Comedy_American Style

  What a snarl life could become! Inhaling once more deeply of his cigarette he threw the charred fragment out the window. . . . The sympathetic tree sighed to him once more tenderly. Stumbling across his room he fell into bed where sleep covered him immediately like a pall.

  In the morning Pete Holland called him: “Say, Nick, I’ve got those notes you were so crazy about. Carter Lister lent me his. How’ll I get them to you?”

  In the end they decided to work together that night in Campbell’s room. Nicholas bathed, breakfasted, telephoned to Phebe and set off for a gruelling day in the laboratory.

  The notes which Holland brought him, remarkably succinct and clear though they were, differed not a whit in quality from those which Nicholas had taken. He went through them all with the utmost care; comparing them wtih his own; noticing specially any marked difference in diction or emphasis. But invariably the sense was the same. Lister and he might have been two halves of the same mind for any difference which appeared in their accounts of the lectures.

  After a long two hours of steady application Nicholas laid down the books and his pen, took out a fresh cigarette, stretched his long legs under his study table. Holland some time since had put aside his book and greatly at ease on the roomy couch was perusing the sporting sheet of an old newspaper.

  “Now,” said Nicholas, “old Reading will really have to go out of his way to mark me down on those notes . . . they’re as near perfect as they come. . . .” But his face showed his worry. “Yet I’ll bet good money he’ll manage to sock me at that. . . . Wonder what he’s got against me, Pete?”

  Holland cleared his throat; he started to speak; then thinking better of it relaxed into even greater ease, lying flat on his back the better to blow smoke rings.

  His friend continued scowling. “I wish I could get their point of view. I can’t see their logic . . . making it harder for a colored man because he is colored . . . a thing he can’t help . . . and half the time doesn’t want to. Remember that professor in that medical college in South Philadelphia who held back Julia Anstey three years ago? She told Julia to her face that no colored woman should ever say she had passed her course.

  “Bob Anstey told me that Julia actually started to kill herself on account of it . . . she had worked so hard and she was in debt up to her neck . . . the thought of another year simply paralyzed her. Fact. But she did buck up, got another prof and fooled them all. Well, I won’t kill myself . . . oh, no. . . . But I’m going to be pretty sick, Pete, if this old son-of-a-gun does bust me. Funny thing I can’t see why he picks on me. All the other colored fellows say he’s o.k.”

  They were silent for a long five minutes. Then Pete, rolling over on his side, his back to Nicholas, sighed explosively.

  “What’s the matter?” Nicky asked him. “What’s your trouble?”

  “Funny,” Pete rejoined, his voice necessarily smothered by his position, “funny that you should mention Bob Anstey.”

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “Well, because he’s the fellow that told me all about it, you know. The fellow who gave me the lowdown.”

  “Lowdown on what? What are you driving at, Holland?”

  “Well, Great Scott, don’t you hear me trying to tell you? The lowdown on Reading and what he has against you.”

  Nicholas stared in amazement. “Bob Anstey! On what Reading has against me! Come on, Pete, turn over and tell me what you’re driving at.”

  “Well, Anstey had to come out of school for a while, you know. He’s working, waiting table for Marise Davies’ father, or for the Tallivers, I forget which. . . .”

  “Well, surely that can’t make any difference. Go on, fella.”

  “Well, it seems this Reading goes with a pretty top-notch crowd. Anyway Bob was waiting table at a dinner out at Chestnut Hill, a dinner given by some people named Nash, I believe. . . . Anyway, this particular bunch must have done some talking about colored people; some said this and some said that; none of them seemed too favorably inclined, just spoke their minds right out. . . . You know the dumb way white people act before colored servants, as though they didn’t have any ears. . . .”

  Nick, remembering harassing moments at hotels when he was working in Asbury Park, nodded. “For God’s sake, get on, Pete.”

