No One Hears but Him

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Now,” said Lucy, who did not know she was crying again, “that sounds awfully pathetic to me. But I know what she means! What is the use of our going to school and listening, when there are no answers to the admiration of those idiots who call us ‘The New Breed’? Our frantic questions are received only with adulation, as if the question were important in itself and an answer could only be stupid! Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “But Granny had an answer, even if my parents said her answer was medieval.” Lucy did not know that she was standing in extreme and desperate agitation. “Those few short months! I can’t tell you how wonderful they were. What Granny said may be silly, as my parents said it was, and backward, and superstitious and Victorian and outmoded. But it meant something to me! They—they—well, it’s like you’re hungry, and someone takes you into a wonderful brick-floored kitchen and there is a smell of bread baking there, and wonderful things cooking, and someone gives you a plate and you fill it, and you eat, and you aren’t hungry any more. You’re filled. You feel satisfied and at peace, and so wonderfully happy.

  “So happy,” said poor young Lucy. “So satisfied. I don’t remember where it was in the Bible, but Granny read it to me. ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He leads my soul—my soul—he leads my soul—Green pastures. Thy Rod and thy Staff, they comfort me. The valley of the shadow of death—I shall fear no evil.’ I don’t remember it very clear, you know. But when she read it to me, I felt so peaceful, so filled, as if someone really loved me. As if someone really listened to me. As if everything was—explained. I think it was the Old Testament, but I don’t know. I never saw a Bible before or since.

  “And then,” said Lucy, weeping without restraint, “there was something Jesus said. Granny read it to me. It was about children. He said something about permitting little children to go to Him and forbidding them not. And there was something else a woman said after He had been crucified. ‘They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have lain Him.’ Whenever I think of that, I think of me. What have they done with my Lord? Where have they taken Him that I don’t know anything about Him? If there is anything to know at all?”

  She pressed her clenched hands to her young breast. “Where have they taken Him? Why don’t I ever hear about Him? Why do my parents laugh indulgently when I ask? Why do my profs talk only about ‘Social Consciousness’ and all the other stuff, as if individuals have no existence, and no hope beyond this mere living? Why does Dr. Pfeiffer talk about us ‘merging ourselves in humanity and losing our selfish individuality’? But our individuality is all that counts! It’s all that we have! We aren’t group-souls. We aren’t just collectively-striving animals. We know only ourselves and our own thoughts.

  “We’re hungry! We want something else besides this world and our ‘social obligations.’ We want to be satisfied as persons. If we aren’t satisfied as individuals, we aren’t going to be good for anyone else, either. We are just going to regard our fellow human beings as biped animals; is that any good? Why, human life doesn’t mean anything, then, and I and millions of girls like me are going to be just as desperate as that poor Russian girl, Svetlina! And just as amoral and as meaningless.”

  Lucy put her hands over her wet face and moaned a little. “Meaningless. Meaningless. Where have they taken my Lord, so that I don’t have a sense of being alive, but just part of a group?”

  She threw down her hands. “Why do they forbid us to go to Him? Why do they block the way with ‘problems’ we are supposed to solve in the world, which has always been filled with problems? And if we go to Him, what can He tell us? Where is my Lord? They have driven Him away, from our houses and our churches, from our government and our schools. They have taken Him out to a field and killed Him and have put Him in a grave, and He can never talk to us again or give us a reason for living.”

  The man did not answer. In utter despair Lucy ran again to the curtain and struck the button. The blue curtains silently drew aside, as if weary and sad, and the light shone out and in that light stood the man who listens.

  “Oh!” cried Lucy, sharply, and retreated. “Oh, my God!”

  Then she cried over and over, “Oh, my God, my God, my God!”

  She had never knelt before in a church, before an altar, or at her bedside. But she knelt now, slowly, painfully, trembling. She clasped her hands together like a little child and not a woman of twenty. She stared at the man in the light, wonderingly.

