There Was a Time

  On the appearance of Frank in his class, for the third season, Mr. Preston had called him aside, and had said: “Now, then, this is your third semester here with me, isn’t it? I saw your name on the card the other day, and I—I was just a little surprised. You’re thirty-two, aren’t you? Don’t you think you are ready for Dr. Berry now? After all, this is just sophomore English—”

  And Frank had replied:, “No. You give me all I want and need.”

  Mr. Preston had flushed at this, a little guilty but gratified. He knew all about Frank. He had never had a student like this, and sometimes he accused himself of directing the studies for Frank’s benefit. Certainly, each semester was entirely different from the one before, and contained much that would be of distinct advantage to Frank, be peculiarly useful to him. Mr. Preston was very tired. He had some serious heart ailment. He held his classes during the day, and he taught three evenings a week at the Evening Sessions. Sometimes he was so fatigued that he thought death preferable to this aching weariness in his flesh. Yet, at least once a week he had Frank remain for as much as an hour after the class was dismissed, and talked to him, criticized his work, recommended certain textbooks and books on biography, travel and novelized history, inspired him and encouraged him, and gave him the full strong glow of his passion for poetry and great prose, until his own terrible weariness had burned itself away in his selfless desire to help and sustain and stimulate. And Frank would listen, feeling a tumult in himself, an ardor, a joy. They nourished each other, one with comprehension and gratitude, the other with giving, until the hours they spent together became interludes of supreme pleasure and satisfaction.

  “I notice,” said Mr. Preston once, “that when you express your hatred for hypocrisy and cruelty and stupidity, you write with fire and real literary power. That, then, is a clue for you, the one real clue. But when you merely express hatred, blind, wild hatred, for anything and everything, there is a kind of danger in your writing, a kind of terribleness. You defeat yourself. And you will fail, and you will be sick with your failure, no matter how much money you might make. There is the hatred which is life-giving, the hatred of a Jeremiah, the constructive hatred which is like a goad in the rumps of the apes called malice and bestiality and savagery. That hatred advances civilization and justice, enlightens mankind, helps the animal to rise upon his hind legs and take on the shape and gait of a man. But there is another hatred, which destroys not only the writer but those who read him and hear him, which poisons the well of hope and integrity, and drives men mad. You must look out for that hatred in your writing, and in yourself. It crops up too often, and frightens me.… Have you been reading much about Hitler? Listen to him, and you will know what I mean.”

  At this, Frank’s face tightened obstinately and with sullenness. You talk like an old fool I knew once, by the name of Farley, he thought.

  He sent three of his stories to some of the more popular and prosperous magazines. They all came back, rejected, but the editors wrote personal letters expressing their belief in his future, and asking for other stories or articles for their consideration. One editor criticized the story submitted to him in almost the same phraseology used by Mr. Preston, and this letter Frank destroyed. He showed the others proudly.

  CHAPTER 59

  The Years of the Black Locust had descended upon America, and the national sky was black with them. Under the ominous cloud, the nation crouched in stupefied paralysis. They looked to Washington, as men look to the east during a night of suffering, for Mr. Roosevelt had been inaugurated and a faint and smoldering hope began to burn on the dark horizon. The bank holiday had created a temporary panic, but so firm was the faith of the desperate people that the new Administration would lift the horror from their minds and the paralysis from their arms and the fear from their hearts that even this was regarded as only the first step toward national recovery.

  The suicides of Stock Market plungers and once wealthy men were blazoned in turgid headlines on the country’s newspapers. But the thousands of suicides of the desperate old and middle-aged who witnessed the foreclosures of their little homes and faced the yawning skull of starvation were noted only in small paragraphs appropriately near the obituaries, or did not appear at all. One heard the rumbling crash of great fortunes from east to west. But one never heard the stifled despair of millions of little men who silently and grimly preferred not to eat rather than to stand at a public trough. They stood in the rubble of a fallen economy and stared about them with dazed eyes, unable to comprehend what had befallen them, able only to move numbly amid the ruins. One by one, the small shops closed; one by one, the factories shut their doors. One by one, and then, the pace quickening, hundreds of banks failed, while the petrified and shabby depositors stood in stupefaction on the cold sidewalks.

