Frank’s mouth became ugly. “Because I want money,” he said. Because I want you, he added to himself.
He saw that her smooth face had turned scarlet with her emotions and that her eyes blazed. He was astounded at the passion in her voice, for he had thought her so composed, so cool, so invulnerable, made of different flesh. He had wanted that different flesh, which knew no fear, which was invincible and strong, an alien humanity at once precious and superior and immune. And so he suddenly hated her, was enraged against her for revealing herself to be no more than himself and all the others that he had known. She was a combination of old Tim Farley, Wade O’Leary, Mr. Preston, who believed a man’s first service was to his fellows. She was one of those sentimentalists who thought that, for their fat and complacent pleasure, an “artist” should be content to work and starve in a garret, demanding no reward but the satisfaction of giving sustenance and “inspiration.” She was one of the maudlin who did not believe that a writer was worthy of his hire.
Now his expression became brutal and savage. His was a nature slow to anger, but vindictive and ruthless when finally aroused. He felt no regret, no alarm, when he realized that he had lost her and all that she was, for he did not believe that he could want one so degradingly like those he had despised for their sentimentality. She was coarse and common. What he had loved in her—her composure, her aloofness, her imagined superiority—did not exist and had existed only in his jejune imagination.
Fearless of her now, he spoke in a hard low voice: “I want money, because it will help me to escape from those I hate, because it will free me from the sight and the smell of them. You don’t know the poor; you can’t imagine how horrible they are. And I can get money only by giving the people what they want; they give money only to those who serve them. I am not an impudent fool. I’m not so impertinent as to think I know what is ‘best’ for the public, and I have no right to push things down their throats when they don’t want them.”
She had become very still, even reflective, as he spoke. She sat down again, very slowly, and looked up at him with quiet and level eyes. She said almost indifferently: “You sound so defiant, as if you really thought wanting money was somehow immoral. That’s sentimental.”
He was surprised and startled. He had expected anything but this. He could only regard her in silence, frowning.
She laughed a little, abruptly. “Yes, sentimental, and just a trifle precious. Look, now, you know you want money, and you want it terribly, yet some kind of Methodism in your subconscious thinking tries to tell you that wanting money is sort of vicious, and you are childishly defiant. That’s all so silly.
“All right, then, you want money. There is nothing dishonorable in that, nothing vile. Every sensible man wants money; I might even say every moral man wants it. I think it is immoral not to want property and affluence of a major or minor degree. Not to want them shows that a man has no self-respect and no desire for his own welfare. Lacking these, he can’t possibly have any of the other virtues either. So that makes him immoral, unless he is an ascetic or a saint. A poor man must be contemptible in the sight of the angels, ‘poor’ in all things.”
He was more surprised than ever, then suddenly gratified and relieved. He was wrong, then. She was indeed superior; she had his own contempt for the poverty-stricken and the hopeless. What he did not know was that she read his thoughts very acutely. Now her fine dark brows drew together. I can’t reach him, she said to herself. He reads a different meaning entirely into whatever I say.
She went on: “Wanting money, then, for your self-respect and your welfare, is virtuous and moral. But I don’t think you want money for self-respect and your own welfare, and that is where you are immoral.”
“What do I want it for, then?” he asked angrily.
“I don’t know. That is what I’d like to find out. I may be wrong, but I think you think that having money will ‘elevate’ you to some superior class, or something, and free you from something you hate. In short, I think your reasons for wanting money are disgusting, and that’s what makes you dangerous, not only you, yourself, but your writing.”
She glanced at the crystal box near her on the table, and he opened it and gave her a cigarette. He took one himself. He lit them both, blew out the match. The maid brought in a silver tray on which stood a seltzer bottle and a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. Jessica glanced at them when the maid had gone. Frank mixed two drinks and gave one to Jessica. He sat down and began to sip his. Jessica seemed to have forgotten him, she was so thoughtful. But his original excitement and sense of power had returned. He no longer stood in awe of her, she had voluntarily come too close to him for that.
