Nella Larsen, "Quicksand" (1928) (full text)
On January 1, 2024, the book entered the public domain, allowing it to
be freely reproduced and disseminated. This version is based on a
digital version of the first edition available from Google Books. Credit to Neal Caren.
Dedication
FOR E. S. I.
Epigraph
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I’m gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
Langston Hughes
One
Helga Crane sat alone in her room, which at that hour, eight in the
evening, was in soft gloom. Only a single reading lamp, dimmed by a
great black and red shade, made a pool of light on the blue Chinese
carpet, on the bright covers of the books which she had taken down from
their long shelves, on the white pages of the opened one selected, on
the shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums beside her
on the low table, and on the oriental silk which covered the stool at
her slim feet. It was a comfortable room, furnished with rare and
intensely personal taste, flooded with Southern sun in the day, but
shadowy just then with the drawn curtains and single shaded light.
Large, too. So large that the spot where Helga sat was a small oasis in
a desert of darkness. And eerily quiet. But that was what she liked
after her taxing day’s work, after the hard classes, in which she gave
willingly and unsparingly of herself with no apparent return. She loved
this tranquillity, this quiet, following the fret and strain of the long
hours spent among fellow members of a carelessly unkind and gossiping
faculty, following the strenuous rigidity of conduct required in this
huge educational community of which she was an insignificant part. This
was her rest, this intentional isolation for a short while in the
evening, this little time in her own attractive room with her own books.
To the rapping of other teachers, bearing fresh scandals, or seeking
information, or other more concrete favors, or merely talk, at that hour
Helga Crane never opened her door.
An observer would have thought her well fitted to that framing of light
and shade. A slight girl of twenty-two years, with narrow, sloping
shoulders and delicate, but well-turned, arms and legs, she had, none
the less, an air of radiant, careless health. In vivid green and gold
negligee and glistening brocaded mules, deep sunk in the big high-backed
chair, against whose dark tapestry her sharply cut face, with skin like
yellow satin, was distinctly outlined, she was—to use a hackneyed
word—attractive. Black, very broad brows over soft, yet penetrating,
dark eyes, and a pretty mouth, whose sensitive and sensuous lips had a
slight questioning petulance and a tiny dissatisfied droop, were the
features on which the observer’s attention would fasten; though her nose
was good, her ears delicately chiseled, and her curly blue-black hair
plentiful and always straying in a little wayward, delightful way. Just
then it was tumbled, falling unrestrained about her face and on to her
shoulders.
Helga Crane tried not to think of her work and the school as she sat
there. Ever since her arrival in Naxos she had striven to keep these
ends of the days from the intrusion of irritating thoughts and worries.
Usually she was successful. But not this evening. Of the books which she
had taken from their places she had decided on Marmaduke Pickthall’s
Saïd the Fisherman. She wanted forgetfulness, complete mental
relaxation, rest from thought of any kind. For the day had been more
than usually crowded with distasteful encounters and stupid
perversities. The sultry hot Southern spring had left her strangely
tired, and a little unnerved. And annoying beyond all other happenings
had been that affair of the noon period, now again thrusting itself on
her already irritated mind.
She had counted on a few spare minutes in which to indulge in the sweet
pleasure of a bath and a fresh, cool change of clothing. And instead her
luncheon time had been shortened, as had that of everyone else, and
immediately after the hurried gulping down of a heavy hot meal the
hundreds of students and teachers had been herded into the sun-baked
chapel to listen to the banal, the patronizing, and even the insulting
remarks of one of the renowned white preachers of the state.
Helga shuddered a little as she recalled some of the statements made by
that holy white man of God to the black folk sitting so respectfully
before him.
This was, he had told them with obvious sectional pride, the finest
school for Negroes anywhere in the country, north or south; in fact, it
was better even than a great many schools for white children. And he had
dared any Northerner to come south and after looking upon this great
institution to say that the Southerner mistreated the Negro. And he had
said that if all Negroes would only take a leaf out of the book of Naxos
and conduct themselves in the manner of the Naxos products, there would
be no race problem, because Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of
them. They had good sense and they had good taste. They knew enough to
stay in their places, and that, said the preacher, showed good taste. He
spoke of his great admiration for the Negro race, no other race in so
short a time had made so much progress, but he had urgently besought
them to know when and where to stop. He hoped, he sincerely hoped, that
they wouldn’t become avaricious and grasping, thinking only of adding to
their earthly goods, for that would be a sin in the sight of Almighty
God. And then he had spoken of contentment, embellishing his words with
scriptural quotations and pointing out to them that it was their duty to
be satisfied in the estate to which they had been called, hewers of wood
and drawers of water. And then he had prayed.
Sitting there in her room, long hours after, Helga again felt a surge of
hot anger and seething resentment. And again it subsided in amazement at
the memory of the considerable applause which had greeted the speaker
just before he had asked his God’s blessing upon them.
The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all. Strange,
too, for this was the thing which she had ardently desired to share in,
to be a part of this monument to one man’s genius and vision. She pinned
a scrap of paper about the bulb under the lamp’s shade, for, having
discarded her book in the certainty that in such a mood even Saïd and
his audacious villainy could not charm her, she wanted an even more
soothing darkness. She wished it were vacation, so that she might get
away for a time.
“No, forever!” she said aloud.
The minutes gathered into hours, but still she sat motionless, a
disdainful smile or an angry frown passing now and then across her face.
Somewhere in the room a little clock ticked time away. Somewhere
outside, a whippoorwill wailed. Evening died. A sweet smell of early
Southern flowers rushed in on a newly-risen breeze which suddenly parted
the thin silk curtains at the opened windows. A slender, frail glass
vase fell from the sill with a tingling crash, but Helga Crane did not
shift her position. And the night grew cooler, and older.
At last she stirred, uncertainly, but with an overpowering desire for
action of some sort. A second she hesitated, then rose abruptly and
pressed the electric switch with determined firmness, flooding suddenly
the shadowy room with a white glare of light. Next she made a quick
nervous tour to the end of the long room, paused a moment before the old
bow-legged secretary that held with almost articulate protest her
school-teacher paraphernalia of drab books and papers. Frantically Helga
Crane clutched at the lot and then flung them violently, scornfully
toward the wastebasket. It received a part, allowing the rest to spill
untidily over the floor. The girl smiled ironically, seeing in the mess
a simile of her own earnest endeavor to inculcate knowledge into her
indifferent classes.
Yes, it was like that; a few of the ideas which she tried to put into
the minds behind those baffling ebony, bronze, and gold faces reached
their destination. The others were left scattered about. And, like the
gay, indifferent wastebasket, it wasn’t their fault. No, it wasn’t the
fault of those minds back of the diverse colored faces. It was, rather,
the fault of the method, the general idea behind the system. Like her
own hurried shot at the basket, the aim was bad, the material drab and
badly prepared for its purpose.
This great community, she thought, was no longer a school. It had grown
into a machine. It was now a show place in the black belt,
exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the black
man’s inefficiency. Life had died out of it. It was, Helga decided, now
only a big knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to a
pattern, the white man’s pattern. Teachers as well as students were
subjected to the paring process, for it tolerated no innovations, no
individualisms. Ideas it rejected, and looked with open hostility on one
and all who had the temerity to offer a suggestion or ever so mildly
express a disapproval. Enthusiasm, spontaneity, if not actually
suppressed, were at least openly regretted as unladylike or
ungentlemanly qualities. The place was smug and fat with
self-satisfaction.
A peculiar characteristic trait, cold, slowly accumulated unreason in
which all values were distorted or else ceased to exist, had with
surprising ferociousness shaken the bulwarks of that self-restraint
which was also, curiously, a part of her nature. And now that it had
waned as quickly as it had risen, she smiled again, and this time the
smile held a faint amusement, which wiped away the little hardness which
had congealed her lovely face. Nevertheless she was soothed by the
impetuous discharge of violence, and a sigh of relief came from her.
She said aloud, quietly, dispassionately: “Well, I’m through with that,”
and, shutting off the hard, bright blaze of the overhead lights, went
back to her chair and settled down with an odd gesture of sudden soft
collapse, like a person who had been for months fighting the devil and
then unexpectedly had turned round and agreed to do his bidding.
Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with the
keen joy and zest of those immature people who have dreamed dreams of
doing good to their fellow men. But gradually this zest was blotted out,
giving place to a deep hatred for the trivial hypocrisies and careless
cruelties which were, unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos
policy of uplift. Yet she had continued to try not only to teach, but to
befriend those happy singing children, whose charm and distinctiveness
the school was so surely ready to destroy. Instinctively Helga was aware
that their smiling submissiveness covered many poignant heartaches and
perhaps much secret contempt for their instructors. But she was
powerless. In Naxos between teacher and student, between condescending
authority and smoldering resentment, the gulf was too great, and too few
had tried to cross it. It couldn’t be spanned by one sympathetic
teacher. It was useless to offer her atom of friendship, which under the
existing conditions was neither wanted nor understood.
Nor was the general atmosphere of Naxos, its air of self-rightness and
intolerant dislike of difference, the best of mediums for a pretty,
solitary girl with no family connections. Helga’s essentially likable
and charming personality was smudged out. She had felt this for a long
time. Now she faced with determination that other truth which she had
refused to formulate in her thoughts, the fact that she was utterly
unfitted for teaching, even for mere existence, in Naxos. She was a
failure here. She had, she conceded now, been silly, obstinate, to
persist for so long. A failure. Therefore, no need, no use, to stay
longer. Suddenly she longed for immediate departure. How good, she
thought, to go now, tonight!—and frowned to remember how impossible that
would be. “The dignitaries,” she said, “are not in their offices, and
there will be yards and yards of red tape to unwind, gigantic,
impressive spools of it.”
And there was James Vayle to be told, and much-needed money to be got.
James, she decided, had better be told at once. She looked at the clock
racing indifferently on. No, too late. It would have to be tomorrow.
She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing
full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the
unalterable truth that it could influence her actions, block her
desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with. With Helga it was
almost a superstition that to concede to money its importance magnified
its power. Still, in spite of her reluctance and distaste, her financial
situation would have to be faced, and plans made, if she were to get
away from Naxos with anything like the haste which she now so ardently
desired.
Most of her earnings had gone into clothes, into books, into the
furnishings of the room which held her. All her life Helga Crane had
loved and longed for nice things. Indeed, it was this craving, this urge
for beauty which had helped to bring her into disfavor in Naxos—“pride”
and “vanity” her detractors called it.
The sum owing to her by the school would just a little more than buy her
ticket back to Chicago. It was too near the end of the school term to
hope to get teaching-work anywhere. If she couldn’t find something else,
she would have to ask Uncle Peter for a loan. Uncle Peter was, she knew,
the one relative who thought kindly, or even calmly, of her. Her
stepfather, her stepbrothers and sisters, and the numerous cousins,
aunts, and other uncles could not be even remotely considered. She
laughed a little, scornfully, reflecting that the antagonism was mutual,
or, perhaps, just a trifle keener on her side than on theirs. They
feared and hated her. She pitied and despised them. Uncle Peter was
different. In his contemptuous way he was fond of her. Her beautiful,
unhappy mother had been his favorite sister. Even so, Helga Crane knew
that he would be more likely to help her because her need would
strengthen his oft-repeated conviction that because of her Negro blood
she would never amount to anything, than from motives of affection or
loving memory. This knowledge, in its present aspect of truth, irritated
her to an astonishing degree. She regarded Uncle Peter almost
vindictively, although always he had been extraordinarily generous with
her and she fully intended to ask his assistance. “A beggar,” she
thought ruefully, “cannot expect to choose.”
Returning to James Vayle, her thoughts took on the frigidity of complete
determination. Her resolution to end her stay in Naxos would of course
inevitably end her engagement to James. She had been engaged to him
since her first semester there, when both had been new workers, and both
were lonely. Together they had discussed their work and problems in
adjustment, and had drifted into a closer relationship. Bitterly she
reflected that James had speedily and with entire ease fitted into his
niche. He was now completely “naturalized,” as they used laughingly to
call it. Helga, on the other hand, had never quite achieved the
unmistakable Naxos mold, would never achieve it, in spite of much
trying. She could neither conform, nor be happy in her unconformity.
This she saw clearly now, and with cold anger at all the past futile
effort. What a waste! How pathetically she had struggled in those first
months and with what small success. A lack somewhere. Always she had
considered it a lack of understanding on the part of the community, but
in her present new revolt she realized that the fault had been partly
hers. A lack of acquiescence. She hadn’t really wanted to be made over.
This thought bred a sense of shame, a feeling of ironical disillusion.
Evidently there were parts of her she couldn’t be proud of. The
revealing picture of her past striving was too humiliating. It was as if
she had deliberately planned to steal an ugly thing, for which she had
no desire, and had been found out.
Ironically she visualized the discomfort of James Vayle. How her
maladjustment had bothered him! She had a faint notion that it was
behind his ready assent to her suggestion anent a longer engagement
than, originally, they had planned. He was liked and approved of in
Naxos and loathed the idea that the girl he was to marry couldn’t manage
to win liking and approval also. Instinctively Helga had known that
secretly he had placed the blame upon her. How right he had been!
Certainly his attitude had gradually changed, though he still gave her
his attention. Naxos pleased him and he had become content with life as
it was lived there. No longer lonely, he was now one of the community
and so beyond the need or the desire to discuss its affairs and its
failings with an outsider. She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way,
a disturbing factor. She knew too that a something held him, a something
against which he was powerless. The idea that she was in but one
nameless way necessary to him filled her with a sensation amounting
almost to shame. And yet his mute helplessness against that ancient
appeal by which she held him pleased her and fed her vanity—gave her a
feeling of power. At the same time she shrank away from it, subtly aware
of possibilities she herself couldn’t predict.
Helga’s own feelings defeated inquiry, but honestly confronted, all
pretense brushed aside, the dominant one, she suspected, was relief. At
least, she felt no regret that tomorrow would mark the end of any claim
she had upon him. The surety that the meeting would be a clash annoyed
her, for she had no talent for quarreling—when possible she preferred to
flee. That was all.
The family of James Vayle, in near-by Atlanta, would be glad. They had
never liked the engagement, had never liked Helga Crane. Her own lack of
family disconcerted them. No family. That was the crux of the whole
matter. For Helga, it accounted for everything, her failure here in
Naxos, her former loneliness in Nashville. It even accounted for her
engagement to James. Negro society, she had learned, was as complicated
and as rigid in its ramifications as the highest strata of white
society. If you couldn’t prove your ancestry and connections, you were
tolerated, but you didn’t “belong.” You could be queer, or even
attractive, or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and such nonsense
if you were a Rankin, or a Leslie, or a Scoville; in other words, if you
had a family. But if you were just plain Helga Crane, of whom nobody had
ever heard, it was presumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicuous
and conformable.
To relinquish James Vayle would most certainly be social suicide, for
the Vayles were people of consequence. The fact that they were a “first
family” had been one of James’s attractions for the obscure Helga. She
had wanted social background, but—she had not imagined that it could be
so stuffy.
She made a quick movement of impatience and stood up. As she did so, the
room whirled about her in an impish, hateful way. Familiar objects
seemed suddenly unhappily distant. Faintness closed about her like a
vise. She swayed, her small, slender hands gripping the chair arms for
support. In a moment the faintness receded, leaving in its wake a sharp
resentment at the trick which her strained nerves had played upon her.
And after a moment’s rest she got hurriedly into bed, leaving her room
disorderly for the first time.
Books and papers scattered about the floor, fragile stockings and
underthings and the startling green and gold negligee dripping about on
chairs and stool, met the encounter of the amazed eyes of the girl who
came in the morning to awaken Helga Crane.
Two
She woke in the morning unrefreshed and with that feeling of
half-terrified apprehension peculiar to Christmas and birthday mornings.
A long moment she lay puzzling under the sun streaming in a golden flow
through the yellow curtains. Then her mind returned to the night before.
She had decided to leave Naxos. That was it.
Sharply she began to probe her decision. Reviewing the situation
carefully, frankly, she felt no wish to change her resolution.
Except—that it would be inconvenient. Much as she wanted to shake the
dust of the place from her feet forever, she realized that there would
be difficulties. Red tape. James Vayle. Money. Other work. Regretfully
she was forced to acknowledge that it would be vastly better to wait
until June, the close of the school year. Not so long, really. Half of
March, April, May, some of June. Surely she could endure for that much
longer conditions which she had borne for nearly two years. By an effort
of will, her will, it could be done.
But this reflection, sensible, expedient, though it was, did not
reconcile her. To remain seemed too hard. Could she do it? Was it
possible in the present rebellious state of her feelings? The uneasy
sense of being engaged with some formidable antagonist, nameless and
ununderstood, startled her. It wasn’t, she was suddenly aware, merely
the school and its ways and its decorous stupid people that oppressed
her. There was something else, some other more ruthless force, a quality
within herself, which was frustrating her, had always frustrated her,
kept her from getting the things she had wanted. Still wanted.
But just what did she want? Barring a desire for material security,
gracious ways of living, a profusion of lovely clothes, and a goodly
share of envious admiration, Helga Crane didn’t know, couldn’t tell. But
there was, she knew, something else. Happiness, she supposed. Whatever
that might be. What, exactly, she wondered, was happiness. Very
positively she wanted it. Yet her conception of it had no tangibility.
She couldn’t define it, isolate it, and contemplate it as she could some
other abstract things. Hatred, for instance. Or kindness.
The strident ringing of a bell somewhere in the building brought back
the fierce resentment of the night. It crystallized her wavering
determination.
From long habit her biscuit-colored feet had slipped mechanically out
from under the covers at the bell’s first unkind jangle. Leisurely she
drew them back and her cold anger vanished as she decided that, now, it
didn’t at all matter if she failed to appear at the monotonous
distasteful breakfast which was provided for her by the school as part
of her wages.
In the corridor beyond her door was a medley of noises incident to the
rising and preparing for the day at the same hour of many
schoolgirls—foolish giggling, indistinguishable snatches of merry
conversation, distant gurgle of running water, patter of slippered feet,
low-pitched singing, good-natured admonitions to hurry, slamming of
doors, clatter of various unnamable articles, and—suddenly—calamitous
silence.
Helga ducked her head under the covers in the vain attempt to shut out
what she knew would fill the pregnant silence—the sharp sarcastic voice
of the dormitory matron. It came.
“Well! Even if every last one of you did come from homes where you
weren’t taught any manners, you might at least try to pretend that
you’re capable of learning some here, now that you have the opportunity.
Who slammed the shower-baths door?”
Silence.
“Well, you needn’t trouble to answer. It’s rude, as all of you know. But
it’s just as well, because none of you can tell the truth. Now hurry up.
Don’t let me hear of a single one of you being late for breakfast. If I
do there’ll be extra work for everybody on Saturday. And please at least
try to act like ladies and not like savages from the backwoods.”
On her side of the door, Helga was wondering if it had ever occurred to
the lean and desiccated Miss MacGooden that most of her charges had
actually come from the backwoods. Quite recently too. Miss MacGooden,
humorless, prim, ugly, with a face like dried leather, prided herself on
being a “lady” from one of the best families—an uncle had been a
congressman in the period of the Reconstruction. She was therefore,
Helga Crane reflected, perhaps unable to perceive that the inducement to
act like a lady, her own acrimonious example, was slight, if not
altogether negative. And thinking on Miss MacGooden’s “ladyness,” Helga
grinned a little as she remembered that one’s expressed reason for never
having married, or intending to marry. There were, so she had been given
to understand, things in the matrimonial state that were of necessity
entirely too repulsive for a lady of delicate and sensitive nature to
submit to.
Soon the forcibly shut-off noises began to be heard again, as the
evidently vanishing image of Miss MacGooden evaporated from the short
memories of the ladies-in-making. Preparations for the intake of the
day’s quota of learning went on again. Almost naturally.
“So much for that!” said Helga, getting herself out of bed.
She walked to the window and stood looking down into the great
quadrangle below, at the multitude of students streaming from the six
big dormitories which, two each, flanked three of its sides, and
assembling into neat phalanxes preparatory to marching in military order
to the sorry breakfast in Jones Hall on the fourth side. Here and there
a male member of the faculty, important and resplendent in the regalia
of an army officer, would pause in his prancing or strutting, to jerk a
negligent or offending student into the proper attitude or place. The
massed phalanxes increased in size and number, blotting out pavements,
bare earth, and grass. And about it all was a depressing silence, a
sullenness almost, until with a horrible abruptness the waiting band
blared into “The Star Spangled Banner.” The goose-step began. Left,
right. Left, right. Forward! March! The automatons moved. The squares
disintegrated into fours. Into twos. Disappeared into the gaping doors
of Jones Hall. After the last pair of marchers had entered, the huge
doors were closed. A few unlucky late-comers, apparently already
discouraged, tugged half-heartedly at the knobs, and finding, as they
had evidently expected, that they were indeed barred out, turned
resignedly away.
Helga Crane turned away from the window, a shadow dimming the pale amber
loveliness of her face. Seven o’clock it was now. At twelve those
children who by some accident had been a little minute or two late would
have their first meal after five hours of work and so-called education.
Discipline, it was called.
There came a light knocking on her door.
“Come in,” invited Helga unenthusiastically. The door opened to admit
Margaret Creighton, another teacher in the English department and to
Helga the most congenial member of the whole Naxos faculty. Margaret,
she felt, appreciated her.
Seeing Helga still in night robe seated on the bedside in a mass of
cushions, idly dangling a mule across bare toes like one with all the
time in the world before her, she exclaimed in dismay: “Helga Crane, do
you know what time it is? Why, it’s long after half past seven. The
students—”
“Yes, I know,” said Helga defiantly, “the students are coming out from
breakfast. Well, let them. I, for one, wish that there was some way that
they could forever stay out from the poisonous stuff thrown at them,
literally thrown at them, Margaret Creighton, for food. Poor things.”
Margaret laughed. “That’s just ridiculous sentiment, Helga, and you know
it. But you haven’t had any breakfast, yourself. Jim Vayle asked if you
were sick. Of course nobody knew. You never tell anybody anything about
yourself. I said I’d look in on you.”
“Thanks awfully,” Helga responded, indifferently. She was watching the
sunlight dissolve from thick orange into pale yellow. Slowly it crept
across the room, wiping out in its path the morning shadows. She wasn’t
interested in what the other was saying.
“If you don’t hurry, you’ll be late to your first class. Can I help
you?” Margaret offered uncertainly. She was a little afraid of Helga.
Nearly everyone was.
“No. Thanks all the same.” Then quickly in another, warmer tone: “I do
mean it. Thanks, a thousand times, Margaret. I’m really awfully
grateful, but—you see, it’s like this, I’m not going to be late to my
class. I’m not going to be there at all.”
The visiting girl, standing in relief, like old walnut against the
buff-colored wall, darted a quick glance at Helga. Plainly she was
curious. But she only said formally: “Oh, then you are sick.” For
something there was about Helga which discouraged questionings.
No, Helga wasn’t sick. Not physically. She was merely disgusted. Fed up
with Naxos. If that could be called sickness. The truth was that she had
made up her mind to leave. That very day. She could no longer abide
being connected with a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty,
servility, and snobbishness. “It ought,” she concluded, “to be shut down
by law.”
“But, Helga, you can’t go now. Not in the middle of the term.” The
kindly Margaret was distressed.
“But I can. And I am. Today.”
“They’ll never let you,” prophesied Margaret.
“They can’t stop me. Trains leave here for civilization every day. All
that’s needed is money,” Helga pointed out.
“Yes, of course. Everybody knows that. What I mean is that you’ll only
hurt yourself in your profession. They won’t give you a reference if you
jump up and leave like this now. At this time of the year. You’ll be put
on the black list.” And you’ll find it hard to get another teaching-job.
Naxos has enormous influence in the South. Better wait till school
closes.”
“Heaven forbid,” answered Helga fervently, “that I should ever again
want work anywhere in the South! I hate it.” And fell silent, wondering
for the hundredth time just what form of vanity it was that had induced
an intelligent girl like Margaret Creighton to turn what was probably
nice live crinkly hair, perfectly suited to her smooth dark skin and
agreeable round features, into a dead straight, greasy, ugly mass.
Looking up from her watch, Margaret said: “Well, I’ve really got to run,
or I’ll be late myself. And since I’m staying—Better think it over,
Helga. There’s no place like Naxos, you know. Pretty good salaries,
decent rooms, plenty of men, and all that. Ta-ta.” The door slid to
behind her.
But in another moment it opened. She was back. “I do wish you’d stay.
It’s nice having you here, Helga. We all think so. Even the dead ones.
We need a few decorations to brighten our sad lives.” And again she was
gone.
Helga was unmoved. She was no longer concerned with what anyone in Naxos
might think of her, for she was now in love with the piquancy of
leaving. Automatically her fingers adjusted the Chinese-looking pillows
on the low couch that served for her bed. Her mind was busy with plans
for departure. Packing, money, trains, and—could she get a berth?
Three
On one side of the long, white, hot sand road that split the flat green,
there was a little shade, for it was bordered with trees. Helga Crane
walked there so that the sun could not so easily get at her. As she went
slowly across the empty campus she was conscious of a vague tenderness
for the scene spread out before her. It was so incredibly lovely, so
appealing, and so facile. The trees in their spring beauty sent through
her restive mind a sharp thrill of pleasure. Seductive, charming, and
beckoning as cities were, they had not this easy unhuman loveliness. The
trees, she thought, on city avenues and boulevards, in city parks and
gardens, were tamed, held prisoners in a surrounding maze of human
beings. Here they were free. It was human beings who were prisoners. It
was too bad. In the midst of all this radiant life. They weren’t, she
knew, even conscious of its presence. Perhaps there was too much of it,
and therefore it was less than nothing.
In response to her insistent demand she had been told that Dr. Anderson
could give her twenty minutes at eleven o’clock. Well, she supposed that
she could say all that she had to say in twenty minutes, though she
resented being limited. Twenty minutes. In Naxos, she was as unimportant
as that.
He was a new man, this principal, for whom Helga remembered feeling
unaccountably sorry, when last September he had first been appointed to
Naxos as its head. For some reason she had liked him, although she had
seen little of him; he was so frequently away on publicity and
money-raising tours. And as yet he had made but few and slight changes
in the running of the school. Now she was a little irritated at finding
herself wondering just how she was going to tell him of her decision.
What did it matter to him? Why should she mind if it did? But there
returned to her that indistinct sense of sympathy for the remote silent
man with the tired gray eyes, and she wondered again by what fluke of
fate such a man, apparently a humane and understanding person, had
chanced into the command of this cruel educational machine. Suddenly,
her own resolve loomed as an almost direct unkindness. This increased
her annoyance and discomfort. A sense of defeat, of being cheated of
justification, closed down on her. Absurd!
She arrived at the administration building in a mild rage, as
unreasonable as it was futile, but once inside she had a sudden attack
of nerves at the prospect of traversing that great outer room which was
the workplace of some twenty odd people. This was a disease from which
Helga had suffered at intervals all her life, and it was a point of
honor, almost, with her never to give way to it. So, instead of turning
away, as she felt inclined, she walked on, outwardly indifferent.
Half-way down the long aisle which divided the room, the principal’s
secretary, a huge black man, surged toward her.
“Good-morning, Miss Crane, Dr. Anderson will see you in a few moments.
Sit down right here.”
