There Was a Time

by Taylor Caldwell

  As pure grief and shock slowly subsided from their acute crescendo, loneliness closed in about Frank Clair. Loneliness like a sound-proof glass wall through which he could gaze at others, see their gestures, catch distorted views of their faces, but hear no voice. He rumbled along in the groaning streetcars of Bison, and the people about him spoke in an alien language which he could not understand, and their eyes passed through him as if he were not there.

  The sun had literally gone from him. There was only the glare of stage lights on crudely painted, two-dimensional back-drops. Desolation walked about him, echoing. For him, the city was dead. He wandered through familiar streets. He saw sunsets. He sat on benches at Front Park, and looked at the river. He saw the spring, the summer, the ruddy fall, the blazing blue winter. But glory had gone from it all, and wonder, and delight. He could not read. The spring of fancy, of color, of vitality, of exaltation and joy, had subsided into the wasteland of choking sand, and he had neither the desire nor the inspiration to write again. Numbed, silent, bereft and empty, he went to work, ate, slept, and felt nothing in himself but dejection and anguish. All about him lay a dead garden, in which a dry wind rustled, and dead grasses bent, and the withered flowers hung on their yellow stalks.

  On a dewy lilac evening in April, he heard that America had declared war on Germany. He saw the bustle of excitement in the streets, the groups gathered on corners, passing papers from hand to hand. Somewhere there was the sound of an excited drum. The streetcars buzzed with comment and raised voices. But to him it was all a meaningless stir of idiocy, the unrelated, irrelevant sounds and voices of nightmare.

  Maybelle said to him uneasily, one night: “Sonny, why don’t you get a companion? I know you haven’t been yourself since Paul went away. Isn’t there anyone in the factory you could talk to? And bring home for tea? Some young chap your own age?”

  He felt the hesitant concern in her voice, and he looked at her squarely as he had not looked at her for years. Her slightly protruding brown eyes were soft with anxiety. He smiled at her. The muscles of his face moved stiffly. He said: “There isn’t anyone, Ma.”

  “But look around, Frankie! There’re lads on this street. You could go to a show with them, or the beach.” She hesitated again. “I could squeeze out a dollar or two. You don’t go to the library any more. You don’t read. Look at the papers! Aren’t you interested in the war? If it keeps on, they’ll take you.”

  He was touched. A hand had encountered his in the darkness, a calloused and uncertain hand. He thought: I guess she does care about me a little. He tried to smile again.

  “I wouldn’t care if I went into the Army.”

  The monstrous spiritual pain which had afflicted him during the first months of Paul’s absence came back like the sudden stroke of a sword on his heart, and he felt the blazing impact again. He got up and left the table.

  Francis had been afraid that his son might “get to know girls, and waste money.” If Frank became like a lot of callow young lads, he might even marry and deprive his parents of wages. But Frank saw neither male nor female about him, only shadows.

  “That Paul doesn’t write to him often now,” Maybelle complained. “It used to be every day or so. Now it’s only twice a month, sometimes less. But it’s not Paul’s fault, I fancy. I found one of his letters. He asked Frankie why he didn’t write.”

  “Moonstruck,” commented Francis, sourly. “You’d think he’d take an interest. War going on, and the world in a turmoil. And he walks around like in a dream. And I thought he was bucking up! He’ll never amount to anything. He’s a failure. He’ll just jog along at a daily wage. No ambition.”

  “I try to wake him up,” said Maybelle miserably. “If he’d only eat. He’s nearly seventeen, and he looks like a rail. No flesh. He might be going into a decline.”

  But Francis ended the conversation, as he ended all conversations that annoyed and bored him, by coughing violently. Now he did not look at his handkerchief, for once or twice he had tasted something salty on his tongue. He had his own troubles, God knew! And now his wife mithered him about a stupid lump of a lad who didn’t know when he was well off. Some chaps had good sons, who had ambitions and saved money and were a pleasure to their parents. It was his bad luck that he had a dolt for a son who in two years had had an increase of only two dollars a week.

