But from Rachel Salting and from Ashley not one single word!
Chapter II
MORE than ever her determination to sail became fixed. “Some people,” she said to Jinny, “might think it the thing to stay here and fight things out. Martha, for instance, is keenly disappointed because I won’t let the committee which had been working for Miss Powell take up my case. I suspect she thinks we’re all quitters. But I know when I’ve had enough. I told her I wanted to spend my life doing something besides fighting. Moreover, the Committee, like myself, is pretty sick of the whole affair, though not for the same reason, and I think there’d be even less chance for a readjustment in my case than there was in Miss Powell’s.”
An interview with Clarke Otter, Chairman of the Advisory Board of the American Committee, had given her this impression. Mr. Otter’s attitude betokened a curious admixture of resentment at what he seemed to consider her deceit in “passing” and exasperation at her having been quixotic enough to give the show away. “We think you are quite right in expressing your determination not to take advantage of the Committee’s arrangements. It evidences a delicacy of feeling quite unusual in the circumstances.” Angela was boiling with anger when she left.
A letter to the donor of the prize brought back the laconic answer that the writer was interested “not in Ethnology but in Art.”
“I’d like to see that party,” said Angela, reverting to the jargon of her youth. “I’ll bet he’s nowhere near as stodgy as he sounds. I shouldn’t wonder but what he was just bubbling over with mirth at the silliness of it all.”
Certainly she herself was bubbling over with mirth or with what served for that quality. Virginia could not remember ever having seen her in such high spirits, not since the days when they used to serve Monday’s dinner for their mother and play at the rôles in which Mrs. Henrietta Jones had figured so largely. But Angela herself knew the shallowness of that mirth whose reality, Anthony, unable to remain for any length of time in her presence and yet somehow unable to stay away, sometimes suspected.
Her savings, alas! including the prize money, amounted roughly to 1,400 dollars. Anthony had urged her to make the passage second class on one of the large, comfortable boats. Then, if she proved herself a good sailor, she might come back third class.
“And anyway don’t put by any more than enough for that,” said Jinny maternally, “and if you need any extra money write to me and I’ll send you all you want.”
From stories told by former foreign students who had sometimes visited the Union it seemed as though she might stretch her remaining hundreds over a period of eight or nine months. “And by that time I’ll have learned enough to know whether I’m to be an honest-to-God artist or a plain drawing teacher.”
“I almost hope it will be the latter,” said Jinny with a touching selfishness, “so you’ll have to come back and live with us. Don’t you hope so, Anthony?”
Angela could see him wince under the strain of her sister’s artlessness. “Eight or nine months abroad ought to make a great difference in her life,” he said with no particular relevance. “Indeed in the lives of all of us.” Both he and Angela had only one thought these days, that the time for departure would have to arrive. Neither of them had envisaged the awfulness of this pull on their self-control.
Now there were only five days before her departure on Monday. She divided them among the Sandburgs, Anthony and Jinny who was coming down with a summer cold. On Saturday the thought came to her that she would like to see Philadelphia again; it was a thought so persistent that by nine o’clock she was in the train and by 11.15 she was preparing for bed in a small side-room in the Hotel Walton in the city of her birth. Smiling, she fell asleep vaguely soothed by the thought of being so close to all that had been once the scene of her steady, unchecked life.
The propinquity was to shake her more than she could dream.
In the morning she breakfasted in her room, then coming downstairs stood in the portico of the hotel drawing on her gloves as she had done so many years before when she had been a girl shopping with her mother. A flood of memories rushed over her, among them the memory of that day when her father and Virginia had passed them on the street and they had not spoken. How trivial the reason for not speaking seemed now! In later years she had cut Jinny for a reason equally trivial.
