She said to him evenly: “What’s it really all about, Nicky?”
He couldn’t tell her about Marise. Considering the casualness of his attentions to the young dancer, it would sound as though he were snatching at a straw. . . . No, he must parade his other reason which after all was just as true.
“I’ll tell you, Phebe. It’s about our color. . . .”
Whatever else she may have been expecting, it was clearly not this. She could only echo stupidly: “Color?”
“Yes, color! I’ve been meaning to tell you about this for years. But how could I? Still even you must have noticed, heard what I mean. . . . Haven’t you seen people whispering, and staring when we’ve got into street-cars? White men leering at you and looking daggers at me? White women curling their lips at both of us? I’ve seen it and I tell you, Phebe, I’ve grown sick and tired of it. . . .”
She said in bewilderment: “But, Nicky, as long as I don’t mind. . . .”
“Phebe, you must see that in this connection I have to think of myself too . . . it puts me in such a false, such an utterly ridiculous position! Why, there have been times when I’ve been taken for your servant. . . .”
At this she was plainly aghast, but she said truly and bravely, “I’d be proud to be taken for yours.”
He went over to her chair then; he dropped to his knees and took her cold hands in his. . . . Once, she told herself drearily, this would have seemed the happiest moment in her life . . . now it was ashes.
“My dear, I know you think you mean that, but, Phebe, we have to take things as they are. . . . I remember Miss Cummings in Sunday School, you had her too, do you remember? I recall all those things she used to tell us about love . . . how it is kind, does not vaunt itself . . . and all that sort of thing. . . .
“It is a beautiful sentiment, it might work for a day, a month, at a pinch for a year. But for a life-time, to be on account of color, in jeopardy of one’s peace of mind, of one’s pride, of one’s life in some places in this democratic country . . . well, Phebe, it simply isn’t being done.”
“But, Nicky, you know those things don’t happen to the people we know and see. . . .”
“Only last night I heard of a man whose career may quite possibly be blasted . . . and all on account of just such a thing as this. . . .”
“And that’s why you came and told me about it?”
“I never meant to tell you about it . . . it just all popped out as you said . . . but it strengthened considerably the feeling which I’ve had such a long time about it.”
“Whoever told you was probably exaggerating. . . .”
“No, he wasn’t . . . because he was telling me about . . . myself.”
“You mean,” she whispered incredulously, “that already I’ve begun to harm you?”
He told her then gently but succinctly all of Pete Holland’s story concerning Professor Reading. . . . “Maybe I might not have believed it, if it had been about another man. But you see I already knew of Reading’s attitude toward me. . . . It was like seeing both sides of the medal.”
Motionless she regarded him from the depths of her chair. She was like something empty, drained of life. . . . “Of course the truth of the whole matter is . . . you simply don’t love me.”
“I am nearer,” he told her solemnly, truthfully, “to loving you greatly, deeply, tonight than I have ever been before. . . . But, I must admit . . . it is not quite enough. I don’t mind bucking difficulties, but, Phebe, I’m just not constituted to play a losing game. . . . After all, isn’t that the salvation of all of us colored people that we just don’t play if we know we’re going to lose? I know it’s the fashion to admire the Indian, because he put up such a fight against the invading paleface. But where is he now? . . . Mostly dead . . . his relicts herded on reservations, his oil-lands maladministered. . . .”
He lit a cigarette.
“But you take us . . . ‘poor colored people,’ as Old Man Talliver so often says . . . we put up a fight of another kind . . . we clung to life in the face of the cruelest treatment that the country has ever known. We learned new ways, new idioms of speech, new adjustments to climate and food. We even learnt and adapted new ideals of beauty. . . .”
“Oh,” she complained wearily, “what has all this to do with us, Nicholas?”
“Only this. If we loved each other as we should, and married and could make it . . . then that would be o.k., Phebe. But to marry knowing that here, right here in Philadelphia, you might see me, your husband, exposed any day in your presence, and sometimes, on account of your presence, to the acutest insult, to know yourself able to enter places, restaurants, movies, homes which I could never penetrate . . . it would be bound to affect us, Phebe. Perhaps you’d pity me; perhaps you’d only remain mildly thwarted. . . . But it would be there between us.”
He hoped never again to see a woman so stricken, so desolated.
“Dear, don’t grieve for me. . . . I’m not worth it. No man is worth it. The whole situation isn’t worth the pain it causes. That’s why I can’t understand a country like this . . . that started out from the beginning to alleviate the natural woes of man . . . pain, sorrow, poverty, caste and all the rest of it, and then went about adding a special little group of woes for us in addition to the ones which every man bears.”
She rose. “I guess you’ll have to go, Nicky. . . . I’m desperately tired. . . . Good-night and good-bye.”
“Wait a minute, Phebe, don’t think I’m hard-hearted. My dear, I thank you with every ounce of me for what you’ve given me. . . . I know. . . . I know, Phebe, that I shall never again meet with such love as yours . . . such loyalty. Believe me, I am thinking of you only when I say to you forget all about me. Marry someone else . . . why not a white man? Why not Llewellyn Nash?”
