She paused, hoping the latter artful statement had penetrated to that dull and sluggish brain behind the boy’s blank face. But he said nothing. She thought: I doubt if he knows how to speak. I haven’t heard him say a word all day.
She knew fresh relief. But still, his stained and dusty clothing, his bruises, had to be explained.
She carried him downstairs to her musty little sitting room, sat him down in the semi-darkness, shut the door behind her, and waited for Francis Clair.
Frank was alone, as he had not been alone all day. He lay back in the horsehair chair, and closed his eyes. A frightful exhaustion overpowered him. He sank into semi-sleep, retreating away from the aching of his body.
Years later he remembered that dark and silent half hour. Had he later dreamed that he was a child again, in that little dank parlor, and had another dream flowed into that one? He could not know.
But somewhere, after a time, there was mauve twilight and mauve rain, and a woman standing with white lilacs in her arms, her eyes shining in the dusk. Somewhere, peace and all sweetness, and the smell of the lilacs all about him, and silver drops falling in the silence. Somewhere a thrush singing far in the dimness of unseen woods, and those shining eyes gazing at him with so deep a love and tenderness. He could feel the fulfilment in his heart. Yes, yes, it must have been a dream, for he was a man, not a child, as he had dreamt it!
Miss Ballister met Francis at the door and gave him a slightly changed and expurgated version of the affair. Frank had been naughty. He had thrown an ink-pot at a child. But perhaps it had been only childish high spirits, after all. She, Miss Ballister, understood high spirits. Of course, it was unfortunate, and she was very vexed with little Frank. But the least said the soonest mended. Shall we not forget it, Mr. Clair? I am sure that little Frank is very sorry, and these things do happen among children.
Francis was aghast. He could only stammer his abject apologies. He could not know that Miss Ballister was worried about her extra four shillings a week, worried lest some natural paternal concern might cause him to doubt her story, especially when he saw the child. She need not have alarmed herself. Francis Clair was too abject, too frightened, too craven a man, to feel anger for a palpable injury done to a child, especially where his precarious social position was concerned. In truth, had Miss Ballister told him the real story, including the assault on Frank by the depraved Bobbie Tompkins, Francis would have exclaimed: “Good job! Serves him right!” Tompkins was a rich man; his children were sacrosanct. Francis, the chronically fearful, and possessed of quite an imagination, would have had visions of lawsuits directed against himself.
He was overwhelmed by Miss Ballister’s graciousness. The woman, the lady, was so damned civil and well-bred! There she stood, making such kind excuses for the little beggar, and pleading with him with her eyes not to be angry at him! He was touched to the heart, and infuriated that his boy had dared to cause her a moment’s inconvenience. So much above him, too, she was. One could see her breeding, her gentility. And there she stood, talking to him, Francis Clair, as if he were her equal! A phrase rang through his tumultuous mind: “‘Kind hearts are more than coronets—and Norman blood.’” It was plain to see she had “Norman blood.” It would serve the little devil right if she expelled him, that it would!
“He is really such a nice little boy,” Miss Ballister was saying, enthusiastically, her mental eye sternly fixed on the four shillings. “We’ve had such a jolly time together. He read his little book, and asked me to tell him what the pictures meant. Perhaps he was just a wee bit excited over it all. In looking back, I can almost believe he did not know what he was doing! I had been telling him the tale of Jack the Giant-Killer, and it might possibly be—yes, it might possibly be—that he was reaching for a stone to throw at the wicked giant! The fantasies that children have!”
“I’ll give him fantasies!” muttered Francis, between his teeth.
Frank lay in his chair in the mauve and silver twilight of his dream. He heard the door open. He sat upright. Then all at once one clear quiet thought came to him with powerful surety: “What am I doing here?”
What am I doing here! The dark room rocked about him. He shuddered. He gazed about him, stupefied. Why was he here? What had happened to him? He knew nothing of this room, of the man and woman standing like wan shadows in the doorway, staring at him. They were strangers. He had never seen them before.
The room dissolved about him like mist, the walls sloping grotesquely, the door with its shadows slanting away from him into space. He was sitting upon an enormous top, which revolved, at first slowly, then faster, faster, and the walls, sloping, retreated, and the shadows in the doorway fled away.
