Such thoughts as these left her panic-stricken, cold with fear. The spectre of possible want filled her dreams, haunted her waking hours, thrust aside the devastating shame of her affair with Roger to replace it with dread and apprehension. In her despair she turned more ardently than ever to her painting; already she was capable of doing outstanding work in portraiture, but she lacked cachet; she was absolutely unknown.
This condition of her mind affected her appearance; she began to husband her clothes, sadly conscious that she could not tell where others would come from. Her face lost its roundness, the white warmness of her skin remained but there were violet shadows under her eyes; her forehead showed faint lines; she was slightly shabby. Gradually the triumphant vividness so characteristic of Angèle Mory left her, she was like any one of a thousand other pitiful, frightened girls thronging New York. Miss Powell glanced at her and thought: “she looks unhappy, but how can she be when she has a chance at everything in the world just because she’s white?”
Anthony marked her fading brightness; he would have liked to question her, comfort her, but where this girl was concerned the rôle of comforter was not for him. Only the instructor, Mr. Paget guessed at her extremity. He had seen too many students not to recognize the signs of poverty, of disaster in love, of despair at the tardy flowering of dexterity that had been mistaken for talent. Once after class he stopped Angela and asked her if she knew of anyone willing to furnish designs for a well-known journal of fashion.
“Not very stimulating work, but the pay is good and the firm reliable. Their last artist was with them eight years. If you know of anyone,——”
She interrupted: “I know of myself. Do you think they’d take me on?”
“I could recommend you. They applied to me, you see. Doubtless they’d take my suggestions into account.”
He was very kind; made all the necessary arrangements. The firm received Angela gladly, offering her a fair salary for work that was a trifle narrow, a bit stultifying. But it opened up possibilities; there were new people to be met; perhaps she would make new friends, form ties which might be lasting.
“Oh,” she said hopefully to herself, “life is wonderful! It’s giving me a new deal and I’ll begin all over again. I’m young and now I’m sophisticated; the world is wide, somewhere there’s happiness and peace and a place for me. I’ll find it.”
But her hope, her sanguineness, were a little forced, her superb self-confidence perceptibly diminished. The radiance which once had so bathed every moment of her existence was fading gently, inexorably into the “light of common day”.
HOME AGAIN
Chapter I
NEW YORK, it appeared, had two visages. It could offer an aspect radiant with promise or a countenance lowering and forbidding. With its flattering possibilities it could elevate to the seventh heaven, or lower to the depths of hell with its crushing negations. And loneliness! Loneliness such as that offered by the great, noisy city could never be imagined. To realize it one would have to experience it. Coming home from work Angela used to study the people on the trains, trying to divine what cause had engraved a given expression on their faces, particularly on the faces of young women. She picked out for herself four types, the happy, the indifferent, the preoccupied, the lonely. Doubtless her classification was imperfect, but she never failed, she thought, to recognize the signs of loneliness, a vacancy of expression, a listlessness, a faintly pervading despair. She remembered the people in Union Square on whom she had spied so blithely when she had first come to New York. Then she had thought of them as being “down and out”, mere idlers, good for nothing. It had not occurred to her that their chief disaster might be loneliness. Her office was on Twenty-third Street and often at the noon-hour she walked down to the dingy Square and looked again in on the sprawling, half-recumbent, dejected figures. And between them and herself she was able to detect a terrifying relationship. She still carried her notebook, made sketches, sitting watching them and jotting down a line now and then when their vacant, staring eyes were not fixed upon her. Once she would not have cared if they had caught her; she would have said with a shrug: “Oh they wouldn’t mind, they’re too far gone for that.” But since then her sympathy and knowledge had waxed. How fiercely she would have rebelled had anyone from a superior social plane taken her for copy!
In the evenings she worked at the idea of a picture which she intended for a masterpiece. It was summer and the classes at Cooper Union had been suspended. But she meant to return in the fall, perhaps she would enter the scholarship contest and if successful, go abroad. But the urge to wander was no longer in the ascendant. The prospect of Europe did not seem as alluring now as the prospect of New York had appeared when she lived in Philadelphia. It would be nice to stay put, rooted; to have friends, experiences, memories.
Paulette, triumphant to the last, had left with Hudson for Russia. Martha and Ladislas were spending the summer with Martha’s people on Long Island. Roger had dropped into the void, but she could not make herself miss him; to her he was the symbol of all that was most futile in her existence, she could forgive neither him nor herself for their year of madness. If the experience, she told herself, had ended—so-be-it—everything ends. If it had faded into a golden glow with a wealth of memories, the promise of a friendship, she would have had no qualms; but as matters had turned out it was an offence in her nostrils, a great blot on the escutcheon of her fastidiousness.
She wished that Martha had asked her to spend week-ends with her but the idea had apparently never crossed the latter’s mind. “Good-bye until fall,” she had said gaily, “do you know, I’m awfully glad to go home this time. I always have my old room; it’s like begining life all over again. Of course I wouldn’t give up New York but life seems so much more real and durable down there. After all it’s where my roots are.”