She walked up toward Sixteenth Street. It was Sunday and the beautiful melancholy of the day was settling on the quiet city. There was a freshness and a solemnity in the air as though even the atmosphere had been rarified and soothed. A sense of loneliness invaded her; this was the city of her birth, of her childhood and of most of her life. Yet there was no one, she felt, to whom she could turn this beautiful day for a welcome; old acquaintances might be mildly pleased, faintly curious at seeing her, but none of them would show any heart-warming gladness. She had left them so abruptly, so completely. Well, she must not think on these things. After all, in New York she had been lonely too.
The Sixteenth Street car set her down at Jefferson Street and slowly she traversed the three long blocks. Always quiet, always respectable, they were doubly so in the sanctity of Sunday morning. What a terrible day Sunday could be without friends, ties, home, family. Only five years ago, less than five years, she had had all the simple, stable fixtures of family life, the appetizing breakfast, the music, the church with its interesting, paintable types, long afternoons and evenings with visitors and discussions beating in the void. And Matthew Henson, would he, she wondered, give her welcome? But she thought that still she did not want to see him. She was not happy, but she was not through adventuring, through tasting life. And she knew that a life spent with Matthew Henson would mean a cessation of that. After all, was he, with his steadiness, his uprightness, his gift for responsibility any happier than she? She doubted it.
Oh, she hoped Sundays in Paris would be gay!
Opal Street came into her vision, a line, a mere shadow of a street falling upon the steadfastness of Jefferson. Her heart quickened, tears came into her eyes as she turned that corner which she had turned so often, that corner which she had once left behind her forever in order to taste and know life. In the hot July sun the street lay almost deserted. A young coloured man, immaculate in white shirt sleeves, slim and straight, bending in his doorway to pick up the bulky Sunday paper, straightened up to watch her advancing toward him. Just this side of him stood her former home,—how tiny it was and yet how full of secrets, of knowledge of joy, despair, suffering, futility—in brief Life! She stood a few moments in front of it, just gazing, but presently she went up and put her hand on the red brick, wondering blindly if in some way the insensate thing might not communicate with her through touch. A coloured woman sitting in the window watching her rather sharply, came out then and asked her suspiciously what she wanted.
“Nothing,” Angela replied dully. “I just wanted to look at the house.”
“It isn’t for sale, you know.”
“No, no, of course not. I just wanted to look at it again. I used to live here, you see. I wondered——” Even if she did get permission to go inside, could she endure it? If she could just stand once in that little back room and cry and cry—perhaps her tears would flood away all that mass of regret and confusion and futile memories, and she could begin life all over with a blank page. Thank God she was young! Suddenly it seemed to her that entering the house once more, standing in that room would be a complete panacea. Raising her eyes expectantly to the woman’s face she began: “Would you be so kind——?”
But the woman, throwing her a last suspicious look and muttering that she was “nothing but poor white trash,” turned and, slamming the door behind her, entered the little square parlour and pulled down the blinds.
The slim young man came running down the steet toward her. Closer inspection revealed his ownership of a pleasant brown freckled face topped by thick, soft, rather closely cropped dark-red hair.
“Angela,” he said timidly, and then with more
assurance: “It is Angela Murray.”
She turned her stricken face toward him. “She wouldn’t let me in, Matthew. I’m going to France to-morrow and I thought I’d like to see the old house. But she wouldn’t let me look at it. She called me,”—her voice broke with the injustice of it,—“poor white trash.”
“I know,” he nodded gravely. “She’d do that kind of thing; she doesn’t understand, you see.” He was leading her gently toward his house. “I think you’d better come inside and rest a moment. My father and mother have gone off for their annual trip to Bridgeton; mother was born there, you know. But you won’t mind coming into the house of an old and tried friend.”
“No,” she said, conscious of an overwhelming fatigue and general sense of let-downness, “I should say I wouldn’t.” As they crossed the threshold she tried faintly to smile but the effort was too much for her and she burst into a flood of choking, strangling, noisy tears.
