There Was a Time

  He ran upstairs, just to hear his footsteps echo through the barren corridors, just to hear the booming of a slammed door. Oh, he had never slept here, in this room with the sloping high roof! He had never seen a fire in this ash-filled grate. He had never seen the sun through this dusty window! He was a stranger here, in a strange house, and ghosts in every corner. He ran down the stairs, faster, faster, trembling with fear.

  Now the carriage which was to take the family to the station was at the door. There it stood, twinkling in the warm spring sun, the horses with gleaming black silky hides. A man was putting small bags on the floor. There was his father’s new London luggage, and a mysterious bundle of his mother’s, wrapped in an old Paisley shawl. Francis was disgusted. He pulled his luggage over the shameful thing. Maybelle would never learn. There was something common about Maybelle.

  The family, after much last bustling on Maybelle’s part, were finally ensconced in the carriage. The neighbors were on the street, waving, blowing kisses. Mrs. Worden had her apron to her eyes. The warm wind blew the women’s shawls, the little children gaped. The sun lay on the slate roofs, over which coiled the acrid smoke from the chimney-pots. Maybelle wore a dark-brown suit, new and handsome, and a big brown straw hat, heavy with pink roses. The jacket was too tight. It strained at the seams and in the middle. She smelt of rose perfume, lavishly sprayed upon her person. Her brown buttoned boots glittered in the clear lucid light. Frank’s woolen shirt scratched his sensitive flesh. His face was moist. Francis, lifting his new derby hat with dignity, nodded a last farewell to the chattering women. The carriage began to roll. Francis sat, staring straight ahead, his gloved hands folded on his cane. Maybelle sobbed, her arm about her little boy. But Frank gazed about him eagerly, delighting in the motion of the carriage. He had never been in such a vehicle before.

  The carriage rattled briskly over the bricks of Mosston Street. It rose at a sharp tilt, and reached Sandy Lane. Now the shopwindows gleamed in the morning light. Now the street tilted downward, and Frank saw the ineffably blue sky, adrift with snow-white clouds like huge mushrooms.

  Maybelle wept. Francis moved his head majestically. The harness jingled. The horses trotted. There was a pungent smell of manure.

  CHAPTER 10

  Frank’s next memory was of a street in Liverpool, a street filled with the pale wan light of evening. And, at the end of the street, a vast gray wooden wall, which his mother told him was “the ship.”

  He was disappointed. He had seen pictures of great sailing ships in his picture books, and he had had visions of standing on a polished deck and seeing the mighty sails spread far above him. This was no ship of his dreams. It was only a wall, and nothing else, a drab wall pressed hard against the end of the street. How could a wall carry the family over seas, to America? He was very tired, and his feet hurt in his new boots. He began to whimper a little.

  The next thing he remembered was the cabin of the ship, where he was to spend twelve whole days. He knew that the name of the ship was the “Baltic,” and that the Captain’s name was Smith. Years later, when the “Titanic” died in the waves of the terrible Atlantic, his parents told him that the Captain of this ship had been their own Captain. He remembered one or two glimpses he had had of Captain Smith: a tall, quiet and rugged man with a gray Vandyke beard, and kind and distant eyes.

  The cabin was quite commodious, with a most fascinating washbowl that folded into the wall, and three fixed bunks, soft, covered with good blankets, and very comfortable. There was a closet for clothes and luggage. But this is all that Frank ever remembered of the cabin, though his mother lay there, moaning in sickness, during most of the passage.

  He had only one poignant memory of that day of sailing. The portholes were open to the warm sea breezes. His mother had opened her bags and bundle on one of the beds. Now she lifted her head, and looked through a porthole. Frank stood beside her. He, too, looked. He was not conscious of movement, of motion. But he saw a silvery and shimmering expanse, softly heaving, and beyond that, the purple shores of England, dropping slowly behind the curve of water. “There, that’s England, good old England, dear old England,” said Maybelle, and Frank looked until the purple cloud that was his native country sank behind the swelling sea. And then he heard his mother’s weeping. But Francis was up on the second-class deck, his arms on the railing.