She felt the inquiry in the shuttered eyes. For some reason this
dissipated her self-consciousness and restored her poise. Thanking him,
she seated herself, really careless now of the glances of the
stenographers, book-keepers, clerks. Their curiosity and slightly veiled
hostility no longer touched her. Her coming departure had released her
from the need for conciliation which had irked her for so long. It was
pleasant to Helga Crane to be able to sit calmly looking out of the
window on to the smooth lawn, where a few leaves quite prematurely
fallen dotted the grass, for once uncaring whether the frock which she
wore roused disapproval or envy.
Turning from the window, her gaze wandered contemptuously over the dull
attire of the women workers. Drab colors, mostly navy blue, black,
brown, unrelieved, save for a scrap of white or tan about the hands and
necks. Fragments of a speech made by the dean of women floated through
her thoughts—“Bright colors are vulgar”—“Black, gray, brown, and navy
blue are the most becoming colors for colored people”—“Dark-complected
people shouldn’t wear yellow, or green or red.”—The dean was a woman
from one of the “first families”—a great “race” woman; she, Helga Crane,
a despised mulatto, but something intuitive, some unanalyzed driving
spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for gorgeousness told her
that bright colors were fitting and that dark-complexioned people should
wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray were ruinous to
them, actually destroyed the luminous tones lurking in their dusky
skins. One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever seen had been a sooty
black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress, which a horrified
matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she wondered, didn’t
someone write A Plea for Color?
These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race
pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of
color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spontaneous laughter. Harmony,
radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the
race they had marked for destruction.
She came back to her own problems. Clothes had been one of her
difficulties in Naxos. Helga Crane loved clothes, elaborate ones.
Nevertheless, she had tried not to offend. But with small success, for,
although she had affected the deceptively simple variety, the hawk eyes
of dean and matrons had detected the subtle difference from their own
irreproachably conventional garments. Too, they felt that the colors
were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft,
luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks. And the trimmings—when
Helga used them at all—seemed to them odd. Old laces, strange
embroideries, dim brocades. Her faultless, slim shoes made them
uncomfortable and her small plain hats seemed to them positively
indecent. Helga smiled inwardly at the thought that whenever there was
an evening affair for the faculty, the dear ladies probably held their
breaths until she had made her appearance. They existed in constant fear
that she might turn out in an evening dress. The proper evening wear in
Naxos was afternoon attire. And one could, if one wished, garnish the
hair with flowers.
Quick, muted footfalls sounded. The secretary had returned.
“Dr. Anderson will see you now, Miss Crane.”
She rose, followed, and was ushered into the guarded sanctum, without
having decided just what she was to say. For a moment she felt behind
her the open doorway and then the gentle impact of its closing. Before
her at a great desk her eyes picked out the figure of a man, at first
blurred slightly in outline in that dimmer light. At his “Miss Crane?”
her lips formed for speech, but no sound came. She was aware of inward
confusion. For her the situation seemed charged, unaccountably, with
strangeness and something very like hysteria. An almost overpowering
desire to laugh seized her. Then, miraculously, a complete ease, such as
she had never known in Naxos, possessed her. She smiled, nodded in
answer to his questioning salutation, and with a gracious “Thank you”
dropped into the chair which he indicated. She looked at him frankly
now, this man still young, thirty-five perhaps, and found it easy to go
on in the vein of a simple statement.
“Dr. Anderson, I’m sorry to have to confess that I’ve failed in my job
here. I’ve made up my mind to leave. Today.”
A short, almost imperceptible silence, then a deep voice of peculiarly
pleasing resonance, asking gently: “You don’t like Naxos, Miss Crane?”
She evaded. “Naxos, the place? Yes, I like it. Who wouldn’t like it?
It’s so beautiful. But I—well—I don’t seem to fit here.”
The man smiled, just a little. “The school? You don’t like the school?”
The words burst from her. “No, I don’t like it. I hate it!”
“Why?” The question was detached, too detached.
In the girl blazed a desire to wound. There he sat, staring dreamily out
of the window, blatantly unconcerned with her or her answer. Well, she’d
tell him. She pronounced each word with deliberate slowness.
“Well, for one thing, I hate hypocrisy. I hate cruelty to students, and
to teachers who can’t fight back. I hate backbiting, and sneaking, and
petty jealousy. Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some
loathsome, venomous disease. Ugh! Everybody spending his time in a
malicious hunting for the weaknesses of others, spying, grudging,
scratching.”
“I see. And you don’t think it might help to cure us, to have someone
who doesn’t approve of these things stay with us? Even just one person,
Miss Crane?”
She wondered if this last was irony. She suspected it was humor and so
ignored the half-pleading note in his voice.
“No, I don’t! It doesn’t do the disease any good. Only irritates it. And
it makes me unhappy, dissatisfied. It isn’t pleasant to be always made
to appear in the wrong, even when I know I’m right.”
His gaze was on her now, searching. “Queer,” she thought, “how some
brown people have gray eyes. Gives them a strange, unexpected
appearance. A little frightening.”
The man said, kindly: “Ah, you’re unhappy. And for the reasons you’ve
stated?”
“Yes, partly. Then, too, the people here don’t like me. They don’t think
I’m in the spirit of the work. And I’m not, not if it means suppression
of individuality and beauty.”
“And does it?”
“Well, it seems to work out that way.”
“How old are you, Miss Crane?”
She resented this, but she told him, speaking with what curtness she
could command only the bare figure: “Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three. I see. Some day you’ll learn that lies, injustice, and
hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a
sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they
didn’t, they couldn’t endure. I think there’s less of these evils here
than in most places, but because we’re trying to do such a big thing, to
aim so high, the ugly things show more, they irk some of us more.
Service is like clean white linen, even the tiniest speck shows.” He
went on, explaining, amplifying, pleading.
Helga Crane was silent, feeling a mystifying yearning which sang and
throbbed in her. She felt again that urge for service, not now for her
people, but for this man who was talking so earnestly of his work, his
plans, his hopes. An insistent need to be a part of them sprang in her.
With compunction tweaking at her heart for even having entertained the
notion of deserting him, she resolved not only to remain until June, but
to return next year. She was shamed, yet stirred. It was not sacrifice
she felt now, but actual desire to stay, and to come back next year.
He came, at last, to the end of the long speech, only part of which she
had heard. “You see, you understand?” he urged.
“Yes, oh yes, I do.”
“What we need is more people like you, people with a sense of values,
and proportion, an appreciation of the rarer things of life. You have
something to give which we badly need here in Naxos. You mustn’t desert
us, Miss Crane.”
She nodded, silent. He had won her. She knew that she would stay. “It’s
an elusive something,” he went on. “Perhaps I can best explain it by the
use of that trite phrase, ‘You’re a lady.’ You have dignity and
breeding.”
At these words turmoil rose again in Helga Crane. The intricate pattern
of the rug which she had been studying escaped her. The shamed feeling
which had been her penance evaporated. Only a lacerated pride remained.
She took firm hold of the chair arms to still the trembling of her
fingers.
“If you’re speaking of family, Dr. Anderson, why, I haven’t any. I was
born in a Chicago slum.”
The man chose his words, carefully he thought. “That doesn’t at all
matter, Miss Crane. Financial, economic circumstances can’t destroy
tendencies inherited from good stock. You yourself prove that!”
Concerned with her own angry thoughts, which scurried here and there
like trapped rats, Helga missed the import of his words. Her own words,
her answer, fell like drops of hail.
“The joke is on you, Dr. Anderson. My father was a gambler who deserted
my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were
married. As I said at first, I don’t belong here. I shall be leaving at
once. This afternoon. Good-morning.”
Four
Long, soft white clouds, clouds like shreds of incredibly fine cotton,
streaked the blue of the early evening sky. Over the flying landscape
hung a very faint mist, disturbed now and then by a languid breeze. But
no coolness invaded the heat of the train rushing north. The open
windows of the stuffy day coach, where Helga Crane sat with others of
her race, seemed only to intensify her discomfort. Her head ached with a
steady pounding pain. This, added to her wounds of the spirit, made
traveling something little short of a medieval torture. Desperately she
was trying to right the confusion in her mind. The temper of the
morning’s interview rose before her like an ugly mutilated creature
crawling horribly over the flying landscape of her thoughts. It was no
use. The ugly thing pressed down on her, held her. Leaning back, she
tried to doze as others were doing. The futility of her effort
exasperated her.
Just what had happened to her there in that cool dim room under the
quizzical gaze of those piercing gray eyes? Whatever it was had been so
powerful, so compelling, that but for a few chance words she would still
be in Naxos. And why had she permitted herself to be jolted into a rage
so fierce, so illogical, so disastrous, that now after it was spent she
sat despondent, sunk in shameful contrition? As she reviewed the manner
of her departure from his presence, it seemed increasingly rude.
She didn’t, she told herself, after all, like this Dr. Anderson. He was
too controlled, too sure of himself and others. She detested cool,
perfectly controlled people. Well, it didn’t matter. He didn’t matter.
But she could not put him from her mind. She set it down to annoyance
because of the cold discourtesy of her abrupt action. She disliked
rudeness in anyone.
She had outraged her own pride, and she had terribly wronged her mother
by her insidious implication. Why? Her thoughts lingered with her
mother, long dead. A fair Scandinavian girl in love with life, with
love, with passion, dreaming, and risking all in one blind surrender. A
cruel sacrifice. In forgetting all but love she had forgotten, or had
perhaps never known, that some things the world never forgives. But as
Helga knew, she had remembered, or had learned in suffering and longing
all the rest of her life. Her daughter hoped she had been happy, happy
beyond most human creatures, in the little time it had lasted, the
little time before that gay suave scoundrel, Helga’s father, had left
her. But Helga Crane doubted it. How could she have been? A girl gently
bred, fresh from an older, more polished civilization, flung into
poverty, sordidness, and dissipation. She visualized her now, sad, cold,
and—yes, remote. The tragic cruelties of the years had left her a little
pathetic, a little hard, and a little unapproachable.
That second marriage, to a man of her own race, but not of her own
kind—so passionately, so instinctively resented by Helga even at the
trivial age of six—she now understood as a grievous necessity. Even
foolish, despised women must have food and clothing; even unloved little
Negro girls must be somehow provided for. Memory, flown back to those
years following the marriage, dealt her torturing stabs. Before her rose
the pictures of her mother’s careful management to avoid those ugly
scarifying quarrels which even at this far-off time caused an
uncontrollable shudder, her own childish self-effacement, the savage
unkindness of her stepbrothers and sisters, and the jealous, malicious
hatred of her mother’s husband. Summers, winters, years, passing in one
long, changeless stretch of aching misery of soul. Her mother’s death,
when Helga was fifteen. Her rescue by Uncle Peter, who had sent her to
school, a school for Negroes, where for the first time she could breathe
freely, where she discovered that because one was dark, one was not
necessarily loathsome, and could, therefore, consider oneself without
repulsion.
Six years. She had been happy there, as happy as a child unused to
happiness dared be. There had been always a feeling of strangeness, of
outsideness, and one of holding her breath for fear that it wouldn’t
last. It hadn’t. It had dwindled gradually into eclipse of painful
isolation. As she grew older, she became gradually aware of a difference
between herself and the girls about her. They had mothers, fathers,
brothers, and sisters of whom they spoke frequently, and who sometimes
visited them. They went home for the vacations which Helga spent in the
city where the school was located. They visited each other and knew many
of the same people. Discontent for which there was no remedy crept upon
her, and she was glad almost when these most peaceful years which she
had yet known came to their end. She had been happier, but still
horribly lonely.
She had looked forward with pleasant expectancy to working in Naxos when
the chance came. And now this! What was it that stood in her way? Helga
Crane couldn’t explain it, put a name to it. She had tried in the early
afternoon in her gentle but staccato talk with James Vayle. Even to
herself her explanation had sounded inane and insufficient; no wonder
James had been impatient and unbelieving. During their brief and
unsatisfactory conversation she had had an odd feeling that he felt
somehow cheated. And more than once she had been aware of a suggestion
of suspicion in his attitude, a feeling that he was being duped, that he
suspected her of some hidden purpose which he was attempting to
discover.
Well, that was over. She would never be married to James Vayle now. It
flashed upon her that, even had she remained in Naxos, she would never
have been married to him. She couldn’t have married him. Gradually, too,
there stole into her thoughts of him a curious sensation of repugnance,
for which she was at a loss to account. It was new, something unfelt
before. Certainly she had never loved him overwhelmingly, not, for
example, as her mother must have loved her father, but she had liked
him, and she had expected to love him, after their marriage. People
generally did love then, she imagined. No, she had not loved James, but
she had wanted to. Acute nausea rose in her as she recalled the slight
quivering of his lips sometimes when her hands had unexpectedly touched
his; the throbbing vein in his forehead on a gay day when they had
wandered off alone across the low hills and she had allowed him frequent
kisses under the shelter of some low-hanging willows. Now she shivered a
little, even in the hot train, as if she had suddenly come out from a
warm scented place into cool, clear air. She must have been mad, she
thought; but she couldn’t tell why she thought so. This, too, bothered
her.
Laughing conversation buzzed about her. Across the aisle a bronze baby,
with bright staring eyes, began a fretful whining, which its young
mother essayed to silence by a low droning croon. In the seat just
beyond, a black and tan young pair were absorbed in the eating of a cold
fried chicken, audibly crunching the ends of the crisp, browned bones. A
little distance away a tired laborer slept noisily. Near him two
children dropped the peelings of oranges and bananas on the already
soiled floor. The smell of stale food and ancient tobacco irritated
Helga like a physical pain. A man, a white man, strode through the
packed car and spat twice, once in the exact centre of the dingy door
panel, and once into the receptacle which held the drinking-water.
Instantly Helga became aware of stinging thirst. Her eyes sought the
small watch at her wrist. Ten hours to Chicago. Would she be lucky
enough to prevail upon the conductor to let her occupy a berth, or would
she have to remain here all night, without sleep, without food, without
drink, and with that disgusting door panel to which her purposely
averted eyes were constantly, involuntarily straying?
Her first effort was unsuccessful. An ill-natured “No, you know you
can’t,” was the answer to her inquiry. But farther on along the road,
there was a change of men. Her rebuff had made her reluctant to try
again, but the entry of a farmer carrying a basket containing live
chickens, which he deposited on the seat (the only vacant one) beside
her, strengthened her weakened courage. Timidly, she approached the new
conductor, an elderly gray-mustached man of pleasant appearance, who
subjected her to a keen, appraising look, and then promised to see what
could be done. She thanked him, gratefully, and went back to her shared
seat, to wait anxiously. After half an hour he returned, saying he could
“fix her up,” there was a section she could have, adding: “It’ll cost
you ten dollars.” She murmured: “All right. Thank you.” It was twice the
price, and she needed every penny, but she knew she was fortunate to get
it even at that, and so was very thankful, as she followed his tall,
loping figure out of that car and through seemingly endless others, and
at last into one where she could rest a little.
She undressed and lay down, her thoughts still busy with the morning’s
encounter. Why hadn’t she grasped his meaning? Why, if she had said so
much, hadn’t she said more about herself and her mother? He would, she
was sure, have understood, even sympathized. Why had she lost her temper
and given way to angry half-truths?—Angry half-truths—Angry half—
Five
Gray Chicago seethed, surged, and scurried about her. Helga shivered a
little, drawing her light coat closer. She had forgotten how cold March
could be under the pale skies of the North. But she liked it, this
blustering wind. She would even have welcomed snow, for it would more
clearly have marked the contrast between this freedom and the cage which
Naxos had been to her. Not but what it was marked plainly enough by the
noise, the dash, the crowds.
Helga Crane, who had been born in this dirty, mad, hurrying city, had no
home here. She had not even any friends here. It would have to be, she
decided, the Young Women’s Christian Association. “Oh dear! The uplift.
Poor, poor colored people. Well, no use stewing about it. I’ll get a
taxi to take me out, bag and baggage, then I’ll have a hot bath and a
really good meal, peep into the shops—mustn’t buy anything—and then for
Uncle Peter. Guess I won’t phone. More effective if I surprise him.”
It was late, very late, almost evening, when finally Helga turned her
steps northward, in the direction of Uncle Peter’s home. She had put it
off as long as she could, for she detested her errand. The fact that
that one day had shown her its acute necessity did not decrease her
distaste. As she approached the North Side, the distaste grew. Arrived
at last at the familiar door of the old stone house, her confidence in
Uncle Peter’s welcome deserted her. She gave the bell a timid push and
then decided to turn away, to go back to her room and phone, or, better
yet, to write. But before she could retreat, the door was opened by a
strange red-faced maid, dressed primly in black and white. This
increased Helga’s mistrust. Where, she wondered, was the ancient Rose,
who had, ever since she could remember, served her uncle.
The hostile “Well?” of this new servant forcibly recalled the reason for
her presence there. She said firmly: “Mr. Nilssen, please.”
“Mr. Nilssen’s not in,” was the pert retort. “Will you see Mrs.
Nilssen?”
Helga was startled. “Mrs. Nilssen! I beg your pardon, did you say Mrs.
Nilssen?”
“I did,” answered the maid shortly, beginning to close the door.
“What is it, Ida?” A woman’s soft voice sounded from within.
“Someone for Mr. Nilssen, m’am.” The girl looked embarrassed.
In Helga’s face the blood rose in a deep-red stain. She explained:
“Helga Crane, his niece.”
“She says she’s his niece, m’am.”
“Well, have her come in.”
There was no escape. She stood in the large reception hall, and was
annoyed to find herself actually trembling. A woman, tall, exquisitely
gowned, with shining gray hair piled high, came forward murmuring in a
puzzled voice: “His niece, did you say?”
“Yes, Helga Crane. My mother was his sister, Karen Nilssen. I’ve been
away. I didn’t know Uncle Peter had married.” Sensitive to atmosphere,
Helga had felt at once the latent antagonism in the woman’s manner.
“Oh, yes! I remember about you now. I’d forgotten for a moment. Well, he
isn’t exactly your uncle, is he? Your mother wasn’t married, was she? I
mean, to your father?”
“I—I don’t know,” stammered the girl, feeling pushed down to the
uttermost depths of ignominy.
“Of course she wasn’t.” The clear, low voice held a positive note. “Mr.
Nilssen has been very kind to you, supported you, sent you to school.
But you mustn’t expect anything else. And you mustn’t come here any
more. It—well, frankly, it isn’t convenient. I’m sure an intelligent
girl like yourself can understand that.”
“Of course,” Helga agreed, coldly, freezingly, but her lips quivered.
She wanted to get away as quickly as possible. She reached the door.
There was a second of complete silence, then Mrs. Nilssen’s voice, a
little agitated: “And please remember that my husband is not your uncle.
No indeed! Why, that, that would make me your aunt! He’s not—”
But at last the knob had turned in Helga’s fumbling hand. She gave a
little unpremeditated laugh and slipped out. When she was in the street,
she ran. Her only impulse was to get as far away from her uncle’s house,
and this woman, his wife, who so plainly wished to dissociate herself
from the outrage of her very existence. She was torn with mad fright, an
emotion against which she knew but two weapons: to kick and scream, or
to flee.
The day had lengthened. It was evening and much colder, but Helga Crane
was unconscious of any change, so shaken she was and burning. The wind
cut her like a knife, but she did not feel it. She ceased her frantic
running, aware at last of the curious glances of passersby. At one spot,
for a moment less frequented than others, she stopped to give heed to
her disordered appearance. Here a man, well groomed and pleasant-spoken,
accosted her. On such occasions she was wont to reply scathingly, but,
tonight, his pale Caucasian face struck her breaking faculties as too
droll. Laughing harshly, she threw at him the words: “You’re not my
uncle.”
He retired in haste, probably thinking her drunk, or possibly a little
mad.
Night fell, while Helga Crane in the rushing swiftness of a roaring
elevated train sat numb. It was as if all the bogies and goblins that
had beset her unloved, unloving, and unhappy childhood had come to life
with tenfold power to hurt and frighten. For the wound was deeper in
that her long freedom from their presence had rendered her the more
vulnerable. Worst of all was the fact that under the stinging hurt she
understood and sympathized with Mrs. Nilssen’s point of view, as always
she had been able to understand her mother’s, her stepfather’s, and his
children’s points of view. She saw herself for an obscene sore in all
their lives, at all costs to be hidden. She understood, even while she
resented. It would have been easier if she had not.
Later in the bare silence of her tiny room she remembered the
unaccomplished object of her visit. Money. Characteristically, while
admitting its necessity, and even its undeniable desirability, she
dismissed its importance. Its elusive quality she had as yet never
known. She would find work of some kind. Perhaps the library. The idea
clung. Yes, certainly the library. She knew books and loved them.
She stood intently looking down into the glimmering street, far below,
swarming with people, merging into little eddies and disengaging
themselves to pursue their own individual ways. A few minutes later she
stood in the doorway, drawn by an uncontrollable desire to mingle with
the crowd. The purple sky showed tremulous clouds piled up, drifting
here and there with a sort of endless lack of purpose. Very like the
myriad human beings pressing hurriedly on. Looking at these, Helga
caught herself wondering who they were, what they did, and of what they
thought. What was passing behind those dark molds of flesh? Did they
really think at all? Yet, as she stepped out into the moving
multi-colored crowd, there came to her a queer feeling of enthusiasm, as
if she were tasting some agreeable, exotic food—sweetbreads, smothered
with truffles and mushrooms—perhaps. And, oddly enough, she felt, too,
that she had come home. She, Helga Crane, who had no home.
Six
Helga woke to the sound of rain. The day was leaden gray, and misty
black, and dullish white. She was not surprised, the night had promised
it. She made a little frown, remembering that it was today that she was
to search for work.
She dressed herself carefully, in the plainest garments she possessed, a
suit of fine blue twill faultlessly tailored, from whose left pocket
peeped a gay kerchief, an unadorned, heavy silk blouse, a small, smart,
fawn-colored hat, and slim, brown oxfords, and chose a brown umbrella.
In a near-by street she sought out an appealing little restaurant, which
she had noted in her last night’s ramble through the neighborhood, for
the thick cups and the queer dark silver of the Young Women’s Christian
Association distressed her.
After a slight breakfast she made her way to the library, that ugly gray
building, where was housed much knowledge and a little wisdom, on
interminable shelves. The friendly person at the desk in the hall
bestowed on her a kindly smile when Helga stated her business and asked
for directions.
“The corridor to your left, then the second door to your right,” she was
told.
Outside the indicated door, for half a second she hesitated, then braced
herself and went in. In less than a quarter of an hour she came out, in
surprised disappointment. “Library training”—“civil service”—“library
school”—“classification”—“cataloguing”—“training
class”—“examination”—“probation period”—flitted through her mind.
“How erudite they must be!” she remarked sarcastically to herself, and
ignored the smiling curiosity of the desk person as she went through the
hall to the street. For a long moment she stood on the high stone steps
above the avenue, then shrugged her shoulders and stepped down. It was a
disappointment, but of course there were other things. She would find
something else. But what? Teaching, even substitute teaching, was
hopeless now, in March. She had no business training, and the shops
didn’t employ colored clerks or sales-people, not even the smaller ones.
She couldn’t sew, she couldn’t cook. Well, she could do housework, or
wait on tables, for a short time at least. Until she got a little money
together. With this thought she remembered that the Young Women’s
Christian Association maintained an employment agency.
“Of course, the very thing!” She exclaimed, aloud. “I’ll go straight
back.”
But, though the day was still drear, rain had ceased to fall, and Helga,
instead of returning, spent hours in aimless strolling about the
hustling streets of the Loop district. When at last she did retrace her
steps, the business day had ended, and the employment office was closed.
This frightened her a little, this and the fact that she had spent
money, too much money, for a book and a tapestry purse, things which she
wanted, but did not need and certainly could not afford. Regretful and
dismayed, she resolved to go without her dinner, as a self-inflicted
penance, a well as an economy—and she would be at the employment office
the first thing tomorrow morning.
But it was not until three days more had passed that Helga Crane sought
the Association, or any other employment office. And then it was sheer
necessity that drove her there, for her money had dwindled to a
ridiculous sum. She had put off the hated moment, had assured herself
that she was tired, needed a bit of vacation, was due one. It had been
pleasant, the leisure, the walks, the lake, the shops and streets with
their gay colors, their movement, after the great quiet of Naxos. Now
she was panicky.
In the office a few nondescript women sat scattered about on the long
rows of chairs. Some were plainly uninterested, others wore an air of
acute expectancy, which disturbed Helga. Behind a desk two alert young
women, both wearing a superior air, were busy writing upon and filing
countless white cards. Now and then one stopped to answer the telephone.
“Y. W. C. A. employment…. Yes. … Spell it, please…. Sleep in or out?
Thirty dollars? … Thank you, I’ll send one right over.”
Or, “I’m awfully sorry, we haven’t anybody right now, but I’ll send you
the first one that comes in.”
Their manners were obtrusively business-like, but they ignored the
already embarrassed Helga. Diffidently she approached the desk. The
darker of the two looked up and turned on a little smile.
“Yes?” she inquired.
“I wonder if you can help me? I want work,” Helga stated simply.
“Maybe. What kind? Have you references?”
Helga explained. She was a teacher. A graduate of Devon. Had been
teaching in Naxos.
The girl was not interested. “Our kind of work wouldn’t do for you,” she
kept repeating at the end of each of Helga’s statements. “Domestic
mostly.”
When Helga said that she was willing to accept work of any kind, a
slight, almost imperceptible change crept into her manner and her
perfunctory smile disappeared. She repeated her question about the
reference. On learning that Helga had none, she said sharply, finally:
“I’m sorry, but we never send out help without references.”
With a feeling that she had been slapped, Helga Crane hurried out. After
some lunch she sought out an employment agency on State Street. An hour
passed in patient sitting. Then came her turn to be interviewed. She
said, simply, that she wanted work, work of any kind. A competent young
woman, whose eyes stared frog-like from great tortoise-shell-rimmed
glasses, regarded her with an appraising look and asked for her history,
past and present, not forgetting the “references.” Helga told her that
she was a graduate of Devon, had taught in Naxos. But even before she
arrived at the explanation of the lack of references, the other’s
interest in her had faded.
“I’m sorry, but we have nothing that you would be interested in,” she
said and motioned to the next seeker, who immediately came forward,
proffering several much worn papers.
“References,” thought Helga, resentfully, bitterly, as she went out the
door into the crowded garish street in search of another agency, where
her visit was equally vain.
Days of this sort of thing. Weeks of it. And of the futile scanning and
answering of newspaper advertisements. She traversed acres of streets,
but it seemed that in that whole energetic place nobody wanted her
services. At least not the kind that she offered. A few men, both white
and black, offered her money, but the price of the money was too dear.
Helga Crane did not feel inclined to pay it.
She began to feel terrified and lost. And she was a little hungry too,
for her small money was dwindling and she felt the need to economize
somehow. Food was the easiest.
In the midst of her search of work she felt horribly lonely too. This
sense of loneliness increased, it grew to appalling proportions,
encompassing her, shutting her off from all of life around her.
Devastated she was, and always on the verge of weeping. It made her feel
small and insignificant that in all the climbing massed city no one
cared one whit about her.
Helga Crane was not religious. She took nothing on trust. Nevertheless
on Sundays she attended the very fashionable, very high services in the
Negro Episcopal church on Michigan Avenue. She hoped that some good
Christian would speak to her, invite her to return, or inquire kindly if
she was a stranger in the city. None did, and she became bitter,
distrusting religion more than ever. She was herself unconscious of that
faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an
arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation. They noticed
her, admired her clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient
uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a protective measure for
her acute sensitiveness, in her child days, still clung to her.