  “I believe!” she whispered. “What was it Granny said? ‘I believe, I believe. O God, help Thou my unbelief!’ Yes, yes. ‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ Give me—give me—something that can feed me and that can answer me. You didn’t die after all, did you? Granny told me. But no one else ever did, no one else. They never told me that you had not gone away, that you were still here, even if they had driven you out and had laughed at you. They had never told me that you were still in this ‘modern’ world, even if everything is shut against you now.

  “‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ I know you talked to me, because I never had thoughts like those before. I never had anything but ridicule. I was sufficient unto myself—they thought. They were sufficient to themselves, too. Maybe that’s what makes them so frightened when they are a little sick, or they feel they are growing old and life won’t be fun any longer. Maybe that’s why I was so—hungry, like that girl, Svetlina.”

  Lucy got to her feet. She went to the man, slow step by step. She reached out and laid her hand on his. She smiled, though she was still crying. There was such a peace in her.

  “‘Help Thou my unbelief.’ No, just give back to me what Granny gave me, and everybody else took away afterward. Look, I still have my world to face, and college and the profs and my parents—You did call them piteous, didn’t you? Oh, how piteous! I see it all now. They are just like children in the dark. Why did they drive you away, and why did they hide me from you? The poor people. Poor Dad; poor Mom. Maybe that’s why they are so frantic about staying young and ‘modern’ and enthusiastic. They seem so—feverish—sometimes. So desperate. Even more desperate than I—was.

  “I’m not so desperate any more. There’s a little church near our house, with candles. It’s always open. It has beautiful statues in it. There’s a light, near the altar. I don’t know why.

  “But every day I’m going to stop there before going to school. I’m going to find out—where they have lain my Lord.”

  SOUL ELEVEN

  The Dream-Spinner

  “All which thy child’s mistake

  Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home …”

  The Hound of Heaven. Francis Thompson

  SOUL ELEVEN

  The golden spring day was no fresher than the air in the white and blue waiting room. The men and women and youths waiting for the chime to sound for them unconsciously relaxed as if, even now, some of their weight and sorrow and despair were already lifting in the sweet air with its hint of fern. The woman entering peeped at them coyly, a half-smile on her widely rouged lips, her painted eyes tilted in a coquettish way, her brazen hair rolling in waves about her coarse cheeks. It was evident that she expected a glance of interest from those already in their chairs, but no one glanced at her, no one appeared aware that she had entered. Her smile faded a little, and she pouted. The door silently closed behind her and she leaned against it, casually, breathlessly, like the young girl she had been some fifty years ago. She sighed, and said appreciatively, “Um.” No one looked at her; some were reading, sunken wearily in themselves.

  Smiling again, after a moment, she elaborately tiptoed to an empty chair and sat down. She was large and stout, massively stout, but relentlessly girdled. She was dressed like a young girl, in a gay green silk dress with a wide green silk coat over it, and every seam strained. A string of patently false pearls encircled her flushed and deeply lined throat. As she had had the vague idea that she was going to some sort of church she had put on a hat, a rather broad velvet and black straw suitable for a girl four
teen years old. Her white-gloved hands carried a patent-leather purse to match her cheap patent-leather slippers, and her fat nyloned flesh bulged over the arch and the sides. She exuded a scent which had been optimistically named Turkish Night, at one dollar the ounce, and smelled, as one of her more ruthless friends had said, like perfumed sweat. It was considered distracting to ladies like Maude Finch.

  Some of her kinder friends told her that she looked not a day over forty-nine, but her powdered and colored wrinkles blatantly announced her full sixty-five birthdays, and not one article of her clothing had cost more than twenty-five dollars. She was considered, by friends of her own generation, to be “a card,” for she could play poker like a man, could drink beer like a man, and had a hoarse jolly laugh, and she earned sixty dollars a week as a clothing saleswoman in a branch of a downtown store in the little suburb where she lived.

  Sadly, she considered herself extremely stylish and believed, most of the time, that she had éclat. (She had read the word in Harper’s Bazaar, and now used it lavishly though not with the proper pronunciation. She had never learned how to pronounce half the words she used with an air, but at least she knew the meaning to a certain extent.) Her hair was dyed, and not by a professional. Her eyes were small and blue and webbed with tiredness and with her everlasting smiles. Her one good feature was her teeth, without flaw, and big and white, without fillings. She had rarely needed a dentist, which was fortunate for her. When she smiled brightly, as she did almost always, her teeth sparkled, she appeared younger, and yet far more pathetic than ordinarily.

