annoying, if for nothing else but his complete blankness and lack of response to the impact of unfolding life. Once his grandmother had called him “a dolt.” He had gazed at her, his mouth open, his eyes fogged with heavy, sleeping dreams. “The lad’s not right in his head,” she would say, sharply, to which his mother would reply, in her whining but respectful voice: “The lad is good. He never mithers me.” “You’ll be putting him away if he doesn’t improve,” said his grandmother, grimly. He thought nothing.

  This pungent exchange, quite familiar to him, occurred on this day also. He rocked slightly; the buttons winked at him, dropped into darkness. One coal in the grate cracked; a little tongue of flame licked upwards. Frank watched it, enchanted. It was like an eager red flower, opening, leaping, falling. The chandelier had not yet been lit. The parlor was filled with ponderous cold gloom, enlivened only by the twinkle of the fender and the andirons. He liked to watch them; they were alive, and curious thin images flashed over them.

  Up to this time, he had never been really conscious of his parents, or of his grandmother, or of anyone else, as having pertinence or existence in his private universe, which was so immense and shadowy and voiceless. But all at once he was conscious of the others in the room, and he looked up alertly. Now his blue eyes became poignant, brilliant.

  For the first time in his life, the world rushed in on him, loudly, unbearably, filled with clamor and awareness, too vivid, too intense, and he felt a wild swirling in himself, a terror, a fright, a sudden impulse to cover his ears with his hands. His small pale face, triangular and wizened, whitened. His slack mouth dropped open. It was as if his damp nostrils had been pinched together, for his breath stopped. He could feel the scratching of his starched, frilled blouse about his neck and wrists; he could feel the harsh wool of his shirt, his serge trousers, his stockings, lacerating his sensitive flesh. He could feel his body, and never before had he been conscious of it. He could feel the movement of his heart, leaping affrightedly in his meagre chest, and the length of his long thin legs, and the hair on his head. The horsehair that rasped his flesh made his skin cringe. The chill of the room, its bleakness, its smells, the sight of the fog at the windows, the drip of the rain, the presence of the three adults, penetrated like agony to his very bones. The protoplasm of his body, sleeping sluggishly for four years, was suddenly drenched with soul, and became conscious, and could not endure the consciousness.

  He really saw his parents for the first time. There was his father, a little withered man of some thirty-five years, sitting opposite the grandmother. He had a completely bald head, polished, gnome-like, too large for the small frame that supported it. The flat and angular face was decorated with an immense pair of waxed black mustaches, like symmetrical stiff wings on the facade of a skull. There was such a meek, wary, blinking and apologetic aura about poor Francis Clair, that one knew he possessed no will-power, no impulse to revolt, no passionate emotion in his soul, despite the fierce mustaches. One saw at once that this little thin man was afraid, nebulously but enormously afraid of everything, that never would he assert himself, that never had he known more than the most furtive gleam of grandeur or exaltation. He had little bright blue eyes, shifty, timorous, placating, though often they were sly and cautious and frightened, as well.

  He wore black broadcloth, which was so “genteel” and “respectable.” His waistcoat, his best, was of black sateen, with a vague pattern of leaves which shivered over the tiniest of paunches. The sharp flaring corners of his stiff white collar appeared to choke him, as did the bulky black silk of his cravat, which was stuck through with an immense artificial pearl pin, gleaming in the firelight like a glaucous eye. H
e had a scrawny neck, and the keen edge of his collar had left a chronic red line upon it, angrily suggestive of the scars of a hangman’s rope. His hands trembled continually; his right hand had a habit of clenching his right knee, all the fingers spread and tense, like a convulsive claw. Then he would move that hand to his jutting little knob of a chin, there to finger an astonishingly deep cleft or to rub his very insignificant and pointed nose. It was evident that he feared his mother, that her every gesture and word were, to him, fraught with apprehensive anxiety, that he wriggled before her like a worm on a pin, helplessly cajoling her to be kind to him with every fearful skulking of his eyes.