An agitated feeling of disaster closed in on her, tightened. Then, one
afternoon, coming in from the discouraging round of agencies and the
vain answering of newspaper wants to the stark neatness of her room, she
found between door and sill a small folded note. Spreading it open, she
read:
Miss Crane:
Please come into the employment office as soon as you return.
Ida Ross
Helga spent some time in the contemplation of this note. She was afraid
to hope. Its possibilities made her feel a little hysterical. Finally,
after removing the dirt of the dusty streets, she went down, down to
that room where she had first felt the smallness of her commercial
value. Subsequent failures had augmented her feeling of incompetence,
but she resented the fact that these clerks were evidently aware of her
unsuccess. It required all the pride and indifferent hauteur she could
summon to support her in their presence. Her additional arrogance passed
unnoticed by those for whom it was assumed. They were interested only in
the business for which they had summoned her, that of procuring a
traveling-companion for a lecturing female on her way to a convention.
“She wants,” Miss Ross told Helga, “someone intelligent, someone who can
help her get her speeches in order on the train. We thought of you right
away. Of course, it isn’t permanent. She’ll pay your expenses and
there’ll be twenty-five dollars besides. She leaves tomorrow. Here’s her
address. You’re to go to see her at five o’clock. It’s after four now.
I’ll phone that you’re on your way.”
The presumptuousness of their certainty that she would snatch at the
opportunity galled Helga. She became aware of a desire to be
disagreeable. The inclination to fling the address of the lecturing
female in their face stirred in her, but she remembered the lone
five-dollar bill in the rare old tapestry purse swinging from her arm.
She couldn’t afford anger. So she thanked them very politely and set out
for the home of Mrs. Hayes-Rore on Grand Boulevard, knowing full well
that she intended to take the job, if the lecturing one would take her.
Twenty-five dollars was not to be looked at with nose in air when one
was the owner of but five. And meals—meals for four days at least.
Mrs. Hayes-Rore proved to be a plump lemon-colored woman with badly
straightened hair and dirty finger-nails. Her direct, penetrating gaze
was somewhat formidable. Notebook in hand, she gave Helga the impression
of having risen early for consultation with other harassed authorities
on the race problem, and having been in conference on the subject all
day. Evidently, she had had little time or thought for the careful
donning of the five-years-behind-the-mode garments which covered her,
and which even in their youth could hardly have fitted or suited her.
She had a tart personality, and prying. She approved of Helga, after
asking her endless questions about her education and her opinions on the
race problem, none of which she was permitted to answer, for Mrs.
Hayes-Rore either went on to the next or answered the question herself
by remarking: “Not that it matters, if you can only do what I want done,
and the girls at the ‘Y’ said that you could. I’m on the Board of
Managers, and I know they wouldn’t send me anybody who wasn’t all
right.” After this had been repeated twice in a booming, oratorical
voice, Helga felt that the Association secretaries had taken an awful
chance in sending a person about whom they knew as little as they did
about her.
“Yes, I’m sure you’ll do. I don’t really need ideas, I’ve plenty of my
own. It’s just a matter of getting someone to help me get my speeches in
order, correct and condense them, you know. I leave at eleven in the
morning. Can you be ready by then? … That’s good. Better be here at
nine. Now, don’t disappoint me. I’m depending on you.”
As she stepped into the street and made her way skillfully through the
impassioned human traffic, Helga reviewed the plan which she had formed,
while in the lecturing one’s presence, to remain in New York. There
would be twenty-five dollars, and perhaps the amount of her return
ticket. Enough for a start. Surely she could get work there. Everybody
did. Anyway, she would have a reference.
With her decision she felt reborn. She began happily to paint the future
in vivid colors. The world had changed to silver, and life ceased to be
a struggle and became a gay adventure. Even the advertisements in the
shop windows seemed to shine with radiance.
Curious about Mrs. Hayes-Rore, on her return to the “Y” she went into
the employment office, ostensibly to thank the girls and to report that
that important woman would take her. Was there, she inquired, anything
that she needed to know? Mrs. Hayes-Rore had appeared to put such faith
in their recommendation of her that she felt almost obliged to give
satisfaction. And she added: “I didn’t get much chance to ask questions.
She seemed so—er—busy.”
Both the girls laughed. Helga laughed with them, surprised that she
hadn’t perceived before how really likable they were.
“We’ll be through here in ten minutes. If you’re not busy, come in and
have your supper with us and we’ll tell you about her,” promised Miss
Ross.
Seven
Having finally turned her attention to Helga Crane, Fortune now seemed
determined to smile, to make amends for her shameful neglect. One had,
Helga decided, only to touch the right button, to press the right
spring, in order to attract the jade’s notice.
For Helga that spring had been Mrs. Hayes-Rore. Ever afterwards on
recalling that day on which with wellnigh empty purse and apprehensive
heart she had made her way from the Young Women’s Christian Association
to the Grand Boulevard home of Mrs. Hayes-Rore, always she wondered at
her own lack of astuteness in not seeing in the woman someone who by a
few words was to have a part in the shaping of her life.
The husband of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had at one time been a dark thread in the
soiled fabric of Chicago’s South Side politics, who, departing this life
hurriedly and unexpectedly and a little mysteriously, and somewhat
before the whole of his suddenly acquired wealth had had time to vanish,
had left his widow comfortably established with money and some of that
prestige which in Negro circles had been his. All this Helga had learned
from the secretaries at the “Y.” And from numerous remarks dropped by
Mrs. Hayes-Rore herself she was able to fill in the details more or less
adequately.
On the train that carried them to New York, Helga had made short work of
correcting and condensing the speeches, which Mrs. Hayes-Rore as a
prominent “race” woman and an authority on the problem was to deliver
before several meetings of the annual convention of the Negro Women’s
League of Clubs, convening the next week in New York. These speeches
proved to be merely patchworks of others’ speeches and opinions. Helga
had heard other lecturers say the same things in Devon and again in
Naxos. Ideas, phrases, and even whole sentences and paragraphs were
lifted bodily from previous orations and published works of Wendell
Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and other doctors of
the race’s ills. For variety Mrs. Hayes-Rore had seasoned hers with a
peppery dash of Du Bois and a few vinegary statements of her own. Aside
from these it was, Helga reflected, the same old thing.
But Mrs. Hayes-Rore was to her, after the first short, awkward period,
interesting. Her dark eyes, bright and investigating, had, Helga noted,
a humorous gleam, and something in the way she held her untidy head gave
the impression of a cat watching its pray so that when she struck, if
she so decided, the blow would be unerringly effective. Helga, looking
up from a last reading of the speeches, was aware that she was being
studied. Her employer sat leaning back, the tips of her fingers pressed
together, her head a bit on one side, her small inquisitive eyes boring
into the girl before her. And as the train hurled itself frantically
toward smoke-infested Newark, she decided to strike.
“Now tell me,” she commanded, “how is it that a nice girl like you can
rush off on a wildgoose chase like this at a moment’s notice. I should
think your people’d object, or’d make inquiries, or something.”
At that command Helga Crane could not help sliding down her eyes to hide
the anger that had risen in them. Was she to be forever explaining her
people—or lack of them? But she said courteously enough, even managing a
hard little smile: “Well you see, Mrs. Hayes-Rore, I haven’t any people.
There’s only me, so I can do as I please.”
“Ha!” said Mrs. Hayes-Rore.
Terrific, thought Helga Crane, the power of that sound from the lips of
this woman. How, she wondered, had she succeeded in investing it with so
much incredulity.
“If you didn’t have people, you wouldn’t be living. Everybody has
people, Miss Crane. Everybody.”
“I haven’t, Mrs. Hayes-Rore.”
Mrs. Hayes-Rore screwed up her eyes. “Well, that’s mighty mysterious,
and I detest mysteries.” She shrugged, and into those eyes there now
came with alarming quickness an accusing criticism.
“It isn’t,” Helga said defensively, “a mystery. It’s a fact and a mighty
unpleasant one. Inconvenient too,” and she laughed a little, not wishing
to cry.
Her tormentor, in sudden embarrassment, turned her sharp eyes to the
window. She seemed intent on the miles of red clay sliding past. After a
moment, however, she asked gently: “You wouldn’t like to tell me about
it, would you? It seems to bother you. And I’m interested in girls.”
Annoyed, but still hanging, for the sake of the twenty-five dollars, to
her self-control, Helga gave her head a little toss and flung out her
hands in a helpless, beaten way. Then she shrugged. What did it matter?
“Oh, well, if you really want to know. I assure you, it’s nothing
interesting. Or nasty,” she added maliciously. “It’s just plain horrid.
For me.” And she began mockingly to relate her story.
But as she went on, again she had that sore sensation of revolt, and
again the torment which she had gone through loomed before her as
something brutal and undeserved. Passionately, tearfully, incoherently,
the final words tumbled from her quivering petulant lips.
The other woman still looked out of the window, apparently so interested
in the outer aspect of the drab sections of the Jersey manufacturing
city through which they were passing that, the better to see, she had
now so turned her head that only an ear and a small portion of cheek
were visible.
During the little pause that followed Helga’s recital, the faces of the
two women, which had been bare, seemed to harden. It was almost as if
they had slipped on masks. The girl wished to hide her turbulent feeling
and to appear indifferent to Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s opinion of her story. The
woman felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and
possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black
people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these
things are not mentioned—and therefore they do not exist.
Sliding adroitly out from under the precarious subject to a safer, more
decent one, Mrs. Hayes-Rore asked Helga what she was thinking of doing
when she got back to Chicago. Had she anything in mind?
Helga, it appeared, hadn’t. The truth was she had been thinking of
staying in New York. Maybe she could find something there. Everybody
seemed to. At least she could make the attempt.
Mrs. Hayes-Rore sighed, for no obvious reason. “Um, maybe I can help
you. I know people in New York. Do you?”
“No.”
“New York’s the lonesomest place in the world if you don’t know
anybody.”
“It couldn’t possibly be worse than Chicago,” said Helga savagely,
giving the table support a violent kick.
They were running into the shadow of the tunnel. Mrs. Hayes-Rore
murmured thoughtfully: “You’d better come uptown and stay with me a few
days. I may need you. Something may turn up.”
It was one of those vicious mornings, windy and bright. There seemed to
Helga, as they emerged from the depths of the vast station, to be a
whirling malice in the sharp air of this shining city. Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s
words about its terrible loneliness shot through her mind. She felt its
aggressive unfriendliness. Even the great buildings, the flying cabs,
and the swirling crowds seemed manifestations of purposed malevolence.
And for that first short minute she was awed and frightened and inclined
to turn back to that other city, which, though not kind, was yet not
strange. This New York seemed somehow more appalling, more scornful, in
some inexplicable way even more terrible and uncaring than Chicago.
Threatening almost. Ugly. Yes, perhaps she’d better turn back.
The feeling passed, escaped in the surprise of what Mrs. Hayes-Rore was
saying. Her oratorical voice boomed above the city’s roar. “I suppose I
ought really to have phoned Anne from the station. About you, I mean.
Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s got plenty of room. Lives alone in a big
house, which is something Negroes in New York don’t do. They fill ’em up
with lodgers usually. But Anne’s funny. Nice, though. You’ll like her,
and it will be good for you to know her if you’re going to stay in New
York. She’s a widow, my husband’s sister’s son’s wife. The war, you
know.”
“Oh,” protested Helga Crane, with a feeling of acute misgiving, “but
won’t she be annoyed and inconvenienced by having me brought in on her
like this? I supposed we were going to the ‘Y’ or a hotel or something
like that. Oughtn’t we really to stop and phone?”
The woman at her side in the swaying cab smiled, a peculiar invincible,
self-reliant smile, but gave Helga Crane’s suggestion no other
attention. Plainly she was a person accustomed to having things her way.
She merely went on talking of other plans. “I think maybe I can get you
some work. With a new Negro insurance company. They’re after me to put
quite a tidy sum into it. Well, I’ll just tell them that they may as
well take you with the money,” and she laughed.
“Thanks awfully,” Helga said, “but will they like it? I mean being made
to take me because of the money.”
“They’re not being made,” contradicted Mrs. Hayes-Rore. “I intended to
let them have the money anyway, and I’ll tell Mr. Darling so—after he
takes you. They ought to be glad to get you. Colored organizations
always need more brains as well as more money. Don’t worry. And don’t
thank me again. You haven’t got the job yet, you know.”
There was a little silence, during which Helga gave herself up to the
distraction of watching the strange city and the strange crowds, trying
hard to put out of her mind the vision of an easier future which her
companion’s words had conjured up; for, as had been pointed out, it was,
as yet, only a possibility.
Turning out of the park into the broad thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue,
Mrs. Hayes-Rore said in a too carefully casual manner: “And, by the way,
I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored
people won’t understand it, and after all it’s your own business. When
you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll know that what others don’t know
can’t hurt you. I’ll just tell Anne that you’re a friend of mine whose
mother’s dead. That’ll place you well enough and it’s all true. I never
tell lies. She can fill in the gaps to suit herself and any one else
curious enough to ask.”
“Thanks,” Helga said again. And so great was her gratitude that she
reached out and took her new friend’s slightly soiled hand in one of her
own fastidious ones, and retained it until their cab turned into a
pleasant tree-lined street and came to a halt before one of the
dignified houses in the center of the block. Here they got out.
In after years Helga Crane had only to close her eyes to see herself
standing apprehensively in the small cream-colored hall, the floor of
which was covered with deep silver-hued carpet; to see Mrs. Hayes-Rore
pecking the cheek of the tall slim creature beautifully dressed in a
cool green tailored frock; to hear herself being introduced to “my
niece, Mrs. Grey” as “Miss Crane, a little friend of mine whose mother’s
died, and I think perhaps a while in New York will be good for her”; to
feel her hand grasped in quick sympathy, and to hear Anne Grey’s
pleasant voice, with its faint note of wistfulness saying: “I’m so
sorry, and I’m glad Aunt Jeanette brought you here. Did you have a good
trip? I’m sure you must be worn out. I’ll have Lillie take you right
up.” And to feel like a criminal.
Eight
A year thick with various adventures had sped by since that spring day
on which Helga Crane had set out away from Chicago’s indifferent
unkindness for New York in the company of Mrs. Hayes-Rore. New York she
had found not so unkind, not so unfriendly, not so indifferent. There
she had been happy, and secured work, had made acquaintances and another
friend. Again she had had that strange transforming experience, this
time not so fleetingly, that magic sense of having come home. Harlem,
teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her and lulled her into something
that was, she was certain, peace and contentment.
The request and recommendation of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had been sufficient
for her to obtain work with the insurance company in which that
energetic woman was interested. And through Anne it had been possible
for her to meet and to know people with tastes and ideas similar to her
own. Their sophisticated cynical talk, their elaborate parties, the
unobtrusive correctness of their clothes and homes, all appealed to her
craving for smartness, for enjoyment. Soon she was able to reflect with
a flicker of amusement on that constant feeling of humiliation and
inferiority which had encompassed her in Naxos. Her New York friends
looked with contempt and scorn on Naxos and all its works. This gave
Helga a pleasant sense of avengement. Any shreds of self-consciousness
or apprehension which at first she may have felt vanished quickly,
escaped in the keenness of her joy at seeming at last to belong
somewhere. For she considered that she had, as she put it, “found
herself.”
Between Anne Grey and Helga Crane there had sprung one of those
immediate and peculiarly sympathetic friendships. Uneasy at first, Helga
had been relieved that Anne had never returned to the uncomfortable
subject of her mother’s death so intentionally mentioned on their first
meeting by Mrs. Hayes-Rore, beyond a tremulous brief: “You won’t talk to
me about it, will you? I can’t bear the thought of death. Nobody ever
talks to me about it. My husband, you know.” This Helga discovered to be
true. Later, when she knew Anne better, she suspected that it was a bit
of a pose assumed for the purpose of doing away with the necessity of
speaking regretfully of a husband who had been perhaps not too greatly
loved.
After the first pleasant weeks, feeling that her obligation to Anne was
already too great, Helga began to look about for a permanent place to
live. It was, she found, difficult. She eschewed the “Y” as too bare,
impersonal, and restrictive. Nor did furnished rooms or the idea of a
solitary or a shared apartment appeal to her. So she rejoiced when one
day Anne, looking up from her book, said lightly: “Helga, since you’re
going to be in New York, why don’t you stay here with me? I don’t
usually take people. It’s too disrupting. Still, it is sort of pleasant
having somebody in the house and I don’t seem to mind you. You don’t
bore me, or bother me. If you’d like to stay—Think it over.”
Helga didn’t, of course, require to think it over, because lodgment in
Anne’s home was in complete accord with what she designated as her
“æsthetic sense.” Even Helga Crane approved of Anne’s house and the
furnishings which so admirably graced the big cream-colored rooms. Beds
with long, tapering posts to which tremendous age lent dignity and
interest, bonneted old highboys, tables that might be by Duncan Phyfe,
rare spindle-legged chairs, and others whose ladder backs gracefully
climbed the delicate wall panels. These historic things mingled
harmoniously and comfortably with brass-bound Chinese tea-chests,
luxurious deep chairs and davenports, tiny tables of gay color, a
lacquered jade-green settee with gleaming black satin cushions, lustrous
Eastern rugs, ancient copper, Japanese prints, some fine etchings, a
profusion of precious bric-a-brac, and endless shelves filled with
books.
Anne Grey herself was, as Helga expressed it, “almost too good to be
true.” Thirty, maybe, brownly beautiful, she had the face of a golden
Madonna, grave and calm and sweet, with shining black hair and eyes. She
carried herself as queens are reputed to bear themselves, and probably
do not. Her manners were as agreeably gentle as her own soft name. She
possessed an impeccably fastidious taste in clothes, knowing what suited
her and wearing it with an air of unconscious assurance. The unusual
thing, a native New Yorker, she was also a person of distinction,
financially independent, well connected and much sought after. And she
was interesting, an odd confusion of wit and intense earnestness; a
vivid and remarkable person. Yes, undoubtedly, Anne was almost too good
to be true. She was almost perfect.
Thus established, secure, comfortable, Helga soon became thoroughly
absorbed in the distracting interests of life in New York. Her
secretarial work with the Negro insurance company filled her day. Books,
the theater, parties, used up the nights. Gradually in the charm of this
new and delightful pattern of her life she lost that tantalizing
oppression of loneliness and isolation which always, it seemed, had been
a part of her existence.
But, while the continuously gorgeous panorama of Harlem fascinated her,
thrilled her, the sober mad rush of white New York failed entirely to
stir her. Like thousands of other Harlem dwellers, she patronized its
shops, its theaters, its art galleries, and its restaurants, and read
its papers, without considering herself a part of the monster. And she
was satisfied, unenvirous. For her this Harlem was enough. Of that white
world, so distant, so near, she asked only indifference. No, not at all
did she crave, from those pale and powerful people, awareness. Sinister
folk, she considered them, who had stolen her birthright. Their past
contribution to her life, which had been but shame and grief, she had
hidden away from brown folk in a locked closet, “never,” she told
herself, “to be reopened.”
Some day she intended to marry one of those alluring brown or yellow men
who danced attendance on her. Already financially successful, any one of
them could give to her the things which she had now come to desire, a
home like Anne’s, cars of expensive makes such as lined the avenue,
clothes and furs from Bendel’s and Revillon Frères’, servants, and
leisure.
Always her forehead wrinkled in distaste whenever, involuntarily, which
was somehow frequently, her mind turned on the speculative gray eyes and
visionary uplifting plans of Dr. Anderson. That other, James Vayle, had
slipped absolutely from her consciousness. Of him she never thought.
Helga Crane meant, now, to have a home and perhaps laughing, appealing
dark-eyed children in Harlem. Her existence was bounded by Central Park,
Fifth Avenue, St. Nicholas Park, and One Hundred and Forty-fifth Street.
Not at all a narrow life, as Negroes live it, as Helga Crane knew it.
Everything was there, vice and goodness, sadness and gayety, ignorance
and wisdom, ugliness and beauty, poverty and richness. And it seemed to
her that somehow of goodness, gayety, wisdom, and beauty always there
was a little more than of vice, sadness, ignorance, and ugliness. It was
only riches that did not quite transcend poverty.
“But,” said Helga Crane, “what of that? Money isn’t everything. It isn’t
even the half of everything. And here we have so much else—and by
ourselves. It’s only outside of Harlem among those others that money
really counts for everything.”
In the actuality of the pleasant present and the delightful vision of an
agreeable future she was contented, and happy. She did not analyze this
contentment, this happiness, but vaguely, without putting it into words
or even so tangible a thing as a thought, she knew it sprang from a
sense of freedom, a release from the feeling of smallness which had
hedged her in, first during her sorry, unchildlike childhood among
hostile white folk in Chicago, and later during her uncomfortable
sojourn among snobbish black folk in Naxos.
Nine
But it didn’t last, this happiness of Helga Crane’s.
Little by little the signs of spring appeared, but strangely the
enchantment of the season, so enthusiastically, so lavishly greeted by
the gay dwellers of Harlem, filled her only with restlessness.
Somewhere, within her, in a deep recess, crouched discontent. She began
to lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the glow began to fade
from her conception of it. As the days multiplied, her need of
something, something vaguely familiar, but which she could not put a
name to and hold for definite examination, became almost intolerable.
She went through moments of overwhelming anguish. She felt shut in,
trapped. “Perhaps I’m tired, need a tonic, or something,” she reflected.
So she consulted a physician, who, after a long, solemn examination,
said that there was nothing wrong, nothing at all. “A change of scene,
perhaps for a week or so, or a few days away from work,” would put her
straight most likely. Helga tried this, tried them both, but it was no
good. All interest had gone out of living. Nothing seemed any good. She
became a little frightened, and then shocked to discover that, for some
unknown reason, it was of herself she was afraid.
Spring grew into summer, languidly at first, then flauntingly. Without
awareness on her part, Helga Crane began to draw away from those
contacts which had so delighted her. More and more she made lonely
excursions to places outside of Harlem. A sensation of estrangement and
isolation encompassed her. As the days became hotter and the streets
more swarming, a kind of repulsion came upon her. She recoiled in
aversion from the sight of the grinning faces and from the sound of the
easy laughter of all these people who strolled, aimlessly now, it
seemed, up and down the avenues. Not only did the crowds of nameless
folk on the street annoy her, she began also actually to dislike her
friends.
Even the gentle Anne distressed her. Perhaps because Anne was obsessed
by the race problem and fed her obsession. She frequented all the
meetings of protest, subscribed to all the complaining magazines, and
read all the lurid newspapers spewed out by the Negro yellow press. She
talked, wept, and ground her teeth dramatically about the wrongs and
shames of her race. At times she lashed her fury to surprising heights
for one by nature so placid and gentle. And, though she would not, even
to herself, have admitted it, she reveled in this orgy of protest.
“Social equality,” “Equal opportunity for all,” were her slogans, often
and emphatically repeated. Anne preached these things and honestly
thought that she believed them, but she considered it an affront to the
race, and to all the vari-colored peoples that made Lenox and Seventh
Avenues the rich spectacles which they were, for any Negro to receive on
terms of equality any white person.
“To me,” asserted Anne Grey, “the most wretched Negro prostitute that
walks One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street is more than any president of
these United States, not excepting Abraham Lincoln.” But she turned up
her finely carved nose at their lusty churches, their picturesque
parades, their naïve clowning on the streets. She would not have desired
or even have been willing to live in any section outside the black belt,
and she would have refused scornfully, had they been tendered, any
invitation from white folk. She hated white people with a deep and
burning hatred, with the kind of hatred which, finding itself held in
sufficiently numerous groups, was capable some day, on some great
provocation, of bursting into dangerously malignant flames.
But she aped their clothes, their manners, and their gracious ways of
living. While proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro,
she yet disliked the songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of
the race. Toward these things she showed only a disdainful contempt,
tinged sometimes with a faint amusement. Like the despised people of the
white race, she preferred Pavlova to Florence Mills, John McCormack to
Taylor Gordon, Walter Hampden to Paul Robeson. Theoretically, however,
she stood for the immediate advancement of all things Negroid, and was
in revolt against social inequality.
Helga had been entertained by this racial ardor in one so little
affected by racial prejudice as Anne, and by her inconsistencies. But
suddenly these things irked her with a great irksomeness and she wanted
to be free of this constant prattling of the incongruities, the
injustices, the stupidities, the viciousness of white people. It stirred
memories, probed hidden wounds, whose poignant ache bred in her
surprising oppression and corroded the fabric of her quietism. Sometimes
it took all her self-control to keep from tossing sarcastically at Anne
Ibsen’s remark about there being assuredly something very wrong with the
drains, but after all there were other parts of the edifice.
It was at this period of restiveness that Helga met again Dr. Anderson.
She was gone, unwillingly, to a meeting, a health meeting, held in a
large church—as were most of Harlem’s uplift activities—as a substitute
for her employer, Mr. Darling. Making her tardy arrival during a tedious
discourse by a pompous saffron-hued physician, she was led by the
irritated usher, whom she had roused from a nap in which he had been
pleasantly freed from the intricacies of Negro health statistics, to a
very front seat. Complete silence ensued while she subsided into her
chair. The offended doctor looked at the ceiling, at the floor, and
accusingly at Helga, and finally continued his lengthy discourse. When
at last he had ended and Helga had dared to remove her eyes from his
sweating face and look about, she saw with a sudden thrill that Robert
Anderson was among her nearest neighbors. A peculiar, not wholly
disagreeable, quiver ran down her spine. She felt an odd little
faintness. The blood rushed to her face. She tried to jeer at herself
for being so moved by the encounter.
He, meanwhile, she observed, watched her gravely. And having caught her
attention, he smiled a little and nodded.
When all who so desired had spouted to their hearts’ content—if to
little purpose—and the meeting was finally over, Anderson detached
himself from the circle of admiring friends and acquaintances that had
gathered around him and caught up with Helga half-way down the long
aisle leading out to fresher air.
“I wondered if you were really going to cut me. I see you were,” he
began, with that half-quizzical smile which she remembered so well.
She laughed. “Oh, I didn’t think you’d remember me.” Then she added:
“Pleasantly, I mean.”
The man laughed too. But they couldn’t talk yet. People kept breaking in
on them. At last, however, they were at the door, and then he suggested
that they share a taxi “for the sake of a little breeze.” Helga
assented.
Constraint fell upon them when they emerged into the hot street, made
seemingly hotter by a low-hanging golden moon and the hundreds of
blazing electric lights. For a moment, before hailing a taxi, they stood
together looking at the slow moving mass of perspiring human beings.
Neither spoke, but Helga was conscious of the man’s steady gaze. The
prominent gray eyes were fixed upon her, studying her, appraising her.
Many times since turning her back on Naxos she had in fancy rehearsed
this scene, this reencounter. Now she found that rehearsal helped not at
all. It was so absolutely different from anything that she had imagined.
In the open taxi they talked of impersonal things, books, places, the
fascination of New York, of Harlem. But underneath the exchange of small
talk lay another conversation of which Helga Crane was sharply aware.
She was aware, too, of a strange ill-defined emotion, a vague yearning
rising within her. And she experienced a sensation of consternation and
keen regret when with a lurching jerk the cab pulled up before the house
in One Hundred and Thirty-ninth Street. So soon, she thought.
But she held out her hand calmly, coolly. Cordially she asked him to
call some time. “It is,” she said, “a pleasure to renew our
acquaintance.” Was it, she was wondering, merely an acquaintance?
He responded seriously that he too thought it a pleasure, and added:
“You haven’t changed. You’re still seeking for something, I think.”
At his speech there dropped from her that vague feeling of yearning,
that longing for sympathy and understanding which his presence evoked.
