Frank kicked him vigorously and sent him sprawling into the gutter. He then turned his attention to the boy in whose neck Paul had fastened his ferocious teeth. He said: “Paul, let him go.” And took hold of Paul’s shoulder strongly.
Paul, who now began to shudder, obeyed. He drew away. His mouth was stained with blood. But his eyes, one wild greenish glare, were demented. His tremblings almost rocked him off his feet.
Frank struck the remaining German on the head with the shoe, followed the blow with a punch to the jaw. The boy fell prone on the sidewalk.
All this had taken place without an audience. It had lasted less than ten minutes.
Frank turned to Paul, who was panting and shaking and glaring down at the two fallen enemies. “That’s enough. That’ll teach them,” he said with satisfaction.
Paul swung towards him. He saw Frank’s bloody face. His mouth worked. He pulled out his neat white handkerchief and wiped the bleeding nose. “I could kill them,” he said hoarsely. “Why didn’t you leave me alone? I’d have killed him.”
Frank smiled and took his friend’s arm. “I guess it’s enough. They won’t bother us again. My pa says Germans are cowards. They only fight in packs. I don’t think they’ll ever attack us again.”
His body swelled with gratitude and love. This had been no fight of Paul’s, but Paul had flown to his defense. He linked his arm in Paul’s and they went away together.
The news of the fight ran swiftly over the grapevine of the school. Frank was quite right. He and Paul were never attacked again.
CHAPTER 26
This was the last year of Frank Clair’s boyhood, and in one respect at least it was the happiest.
Young manhood quickened all through him, and like a tide of exultation, the glory that was on the earth quickened also. The war was in its seventh month, and the world knew its own quickening of terror and foreboding. It knew also that an era was passing; it felt this passing instinctively. The depression of 1913-14 had lifted with the war in Europe, and American factories were roaring with the munitions of death. Americans, young, ardent, still undisillusioned, stared with sparkling eyes across the somber Atlantic, and hostility against Germany, especially in the Anglo-Saxon South, ran swift and violent in men’s veins. When Germany announced that she had drawn a submarine zone about the British Isles, Mr. Wilson had issued his Note of Strict Accountability. On May 7th, the Lusitania went to her death, carrying with her hundreds of neutral American lives. In the meantime, there was grave trouble in Nicaragua. But there was, as yet, no real threat to the safety and peace of America.
The war was still unreal, insubstantial and unimportant to Frank, fifteen years old. He was discovering himself as a human being approaching maturity and manhood. The world, as a thing in itself, became imminent, a glorious dream of adventure into which he would soon step and distinguish himself.
One of his favorite haunts was the old Church of the Nativity on Albany Street. Nothing would induce Paul to enter that church, so Frank went alone, while Paul lingered outside, sourly, and waited for him.
One lovely May day, as he and Paul were passing it, Frank felt an urge to go into the church. Paul obdurately refused to enter, and went across the street to the little green park to wait. The church was dim, suffused with a soft lavender shadow, in which the sunlit windows were set like fiery and multi-colored jewels. Frank saw the statues, gleaming like snow in the gentle gloom. He saw the altar, with its flickering far light. He knew very little of Catholicism, but there was something here that thrilled and awed him, filled him with reverence. This church was not situated in a prosperous parish, yet beauty was here, noble and clothed in radiance. Frank would wander along the Stations of the Cross; he would pause before the altars to Mary and Joseph. He would see the arch of golden candles in the dusk. Sometimes, though not often, he would approach the great altar with its eternal light, and kneel on the red-carpeted steps before it and remain there for a long time, lost in formless meditation. Silence would surround him, broken only by a soft foot-fall, or the click of the beads of a worshipper in one of the shadowy pews.
It seemed a lovely thing, this open church which did not shut its doors after Sunday services, and then open them on the Sabbath to the smell of old carpet, mustiness and staleness. Here the church, and God, were always waiting, always ready with solace and meditation and gentleness.