  She sat down, carefully rearranging her dress and coat so they would not wrinkle. They were real silk, in a large size, and she had been able to buy them at the shop for half their original price because no customer had called for them. She was very proud of the costume. This was the first wearing. She touched her hat, now, opened her bag, took out a compact and peeped at the glass. She did not see her large-pored skin. She saw the charming sweet girl she had never been, not even once in her life. She smiled widely at the dream-image, snapped the compact closed, replaced it, snapped the gilt fastening of the bag and looked about her, beaming.

  But no one turned to give her a brief glance or a smile in return. So she reached for a magazine. She did not wear glasses in public, except furtively behind the cash register in the store, and at home. Therefore, she could read nothing though she pretended to do so, and with deep interest, her head cocked, her pink lips pursed reservedly as if she did not entirely agree with the writer.

  Becoming bored by this small touch of acting, she put aside the magazine and stared at her fellow-waiters in the room. Not a bad dress on that woman there; it must have cost at least one hundred dollars. But black, on a lovely day like this! And the woman must have cancer or something, she was so white. Why hadn’t she tinted her cheeks and her lips? No one went bare-faced these days, like a farm wife. She must be all of forty-five, too. And so thin! A twelve dress, at the very most. But no style. Maude’s eyes, disapproving, went from face to face, but every face was absorbed in its own pain or misery. What a bunch! She was the only person here with any life to her, or any color or bounce. She made her dyed thick hair bounce on her neck and cheeks. It was a wiry bouncing, but nevertheless she felt young and vital at the feel of it. She began to wonder why she had come at all, she, common-sense Maude Finch, with all the wonderful life that she had had and all the wonderful things that had happened to her!

  It was just that she was a teeny bit tired, that was all. The shop had been open to nine-thirty last night, and there had been quite a number of customers. She had made five dollars, at least, in commissions. It made up for the days before that when she had barely made her pay. So, she was five ahead of Nancy, her fellow employee and her best friend. Poor Nancy, with that terrible crippled husband of hers to support. She, Maude, was glad she had no one to support except herself, and in a way she didn’t need the money. Plenty in the bank, to live as she wanted to the rest of her life. She smiled widely again, and cocked her head complacently and the blue eyes filled with a glaze of dreams and became young again and wistful. After a time, she glanced at her small gold and diamond watch; only six installments left to pay on it. Half-past six! Had she fallen asleep or something? She had left the shop at five, had raced home to dress, had set out for the Sanctuary at half after five, and had arrived here long before six—a fifteen-minute ride on the bus.

  She had never been on the lawns or the path before. She had moved from the city to the adjacent suburb twenty years ago when darling Jerry had died and left her so very comfortable. Since then she had been in the city but once or twice a month, to visit friends, and always at night, and though she had been aware of the Sanctuary’s existence since she had been much younger, she had felt no curiosity about it. “Some old goat’s little church,” she had once said. “Methodist or something. No? What then? Oh, ‘The man who listens.’ Now, isn’t that silly? Why should he do that? Yes, I know it’s a pretty place; it’s been there for ages, ages. I don’t even remember when it was built. But ages, really. I heard millions of people’ve come to it, even from them foreign places. Somebody said the Governor came once, but I don’t believe that, honestly! Well, there’s more than one way to waste money, it seems, and that old man—his name was Goodwin or something—had no kids or wife and he built this because he was a Catholic and he just couldn’t stand the Roman Catholics any longer, and built his own church! Funny, isn’t it? It takes all kinds.”