She felt a sharp stinging sensation and a recurrence of that anger and
defiant desire to hurt which had so seared her on that past morning in
Naxos. She searched for a biting remark, but, finding none venomous
enough, she merely laughed a little rude and scornful laugh and,
throwing up her small head, bade him an impatient good-night and ran
quickly up the steps.
Afterwards she lay for long hours without undressing, thinking angry
self-accusing thoughts, recalling and reconstructing that other
explosive contact. That memory filled her with a sort of aching
delirium. A thousand indefinite longings beset her. Eagerly she desired
to see him again to right herself in his thoughts. Far into the night
she lay planning speeches for their next meeting, so that it was long
before drowsiness advanced upon her.
When he did call, Sunday, three days later, she put him off on Anne and
went out, pleading an engagement, which until then she had not meant to
keep. Until the very moment of his entrance she had had no intention of
running away, but something, some imp of contumacy, drove her from his
presence, though she longed to stay. Again abruptly had come the
uncontrollable wish to wound. Later, with a sense of helplessness and
inevitability, she realized that the weapon which she had chosen had
been a boomerang, for she herself had felt the keen disappointment of
the denial. Better to have stayed and hurled polite sarcasms at him. She
might then at least have had the joy of seeing him wince.
In this spirit she made her way to the corner and turned into Seventh
Avenue. The warmth of the sun, though gentle on that afternoon, had
nevertheless kissed the street into marvelous light and color. Now and
then, greeting an acquaintance, or stopping to chat with a friend, Helga
was all the time seeing its soft shining brightness on the buildings
along its sides or on the gleaming bronze, gold, and copper faces of its
promenaders. And another vision, too, came haunting Helga Crane; level
gray eyes set down in a brown face which stared out at her, coolly,
quizzically, disturbingly. And she was not happy.
The tea to which she had so suddenly made up her mind to go she found
boring beyond endurance, insipid drinks, dull conversation, stupid men.
The aimless talk glanced from John Wellinger’s lawsuit for
discrimination because of race against a downtown restaurant and the
advantages of living in Europe, especially in France, to the
significance, if any, of the Garvey movement. Then it sped to a favorite
Negro dancer who had just then secured a foothold on the stage of a
current white musical comedy, to other shows, to a new book touching on
Negroes. Thence to costumes for a coming masquerade dance, to a new jazz
song, to Yvette Dawson’s engagement to a Boston lawyer who had seen her
one night at a party and proposed to her the next day at noon. Then back
again to racial discrimination.
Why, Helga wondered, with unreasoning exasperation, didn’t they find
something else to talk of? Why must the race problem always creep in?
She refused to go on to another gathering. It would, she thought, be
simply the same old thing.
On her arrival home she was more disappointed than she cared to admit to
find the house in darkness and even Anne gone off somewhere. She would
have liked that night to have talked with Anne. Get her opinion of Dr.
Anderson.
Anne it was who the next day told her that he had given up his work in
Naxos; or rather that Naxos had given him up. He had been too liberal,
too lenient, for education as it was inflicted in Naxos. Now he was
permanently in New York, employed as welfare worker by some big
manufacturing concern, which gave employment to hundreds of Negro men.
“Uplift,” sniffed Helga contemptuously, and fled before the onslaught of
Anne’s harangue on the needs and ills of the race.
Ten
With the waning summer the acute sensitiveness of Helga Crane’s frayed
nerves grew keener. There were days when the mere sight of the serene
tan and brown faces about her stung her like a personal insult. The
care-free quality of their laughter roused in her the desire to scream
at them: “Fools, fools! Stupid fools!” This passionate and unreasoning
protest gained in intensity, swallowing up all else like some dense fog.
Life became for her only a hateful place where one lived in intimacy
with people one would not have chosen had one been given choice. It was,
too, an excruciating agony. She was continually out of temper: Anne,
thank the gods! was away, but her nearing return filled Helga with
dismay.
Arriving at work one sultry day, hot and dispirited, she found waiting a
letter, a letter from Uncle Peter. It had originally been sent to Naxos,
and from there it had made the journey back to Chicago to the Young
Women’s Christian Association, and then to Mrs. Hayes-Rore. That busy
woman had at last found time between conventions and lectures to
readdress it and had sent it on to New York. Four months, at least, it
had been on its travels. Helga felt no curiosity as to its contents,
only annoyance at the long delay, as she ripped open the thin edge of
the envelope, and for a space sat staring at the peculiar foreign script
of her uncle.
715 Sheridan Road
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Helga:
It is now over a year since you made your unfortunate call here. It was
unfortunate for us all, you, Mrs. Nilssen, and myself. But of course you
couldn’t know. I blame myself. I should have written you of my marriage.
I have looked for a letter, or some word from you; evidently, with your
usual penetration, you understood thoroughly that I must terminate my
outward relation with you. You were always a keen one.
Of course I am sorry, but it can’t be helped. My wife must be
considered, and she feels very strongly about this.
You know, of course, that I wish you the best of luck. But take an old
man’s advice and don’t do as your mother did. Why don’t you run over and
visit your Aunt Katrina? She always wanted you. Maria Kirkeplads, No. 2,
will find her.
I enclose what I intended to leave you at my death. It is better and
more convenient that you get it now. I wish it were more, but even this
little may come in handy for a rainy day.
Best wishes for your luck.
Peter Nilssen
Beside the brief, friendly, but none the less final, letter there was a
check for five thousand dollars. Helga Crane’s first feeling was one of
unreality. This changed almost immediately into one of relief, of
liberation. It was stronger than the mere security from present
financial worry which the check promised. Money as money was still not
very important to Helga. But later, while on an errand in the big
general office of the society, her puzzled bewilderment fled. Here the
inscrutability of the dozen or more brown faces, all cast from the same
indefinite mold, and so like her own, seemed pressing forward against
her. Abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing irritation of the
past weeks was a smoldering hatred. Then, she was overcome by another,
so actual, so sharp, so horribly painful, that forever afterwards she
preferred to forget it. It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with
hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial
character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she
demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised
black folk?
Back in the privacy of her own cubicle, self-loathing came upon her.
“They’re my own people, my own people,” she kept repeating over and over
to herself. It was no good. The feeling would not be routed. “I can’t go
on like this,” she said to herself. “I simply can’t.”
There were footsteps. Panic seized her. She’d have to get out. She
terribly needed to. Snatching hat and purse, she hurried to the narrow
door, saying in a forced, steady voice, as it opened to reveal her
employer: “Mr. Darling, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go out. Please, may I
be excused?”
At his courteous “Certainly, certainly. And don’t hurry. It’s much too
hot,” Helga Crane had the grace to feel ashamed, but there was no
softening of her determination. The necessity for being alone was too
urgent. She hated him and all the others too much.
Outside, rain had begun to fall. She walked bare-headed, bitter with
self-reproach. But she rejoiced too. She didn’t, in spite of her racial
markings, belong to these dark segregated people. She was different. She
felt it. It wasn’t merely a matter of color. It was something broader,
deeper, that made folk kin.
And now she was free. She would take Uncle Peter’s money and advice and
revisit her aunt in Copenhagen. Fleeting pleasant memories of her
childhood visit there flew through her excited mind. She had been only
eight, yet she had enjoyed the interest and the admiration which her
unfamiliar color and dark curly hair, strange to those pink, white, and
gold people, had evoked. Quite clearly now she recalled that her Aunt
Katrina had begged for her to be allowed to remain. Why, she wondered,
hadn’t her mother consented? To Helga it seemed that it would have been
the solution to all their problems, her mother’s, her stepfather’s, her
own.
At home in the cool dimness of the big chintz-hung living-room, clad
only in a fluttering thing of green chiffon, she gave herself up to
day-dreams of a happy future in Copenhagen, where there were no Negroes,
no problems, no prejudice, until she remembered with perturbation that
this was the day of Anne’s return from her vacation at the sea-shore.
Worse. There was a dinner-party in her honor that very night. Helga
sighed. She’d have to go. She couldn’t possibly get out of a
dinner-party for Anne, even though she felt that such an event on a hot
night was little short of an outrage. Nothing but a sense of obligation
to Anne kept her from pleading a splitting headache as an excuse for
remaining quietly at home.
Her mind trailed off to the highly important matter of clothes. What
should she wear? White? No, everybody would, because it was hot. Green?
She shook her head, Anne would be sure to. The blue thing. Reluctantly
she decided against it; she loved it, but she had worn it too often.
There was that cobwebby black net touched with orange, which she had
bought last spring in a fit of extravagance and never worn, because on
getting it home both she and Anne had considered it too décolleté, and
too outré. Anne’s words: “There’s not enough of it, and what there is
gives you the air of something about to fly,” came back to her, and she
smiled as she decided that she would certainly wear the black net. For
her it would be a symbol. She was about to fly.
She busied herself with some absurdly expensive roses which she had
ordered sent in, spending an interminable time in their arrangement. At
last she was satisfied with their appropriateness in some blue Chinese
jars of great age. Anne did have such lovely things, she thought, as she
began conscientiously to prepare for her return, although there was
really little to do; Lillie seemed to have done everything. But Helga
dusted the tops of the books, placed the magazines in ordered
carelessness, redressed Anne’s bed in fresh-smelling sheets of cool
linen, and laid out her best pale-yellow pajamas of crêpe de Chine.
Finally she set out two tall green glasses and made a great pitcher of
lemonade, leaving only the ginger-ale and claret to be added on Anne’s
arrival. She was a little conscience-stricken, so she wanted to be
particularly nice to Anne, who had been so kind to her when first she
came to New York, a forlorn friendless creature. Yes, she was grateful
to Anne; but, just the same, she meant to go. At once.
Her preparations over, she went back to the carved chair from which the
thought of Anne’s home-coming had drawn her. Characteristically she
writhed at the idea of telling Anne of her impending departure and
shirked the problem of evolving a plausible and inoffensive excuse for
its suddenness. “That,” she decided lazily, “will have to look out for
itself; I can’t be bothered just now. It’s too hot.”
She began to make plans and to dream delightful dreams of change, of
life somewhere else. Some place where at last she would be permanently
satisfied. Her anticipatory thoughts waltzed and eddied about to the
sweet silent music of change. With rapture almost, she let herself drop
into the blissful sensation of visualizing herself in different, strange
places, among approving and admiring people, where she would be
appreciated, and understood.
Eleven
It was night. The dinner-party was over, but no one wanted to go home.
Half-past eleven was, it seemed, much too early to tumble into bed on a
Saturday night. It was a sulky, humid night, a thick furry night,
through which the electric torches shone like silver fuzz—an atrocious
night for cabareting, Helga insisted, but the others wanted to go, so
she went with them, though half unwillingly. After much consultation and
chatter they decided upon a place and climbed into two patiently waiting
taxis, rattling things which jerked, wiggled, and groaned, and
threatened every minute to collide with others of their kind, or with
inattentive pedestrians. Soon they pulled up before a tawdry doorway in
a narrow crosstown street and stepped out. The night was far from quiet,
the streets far from empty. Clanging trolley bells, quarreling cats,
cackling phonographs, raucous laughter, complaining motorhorns, low
singing, mingled in the familiar medley that is Harlem. Black figures,
white figures, little forms, big forms, small groups, large groups,
sauntered, or hurried by. It was gay, grotesque, and a little weird.
Helga Crane felt singularly apart from it all. Entering the waiting
doorway, they descended through a furtive, narrow passage, into a vast
subterranean room. Helga smiled, thinking that this was one of those
places characterized by the righteous as a hell.
A glare of light struck her eyes, a blare of jazz split her ears. For a
moment everything seemed to be spinning round; even she felt that she
was circling aimlessly, as she followed with the others the black giant
who led them to a small table, where, when they were seated, their knees
and elbows touched. Helga wondered that the waiter, indefinitely carved
out of ebony, did not smile as he wrote their order—“four bottles of
White Rock, four bottles of gingerale.” Bah! Anne giggled, the others
smiled and openly exchanged knowing glances, and under the tables flat
glass bottles were extracted from the women’s evening scarfs and small
silver flasks drawn from the men’s hip pockets. In a little moment she
grew accustomed to the smoke and din.
They danced, ambling lazily to a crooning melody, or violently twisting
their bodies, like whirling leaves, to a sudden streaming rhythm, or
shaking themselves ecstatically to a thumping of unseen tomtoms. For the
while, Helga was oblivious of the reek of flesh, smoke, and alcohol,
oblivious of the oblivion of other gyrating pairs, oblivious of the
color, the noise, and the grand distorted childishness of it all. She
was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the extraordinary music, blown out,
ripped out, beaten out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra. The
essence of life seemed bodily motion. And when suddenly the music died,
she dragged herself back to the present with a conscious effort; and a
shameful certainty that not only had she been in the jungle, but that
she had enjoyed it, began to taunt her. She hardened her determination
to get away. She wasn’t, she told herself, a jungle creature. She
cloaked herself in a faint disgust as she watched the entertainers throw
themselves about to the bursts of syncopated jangle, and when the time
came again for the patrons to dance, she declined. Her rejected partner
excused himself and sought an acquaintance a few tables removed. Helga
sat looking curiously about her as the buzz of conversation ceased,
strangled by the savage strains of music, and the crowd became a
swirling mass. For the hundredth time she marveled at the gradations
within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen shades slid by. There was
sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold, orange,
yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry white. There was yellow hair,
brown hair, black hair; straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair,
crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes in white faces, brown eyes
in yellow faces, gray eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces.
Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia, in a fantastic motley of
ugliness and beauty, semi-barbaric, sophisticated, exotic, were here.
But she was blind to its charm, purposely aloof and a little
contemptuous, and soon her interest in the moving mosaic waned.
She had discovered Dr. Anderson sitting at a table on the far side of
the room, with a girl in a shivering apricot frock. Seriously he
returned her tiny bow. She met his eyes, gravely smiling, then blushed,
furiously, and averted her own. But they went back immediately to the
girl beside him, who sat indifferently sipping a colorless liquid from a
high glass, or puffing a precariously hanging cigarette. Across dozens
of tables, littered with corks, with ashes, with shriveled sandwiches,
through slits in the swaying mob, Helga Crane studied her.
She was pale, with a peculiar, almost deathlike pallor. The brilliantly
red, softly curving mouth was somehow sorrowful. Her pitch-black eyes, a
little aslant, were veiled by long, drooping lashes and surmounted by
broad brows, which seemed like black smears. The short dark hair was
brushed severely back from the wide forehead. The extreme décolleté of
her simple apricot dress showed a skin of unusual color, a delicate,
creamy hue, with golden tones. “Almost like an alabaster,” thought
Helga.
Bang! Again the music died. The moving mass broke, separated. The others
returned. Anne had rage in her eyes. Her voice trembled as she took
Helga aside to whisper: “There’s your Dr. Anderson over there, with
Audrey Denney.”
“Yes, I saw him. She’s lovely. Who is she?”
“She’s Audrey Denney, as I said, and she lives downtown. West
Twenty-second Street. Hasn’t much use for Harlem any more. It’s a wonder
she hasn’t some white man hanging about. The disgusting creature! I
wonder how she inveigled Anderson? But that’s Audrey! If there is any
desirable man about, trust her to attach him. She ought to be
ostracized.”
“Why?” asked Helga curiously, noting at the same time that three of the
men in their own party had deserted and were now congregated about the
offending Miss Denney.
“Because she goes about with white people,” came Anne’s indignant
answer, “and they know she’s colored.”
“I’m afraid I don’t quite see, Anne. Would it be all right if they
didn’t know she was colored?”
“Now, don’t be nasty, Helga. You know very well what I mean.” Anne’s
voice was shaking. Helga didn’t see, and she was greatly interested, but
she decided to let it go. She didn’t want to quarrel with Anne, not now,
when she had that guilty feeling about leaving her. But Anne was off on
her favorite subject, race. And it seemed, too, that Audrey Denney was
to her particularly obnoxious.
“Why, she gives parties for white and colored people together. And she
goes to white people’s parties. It’s worse than disgusting, it’s
positively obscene.”
“Oh, come, Anne, you haven’t been to any of the parties, I know, so how
can you be so positive about the matter?”
“No, but I’ve heard about them. I know people who’ve been.”
“Friends of yours, Anne?”
Anne admitted that they were, some of them.
“Well, then, they can’t be so bad. I mean, if your friends sometimes go,
can they? Just what goes on that’s so terrible?”
“Why, they drink, for one thing. Quantities, they say.”
“So do we, at the parties here in Harlem,” Helga responded. An idiotic
impulse seized her to leave the place, Anne’s presence, then, forever.
But of course she couldn’t. It would be foolish, and so ugly.
“And the white men dance with the colored women. Now you know, Helga
Crane, that can mean only one thing.” Anne’s voice was trembling with
cold hatred. As she ended, she made a little clicking noise with her
tongue, indicating an abhorrence too great for words.
“Don’t the colored men dance with the white women, or do they sit about,
impolitely, while the other men dance with their women?” inquired Helga
very softly, and with a slowness approaching almost to insolence. Anne’s
insinuations were too revolting. She had a slightly sickish feeling, and
a flash of anger touched her. She mastered it and ignored Anne’s
inadequate answer.
“It’s the principle of the thing that I object to. You can’t get round
the fact that her behavior is outrageous, treacherous, in fact. That’s
what’s the matter with the Negro race. They won’t stick together. She
certainly ought to be ostracized. I’ve nothing but contempt for her, as
has every other self-respecting Negro.”
The other women and the lone man left to them—Helga’s own escort—all
seemingly agreed with Anne. At any rate, they didn’t protest. Helga gave
it up. She felt that it would be useless to tell them that what she felt
for the beautiful, calm, cool girl who had the assurance, the courage,
so placidly to ignore racial barriers and give her attention to people,
was not contempt, but envious admiration. So she remained silent,
watching the girl.
At the next first sound of music Dr. Anderson rose. Languidly the girl
followed his movement, a faint smile parting her sorrowful lips at some
remark he made. Her long, slender body swayed with an eager pulsing
motion. She danced with grace and abandon, gravely, yet with obvious
pleasure, her legs, her hips, her back, all swaying gently, swung by
that wild music from the heart of the jungle. Helga turned her glance to
Dr. Anderson. Her disinterested curiosity passed. While she still felt
for the girl envious admiration, that feeling was now augmented by
another, a more primitive emotion. She forgot the garish crowded room.
She forgot her friends. She saw only two figures, closely clinging. She
felt her heart throbbing. She felt the room receding. She went out the
door. She climbed endless stairs. At last, panting, confused, but
thankful to have escaped, she found herself again out in the dark night
alone, a small crumpled thing in a fragile, flying black and gold dress.
A taxi drifted toward her, stopped. She stepped into it, feeling cold,
unhappy, misunderstood, and forlorn.
Twelve
Helga Crane felt no regret as the cliff-like towers faded. The sight
thrilled her as beauty, grandeur, of any kind always did, but that was
all.
The liner drew out from churning slate-colored waters of the river into
the open sea. The small seething ripples on the water’s surface became
little waves. It was evening. In the western sky was a pink and mauve
light, which faded gradually into a soft gray-blue obscurity. Leaning
against the railing, Helga stared into the approaching night, glad to be
at last alone, free of that great superfluity of human beings, yellow,
brown, and black, which, as the torrid summer burnt to its close, had so
oppressed her. No, she hadn’t belonged there. Of her attempt to emerge
from that inherent aloneness which was part of her very being, only
dullness had come, dullness and a great aversion.
Almost at once it was time for dinner. Somewhere a bell sounded. She
turned and with buoyant steps went down. Already she had begun to feel
happier. Just for a moment, outside the dining-salon, she hesitated,
assailed with a tiny uneasiness which passed as quickly as it had come.
She entered softly, unobtrusively. And, after all, she had had her
little fear for nothing. The purser, a man grown old in the service of
the Scandinavian-American Line, remembered her as the little dark girl
who had crossed with her mother years ago, and so she must sit at his
table. Helga liked that. It put her at her ease and made her feel
important.
Everyone was kind in the delightful days which followed, and her first
shyness under the politely curious glances of turquoise eyes of her
fellow travelers soon slid from her. The old forgotten Danish of her
childhood began to come, awkwardly at first, from her lips, under their
agreeable tutelage. Evidently they were interested, curious, and perhaps
a little amused about this Negro girl on her way to Denmark alone.
Helga was a good sailor, and mostly the weather was lovely with the
serene calm of the lingering September summer, under whose sky the sea
was smooth, like a length of watered silk, unruffled by the stir of any
wind. But even the two rough days found her on deck, reveling like a
released bird in her returned feeling of happiness and freedom, that
blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race. Again,
she had put the past behind her with an ease which astonished even
herself. Only the figure of Dr. Anderson obtruded itself with surprising
vividness to irk her because she could get no meaning from that keen
sensation of covetous exasperation that had so surprisingly risen within
her on the night of the cabaret party. This question Helga Crane
recognized as not entirely new; it was but a revival of the puzzlement
experienced when she had fled so abruptly from Naxos more than a year
before. With the recollection of that previous flight and subsequent
half-questioning a dim disturbing notion came to her. She wasn’t, she
couldn’t be, in love with the man. It was a thought too humiliating, and
so quickly dismissed. Nonsense! Sheer nonsense! When one is in love, one
strives to please. Never, she decided, had she made an effort to be
pleasing to Dr. Anderson. On the contrary, she had always tried,
deliberately, to irritate him. She was, she told herself, a sentimental
fool.
Nevertheless, the thought of love stayed with her, not prominent,
definite; but shadowy, incoherent. And in a remote corner of her
consciousness lurked the memory of Dr. Anderson’s serious smile and
gravely musical voice.
On the last morning Helga rose at dawn, a dawn outside old Copenhagen.
She lay lazily in her long chair watching the feeble sun creeping over
the ship’s great green funnels with sickly light; watching the purply
gray sky change to opal, to gold, to pale blue. A few other passengers,
also early risen, excited by the prospect of renewing old attachments,
of glad homecomings after long years, paced nervously back and forth.
Now, at the last moment, they were impatient, but apprehensive fear,
too, had its place in their rushing emotions. Impatient Helga Crane was
not. But she was apprehensive. Gradually, as the ship drew into the
lazier waters of the dock, she became prey to sinister fears and
memories. A deep pang of misgiving nauseated her at the thought of her
aunt’s husband, acquired since Helga’s childhood visit. Painfully,
vividly, she remembered the frightened anger of Uncle Peter’s new wife,
and looking back at her precipitate departure from America, she was
amazed at her own stupidity. She had not even considered the remote
possibility that her aunt’s husband might be like Mrs. Nilssen. For the
first time in nine days she wished herself back in New York, in America.
The little gulf of water between the ship and the wharf lessened. The
engines had long ago ceased their whirring, and now the buzz of
conversation, too, died down. There was a sort of silence. Soon the
welcoming crowd on the wharf stood under the shadow of the great
sea-monster, their faces turned up to the anxious ones of the passengers
who hung over the railing. Hats were taken off, handkerchiefs were
shaken out and frantically waved. Chatter. Deafening shouts. A little
quiet weeping. Sailors and laborers were yelling and rushing about.
Cables were thrown. The gangplank was laid.
Silent, unmoving, Helga Crane stood looking intently down into the
gesticulating crowd. Was anyone waving to her? She couldn’t tell. She
didn’t in the least remember her aunt, save as a hazy pretty lady. She
smiled a little at the thought that her aunt, or anyone waiting there in
the crowd below, would have no difficulty in singling her out. But—had
she been met? When she descended the gangplank she was still uncertain
and was trying to decide on a plan of procedure in the event that she
had not. A telegram before she went through the customs? Telephone? A
taxi?
But, again, she had all her fears and questionings for nothing. A smart
woman in olive-green came toward her at once. And, even in the fervent
gladness of her relief, Helga took in the carelessly trailing purple
scarf and correct black hat that completed the perfection of her aunt’s
costume, and had time to feel herself a little shabbily dressed. For it
was her aunt; Helga saw that at once, the resemblance to her own mother
was unmistakable. There was the same long nose, the same beaming blue
eyes, the same straying pale-brown hair so like sparkling beer. And the
tall man with the fierce mustache who followed carrying hat and stick
must be Herr Dahl, Aunt Katrina’s husband. How gracious he was in his
welcome, and how anxious to air his faulty English, now that her aunt
had finished kissing her and exclaimed in Danish: “Little Helga! Little
Helga! Goodness! But how you have grown!”
Laughter from all three.
“Welcome to Denmark, to Copenhagen, to our home,” said the new uncle in
queer, proud, oratorical English. And to Helga’s smiling, grateful
“Thank you,” he returned: “Your trunks? Your checks?” also in English,
and then lapsed into Danish.
“Where in the world are the Fishers? We must hurry the customs.”
Almost immediately they were joined by a breathless couple, a young
gray-haired man and a fair, tiny, doll-like woman. It developed that
they had lived in England for some years and so spoke English, real
English, well. They were both breathless, all apologies and
explanations.
“So early!” sputtered the man, Herr Fisher, “We inquired last night and
they said nine. It was only by accident that we called again this
morning to be sure. Well, you can imagine the rush we were in when they
said eight! And of course we had trouble in finding a cab. One always
does if one is late.” All this in Danish. Then to Helga in English: “You
see, I was especially asked to come because Fru Dahl didn’t know if you
remembered your Danish, and your uncle’s English—well—”
More laughter.
At last, the customs having been hurried and a cab secured, they were
off, with much chatter, through the toy-like streets, weaving perilously
in and out among the swarms of bicycles.
It had begun, a new life for Helga Crane.
Thirteen
She liked it, this new life. For a time it blotted from her mind all
else. She took to luxury as the proverbial duck to water. And she took
to admiration and attention even more eagerly.
It was pleasant to wake on that first afternoon, after the insisted-upon
nap, with that sensation of lavish contentment and well-being enjoyed
only by impecunious sybarites waking in the houses of the rich. But
there was something more than mere contentment and well-being. To Helga
Crane it was the realization of a dream that she had dreamed
persistently ever since she was old enough to remember such vague things
as day-dreams and longings. Always she had wanted, not money, but the
things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful
surroundings. Things. Things. Things.
So it was more than pleasant, it was important, this awakening in the
great high room which held the great high bed on which she lay, small
but exalted. It was important because to Helga Crane it was the day, so
she decided, to which all the sad forlorn past had led, and from which
the whole future was to depend. This, then, was where she belonged. This
was her proper setting. She felt consoled at last for the spiritual
wounds of the past.
A discreet knocking on the tall paneled door sounded. In response to
Helga’s “Come in” a respectfully rosy-faced maid entered and Helga lay
for a long minute watching her adjust the shutters. She was conscious,
too, of the girl’s sly curious glances at her, although her general
attitude was quite correct, willing and disinterested. In New York,
America, Helga would have resented this sly watching. Now, here, she was
only amused. Marie, she reflected, had probably never seen a Negro
outside the pictured pages of her geography book.
Another knocking. Aunt Katrina entered, smiling at Helga’s quick, lithe
spring from the bed. They were going out to tea, she informed Helga.
What, the girl inquired, did one wear to tea in Copenhagen, meanwhile
glancing at her aunt’s dark purple dress and bringing forth a severely
plain blue crêpe frock. But no! It seemed that that wouldn’t at all do.
“Too sober,” pronounced Fru Dahl. “Haven’t you something lively,
something bright?” And, noting Helga’s puzzled glance at her own subdued
costume, she explained laughingly: “Oh, I’m an old married lady, and a
Dane. But you, you’re young. And you’re a foreigner, and different. You
must have bright things to set off the color of your lovely brown skin.