Matthew removed her hat and fanned her; brought her ice-water and a large soft handkerchief to replace her own sodden wisp. Through her tears she smiled at him, understanding as she did so, the reason for Virginia’s insistence on his general niceness. He was still Matthew Henson, still freckled and brown, still capped with that thatch of thick bad hair. But care and hair-dressings and improved toilet methods and above all the emanation of a fine and generous spirit had metamorphosed him into someone still the old Matthew Henson and yet someone somehow translated into a quintessence of kindliness and gravity and comprehending.
She drank the water gratefully, took out her powder puff.
“I don’t need to ask you how you are,” he said, uttering a prayer of thanks for averted hysterics. “When a lady begins to powder her nose, she’s bucking up all right. Want to tell me all about it?”
“There’s nothing to tell. Only I wanted to see the house and suddenly found myself unexpectedly homesick, lonely, misunderstood. And when that woman refused me so cruelly, it was just too much.” Her gaze wavered, her eyes filled again.
“Oh,” he said in terror, “for God’s sake don’t cry again! I’ll go over and give her a piece of my mind; I’ll make her turn the whole house over to you. I’ll bring you her head on a charger. Only ‘dry those tears’.” He took her handkerchief and dried them himself very, very gently.
She caught his hand. “Matthew, you’re a dear.”
He shrugged negligently, “You haven’t always thought that.”
This turn of affairs would never do. “What were you planning to do when I barged in? Getting ready to read your paper and be all homey and comfortable?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to do that now. Tell you what, Angela, let’s have a lark. Suppose we have dinner here? You get it. Remember how it used to make me happy as a king in the old days if you’d just hand me a glass of water? You said you were sailing to-morrow; you must be all packed. What time do you have to be back? I’ll put you on the train.”
The idea enchanted her. “I’d love it! Matthew, what fun!” They found an apron of his mother’s, and in the ice-box, cold roast beef, lettuce which Philadelphians call salad, beets and corn. “I’ll make muffins,” said Angela joyously, “and you take a dish after dinner and go out and get some ice-cream. Oh, Matthew, how it’s all coming back to me! Do you still shop up here in the market?”
They ate the meal in the little dark cool dining-room, the counterpart of the dining-room in Junius Murray’s one-time house across the way. But somehow its smallness was no longer irksome; rather it seemed a tiny island of protection reared out of and against an encroaching sea of troubles. In fancy she saw her father and mother almost a quarter of a century ago coming proudly to such a home, their little redoubt of refuge against the world. How beautiful such a life could be, shared with some one beloved,—with Anthony! Involuntarily she sighed.
Matthew studying her thoughtfully said: “You’re dreaming, Angela. Tell me what it’s all about.”
“I was thinking what a little haven a house like this could be; what it must have meant to my mother. Funny how I almost pounded down the walls once upon a time trying to get away. Now I can’t think of anything more marvellous than having such a place as this, here, there, anywhere, to return to.”
Startled, he told her of his surprise at hearing such words from her. “If Virginia had said them I should think it perfectly natural; but I hadn’t thought of you as being interested in home. How, by the way, is Virginia?”
“Perfect.”
With a wistfulness which barely registered with her absorption, he queried: “I suppose she’s tremendously happy?”
“Happy enough.”
“A great girl, little Virginia.” In his turn he fell to musing, roused himself. “You haven’t told me of your adventures and your flight into the great world.”
“There’s not much to tell, Matthew. All I’ve seen and experienced has been the common fate of most people, a little sharpened, perhaps, a little vivified. Briefly, I’ve had a lot of fun and a measure of trouble. I’ve been stimulated by adventure; I’ve known suffering and love and pain.”
“You’re still surprising me. I didn’t suppose a girl like you could know the meaning of pain.” He gave her a twisted smile. “Though you certainly know how to cause it. Even yet I can get a pang which no other thought produces if I let my mind go back to those first few desperate days after you left me. Heavens, can’t you suffer when you’re young!”
