There Was a Time

by Taylor Caldwell

  “Paul, you must promise me not to do it again. This is terrible! Paul, you know that the only hope we have of you boys’ obtaining an education is to win scholarships. How are you going to do it with this attitude? You are in your last year. The record you make during the next four years will determine your future. You know that I have no money—”

  “I know,” whispered Paul, with real and helpless grief.

  “Paul, you have always had such an excellent record at all your schools. You were always on the honor roll. Now, you are a truant! Paul, I just can’t stand it. I don’t know what it is all about. Promise me, Paul.”

  Paul was silent. Why did he follow Frank Clair everywhere, involving himself in dangerous and unpleasant situations? He did not know. He only knew that he would trail Frank, complaining: “We can’t do that, Frank, we can’t do that!” But they always did. There was something so exuberant, romantic about Frank, and Paul inevitably, and defenselessly, followed him. It was as if he were hypnotized!

  “Promise me, Paul,” Edward was pleading. He never disciplined his children; he never commanded them. It was his theory that one should “reason” with the young, and that there was something absurd in parental authority and pompousness.

  Paul had gone from him. His mind and thoughts were on that day on the ferry docks, when the ice floes had churned like the crunching and gritting of giant and hungry teeth! The Niagara River had been black as shining ink between the blue and gray cakes, and the spring sky had been an arch of ultramarine filled with crystal light. The boys had felt the heavy wall of cold air in their faces, and Paul, all at once, as he stood beside Frank, had known the uplifting and nameless ecstasy of freedom and joy. Always, he knew this ecstasy with Frank Clair. It was life to him, who had never known life before. When he approached his friend, it was as if he came into the aura of violet rainbows, the sound of musical thunder, and laughter and excitement and immense anticipation.

  “What’s school compared with this—and foolish books?” Frank had asked him, was always asking him. “Sunshine and air and light and beauty—aren’t they more important than dust and the thoughts of old dead men?”

  Paul had assented, with a still rapture, and he knew that his assent contained the ultimate truth.

  Now he was threatened with the cloister again, the old gray cloister of nothingness, of blankness, of the sound of dusty voices and the foggy movement of lightless days. No! He could not return to it. He could not relinquish the reflection of glory and splendor which touched him in the presence of his friend.

  He said dully: “I’ll try not to play truant again, Dad.” How could he say to his father: “You want me to die again, to be lifeless grub in the cocoon of loneliness and coldness?” He could not say it. He knew that Edward would never understand, and suddenly he was filled with pity for his father.

  It was this pity which made him refuse the next two invitations to truancy. He watched Frank slip away at noon, and he felt no smug righteousness but only a sense of loss and nostalgia. Where was Frank going? To what ebullient excitement and to what new discovery of grandeur and loveliness and strangeness?

  The next invitation came on an early day in March. The winter had been endless. Drifts, many feet high, had filled the streets, hidden the houses. Then, miraculously, there had come two or three days of clear mild weather, smiling, passionate, and the songs of returned robins had greeted new dawns in bursts of poignant music. Frank had said: “Let’s go away at noon. I’ve got ten cents. Have you any money? Fifteen cents? Swell. We can go across by ferry to Canada. I want to get out in the fields and the woods. I always go, on the first nice days. Nothing to see yet, of course, but there’s something—”

  Paul had slipped away. They could disappear like shadows, for all the watchfulness of the teacher. They went down to the ferry docks through silent hushed streets. They heard a hurdy-gurdy in the distance, playing the Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, and the song came through the aisles of the abandoned and ashen streets like the voice of all love and sweetness and hidden beauty, softened and melancholy. They heard hammering at a distance, too, and the sound was a hollow echo. They might have been alone in a dead city, in which only the song and the hammering were alive.

  The sky above them was pale, misty, through which the spring sun came in long and slanting bars, light from a far heaven. They invested five cents in a bag of peanuts, and blissfully chewed the nuts as they went aboard the deserted ferryboat. Now they were moving across the river. As far as they could see, to Lake Erie itself, there lay a blue mist. The ice floes about the boat were like restless sharks, bumping into the sides and careening off, and between them the water was the color of a cloudy turquoise. The Canadian shore awaited them, brown and sleeping in the sunlight.