Striking things, exotic things. You must make an impression.”
“I’ve only these,” said Helga Crane, timidly displaying her wardrobe on
couch and chairs. “Of course I intend to buy here. I didn’t want to
bring over too much that might be useless.”
“And you were quite right too. Umm. Let’s see. That black there, the one
with the cerise and purple trimmings. Wear that.”
Helga was shocked. “But for tea, Aunt! Isn’t it too gay? Too—too—outré?”
“Oh dear, no. Not at all, not for you. Just right.” Then after a little
pause she added: “And we’re having people in to dinner tonight, quite a
lot. Perhaps we’d better decide on our frocks now.” For she was, in
spite of all her gentle kindness, a woman who left nothing to chance. In
her own mind she had determined the role that Helga was to play in
advancing the social fortunes of the Dahls of Copenhagen, and she meant
to begin at once.
At last, after much trying on and scrutinizing, it was decided that
Marie should cut a favorite emerald-green velvet dress a little lower in
the back and add some gold and mauve flowers, “to liven it up a bit,” as
Fru Dahl put it.
“Now that,” she said, pointing to the Chinese red dressing-gown in which
Helga had wrapped herself when at last the fitting was over, “suits you.
Tomorrow we’ll shop. Maybe we can get something that color. That black
and orange thing there is good too, but too high. What a prim American
maiden you are, Helga, to hide such a fine back and shoulders. Your feet
are nice too, but you ought to have higher heels—and buckles.”
Left alone, Helga began to wonder. She was dubious, too, and not a
little resentful. Certainly she loved color with a passion that perhaps
only Negroes and Gypsies know. But she had a deep faith in the
perfection of her own taste, and no mind to be bedecked in flaunting
flashy things. Still—she had to admit that Fru Dahl was right about the
dressing-gown. It did suit her. Perhaps an evening dress. And she knew
that she had lovely shoulders, and her feet were nice.
When she was dressed in the shining black taffeta with its bizarre
trimmings of purple and cerise, Fru Dahl approved her and so did Herr
Dahl. Everything in her responded to his “She’s beautiful; beautiful!”
Helga Crane knew she wasn’t that, but it pleased her that he could think
so, and say so. Aunt Katrina smiled in her quiet, assured way, taking to
herself her husband’s compliment to her niece. But a little frown
appeared over the fierce mustache, as he said, in his precise, faintly
feminine voice: “She ought to have earrings, long ones. Is it too late
for Garborg’s? We could call up.”
And call up they did. And Garborg, the jeweler, in Fredericksgaarde
waited for them. Not only were earrings bought, long ones brightly
enameled, but glittering shoe-buckles and two great bracelets. Helga’s
sleeves being long, she escaped the bracelets for the moment. They were
wrapped to be worn that night. The earrings, however, and the buckles
came into immediate use and Helga felt like a veritable savage as they
made their leisurely way across the pavement from the shop to the
waiting motor. This feeling was intensified by the many pedestrians who
stopped to stare at the queer dark creature, strange to their city. Her
cheeks reddened, but both Herr and Fru Dahl seemed oblivious of the
stares or the audible whispers in which Helga made out the one
frequently recurring word ”sorte,” which she recognized as the Danish
word for “black.”
Her Aunt Katrina merely remarked: “A high color becomes you, Helga.
Perhaps tonight a little rouge—” To which her husband nodded in
agreement and stroked his mustache meditatively. Helga Crane said
nothing.
They were pleased with the success she was at the tea, or rather the
coffee—for no tea was served—and later at dinner. Helga herself felt
like nothing so much as some new and strange species of pet dog being
proudly exhibited. Everyone was very polite and very friendly, but she
felt the massed curiosity and interest, so discreetly hidden under the
polite greetings. The very atmosphere was tense with it. “As if I had
horns, or three legs,” she thought. She was really nervous and a little
terrified, but managed to present an outward smiling composure. This was
assisted by the fact that it was taken for granted that she knew nothing
or very little of the language. So she had only to bow and look
pleasant. Herr and Fru Dahl did the talking, answered the questions. She
came away from the coffee feeling that she had acquitted herself well in
the first skirmish. And, in spite of the mental strain, she had enjoyed
her prominence.
If the afternoon had been a strain, the evening was something more. It
was more exciting too. Marie had indeed “cut down” the prized green
velvet, until, as Helga put it, it was “practically nothing but a
skirt.” She was thankful for the barbaric bracelets, for the dangling
earrings, for the beads about her neck. She was even thankful for the
rouge on her burning cheeks and for the very powder on her back. No
other woman in the stately pale-blue room was so greatly exposed. But
she liked the small murmur of wonder and admiration which rose when
Uncle Poul brought her in. She liked the compliments in the men’s eyes
as they bent over her hand. She liked the subtle half-understood
flattery of her dinner partners. The women too were kind, feeling no
need for jealousy. To them this girl, this Helga Crane, this mysterious
niece of the Dahls, was not to be reckoned seriously in their scheme of
things. True, she was attractive, unusual, in an exotic, almost savage
way, but she wasn’t one of them. She didn’t at all count.
Near the end of the evening, as Helga sat effectively posed on a red
satin sofa, the center of an admiring group, replying to questions about
America and her trip over, in halting, inadequate Danish, there came a
shifting of the curious interest away from herself. Following the
others’ eyes, she saw that there had entered the room a tallish man with
a flying mane of reddish blond hair. He was wearing a great black cape,
which swung gracefully from his huge shoulders, and in his long, nervous
hand he held a wide soft hat. An artist, Helga decided at once, taking
in the broad streaming tie. But how affected! How theatrical!
With Fru Dahl he came forward and was presented. “Herr Olsen, Herr Axel
Olsen.” To Helga Crane that meant nothing. The man, however, interested
her. For an imperceptible second he bent over her hand. After that he
looked intently at her for what seemed to her an incredibly rude length
of time from under his heavy drooping lids. At last, removing his stare
of startled satisfaction, he wagged his leonine head approvingly.
“Yes, you’re right. She’s amazing. Marvelous,” he muttered.
Everyone else in the room was deliberately not staring. About Helga
there sputtered a little staccato murmur of manufactured conversation.
Meanwhile she could think of no proper word of greeting to the
outrageous man before her. She wanted, very badly, to laugh. But the man
was as unaware of her omission as of her desire. His words flowed on and
on, rising and rising. She tried to follow, but his rapid Danish eluded
her. She caught only words, phrases, here and there. “Superb eyes . . .
color … neck column … yellow … hair … alive . . . wonderful. …” His
speech was for Fru Dahl. For a bit longer he lingered before the silent
girl, whose smile had become a fixed aching mask, still gazing
appraisingly, but saying no word to her, and then moved away with Fru
Dahl, talking rapidly and excitedly to her and her husband, who joined
them for a moment at the far side of the room. Then he was gone as
suddenly as he had come.
“Who is he?” Helga put the question timidly to a hovering young army
officer, a very smart captain just back from Sweden. Plainly he was
surprised.
“Herr Olsen, Herr Axel Olsen, the painter. Portraits, you know.”
“Oh,” said Helga, still mystified.
“I guess he’s going to paint you. You’re lucky. He’s queer. Won’t do
everybody.”
“Oh, no. I mean, I’m sure you’re mistaken. He didn’t ask, didn’t say
anything about it.”
The young man laughed. “Ha ha! That’s good! He’ll arrange that with Herr
Dahl. He evidently came just to see you, and it was plain that he was
pleased.” He smiled, approvingly.
“Oh,” said Helga again. Then at last she laughed. It was too funny. The
great man hadn’t addressed a word to her. Here she was, a curiosity, a
stunt, at which people came and gazed. And was she to be treated like a
secluded young miss, a Danish frøkken, not to be consulted personally
even on matters affecting her personally? She, Helga Crane, who almost
all her life had looked after herself, was she now to be looked after by
Aunt Katrina and her husband? It didn’t seem real.
It was late, very late, when finally she climbed into the great bed
after having received an auntly kiss. She lay long awake reviewing the
events of the crowded day. She was happy again. Happiness covered her
like the lovely quilts under which she rested. She was mystified too.
Her aunt’s words came back to her. “You’re young and a foreigner and—and
different.” Just what did that mean, she wondered. Did it mean that the
difference was to be stressed, accented? Helga wasn’t so sure that she
liked that. Hitherto all her efforts had been toward similarity to those
about her.
“How odd,” she thought sleepily, “and how different from America!”
Fourteen
The young officer had been right in his surmise. Axel Olsen was going to
paint Helga Crane. Not only was he going to paint her, but he was to
accompany her and her aunt on their shopping expedition. Aunt Katrina
was frankly elated. Uncle Poul was also visibly pleased. Evidently they
were not above kotowing to a lion. Helga’s own feelings were mixed; she
was amused, grateful, and vexed. It had all been decided and arranged
without her, and, also, she was a little afraid of Olsen. His stupendous
arrogance awed her.
The day was an exciting, not easily to be forgotten one. Definitely,
too, it conveyed to Helga her exact status in her new environment. A
decoration. A curio. A peacock. Their progress through the shops was an
event; an event for Copenhagen as well as for Helga Crane. Her dark,
alien appearance was to most people an astonishment. Some stared
surreptitiously, some openly, and some stopped dead in front of her in
order more fully to profit by their stares. “Den Sorte” dropped freely,
audibly, from many lips.
The time came when she grew used to the stares of the population. And
the time came when the population of Copenhagen grew used to her
outlandish presence and ceased to stare. But at the end of that first
day it was with thankfulness that she returned to the sheltering walls
of the house on Maria Kirkeplads.
They were followed by numerous packages, whose contents all had been
selected or suggested by Olsen and paid for by Aunt Katrina. Helga had
only to wear them. When they were opened and the things spread out upon
the sedate furnishings of her chamber, they made a rather startling
array. It was almost in a mood of rebellion that Helga faced the
fantastic collection of garments incongruously laid out in the quaint,
stiff, pale old room. There were batik dresses in which mingled indigo,
orange, green, vermilion, and black; dresses of velvet and chiffon in
screaming colors, blood-red, sulphur-yellow, sea-green; and one black
and white thing in striking combination. There was a black Manila shawl
strewn with great scarlet and lemon flowers, a leopard-skin coat, a
glittering opera-cape. There were turban-like hats of metallic silks,
feathers and furs, strange jewelry, enameled or set with odd
semiprecious stones, a nauseous Eastern perfume, shoes with dangerously
high heels. Gradually Helga’s perturbation subsided in the unusual
pleasure of having so many new and expensive clothes at one time. She
began to feel a little excited, incited.
Incited. That was it, the guiding principle of her life in Copenhagen.
She was incited to make an impression, a voluptuous impression. She was
incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it,
subtly schooled for it. And after a little while she gave herself up
wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.
Against the solid background of Herr Dahl’s wealth and generosity she
submitted to her aunt’s arrangement of her life to one end, the amusing
one of being noticed and flattered. Intentionally she kept to the slow,
faltering Danish. It was, she decided, more attractive than a nearer
perfection. She grew used to the extravagant things with which Aunt
Katrina chose to dress her. She managed, too, to retain that air of
remoteness which had been in America so disastrous to her friendships.
Here in Copenhagen it was merely a little mysterious and added another
clinging wisp of charm.
Helga Crane’s new existence was intensely pleasant to her; it gratified
her augmented sense of self-importance. And it suited her. She had to
admit that the Danes had the right idea. To each his own milieu. Enhance
what was already in one’s possession. In America Negroes sometimes
talked loudly of this, but in their hearts they repudiated it. In their
lives too. They didn’t want to be like themselves. What they wanted,
asked for, begged for, was to be like their white overlords. They were
ashamed to be Negroes, but not ashamed to beg to be something else.
Something inferior. Not quite genuine. Too bad!
Helga Crane didn’t, however, think often of America, excepting in
unfavorable contrast to Denmark. For she had resolved never to return to
the existence of ignominy which the New World of opportunity and promise
forced upon Negroes. How stupid she had been ever to have thought that
she could marry and perhaps have children in a land where every dark
child was handicapped at the start by the shroud of color! She saw,
suddenly, the giving birth to little, helpless, unprotesting Negro
children as a sin, an unforgivable outrage. More black folk to suffer
indignities. More dark bodies for mobs to lynch. No, Helga Crane didn’t
think often of America. It was too humiliating, too disturbing. And she
wanted to be left to the peace which had come to her. Her mental
difficulties and questionings had become simplified. She now believed
sincerely that there was a law of compensation, and that sometimes it
worked. For all those early desolate years she now felt recompensed. She
recalled a line that had impressed her in her lonely school-days, “The
far-off interest of tears.”
To her, Helga Crane, it had come at last, and she meant to cling to it.
So she turned her back on painful America, resolutely shutting out the
griefs, the humiliations, the frustrations, which she had endured there.
Her mind was occupied with other and nearer things.
The charm of the old city itself, with its odd architectural mixture of
medievalism and modernity, and the general air of well-being which
pervaded it, impressed her. Even in the so-called poor sections there
was none of that untidiness and squalor which she remembered as the
accompaniment of poverty in Chicago, New York, and the Southern cities
of America. Here the door-steps were always white from constant
scrubbings, the women neat, and the children washed and provided with
whole clothing. Here were no tatters and rags, no beggars. But, then,
begging, she learned, was an offense punishable by law. Indeed, it was
unnecessary in a country where everyone considered it a duty somehow to
support himself and his family by honest work; or, if misfortune and
illness came upon one, everyone else, including the State, felt bound to
give assistance, a lift on the road to the regaining of independence.
After the initial shyness and consternation at the sensation caused by
her strange presence had worn off, Helga spent hours driving or walking
about the city, at first in the protecting company of Uncle Poul or Aunt
Katrina or both, or sometimes Axel Olsen. But later, when she had become
a little familiar with the city, and its inhabitants a little used to
her, and when she had learned to cross the streets in safety, dodging
successfully the innumerable bicycles like a true Copenhagener, she went
often alone, loitering on the long bridge which spanned the placid
lakes, or watching the pageant of the blue-clad, sprucely tailored
soldiers in the daily parade at Amalienborg Palace, or in the historic
vicinity of the long, low-lying Exchange, a picturesque structure in
picturesque surroundings, skirting as it did the great canal, which
always was alive with many small boats, flying broad white sails and
pressing close on the huge ruined pile of the Palace of Christiansborg.
There was also the Gammelstrand, the congregating-place of the venders
of fish, where daily was enacted a spirited and interesting scene
between sellers and buyers, and where Helga’s appearance always roused
lively and audible, but friendly, interest, long after she became in
other parts of the city an accepted curiosity. Here it was that one day
an old countrywoman asked her to what manner of mankind she belonged and
at Helga’s replying: “I’m a Negro,” had become indignant, retorting
angrily that, just because she was old and a countrywoman she could not
be so easily fooled, for she knew as well as everyone else that Negroes
were black and had woolly hair.
Against all this walking the Dahls had at first uttered mild protest.
“But, Aunt dear, I have to walk, or I’ll get fat,” Helga asserted. “I’ve
never, never in all my life, eaten so much.” For the accepted style of
entertainment in Copenhagen seemed to be a round of dinner-parties, at
which it was customary for the hostess to tax the full capacity not only
of her dining-room, but of her guests as well. Helga enjoyed these
dinner-parties, as they were usually spirited affairs, the conversation
brilliant and witty, often in several languages. And always she came in
for a goodly measure of flattering attention and admiration.
There were, too, those popular afternoon gatherings for the express
purpose of drinking coffee together, where between much talk,
interesting talk, one sipped the strong and steaming beverage from
exquisite cups fashioned of Royal Danish porcelain and partook of an
infinite variety of rich cakes and smørre-brød. This smørrebrød, dainty
sandwiches of an endless and tempting array, was distinctly a Danish
institution. Often Helga wondered just how many of these delicious
sandwiches she had consumed since setting foot on Denmark’s soil.
Always, wherever food was served, appeared the inevitable smørrebrød, in
the home of the Dahls, in every other home that she visited, in hotels,
in restaurants.
At first she had missed, a little, dancing, for, though excellent
dancers, the Danes seemed not to care a great deal for that pastime,
which so delightfully combines exercise and pleasure. But in the winter
there was skating, solitary, or in gay groups. Helga liked this sport,
though she was not very good at it. There were, however, always plenty
of efficient and willing men to instruct and to guide her over the
glittering ice. One could, too, wear such attractive skating-things.
But mostly it was with Axel Olsen that her thoughts were occupied.
Brilliant, bored, elegant, urbane, cynical, worldly, he was a type
entirely new to Helga Crane, familiar only, and that but little, with
the restricted society of American Negroes. She was aware, too, that
this amusing, if conceited, man was interested in her. They were,
because he was painting her, much together. Helga spent long mornings in
the eccentric studio opposite the Folkemuseum, and Olsen came often to
the Dahl home, where, as Helga and the man himself knew, he was
something more than welcome. But in spite of his expressed interest and
even delight in her exotic appearance, in spite of his constant
attendance upon her, he gave no sign of the more personal kind of
concern which—encouraged by Aunt Katrina’s mild insinuations and Uncle
Poul’s subtle questionings—she had tried to secure. Was it, she
wondered, race that kept him silent, held him back. Helga Crane frowned
on this thought, putting it furiously from her, because it disturbed her
sense of security and permanence in her new life, pricked her
self-assurance.
Nevertheless she was startled when on a pleasant afternoon while
drinking coffee in the Hotel Vivili, Aunt Katrina mentioned, almost
casually, the desirability of Helga’s making a good marriage.
“Marriage, Aunt dear!”
“Marriage,” firmly repeated her aunt, helping herself to another anchovy
and olive sandwich. “You are,” she pointed out, “twenty-five.”
“Oh, Aunt, I couldn’t! I mean, there’s nobody here for me to marry.” In
spite of herself and her desire not to be, Helga was shocked.
“Nobody?” There was, Fru Dahl asserted, Captain Frederick Skaargaard—and
very handsome he was too—and he would have money. And there was Herr
Hans Tietgen, not so handsome, of course, but clever and a good business
man; he too would be rich, very rich, some day. And there was Herr Karl
Pedersen, who had a good berth with the Landmands-bank and considerable
shares in a prosperous cement-factory at Aalborg. There was, too,
Christian Lende, the young owner of the new Odin Theater. Any of these
Helga might marry, was Aunt Katrina’s opinion. “And,” she added,
“others.” Or maybe Helga herself had some ideas.
Helga had. She didn’t, she responded, believe in mixed marriages,
“between races, you know.” They brought only trouble—to the children—as
she herself knew but too well from bitter experience.
Fru Dahl thoughtfully lit a cigarette. Eventually, after a satisfactory
glow had manifested itself, she announced: “Because your mother was a
fool. Yes, she was! If she’d come home after she married, or after you
were born, or even after your father—er—went off like that, it would
have been different. If even she’d left you when she was here. But why
in the world she should have married again, and a person like that, I
can’t see. She wanted to keep you, she insisted on it, even over his
protest, I think. She loved you so much, she said.—And so she made you
unhappy. Mothers, I suppose, are like that. Selfish. And Karen was
always stupid. If you’ve got any brains at all they came from your
father.”
Into this Helga would not enter. Because of its obvious partial truths
she felt the need for disguising caution. With a detachment that amazed
herself she asked if Aunt Katrina didn’t think, really, that
miscegenation was wrong, in fact as well as principle.
“Don’t,” was her aunt’s reply, “be a fool too, Helga. We don’t think of
those things here. Not in connection with individuals, at least.” And
almost immediately she inquired: “Did you give Herr Olsen my message
about dinner tonight?”
“Yes, Aunt.” Helga was cross, and trying not to show it.
“He’s coming?”
“Yes, Aunt,” with precise politeness.
“What about him?”
“I don’t know. What about him?”
“He likes you?”
“I don’t know. How can I tell that?” Helga asked with irritating
reserve, her concentrated attention on the selection of a sandwich. She
had a feeling of nakedness. Outrage.
Now Fru Dahl was annoyed and showed it. “What nonsense! Of course you
know. Any girl does,” and her satin-covered foot tapped, a little
impatiently, the old tiled floor.
“Really, I don’t know, Aunt,” Helga responded in a strange voice, a
strange manner, coldly formal, levelly courteous. Then suddenly
contrite, she added: “Honestly, I don’t. I can’t tell a thing about
him,” and fell into a little silence. “Not a thing,” she repeated. But
the phrase, though audible, was addressed to no one. To herself.
She looked out into the amazing orderliness of the street. Instinctively
she wanted to combat this searching into the one thing which, here,
surrounded by all other things which for so long she had so positively
wanted, made her a little afraid. Started vague premonitions.
Fru Dahl regarded her intently. It would be, she remarked with a return
of her outward casualness, by far the best of all possibilities.
Particularly desirable. She touched Helga’s hand with her fingers in a
little affectionate gesture. Very lightly.
Helga Crane didn’t immediately reply. There was, she knew, so much
reason—from one viewpoint—in her aunt’s statement. She could only
acknowledge it. “I know that,” she told her finally. Inwardly she was
admiring the cool, easy way in which Aunt Katrina had brushed aside the
momentary acid note of the conversation and resumed her customary pitch.
It took, Helga thought, a great deal of security. Balance.
“Yes,” she was saying, while leisurely lighting another of those long,
thin, brown cigarettes which Helga knew from distressing experience to
be incredibly nasty tasting, “it would be the ideal thing for you,
Helga.” She gazed penetratingly into the masked face of her niece and
nodded, as though satisfied with what she saw there. “And you of course
realize that you are a very charming and beautiful girl. Intelligent
too. If you put your mind to it, there’s no reason in the world why you
shouldn’t—” Abruptly she stopped, leaving her implication at once
suspended and clear. Behind her there were footsteps. A small gloved
hand appeared on her shoulder. In the short moment before turning to
greet Fru Fischer she said quietly, meaningly: “Or else stop wasting
your time, Helga.”
Helga Crane said: “Ah, Fru Fischer. It’s good to see you.” She meant it.
Her whole body was tense with suppressed indignation. Burning inside
like the confined fire of a hot furnace. She was so harassed that she
smiled in self-protection. And suddenly she was oddly cold. An
intimation of things distant, but none the less disturbing, oppressed
her with a faintly sick feeling. Like a heavy weight, a stone weight,
just where, she knew, was her stomach.
Fru Fischer was late. As usual. She apologized profusely. Also as usual.
And, yes, she would have some coffee. And some smørrebrød. Though she
must say that the coffee here at the Vivili was atrocious. Simply
atrocious. “I don’t see how you stand it.” And the place was getting so
common, always so many Bolsheviks and Japs and things. And she
didn’t—“begging your pardon, Helga”—like that hideous American music
they were forever playing, even if it was considered very smart. “Give
me,” she said, “the good old-fashioned Danish melodies of Gade and
Heise. Which reminds me, Herr Olsen says that Nielsen’s ‘Helios’ is
being performed with great success just now in England. But I suppose
you know all about it, Helga. He’s already told you. What?” This last
was accompanied with an arch and insinuating smile.
A shrug moved Helga Crane’s shoulders. Strange she’d never before
noticed what a positively disagreeable woman Fru Fischer was. Stupid,
too.
Fifteen
Well into Helga’s second year in Denmark, came an indefinite discontent.
Not clear, but vague, like a storm gathering far on the horizon. It was
long before she would admit that she was less happy than she had been
during her first year in Copenhagen, but she knew that it was so. And
this subconscious knowledge added to her growing restlessness and little
mental insecurity. She desired ardently to combat this wearing down of
her satisfaction with her life, with herself. But she didn’t know how.
Frankly the question came to this: what was the matter with her? Was
there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd. But
she began to have a feeling of discouragement and hopelessness. Why
couldn’t she be happy, content, somewhere? Other people managed,
somehow, to be. To put it plainly, didn’t she know how? Was she
incapable of it?
And then on a warm spring day came Anne’s letter telling of her coming
marriage to Anderson, who retained still his shadowy place in Helga
Crane’s memory. It added, somehow, to her discontent, and to her growing
dissatisfaction with her peacock’s life. This, too, annoyed her.
What, she asked herself, was there about that man which had the power
always to upset her? She began to think back to her first encounter with
him. Perhaps if she hadn’t come away—She laughed. Derisively. “Yes, if I
hadn’t come away, I’d be stuck in Harlem. Working every day of my life.
Chattering about the race problem.”
Anne, it seemed, wanted her to come back for the wedding. This, Helga
had no intention of doing. True, she had liked and admired Anne better
than anyone she had ever known, but even for her she wouldn’t cross the
ocean.
Go back to America, where they hated Negroes! To America, where Negroes
were not people. To America, where Negroes were allowed to be beggars
only, of life, of happiness, of security. To America, where everything
had been taken from those dark ones, liberty, respect, even the labor of
their hands. To America, where if one had Negro blood, one mustn’t
expect money, education, or, sometimes, even work whereby one might earn
bread. Perhaps she was wrong to bother about it now that she was so far
away. Helga couldn’t, however, help it. Never could she recall the
shames and often the absolute horrors of the black man’s existence in
America without the quickening of her heart’s beating and a sensation of
disturbing nausea. It was too awful. The sense of dread of it was almost
a tangible thing in her throat.
And certainly she wouldn’t go back for any such idiotic reason as Anne’s
getting married to that offensive Robert Anderson. Anne was really too
amusing. Just why, she wondered, and how had it come about that he was
being married to Anne? And why did Anne, who had so much more than so
many others—more than enough—want Anderson too? Why couldn’t she—“I
think,” she told herself, “I’d better stop. It’s none of my business. I
don’t care in the least. Besides,” she added irrelevantly, “I hate such
nonsensical soul-searching.”
One night not long after the arrival of Anne’s letter with its curious
news, Helga went with Olsen and some other young folk to the great
Circus, a vaudeville house, in search of amusement on a rare off night.
After sitting through several numbers they reluctantly arrived at the
conclusion that the whole entertainment was dull, unutterably dull, and
apparently without alleviation, and so not to be borne. They were
reaching for their wraps when out upon the stage pranced two black men,
American Negroes undoubtedly, for as they danced and cavorted, they sang
in the English of America an old rag-time song that Helga remembered
hearing as a child, “Everybody Gives Me Good Advice.” At its conclusion
the audience applauded with delight. Only Helga Crane was silent,
motionless.
More songs, old, all of them old, but new and strange to that audience.
And how the singers danced, pounding their thighs, slapping their hands
together, twisting their legs, waving their abnormally long arms,
throwing their bodies about with a loose ease! And how the enchanted
spectators clapped and howled and shouted for more!
Helga Crane was not amused. Instead she was filled with a fierce hatred
for the cavorting Negroes on the stage. She felt shamed, betrayed, as if
these pale pink and white people among whom she lived had suddenly been
invited to look upon something in her which she had hidden away and
wanted to forget. And she was shocked at the avidity at which Olsen
beside her drank it in.
But later, when she was alone, it became quite clear to her that all
along they had divined its presence, had known that in her was
something, some characteristic, different from any that they themselves
possessed. Else why had they decked her out as they had? Why subtly
indicated that she was different? And they hadn’t despised it. No, they
had admired it, rated it as a precious thing, a thing to be enhanced,
preserved. Why? She, Helga Crane, didn’t admire it. She suspected that
no Negroes, no Americans, did. Else why their constant slavish imitation
of traits not their own? Why their constant begging to be considered as
exact copies of other people? Even the enlightened, the intelligent ones
demanded nothing more. They were all beggars like the motley crowd in
the old nursery-rhyme:
Hark! Hark!