“Because,” she said steadily, “I like colored people. With all our troubles, our hard times, our difficulties like no others under the sun, they are my folks and I’m sticking with them. Good-night, Nicky. I understand everything you’ve told me and I can see you are quite right. . . . But don’t come to see me anymore.”
CHAPTER VI
CHRISTOPHER CARY, Junior, stopped short at the corner nearest his house, wheeled and sped back in the direction whence he had come. It was dusk; he was through with his studies for the day. His dinner, he knew, would be ready; his mother, who particularly disliked anyone to be late for meals would be waiting for him in her room. His father would be in his office, intermittently reading his paper and also watching for him.
But there were times, such as this evening when he could not bear to cross his father’s threshold. Two years now had elapsed since his sister Teresa had married a Frenchman in Toulouse, “and lived unhappily ever after,” he used sometimes to mutter to himself. . . . Two years likewise had come and passed since that night when he had found Oliver lying on the floor of an upper room, smiling through a veil of blood.
When the light of the late afternoon lay as it lay today across people’s faces; as it lay just an hour ago across the countenance of that lad in the Elevated . . . it was simply impossible for him to know peace in his own home. He must be out and away in the pursuit of something . . . or nothing.
It was all one to him as long as he was spared the sight of his father’s face, which grief had marked so ineffaceably; as long as he could forget that never again would he hear the strains of great music floating down the well of the stairway. Never again tease the lad for the choice of the high-sounding words in which at times he couched his ideas.
At the corner of Fortieth and Market he entered a drug store in order to telephone his father. “I won’t be home till all hours, Dad. Tell them not to wait dinner for me.”
“Very well, son. Would you like me to wait up?”
“No, but I’d like you to go down to the Citizens’ Club and play a game of billiards with Doc. Slocum. Suppose I call him for you and tell him you’re coming.”
“I guess you might do that, Christopher. Only b
e sure to make it plain that if I’m not there by eleven he needn’t expect me.”
“All right, Father. See you later.” He hung up the receiver. “That means he has no intention of going out. . . . Poor Father!”
In five minutes he was at the West Philadelphia Station. In another five minutes he was on the train, on his way to New York and Marise. Sitting in the coach, his eyes straining into the flying darkness, he found himself coming to a decision. He would not, he told himself, go through any longer with all this miserable pain and loneliness. He must change his living conditions . . . for himself and for his father. It was nonsense to let life drift on as they were permitting it, waiting for the gods—or for events to shape themselves . . . and you. People could be the masters of their fates . . . with just a little care, a little more foresight, even a very little telling of the truth Oliver might have been with them now.
If only they had not been so averse to wounding his feeling! How much better to have acquainted the child with his mother’s obsession. How infinitely better for him to have held his mother in a certain kind of contempt than for him to go out in that agony of misunderstanding and to plunge his brother, his sister, father into these ineluctable depths of sorrow. . . . Olivia would either have been totally unaware of his scorn . . . or would even have welcomed it since then, in his effort to evade her, he too would have been working on her side.
The train rolled into the huge station in New York; he ate a leisurely dinner in the restaurant, washed up a bit and sauntered, glad of an opportunity to stretch his legs, through the hard effulgence of Broadway to the theater where Marise was playing. He had not seen her now for six weeks, to such an extent had her indifference on his last visit piqued him. . . .
She was better than ever tonight. Her voice rose very true and luscious and slightly husky with the huskiness of the professional:
“Love me, Hon! That’s the only thing that matters!”
The smooth satin of her skin, dusky and yet glowing like the deep, dark depths of a great crimson dahlia, flashed its allure beneath and above her scanty garment. Her lovely shapely legs with their incredibly slender, rounded ankles, rising from red shoes, moved in a maze of intoxicatingly graceful steps from one end of the great stage to the other. She was the hit of the season, the most fascinatting creature, for the moment, in New York. The incomparable Marise!
In answer to his note she sent back a scrawl telling him to meet her at the stage entrance immediately after the performance. . . . She was there almost as quickly as he; her chauffeur closed the door of her smart little car upon them. It seemed to him as though they had barely exchanged greetings before they were in her large sitting-room in the house which she had taken on One Hundred and Twentieth Street.
From the doorway she asked him: “How long can you stay, Chris?”
“I’d better catch the owl-train back, I’ve a nine o’clock class in the morning.”
“I’ll have Peabody send in supper while I’m dressing.”
But she was back before Peabody could complete his change from chauffeur to butler.
He was general houseman too and, after wheeling in the table, appeared with an armful of logs with which he had soon built up a creditable fire.
“This is the part I like best,” Marise said, dropping down on a low stool. “Pour me some coffee, Chris, and forget my poor manners.”
She found him very good to look at, sitting there in his severe rough suit; she liked his strongly built head with its powerful jaw and its burnished hair. “I didn’t see much of you when you were a boy,” she reminded him, “but I do remember that your hair was always rough. . . . I used to think I’d like to give you something to oil it with.”
He laughed, not at all displeased with the personal turn of the conversation. “I’ll bet you never had a rough strand of hair on your head in your life.”