  Even those who feared Mr. Roosevelt waited to hear what he would say. After all, a danger, like a smoldering fire, began to lick through the streets of the nation; one could smell its smoke. At noonday, the sun was made brazen by it. If Mr. Roosevelt could put out this gathering flame, then even his enemies would be grateful. A radical “crackpot” was better than revolution. If the people’s hunger could be stayed, if their bewildered fury could be quieted, there was hope for all the nation. A starving people cannot think. They can only riot and seize and massacre. They can only let loose their latent hatred and resentment for those who live softer, eat heartier, and are more secure. The powerful in the country remembered the guillotine in the streets of Paris, and looked toward Washington, and waited.

  Who will sing the saga of a door-to-door salesman during the Great Depression?

  Frank Clair sold, or tried to sell, Pure Silk Stockings and Select Pure Silk or Rayon Underthings for Ladies. He carried his heavy valise, order blanks and merchandise books from door to door, in summer heat and winter blizzards. Sometimes he made twenty dollars a week in commissions. Sometimes only ten. The bank account dwindled inexorably. Grimly, from early morning till late at night, he walked the streets, knocking on back doors. Grimly, his arm almost torn from its socket, he walked the several miles back to his wretched room over a meat shop on Grant Street. He had a doughnut and one cup of coffee for breakfast—ten cents. He ate a similar repast at noon. At night, he stopped in at a “hot-dog” stand, and treated himself to a thirty-five cent meal. Then, sometimes, it was too late to return to his room with his satchel. He carried it to the Evening Sessions. The days were steaming or frozen pits of hell. The nights were fragrant islands full of light and sound and hope. But the bank account dwindled to one thousand dollars, to eight hundred, to five, to four.

  He found that the poor would buy more readily than the middle-class. Poor women, their worn faces full of fear and compassion, would hesitate at their splintered doors. They would order a pair or two of stockings, for it was not possible to walk the winter streets with bare legs. They would count out their fifty cents reluctantly, but their tired and heavy eyes would be bright with pity as they looked at Frank. They could not afford what they bought. But the universal misery brought out the heroism latent in the people. The parting with a dollar or two might have seemed mean or insignificant. But in all their lives the people performed no more heroic act. Sometimes Frank was invited into a cold and bleak little house or flat, and given coffee or a sandwich from a guarded supply. Sometimes, when he ate at such bare tables, a curious pain came to him, against which he clenched his teeth and tried to steel his heart. He tried not to listen to the sad and desperate tales he heard. He tried to harden himself against them. But they sank like stones into the dark water of his subconscious mind, awaiting the day when he would give them words and being.

  He met companions in his despair and hunger and destitution. One day, on lower Main Street, he met old Matthew Sanders. He met him in the fetid little hole of a cheap restaurant where, for thirty-five cents, he ate his evening meal.

  Bison’s lower Main Street ran obscurely and meanly to the water front through a huddle of dreadful small stores
and poolrooms, suspect and filthy little hotels, tiny, squalid restaurants and saloons, and ancient old houses leaning and broken and blind. In one of these houses, almost untenanted, in an attic room, lived Matthew Sanders, who sold photographs in a house-to-house canvass.

  Frank was forcing the horrible concoction of stew down his throat when he became aware of the neat little old man sitting near him at the greasy wooden table. Frank was rarely aware of those about him; he shut his eyes and his consciousness against them. But he could not ignore this man, so reserved and quiet was his air, his patched clothing so clean. Despite himself, Frank stared at him with curiosity.

  Matthew Sanders, even at the table, appeared very tall and thin in his cheap black suit and frayed old topcoat. He had politely taken off his hat, though no other man in the hot and filthy little hole had removed his. Frank saw a shock of thick white hair, carefully combed. Its uneven edges revealed that he had clipped and cut it himself. He had a long and emaciated face, lined but composed, and his eyes, lifted for an instant to Frank’s, were blue and full and curiously gentle and childlike. Frank saw his hands, scoured as to nail and knuckle, tremulous and veined. Above them, his frayed cuffs were white and stiff with starch.

