She was impervious to his mood, utterly indifferent, so indifferent that she was herself unaware of her manner. “Heavens, I’ve sort of forgotten, but I don’t remember your ever having been so eager for criticism heretofore!”
He caught at one phrase. “Forgotten! You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten the past and all that was once so dear to us?”
Impatience overwhelmed her. She wished he would go and leave her to her thoughts and to her picture; such a splendid idea had come to her; it was the first time for weeks that she had felt like working. Aware of the blessed narcotic value of interesting occupation, she looked forward to his departure with a sense of relief; even hoped with her next words to precipitate it.
“Roger, you don’t mean to say that you called on me on a hot September Sunday just to talk to me in that theatrical manner? I don’t mind telling you I’ve a million things to do this afternoon; let’s get down to bed rock so we can both be up and doing.”
She had been sitting, almost lolling at ease in the big chair, not regarding him, absently twisting a scarf in her fingers. Now she glanced up and something in the hot blueness of his eyes brought her to an upright position, alert, attentive.
“Angèle, you’ve got to take me back.”
“Back! I don’t know what you’re talking about. Between you and me there is no past, so don’t mention it. If you’ve nothing better to say than that, you might as well get out.”
He tried to possess himself of her hands but she shook him off, impatiently, angrily, with no pretence at feeling. “Go away, Roger. I don’t want to be bothered with you!” This pinchbeck emotionalism after the reality of her feeling for Anthony, the sincerity of his feeling for her! “I won’t have this sort of thing; if you won’t go I will.” She started for the door but he barred her way, suddenly straight and serious.
“No listen, Angèle, you must listen. I’m in earnest this time. You must forgive me for the past, for the things I said. Oh, I was unspeakable! But I had it in my head,—you don’t know the things a man has borne in on him about designing women,—if he’s got anything, family, money,——” she could see him striving to hide his knowledge of his vast eligibility. “I thought you were trying to ‘get’ me, it made me suspicious, angry. I knew you were poor,——”
“And nobody! Oh say it, say it!”
“Well, I will say it. According to my father’s standards, nobody. And when you began to take an interest in me, in my affairs,——”
“You thought I was trying to marry you. Well, at first I was. I was poor, I was nobody! I wanted to be rich, to be able to see the world, to help people. And then when you and I came so near to each other I didn’t care about marriage at all—just about living! Oh, I suppose my attitude was perfectly pagan. I hadn’t meant to drift into such a life, all my training was against it, you can’t imagine how completely my training was against it. And then for a time I was happy. I’m afraid I didn’t love you really, Roger, indeed I know now that in a sense I didn’t love you, but somehow life seemed to focus into an absolute perfection. Then you became petulant, ugly, suspicious, afraid of my interest, of my tenderness. And I thought, ‘I can’t let this all end in a flame of ugliness; it must be possible for people to have been lovers and yet remain friends.’ I tried so hard to keep things so that it would at least remain a pleasant memory. But you resented my efforts. What I can’t understand is—why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to, either try to marry you or to make an ideal thing of our relationship? Why is it that men like you resent an effort on our part to make our commerce decent? Well, it’s all over now. . . . Theoretically ‘free love’ or whatever you choose to call it, is all right. Actually, it’s all wrong. I don’t want any such relationship with you or with any other man in this world. Marriage was good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me.”
“There’s nothing good enough for you, Angèle; but marriage is the best thing that I have to offer and I’m offering you just that. And it’s precisely because you were honest and frank and decent and tried to keep our former relationship from deteriorating into sordidness that I am back.”
Clearly she was staggered. Marriage with Roger meant protection, position, untold wealth, unlimited opportunities for doing good. Once how she would have leapt to such an offer!
“What’s become of Carlotta?” she asked bluntly.
“She’s on the eve of marrying Tom Estes, a fellow who was in college with me. He has heaps more money than I. Carlotta thought she’d better take him on.”
“I see.” She looked at him thoughtfully, then the remembrance of her great secret came to her, a secret which she could never share with Roger. No! No more complications and their consequent disaster! “No, no, we won’t talk about it any more. What you want is impossible; you can’t guess how completely impossible.”