“It’s a safe bet,” she assured him. “When I was a very little girl I made as solemn a vow as a little girl knows how to make always to appear at my best.”
“Well, you’ve certainly kept it. But then you had pretty good material to start with. . . . Well, this isn’t getting us anywhere. Marise, you know why I’m here tonight . . . you understand me when I tell you that it’s either my last night or the beginning of many nights. . . . They say faint heart never won fair lady so I suppose it will scarcely help my cause when I tell you that I’m pretty nearly sure it will be my last night.”
She was pretty sure of it too, but curious enough to want him to continue.
“I must confess your resignation seems a little too placid, too ready as it were. Is it fair for me to inquire its cause?”
“Only this. You know I’ve liked you for a long while, Marise. I think I liked you at first not so much for your beauty, though a man values that, as because you had the gift of gayety. . . . We weren’t very gay in our household in those days.” His face clouded a little remembering other times.
“But of late my thoughts have been turning to you because you were the girl I knew best . . . outside of Teresa . . . Marise, in my home we are heart-broken, that is my father and I, and only a woman can heal us. . . . I am asking you to come and be that woman.”
She could scarcely believe her ears. “Without love?”
“With a great deal of love . . . and endless gratitude.”
“I wouldn’t want gratitude from a man . . . from my husband, Chris. I’d want something much wilder . . . something that would compel me to give as it would compel him to take. . . .”
He was surprised to find himself not greatly disappointed. “You know you are no more astonished to hear me talk in this way than I am myself,” he said after a brief silence. “It always seemed to me that you were a girl to be courted with castanets, with roses and incense. . . . But life has done something to me, Marise . . . since Oliver’s death. Many things that once seemed so important . . . among them pure romance . . . now seem less so. Only human relationships matter. I am sure that you mean what you say; you deserve beauty in every form; you’ve earned it. I hope your shining knight comes and sweeps you off your feet. . . . You must forgive me for trying to link you up to the dull existence which is all I can offer you now.”
She said with kindness: “I don’t think it’s dull. It might be very sweet. But not for me.”
“You seem to have a very definite idea, maybe a very definite man in view,” he said smiling. . . . “Tell me if I hadn’t been so . . . frightfully matter of fact . . . might I have had a better chance?”
“Not recently . . . but for a while the odds were very slightly in your favor.”
“Then you changed your mind?”
“I changed my mind. . . . Good-bye, Christopher.”
She did not tell him all that lay behind that change. There was that morning about three months ago. She was sitting in her room drinking her coffee and reading letters. Peabody brought her a card on a tray.
She picked it up and read: “Mrs. Olivia B. Cary.”
Surprised and wondering she told the servant to show the visitor in.
Her surprise was destined to be of short duration, for Olivia came directly to the point. “Miss Davies, I shan’t be detaining you long, so I shall be glad to have your undivided attention for a few minutes. . . .”
“Very well,” Marise answered. She could not tell when she had felt a situation so completely out of her hands.
“I have occasion to believe,” Olivia resumed at her chilliest, “that you’ve been seeing a great deal of my son.”
“Not so often,” the girl replied, more at ease. “I believe he does come over to New York . . . more than occasionally, he comes to this house but I rarely have any talk with him.”
“You rarely talk to him!”
“No. Usually there are so many people here, Mrs. Cary . . . people my managers think it best for me to see . . . that there are times when I have to content myself with only a word to . . . well, to people like Christopher.”
Mrs. Cary,
looking as though she did not believe a word of this, continued inexorably:
“What you say, may or may not be true. I have no manner of discovering that. But I can make myself clear . . . on this matter at least . . . I hope for your own sake that you are not construing my son’s visits into anything serious.”
Marise, lighting a cigarette, and enjoying herself, asked calmly: “Did Chris ask you to say that to me?”
His mother had the grace to flush. “No, he didn’t. . . . But I wanted you to know that it would not be at all in keeping with the plans which his father and I have long since cherished. . . .”
“To see him married to a woman as dark as I,” Marise interrupted brutally. “You needn’t warn me, Mrs. Cary. I have no desire to break into your sacred ranks. . . . There’s not a colored person in Philadelphia who doesn’t know in what regard the Carys hold people who show color.” She called to Peabody, who was passing the open door: “Mrs. Cary is leaving. Will you show her the way out?”
All this flashed through Marise’s mind as she stood there looking at the door through which Christopher had passed on his way to the train. Suddenly all her glory, her prestige, her popularity dropped away from her, leaving her lonely and frightened. . . . For years now she had thought that love must come to her . . . the love she especially sought, in the manner which she desired. . . . But it had eluded her . . . and she had been too proud, too busy, too absorbed in getting ahead, to see it. Besides she was not quite sure whether or not she would be playing fair.
For some time past she had been deliberately letting her mind, her fancy rest upon young Cary. He was good enough looking, though not in her preferred style, well-trained, and she thought, not prudish. He would never object, for instance, after the fashion of some tiresome men, to her pursuit of an independent career. But above all she knew him.
For all her radiant assurance this girl possessed an odd streak of timidity; other things being equal, and in spite of her definite leaning toward coquetry, she would always choose from her group of suitors the one she had known longest. . . .