“There is no danger in anything I write. There is just money,” he said, smiling at her indulgently.
But she frowned as if she thought him childish. “When I read your stories in the magazines, they made me restless. I thought I saw something in them that could be”—she paused—“liberated. I know that is a sentimental word, but I can’t think of any other. Something was missing in your writing, but there was a hint of it here and there.”
He was angry again. Mr. Mason, Mr. Preston—they both had spoken of the “missing something.” This was becoming irritating. Then, for no reason at all, he saw Mr. Hawkins’ lean cold face and pale blue eyes.
Jessica continued, almost idly: “What are you afraid of, Frank?”
Afraid! They all came back to that, in a stupid, monotonous refrain.
“I’m not afraid of anything,” he replied furiously.
“Yes, you are. And that is why you are so full of hate. And because you hate, you are dangerous. You and Hitler ought to have a great deal in common. It’s too bad you can’t meet. He is terrified, and so he hates, and because he hates he has to have a victim. He is symptomatic of the German people; he is symptomatic of the whole world. What are we all afraid of? I sometimes think I know. We are afraid of one another, because we know what we ourselves are. We know we are hideous and godless and hopeless, that we are completely evil. We are like condemned prisoners who glare at each other murderously through the bars. Knowing what is in our own minds, we know what is in the minds of others.”
She put down her drink and looked at it somberly. “You know, of course, that there will be a war. The attacker will claim to be the attacked. Because he wants to kill. And he wants to kill because he hates, and he hates because he is afraid.”
“There won’t be a war,” said Frank sullenly.
“And if there is, you won’t care, will you?”
“No.” he added bitterly: “You are wrong. I’m not afraid of anything.”
He stood up. The old mysterious depression was on him again, the old flatness and undesire and misery. Jessica watched him. “You must know,” she said gently, “that only you matter. If you are to say anything of importance that will help all the rest of us, you’ve got to begin with yourself.”
He laughed contemptuously. “Now you are being sentimental again. Don’t you know that no writer is of any importance? Lots of fools think that writers have significance and power, and that they are of value. They aren’t. I’ve had to learn that.”
“But you believed it at one time, didn’t you?”
He was silent.
Jessica sighed. “It’s too bad. Everything’s subjective, you know, and I think that if a sane man believes he is of value, he really is.”
She stood up and gave him her hand. Her eyes were sad. “Please forgive me if I’ve offended you in any way. But it seemed awfully important for me to—for me—” She could not go on. Whatever she might say would sound grandiloquent or too intimate.
He held her hand and said: “May I come to see you again, soon?”
“Yes, of course.” She appeared very tired.
He had only to relinquish her hand gently and go. But just as his fingers were slackening, some impulse made him grasp her hand more firmly. He felt the pulse in her flesh. He saw her pale and weary face, her beauti
ful dark eyes and finely molded lips. He forgot his fears, his suspicions, his self-consciousness and inferiority. He exclaimed: “Jessica! Oh, Jessica!”
How terrible, how ridiculous this was, that he and she should stand facing each other like strangers, like two who meet casually and part vaguely, without interest! He did not care if he offended her now, or whatever else happened. He wanted her to know, he wanted her to understand. He went on, in a loud and rapid voice: “Jessica, this is all wrong, everything we’ve said to each other. You’ll probably kick me out, but I’ve got to tell you. All this time, while I was working, I was thinking of you, and wanting you, and living for the time when I could be here with you. I have an idea that all this—what I’ve tried to do—doesn’t mean much to you, and that you think I’ve been a fool. Perhaps I have; I don’t know. But nothing matters but wanting to be with you, and hoping that you won’t turn me away, but that you’ll let me come and talk to you sometime—”
Her face changed. In the beginning, she had tried to withdraw her hand, but now it lay in his quietly, even warmly. She smiled; her mouth softened and her eyes brightened. She listened to him eagerly, expectantly. Then she came a little closer to him.