In his earlier youth, Maybelle had sent him to a Baptist church not far from this Catholic church, but he had long abandoned attendance. On those Sundays, he would tuck his Testament under his arm, straighten his clothing, and, with a miserable sigh, start out for Sunday school. He would pass through endless, abandoned streets, where the houses lay in sunlight like sleeping tombs. A few “Chinese” glass ornaments would tinkle feebly in a faint breeze on deserted porches, and the trees would rustle slightly. The wooden doors of the church would yawn. The organ would groan rustily as the congregation entered; the choir would tune up in those childish and toneless hymns so peculiar to the Protestant service. The doors would close behind him, and all hope would be abandoned for two of the longest hours in recorded time, while a half-educated minister droned along tonelessly on a subject so far removed from God and reality as to resemble the drone of a fly on a windowpane.
Frank was to be bored many times in his life, but not so completely, so hopelessly, as he was bored in his own church. In all his experience of being bored by assininities and inanities, nothing ever surpassed the hours he spent in that church, and nothing ever afflicted him with such sheer torpidity and dullness and lifelessness. Occasionally, however, the minister enlivened the proceedings by furiously belaboring the Roman Catholic Church, and his attacks upon the “Scarlet Woman on the Seven Hills” would arouse the sleeping congregation to the first animation they had so far displayed. Even his philippics against “the demon rum,” against men who swore and smoked and ladies who showed their ankles, against all who violated the holiness of the Sabbath, could not awaken such concentrated attention and joy. Then the faces would gleam with suppressed and ecstatic hatred; hands would tremble lustfully; mouths would part in rapturous smiles of delight.
Then Frank had discovered the Church of the Nativity, and he often attended High Mass when ostensibly he was safe in his own church. Here he discovered majesty, mystery, heroic music, virility and pageantry. The priest did not seem to have much to say that was superior to that of the minister, but his sermons were short, and the rest of the time was spent in moving and solemn loveliness and grandeur. He discovered that the Catholic Church offers to the beauty-staryed and humble masses, the drudges of the dreadful factories and the dusty shops, a scene of splendor and passionate warmth and dynamic emotion.
He was beginning to understand these things, vaguely, but more completely as time passed, when he visited the Church of the Nativity. He felt them strongly on this warm May day, while Paul awaited him in the little park outside.
He saw a group of women lighting fat candles in little red glasses, and he went up to them and discovered, by an adroit whisper or two, that these candles burned in remembrance of the dead. He stood there, filled with a nameless emotion, watching the flickering of the crowded little flames.
He saw the spirits of the dead, their dull, clay-filled eyes struck by these small lights. He saw those eyes open, brighten, fill with tears, because they had been remembered, and their love had not been forgotten. By those lights, they took another step upward to the eternal sun, and the darkness receded about them.
He knew the dogma of hell. He thought of the souls in hell who would never see a light, who would never rise out of darkness and pain and lostness. It seemed to him that this was a most terrible thing. He glanced at candles waiting to be lit, and saw the coin-box beside them. He had no money. He waited until the women had drifted away and only the golden little flames lighted in remembrance were before him. Then he took several of the candles, lit them, and whispered: “For the souls in hell, to light their way.” He was certain,
with a profound and swelling certainty, that they saw these lights and took their first step back to God. And it seemed to him most appropriate that the lights set aflame for their guidance were stolen lights, and that by his sin he had saved them.
He had known compassion before in his life, but now this small act of compassion, like the sudden bursting forth of a flower, filled all the air about him with a passionate and unbearable fragrance. He knelt before the great altar and knew his deepest peace, and made his first vow to help in the rescuing of the lost and the mourning, the abandoned and the hopeless, the pain-filled and the blind and the despairing, the persecuted and the exploited, and those who knew neither the joy of God nor the love of men.
As he knelt, he looked at his fingers and whispered: “In my hand!” He felt there some mysterious touch, some dedication, some anointment, He knew this was so, beyond all reason and all words.