He felt himself dragged by some force from the top. He felt a sharp impact on his cheek. It was not until he was on Sandy Lane that he became aware of anything at all, and then he burst into dreadful tears.
“I’ll give you something to blubber about when we get home,” Francis promised, jerking his son by the arm. “You damned little pig, you.”
CHAPTER 6
Frank learned slowly and painfully anything that did not pertain to letters and words.
Within a week, he could trace very sure, delicately strong letters, but it was months before he could recognize figures easily. For a long time, for instance, he would write the figure “nine,” under Miss Ballister’s impatient tutelage, but reversed; then, with silent triumph, he would add another circle and murmur: “B!” Letters had significance for him; figures were cabalistic characters that one only guessed at, dreamily, and, with luck, arrived at the correct conclusion.
He seemed to love the sound of words, formed surely from the letters he traced. He was face to face with a miracle, and when the word “cat” had been spelled out by him, and he understood that it referred to the creature pictured in his book, his eyes would glow and he would seem on the verge of tears. He had a low, uncertain voice, a rusty young voice, which was rarely used except to cry out the magic groupings he had achieved, or which he had learned to recognize in his books. Now he began to listen to all words, as if they were music, sometimes repeating them silently with strong motions of his lips, as the speaker enunciated them. It was as if he were intoxicated by words, any words. They were flashes of light; they were windows suddenly thrown open upon a land drenched with moon and enchantment. They were the blaze of trumpets raised visibly in darkness, haloed with radiance. They were drums that thundered, and filled the silence with wings.
How could he ever explain the intoxication of words, mere disjointed words, words in themselves, the butterflies of color, the rainbow bridges over voiceless abysses, the sudden flight of birds like the rising and wheeling of gulls with sunset on their wings?
Instinctively, he knew the richness, the succulence, the suety opulence of words. Sometimes a new word would remind him of a little fat man, waddling, full of chuckles. It was the sound of them, the mere sound of words (for he could not as yet know the meaning of one-tenth he heard) which entranced him. It was the rhythm and the spacing of them, the flow, the pianissimo or the fortissimo of accent, the sudden curve of a syllable like the swell of a glass vase, the sudden and abrupt rise, as if a hand had been lifted peremptorily. Sometimes they were ugly words, unpleasant raucous words, hideous little spoons of words that contained a lump of poisoned jam. He listened for words on the street; he listened for them in houses, in the shops, in corridors, halls, rooms. He listened when his father read from the Manchester Guardian, and the measured pace of these words was like a procession, a somber parade, a conclave of kings, an old man talking gravely in the night. Best of all, when his father read some incomprehensible comic comment, the words were like tumbling clowns at the pantomime, rollicking little dwarfs with large red noses, tiny tinselled fairies pulled by strings, Punch and Judies with cackling voices, or a silly little bang of happy drums. And some words were cold and stiff, like twigs in winter, or hard, like stone, or pungent, like the striped peppermint canes given to
children at Christmas. But still they carried no actual projection of their intrinsic meaning to his brain. It was the mere sound of them which held him transfixed.
There were letters from Mrs. Jamie Clair, in America, which Francis read aloud to Maybelle. Mrs. Clair lived in Bison, New York, but she wrote grandiloquently (to show her new, cosmopolitan character) of heroic words like Oregon and Philadelphia and California. Oregon! Frank felt a profound silence like marble. The “Ore” was a man’s stern voice, the “gon” was loneliness and adventure. Philadelphia! It was a word with velvet around the edges, the “del” in the center was a sweetness, the “phia,” a soft excitement. California! There was the sweetness, also, in the first syllable, but a sweetness as of a cheaper grade, sugary, like jam which had begun to crystallize, and the “for” was hard as a wooden almond in toffy, and he did not like the “nia” at all. No, it was not nearly the delightful word that Philadelphia was, nor did it have the heroism of Oregon. He repeated these words over and over to himself, for the sheer ecstasy of the sound of them.