  It was on shipboard that Frank discovered that not only himself, but all others, were distinct personalities, and that each had his secret life which did not impinge on the rim of the consciousness of his fellowmen.

  His mind had always been involved in dreams, in huge cloudlike emotions and reactions, in tidelike responses to stimuli. But now, as he moved about the ship, his eye became more objective, and the amorphous clay of his mind took on patterns of thought, conscious conjecture, deduction and silent comment. If he looked at the sea in the morning, it was not only with responsive rapture and awe, but with the thought: How beautiful it is! When his father pointed out a whale to him, far off on the vast level of the ocean, a thin fountain of water betraying his great, indifferent presence, Frank was no longer merely excited. He projected himself into the whale, became part of the enormous monster, felt his dim consciousness and content, and imagined the green universe that flowed in the subaqueous depths. When he saw the leaping dolphins in the wake of the ship, he wondered at their life, and was filled with marvelling at the unknowable mysteries of existence. He no longer, with thoughtless joy, accepted the limitless red sunsets that turned the amethystine waters to fire, but he wondered about the sun and its journeyings, and tried to solve the puzzle in his thoughts.

  Now, wandering about the deck, and observing the passengers in their chairs, or at the rails, or conversing with one another, or strolling briskly, he no longer accepted their presence with vague indifference, as one accepts shadows. He began to stare at them eagerly; he listened to them; he followed them about; he watched the play of expression on their faces. His sensitivity, like delicate antennae, extended to them, feeling the substance of their being, their thoughts, their passions, their despairs and their responses to all about them.

  In so projecting himself into these others, into the feel of the air, the movement of the stars, the meaning of a voice, he discovered himself, and this was the most exciting discovery of all.

  On the morning of the third day out, Frank came up on the second-class deck and found his father leaning on the railings, and talking to some shipboard acquaintances. He wore the astonishing cap he had so proudly purchased in Manchester, and his leggings. His cane hung over his arm. The cap shadowed his small meagre face and enhanced the black belligerence of his mustaches. The leggings betrayed the spindling thinness of his calves. The cane was a pretentiousness.

  There he stood, with the air of a blasé voyageur, his voice dogmatic and affected, his gestures languid and continental. He was the traveller bored with Paris, with London, with Copenhagen and Berlin and Stockholm. He was the independent seeker after novelty in America. Casually, he gave the impression that he was on some mission of experimental research in certain American cities, and that he was to compare notes with mysterious colleagues on the subject of scientific chemistry. As he had read much on the subject, possessed more than the low average of intelligence, and had a quick mind which raced neatly over gaps in his knowledge, he was not too unconvincing to his audience. It was fortunate, however, that all of them were of his own class, pathetic poseurs in their own right, seekers after an importance they instinctively knew was not and never would be theirs, and each eager to impress the other. You believe this tale of mine, about my significance and value, and I will believe yours, they seemed to say. Grant me my miserable false glory, my little hour in the sun of your admiration, and I will grant the same glory to you and let you bask in my sun. Pretend to believe that I am a person of consequence and dignity, and I will pretend to believe the same of you.

  Young Frank stood at a distance, watched and listened. Only a short time ago he
would have noticed his father listlessly, and would then have made himself scarce. Adults were boresome creatures who had no perceptible reason for existence. But now, his supersensitive antennae reached out restlessly towards his father and the other elaborately nonchalant men, and, though as yet untouched by experience, the child knew and understood.

  He did not as yet know exactly why they were so pathetic, why there was a quality of terror in their being, why they should so wring his heart. But all at once he was flooded with a bitter and tearless compassion, a burning sadness. He saw his father as he had never seen him before. He saw his pitiable pretenses, his elaborate and touching gestures. The cap, the leggings, the cane, were points of pain to the boy, individual blows on an excruciatingly sensitive spot of perception. He wanted to cry, but no tears came to him out of his adult sorrow. He wanted to run to Francis, to grasp his hand, to cry out to him in anguish: “I know! I know!” He wanted to look up into Francis’ frightened blue eyes, and say to him out of the depths of his suffering spirit: “I understand, Papa. And I am so sorry. I want to help you, but I know there is no help anywhere.”