  “Have to tell it my own way, fella. . . . Well, anyway, this Reading spoke up for the colored brother, said he’d had a raw deal et. cet., et. cet. Said he had a lot of sympathy for them as long as they stayed in their places. But when they got beyond themselves and especially when they got to chasing about after white women . . .” Holland paused, deliberately turned over and looked at his friend with significance.

  Nick only stared blankly. “So what?”

  “You are dumb, Nick. . . . So he said he had a colored fellow in one of his classes, a man with a good mind, rather uppish, but he could forgive that. But he’d seen him at least four times in his neighborhood, late at night, each time with a white woman, out around George’s Hill. He wished he knew the young woman’s father. . . .”

  Nick, still hazy, could only mutter: “George’s Hill?”

  “Yes,” Holland returned testily. “Haven’t you got any sense at all? Don’t you go out to George’s Hill every now and then with Phebe Grant? Seems to me I met you out there once myself. . . .” He dragged himself up and began looking for his hat. “Guess I’ve done all the damage I can do in one sitting. . . . Here, give me those notes; Lister thinks I’ve borrowed them for myself. Well, s’long, Nick. . . .”

  The street-door at the end of the long well of the stairs slammed behind him.

  “And the last time too I butt into any man’s private affairs, I’m telling you,” he said to Bob Anstey, whom he met later at the Talliver boys. “I don’t think he liked it any too well.”

  Nicholas did not like the situation; did not like it at all. Holland’s narrative added fuel to the smouldering fire of indignation which burned within him when he thought of the inconsistencies of his white fellowman. “Not a person in that bunch that would have been willing to accept Phebe for white, if they knew her story. And yet all of them ready to burst with resentment because she is of mixed blood and elects to associate with a person of the same combination, only darker.”

  He would go down to the ice-box and see what he could find. “I don’t see how I’m going to get that over to Reading,” he thought to himself, trying to keep his feet from clattering too loudly on the stairs. . . . He was taking a bottle of cream out of the ice-box . . . his mother would probably be quite provoked to find she’d have to get more of it in the morning. He must try to get down early enough to go to the milk store for her. It was then that the thought struck him . . . Holland’s story had provided him with a way out of his dilemma with Phebe.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE more he thought of it, the more his mind clung to the idea. It was one, he knew, which for many years had revolved dimly in the back of his head. More than once in Phebe’s company he had winced under the surprised or curious, gaping stares of white people in street-cars, or theaters, or parks. It was an ordeal which never failed to arouse within him a perfect fury of rage and exasperation.

  What group of people could there be, he often wondered, within the United States, who were totally unaware that the admixture of whites and blacks had been going on, covertly to say the least, for centuries? How could the most ordinary feat of ratiocination refuse to acknowledge the possibility of a type like Phebe as a result of this admixture?

  Why should they expect the product of this combination to run to a fixed, immediately recognizable type? And in any event what difference did it make? . . . Why should he himself, even, secure in his knowledge, object so to these stares and whispered comments?

  He could not feel proud of his decision, and yet he wondered if after all this fatal difference in appearance had not worked its effect upon him during the more conscious stages of his and Phebe’s acquaintance. This, even more than his love for Marise, wa
s the hidden cause of his having steadfastly refused in his innermost mind to accept Phebe as his wife. A man in his marriage sought, he knew, the fulfilment of love, of passion, proved possessorship, security of affection. But more than any of these he sought comfort which was the combination of all these qualities and yet an entity apart.

  Well, there it was! In Phebe’s presence, he was, if surrounded by white Americans, without comfort. He might, he knew very well, in some sections of the country be subjected to open insult . . . to possible danger. And the same might be true for Phebe. There were, it was true, several cases among people whom he knew where the difference in color and appearance had not proved a deterrent, but for himself he disliked the self-consciousness which it imposed . . . the unnecessary complications . . . the extra inconveniences heaped, like Ossa upon Pelion, upon the ordinary difficulties of living.