  At his right hand, away from the fire, sat his wife, Maybelle. (Such a vulgar name! Mrs. Clair was wont to say, with a snort.) She was five years Francis’ senior, and was never allowed by her mother-in-law to forget it. She had been a seamstress before her marriage, and even now, five years later, her fingers were rough, like a grater, and their plumpness had a calloused feel. She was a small, very buxom woman, with untidy auburn hair, huge masses of it forever tumbling around her small round cheeks, which were as hard, as red, and as firm as apples. Her breast impinged on her short neck, for it was full and swelling. Her skin was the easily flushing skin of the red-haired woman, and the least excitement sent warm moist waves of color over her throat and face. Her features, small, plump, pursy, seemed stuck on her broad countenance haphazardly, like lumps of pink dough, and the peevish pouting of her lips, by turns chronically frightened and anxiously belligerent, betrayed a most commonplace and servile mind. Her brown eyes were wide, blank, staring, full of suspicious wariness, and like her husband, she blinked rapidly when the least confused, her reddish lashes standing out in a hard fringe from her eyelids. Despite her plumpness and shortness, all her movements were uncoordinated and rapid and blundering. Sometimes, when on the most insignificant mission about the house, she would wave her short fat arms distractedly, and her fingers bumbled at button-holes if she were pressed for time.

  She had made her light-fawn shirtwaist herself, but had made a dolorous error in the huge frou-frou of lace puffing from the high neck to her belt, for she lacked any semblance of taste. “Really, May,” Mrs. Clair would say, disdaining the “Maybelle,” “I cannot understand, really, how you ever made a living at sewing, with your complete ignorance of style!” The light dull color of the fabric was liberally spotted with remnants of the last meal, evidences which Maybelle repeatedly tried to obliterate by rubbing futilely at them with a messy handkerchief. Her skirt, of heavy navy-blue serge, was awkwardly cut and badly fitted, and kept slipping away from the belt. Her buttoned boots, wide, squat and swelling with bunions, were toed-in nervously, as she looked fearfully at her mother-in-law and tried to smile appeasingly.

  Frank stared at his parents, stunned, not by any real critical apprehension, but by his conscious awareness of their existence, and his awareness of his own. He stared for a long time, for in the room there had fallen a prolonged and uneasy silence. Then he heard his grandmother’s harsh voice, and he started violently and looked at her.

  No one knew why Mrs. Clair was known as “Jamie,” a distinctly masculine name, but “Jamie” it was, and the devil with those who cavilled. She sat bolt upright in her stiff chair, for there was no nonsense about her. She was the reasonably prosperous landlady of a most respectable lodging house, had a “nice bit of money tucked away in the bank,” and was proud of it. She was also proud of the fact that she had supported herself and her son since he had been six years old, “and never a penny from a soul, and never beholden to anybody.” This was no mean accomplishment to boast about on this tenth day of November in the year of Our Lord 1904. Everything in her house, she would say, was paid for, from the carpets on the floor to the curtains at the windows, and every pot and dish and spoon in the kitchen. “A creditor is a bad friend, and I want no kind,” she was fondly, and loudly, accustomed to say. These were no empty words. She considered it a kind of special virtue that she had no close acquaintances. “I walk like a queen among the neighbors,” she would declare, “and there’s none can say a word against me, and precious few to me. Never a friend, never an enemy, is my motto. Pay your debts and hold your head high, and put your shilling in the collection box of a Sunday, and you can face God and man with a clear conscience.” She was not one to speak loosely; her lodgers never spoke much of anything to her except a meek “good morning, Mrs. Clair,” and as meek a “good evening.” Only one or two dared venture an opinion of the weather in her presence. She kept their rooms expertly cleaned, and demanded her rent of a Saturday, nor did she expect them to regard her as a human being. It was a matter of business. If one of them sickened, a tray might be dispatched to his room by the slattern, but not many of them. Two days’ sickness and they were “out of the house,” God knows where. That was no concern of hers.