  They were almost the only passengers to disembark. Now the wind was clear and strong in their faces, and cold and pure as crystal water. The little village of Fort Erie slept; here and there a farmer’s wagon rumbled through the cobbled streets. They climbed a hill, walked down a muddy road, heard the far barking of a dog, but saw nothing. Then, there lay the woods before them, and they plunged into them. They did not speak very much. It was not necessary now. They knew each other too well.

  Now the woods closed about them, slim pallid birches, old maples, chestnuts, beeches, elms. Their branches were still bare, but their limbs were softly brown, and pregnant with life. The buds on the maples had turned red and fat. The elms had tiny yellow tufts on the twigs. The birches were like tall and slender youths, naked and solemn. A white dim light pervaded the aisles of the trees, a misty light like a gentle fog. They could see the sky through the branches, pale, shadowy blue, and very far and serene. There was only silence, yet they heard the swell of life, the ground swell of nature coming awake after a long death.

  The ground all about them gleamed pallidly with pools of water. They saw ferns bending over marshy patches. Their boots sank into brown mud. Deeper and deeper they penetrated into the woods, hurrying, holding their breath as if escaping, as if fugitives. Now as far as they could see the woods had closed them in, and they were held against the heart of nature. Somewhere, there was a low and watery chuckle, but no other sound, not even the call of a bird.

  They stood side by side, and looked, and felt, and smiled at each other, and moved their arms as if just released from chains.

  How long they stood there they did not know. But then, all at once, as if some invisible choirmaster had lifted a baton, the woods, the swampy places, came alive, with a wild, sustained, passionate life of shrill, high, sweet piping. All the air was filled with it; the trees echoed it; the sky rang with it. They heard the voice of vivification, of birth emerging from death, of rapture, of hosannas to the spring. The song, almost unbearably joyous, did not rise and fall. It was sustained, steadfast, increasing in tone and intensity rather than in mere volume.

  The children listened in awe. They stood in the midst of the surging, the bursting forth of life, and their hearts rose on wings of agonized joy. Now it was at their very feet, all about them in the air, a choral ecstasy that was taken up in every direction.

  “Tree-toads,” whispered Paul.

  Frank did not answer. He knew now, though he had not known it before, that he had come for this, for this first paean to the spring. It had called to him in the dusty, chalky schoolroom. A message had been delivered to him as he sat at his desk while the teacher scrawled dull algebraic symbols on the blackboards. Pan, dressed in his green leaves, his eyes heavy with sleep, his gleaming hoofs tapping impatiently, had cried to him.

  He could not bear it. His eyes filled with tears. He turned to Paul. Paul saw those tears, and suddenly his own eyes were wet. They moved closer together.

  “Thank You—God,” Frank said in himself, and he felt a convulsion of mingled pain and solemn elation and gratitude that God had called him here, to listen to the promise and the voice of spring.

  A poem began to form in his mind, as he listened, as the piping pe
netrated to every cell of his mind and body. It would be part of the blank-verse poem he was writing now, a play-poem in three acts. He heard the measured majesty and flow of the poem, the lilting brightness of it.

  On the way home, he told Paul of the poem. They lingered in the silent muddy lanes, while Frank repeated a few lines. Paul listened, his eyes on his friend’s face. He was absorbed. It was as if he were hearing a voice that came from himself, which made articulate what he had always known but had never been able to express.

  “O strange and fearful world, where every morn

  Is full of solemn splendor and despair!

  Each breath we draw, each lift of hand and eye,

  Is filled with wonder and dark mystery.

  We live in marvels, question every hour

  By very living; hurl demands to gods

  In every heartbeat. And our smallest step

  Confounds the sage, refutes philosophy.