The dogs do bark.
The beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags,
Some in tags,
And some in velvet gowns.
The incident left her profoundly disquieted. Her old unhappy questioning
mood came again upon her, insidiously stealing away more of the
contentment from her transformed existence.
But she returned again and again to the Circus, always alone, gazing
intently and solemnly at the gesticulating black figures, an ironical
and silently speculative spectator. For she knew that into her plan for
her life had thrust itself a suspensive conflict in which were fused
doubts, rebellion, expediency, and urgent longings.
It was at this time that Axel Olsen asked her to marry him. And now
Helga Crane was surprised. It was a thing that at one time she had much
wanted, had tried to bring about, and had at last relinquished as
impossible of achievement. Not so much because of its apparent
hopelessness as because of a feeling, intangible almost, that, excited
and pleased as he was with her, her origin a little repelled him, and
that, prompted by some impulse of racial antagonism, he had retreated
into the fastness of a protecting habit of self-ridicule. A mordantly
personal pride and sensitiveness deterred Helga from further efforts at
incitation.
True, he had made, one morning, while holding his brush poised for a
last, a very last stroke on the portrait, one admirably draped
suggestion, speaking seemingly to the pictured face. Had he insinuated
marriage, or something less—and easier? Or had he paid her only a rather
florid compliment, in somewhat dubious taste? Helga, who had not at the
time been quite sure, had remained silent, striving to appear unhearing.
Later, having thought it over, she flayed herself for a fool. It wasn’t,
she should have known, in the manner of Axel Olsen to pay florid
compliments in questionable taste. And had it been marriage that he had
meant, he would, of course, have done the proper thing. He wouldn’t have
stopped—or, rather, have begun—by making his wishes known to her when
there was Uncle Poul to be formally consulted. She had been, she told
herself, insulted. And a goodly measure of contempt and wariness was
added to her interest in the man. She was able, however, to feel a
gratifying sense of elation in the remembrance that she had been silent,
ostensibly unaware of his utterance, and therefore, as far as he knew,
not affronted.
This simplified things. It did away with the quandary in which the
confession to the Dahls of such a happening would have involved her, for
she couldn’t be sure that they, too, might not put it down to the
difference of her ancestry. And she could still go attended by him, and
envied by others, to openings in Kongen’s Nytorv, to showings at the
Royal Academy or Char-lottenborg’s Palace. He could still call for her
and Aunt Katrina of an afternoon or go with her to Magasin du Nord to
select a scarf or a length of silk, of which Uncle Poul could say
casually in the presence of interested acquaintances: “Um, pretty
scarf”—or “frock”—“you’re wearing, Helga. Is that the new one Olsen
helped you with?”
Her outward manner toward him changed not at all, save that gradually
she became, perhaps, a little more detached and indifferent. But
definitely Helga Crane had ceased, even remotely, to consider him other
than as someone amusing, desirable, and convenient to have about—if one
was careful. She intended, presently, to turn her attention to one of
the others. The decorative Captain of the Hussars, perhaps. But in the
ache of her growing nostalgia, which, try as she might, she could not
curb, she no longer thought with any seriousness on either Olsen or
Captain Skaargaard. She must, she felt, see America again first. When
she returned—
Therefore, where before she would have been pleased and proud at Olsen’s
proposal, she was now truly surprised. Strangely, she was aware also of
a curious feeling of repugnance, as her eyes slid over his face, as
smiling, assured, with just the right note of fervor, he made his
declaration and request. She was astonished. Was it possible? Was it
really this man that she had thought, even wished, she could marry?
He was, it was plain, certain of being accepted, as he was always
certain of acceptance, of adulation, in any and every place that he
deigned to honor with his presence. Well, Helga was thinking, that
wasn’t as much his fault as her own, her aunt’s, everyone’s. He was
spoiled, childish almost.
To his words, once she had caught their content and recovered from her
surprise, Helga paid not much attention. They would, she knew, be
absolutely appropriate ones, and they didn’t at all matter. They meant
nothing to her—now. She was too amazed to discover suddenly how
intensely she disliked him, disliked the shape of his head, the mop of
his hair, the line of his nose, the tones of his voice, the nervous
grace of his long fingers; disliked even the very look of his
irreproachable clothes. And for some inexplicable reason, she was a
little frightened and embarrassed, so that when he had finished
speaking, for a short space there was only stillness in the small room,
into which Aunt Katrina had tactfully had him shown. Even Thor, the
enormous Persian, curled on the window ledge in the feeble late
afternoon sun, had rested for the moment from his incessant purring
under Helga’s idly stroking fingers.
Helga, her slight agitation vanished, told him that she was surprised.
His offer was, she said, unexpected. Quite.
A little sardonically, Olsen interrupted her. He smiled too. “But of
course I expected surprise. It is, is it not, the proper thing? And
always you are proper, Frøkken Helga, always.”
Helga, who had a stripped, naked feeling under his direct glance, drew
herself up stiffly. Herr Olsen needn’t, she told him, be sarcastic. She
was surprised. He must understand that she was being quite sincere,
quite truthful about that. Really, she hadn’t expected him to do her so
great an honor.
He made a little impatient gesture. Why, then, had she refused, ignored,
his other, earlier suggestion?
At that Helga Crane took a deep indignant breath and was again, this
time for an almost imperceptible second, silent. She had, then, been
correct in her deduction. Her sensuous, petulant mouth hardened. That he
should so frankly—so insolently, it seemed to her—admit his outrageous
meaning was too much. She said, coldly: “Because, Herr Olsen, in my
country the men, of my race, at least, don’t make such suggestions to
decent girls. And thinking that you were a gentleman, introduced to me
by my aunt, I chose to think myself mistaken, to give you the benefit of
the doubt.”
“Very commendable, my Helga—and wise. Now you have your reward. Now I
offer you marriage.”
“Thanks,” she answered, “thanks, awfully.”
“Yes,” and he reached for her slim cream hand, now lying quiet on Thor’s
broad orange and black back. Helga let it lie in his large pink one,
noting their contrast. “Yes, because I, poor artist that I am, cannot
hold out against the deliberate lure of you. You disturb me. The longing
for you does harm to my work. You creep into my brain and madden me,”
and he kissed the small ivory hand. Quite decorously, Helga thought, for
one so maddened that he was driven, against his inclination, to offer
her marriage. But immediately, in extenuation, her mind leapt to the
admirable casualness of Aunt Katrina’s expressed desire for this very
thing, and recalled the unruffled calm of Uncle Poul under any and all
circumstances. It was, as she had long ago decided, security. Balance.
“But,” the man before her was saying, “for me it will be an experience.
It may be that with you, Helga, for wife, I will become great. Immortal.
Who knows? I didn’t want to love you, but I had to. That is the truth. I
make of myself a present to you. For love.” His voice held a theatrical
note. At the same time he moved forward putting out his arms. His hands
touched air. For Helga had moved back. Instantly he dropped his arms and
took a step away, repelled by something suddenly wild in her face and
manner. Sitting down, he passed a hand over his face with a quick,
graceful gesture.
Tameness returned to Helga Crane. Her ironic gaze rested on the face of
Axel Olsen, his leonine head, his broad nose—“broader than my own”—his
bushy eyebrows, surmounting thick, drooping lids, which hid, she knew,
sullen blue eyes. He stirred sharply, shaking off his momentary
disconcertion.
In his assured, despotic way he went on: “You know, Helga, you are a
contradiction. You have been, I suspect, corrupted by the good Fru Dahl,
which is perhaps as well. Who knows? You have the warm impulsive nature
of the women of Africa, but, my lovely, you have, I fear, the soul of a
prostitute. You sell yourself to the highest buyer. I should of course
be happy that it is I. And I am.” He stopped, contemplating her, lost
apparently, for the second, in pleasant thoughts of the future.
To Helga he seemed to be the most distant, the most unreal figure in the
world. She suppressed a ridiculous impulse to laugh. The effort sobered
her. Abruptly she was aware that in the end, in some way, she would pay
for this hour. A quick brief fear ran through her, leaving in its wake a
sense of impending calamity. She wondered if for this she would pay all
that she’d had.
And, suddenly, she didn’t at all care. She said, lightly, but firmly:
“But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white
man. I don’t at all care to be owned. Even by you.”
The drooping lids lifted. The look in the blue eyes was, Helga thought,
like the surprised stare of a puzzled baby. He hadn’t at all grasped her
meaning.
She proceeded, deliberately: “I think you don’t understand me. What I’m
trying to say is this, I don’t want you. I wouldn’t under any
circumstances marry you,” and since she was, as she put it, being
brutally frank, she added: “Now.”
He turned a little away from her, his face white but composed, and
looked down into the gathering shadows in the little park before the
house. At last he spoke, in a queer frozen voice: “You refuse me?”
“Yes,” Helga repeated with intentional carelessness. “I refuse you.”
The man’s full upper lip trembled. He wiped his forehead, where the gold
hair was now lying flat and pale and lusterless. His eyes still avoided
the girl in the high-backed chair before him. Helga felt a shiver of
compunction. For an instant she regretted that she had not been a little
kinder. But wasn’t it after all the greatest kindness to be cruel? But
more gently, less indifferently, she said: “You see, I couldn’t marry a
white man. I simply couldn’t. It isn’t just you, not just personal, you
understand. It’s deeper, broader than that. It’s racial. Some day maybe
you’ll be glad. We can’t tell, you know; if we were married, you might
come to be ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark people. My mother
did that.”
“I have offered you marriage, Helga Crane, and you answer me with some
strange talk of race and shame. What nonsense is this?”
Helga let that pass because she couldn’t, she felt, explain. It would be
too difficult, too mortifying. She had no words which could adequately,
and without laceration to her pride, convey to him the pitfalls into
which very easily they might step. “I might,” she said, “have considered
it once—when I first came. But you, hoping for a more informal
arrangement, waited too long. You missed the moment. I had time to
think. Now I couldn’t. Nothing is worth the risk. We might come to hate
each other. I’ve been through it, or something like it. I know. I
couldn’t do it. And I’m glad.”
Rising, she held out her hand, relieved that he was still silent. “Good
afternoon,” she said formally. “It has been a great honor—”
“A tragedy,” he corrected, barely touching her hand with his moist
finger-tips.
“Why?” Helga countered, and for an instant felt as if something sinister
and internecine flew back and forth between them like poison.
“I mean,” he said, and quite solemnly, “that though I don’t entirely
understand you, yet in a way I do too. And—” He hesitated. Went on. “I
think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane.
Therefore—a tragedy. For someone. For me? Perhaps.”
“Oh, the picture!” Helga lifted her shoulders in a little impatient
motion.
Ceremoniously Axel Olsen bowed himself out, leaving her grateful for the
urbanity which permitted them to part without too much awkwardness. No
other man, she thought, of her acquaintance could have managed it so
well—except, perhaps, Robert Anderson.
“I’m glad,” she declared to herself in another moment, “that I refused
him. And,” she added honestly, “I’m glad that I had the chance. He took
it awfully well, though—for a tragedy.” And she made a tiny frown.
The picture—she had never quite, in spite of her deep interest in him,
and her desire for his admiration and approval, forgiven Olsen for that
portrait. It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting
sensual creature with her features. Herr and Fru Dahl had not exactly
liked it either, although collectors, artists, and critics had been
unanimous in their praise and it had been hung on the line at an annual
exhibition, where it had attracted much flattering attention and many
tempting offers.
Now Helga went in and stood for a long time before it, with its
creator’s parting words in mind: “… a tragedy … my picture is, after
all, the true Helga Crane.” Vehemently she shook her head. “It isn’t, it
isn’t at all,” she said aloud. Bosh! Pure artistic bosh and conceit.
Nothing else. Anyone with half an eye could see that it wasn’t, at all,
like her.
“Marie,” she called to the maid passing in the hall, “do you think this
is a good picture of me?”
Marie blushed. Hesitated. “Of course, Frøkken, I know Herr Olsen is a
great artist, but no, I don’t like that picture. It looks bad, wicked.
Begging your pardon, Frøkken.”
“Thanks, Marie, I don’t like it either.”
Yes, anyone with half an eye could see that it wasn’t she.
Sixteen
Glad though the Dahls may have been that their niece had had the chance
of refusing the hand of Axel Olsen, they were anything but glad that she
had taken that chance. Very plainly they said so, and quite firmly they
pointed out to her the advisability of retrieving the opportunity, if,
indeed, such a thing were possible. But it wasn’t, even had Helga been
so inclined, for, they were to learn from the columns of Politikken,
Axel Olsen had gone off suddenly to some queer place in the Balkans. To
rest, the newspapers said. To get Frøkken Crane out of his mind, the
gossips said.
Life in the Dahl ménage went on, smoothly as before, but not so
pleasantly. The combined disappointment and sense of guilt of the Dahls
and Helga colored everything. Though she had resolved not to think that
they felt that she had, as it were, “let them down,” Helga knew that
they did. They had not so much expected as hoped that she would bring
down Olsen, and so secure the link between the merely fashionable set to
which they belonged and the artistic one after which they hankered. It
was of course true that there were others, plenty of them. But there was
only one Olsen. And Helga, for some idiotic reason connected with race,
had refused him. Certainly there was no use in thinking, even, of the
others. If she had refused him, she would refuse any and all for the
same reason. It was, it seemed, all-embracing.
“It isn’t,” Uncle Poul had tried to point out to her, “as if there were
hundreds of mulattoes here. That, I can understand, might make it a
little different. But there’s only you. You’re unique here, don’t you
see? Besides, Olsen has money and enviable position. Nobody’d dare to
say, or even to think anything odd or unkind of you or him. Come now,
Helga, it isn’t this foolishness about race. Not here in Denmark. You’ve
never spoken of it before. It can’t be just that. You’re too sensible.
It must be something else. I wish you’d try to explain. You don’t
perhaps like Olsen?”
Helga had been silent, thinking what a severe wrench to Herr Dahl’s
ideas of decency was this conversation. For he had an almost fanatic
regard for reticence, and a peculiar shrinking from what he looked upon
as indecent exposure of the emotions.
“Just what is it, Helga?” he asked again, because the pause had grown
awkward, for him.
“I can’t explain any better than I have,” she had begun tremulously,
“it’s just something—something deep down inside of me,” and had turned
away to hide a face convulsed by threatening tears.
But that, Uncle Poul had remarked with a reasonableness that was wasted
on the miserable girl before him, was nonsense, pure nonsense.
With a shaking sigh and a frantic dab at her eyes, in which had come a
despairing look, she had agreed that perhaps it was foolish, but she
couldn’t help it. “Can’t you, won’t you understand, Uncle Poul?” she
begged, with a pleading look at the kindly worldly man who at that
moment had been thinking that this strange exotic niece of his wife’s
was indeed charming. He didn’t blame Olsen for taking it rather hard.
The thought passed. She was weeping. With no effort at restraint.
Charming, yes. But insufficiently civilized. Impulsive. Imprudent.
Selfish.
“Try, Helga, to control yourself,” he had urged gently. He detested
tears. “If it distresses you so, we won’t talk of it again. You, of
course, must do as you yourself wish. Both your aunt and I want only
that you should be happy.” He had wanted to make an end of this
fruitless wet conversation.
Helga had made another little dab at her face with the scrap of lace and
raised shining eyes to his face. She had said, with sincere regret:
“You’ve been marvelous to me, you and Aunt Katrina. Angelic. I don’t
want to seem ungrateful. I’d do anything for you, anything in the world
but this.”
Herr Dahl had shrugged. A little sardonically he had smiled. He had
refrained from pointing out that this was the only thing she could do
for them, the only thing that they had asked of her. He had been too
glad to be through with the uncomfortable discussion.
So life went on. Dinners, coffees, theaters, pictures, music, clothes.
More dinners, coffees, theaters, clothes, music. And that nagging aching
for America increased. Augmented by the uncomfortableness of Aunt
Katrina’s and Uncle Poul’s disappointment with her, that tormenting
nostalgia grew to an unbearable weight. As spring came on with many
gracious tokens of following summer, she found her thoughts straying
with increasing frequency to Anne’s letter and to Harlem, its dirty
streets, swollen now, in the warmer weather, with dark, gay humanity.
Until recently she had had no faintest wish ever to see America again.
Now she began to welcome the thought of a return. Only a visit, of
course. Just to see, to prove to herself that there was nothing there
for her. To demonstrate the absurdity of even thinking that there could
be. And to relieve the slight tension here. Maybe when she came back—
Her definite decision to go was arrived at with almost bewildering
suddenness. It was after a concert at which Dvorák’s “New World
Symphony” had been wonderfully rendered. Those wailing undertones of
“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” were too poignantly familiar. They struck
into her longing heart and cut away her weakening defenses. She knew at
least what it was that had lurked formless and undesignated these many
weeks in the back of her troubled mind. Incompleteness.
“I’m homesick, not for America, but for Negroes. That’s the trouble.”
For the first time Helga Crane felt sympathy rather than contempt and
hatred for that father, who so often and so angrily she had blamed for
his desertion of her mother. She understood, now, his rejection, his
repudiation, of the formal calm her mother had represented. She
understood his yearning, his intolerable need for the inexhaustible
humor and the incessant hope of his own kind, his need for those things,
not material, indigenous to all Negro environments. She understood and
could sympathize with his facile surrender to the irresistible ties of
race, now that they dragged at her own heart. And as she attended
parties, the theater, the opera, and mingled with people on the streets,
meeting only pale serious faces when she longed for brown laughing ones,
she was able to forgive him. Also, it was as if in this understanding
and forgiving she had come upon knowledge of almost sacred importance.
Without demur, opposition, or recrimination Herr and Fru Dahl accepted
Helga’s decision to go back to America. She had expected that they would
be glad and relieved. It was agreeable to discover that she had done
them less than justice. They were, in spite of their extreme
worldliness, very fond of her, and would, as they declared, miss her
greatly. And they did want her to come back to them, as they repeatedly
insisted. Secretly they felt as she did, that perhaps when she
returned—So it was agreed upon that it was only for a brief visit, “for
your friend’s wedding,” and that she was to return in the early fall.
The last day came. The last good-byes were said. Helga began to regret
that she was leaving. Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t
she be satisfied in one place? Now that she was actually off, she felt
heavy at heart. Already she looked back with infinite regret at the two
years in the country which had given her so much, of pride, of
happiness, of wealth, and of beauty.
Bells rang. The gangplank was hoisted. The dark strip of water widened.
The running figures of friends suddenly grown very dear grew smaller,
blurred into a whole, and vanished. Tears rose in Helga Crane’s eyes,
fear in her heart.
Good-bye Denmark! Good-bye. Good-bye!
Seventeen
A summer had ripened and fall begun. Anne and Dr. Anderson had returned
from their short Canadian wedding journey. Helga Crane, lingering still
in America, had tactfully removed herself from the house in One Hundred
and Thirty-ninth Street to a hotel. It was, as she could point out to
curious acquaintances, much better for the newly-married Andersons not
to be bothered with a guest, not even with such a close friend as she,
Helga, had been to Anne.
Actually, though she herself had truly wanted to get out of the house
when they came back, she had been a little surprised and a great deal
hurt that Anne had consented so readily to her going. She might at
least, thought Helga indignantly, have acted a little bit as if she had
wanted her to stay. After writing for her to come, too.
Pleasantly unaware was Helga that Anne, more silently wise than herself,
more determined, more selfish, and less inclined to leave anything to
chance, understood perfectly that in a large measure it was the voice of
Robert Anderson’s inexorable conscience that had been the chief factor
in bringing about her second marriage—his ascetic protest against the
sensuous, the physical. Anne had perceived that the decorous surface of
her new husband’s mind regarded Helga Crane with that intellectual and
æsthetic appreciation which attractive and intelligent women would
always draw from him, but that underneath that well-managed section, in
a more lawless place where she herself never hoped or desired to enter,
was another, a vagrant primitive groping toward something shocking and
frightening to the cold asceticism of his reason. Anne knew also that
though she herself was lovely—more beautiful than Helga—and interesting,
with her he had not to struggle against that nameless and to him
shameful impulse, that sheer delight, which ran through his nerves at
mere proximity to Helga. And Anne intended that her marriage should be a
success. She intended that her husband should be happy. She was sure
that it could be managed by tact and a little cleverness on her own
part. She was truly fond of Helga, but seeing how she had grown more
charming, more aware of her power, Anne wasn’t so sure that her sincere
and urgent request to come over for her wedding hadn’t been a mistake.
She was, however, certain of herself. She could look out for her
husband. She could carry out what she considered her obligation to him,
keep him undisturbed, unhumiliated. It was impossible that she could
fail. Unthinkable.
Helga, on her part, had been glad to get back to New York. How glad, or
why, she did not truly realize. And though she sincerely meant to keep
her promise to Aunt Katrina and Uncle Poul and return to Copenhagen,
summer, September, October, slid by and she made no move to go. Her
uttermost intention had been a six or eight weeks’ visit, but the
feverish rush of New York, the comic tragedy of Harlem, still held her.
As time went on, she became a little bored, a little restless, but she
stayed on. Something of that wild surge of gladness that had swept her
on the day when with Anne and Anderson she had again found herself
surrounded by hundreds, thousands, of dark-eyed brown folk remained with
her. These were her people. Nothing, she had come to understand now,
could ever change that. Strange that she had never truly valued this
kinship until distance had shown her its worth. How absurd she had been
to think that another country, other people, could liberate her from the
ties which bound her forever to these mysterious, these terrible, these
fascinating, these lovable, dark hordes. Ties that were of the spirit.
Ties not only superficially entangled with mere outline of features or
color of skin. Deeper. Much deeper than either of these.
Thankful for the appeasement of that loneliness which had again
tormented her like a fury, she gave herself up to the miraculous
joyousness of Harlem. The easement which its heedless abandon brought to
her was a real, a very definite thing. She liked the sharp contrast to
her pretentious stately life in Copenhagen. It was as if she had passed
from the heavy solemnity of a church service to a gorgeous care-free
revel.
Not that she intended to remain. No. Helga Crane couldn’t, she told
herself and others, live in America. In spite of its glamour, existence
in America, even in Harlem, was for Negroes too cramped, too uncertain,
too cruel; something not to be endured for a lifetime if one could
escape; something demanding a courage greater than was in her. No. She
couldn’t stay. Nor, she saw now, could she remain away. Leaving, she
would have to come back.
This knowledge, this certainty of the division of her life into two
parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual
freedom in America, was unfortunate, inconvenient, expensive. It was,
too, as she was uncomfortably aware, even a trifle ridiculous, and
mentally she caricatured herself moving shuttle-like from continent to
continent. From the prejudiced restrictions of the New World to the easy
formality of the Old, from the pale calm of Copenhagen to the colorful
lure of Harlem.
Nevertheless she felt a slightly pitying superiority over those Negroes
who were apparently so satisfied. And she had a fine contempt for the
blatantly patriotic black Americans. Always when she encountered one of
those picturesque parades in the Harlem streets, the Stars and Stripes
streaming ironically, insolently, at the head of the procession tempered
for her, a little, her amusement at the childish seriousness of the
spectacle. It was too pathetic.
But when mental doors were deliberately shut on those skeletons that
stalked lively and in full health through the consciousness of every
person of Negro ancestry in America—conspicuous black, obvious brown, or
indistinguishable white—life was intensely amusing, interesting,
absorbing, and enjoyable; singularly lacking in that tone of anxiety
which the insecurities of existence seemed to ferment in other peoples.
Yet Helga herself had an acute feeling of insecurity, for which she
could not account. Sometimes it amounted to fright almost. “I must,” she
would say then, “get back to Copenhagen.” But the resolution gave her
not much pleasure. And for this she now blamed Axel Olsen. It was, she
insisted, he who had driven her back, made her unhappy in Denmark.
Though she knew well that it wasn’t. Misgivings, too, rose in her. Why
hadn’t she married him? Anne was married—she would not say Anderson—Why
not she? It would serve Anne right if she married a white man. But she
knew in her soul that she wouldn’t. “Because I’m a fool,” she said
bitterly.
Eighteen
One November evening, impregnated still with the kindly warmth of the
dead Indian summer, Helga Crane was leisurely dressing in pleasant
anticipation of the party to which she had been asked for that night. It
was always amusing at the Tavenors’. Their house was large and
comfortable, the food and music always of the best, and the type of
entertainment always unexpected and brilliant. The drinks, too, were
sure to be safe.
And Helga, since her return, was more than ever popular at parties. Her
courageous clothes attracted attention, and her deliberate lure—as Olsen
had called it—held it. Her life in Copenhagen had taught her to expect
and accept admiration as her due. This attitude, she found, was as
effective in New York as across the sea. It was, in fact, even more so.
And it was more amusing too. Perhaps because it was somehow a bit more
dangerous.
In the midst of curious speculation as to the possible identity of the
other guests, with an indefinite sense of annoyance she wondered if Anne
would be there. There was of late something about Anne that was to Helga
distinctly disagreeable, a peculiar half-patronizing attitude, mixed
faintly with distrust. Helga couldn’t define it, couldn’t account for
it. She had tried. In the end she had decided to dismiss it, to ignore
it.
“I suppose,” she said aloud, “it’s because she’s married again. As if
anybody couldn’t get married. Anybody. That is, if mere marriage is all
one wants.”
Smoothing away the tiny frown from between the broad black brows, she
got herself into a little shining, rose-colored slip of a frock knotted
with a silver cord. The gratifying result soothed her ruffled feelings.
It didn’t really matter, this new manner of Anne’s. Nor did the fact
that Helga knew that Anne disapproved of her. Without words Anne had
managed to make that evident. In her opinion, Helga had lived too long
among the enemy, the detestable pale faces. She understood them too
well, was too tolerant of their ignorant stupidities. If they had been
Latins, Anne might conceivably have forgiven the disloyalty. But
Nordics! Lynchers! It was too traitorous. Helga smiled a little,
understanding Anne’s bitterness and hate, and a little of its cause. It
was of a piece with that of those she so virulently hated. Fear. And
then she sighed a little, for she regretted the waning of Anne’s
friendship. But, in view of diverging courses of their lives, she felt
that even its complete extinction would leave her undevastated. Not that
she wasn’t still grateful to Anne for many things. It was only that she
had other things now. And there would, forever, be Robert Anderson
between them. A nuisance. Shutting them off from their previous
confident companionship and understanding. “And anyway,” she said again,
aloud, “he’s nobody much to have married. Anybody could have married
him. Anybody. If a person wanted only to be married—If it had been
somebody like Olsen—That would be different—something to crow over,
perhaps.”
The party was even more interesting than Helga had expected. Helen, Mrs.
Tavenor, had given vent to a malicious glee, and had invited
representatives of several opposing Harlem political and social
factions, including the West Indian, and abandoned them helplessly to
each other. Helga’s observing eyes picked out several great and
near-great sulking or obviously trying hard not to sulk in widely
separated places in the big rooms. There were present, also, a few white
people, to the open disapproval or discomfort of Anne and several
others. There too, poised, serene, certain, surrounded by masculine
black and white, was Audrey Denney.
“Do you know, Helen,” Helga confided, “I’ve never met Miss Denney. I
wish you’d introduce me. Not this minute. Later, when you can manage it.
Not so—er—apparently by request, you know.”
Helen Tavenor laughed. “No, you wouldn’t have met her, living as you did
with Anne Grey. Anderson, I mean. She’s Anne’s particular pet aversion.
The mere sight of Audrey is enough to send her into a frenzy for a week.
It’s too bad, too, because Audrey’s an awfully interesting person and
Anne’s said some pretty awful things about her. You’ll like her, Helga.”