  When he became aware that Frank was staring at him he smiled, and his very old face brightened into an expression even more childlike and simple than his eyes. He said, in his croaking voice: “Bad weather today, isn’t it?”

  “Very,” said Frank. The old man nodded and smiled again, as if with pleasure. Then Frank saw how his eyes had fastened on Frank’s uneaten bread; for one moment they became tragic. He glanced away and resumed brightly: “But it’s healthy, they say. The winter.”

  Frank hesitated. Then, impatiently, he pushed the bread towards the old man, for he had seen that he had only a cheese sandwich and a small glass of milk. “I don’t want this bread,” he muttered. “Shame to waste it. Do you want it?”

  “Are you sure?” said the other, but his pale mouth twitched and his head trembled with eagerness. “I’m not deprivin’ you?”

  Frank replied by pushing the bread closer. Then he added, against all his efforts to keep from speaking: “I’ve got a piece of apple pie coming, but I can’t eat it. Do you want it?”

  That day marked the beginning of their curious friendship. Frank was bitter and contemptuous toward the old man for his very poverty and futility and hopelessness. But he listened to his story with a queer eagerness which he could not explain to himself. They met every night at six o’clock and talked over the table. Then one night Matthew invited his new friend up to his attic room over the restaurant.

  Frank went reluctantly, cursing himself for his weakness. They climbed up a filthy and broken flight of stairs. Then Frank saw the room. It was tiny, windowless, airless. It held an iron Army cot, covered with two filthy brown blankets, grayed and full of holes, a commode with a pitcher and cracked bowl, one broken chair, and a tiny gas heater. One gauntly dim electric bulb swung from the ceiling. The floor was bare; the walls and ceiling and bed literally crawled with cockroaches. In the closet, hanging neatly, were Matthew’s few belongings. For this room he paid two dollars a week.

  He informed Frank, whom he had ceremoniously seated on the one chair, that he washed his shirts and socks and handkerchiefs in the bowl, which he filled from a stinking bathroom on the first floor, behind the restaurant. Each morning he polished his boots. He spread newspapers between himself and the sheets on the bed. Each night he lit his little gas fire and sat before it. Frank could see him with a vivid clarity, staring into space, rubbing his thin gnarled hands with a dry sound.

  Each morning he crept down the garbage-littered stairs, past rooms of obscenity and vice, slipped obscurely past a riotous saloon, glanced aside from the degenerate beings he encountered on the street. He carried a portfolio of photographs from house to house. He was to sell tickets at one dollar apiece for a large and not too-bad photograph. He had to sell ten tickets for the photograph studio to maintain his “salary” of five dollars a week; anything over that would entitle him to a fifty per cent commission. “Silk-linen finished studio photographs,” said Matthew to Frank, proudly. Worth two dollars apiece, at least. He also sold passport and automobile license photographs. Sometimes he made ten dollars a week.

  Frank, with his writer’s sharp and vivid inner eye, could see it all as clearly as if he were present on the rounds old Matthew made. He could see the old man tottering from door to door, tall, shriveled, slightly bent, palely blue and red-rimmed of eye, vaguely courteous and gentlemanly, absent. His toneless flat voice solicited politely, and the pity of the poor went out to him, to this old and weary man. Frank knew that pity, and again the pain assailed him, and again he stiffened against it. He could see Matthew tramping the streets, shivering in the winter wind, crouching exhausted in doorways for a moment’s breath, creeping into stores for an instant’s warmth until he was evicted. But he made his eight or ten dollars a week. Frank saw that Matthew was sufficiently piteous to excite sympathy even in the wretched, yet refined enough not to rouse that sympathy to the point of exasperation.

  Frank’s clairvoyant vision quickened. As if he were Matthew himself, he had a queer memory of Matthew’s miles of aching and weary plodding through snowy streets, of creeping through back yards, of a gnawing stomach and feet like plagues of living fire, of legs that trembled and a back that broke. He could hear, as if they had been addressed to him, the insults, the rebuffs, sense the closed doors, the old numb despair.