  But the paralyzing impotence of childhood was heavy upon him, and he had no real words to express his new knowledge, and no means of communicating his pity. He turned away, and went back to the salon, and there he sat for over an hour, enduring his first agonizing compassion for his father, his first understanding. And he knew his first abstract anger against all the world, his first comprehension that it was a shameful and terrible thing that anything in the world should be able to arouse pity, that the necessity for pity was evil and outrageous.

  Frank did not recall ever having made any shipboard acquaintances among the children. Not one young face ever rose up in his memory. He remembered the handsome dining room, the stewards and stewardesses, the afternoon tea on deck, the little cups of chicken bouillon, the sound of the dinner-gong, and the vast breathing floor of the ocean. He remembered fog, and the uneasy foghorns at night, and the sound of music.

  On the fifth day, the “Baltic” moved out of its course because of storms and the threat of icebergs. Now the warmth of the Gulf Stream was gone. The dolphins no longer playfully chased the ship. The blue glory of the water gave place to a mist-covered grayness, and the ship heaved and tossed and rolled incessantly. The dining room grew emptier with every meal. Captain Smith’s face was anxious and absorbed. For three days no one was allowed on deck.

  Steam hissed in the pipes along the companionways and in the cabins. But a pervading chill penetrated every cabin and stateroom and down into the crowded steerage. When the passengers were again allowed on deck, they shivered, turned blue. It was early March, and they were approaching America. Francis wore his tweed suit and thanked God for it. Frank’s woolly shirts no longer itched him. Maybelle put on her coat, even in the cabin, even when she lay on her bed. Stewardesses brought rubber bags full of comforting hot water. English blood congealed in English veins.

  On the sixth of March the ocean rose in smooth, gray and oily swells, but the fury of the gale had subsided to a constant low thrumming. The sky boiled with thick whitish clouds, streaked with coiling black mist. The bitter cold “froze a man’s marrow,” to quote Francis Clair, whose short sharp nose was constantly blue. Never had he felt such piercing wind, such grim temperatures. His mother had been right. He thought of the warm English breeze, the daisies, the low purple hills, the green meadows, and for the first time he was sick with longing.

  On the morning of the seventh of March, Francis rushed down into the cabin and excitedly demanded that his wife and son come up on deck with him. But Maybelle, whose fresh pinkness had faded into a permanent sallowness, was listlessly packing the scattered luggage, and denied that she felt any desire to see the New York coastline. To her, the ship had become her tie with England. She clung to this umbilical cord to the last moment. Frank, however, raced upstairs with his father. Francis had provided himself with a pair of binoculars. He pushed his son ahead of him through the crowds to the rail, focused the glasses for the child.

  Frank, trembling with excitement, stared through the binoculars. There, right on the floor of the thick heaving ocean he saw a low sharp wall, broken and chaotic, blue and lavender and pale yellow. The wall appeared to sink, to rise, to grow steadily brighter and firmer. Now the ship, jubilant, brayed out its greeting to America, and the deck was inundated with smoke. Voices rose on a happy storm of exclamations and laughter. The perilous journey was over. Frank became conscious of a strong sickish smell, sweet and overpowering. Gulls swooped over the deck, their shrill cries mingling with the gray wind. Frank saw small busy tugs, black and important, moving over the water towards them, belching smoke and making a prodigious noise.

  His next memory was of American Customs and Immigration officials filling the cabin. As the Clairs were second-class passengers, they were not compelled to undergo the indignity of examination at Ellis Island. There was a little doctor among them, who applied stethoscopes to the chests of the three Clairs in their cabin.

  Then Frank heard his father’s angry, protesting voice: “What’re you talking about, man? I’ve never had consumption in my life! Nonsense. I’m as sound as a nut!”

  The doctor shook his head, listened again. Francis had removed his “weskit” and shirt. He stood in his woolen underwear, his meagre little face sparkling with ire and fear, his eyes darting about restlessly, his mustaches bristling, his tongue moistening his lips. Maybelle stared blankly, her face paling.