Her roots! Angela echoed the expression to herself on a note that was wholly envious. How marvellous to go back to parents, relatives, friends with whom one had never lost touch! The peace, the security, the companionableness of it! This was a relationship which she had forfeited with everyone, even with Jinny. And as for her other acquaintances in Philadelphia, Henson, Butler, Kate and Agnes Hallowell, so completely, so casually, without even a ripple had she dropped out of their lives that it would have been impossible for her to re-establish their old, easy footing even had she so desired.
Virginia, without making an effort, seemed overwhelmed, almost swamped by friendships, pleasant intimacies, a thousand charming interests. She and Sara Penton, another teacher, had taken an apartment together, a three room affair on the top floor of a house on 139th Street, in “Striver’s Row”, explained Jinny. Whether or not the nickname was deserved, it seemed to Angela well worth an effort to live in this beautiful block with its tree-bordered pavements, its spacious houses, its gracious neighbourliness. A doctor and his wife occupied the first two floors; they were elderly, rather lonely people, for their two children had married and gone to other cities. They had practically adopted Virginia and Sara; nursing them when they had colds, indulgently advising them as to their callers. Mrs. Bradley, the doctor’s wife, occasionally pressed a dress for them; on stormy days the doctor drove them in his car around to “Public School 89” where they both taught. Already the two girls were as full of intimacies, joyous reminiscences, common plans as though they had lived together for years. Secrets, nicknames, allusions, filled the atmosphere. Angela grew sick of the phrases: “Of course you don’t understand that; just some nonsense and it would take too long to explain it. Besides you wouldn’t know any of the people.” Even so, unwelcome as the expression was, she did not hear it very often, for Jinny did not encourage her visits to the apartment even as much as to the boarding house.
“Sara will think it strange if you come too often.”
“We might tell her,” Angela rejoined, “and ask her to keep it a secret.”
But Jinny opined coolly that that would never do; it was bad to entrust p
eople with one’s secrets. “If you can’t keep them yourself, why should they?” she asked sagely. Her attitude showed no malice, only the complete acceptance of the stand which her sister had adopted years ago.
In her sequestered rooms in the Village lying in the summer heat unkempt and shorn of its glamour Angela pondered long and often on her present mode of living. Her life, she was pretty sure, could not go on indefinitely as it did now. Even if she herself made no effort it was unlikely that the loneliness could persist. Jinny, she shrewdly suspected, had known something of this horrible condition when she, the older sister had left her so ruthlessly to go off and play at adventure. This loneliness and her unfortunate affair with Henson had doubtless proved too much for her, and she had deliberately sought change and distraction elsewhere. There were depths upon depths of strength in Jinny and as much purpose and resource as one might require. Now here she was established in New York with friends, occupation, security, leading an utterly open life, no secrets, no subterfuges, no goals to be reached by devious ways.
Jinny had changed her life and been successful. Angela had changed hers and had found pain and unhappiness. Where did the fault lie? Not, certainly, in her determination to pass from one race to another. Her native good sense assured her that it would have been silly for her to keep on living as she had in Philadelphia, constantly, through no fault of her own, being placed in impossible positions, eternally being accused and hounded because she had failed to placard herself, forfeiting old friendships, driven fearfully to the establishing of new ones. No, the fault was not there. Perhaps it lay in her attitude toward her friends. Had she been too coldly deliberate in her use of them? Certainly she had planned to utilize her connection with Roger, but on this point she had no qualms; he had been paid in full for any advantages which she had meant to gain. She had not always been kind to Miss Powell, “but,” she murmured to herself, “I was always as kind to her as I dared be in the circumstances and far, far more attentive than any of the others.” As for Anthony, Paulette, and Martha, her slate was clear on their score. She was struck at this point to realize that during her stay of nearly three years these five were the only people to whom she could apply the term friends. Of these Roger had dropped out; Miss Powell was negative; Paulette had gone to Russia. There remained only Martha and Anthony. Martha was too intensely interested in the conduct of her own life in connection with Ladislas to make a friend, a satisfying, comfortable, intimate friend such as Sara Penton seemed to be with Virginia. There remained then only Anthony—yes, and her new acquaintance, Rachel Salting.
She began then in her loneliness to approach Rachel seeking for nothing other than those almost sisterly intimacies which spring up between solitary women cut off in big cities from their homes and from all the natural resources which add so much to the beauty and graciousness of young womanhood. “If anything comes out of this friendship to advance me in any way,” she told herself solemnly, “it will happen just because it happens but I shall go into this with clean hands and a pure heart—merely because I like Rachel.”
After the fever and fret of her acquaintanceship with Roger, the slight unwholesomeness attendant on Paulette, the didactic quality lurking in Martha’s household, it was charming, even delicious to enter on a friendship with this simple, intelligent, enthusiastic girl. Rachel, for all her native endowment, her wide reading and her broad scholastic contacts, had the straightforward utter sincerity and simplicity of a child; at times Angela felt quite sophisticated, even blasé beside her. But in reality they were two children together; Angela’s brief episode with Roger had left no trace on her moral nature; she was ashamed now of the affair with a healthy shame at its unworthiness; but beyond that she suffered from no morbidness. Her sum total of the knowledge of life had been increased; she saw men with a different eye, was able to differentiate between the attitudes underlying the pleasantries of the half dozen young men in her office; listening, laughing, weighing all their attentions, accepting none. In truth she had lost to a degree her taste for the current type of flirtations. She might marry some day but all that was still in the dim future. Meanwhile the present beckoned; materially she was once more secure, her itching ambition was temporarily lulled; she had a friend. It was just as well to let time slide by for a while.