  It was all very strange, for old Matthew, in speaking cheerfully to Frank, told him none of this. But Frank felt and knew it in all his bones, in his somber mind, in the depths of his aching heart. He knew that the soles of Matthew’s boots had worn through, and that he put cardboard over the gaps in the soles. He knew that Matthew slept on his trousers, that they might be neat and creased. It was cold in this room tonight, despite the hissing little gas fire. Matthew would move in a world of emptiness, without despair, but also without life. Frank knew he prayed. But his prayers were like an old dusty sheet of paper upon which nothing had ever been written, not a single word of hope.

  Frank was still young, but he felt Matthew’s brittle age, he felt the long and awful years behind him. Frank sat on the broken chair and listened to the old man, absorbed, trapped, enchanted, chained in the other’s body, as if his own spirit had entered that ancient flesh and knew all its secrets, all its pain and suffering.

  Matthew, who was very simple and unsuspecting, did not know that Frank was one with him, as he sat on that broken chair opposite the old man, who sat on the edge of his cot. He saw only Frank’s slightly glazed and attentive eyes, in the glaring electric light. Encouraged by the young man’s silence and apparent sympathy, he told him artlessly of his former life.

  He and his wife, Eliza, had formerly owned a prosperous little grocery store. Eliza was the businessman. She kept all the records, ordered all the goods, went to the market with him, and bargained sharply. Matthew did not describe Eliza, but Frank could see her with a clairvoyant’s vision: lean, tall, stringy, grim-mouthed, straight and firm of glance, her gray hair wound in a bun on the top of her head. Matthew confessed that he was no businessman; he merely stood behind the counter. They did very well, and the customers paid promptly on the first of each month. Eliza saw to that, old Matthew chuckled fondly.

  Then had come the depression. The customers either could not pay their bills, or they vanished discreetly from the neighborhood, owing considerable money. Eliza and Matthew struggled along a little while, and then they failed. But something even worse happened. Eliza became ill, very suddenly. It was discovered that she had cancer. She had died in the ward of a local hospital. Matthew had insisted upon paying every bill. He had been left destitute.

  Eliza had been “religious,” Matthew said tenderly, cracking his knuckles before the gas fire. She had made him pious. She trusted in God. God knew best. Even when Eliza had died, her last words to him, compelling, urgent,
stern words, had been to “have faith.” Yes, he had always “had faith,” he confessed simply. What would he do without God, and his hope that he would soon see Eliza? But Frank, still in Matthew’s body, one with his mind, heard Matthew’s prayers, methodical, earnest, mechanical, and he knew that the prayers had become repetitions, words without meaning, without peace or hope, and without echo. He prayed as a loving sacrifice to his wife. He prayed for her sake. But there was nothing in him, except his hideous misery, his dumb acceptance, his pain.

  “God, my dear Frank, is always the refuge,” said Matthew, gazing at Frank with his exhausted pale eyes and smiling. “Always the refuge. Our life here is nothing. Learn the joy of sanctity, my boy. There is always God. What would I do without Him?”

  Frank came out of the old man’s body and shivered. His pity and compassion filled him with weariness and despair. He said: “Why don’t you go on relief, Matt? You’d at least eat, and they’d pay your rent, and you wouldn’t have to tramp the streets any more.”

  Matthew, who had been smiling vaguely to himself, came to with a start of shock and horror. He stared at Frank aghast. “Relief? What would Eliza say? She would never forgive me! We’ve never eaten a crumb of charity in our lives! Why—why, I’d rather starve to death! I’d never hold up my head again!”

  This is where I should feel admiration, thought Frank bitterly. But he saw the empty place in Matthew from which joy and hope and love and significance had departed forever, leaving nothing behind but an attic tenanted by cobwebs, attended only by parching midnight winds, and haunted by voiceless ghosts: the memory of a proud and resolute old woman and the long shadow of a dead God.

  I can’t stand it, thought Frank, ignominiously shaken and wretched, I’ll avoid this poor old fool after this. He went away, after shaking hands with Matthew and hearing a last injunction, “Trust God, and all will be well.”