  Strange things, mysterious things, each filled with awe,

  Do by familiar presence lose their fear,

  Yet every one, if man but had the eye,

  Would smite him to the dust with hidden face.

  The gods are kind. So little is man endowed

  With power to see, with heart to beat with dread.

  Our very childlike blindness is our shield

  Against the unseen portents massed about.”

  “That’s beautiful,” said Paul, softly. “It is what I’ve always known, Frank, but I had no words for it.”

  Frank swaggered a little, tried to look modest. “Oh, it’s not very good. I try and try, and then just squeeze some little squeal out, not what I had in mind.” Now a sincere shadow of distress and longing touched his face. “I wonder if there is really any way a person could express it for what it actually is? Music, perhaps, only music. I wish I could play something. Words are so—so inadequate.”

  Paul did not answer. A shadow of suffering darkened his features. Then he said: “I hear it sometimes. But I can’t bring it out on the violin. I’ve stopped taking lessons. Dad was annoyed. But I—I didn’t dare go on. It was like”—he paused, and now he colored—“like a blasphemy, or something.”

  Frank’s hand rose awkwardly from his side; he touched his friend’s hand, and at that touch Paul’s heart swelled with unendurable pain. And yet he was comforted.

  They wandered down the silent lanes. Sometimes they saw a house, far back from the road, and heard a dog barking, or caught a glimpse of cattle in a wet meadow. They passed over a small wooden bridge that spanned a brown and rushing little stream. They could see the polished stones at the bottom, sparkling like laughter.

  Then they heard the whistles from Bison, over the water, and knew it was time to go home. Depression came to them. They turned back.

  They came to a wooden fence. Two little girls of their own age were perched on the wooden railing. Their heads were bare, and their yellow locks fluttered in the wind. They regarded Paul and Frank with inquisitive but wary friendliness, and their rosy faces dimpled coyly.

  Paul gave them a glance, and his own face closed, became almost lividly malignant. But Frank slowed down, hesitated, came to a momentary halt.

  “Hello,” he said.

  The girls giggled and blushed. One of them faltered: “Hello.”

  Frank was pleased at the sight of them. He stared at their roughened red hands, at their torn black stockings, at their broken, muddy shoes and poor clothing. He was filled with warm compassion and friendliness and understanding. This emotion had been growing in him during the past few years, so that he could not gaze upon others without a kind of sad tenderness, especially if they were harmless and intended no evil. For him the world was divided between the shy and the lonely, the frustrated and hopeless and yearning, and the vicious and cruel and heartless.

  “Come on,” muttered Paul. The light had gone from him, was replaced by uneasiness and aversion.

  But Frank lingered. He said: “Do you live here?”

  One of the girls nodded. She beamed at him. She teetered on the fence.

  “It’s nice to live here,” Frank offered.

  The girls gaped, astonished. They looked at each other. Then, simultaneously, they burst into laughter. They rocked on their perch. They regarded Frank with mocking and repudiating eyes, as if he had gone mad before them.

  Paul tugged at his arm. “You see,” he said harshly.

  They walked away, followed by the hysterical laughter of the girls.

  “You never learn,” said Paul angrily. “You know you can’t speak to people. ‘It’s nice to live here’! Do you think they knew what you meant? No! They could only laugh, like fools. That’s because almost everybody is a fool, and you won’t understand.”

  But Frank walked beside him, wrapped in sadness. He kept shaking his head. Then he spoke:

  “It’s terrible. They didn’t know at all. And that’s what’s so terrible—not knowing.”

  Then, all at once, he thought of Jessica, and he said to himself: But Jessica would have known! He did not know why he thought this, or why he saw Jessica’s face, but the thought was so vivid, and the memory of Jessica so over-poweringly strong, that he stopped and looked intensely at Paul.

  “What’s the matter?” asked the other boy.

  But Frank shook his head and went on. He could not tell his friend, and he did not know why this was, either, but he only knew he could not.