He strode toward her, seized her hands. “I’m in earnest, Angèle; you’ve no idea how tired I am of loneliness and uncertainty and,—and of seeking women; I want someone whom I can love and trust, whom I can teach to love me,—we could get married to-morrow. There’s not an obstacle in our way.”
His sincerity left her unmoved. “What would your father say?”
“Oh, we wouldn’t be able to tell him yet; he’d never consent! Of course we’d have to keep things quiet, just ourselves and one or two friends, Martha and Ladislas perhaps, would be in the know.”
More secrets! She pulled her hands away from him. “Oh Roger, Roger! I wouldn’t consider it. No, when I marry I want a man, a man, a real one, someone not afraid to go on his own!” She actually pushed him toward the door. “Some people might revive dead ashes, but not you and I. . . . I’d never be able to trust you again and I’m sick of secrets and playing games with human relationships. I’m going to take my friendships straight hereafter. Please go. I’ve had a hard summer and I’m very tired. Besides I want to work.”
Baffled, he looked at her, surprise and indignation struggling in his face. “Angèle, are you sure you know what you’re doing? I’ve no intention of coming back, so you’d better take me now.”
“Of course you’re not coming back! I’m sure I wouldn’t want you to; my decision is final.” Not unsympathetically she laughed up into his doleful face, actually touched his cheek. “If you only knew how much you look like a cross baby!”
Her newly developed sympathy and understanding made her think of Ashley. Doubtless Carlotta’s defection would hit him very hard. Her conjecture was correct although the effect of the blow was different from what she had anticipated. Ashley was not so perturbed over the actual loss of the girl as confirmed in his opinion that he was never going to be able to form and keep a lasting friendship. In spite of his wealth, his native timidity had always made him distrustful of himself with women of his own class; a veritable Tony Hardcastle, he spent a great deal of time with women whom he did not actually admire, whom indeed he disliked, because, he said to Angela wistfully, they were the only ones who took him seriously.
“No one but you and Carlotta have ever given me any consideration, have ever liked me for myself, Angèle.”
They were seeing a great deal of each other; in a quiet, unemotional way they were developing a real friendship. Angela had taken up her painting again. She had re-entered the classes at Cooper Union and was working with great zest and absorption on a subject which she meant to enter in the competition for scholarships at the school at Fontainebleau. Ashley, who wrote some good verse in the recondite, falsely free style of the present day, fell into the habit of bringing his work down to her little living room, and in the long tender autumn evenings the two worked seriously, with concentration. Ashley had travelled widely and had seen a great deal of life, though usually from the side-lines; Angela for all her lack of wandering, “had lived deeply”, he used to tell her, pondering on some bit of philosophy which she let fall based on the experiences of her difficult life.
“You know, in your way you’re quite a wonder, Angèle; there’s a mystery hang
ing about you; for all your good spirits, your sense of humour, you’re like the Duse, you seem to move in an aura of suffering, of the pain which comes from too great sensitivity. And yet how can that be so? You’re not old enough, you’ve had too few contacts to know how unspeakable life can be, how damnably she can get you in wrong,——”
An enigmatic smile settled on her face. “I don’t know about life, Ralph? How do you think I got the idea for this masterpiece of mine?” She pointed to the painting on which she was then engaged.
“That’s true, that’s true. I’ve wondered often about that composition; lots of times I’ve meant to ask you how you came to evolve it. But keep your mystery to yourself, child; it adds to your charm.”
About this she had her own ideas. Mystery might add to the charm of personality but it certainly could not be said to add to the charm of living. Once she thought that stolen waters were sweetest, but now it was the unwinding road and the open book that most intrigued.
Ashley, she found, for all his shyness, possessed very definite ideas and convictions of his own, was absolutely unfettered in his mode of thought, and quite unmoved by social traditions and standards. An aristocrat if ever there were one, he believed none the less in the essential quality of man and deplored the economic conditions which so often tended to set up superficial and unreal barriers which make as well as separate the classes.