  After all, after two nights of steady concentration he was just as far removed as ever from a solution of the problem into which his constant association with Phebe had brought him. . . . But his thinking did bring about two results: one, the resolve that come what may he would never marry a girl of this type; two, the slight wonderment if, perhaps, Mrs. Olivia Cary might not have had some justification in trying to steer her domestic ship away from the shoals of the question of color in America.

  It was with a clouded face that he entered the Elevated at Market Street; then his brow cleared. In any event he did not have to discuss and settle the matter just now. Perhaps something would turn up. There was no point in forcing the issue. He bought a paper and lost himself in the account of Babe Ruth’s latest encounter with the Philadelphia Athletics.

  In Phebe’s bedroom an errant shaft of light was going through its usual morning’s bewilderment. It was always unable to determine, this ray of sun, whether the halo of bright gold which framed the girl’s smooth brow and which lay in little quirks and whorls upon her pillow was formed from forgotten light, left there perhaps another day, or whether it could possibly be tendrils of hair. . . . Inquisitively, therefore, it climbed slowly over the bed, across the girl’s recumbent figure. Now eager to reach its goal it touched her drooping eyelids . . . they opened, and it lingered, forgetful, in Phebe’s startled gaze.

  For a while she lay there, completely relaxed, completely happy in the happiness with which her whole self was suffused even before she awoke. She was not, except where color was concerned, a very sensuous creature. She was entirely lacking in that ability to savor and to enjoy mere mood and perception . . . that ability which so characterized little Oliver Cary. . . . But for once she was entirely, objectively aware of her state. It seemed to her a lovely, a most grateful condition that one should be happy, even before he was awake. . . . To be somnolent in bliss . . . surely one of the rarest of blessings!

  And of course she could trace the bliss to its source. Today was Wednesday . . . and Nicholas was coming. The thought of it colored and suffused her whole day. Because of it she sold enormous quantities of furbelows at ruinous prices; she thought of a new note to add to a dressing gown which changed it from something merely bizarre to a figment of enchantment and indeed sold it. . . . To Llewellyn Nash, who lunched with her, she talked on such a tide of gayety, exhilaration, complete satisfaction with living, that he felt refreshed as though he had quaffed an elixir. How wonderful it would be to have this lovely, vibrant, gallant creature forever beside one. . . . No need then to go to German Baths . . . to French Watering Places. An hour spent with Phebe was the equivalent of a combination of ozone, champagne, ambrosia, the waters of the Fountain of Youth all poured in some classical goblet and mixed and blessed by some beneficent god.

  At last the lovely, strenuous day was over. In a few hours now, she thought, tripping along the street like some girl in the pictured advertisement of the perfect shoe . . . in a few hours all this heady anticipation would be resolved into realization. Tonight it would be nice to stay at home; to talk, to laugh, to have music, to listen to Nicholas singing, and talking too, in that resonant voice . . . to kiss him good-night. What mattered it if he did not talk of marriage as yet, provided only this could last throughout the years?

  CHAPTER V

  HE HAD rung the bell; he was in the house; she could hear him talking in his deep grave voice to her mother . . . he was always so nice to her mother, treating her with unfeigned deference and respect. From the lodger’s rooms on the third floor, where to Mrs. Nixon’s surprise she was granting all the requests preferred—new blankets and a rug—she could hear him asking: “Where’s Phebe?”

  “Down in just a moment,” her mother said.

  He must have gone across the room to the piano for presently she heard great music, heard his golden voice, heard the heartbreaking yearning of those universally felt words:

  “None but the lonely heart. . . .”

  In her own room she slipped into her white dress, rummaged among piles of costume jewelry for bright, dark blue beads and bracelets with just a thought of tarnished gold; she ran her nervous fingers through the thick cap of hair which tonight had, beyond question, imprisoned the sun. She was down the stairs; she was beside him. “Such a sad song, Nicky!”

  “Such a beautiful one, Phebe! Such a true one!”

  “True or not, no sadness tonight.”