The two girls spent their evenings together. Rachel’s fiancé, John Adams, was a travelling salesman and nearly always out of town. When he was home Angela was careful to have an engagement, though Rachel assured her, laughing and sparkling, that the two were already so used to each other that a third person need not feel de trop. Occasionally the three of them went during the hot summer nights to Coney Island or Far Rockaway. But this jaunt took on the proportions more of an ordeal than a pleasure trip; so packed were the cars with helpless humanity, so crowded the beaches, so nightmarish the trip home. Fortunately Angela came face to face one day with Ralph Ashley, Carlotta’s former friend. Low-spirited, lonely, distrait, he asked Angela eagerly to allow him to call occasionally. He seemed a rather bookish, serious young man who had failed to discover the possibilities of his inner resources. Without an acquaintance or a book he was helpless. Angela’s self-reliance and cleverness seemed to offer a temporary harbour. Apparently with Carlotta out of town, he was at loose ends. By some tacit understanding he was taken into the little group and as he possessed a car which he was willing and eager to share the arrangement was a very happy one.
These were pleasant days. Long afterwards, Angela, looking back recalled them as among the happiest she had known in New York. In particular she liked the hours when she and Rachel were together busied with domestic, homely affairs. They advised each other on the subject of dress; Angela tried out new recipes. In the late evenings she worked on the sketches, recalling them from her note-book while Rachel, sitting sidewise in the big chair, her legs dangling comfortably over its arm, offered comments and suggestions. She had had “courses in art”, and on a trip to France and Italy at the age of eighteen had visited the Louvre, the Pitti and Uffizi Galleries. All this lent a certain pithiness and authority to the criticisms which she poured forth for her friend’s edification; her remarks rarely produced any effect on Angela, but both girls felt that Rachel’s knowledge gave a certain effect of “atmosphere”.
Usually Rachel’s talk was on John and their approaching marriage, their unparalleled courtship. Many years later Angela could have related all the details of that simple, almost sylvan wooing, the growing awareness of the two lovers, their mutual fears and hopes, their questionings, assurances and their blissful engagement. She knew to a penny what John made each week, how much he put by, the amount which thrifty Rachel felt must be in hand before they could marry. Once this recital, so unvarying, so persistent, would have bored her, but she was more sympathetic in these days; sometimes she found herself making suggestions, saving the house-wifely clippings culled from newspapers, proposing decorations for the interior of one of the ugly little houses on which Rachel had so inexplicably set her heart. She was a little older than her friend, she had had experience in keeping house and in shopping with her mother in those far-off days; she ventured occasionally to advise Rachel in her rare purchases very much as though the latter were her own sister instead of a chance acquaintance whom she had known less than a year.
It was a placid, almost ideal existence. Only one thread of worry ran through its fabric, the thought that Rachel and John would soon be marrying and again Angela would be left on the search for a new friend. With one of them in the Bronx and the other Greenwich Village, frequent communication would be physically impossible. But, curiously enough, whenever Angela lamented over this to her friend, a deep sombreness would descend on the latter; she would remark gloomily: “Time enough to worry about that; after all we might not get married. You never can tell.” This was too enigmatic for Angela and finally she grew to look on it as a jest, a rather poor one but still a jest.
Chapter II
INTO the midst of this serenity ca
me a bolt from the blue. Rachel, a librarian, was offered the position of head librarian in a far suburb of Brooklyn. Furthermore a wealthy woman from Butte, Montana, desiring to stay in New York for a few months and taking a fancy to the dinginess of Jayne Street and to the inconveniences of Rachel’s apartment found she must live there and not otherwhere. No other location in the whole great city would do; she was willing to sublet at any figure. Unwillingly Rachel named a price which she secretly considered in the nature of highway robbery, but none of this mattered to Mrs. Denver, who was used to paying for what she wanted. And Rachel could not refuse, for both offers meant a substantial increase in the nest-egg which was to furnish the little brown house in the Bronx. In reality it meant to her extraordinary, unhoped for luck whose only flaw consisted in the enforced separation from her new friend. But to Angela it brought the awfulness of a catastrophe, though not for one moment would she let her deep dismay be suspected. After her first involuntary exclamation of consternation she never faltered in her complete acquiesence in the plan. But at heart she was sick.
The sudden flitting entailed much work and bustle. Rachel was as untidy as Angela was neat; everything she possessed had to be collected separately; there were no stacks of carefully folded clothing to be lifted wholesale and placed in gaping trunks. To begin with the trunks themselves were filled with dubious odds and ends which required to be sorted, given or even thrown away. There was no question of abandoning the débris, for the apartment must be left habitable for Mrs. Denver.