  Why had she come? It was because she had been so tired last night. She wanted to ask the man inside if she should quit her job for an easier one. Something part time, just to take up the slack of her comfortable days. Most of her friends worked; gave them something to do now the kids had left home. Every woman should do something, for heaven’s sake, besides sitting around the house running up new drapes! Shouldn’t they? It kept a woman young and on her toes to have a job, though really her job wasn’t that important. It was fun, though. It was fun because she didn’t need it; Jerry had been so good to her. God, she was tired. And there was that funny ache right under her breastbone all the time. The company doctor had said she was sound as a dollar, so it wasn’t heart or cancer of the lungs which everybody was dying of. Thank God she didn’t smoke, so she didn’t have to worry. It was just that ache, and the tiredness coming last night. No, she had been tired a long time, a very long time. She had heard the man inside was a psychiatrist, and maybe she needed a psychiatrist.

  She giggled like a child ten years old. Maude Finch, who had never had an ache or pain in her life, or a minute’s depression, needing a psychiatrist! But then, lots of times, she’d heard, something could go wrong in your mind and make you feel sick—no, tired. No, sick. Let’s face it, girl. You feel sick, sick at your stomach, and sometimes you can’t sleep and you just stare at the black window at night—You—You’ve got such an ache, right here, right under this wonderful pin that I got at wholesale, only five dollars, and no one who saw it thought it was fake. The blue stones looked real turquoise, and the red ones rubies. It had been on sale for twenty dollars, but it was too big for the teeny little women, and so she had bought it right off the counter, in the shop, for five dollars. Trust her to get a bargain, Maude Finch! Though God knows she didn’t need bargains, not with her money. But them that has looks for bargains. They do it every time. She chuckled fondly at herself. She was as bad as old Mrs. Schlott, who everybody said had a million dollars. Well, Maude Finch didn’t have a million dollars. Now yet, anyway. She chuckled again. If stocks kept rising as they were doing now, she’d make it, she’d make it! Maybe she’d buy one of those villas on the Ree-ve-air-ay, which she had seen pictured in Harper’s. And invite all her friends. “Come anyway. What do you care what the jets cost? Look, when I live there I’ll send you the two-way tickets.” She hadn’t said that yet; people were so envious, and she was afraid of envious people. Superstitious, that’s what Maude was.

  An elderly gentleman who had entered aft
er her leaned toward her and said, “I think that chime’s for you, lady.” She started. There were still a lot of people in the room, but the ones she had seen had already gone. “Thank you,” she said with enormous politeness and rose with majesty and a flick of her wrist. She had seen that airy dismissing flick in one of those foreign movies; French or something. The old man smiled faintly and sadly. With a model’s sway she went to the farther door, opened it, and entered the stark blue and marble room beyond. Then she gawked. There was no one there at all, nothing but that tall marble chair with the blue velvet cushion and fringe, and a blue rounded drape over an alcove or something. Where was the psychiatrist?

  She cleared her throat. There was no sound. Had he gone out on a coffee break? All right, then! She could wait. She was honestly awful tired. She sat down in the chair, and admired the blue silk velvet on the arms. Real stuff, not that synthetic. She could tell. She took off her gloves, after a furtive glance at the hidden alcove, and felt the velvet. Just like the chairs at home when she had been a kid, except that some of the chairs had been pink and yellow silk velvet. But the quality was just as good as she remembered, maybe better. No! Nothing could be better than the chairs, and big Empire sofas, that had filled the drawing room of her childhood home. What did people know these days of drawing rooms? Family rooms, for heaven’s sake! Just cheap; just folksy. And that big white marble fireplace, exactly like that one in Harper’s last month, showing the home of one of the Rosenbergs in Paris, no, it wasn’t Rosenberg. It was—now, let me think a little, things sometimes slip my mind. Got it! Rockschild! No, not quite right. Rothschild! She felt quite triumphant at remembering. She looked complacently at the huge sparkling stone on her left hand, her engagement ring. How Jerry had laughed and kissed it when he had put it on his finger first to show how tiny the loop really was. It hardly covered the first joint of his little finger. Nothing cheap about Jerry Finch, God rest his extravagant soul. Everybody envied her that ring. “More at home,” she would say merrily, tossing her head. She would add, “No, I mean in the bank vault, where I keep all my stock and papers and extra cash. They’ll never catch me again like that bank holiday ’way back in Roosevelt’s time. I believe in lots of loose cash.”