  Now Francis began to tell Maybelle that after the war they would surely return to England. There were ten thousand dollars in the bank now. Two thousand pound! A fortune. Francis was beginning to feel a pressing sense of hurry, of anxiety, though he could not have told why. Maybelle became reasonably happy and full of anticipation. She talked to Frank about England. “Don’t you remember our old home, lovey?” she urged. “Reddish Vale, and Sandy Lane? Our own land? Think how happy we’ll be, home again!”

  Her words penetrated to Frank’s consciousness, but he experienced no reaction in himself. England. Why, England wasn’t his home. This was his country. For the first time there was a faint and protesting stir in him. This was his country! He read the paper that night with a new interest. He saw photographs of Bison young men going to the station, marching in young and exultant ranks, led by a band. Why, he had heard that band that day, and everyone in the little factory had run out to see the passing of the young sacrifices to Moloch, to a world’s stupidity and blindness and tardiness. But he had not gone out. He wished he had gone. And now, again for the first time, there was a dull aching in his atrophied heart, a feeble moving of congealed and sluggish blood.

  What was the war about? Germany had invaded Belgium and France. The Kaiser threatened. Woodrow Wilson replied in sorrowful and measured tones. “The war to end war.” “Make the world safe for democracy.” What was it about? He thought of the children in the German schools, and a little tongue of fire licked his dull mind. It did not matter what the war was about; the Allies intended to kill as many Germans as possible. That was the only important fact, the only relevant and justifiable fact. To kill Germans. Power politics, aggressions, struggles, the clash of arms: these were nothing in the end, compared with the necessity to kill as many Germans as possible, men, women and children.

  That night Maybelle again reiterated her plea that he “find a companion.” It was silly, but the next morning he made himself look at his fellow-workers with interest and forced speculation. Many of them were young; they might soon be going to war. Now voices and faces had relevance. They rushed in upon him.

  The operator of his machine sat high on a stool, moving levers and gears. She was a woman, not more than twenty-five. She had the peasant’s thick features, but she also had an alert concentration about the eyes and mouth, and she did her work competently and swiftly. Frank looked up at her that morning and smiled. He said aloud: “Hello, Elsie.”

  She glanced down at him and gave him a wry grin. “Hello, deaf-mute,” she responded. “Found your tongue? Why all the interest, all of a sudden? See me for the first time?”

  “Yes,” he replied, seriously. “I guess I do.”

  She scrutinized him critically. “I’m sure flattered. Say, you aren’t a bad-looking kid, just kind of funny. Wish you was older. You could take me out.”

  She began to sing: “K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy!”

  Frank, to his amazement (for he was not aware that he had ever heard the foolish song before), joined in:

  “You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore!”

  “Listen to him, guys!” shouted Elsie, pleased, to her fellows nearby. “The dead’s come to life!”

  He ate his lunch that noon with several of the others. He sat beside Elsie, who felt that, in some way, she had something to do with his resurrection. He studied each face and each pair of worn, calloused hands carefully, and with objective interest.

  There was the foreman, a short, fat little Hungarian, who had been christened Tom by his subordinates, though he had a much more complicated name. His face was as round and golden as an autumn moon, and he had tiny little twinkli
ng eyes, sly, hard and humorous. He sat on a bench, a smelly, solid little keg of a man, and brought out for his friends small Hungarian cakes which his wife had made. What pastries! Frank ate one with appreciation and looked hungrily for another. Tom gave him another and eyed him curiously.

  “I got a kid nineteen,” he said, munching. “He’ll be called up in the draft. Now, I’m a Hunky, and my country’s fighting the Allies. But know what I said to the old woman last night? ‘See here, Austria-Hungary ain’t our country no more. Look what this country’s done for us. Don’t we own our own house? Ain’t we got a bank account and enough to eat? Ain’t folks been good to us?’ That’s what I said, and my boy—he’s the one that got a scholarship to the University of Bison—he said: ‘Pa, you’re damn right. This is my country, and she’s goin’ to get all I got to give her. That’s what.’”

  A little frail girl, obviously consumptive, looked up eagerly: “They got these girls, now, in the Navy. Yeomanettes. Thought I’d join up. But me, I ain’t got no education. They want girls that can pound a typewriter. But I can buy liberty bonds. I’m buying one—so much every week.” She coughed hoarsely, and the others looked at her with sympathy.