  CHAPTER 24

  Frank did not win the gold medal that spring for his essay. The subject chosen had been “Why We Owe So Much To Our Parents.” Frank simply could not think what he owed to his parents. His life? They had given it to him accidentally. Duty? What duty did he owe them, who saw in him only a source of expense, however meagre? Love? They deserved no love. They excited only his approhension, and, infrequently, his pity. Could he write an essay on the contemptuous pity he felt for his parents, for their increasing fears, their distrusts, their sullen suspicions, of everyone and everything?

  He wrote, instead, his poem about the song of the tree-toads in the white spring woods.

  It happened just then that this teacher died, and another teacher was installed in her place, a fat elderly little woman who bore a remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria. She was shrewd and humorous, intelligent and kind, and somewhat satirical. She, like Miss Emily Jones, was constantly on the alert for the unusual child, the child of promise as distinguished from the docile and well-mannered mediocrities who filled the other seats. It was her theory that the mediocrities exactly illustrated the words of a certain poet that such “licked the platter clean and died” and left behind them, as a legacy to the world, only a heap of offal. She could frankly see no reason for such lives, which she admitted were in the majority, though it was possible, she would say, that they form a sort of Greek chorus to the exploits of the hero.

  Miss Lois Bendy, then, had not been in charge of Frank’s class more than four days when she discovered him. She said to herself: “There is a very odd boy, indeed. Sometimes he looks hunted and surly.” She saw that the other children despised him, and she was certain that this alone would indicate something interesting and to his credit. When she called upon him for recitations, he would rise slovenly to his feet, and announce, under his breath, that he didn’t know. This would delight the other children, and Miss Bendy would listen to their laughter, her ears intensely alert. Yes, it was most certain that this boy was unusual. Mediocrities and fools never laugh at their own kind.

  When she had the compositions of the class first before her she knew at once. Frank had written a prose poem about the light that came in the schoolroom window, and how it changed, had a different substance, a different reality, each day, each week, each season.

  Miss Bendy smiled to herself with satisfaction. She was never wrong. She asked Frank to remain after school that day. He looked at her, startled, and she saw him glance at another boy in the room, with uneasiness. She followed that glance. Ah, that Paul Hodge,
that silent, impassive and frozen young fellow who was always correct, always ready for recitations, always punctual with his homework. What had these two in common? Then she recalled that she never saw one without the other, that they hovered, during recess, like unaware ghosts, on the edges of the other groups of children.

  She said instinctively: “Never mind, Frank. I’ll see you at noon. Then you won’t be kept after school.”

  Later she questioned Frank Clair. She saw that it would be hard to obtain his confidence. She did not look at him while speaking about his composition. There was only one error, a misplaced comma. She said kindly: “Did you really write this, dear? It is wonderful. A grown man, an accomplished writer, might have written this. If you really do this sort of work, then you have a great future.”

  She looked up then, and he saw her tiny, smiling gray eyes full of satirical kindness and friendly humor. He stammered: “Yes, I—I wrote it, Miss—Bendy. I write lots of things, all the time. I—I’ve written a book, a play, in poetry.” Now his long pale face flushed deeply. “If you want me to, I’ll b-bring them to you.”

  He stared at her, and swallowed visibly. “I—I had a teacher once, Miss Jones. But I—I found out she was dead.”

  Miss Bendy found nothing irrelevant in this remark. She understood immediately. But she said cheerfully: “Oh, I knew Emily Jones. Such a fine woman! She was your teacher? How lucky for you! Yes, dear, bring me your book and your poems. I’d love to see them. Really, Frank, I’d love to see them.”

  He brought a huge batch the next day, wrapped in newspaper. She looked at the pages, and again she understood, but now there was rage in her. Some of the pages were sheets torn from the backs of books; some were toilet paper. Some were bags which had carefully been taken apart, and smoothed, and some were even fragments of wallpaper, on whose difficult surface the pencil writing was hardly discernible. Reverse sides of lesson papers had been utilized, and cardboard. There were very few sheets of ordinary tablet paper. But all the miscellaneous papers had been carefully cut to a conventional size, and all were neatly numbered.