When he joined Paul, his first impulse was to tell him of this experience and of his compassion and love. But when he saw Paul’s pale compressed face, saw the glance he gave some placing children, he fell into silence.
Later, when Paul left him, he hurried quickly to the great still house where he had met little Jessica. He looked through the gates at the deserted driveway. He wandered up and down the street near the low gray wall. He did not really expect to see the girl, but he hungered for something he could not explain. He only knew, vaguely but surely, that Jessica would have understood about the candles and the dead in hell, as Paul would not. He took the gates in his hands and shook them urgently. They were locked.
But he went away comforted. Some day, he would find Jessica again, and he would tell her things he could not tell Paul. There was some reason why he could not tell everything to his friend; there was some barrier which, in his innocence, he could not comprehend. But there would be no barrier between himself and Jessica. This he knew, though he did not know why.
Even when he no longer came back to the house, the comfort remained with him for a long time. Even when he believed, almost, that it had been a dream, he was still comforted and could wait with a kind of steadfast expectation. Even when the very house was lost to him, he had the consolation and the hope.
In June, Miss Bendy was delighted to inform Frank that he had not only distinguished himself in English and history, but had also attained a fair passing mark in civics, grammar and mathematics.
“I knew you could do it!” she exclaimed. “I knew you would remember what I had told you. I have tried, haven’t I, Frank? I did teach you that it was almost as necessary for you to master other subjects as it was to pass in English and history. Yes! After all, education is not one-sided. A top-heavy structure must fall of its own weight. How can you be a writer if you know almost nothing else? A great writer must have knowledge of many things.”
She looked at him solemnly, her fat, wrinkled little face alight. “And now you are being graduated! You are going to high school, and then to college. I do hope I may live long enough to say: ‘That wonderful writer, he was a pupil of mine, and I had a little part in his success!’”
She smiled at him. Then she saw how dark his eyes had become, and how he looked at her. She asked quickly: “What is it, Frank?”
He stammered dully: “I’m not going to high school, Miss Bendy. I’m not going to college. My father says I must work.”
She was aghast. “Oh, Frank! Surely you are mistaken! I talked with your mother, and she was quite impressed by the necessity of your getting a good education. I thought that was all settled.”
He moved restlessly. “It isn’t, Miss Bendy.” His voice choked in his throat. It was some moments before he could speak. “I—I’m almost sixteen. My parents need the money. I—I suppose I can get books out of the library, and go on studying. I can get my working papers now, because I’ve graduated from the ninth grade.” He paused. His voice failed, and he could not go on.
Miss Bendy twisted her plump fingers together, and her heart burned with fierce indignation and grief and hatred of Frank’s parents.
She tried to keep her tone reasonable: “Frank, your parents don’t need the money. I know. Your father is doing very well; I know Mr. Farley, his employer. Your father—he is getting forty dollars a week now. I’ve heard he is very saving. He could send you to college, Frank.”
Frank said, through white, hard lips: “He won’t, Miss Bendy. He wants to save everything, so we can go back to England after the war.” He stared before him. “I don’t want to go back to England. This is my country. I love it. I want to live and work and die here. This is my country.”
“Of course it is, Frank.” But Miss Bendy spoke with abstraction. I must watch my blood pressure, she told herself sternly. Then she said: “Shall I talk to your parents, dear? Perhaps I can persuade them.”
But an expression of sheer fright filled his eyes. “No! They’d only blame me, Miss Bendy. I—I guess we’d better not talk about it any more.”
He picked up his cap and turned away. She caught his arm. She held it, forced him to look at her. Then she spoke slowly but vehemently: “Frank, perhaps I shan’t ever see you again. But I want you to remember this, all the days of your life. God has given you a great gift. You dare not throw it away. No, you dare not! It would be a most terrible sin. So, somehow, some way, you must get an education. Perhaps you can go to night school. Yes, you can go. It will be hard, almost heart-breaking. But you must go. It will take a long time, such an awfully long time. But it is worth it. Frank, look at me. It is worth it!”