  The tall thin shipping clerk, a dour, red-faced man in his forties, munched his sandwiches and drank cold coffee. “Well, we get more money now, don’t we? Heard we was to get a raise. He’s gotta do it. All the folks’re goin’ in the war plants. Curtiss is yellin’ for hands. Anybody kin get a job now for big money. Why, I heard they was payin’ shippin’ clerks thirty-five dollars a week down at Curtiss! My old woman says: ‘What you workin’ down there for, for twenty-two dollars a week?’ Besides, it’s patriotic.”

  Every face became thoughtful and reflective.

  “Yep, big money goin’ around now,” admitted Tom. He cleared his throat. “Now this here bindery work: it ain’t so important, to win the war. Wouldn’t blame anybody who got more money in Curtiss. Jeez! Money’s hard to get.”

  “Gotta make hay while the sun shines,” observed Elsie wisely. “Me, I’m a good machine hand, and my sister’s girlfriend says they’re paying machine hands up to thirty dollars a week down at Curtiss. Maybe she’s lyin’. Who ever heard of machine hands gettin’ thirty dollars a week? It won’t hurt to look around, though, and find out.”

  “Money’s money,” said Tom. “And I’d like to see some real jack. Gettin’ old now. What’ll I do when I can’t work? I hear they got a union at Curtiss. Ought to have had unions long ago. Remember that kid that got his fingers chopped off in the machine two months ago? Well, that’s all he got: two fingers chopped off. If we get our heads knocked off, it’s too damn bad. Know what I read in the papers? That American workingmen are just like workers in India or China. No damages, no help, if they lose their legs or arms. There’s that I.W.W. International Workers of the World, guess it is. Think we ought to have workman’s compensation when we get our hands chopped off, or somethin’. Make the big guys pay. Now we just starve to death.”

  “Oh, that’s them Roosians,” said the shipping-clerk, with wise scorn. “I.W.W.!”

  “You talk like a damn fool!” exclaimed Elsie. “What if it is Roosians? Does it make it any different who talks about us getting protection? Look at my dad. He worked for a company that had a railroad in its back yard. He loaded crates. One of ’em slipped and mashed his foot. Just like a potato. Us kids was only little shavers; oldest twelve. Well, Dad got blood poison’, and he died, and the old lady had to take in washin’, and she got pneumonia. That was when I was fourteen. Did Dad get any money for his foot? No! No, Ma had to die, and leave the whole shebang of us. I had to leave school, and was I good at algebra! Might’ve got a job in an office and made some decent money. But no, I hadda go to work, and my brother Jim sold newspapers, and then he had to leave school, and just as soon as the other kids was fourteen, they left. If we’d had compensation, Ma wouldn’t ’a’ died, and we coulda gone right on at school, and things woulda been hunky-dory.”

  Her intelligent dark face twisted. She did not speak of the pretty little sister who had been forced into prostitution because she was not “bright” enough to hold a job as a bundle girl in a department store. Sweet little Mamie! Now she was in a charity hospital, dying, rotting away.

  The others spoke of similar cases in their own families, or among their friends. Money. The terrible, driving, tragic need for money. Not money to save, “to hide in a hedge,” but just money for bread, for safety, for a roof, for clothing, for medical care. Money for life. Money for the right to breathe, and to be a human being. Money for the protection of children. Money, money!

  Frank listened. Money was no new refrain to him. But this was a different kind of money, a most frightful necessity. It was not money for the bank; not money to attain a certain goal. Money for existence! Money, blood, life, air, shelter! It was money that was the supreme difference between a man and a beast, and without money one was only a dog, an outcast, less than beef cattle.

  Frank had seen poverty all his life, first in England, then in America. He had seen it in his own home on Albany Street. (But there was a difference in his own home: poverty there was self-willed. It was deliberate.) He had seen it, this dreadful poverty, in almost all the streets of Bison. He had smelled it, and it had smelt of that most appalling stench: fear in every house. Yet, it had not reached him, who had walked in rainbow dreams. He had always had enough to eat; he had always been sure of a bed. His clothing, though poor and patched and grotesque, had at least kept him warm and protected from the weather. No, it had not touched him, that skeleton hand, and its stench had not reached his nostrils with any insistent meaning.