She nodded, laid her hand on his. “Terribly. Remember, I was suffering too, Matthew, though for different causes. I was so pushed, so goaded . . . well, we won’t talk about that any more . . . I hope you’ve got over all that feeling. Indeed, indeed I wasn’t worth it. Do tell me you haven’t let it harass you all these years.”
His hand clasped hers lightly, then withdrew. “No I haven’t. . . . The suddenness, the inevitableness of your departure checked me, pulled me up short. I suffered, oh damnably, but it was suffering with my eyes open. I knew then you weren’t for me; that fundamentally we were too far apart. And eventually I got over it. Those days!” He smiled again wryly, recalling a memory. “But I went on suffering just the same, only in another way. I fell in love with Jinny.”
Her heart in her breast stopped beating. “Matthew, you didn’t! Why on earth didn’t you ever say so?”
“I couldn’t. She was such a child, you see; she made it so plain all the time that she looked on me as her sister’s beau and therefore a kind of dependable brother. After you went I used to go to see her, take her about. Why she’d swing on my arm and hold up her face for a good-night kiss! Once, I remember, we had been out and she became car-sick,—poor little weak thing! She was so ashamed! Like a baby, you know, playing at being grown-up and then ashamed for reverting to babyhood. I went to see her the next day and she was so little and frail and confiding! I stayed away then for a long time and the next thing I knew she was going to New York. I misjudged you awfully then, Angela. You must forgive me. I thought you had pulled her away. I learned later that I was wrong, that you and she rarely saw each other in New York. Do you know why she left?”
There was her sister’s pride to shield but her own need to succour; who could have dreamed of such a dilemma? “I can’t betray Jinny,” she said to herself and told him that while she personally had not influenced her sister the latter had had a very good reason for leaving Philadelphia.
“I suppose so. Certainly she left. But she’d write me, occasionally, letters just like her dear self, so frank and girlish and ingenuous and making it so damnably plain that any demonstration of love on my part was out of the question. I said to myself: ‘I’m not going to wreck my whole life over those Murray girls’. And I let our friendship drift off into a nothingness. . . . Then she came to visit Edna Brown this summer. I fairly leaped out to Merion to see her. The moment I laid eyes on her I realized that she had developed, had become a woman. She was as always, kind and sweet, prettier, more alluring than ever. I thought I’d try my luck . . . and Edna told me she
was engaged. What’s the fellow like, Angela?
“Very nice, very fine.”
“Wild about her, I suppose?”
Desperately she looked at him. “He’s a rather undemonstrative sort. I suppose he’s wild enough. Only,—well they talk as though they had no intention of marrying for years and years and they both seem perfectly content with that arrangement.”
He frowned incredulously. “What! If I thought they weren’t in earnest!”
Impulsively she broke out: “Oh, Matthew, don’t you know,—there’s so much pain, such suffering in the world,—a man should never leave any stone unturned to achieve his ultimate happiness. Why don’t you—write to Jinny, go to New York to see her?”
Under his freckles his brown skin paled. “You think there’s a chance?”
“My dear, I wouldn’t dare say. I know she likes you very, very much. And I don’t think she regards you as a brother.”
“Angela, you wouldn’t fool me?”
“Why should I do that? And remember after all I’m giving you no assurance. I’m merely saying it’s worth taking a chance. Now let’s see, we’ll straighten up this place and then we must fly.”
At the station she kissed him good-bye. “Anyway you’re always a brother to me. Think of what I’ve told you, Matthew; act on it.”
“I shall. Oh, Angela, suppose it should be that God sent you down here to-day?”
“Perhaps He did.” They parted solemnly.
Three hours later found her entering her sister’s apartment. Jinny, her cold raging, her eyes inflamed and weeping, greeted her plaintively. “Look at me, Angela. And you leaving tomorrow! I’ll never be able to make that boat!” The telephone rang. “It’s been ringing steadily for the last hour, somebody calling for you. Do answer it.”