  There she sat, conscious of her character and her courage, with her indomitable faith in industry and money in the bank, and no debts. She was very tall and lean, and until this day Frank had never been aware of her face. Now he saw it, rigorous, full of rectitude and firmness, all gray bone and drawn hard flesh, all piercing hazel eyes, jutting nose, grim wide mouth in a nest of wrinkles, and a chin like a spade. She wore black, both because she was a widow and it was “wearing.” Her shirtwaist was of some stiff black silk, which gleamed, rattled with her movements, and seemed spun of cast iron, the collar highly boned, and innocent of even the smallest edging of lace. About her neck was hung a thin golden chain, from which a locket, containing a lock of her husband’s hair, was suspended. Her skirt, black also, was so rigid as to give the illusion of wood, and it covered her feet. Not for her the disgraceful display of ankle or buttoned boot. In fact, one could not imagine that she had ever been young, or that the unpliant gray pompadour, fortified with “rats,” had ever been any other color. It was not possible to believe that she uncoiled it at night and let it down upon her unbending neck, or that she wore a nightdress. Her frightened lodgers sometimes were positive that she never slept, but sat always in that chair in that precise position, waiting for Saturday night. A bunch of keys jingled at her belt.

  A desiccated scent flowed from her when she moved, compounded of soap, old lavender, chloride of lime, and righteousness. This scent struck on young Frank’s nostrils, and he winced. But he did not look away from his grandmother. He was fascinated by his consciousness of her. He was not afraid.

  “Put a few coals on the fire, Francis,” she said peremptorily to her son. “But not too many. A pennyworth’s only. It costs money.”

  She became aware of Frank’s concentrated regard. She turned her head quickly, rigidly, in his direction. The boy was “touched.” There was no doubt of it. Such vacant big eyes, such a slack, hanging mouth, such a stare. She pointed a long hard finger at him, and said, with more concern than derision: “The lad’s a ninny, May. Britched, and no more life than a sick cat. And next year you send him to school! Humph. He’ll be back on your hands, I warn you.”

  “Don’t gape,” said his father, with quick irritation, and a glance at his mother. “Close your mouth, lad. You’re drooling out of the corners.” Forgive me, he seemed to be pleading with the formidable Mrs. Clair. But she brushed aside his plea with an arch of her long neck.

  “Frank’s a good lad,” said Maybelle, with a faint rare spirit. “Wipe your nose, lovey, and don’t glower at your Grandma; there’s a dear.”

  “‘Frank!’” snorted Mrs. Clair, with a toss of her head, and a meaning look at her grovelling son. “His name is Francis. I never held with nicknames. Francis is an honorable name. Or are you ashamed of it, May? If I remember rightly, you were glad to be able to say it, after you had your marriage lines.”

  How unbearably close and near those voices were! Not louder than ordinarily, but to the awakened consciousness of the child they were filled with clangor, with ripping intensity. The figures opposite him did not move, but it appeared to him that they rushed upon him through space,
like menacing presences. Their faces swelled, became enormous, full of eyes and mouths and roaring tongues and frightful tumult. He cowered away from their rush, from their voices. He thrust out his hands, to keep them away. He burst into wild sobs of sheer terror. He clapped his hands over his ears. There was no help, no refuge. He curled his legs under him, as if hiding, trying to make himself tiny like some threatened small animal in a forest full of wild beasts. He clasped his arms over his head, and screamed.

  May, her instinctive motherhood surging over her fear and respect for her mother-in-law, cried shrilly: “There, look what you’ve done to my laddie, Mrs. Clair! Nagging and gnawing at him until he has fits!” She jumped up on her short fat legs and waddled rapidly to the shuddering child. She snatched him up in her arms and smothered his face against her breast, and his cries came in a muffled blur from that welter of lace, warm flesh and buttons. Amidst the multitudinous folds of that bosom a treacherous pin had been concealed, to close an empty button-hole, and the point pierced Frank’s cheek like a touch of fire. He pushed his hands against that overpowering bosom, and screamed in mingled terror and pain, a drop of blood welling up through his skin.

  “Oh, oh, the poor little creature!” Maybelle almost sobbed, rubbing frantically at the red moisture with the rough lace of part of her jabot. “It might have been his eye!”

  “For Heaven’s sake, make him stop that skriking,” demanded Mrs. Clair, unmoved, and only annoyed and disgusted. “And if you will wear pins, as no neat woman would, you’ll have to bear the consequences. You’ll find arnica upstairs. Where’s your handkerchief?”

  Francis Clair had sprung helplessly to his feet, torn between his natural affection for his wife and his awe of his mother. He was enraged with “that brat” for being the cause of all this disturbance. His mother was right; Ma was usually right. The lad was a ninny, a dolt, and Maybelle was “touched” on him, for all her cloutings and rages when the little fool irritated her.