He took her other hand now. She was still smiling up at him.
“You’ve wasted so much time, coming around to this,” she said, with a small, quick laugh. “I’ve been miserable the last few days. I waited for you to come. And then all we could do was to fly into a political discussion, like a pair of fools! It’s amazing, isn’t it, that we’ve seen each other only twice, and yet we seem to know everything about each other—?”
His hands tightened on hers. “You’re wrong, Jessica.” He sounded breathless. “We met a long time ago. I thought it was a dream, until that day I came to sell you stockings, and I recognized the house.”
She exclaimed: “I knew it! But where was it? I, too, began to think it was a dream.”
He told her, and she listened intently, trying to remember. But it was no use; she could not even remember the pink dress and the pink ribbon in her hair. What could she tell him, so that he would not be too disappointed? And then she realized that details did not matter. She remembered him, had dimly recognized him, though the circumstances surrounding their first meeting as children might never rereturn to her.
She said: “It seems to me that I’ve always known you. It seems to go back into eternity.”
She held up her mouth to him simply, and he kissed her. In a way, his kiss was virginal, for what he had known of women before this had been nothing, a nausea, a revulsion. Here was passion and fulfillment. It was different from anything else he had ever known, and it was incredible.
He said: “I love you.” Never in all his life had he ever said those words before, and he felt wonder in himself. He repeated it for the miracle it was: “I love you, Jessica.”
“And I love you too, Frank,” she said, again lifting her mouth to his.
No one had ever said this to him in all his life, not even his mother. He could not believe it. He said: “Say it over and over, Jessica.”
“I love you,” she repeated, and now there were tears in her eyes. “Frank, I love you for just what you are, and for nothing else. Just you, Frank. You must remember that.”
CHAPTER 70
Frank Clair walked through the streets of Bison, and saw none of them. When he had been a child, he had walked this way, lost yet alive, exalted and unseeing. Once, when he was ten years old, he had read of young beggars who had found strange stones or trinkets on the road, had picked them up, turned them over, and had discovered a magic word that made the world their own. For years thereafter he searched the alleys and the streets and the gutters for the wondrous amulet. And now, as he walked, he remembered and smiled, and thought: I have found it.
He had found it, he knew, because someone loved him. To someone, he was the beloved, the one loved above all others. “I love you for just what you are,” she had said. He had no need to “prove” himself; there was no necessity to bring gifts to bribe and attract and compel admiration. It was necessary only to be himself, to be Frank Clair. It did not seem possible; it was a miracle.
It seems a miracle to me, he thought, because, unknown to me until just this minute, I have always believed I was a poor thing, not to be liked for what I am, but always compelled to appease, to do what others wished, to placate, to buy a grudging acceptance. Why was this? Was it because my parents really did inoculate me with their belief that I was worthless, a failure, something to be despised, a kind of monster? If so, why did I believe them? And why has it taken me all these years to realize that I have members and limbs and organs like other men, and that, like other men, I can stand alone to be rejected or accepted? Why have I always been so afraid? I can look at my fear now and know that I have always been afraid, even when I despised fear the most. I repudiated it. It has always been with me. Until now.
He walked on. The sun became a red round ball peering through trees. But he did not see it. The ghost of his father walked with him. It had walked with him before, and when it had done so he had vilified it and defied it and detested it. But now it crept beside him, pathetic, lonely, and very tired. He felt it there, but he did not hate it. He thought: My father walked these very streets, but he saw something I don’t see now, though I know I have seen it many times before. He saw Fear.
What must it have been like, to have known that fear, to have lived with it, to have smelt its corruption in every room, in every street, in every trolley car, in every corridor? To have seen it in every face, against windows glancing with sunlight, in every doorway, in the very shadows of the trees, the very corners of every house, in the shape and form of every stranger! To have heard it echo in every voice, in every footstep, in the rustle of foliage, the rattle of every passing vehicle, in every laugh or cry or shout, at dawn, at noon, at night!