Helga nodded. “Yes, I expect to. And I know about Anne. One night—” She
stopped, for across the room she saw, with a stab of surprise, James
Vayle. “Where, Helen, did you get him?”
“Oh, that? That’s something the cat brought in. Don’t ask which one. He
came with somebody, I don’t remember who. I think he’s shocked to death.
Isn’t he lovely? The dear baby. I was going to introduce him to Audrey
and tell her to do a good job of vamping on him as soon as I could
remember the darling’s name, or when it got noisy enough so he wouldn’t
hear what I called him. But you’ll do just as well. Don’t tell me you
know him!” Helga made a little nod. “Well! And I suppose you met him at
some shockingly wicked place in Europe. That’s always the way with those
innocent-looking men.”
“Not quite. I met him ages ago in Naxos. We were engaged to be married.
Nice, isn’t he? His name’s Vayle. James Vayle.”
“Nice,” said Helen throwing out her hands in a characteristic dramatic
gesture—she had beautiful hands and arms—“is exactly the word. Mind if I
run off? I’ve got somebody here who’s going to sing. Not spirituals. And
I haven’t the faintest notion where he’s got to. The cellar, I’ll bet.”
James Vayle hadn’t, Helga decided, changed at all. Someone claimed her
for a dance and it was some time before she caught his eyes, half
questioning, upon her. When she did, she smiled in a friendly way over
her partner’s shoulder and was rewarded by a dignified little bow.
Inwardly she grinned, flattered. He hadn’t forgotten. He was still hurt.
The dance over, she deserted her partner and deliberately made her way
across the room to James Vayle. He was for the moment embarrassed and
uncertain. Helga Crane, however, took care of that, thinking meanwhile
that Helen was right. Here he did seem frightfully young and
delightfully unsophisticated. He must be, though, every bit of
thirty-two or more.
“They say,” was her bantering greeting, “that if one stands on the
corner of One Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue long
enough, one will eventually see all the people one has ever known or
met. It’s pretty true, I guess. Not literally of course.” He was, she
saw, getting himself together. “It’s only another way of saying that
everybody, almost, some time sooner or later comes to Harlem, even you.”
He laughed. “Yes, I guess that is true enough. I didn’t come to stay,
though.” And then he was grave, his earnest eyes searchingly upon her.
“Well, anyway, you’re here now, so let’s find a quiet corner if that’s
possible, where we can talk. I want to hear all about you.”
For a moment he hung back and a glint of mischief shone in Helga’s eyes.
“I see,” she said, “you’re just the same. However, you needn’t be
anxious. This isn’t Naxos, you know. Nobody’s watching us, or if they
are, they don’t care a bit what we do.”
At that he flushed a little, protested a little, and followed her. And
when at last they had found seats in another room, not so crowded, he
said: “I didn’t expect to see you here. I thought you were still
abroad.”
“Oh, I’ve been back some time, ever since Dr. Anderson’s marriage. Anne,
you know, is a great friend of mine. I used to live with her. I came for
the wedding. But, of course, I’m not staying. I didn’t think I’d be here
this long.”
“You don’t mean that you’re going to live over there? Do you really like
it so much better?”
“Yes and no, to both questions. I was awfully glad to get back, but I
wouldn’t live here always. I couldn’t. I don’t think that any of us
who’ve lived abroad for any length of time would ever live here
altogether again if they could help it.”
“Lot of them do, though,” James Vayle pointed out.
“Oh, I don’t mean tourists who rush over to Europe and rush all over the
continent and rush back to America thinking they know Europe. I mean
people who’ve actually lived there, actually lived among the people.”
“I still maintain that they nearly all come back here eventually to
live.”
“That’s because they can’t help it,” Helga Crane said firmly. “Money,
you know.”
“Perhaps, I’m not so sure. I was in the war. Of course, that’s not
really living over there, but I saw the country and the difference in
treatment. But, I can tell you, I was pretty darn glad to get back. All
the fellows were.” He shook his head solemnly. “I don’t think anything,
money or lack of money, keeps us here. If it was only that, if we really
wanted to leave, we’d go all right. No, it’s something else, something
deeper than that.”
“And just what do you think it is?”
“I’m afraid it’s hard to explain, but I suppose it’s just that we like
to be together. I simply can’t imagine living forever away from colored
people.”
A suspicion of a frown drew Helga’s brows. She threw out rather tartly:
“I’m a Negro too, you know.”
“Well, Helga, you were always a little different, a little dissatisfied,
though I don’t pretend to understand you at all. I never did,” he said a
little wistfully.
And Helga, who was beginning to feel that the conversation had taken an
impersonal and disappointing tone, was reassured and gave him her most
sympathetic smile and said almost gently: “And now let’s talk about you.
You’re still at Naxos?”
“Yes, I’m still there. I’m assistant principal now.”
Plainly it was a cause for enthusiastic congratulation, but Helga could
only manage a tepid “How nice!” Naxos was to her too remote, too
unimportant. She did not even hate it now.
How long, she asked, would James be in New York?
He couldn’t say. Business, important business for the school, had
brought him. It was, he said, another tone creeping into his voice,
another look stealing over his face, awfully good to see her. She was
looking tremendously well. He hoped he would have the opportunity of
seeing her again.
But of course. He must come to see her. Any time, she was always in, or
would be for him. And how did he like New York, Harlem?
He didn’t, it seemed, like it. It was nice to visit, but not to live in.
Oh, there were so many things he didn’t like about it, the rush, the
lack of home life, the crowds, the noisy meaninglessness of it all.
On Helga’s face there had come that pityingly sneering look peculiar to
imported New Yorkers when the city of their adoption is attacked by
alien Americans. With polite contempt she inquired: “And is that all you
don’t like?”
At her tone the man’s bronze face went purple. He answered coldly,
slowly, with a faint gesture in the direction of Helen Tavenor, who
stood conversing gayly with one of her white guests: “And I don’t like
that sort of thing. In fact I detest it.”
“Why?” Helga was striving hard to be casual in her manner.
James Vayle, it was evident, was beginning to be angry. It was also
evident that Helga Crane’s question had embarrassed him. But he seized
the bull by the horns and said: “You know as well as I do, Helga, that
it’s the colored girls these men come up here to see. They wouldn’t
think of bringing their wives.” And he blushed furiously at his own
implication. The blush restored Helga’s good temper. James was really
too funny.
“That,” she said softly, “is Hugh Wentworth, the novelist, you know.”
And she indicated a tall olive-skinned girl being whirled about to the
streaming music in the arms of a towering black man. “And that is his
wife. She isn’t colored, as you’ve probably been thinking. And now let’s
change the subject again.”
“All right! And this time let’s talk about you. You say you don’t intend
to live here. Don’t you ever intend to marry, Helga?”
“Some day, perhaps. I don’t know. Marriage—that means children, to me.
And why add more suffering to the world? Why add any more unwanted,
tortured Negroes to America? Why do Negroes have children? Surely it
must be sinful. Think of the awfulness of being responsible for the
giving of life to creatures doomed to endure such wounds to the flesh,
such wounds to the spirit, as Negroes have to endure.”
James was aghast. He forgot to be embarrassed. “But Helga! Good heavens!
Don’t you see that if we—I mean people like us—don’t have children, the
others will still have. That’s one of the things that’s the matter with
us. The race is sterile at the top. Few, very few Negroes of the better
class have children, and each generation has to wrestle again with the
obstacle of the preceding ones, lack of money, education, and
background. I feel very strongly about this. We’re the ones who must
have the children if the race is to get anywhere.”
“Well, I for one don’t intend to contribute any to the cause. But how
serious we are! And I’m afraid that I’ve really got to leave you. I’ve
already cut two dances for your sake. Do come to see me.”
“Oh, I’ll come to see you all right. I’ve got several things that I want
to talk to you about and one thing especially.”
“Don’t,” Helga mocked, “tell me you’re going to ask me again to marry
you.”
“That,” he said, “is just what I intend to do.”
Helga Crane was suddenly deeply ashamed and very sorry for James Vayle,
so she told him laughingly that it was shameful of him to joke with her
like that, and before he could answer, she had gone tripping off with a
handsome coffee-colored youth whom she had beckoned from across the room
with a little smile.
Later she had to go upstairs to pin up a place in the hem of her dress
which had caught on a sharp chair corner. She finished the temporary
repair and stepped out into the hall, and somehow, she never quite knew
exactly just how, into the arms of Robert Anderson. She drew back and
looked up smiling to offer an apology.
And then it happened. He stooped and kissed her, a long kiss, holding
her close. She fought against him with all her might. Then, strangely,
all power seemed to ebb away, and a long-hidden, half-understood desire
welled up in her with the suddenness of a dream. Helga Crane’s own arms
went up about the man’s neck. When she drew away, consciously confused
and embarrassed, everything seemed to have changed in a space of time
which she knew to have been only seconds. Sudden anger seized her. She
pushed him indignantly aside and with a little pat for her hair and
dress went slowly down to the others.
Nineteen
That night riotous and colorful dreams invaded Helga Crane’s prim hotel
bed. She woke in the morning weary and a bit shocked at the uncontrolled
fancies which had visited her. Catching up a filmy scarf, she paced back
and forth across the narrow room and tried to think. She recalled her
flirtations and her mild engagement with James Vayle. She was used to
kisses. But none had been like that of last night. She lived over those
brief seconds, thinking not so much of the man whose arms had held her
as of the ecstasy which had flooded her. Even recollection brought a
little onrush of emotion that made her sway a little. She pulled herself
together and began to fasten on the solid fact of Anne and experienced a
pleasant sense of shock in the realization that Anne was to her exactly
what she had been before the incomprehensible experience of last night.
She still liked her in the same degree and in the same manner. She still
felt slightly annoyed with her. She still did not envy her marriage with
Anderson. By some mysterious process the emotional upheaval which had
racked her had left all the rocks of her existence unmoved. Outwardly
nothing had changed.
Days, weeks, passed; outwardly serene; inwardly tumultous. Helga met Dr.
Anderson at the social affairs to which often they were both asked.
Sometimes she danced with him, always in perfect silence. She couldn’t,
she absolutely couldn’t, speak a word to him when they were thus alone
together, for at such times lassitude encompassed her; the emotion which
had gripped her retreated, leaving a strange tranquillity, troubled only
by a soft stir of desire. And shamed by his silence, his apparent
forgetting, always after these dances she tried desperately to persuade
herself to believe what she wanted to believe: that it had not happened,
that she had never had that irrepressible longing. It was of no use.
As the weeks multiplied, she became aware that she must get herself out
of the mental quagmire into which that kiss had thrown her. And she
should be getting herself back to Copenhagen, but she had now no desire
to go.
Abruptly one Sunday in a crowded room, in the midst of teacups and
chatter, she knew that she couldn’t go, that she hadn’t since that kiss
intended to go without exploring to the end that unfamiliar path into
which she had strayed. Well, it was of no use lagging behind or pulling
back. It was of no use trying to persuade herself that she didn’t want
to go on. A species of fatalism fastened on her. She felt that, ever
since that last day in Naxos long ago, somehow she had known that this
thing would happen. With this conviction came an odd sense of elation.
While making a pleasant assent to some remark of a fellow guest she put
down her cup and walked without haste, smiling and nodding to friends
and acquaintances on her way to that part of the room where he stood
looking at some examples of African carving. Helga Crane faced him
squarely. As he took the hand which she held out with elaborate
casualness, she noted that his trembled slightly. She was secretly
congratulating herself on her own calm when it failed her. Physical
weariness descended on her. Her knees wobbled. Gratefully she slid into
the chair which he hastily placed for her. Timidity came over her. She
was silent. He talked. She did not listen. He came at last to the end of
his long dissertation on African sculpture, and Helga Crane felt the
intentness of his gaze upon her.
“Well?” she questioned.
“I want very much to see you, Helga. Alone.”
She held herself tensely on the edge of her chair, and suggested:
“Tomorrow?”
He hesitated a second and then said quickly: “Why, yes, that’s all
right.”
“Eight o’clock?”
“Eight o’clock,” he agreed.
Eight o’clock tomorrow came. Helga Crane never forgot it. She had
carried away from yesterday’s meeting a feeling of increasing elation.
It had seemed to her that she hadn’t been so happy, so exalted, in
years, if ever. All night, all day, she had mentally prepared herself
for the coming consummation; physically too, spending hours before the
mirror.
Eight o’clock had come at last and with it Dr. Anderson. Only then had
uneasiness come upon her and a feeling of fear for possible exposure.
For Helga Crane wasn’t, after all, a rebel from society, Negro society.
It did mean something to her. She had no wish to stand alone. But these
late fears were overwhelmed by the hardiness of insistent desire; and
she had got herself down to the hotel’s small reception room.
It was, he had said, awfully good of her to see him. She instantly
protested. No, she had wanted to see him. He looked at her surprised.
“You know, Helga,” he had begun with an air of desperation, “I can’t
forgive myself for acting such a swine at the Tavenors’ party. I don’t
at all blame you for being angry and not speaking to me except when you
had to.”
But that, she exclaimed, was simply too ridiculous. “I wasn’t angry a
bit.” And it had seemed to her that things were not exactly going
forward as they should. It seemed that he had been very sincere, and
very formal. Deliberately. She had looked down at her hands and
inspected her bracelets, for she had felt that to look at him would be,
under the circumstances, too exposing.
“I was afraid,” he went on, “that you might have misunderstood; might
have been unhappy about it. I could kick myself. It was, it must have
been, Tavenor’s rotten cocktails.”
Helga Crane’s sense of elation had abruptly left her. At the same time
she had felt the need to answer carefully. No, she replied, she hadn’t
thought of it at all. It had meant nothing to her. She had been kissed
before. It was really too silly of him to have been at all bothered
about it. “For what,” she had asked, “is one kiss more or less, these
days, between friends?” She had even laughed a little.
Dr. Anderson was relieved. He had been, he told her, no end upset.
Rising, he said: “I see you’re going out. I won’t keep you.”
Helga Crane too had risen. Quickly. A sort of madness had swept over
her. She felt that he had belittled and ridiculed her. And thinking
this, she had suddenly savagely slapped Robert Anderson with all her
might, in the face.
For a short moment they had both stood stunned, in the deep silence
which had followed that resounding slap. Then, without a word of
contrition or apology, Helga Crane had gone out of the room and
upstairs.
She had, she told herself, been perfectly justified in slapping Dr.
Anderson, but she was not convinced. So she had tried hard to make
herself very drunk in order that sleep might come to her, but had
managed only to make herself very sick.
Not even the memory of how all living had left his face, which had gone
a taupe gray hue, or the despairing way in which he had lifted his head
and let it drop, or the trembling hands which he had pressed into his
pockets, brought her any scrap of comfort. She had ruined everything.
Ruined it because she had been so silly as to close her eyes to all
indications that pointed to the fact that no matter what the intensity
of his feelings or desires might be, he was not the sort of man who
would for any reason give up one particle of his own good opinion of
himself. Not even for her. Not even though he knew that she had wanted
so terribly something special from him.
Something special. And now she had forfeited it forever. Forever. Helga
had an instantaneous shocking perception of what forever meant. And
then, like a flash, it was gone, leaving an endless stretch of dreary
years before her appalled vision.
Twenty
The day was a rainy one. Helga Crane, stretched out on her bed, felt
herself so broken physically, mentally, that she had given up thinking.
But back and forth in her staggered brain wavering, incoherent thoughts
shot shuttle-like. Her pride would have shut out these humiliating
thoughts and painful visions of herself. The effort was too great. She
felt alone, isolated from all other human beings, separated even from
her own anterior existence by the disaster of yesterday. Over and over,
she repeated: “There’s nothing left but to go now.” Her anguish seemed
unbearable.
For days, for weeks, voluptuous visions had haunted her. Desire had
burned in her flesh with uncontrollable violence. The wish to give
herself had been so intense that Dr. Anderson’s surprising, trivial
apology loomed as a direct refusal of the offering. Whatever outcome she
had expected, it had been something else than this, this mortification,
this feeling of ridicule and self-loathing, this knowledge that she had
deluded herself. It was all, she told herself, as unpleasant as
possible.
Almost she wished she could die. Not quite. It wasn’t that she was
afraid of death, which had, she thought, its picturesque aspects. It was
rather that she knew she would not die. And death, after the debacle,
would but intensify its absurdity. Also, it would reduce her, Helga
Crane, to unimportance, to nothingness. Even in her unhappy present
state, that did not appeal to her. Gradually, reluctantly, she began to
know that the blow to her self-esteem, the certainty of having proved
herself a silly fool, was perhaps the severest hurt which she had
suffered.
It was her self-assurance that had gone down in the crash. After all,
what Dr. Anderson thought didn’t matter. She could escape from the
discomfort of his knowing gray eyes. But she couldn’t escape from sure
knowledge that she had made a fool of herself. This angered her further
and she struck the wall with her hands and jumped up and began hastily
to dress herself. She couldn’t go on with the analysis. It was too hard.
Why bother, when she could add nothing to the obvious fact that she had
been a fool?
“I can’t stay in this room any longer. I must get out or I’ll choke.”
Her self-knowledge had increased her anguish. Distracted, agitated,
incapable of containing herself, she tore open drawers and closets
trying desperately to take some interest in the selection of her
apparel.
It was evening and still raining. In the streets, unusually deserted,
the electric lights cast dull glows. Helga Crane, walking rapidly,
aimlessly, could decide on no definite destination. She had not thought
to take umbrella or even rubbers. Rain and wind whipped cruelly about
her, drenching her garments and chilling her body. Soon the foolish
little satin shoes which she wore were sopping wet. Unheeding these
physical discomforts, she went on, but at the open corner of One Hundred
and Thirty-eighth Street a sudden more ruthless gust of wind ripped the
small hat from her head. In the next minute the black clouds opened
wider and spilled their water with unusual fury. The streets became
swirling rivers. Helga Crane, forgetting her mental torment, looked
about anxiously for a sheltering taxi. A few taxis sped by, but
inhabited, so she began desperately to struggle through wind and rain
toward one of the buildings, where she could take shelter in a store or
a doorway. But another whirl of wind lashed her and, scornful of her
slight strength, tossed her into the swollen gutter.
Now she knew beyond all doubt that she had no desire to die, and
certainly not there nor then. Not in such a messy wet manner. Death had
lost all of its picturesque aspects to the girl lying soaked and soiled
in the flooded gutter. So, though she was very tired and very weak, she
dragged herself up and succeeded finally in making her way to the store
whose blurred light she had marked for her destination.
She had opened the door and had entered before she was aware that,
inside, people were singing a song which she was conscious of having
heard years ago—hundreds of years it seemed. Repeated over and over, she
made out the words:
… Showers of blessings,
Showers of blessings . . .
She was conscious too of a hundred pairs of eyes upon her as she stood
there, drenched and disheveled, at the door of this improvised
meeting-house.
… Showers of blessings . . .
The appropriateness of the song, with its constant reference to showers,
the ridiculousness of herself in such surroundings, was too much for
Helga Crane’s frayed nerves. She sat down on the floor, a dripping heap,
and laughed and laughed and laughed.
It was into a shocked silence that she laughed. For at the first
hysterical peal the words of the song had died in the singers’ throats,
and the wheezy organ had lapsed into stillness. But in a moment there
were hushed solicitous voices; she was assisted to her feet and led
haltingly to a chair near the low platform at the far end of the room.
On one side of her a tall angular black woman under a queer hat sat
down, on the other a fattish yellow man with huge outstanding ears and
long, nervous hands.
The singing began again, this time a low wailing thing:
Oh, the bitter shame and sorrow
That a time could ever be,
When I let the Savior’s pity
Plead in vain, and proudly answered:
“All of self and none of Thee,
All of self and none of Thee.”
Yet He found me, I beheld Him,
Bleeding on the cursed tree;
Heard Him pray: “Forgive them, Father.”
And my wistful heart said faintly,
“Some of self and some of Thee,
Some of self and some of Thee.”
There were, it appeared, endless moaning verses. Behind Helga a woman
had begun to cry audibly, and soon, somewhere else, another. Outside,
the wind still bellowed. The wailing singing went on:
… Less of self and more of Thee,
Less of self and more of Thee.
Helga too began to weep, at first silently, softly; then with great
racking sobs. Her nerves were so torn, so aching, her body so wet, so
cold! It was a relief to cry unrestrainedly, and she gave herself freely
to soothing tears, not noticing that the groaning and sobbing of those
about her had increased, unaware that the grotesque ebony figure at her
side had begun gently to pat her arm to the rhythm of the singing and to
croon softly: “Yes, chile, yes, chile.” Nor did she notice the furtive
glances that the man on her other side cast at her between his fervent
shouts of “Amen!” and “Praise God for a sinner!”
She did notice, though, that the tempo, that atmosphere of the place,
had changed, and gradually she ceased to weep and gave her attention to
what was happening about her. Now they were singing:
… Jesus knows all about my troubles . . .
Men and women were swaying and clapping their hands, shouting and
stamping their feet to the frankly irreverent melody of the song.
Without warning the woman at her side threw off her hat, leaped to her
feet, waved her long arms, and shouted shrilly: “Glory! Hallelujah!” and
then, in wild, ecstatic fury jumped up and down before Helga clutching
at the girl’s soaked coat, and screamed: “Come to Jesus, you pore los’
sinner!” Alarmed for the fraction of a second, involuntarily Helga had
shrunk from her grasp, wriggling out of the wet coat when she could not
loosen the crazed creature’s hold. At the sight of the bare arms and
neck growing out of the clinging red dress, a shudder shook the swaying
man at her right. On the face of the dancing woman before her a
disapproving frown gathered. She shrieked: “A scarlet ’oman. Come to
Jesus, you pore los’ Jezebel!”
At this the short brown man on the platform raised a placating hand and
sanctimoniously delivered himself of the words: “Remembah de words of
our Mastah: ‘Let him that is without sin cast de first stone.’ Let us
pray for our errin’ sistah.”
Helga Crane was amused, angry, disdainful, as she sat there, listening
to the preacher praying for her soul. But though she was contemptuous,
she was being too well entertained to leave. And it was, at least, warm
and dry. So she stayed, listening to the fervent exhortation to God to
save her and to the zealous shoutings and groanings of the congregation.
Particularly she was interested in the writhings and weepings of the
feminine portion, which seemed to predominate. Little by little the
performance took on an almost Bacchic vehemence. Behind her, before her,
beside her, frenzied women gesticulated, screamed, wept, and tottered to
the praying of the preacher, which had gradually become a cadenced
chant. When at last he ended, another took up the plea in the same
moaning chant, and then another. It went on and on without pause with
the persistence of some unconquerable faith exalted beyond time and
reality.
Fascinated, Helga Crane watched until there crept upon her an indistinct
horror of an unknown world. She felt herself in the presence of a
nameless people, observing rites of a remote obscure origin. The faces
of the men and women took on the aspect of a dim vision. “This,” she
whispered to herself, “is terrible. I must get out of here.” But the
horror held her. She remained motionless, watching, as if she lacked the
strength to leave the place—foul, vile, and terrible, with its mixture
of breaths, its contact of bodies, its concerted convulsions, all in
wild appeal for a single soul. Her soul.
And as Helga watched and listened, gradually a curious influence
penetrated her; she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in her own
heart; she felt herself possessed by the same madness; she too felt a
brutal desire to shout and to sling herself about. Frightened at the
strength of the obsession, she gathered herself for one last effort to
escape, but vainly. In rising, weakness and nausea from last night’s
unsuccessful attempt to make herself drunk overcame her. She had eaten
nothing since yesterday. She fell forward against the crude railing
which enclosed the little platform. For a single moment she remained
there in silent stillness, because she was afraid she was going to be
sick. And in that moment she was lost—or saved. The yelling figures
about her pressed forward, closing her in on all sides. Maddened, she
grasped at the railing, and with no previous intention began to yell
like one insane, drowning every other clamor, while torrents of tears
streamed down her face. She was unconscious of the words she uttered, or
their meaning: “Oh God, mercy, mercy. Have mercy on me!” but she
repeated them over and over.
From those about her came a thunder-clap of joy. Arms were stretched
toward her with savage frenzy. The women dragged themselves upon their
knees or crawled over the floor like reptiles, sobbing and pulling their
hair and tearing off their clothing. Those who succeeded in getting near
to her leaned forward to encourage the unfortunate sister, dropping hot
tears and beads of sweat upon her bare arms and neck.
The thing became real. A miraculous calm came upon her. Life seemed to
expand, and to become very easy. Helga Crane felt within her a supreme
aspiration toward the regaining of simple happiness, a happiness
unburdened by the complexities of the lives she had known. About her the
tumult and the shouting continued, but in a lesser degree. Some of the
more exuberant worshipers had fainted into inert masses, the voices of
others were almost spent. Gradually the room grew quiet and almost
solemn, and to the kneeling girl time seemed to sink back into the
mysterious grandeur and holiness of far-off simpler centuries.
Twenty-One
On leaving the mission Helga Crane had started straight back to her room
at the hotel. With her had gone the fattish yellow man who had sat
beside her. He had introduced himself as the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green
in proffering his escort for which Helga had been grateful because she
had still felt a little dizzy and much exhausted. So great had been this
physical weariness that as she had walked beside him, without attention
to his verbose information about his own “field,” as he called it, she
had been seized with a hateful feeling of vertigo and obliged to lay
firm hold on his arm to keep herself from falling. The weakness had
passed as suddenly as it had come. Silently they had walked on. And
gradually Helga had recalled that the man beside her had himself swayed
slightly at their close encounter, and that frantically for a fleeting
moment he had gripped at a protruding fence railing. That man! Was it
possible? As easy as that?
Instantly across her still half-hypnotized consciousness little burning
darts of fancy had shot themselves. No. She couldn’t. It would be too
awful. Just the same, what or who was there to hold her back? Nothing.
Simply nothing. Nobody. Nobody at all.
Her searching mind had become in a moment quite clear. She cast at the
man a speculative glance, aware that for a tiny space she had looked
into his mind, a mind striving to be calm. A mind that was certain that
it was secure because it was concerned only with things of the soul,
spiritual things, which to him meant religious things. But actually a
mind by habit at home amongst the mere material aspect of things, and at
that moment consumed by some longing for the ecstasy that might lurk
behind the gleam of her cheek, the flying wave of her hair, the pressure
of her slim fingers on his heavy arm. An instant’s flashing vision it
had been and it was gone at once. Escaped in the aching of her own
senses and the sudden disturbing fear that she herself had perhaps
missed the supreme secret of life.
After all, there was nothing to hold her back. Nobody to care. She
stopped sharply, shocked at what she was on the verge of considering.
Appalled at where it might lead her.
The man—what was his name?—thinking that she was almost about to fall
again, had reached out his arms to her. Helga Crane had deliberately
stopped thinking. She had only smiled, a faint provocative smile, and
pressed her fingers deep into his arms until a wild look had come into
his slightly bloodshot eyes.
The next morning she lay for a long while, scarcely breathing, while she
reviewed the happenings of the night before. Curious. She couldn’t be
sure that it wasn’t religion that had made her feel so utterly different
from dreadful yesterday. And gradually she became a little sad, because
she realized that with every hour she would get a little farther away
from this soothing haziness, this rest from her long trouble of body and
of spirit; back into the clear bareness of her own small life and being,
from which happiness and serenity always faded just as they had shaped
themselves. And slowly bitterness crept into her soul. Because, she
thought, all I’ve ever had in life has been things—except just this one
time. At that she closed her eyes, for even remembrance caused her to
shiver a little.