  Now he saw it as it was. The opaque cloud that had been over his eyes so long lifted, and he saw the faces of his fellow-workers, anxious, brooding, tired faces, dusty with the grit of fear. And now he was frightened and enraged. Why, they had nothing but their hands, and if their hands failed them, then they must starve! It was not to be borne. The threat hovered like a dark mist over the city. It swirled in this dusty packing room. It haunted the machines. It stood like a ghost of ruin in every streetcar. There was no refuge from it.

  He had seen so many dull faces in his life, beaten faces, crushed faces. They had vaguely, and with so much more reason than he knew then, depressed him. He had thought the thick patina over those faces the evidence of pure brutish stupidity, and had avoided them. But now he knew what it was. It was poverty, the frightful need for sufficient money; it was terror.

  He felt no compassion, now, for these people about him. Compassion, like color and glory, exaltation and joy and mystery, had gone from him with the going of Paul Hodge. He felt only a grim fear and anxiety. Some way, somehow, he must have money! But how? He was receiving so very little. He could hardly support himself on it when his parents returned to England. (There was no question in his mind about returning. He would stay.) What was he to do? He would be as insecure as these when he was alone. He must make money!

  “What you thinking about, kid?” asked Elsie, nudging him.

  He started and looked up. “I—I was thinking about money,” he confsesed.

  She nodded grimly. “Don’t we all! You know, I been working here a long time, but it never comes Saturday night that I don’t get the chills. What if the pink slip’s in my envelope? What’ll I do? I still got a kid brother at school, and he’s bright! I ain’t got but fifty dollars saved. Never could seem to get enough together to save. Never made enough.” She looked at her scarred and calloused hands and shook her head. “All these years of me working, and only fifty dollars to show! Do I buy nice clothes? I got only two camisoles to my name, and three pair stockings, one extra serge skirt, and one cotton blouse. That’s all. What if I get sick? Say, I’ve been so sick my head nearly fell off some mornings. But do I stay off? You can bet your life I don’t! My kid brother needs specs. I been saving fifty cents a week. Gotta have ten dollars. Know what I heard? In Germany, they got what they call sick and unemployment insurance
. Think of it! You get thrown out of a job, and they pay you. You get sick, and you go to a free doctor. When you’re old, you get a pension—”

  “Oh—!” said the shipping clerk. “God damn lie, most likely. Anyway, that’s Germany. We’re free an’ independent Americans. That sounds like Roosians, anyway.”

  “Russia,” said Frank, stiffly, “is under the Czars, and they’re slaves, there. They have nothing at all.”

  “Well, anyways,” said the shipping clerk, “there’s Roosians here, stirrin’ up trouble. I.W.W.! Want to make socialists outta us. Free, independent Americans!”

  “Don’t know anythin’ about socialists,” said Elsie, dryly. “But, by Jeez, I don’t care what you call it, if I get money for my brother’s specs, and I don’t starve if I ain’t got no job!”

  “Now if any of yez should go down to Curtiss and get good jobs, I ain’t goin’ to blame you,” said the foreman, clearing his throat with embarrassment. He grinned. “Why don’t one of you go down and let me know? Maybe I’ll do it myself!”

  Money, I must have money! thought Frank. Not to save it, perhaps, but to use it, to build a fortress with it. He looked down at his patched and faded overalls, and for the first time he loathed his shabbiness, revolted against it with an intensity that almost nauseated him. If he had money, he could buy decent and respectable clothing. He could travel. He could see the world. He could go down and see Paul—

  He thought of Paul’s home and his father. Why hadn’t he seen before in what dire and horrible poverty the Hodges had lived? Why hadn’t it reached him, with understanding? Why hadn’t he been sickened at it? I must have money, money, money! I must have it to get away from this ugliness, this stench of fear, this quagmire of hopelessness. I must have it to get away from these disgusting people!

  He looked at the faces about him and hated them. They were his enemies, because they were poor, and had no hope; because they could do nothing but suffer, like dumb cattle before the whip of a driver. They had no guts! They had no strength. They complained, but their complaint was impotent and futile. They were ugly! They were detestable.