  The doctor put away his stethoscope, and said: “There are rales there. Ever had bronchitis?”

  “Who hasn’t?” scoffed Francis. “It’s the bloody national disease of England.”

  The doctor examined some papers in his hand. “Chemist, eh? Not a laborer. Well. We’ve had enough laborers coming from Europe. Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Clair. I haven’t said you have consumption, or, rather, tuberculosis. I merely remarked that you show some tendency to it. Probably chronic bronchitis. We find a lot of that coming from England.” He smiled, clapped his hand on Francis’ quivering shoulder, which was so thin, so bony. “We have a lot of sun here, and maybe that’ll fix you up. But if you develop a cough, or show blood, better go to a first-class doctor as soon as possible.”

  When the doctor and the officials had gone, Francis collapsed on the bed. His breath came labored and heavy. He was white with desperate fear. He coughed tentatively. Maybelle said: “I told you you should wear your woollen scarf, but you would traipse around showing your neck!”

  “Shut up!” replied Francis savagely. He coughed again and again, and listened with utter and passionate absorption to the sound. The cough was dry, forced. Francis began to tremble as he listened. “Honey and lemon,” suggested Maybelle anxiously.

  “Shut up!” screamed Francis. He coughed and coughed. He put his handkerchief to his mouth. It remained dry and clean. The little man’s face cleared. “Did you ever hear me cough at night?” he demanded of his wife, excited.

  “No, lovey.”

  “Do I get flushes, or sweats, in the night?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Francis sprang to his feet, triumphant. “These American doctors! Don’t know anything. I’ve heard about them. They go to school for two years. That’s what Durham told me. Consumption! Never had a day’s illness in my life. Did you hear that cough? I had to force it.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Frank Clair’s next memory did not include New York, except for a vague impression of gray cold and patches of snow, and a chaotic confusion of buildings. Nor did he recall the four-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey from New York to Bison by train.

  But he did remember leaving the train at the Lackawanna Station. Before him and his parents rose a long snowy incline, bleak, dirty and bitterly cold, which ended on lower Main Street. On either side extended deserted warehouses, saloons, suspect rooming houses for derelicts and those who sailed the Lake boats in the summer. A fetid odor of sewage, filth, alcohol and bad cooking
filled the ashen air. Overhead, Frank could see the northern sky, heaped, overflowing, tumultuous, with heavy and swollen clouds the color of ash. He felt the paralyzing gale from the river and the Lakes, the sting of sand-like particles of snow and ice in his face. He was exhausted as he climbed the incline with the shivering Maybelle. Francis, capped, caned and resplendent in leggings, climbed ahead, carrying his precious London luggage. Frank never forgot the twinkling legs, the wiry little figure in its tweed suit, climbing with spry alacrity up the slippery slope.

  They reached the upper level of lower Main Street, and Frank saw the street before him, lined with tumbled heaps of shops, restaurants, saloons and rooming houses. Everything appeared to cower before the huge and overwhelming winter sky. The streets, the curbs, the roofs, were heaped with dirty snow. There was a frontier air about this city of some three hundred thousand souls. Perhaps it was the endless winter, the cold, the proximity of those great bodies of fresh-water lakes and the fierce Niagara River which imparted this air, but though Bison was to grow to a population of some seven hundred thousand people, it never lost its frontier quality, its winter desolation, its atmosphere of isolated rigor. It was the second largest city in New York State, but between it and New York City were hundreds of towns, villages and smaller cities which seemed as remote from either as if separated by thousands of miles. Crouched on Lake Erie and the Niagara River, Bison faced the long snowy desolation of Canada, and drew into itself the freezing impact of polar air and the quality of lonely plains and forgotten mountains.

  Mrs. Jamie Clair, who never mixed “family” with business, had made no provision for the immigrants in her own grim lodging-house on Porter Avenue, not far from the river. She had engaged two “housekeeping” rooms for Francis and his family on Vermont Street, near Normal Avenue. Nor had she met them upon their arrival in this forlorn amd melancholy city. They had their directions. Somewhere, Francis found a cold cab, and the family, shivering uncontrollably, climbed in and were driven off.