What must it have been like, to Francis Clair, this world, this sun and moon and stars? A universe of dread, of apprehension, of terror, full of grotesque threat, of ominous portent, of sinister and personal meaning. What horrible and pathetic egotism must have made Francis believe that the vastness of life was directed towards him with baleful intent, like a single gigantic eye turned only upon him, like a single great hand lifted to smash him, flatten him, crush out his life! No wonder he had hoarded talismans against this enormous menace bent on his destruction: rabbits’ feet, pierced coins, four-leaf clovers, a chain woven of dried grass. There was no humor in his hundred magic acts of placating or outwitting a malevolent fate, a universe out to frustrate, defeat or obliterate him. He had infected poor Maybelle with his obscure but looming terrors, so that a normally healthy and courageous young woman had become a gibbering and cruel hag of fear. He had made of his wife a trembling and brutal shadow of himself, concerned with talismans and all the abracadabra of circumventing a ferocious destiny.
How could they have endured living like this? Why had they not died years before of their terrors and their fears? Only the intrinsic toughness of the human body, the iron substance of the human brain, must have kept them alive in that wilderness of menace and fulmination. Frank saw his parents scuttling frantically about their rooms at the unaccustomed sound of a doorbell or a knock. He saw them swiftly and frenziedly pulling down shades, or peeping furtively around the edge of lace curtains, or running away to a back room, there to whisper like fugitives from some secret police, their faces white in the dusk, their eyes strained, their hands clenched together. The caller, a salesman, or a neighbor, would eventually drift away, but it would be quite some time before the shade went up, the curtain was no longer peeped out from behind, the door was unlocked, and voices were allowed once more to rise above a whisper.
My God! thought Frank, his feet pounding faster on the warm July pavements. What was the matter with them? What did they fear? The calamities that come to all men? Why couldn’t they understand that pain and suffering and loss and death are the common lot, and that men develop fo
rtitude and faith against them? Why did they believe that they, and they alone, were marked for horror and destruction? They had only to look about them and see the spectres on every doorstep. But within the other houses the men and women laughed and loved, and, in courage, tried to forget the last inevitable moment when they must answer the somber knocking.
Frank thought of his parents again, and now without hatred. The hatred had fallen from him like dried scabs, and though the scars remained, they were beginning to heal. He thought of his parents with pity and compassion and grief. He remembered their cruelty, and he said to himself: They were cruel because they were afraid. They hated and suspected every living thing because they were afraid.
He looked about him and was dimly surprised. He had arrived at The Front. He was standing near a bench on the lip of the long green hill that ran down to the railroad tracks and to the river. He sat down on the bench. The river, mysteriously shadowed under the setting sun, ran in long amethystine waves. Like waves, too, scarlet fire flowed up into the zenith, palpitating. An ephemeral light, spectral and soft, like gray veils, moved over the earth. The trees stood in warm and dusky silence. Now a breeze ran whispering through the paling air, and Frank felt it on his face. He lit a cigarette and smoked. Peace and tranquillity began to stir in him, to come alive. He looked at the running river and the fiery sky, and he saw them as he had seen them in his childhood, deep, portentous, full of meaning and majesty, no longer flat, no longer painted, no longer empty.
Yes, he thought, my parents hated because they were afraid. It is a terrible thing to be afraid. It is a terrible thing to have on your conscience that some man is afraid of you. My father began by fearing his mother. His fear broadened, and darkened all the world for him. It made him vicious and brutal. It finally killed him, but not before he destroyed my mother, and almost destroyed me.
Surely, he thought, if any man has cause to fear you, then count yourself among the accursed of God. If you are a white man, and a Negro lives in terror of you, if you are a Gentile, and a Jew exists under a shadow because of you, if your neighbor watches in dread your coming and going, if a face darkens anxiously at the sight of your face, then you are doomed, and all that you do, all that you believe, all that you think, all your risings and your sleepings, your eatings and your drinkings, your household and your children, are ill-fated and execrable, and you live under the threat of death.
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