He did not answer. And after a moment she released his arm and watched him walk away.
CHAPTER 27
In september, armed with his working papers, Frank found a job in a little factory on Ellicott Street, which paid him six dollars. He was to work six days a week, from half-past seven in the morning until six o’clock at night. His mother took five dollars and fifty cents from him, gave him his carfare, and packed his lunch. The other fifty cents belonged to him.
The factory printed and stapled little pamphlets to be wrapped about tubes of toothpaste. Frank’s task was to stand at a large machine, scoop out masses of pamphlets, count them, staple them, and place them in cartons. He had no rest periods. His world was encompassed by that roaring and impersonal machine, and by the boxes, and by his aching arms, his tired feet, his stiff back, and sometimes by the tearing pain in his chest. He dared not stop for a moment, otherwise the crate into which the pamphlets fell would fill up and spill over, and the foreman would materialize like a demon with a flailing tongue and threats of dismissal.
But somehow he did not care. His mind was a poisoned wound, bleeding and throbbing. For his first, and, in some ways, his worst, grief had come to him, and he was all desolation and anguish.
Gordon Hodge had triumphantly won a scholarship in some college in a small city down-state. The Hodge family had packed their miserable belongings and had gone with the conquering son.
Frank never forgot the day he said good-bye to his first friend. He never, to the end of his life, fully recovered from that day, for it marked the hour when he stopped writing for many years.
If only there had come to him the slightest warning, only the faintest foreboding. But there was nothing, that hot August night, that might have prepared him by hinting of the frantic sorrow to come.
He had been working in that factory for nearly two months. Each morning saw him racing in the cool damp dawn for the infrequent streetcars. Each noon saw him fall away from the machine, drenched with sweat, his knees and hands trembling, his heart beating painfully. Each evening saw him leave the factory on feet so weary that they felt as if turned to wood. He would reach home shortly before seven. Maybelle’s chronic ill health, she assured her husband and son, now prevented her from completing the day’s work. So it had become Frank’s duty to wash up the “tea” dishes and straighten the kitchen. He was usually finished with his work by eight o’clock. Then he would race off, the sweat stiff and itching on his irritabl
e skin, to meet Paul at his home.
This was the crown of his day, the evening rainbow after a storm of pain and misery. Adolescence, puberty, came late to him, so absorbed had his mind been in his writings, in his work, in the crowded and hurried days, in his dreams and hopes. The young girls he saw about him stirred him only faintly, still, and then as golden creatures awaiting him in the future. Not for him had been the pleasures of other young boys, the happy groups on warm, summer-filled verandahs, the community picnics, the meetings at drugstores for sodas, the visits to public dance halls, the parties in neighboring houses. His natural love for solitude, his lack of any spending money, his repudiation by others because of his shabby clothing and the unfriendliness of his parents toward their neighbors, had militated against even the slightest opportunity to enjoy the pleasures natural to his age. Also, in Paul Hodge, he had found the only contemporary to whom he could talk and who understood him. At once too mature and too immature, he was at home neither with the young nor with adults. A man in mind and emotion, he found the company of even those few youths willing to be friendly insipid and unproductive and tiresome. A child in body, he was ignored by those older than himself.
To his Jonathan, then, he hurried each evening. Only when he saw Paul did the accumulated wretchedness of the day recede. Then he was happy again, full of talk, eager, impetuous. Paul, of course, was not working. He spent his days in reading, in desultorily cleaning the miserable little cottage, in dreaming. When the two met they would look at each other in silence, their faces shining and smiling, then they would burst simultaneously into speech. They would sit on the stoop of the house, while the warm darkness fell about them and the arc light on the corner began to sputter and the dark trees murmured in the evening wind. And they would talk, or fall silent for a long time, content. Then, sometimes, they would go to the little corner store and Frank would buy two ice cream cones, and they would lick them blissfully until the last sweet drop was gone.