When, in his manhood, he remembered this, he was amazed, and bitterly envious. What a pristine and lovely frenzy had been his! What would he not now give to feel again that keen and terrible rapture, that fresh glory, at the mere sound of words! A voice on the street, just an ordinary, flat voice of a child or a housewife, but a voice enunciating a cadence of syllables that caught the ear with their poignant dissonance, or their thin little runnings like a brown rivulet in spring. Images flashed through his awakened mind at a mere exclamation. He heard a child demand something petulantly of its harried mother, and he heard a young rook complaining in the bare trees of winter. A young shopgirl spoke in the sweetest trill of a voice to his mother, and he heard a sleepy thrush awakening in the morning. He heard a woman laugh, and it was the tinkle of a four-sided cow-bell in the evening. Lovely, lovely words, entrancing sounds, excitements in a harsh grunt, enormous fears in the growl of the shoemaker!
He had a deep aversion for the word “platter.” It had a flat, dead sound. He disliked “ham,” for it was smug and thick. But serviette! What tender frolic, what grace, what sparkling fingers, what arching of pretty neck! “Tablecloth” suggested wool that scratched, and he itched at the sound of it. “Jam” set his teeth on edge, and made him annoyed with his mother when she spoke it. His father spoke of “Torquay,” and he did not know whether it was a city, a place, a proper name, or something to eat, but the articulation of it made him feel wild and strange and full of hot bright wind. He heard the word “somber,” and he saw a face turning in darkness, full of meaning. There was no relationship between the words and what he saw and experienced in his trembling heart. It was enough that he heard them.
Long before he knew their meaning, there were words that he could not endure. “Snob” was one. It made him think of thick catarrh. He could not stand hearing his mother say “messages.” Such a fussy, blurred, silly word, like unravelled yarn. His father called an acquaintance a “gambler,” and Frank held a stone in his hands, a stone of rough angles and jutting edges. Once his mother complained of “diarrhea” and Frank saw a little pile of stones with sharp corners glimmering in a brook. He heard Miss Ballister say “glittering,” and he remembered the gritty, sickening feel that had cut his flesh when he had furtively played with his father’s razor. And then there were words that raised gooseflesh on his skin, and one of them, foolishly, was the name “Myrtle.” He thought of his father sharpening the carving knife on Sunday. No, there was no sense to it, none at all.
Miss Ballister could not understand why he listened to her with such intensity, why his eyes fixed themselves upon her as if hypnotized, whenever she spoke. But she was surprised and pleased. Perhaps the boy was not an imbecile, after all. Sometimes he glowed, palpitated, when she made the most ordinary remark. Also, he was learning. In three months he could read as well as little Herbert Kemp, who was eight years old. In another month, he had surpassed Master Kemp, and was reading with the brightest nine-year-old. But he could not understand that the cipher “2” and the cipher “3,” had any meaning whatsoever, and when she showed him, over and over, that they equalled five, he would only stare at his slate, dumfounded. She would give him another sum: 4 and 2, and hopefully, hopelessly, he would put down the answer as five, as three, whatever the answer to the preceding sum had been. It was useless: it was cabalism; he could not fathom it.
Finally, in desperation, she had an inspired thought. She took out five large copper pennies from her purse and laid them on the table before him, and demonstrated addition and subtraction. Now he was fascinated. Something had been projected objectively; it was reality. He stared at the pennies; he looked at the slate. He was suddenly filled with joy. He looked at Miss Ballister and laughed excitedly. He learned to add, to Subtract, to divide. But, to the end of his life, that was all, and whenever he was to add a column of figures, abstract figures, he was compelled to think of them as apples, as copper pennies, as oranges. He never mastered algebra, and geometry was always cabalism, the answer to which forever remained in the realm of luck or crystal-gazing.
He learned to write with amazing speed, and even at six, his script was small and swift, angular and running, and full of fever. He could write his name the first week; in five months, he was writing exercises with nine-year-olds.
But let another subject arise, apart from writing, hearing, reading, and he retired into apathy and inertia, like an emerald-winged butterfly metamorphized again into a sightless, blind pupa. Then blankness would slide over his features like lava, so that all the quickness and clearness of them were only vague sockets and formless lumps.