With some trepidation Angela got him on the subject of colour. He considered prejudice the greatest blot on America’s shield. “We’re wrong, all wrong about those people; after all they did to make America habitable! Some day we’re going to wake up to our shame. I hope it won’t be too late.”
“But you wouldn’t want your sister to marry a nigger!”
“I’m amazed, Angèle, at your using such a word as an exclusive term. I’ve known some fine coloured people. There’re hardly any of unmixed blood in the United States, so the term Negro is usually a misnomer. I haven’t a sister; if I had I’d advise her against marriage with an American coloured man because the social pressure here would probably be too great, but that would be absolutely the only ground on which I’d object to it. And I can tell you this; I wouldn’t care to marry a woman from the Congo but if I met a coloured woman of my own nationality, well-bred, beautiful, sympathetic, I wouldn’t let the fact of her mixed blood stand in my way, I can tell you.”
A sort of secondary interest in living was creeping into to her perspective. The high lights, the high peaks had faded from her sight. She would never, she suspected, know such spontaneity of feeling and attitude again as she had felt toward both Roger and Anthony. Nor would she again approach the experiences of existence with the same naïve expectation, the same desire to see how things would turn out. Young as she was she felt like a battle-scarred veteran who, worn out from his own strenuous activities, was quite content to sit on the side-lines gazing at all phases of warfare with an equal eye.
Although she no longer intended to cast in her lot with Virginia, she made no further effort to set up barriers between herself and coloured people. Let the world take her as it would. If she were in Harlem, in company with Virginia and Sara Penton she went out to dinner, to the noisy, crowded, friendly “Y” dining-room, to “Gert’s” tearoom, to the clean, inviting drug-store for rich “sundaes”. Often, too, she went shopping with her sister and to the theatre; she had her meet Ashley and Martha. But she was careful in this company to avoid contact with people whose attitude on the race question was unknown, or definitely antagonistic.
Harlem intrigued her; it was a wonderful city; it represented, she felt, the last word in racial pride, integrity and even self-sacrifice. Here were people of a very high intellectual type, exponents of the realest and most essential refinement living cheek by jowl with coarse or ill-bred or even criminal, certainly indifferent, members of their race. Of course some of this propinquity was due to outer pressure, but there was present, too, a hidden consciousness of race-duty, a something which if translated said: “Perhaps you do pull me down a little from the height to which I have climbed. But on the other hand, perhaps, I’m helping you to rise.”
There was a hair-dresser’s establishment on 136th Street where Virginia used to have her beautiful hair treated; where Sara Penton, whose locks were of the same variety as Matthew’s, used to repair to have their unruliness “pressed”. Here on Saturdays Angela would accompany the girls and sit through the long process just to overhear the conversations, grave and gallant and gay, of these people whose blood she shared but whose disabilities by a lucky fluke she had been able to avoid. For, while she had been willing for the sake of Anthony to re-enlist in the struggles of this life, she had never closed her eyes to its disadvantages; to its limitedness! What a wealth of courage it took for these people to live! What high degree of humour, determination, steadfastness, undauntedness were not needed,—and poured forth! Maude, the proprietress of the business, for whom the establishment was laconically called “Maude’s”, was a slight, sweet-faced woman with a velvety seal-brown skin, a charming voice and an air of real refinement. She was from Texas, but had come to New York to seek her fortune, had travelled as ladies’ maid in London and Paris, and was as thoroughly conversant with the arts of her calling as any hairdresser in the vicinity of the Rue de la Paix or on Fifth Avenue. A rare quality of hospitality emanated from her presence; her little shop was always full not only of patrons but of callers, visitors from “down home”, actresses from the current coloured “show”, flitting in like radiant birds of paradise with their rich brown skins, their exotic eyes and the gaily coloured clothing which an unconscious style had evolved just for them.