  Obediently he broke into something else, all bright and sparkling, with a touch of the gamin and yet sincere. There was a final, haunting line:

  “Love me, Hon. That’s the only thing that mattersl”

  “That’s from Marise’s show. Like it, Phebe?”

  “I adore it. Play it again.” She took a step or two, snapping her fingers, pirouetting, and twisting her slender body in the modern manner, but always with restraint, even daintiness.

  He left off his strumming to watch her.

  “Can’t dance without music.” She gave one final turn, poised in front of him with hands extended toward him. “How do you like my dress?”

  “It’s beautiful,” he told her. “And you’re beautiful too, Phebe.”

  But all beautiful, sweet, glowing as she was, she was still, he realized, not for him.

  She was delighted that he thought her beautiful. “You’re the second person to tell me that today,” she confided without conceit. “One of those terrible, real Philadelphia Society old ladies was in the shop today; you know, the kind that wears a hat like the Queen of England—only she doesn’t get away with it. . . . I tried on a dress for her daughter who’s at Bar Harbor, and she said my face was my fortune. She bought the dress and paid me two hundred of the best too.”

  “Two hundred dollars!” He whistled. “Gosh that’s a lot of money for . . .”

  “A rag,” she interrupted him gayly, “to adorn a bone and a hank of hair. A lot of it was pure profit too. Getting along, don’t you think so, sonny?”

  “I should say so! What are you going to do with it all?”

  “Well, of course, my expenses are fairly heavy, though not so bad as they were . . . the top floor is rented now and that helps tremendously. And of course Madame and I go half and half. But even then,” she finished with touching humility, “when you remember how calamitously poor we used to be, I am able to put by quite a lot.”

  “For a rainy day,” he appended idly.

  “No, for you.” It was out before she realized it; she was just as astounded as he on hearing those words and then infinitely relieved.

  Impossible to ignore the words; impossible to feign un-awareness of their import.

  “Phebe,” he admonished her, distressed and at sea. “You shouldn’t say a thing like that, dear. You know how impossible it would be for me to accept money from you.”

  She said, savoring the delicious intimacy of the moment: “Don’t you think you’re being a little bit too finicky, Nick? After all you could pay me back at any time. And—and it would bring everything that much nearer.”

  He was resolved to fight to the last ditch. “Bring what that much nearer?”

 
“As though you didn’t know!” But very faintly she felt fright. It was unlike Nicholas, famed among their crowd as a straight shooting sportsman, to hedge like this. “Why, Nicky . . . why of course I never meant to bring this subject up. It . . . it just popped up of itself . . . didn’t it? But after all, isn’t it what we’ve been thinking about all these years?”

  Well, it had come. Never in his life, had he believed it could be his lot to feel such a cad. . . . “Only,” his wavering mind warned him, “you’ll be much more of a cad if you let her marry you feeling as you do.”

  On this note with no plan of action ready he plunged into the miserable fray. For a second he looked at her, penetratingly, sadly. He rose, extended his hand. “Will you sit beside me on the sofa awhile, Phebe?”

  “No,” she answered, her voice a little shrill with fear. “I’ll sit right here.”

  “Well,” he began, “it would only make matters worse, wouldn’t it, if I pretended not to know what is in your mind? . . . We should have had this out long ago, but I kept hoping that we wouldn’t have to face this issue, that you would meet and like somebody else. . . . I suppose you’ve been thinking about marriage, Phebe?”

  She nodded; the lump in her throat made it impossible to speak.

  “I tried my best, Phebe, to make it clear to you that I didn’t love you, not as a man loves a woman from whom he hopes everything. Once or twice, since we’ve been grown, I went out with other girls to make you see that there could be others. . . . I expected you to exercise the same freedom. . . .”

  “But you saw I never did.”

  “No . . . but I couldn’t urge you to be more . . . more catholic so to speak, could I? That would have shown me up as the world’s prize conceited ass.”