Once his mother gave him a broken prism from one of her lamps. At her suggestion, he carried it into the wan spring sun. Instantly, as he held the prism before his eyes, the world was split up into a thousand shattered colors. The stones of the garden wall were edged with crimson, with purple, with an intense golden yellow. He looked at his hand, and each finger became incandescent, streaked with colored fire. He could not get enough of this wonder, of this awesome excitement. Emotion welled up in him; he stood mute, understanding that there were thresholds which words could not cross. But something could cross, and the knowledge of that something hovered just beyond his memory. Then he remembered the strange music he had heard in an old garden and in the shell his grandmother had given him. Only music could render this exquisite play and fantasy of hue and shining light, and he felt a devouring hunger for exultant and passionate sound that lived beyond the enunciation of words.
Later, as now, he realized that the thoughts and the emotions which surged through the human mind were like multi-colored, radiant and gleaming fish, darting, leaping, veering, gliding, which could not be captured in the coarse net of words. Words were like thick and clumsy fingers which tried to catch drops of quicksilver rain. A vast unrest, a sadness, a muteness, filled him.
His mother, who was hanging clothes in the yard, said to him: “Frankie, don’t keep that glass at your eye all this time. You’ll hurt your eyes.”
Years later, when he remembered her words, he thought: Yes, it will always hurt the eye, to know that what it sees can never be fully expressed, that what the heart knows can only be made audible in uncouth grunts.
More and more, as the months passed, he felt the thickness and heaviness of his tongue, the inadequacy of the words he knew and heard. They were like the dumb gestures which the deafened and speechless make, to communicate with others so afflicted.
He did not know what happiness was, the happiness of the thing expressed. He only knew that peace and joy came to him when his eyes were full with seeing, his ears filled with hearing. He cared for nothing else.
He accepted the ostracism imposed upon him by his schoolmates as he accepted the air he breathed. Sometimes, but only sometimes, he was wistful when he saw them romping and laughing and giggling together, and he experienced a kind of bitter young pain when he noticed that on his approach they became silent, th
eir eyes glittering with detestation and hostility, and that, after a moment, they would turn their backs upon him and walk away. He did not know why they did this. He was beginning to talk well, exceptionally well, to quote the surprised Miss Ballister, and he had eager young things to say. But his schoolmates would have none of his company and none of his speech. Then he accepted this, with only a few first pangs of rebellion and perplexity.
But sometimes, only rarely sometimes, he would wonder if it were because he was dirty, or ugly, or repellent in some mysterious manner. Slowly the conviction began to grow up in him that he was repulsive to other eyes, and he would stand on the stool in the kitchen and peer at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. The mirror showed a young, slender, very pale face with brilliant blue eyes, a wide sad mouth almost colorless, a rather large and prominent nose, and a tangled mass of chestnut curls. It was the face of a budding ascetic, an intense thinker, a creature afflicted with too much perception and an agonizing sensibility. It was a strange face, and a compelling one, reminiscent of the faces of old Grecian statues, for the line from the hair to the tip of the nose was almost unbroken, and there was a classic roundness of chin and fullness of lower lip. An artist would have recognized that face. But the children were neither ancient Greeks nor artists, and they knew only that he was different from themselves. They called him “mud-face,” “worm-face,” “clown-face.” They called him “Punch-and-Judy.” They told him he was ugly. They had no other words to express their unease in his presence.
In consequence, he avoided other children as much as possible. The Worden children were more friendly, or, rather, indifferent to him, the result of Maybelle’s warm generosity to the family. He found comfort in the big dark kitchen of the Wordens, which smelled of wet wool, drains, soap, grease and cabbage. Here he was tolerated. Maybelle was too rigorously clean in her own house, so that there was always a chill and ugly stiffness about every article of furniture. But in the Worden house everything was happy, dirty, disordered, and cluttered, and full of shouting young voices. The younger children could squat or lie on the gritty hearth and inhale a mixture of coal gas and blazing heat in utter content. Mrs. Worden was too exhausted, too enfeebled, to have control over her children and over her disheveled household. One found the most entrancing things everywhere, under heaps of damp shawls on scarred chairs, under the beds, under the edges of discolored rugs and linoleum.