In this atmosphere, while there was no coarseness, there was no restriction; life in busy Harlem stopped here and yawned for a delicious moment before going on with its pressure and problems. A girl from Texas, visiting “the big town” for a few weeks took one last glance at her shapely, marvellously “treated” head, poised for a second before the glass and said simply, “Well, good-bye, Maude; I’m off for the backwoods, but I’ll never forget Harlem.” She passed out with the sinuous elegant carriage acquired in her few weeks’ sojourn on Seventh Avenue.
A dark girl, immaculate in white from head to foot, asked: “What’s she going back South for? Ain’t she had enough of Texas yet? ”
Maude replied that she had gone back there because of her property. “Her daddy owns most of the little town where they live.”
“Child, ain’t you learned that you don’t never own no property in Texas as long as those white folks are down there too? Just let those Ku Kluxers get it into their heads that you’ve got something they want. She might just as well leave there first as last; she’s bound to have to some day. I know it’s more’n a notion to pull up stakes and start all over again in a strange town and a strange climate, but it’s the difference between life and death. I know I done it and I don’t expect ever to go back.”
She was a frail woman, daintily dressed and shod. Her voice was soft and drawling. But Angela saw her sharply as the epitome of the iron and blood in a race which did not know how to let go of life.
MARKET IS DONE
Chapter I
THE eternal routine of life went on,—meals, slumber, talk, work—and all of it meaning nothing; a void starting nowhere and leading nowhither; a “getting through” with the days. Gradually however two points fixed themselves in her horizon, and about these her life revolved. One was her work,—her art. Every week found her spending three or four of its nights at her easel. She was feverishly anxious to win one of the prizes in the contest which would be held in May; if successful she would send in her application for registration in the Fountainebleau School of Fine Arts which was financed by Americans and established, so read the circular, “as a summer school for American architects, painters and sculptors”. If she were successful in winning this, she would leave the United States for a year or two, thus assuring herself beyond question of a new deal of the cards. The tena
city with which she held to this plan frightened her a little until she found out that there were also possible funds from which she could, with the proper recommendation, borrow enough money to enable her to go abroad with the understanding that the refund was to be made by slow and easy payments. Ashley discovered this saving information, thus relieving her of the almost paralyzing fear which beset her from time to time. It both amused and saddened her to realize that her talent which she had once used as a blind to shield her real motives for breaking loose and coming to New York had now become the greatest, most real force in her life.
Miss Powell, with whom Angela in her new mood had arranged a successful truce, knew of her ambition, indeed shared it. If she herself should win a prize, that money, combined with some small savings of her own and used in connection with the special terms offered by the American Committee, would mean the fruition of her dearest dreams. All this she confided to Angela on two Sunday mornings which the latter spent with her in her rather compressed quarters up in 134th Street. A dwelling house nearby had been converted into a place of worship for one of the special divisions of religious creed so dear to coloured people’s heart. Most of the service seemed to consist of singing, and so the several hours spent by the two girls in earnest talk were punctuated by the outbursts of song issuing from the brazen-coated throats of the faithful.
The other point about which her thoughts centred was her anomalous position. Yet that clear mind of hers warned her again and again that there was nothing inherently wrong or mean or shameful in the stand which she had taken. The method thereof might come in perhaps for a little censure. But otherwise her harshest critics, if unbiased, could only say that instead of sharing the burdens of her own group she had elected to stray along a path where she personally could find the greatest ease, comfort and expansion. She had long since given up the search for happiness. But there were moments when a chance discussion about coloured people couched in the peculiarly brutal terms which white America affects in the discussion of this problem made her blood boil, and she longed to confound her vis-à-vis and his tacit assumption that she, being presumably a white woman, would hold the same views as he, with the remark: “I’m one of them,—do you find me worthless or dishonest or offensive in any way?” Such a dénouement would have, she felt, been a fine gesture. But life she knew had a way of allowing grand gestures to go unremarked and unrewarded. Would it be worth while to throw away the benefits of casual whiteness in America when no great issue was at stake? Would it indeed be worth while to forfeit them when a great issue was involved? Remembering the material age in which she lived and the material nation of which she was a member, she was doubtful. Her mother’s old dictum recurred: “Life is more important than colour.”