Things, she realized, hadn’t been, weren’t, enough for her. She’d have
to have something else besides. It all came back to that old question of
happiness. Surely this was it. Just for a fleeting moment Helga Crane,
her eyes watching the wind scattering the gray-white clouds and so
clearing a speck of blue sky, questioned her ability to retain, to bear,
this happiness at such cost as she must pay for it. There was, she knew,
no getting round that. The man’s agitation and sincere conviction of sin
had been too evident, too illuminating. The question returned in a
slightly new form. Was it worth the risk? Could she take it? Was she
able? Though what did it matter—now?
And all the while she knew in one small corner of her mind that such
thinking was useless. She had made her decision. Her resolution. It was
a chance at stability, at permanent happiness, that she meant to take.
She had let so many other things, other chances, escape her. And anyway
there was God, He would perhaps make it come out all right. Still
confused and not so sure that it wasn’t the fact that she was “saved”
that had contributed to this after feeling of well-being, she clutched
the hope, the desire to believe that now at last she had found some One,
some Power, who was interested in her. Would help her.
She meant, however, for once in her life to be practical. So she would
make sure of both things, God and man.
Her glance caught the calendar over the little white desk. The tenth of
November. The steamer Oscar II sailed today. Yesterday she had half
thought of sailing with it. Yesterday. How far away!
With the thought of yesterday came the thought of Robert Anderson and a
feeling of elation, revenge. She had put herself beyond the need of help
from him. She had made it impossible for herself ever again to appeal to
him. Instinctively she had the knowledge that he would be shocked.
Grieved. Horribly hurt even. Well, let him!
The need to hurry suddenly obsessed her. She must. The morning was
almost gone. And she meant, if she could manage it, to be married today.
Rising, she was seized with a fear so acute that she had to lie down
again. For the thought came to her that she might fail. Might not be
able to confront the situation. That would be too dreadful. But she
became calm again. How could he, a naïve creature like that, hold out
against her? If she pretended to distress? To fear? To remorse? He
couldn’t. It would be useless for him even to try. She screwed up her
face into a little grin, remembering that even if protestations were to
fail, there were other ways.
And, too, there was God.
Twenty-Two
And so in the confusion of seductive repentance Helga Crane was married
to the grandiloquent Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, that rattish yellow
man, who had so kindly, so unctuously, proffered his escort to her hotel
on the memorable night of her conversion. With him she willingly, even
eagerly, left the sins and temptations of New York behind her to, as he
put it, “labor in the vineyard of the Lord” in the tiny Alabama town
where he was pastor to a scattered and primitive flock. And where, as
the wife of the preacher, she was a person of relative importance. Only
relative.
Helga did not hate him, the town, or the people. No. Not for a long
time.
As always, at first the novelty of the thing, the change, fascinated
her. There was a recurrence of the feeling that now, at last, she had
found a place for herself, that she was really living. And she had her
religion, which in her new status as a preacher’s wife had of necessity
become real to her. She believed in it. Because in its coming it had
brought this other thing, this anæsthetic satisfaction for her senses.
Hers was, she declared to herself, a truly spiritual union. This one
time in her life, she was convinced, she had not clutched a shadow and
missed the actuality. She felt compensated for all previous humiliations
anddisappointments and was glad. If she remembered that she had had
something like this feeling before, she put the unwelcome memory from
her with the thought: “This time I know I’m right. This time it will
last.”
Eagerly she accepted everything, even that bleak air of poverty which,
in some curious way, regards itself as virtuous, for no other reason
than that it is poor. And in her first hectic enthusiasm she intended
and planned to do much good to her husband’s parishioners. Her young joy
and zest for the uplifting of her fellow men came back to her. She meant
to subdue the cleanly scrubbed ugliness of her own surroundings to soft
inoffensive beauty, and to help the other women to do likewise. Too, she
would help them with their clothes, tactfully point out that sunbonnets,
no matter how gay, and aprons, no matter how frilly, were not quite the
proper things for Sunday church wear. There would be a sewing circle.
She visualized herself instructing the children, who seemed most of the
time to run wild, in ways of gentler deportment. She was anxious to be a
true helpmate, for in her heart was a feeling of obligation, of humble
gratitude.
In her ardor and sincerity Helga even made some small beginnings. True,
she was not very successful in this matter of innovations. When she went
about to try to interest the women in what she considered more
appropriate clothing and in inexpensive ways of improving their homes
according to her ideas of beauty, she was met, always, with smiling
agreement and good-natured promises. “Yuh all is right, Mis’ Green,” and
“Ah suttinly will, Mis’ Green,” fell courteously on her ear at each
visit.
She was unaware that afterwards they would shake their heads sullenly
over their wash-tubs and ironing-boards. And that among themselves they
talked with amusement, or with anger, of “dat uppity, meddlin’
No’the’nah,” and “pore Reve’end,” who in their opinion “would ’a done
bettah to a ma’ied Clementine Richards.” Knowing, as she did, nothing of
this, Helga was unperturbed. But even had she known, she would not have
been disheartened. The fact that it was difficult but increased her
eagerness, and made the doing of it seem only the more worth while.
Sometimes she would smile to think how changed she was.
And she was humble too. Even with Clementine Richards, a strapping black
beauty of magnificent Amazon proportions and bold shining eyes of
jet-like hardness. A person of awesome appearance. All chains, strings
of beads, jingling bracelets, flying ribbons, feathery neck-pieces, and
flowery hats. Clementine was inclined to treat Helga with an only
partially concealed contemptuousness, considering her a poor thing
without style, and without proper understanding of the worth and
greatness of the man, Clementine’s own adored pastor, whom Helga had
somehow had the astounding good luck to marry. Clementine’s admiration
of the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green was open. Helga was at first
astonished. Until she learned that there was really no reason why it
should be concealed. Everybody was aware of it. Besides, open adoration
was the prerogative, the almost religious duty, of the female portion of
the flock. If this unhidden and exaggerated approval contributed to his
already oversized pomposity, so much the better. It was what they
expected, liked, wanted. The greater his own sense of superiority
became, the more flattered they were by his notice and small attentions,
the more they cast at him killing glances, the more they hung enraptured
on his words.
In the days before her conversion, with its subsequent blurring of her
sense of humor, Helga might have amused herself by tracing the relation
of this constant ogling and flattering on the proverbially large
families of preachers; the often disastrous effect on their wives of
this constant stirring of the senses by extraneous women. Now, however,
she did not even think of it.
She was too busy. Every minute of the day was full. Necessarily. And to
Helga this was a new experience. She was charmed by it. To be mistress
in one’s own house, to have a garden, and chickens, and a pig; to have a
husband—and to be “right with God”—what pleasure did that other world
which she had left contain that could surpass these? Here, she had
found, she was sure, the intangible thing for which, indefinitely,
always she had craved. It had received embodiment.
Everything contributed to her gladness in living. And so for a time she
loved everything and everyone. Or thought she did. Even the weather. And
it was truly lovely. By day a glittering gold sun was set in an
unbelievably bright sky. In the evening silver buds sprouted in a
Chinese blue sky, and the warm day was softly soothed by a slight, cool
breeze. And night! Night, when a languid moon peeped through the
wide-opened windows of her little house, a little mockingly, it may be.
Always at night’s approach Helga was bewildered by a disturbing medley
of feelings. Challenge. Anticipation. And a small fear.
In the morning she was serene again. Peace had returned. And she could
go happily, inexpertly, about the humble tasks of her household,
cooking, dish-washing, sweeping, dusting, mending, and darning. And
there was the garden. When she worked there, she felt that life was
utterly filled with the glory and the marvel of God.
Helga did not reason about this feeling, as she did not at that time
reason about anything. It was enough that it was there, coloring all her
thoughts and acts. It endowed the four rooms of her ugly brown house
with a kindly radiance, obliterating the stark bareness of its white
plaster walls and the nakedness of its uncovered painted floors. It even
softened the choppy lines of the shiny oak furniture and subdued the
awesome horribleness of the religious pictures.
And all the other houses and cabins shared in this illumination. And the
people. The dark undecorated women unceasingly concerned with the actual
business of life, its rounds of births and christenings, of loves and
marriages, of deaths and funerals, were to Helga miraculously beautiful.
The smallest, dirtiest, brown child, barefooted in the fields or muddy
roads, was to her an emblem of the wonder of life, of love, and of God’s
goodness.
For the preacher, her husband, she had a feeling of gratitude, amounting
almost to sin. Beyond that, she thought of him not at all. But she was
not conscious that she had shut him out from her mind. Besides, what
need to think of him? He was there. She was at peace, and secure. Surely
their two lives were one, and the companionship in the Lord’s grace so
perfect that to think about it would be tempting providence. She had
done with soul-searching.
What did it matter that he consumed his food, even the softest
varieties, audibly? What did it matter that, though he did no work with
his hands, not even in the garden, his fingernails were always rimmed
with black? What did it matter that he failed to wash his fat body, or
to shift his clothing, as often as Helga herself did? There were things
that more than outweighed these. In the certainty of his goodness, his
righteousness, his holiness, Helga somehow overcame her first disgust at
the odor of sweat and stale garments. She was even able to be unaware of
it. Herself, Helga had come to look upon as a finicky, showy thing of
unnecessary prejudices and fripperies. And when she sat in the dreary
structure, which had once been a stable belonging to the estate of a
wealthy horse-racing man and about which the odor of manure still clung,
now the church and social center of the Negroes of the town, and heard
him expound with verbal extravagance the gospel of blood and love, of
hell and heaven, of fire and gold streets, pounding with clenched fists
the frail table before him or shaking those fists in the faces of the
congregation like direct personal threats, or pacing wildly back and
forth and even sometimes shedding great tears as he besought them to
repent, she was, she told herself, proud and gratified that he belonged
to her. In some strange way she was able to ignore the atmosphere of
self-satisfaction which poured from him like gas from a leaking pipe.
And night came at the end of every day. Emotional, palpitating, amorous,
all that was living in her sprang like rank weeds at the tingling
thought of night, with a vitality so strong that it devoured all shoots
of reason.
Twenty-Three
After the first exciting months Helga was too driven, too occupied, and
too sick to carry out any of the things for which she had made such
enthusiastic plans, or even to care that she had made only slight
progress toward their accomplishment. For she, who had never thought of
her body save as something on which to hang lovely fabrics, had now
constantly to think of it. It had persistently to be pampered to secure
from it even a little service. Always she felt extraordinarily and
annoyingly ill, having forever to be sinking into chairs. Or, if she was
out, to be pausing by the roadside, clinging desperately to some
convenient fence or tree, waiting for the horrible nausea and hateful
faintness to pass. The light, care-free days of the past, when she had
not felt heavy and reluctant or weak and spent, receded more and more
and with increasing vagueness, like a dream passing from a faulty
memory.
The children used her up. There were already three of them, all born
within the short space of twenty months. Two great healthy twin boys,
whose lovely bodies were to Helga like rare figures carved out of amber,
and in whose sleepy and mysterious black eyes all that was puzzling,
evasive, and aloof in life seemed to find expression. No matter how
often or how long she looked at these two small sons of hers, never did
she lose a certain delicious feeling in which were mingled pride,
tenderness, and exaltation. And there was a girl, sweet, delicate, and
flower-like. Not so healthy or so loved as the boys, but still
miraculously her own proud and cherished possession.
So there was no time for the pursuit of beauty, or for the uplifting of
other harassed and teeming women, or for the instruction of their
neglected children.
Her husband was still, as he had always been, deferentially kind and
incredulously proud of her—and verbally encouraging. Helga tried not to
see that he had rather lost any personal interest in her, except for the
short spaces between the times when she was preparing for or recovering
from childbirth. She shut her eyes to the fact that his encouragement
had become a little platitudinous, limited mostly to “The Lord will look
out for you,” “We must accept what God sends,” or “My mother had nine
children and was thankful for every one.” If she was inclined to wonder
a little just how they were to manage with another child on the way, he
would point out to her that her doubt and uncertainty were a stupendous
ingratitude. Had not the good God saved her soul from hell-fire and
eternal damnation? Had He not in His great kindness given her three
small lives to raise up for His glory? Had He not showered her with
numerous other mercies (evidently too numerous to be named separately)?
“You must,” the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green would say unctuously, “trust
the Lord more fully, Helga.”
This pabulum did not irritate her. Perhaps it was the fact that the
preacher was, now, not so much at home that even lent to it a measure of
real comfort. For the adoring women of his flock, noting how with
increasing frequency their pastor’s house went unswept and undusted, his
children unwashed, and his wife untidy, took pleasant pity on him and
invited him often to tasty orderly meals, specially prepared for him, in
their own clean houses.
Helga, looking about in helpless dismay and sick disgust at the disorder
around her, the permanent assembly of partly emptied medicine bottles on
the clock-shelf, the perpetual array of drying baby-clothes on the
chair-backs, the constant debris of broken toys on the floor, the
unceasing litter of half-dead flowers on the table, dragged in by the
toddling twins from the forlorn garden, failed to blame him for the
thoughtless selfishness of these absences. And, she was thankful,
whenever possible, to be relieved from the ordeal of cooking. There were
times when, having had to retreat from the kitchen in lumbering haste
with her sensitive nose gripped between tightly squeezing fingers, she
had been sure that the greatest kindness that God could ever show to her
would be to free her forever from the sight and smell of food.
How, she wondered, did other women, other mothers, manage? Could it be
possible that, while presenting such smiling and contented faces, they
were all always on the edge of health? All always worn out and
apprehensive? Or was it only she, a poor weak city-bred thing, who felt
that the strain of what the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green had so often
gently and patiently reminded her was a natural thing, an act of God,
was almost unendurable?
One day on her round of visiting—a church duty, to be done no matter how
miserable one was—she summoned up sufficient boldness to ask several
women how they felt, how they managed. The answers were a resigned
shrug, or an amused snort, or an upward rolling of eyeballs with a
mention of “de Lawd” looking after us all.
“’Tain’t nothin’, nothin’ at all, chile,” said one, Sary Jones, who, as
Helga knew, had had six children in about as many years. “Yuh all takes
it too ha’d. Jes’ remembah et’s natu’al fo’ a ’oman to hab chilluns an’
don’ fret so.”
“But,” protested Helga, “I’m always so tired and half sick. That can’t
be natural.”
“Laws, chile, we’s all ti’ed. An’ Ah reckons we’s all gwine a be ti’ed
till kingdom come. Jes’ make de bes’ of et, honey. Jes’ make de bes’ yuh
can.”
Helga sighed, turning her nose away from the steaming coffee which her
hostess had placed for her and against which her squeamish stomach was
about to revolt. At the moment the compensations of immortality seemed
very shadowy and very far away.
“Jes’ remembah,” Sary went on, staring sternly into Helga’s thin face,
“we all gits ouah res’ by an’ by. In de nex’ worl’ we’s all recompense’.
Jes’ put yo’ trus’ in de Sabioah.”
Looking at the confident face of the little bronze figure on the
opposite side of the immaculately spread table, Helga had a sensation of
shame that she should be less than content. Why couldn’t she be as
trusting and as certain that her troubles would not overwhelm her as
Sary Jones was? Sary, who in all likelihood had toiled every day of her
life since early childhood except on those days, totalling perhaps
sixty, following the birth of her six children. And who by dint of
superhuman saving had somehow succeeded in feeding and clothing them and
sending them all to school. Before her Helga felt humbled and oppressed
by the sense of her own unworthiness and lack of sufficient faith.
“Thanks, Sary,” she said, rising in retreat from the coffee, “you’ve
done me a world of good. I’m really going to try to be more patient.”
So, though with growing yearning she longed for the great ordinary
things of life, hunger, sleep, freedom from pain, she resigned herself
to the doing without them. The possibility of alleviating her burdens by
a greater faith became lodged in her mind. She gave herself up to it. It
did help. And the beauty of leaning on the wisdom of God, of trusting,
gave to her a queer sort of satisfaction. Faith was really quite easy.
One had only to yield. To ask no questions. The more weary, the more
weak, she became, the easier it was. Her religion was to her a kind of
protective coloring, shielding her from the cruel light of an unbearable
reality.
This utter yielding in faith to what had been sent her found her favor,
too, in the eyes of her neighbors. Her husband’s flock began to approve
and commend this submission and humility to a superior wisdom. The
womenfolk spoke more kindly and more affectionately of the preacher’s
Northern wife. “Pore Mis’ Green, wid all dem small chilluns at once. She
suah do hab it ha’d. An’ she don’ nebah complains an’ frets no mo’e.
Jes’ trus’ in de Lawd lak de Good Book say. Mighty sweet lil’ ’oman
too.”
Helga didn’t bother much about the preparations for the coming child.
Actually and metaphorically she bowed her head before God, trusting in
Him to see her through. Secretly she was glad that she had not to worry
about herself or anything. It was a relief to be able to put the entire
responsibility on someone else.
Twenty-Four
It began, this next child-bearing, during the morning services of a
breathless hot Sunday while the fervent choir soloist was singing: “Ah
am freed of mah sorrow,” and lasted far into the small hours of Tuesday
morning. It seemed, for some reason, not to go off just right. And when,
after that long frightfulness, the fourth little dab of amber humanity
which Helga had contributed to a despised race was held before her for
maternal approval, she failed entirely to respond properly to this sop
of consolation for the suffering and horror through which she had
passed. There was from her no pleased, proud smile, no loving,
possessive gesture, no manifestation of interest in the important
matters of sex and weight. Instead she deliberately closed her eyes,
mutely shutting out the sickly infant, its smiling father, the soiled
midwife, the curious neighbors, and the tousled room.
A week she lay so. Silent and listless. Ignoring food, the clamoring
children, the comings and goings of solicitous, kind-hearted women, her
hovering husband, and all of life about her. The neighbors were puzzled.
The Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green was worried. The midwife was frightened.
On the floor, in and out among the furniture and under her bed, the
twins played. Eager to help, the church-women crowded in and, meeting
there others on the same laudable errand, stayed to gossip and to
wonder. Anxiously the preacher sat, Bible in hand, beside his wife’s
bed, or in a nervous half-guilty manner invited the congregated
parishioners to join him in prayer for the healing of their sister.
Then, kneeling, they would beseech God to stretch out His all-powerful
hand on behalf of the afflicted one, softly at first, but with rising
vehemence, accompanied by moans and tears, until it seemed that the God
to whom they prayed must in mercy to the sufferer grant relief. If only
so that she might rise up and escape from the tumult, the heat, and the
smell.
Helga, however, was unconcerned, undisturbed by the commotion about her.
It was all part of the general unreality. Nothing reached her. Nothing
penetrated the kind darkness into which her bruised spirit had
retreated. Even that red-letter event, the coming to see her of the old
white physician from downtown, who had for a long time stayed talking
gravely to her husband, drew from her no interest. Nor for days was she
aware that a stranger, a nurse from Mobile, had been added to her
household, a brusquely efficient woman who produced order out of chaos
and quiet out of bedlam. Neither did the absence of the children,
removed by good neighbors at Miss Hartley’s insistence, impress her.
While she had gone down into that appalling blackness of pain, the
ballast of her brain had got loose and she hovered for a long time
somewhere in that delightful borderland on the edge of unconsciousness,
an enchanted and blissful place where peace and incredible quiet
encompassed her.
After weeks she grew better, returned to earth, set her reluctant feet
to the hard path of life again.
“Well, here you are!” announced Miss Hartley in her slightly harsh voice
one afternoon just before the fall of evening. She had for some time
been standing at the bedside gazing down at Helga with an intent
speculative look.
“Yes,” Helga agreed in a thin little voice, “I’m back.” The truth was
that she had been back for some hours. Purposely she had lain silent and
still, wanting to linger forever in that serene haven, that effortless
calm where nothing was expected of her. There she could watch the figure
of the past drift by. There was her mother, whom she had loved from a
distance and finally so scornfully blamed, who appeared as she had
always remembered her, unbelievably beautiful, young, and remote. Robert
Anderson, questioning, purposely detached, affecting, as she realized
now, her life in a remarkably cruel degree; for at last she understood
clearly how deeply, how passionately, she must have loved him. Anne,
lovely, secure, wise, selfish. Axel Olsen, conceited, worldly, spoiled.
Audrey Denney, placid, taking quietly and without fuss the things which
she wanted. James Vayle, snobbish, smug, servile. Mrs. Hayes-Rore,
important, kind, determined. The Dahls, rich, correct, climbing.
Flashingly, fragmentarily, other long-forgotten figures, women in gay
fashionable frocks and men in formal black and white, glided by in
bright rooms to distant, vaguely familiar music.
It was refreshingly delicious, this immersion in the past. But it was
finished now. It was over. The words of her husband, the Reverend Mr.
Pleasant Green, who had been standing at the window looking mournfully
out at the scorched melon-patch, ruined because Helga had been ill so
long and unable to tend it, were confirmation of that.
“The Lord be praised,” he said, and came forward. It was distinctly
disagreeable. It was even more disagreeable to feel his moist hand on
hers. A cold shiver brushed over her. She closed her eyes. Obstinately
and with all her small strength she drew her hand away from him. Hid it
far down under the bed-covering, and turned her face away to hide a
grimace of unconquerable aversion. She cared nothing, at that moment,
for his hurt surprise. She knew only that, in the hideous agony that for
interminable hours—no, centuries—she had borne, the luster of religion
had vanished; that revulsion had come upon her; that she hated this man.
Between them the vastness of the universe had come.
Miss Hartley, all-seeing and instantly aware of a situation, as she had
been quite aware that her patient had been conscious for some time
before she herself had announced the fact, intervened, saying firmly: “I
think it might be better if you didn’t try to talk to her now. She’s
terribly sick and weak yet. She’s still got some fever and we mustn’t
excite her or she’s liable to slip back. And we don’t want that, do we?”
No, the man, her husband, responded, they didn’t want that. Reluctantly
he went from the room with a last look at Helga, who was lying on her
back with one frail, pale hand under her small head, her curly black
hair scattered loose on the pillow. She regarded him from behind dropped
lids. The day was hot, her breasts were covered only by a nightgown of
filmy crêpe, a relic of prematrimonial days, which had slipped from one
carved shoulder. He flinched. Helga’s petulant lip curled, for she well
knew that this fresh reminder of her desirability was like the flick of
a whip.
Miss Hartley carefully closed the door after the retreating husband.
“It’s time,” she said, “for your evening treatment, and then you’ve got
to try to sleep for a while. No more visitors tonight.”
Helga nodded and tried unsuccessfully to make a little smile. She was
glad of Miss Hartley’s presence. It would, she felt, protect her from so
much. She mustn’t, she thought to herself, get well too fast. Since it
seemed she was going to get well. In bed she could think, could have a
certain amount of quiet. Of aloneness.
In that period of racking pain and calamitous fright Helga had learned
what passion and credulity could do to one. In her was born angry
bitterness and an enormous disgust. The cruel, unrelieved suffering had
beaten down her protective wall of artificial faith in the infinite
wisdom, in the mercy, of God. For had she not called in her agony on
Him? And He had not heard. Why? Because, she knew now, He wasn’t there.
Didn’t exist. Into that yawning gap of unspeakable brutality had gone,
too, her belief in the miracle and wonder of life. Only scorn,
resentment, and hate remained—and ridicule. Life wasn’t a miracle, a
wonder. It was, for Negroes at least, only a great disappointment.
Something to be got through with as best one could. No one was
interested in them or helped them. God! Bah! And they were only a
nuisance to other people.
Everything in her mind was hot and cold, beating and swirling about.
Within her emaciated body raged disillusion. Chaotic turmoil. With the
obscuring curtain of religion rent, she was able to look about her and
see with shocked eyes this thing that she had done to herself. She
couldn’t, she thought ironically, even blame God for it, now that she
knew that He didn’t exist. No. No more than she could pray to Him for
the death of her husband, the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green. The white
man’s God. And His great love for all people regardless of race! What
idiotic nonsense she had allowed herself to believe. How could she, how
could anyone, have been so deluded? How could ten million black folk
credit it when daily before their eyes was enacted its contradiction?
Not that she at all cared about the ten million. But herself. Her sons.
Her daughter. These would grow to manhood, to womanhood, in this
vicious, this hypocritical land. The dark eyes filled with tears.
“I wouldn’t,” the nurse advised, “do that. You’ve been dreadfully sick,
you know. I can’t have you worrying. Time enough for that when you’re
well. Now you must sleep all you possibly can.”
Helga did sleep. She found it surprisingly easy to sleep. Aided by Miss
Hartley’s rather masterful discernment, she took advantage of the ease
with which this blessed enchantment stole over her. From her husband’s
praisings, prayers, and caresses she sought refuge in sleep, and from
the neighbors’ gifts, advice, and sympathy.
There was that day on which they told her that the last sickly infant,
born of such futile torture and lingering torment, had died after a
short week of slight living. Just closed his eyes and died. No vitality.
On hearing it Helga too had just closed her eyes. Not to die. She was
convinced that before her there were years of living. Perhaps of
happiness even. For a new idea had come to her. She had closed her eyes
to shut in any telltale gleam of the relief which she felt. One less.
And she had gone off into sleep.
And there was that Sunday morning on which the Reverend Mr. Pleasant
Green had informed her that they were that day to hold a special
thanksgiving service for her recovery. There would, he said, be prayers,
special testimonies, and songs. Was there anything particular she would
like to have said, to have prayed for, to have sung? Helga had smiled
from sheer amusement as she replied that there was nothing. Nothing at
all. She only hoped that they would enjoy themselves. And, closing her
eyes that he might be discouraged from longer tarrying, she had gone off
into sleep.
Waking later to the sound of joyous religious abandon floating in
through the opened windows, she had asked a little diffidently that she
be allowed to read. Miss Hartley’s sketchy brows contracted into a
dubious frown. After a judicious pause she had answered: “No, I don’t
think so.” Then, seeing the rebellious tears which had sprung into her
patient’s eyes, she added kindly: “But I’ll read to you a little if you
like.”
That, Helga replied, would be nice. In the next room on a high-up shelf
was a book. She’d forgotten the name, but its author was Anatole France.
There was a story, “The Procurator of Judea.” Would Miss Hartley read
that? “Thanks. Thanks awfully.”
“ ‘Lælius Lamia, born in Italy of illustrious parents,’ ” began the
nurse in her slightly harsh voice.
Helga drank it in.
“ ‘… For to this day the women bring down doves to the altar as their
victims….’ ”
Helga closed her eyes.
“ ‘… Africa and Asia have already enriched us with a considerable number
of gods….’ ”
Miss Hartley looked up. Helga had slipped into slumber while the
superbly ironic ending which she had so desired to hear was yet a long
way off. A dull tale, was Miss Hartley’s opinion, as she curiously
turned the pages to see how it turned out.
“ ‘Jesus? … Jesus—of Nazareth? I cannot call him to mind.’ ”
“Huh!” she muttered, puzzled. “Silly.” And closed the book.
Twenty-Five
During the long process of getting well, between the dreamy intervals
when she was beset by the insistent craving for sleep, Helga had had too
much time to think. At first she had felt only an astonished anger at
the quagmire in which she had engulfed herself. She had ruined her life.
Made it impossible ever again to do the things that she wanted, have the
things that she loved, mingle with the people she liked. She had, to put
it as brutally as anyone could, been a fool. The damnedest kind of a
fool. And she had paid for it. Enough. More than enough.
Her mind, swaying back to the protection that religion had afforded her,
almost she wished that it had not failed her. An illusion. Yes. But
better, far better, than this terrible reality. Religion had, after all,
its uses. It blunted the perceptions. Robbed life of its crudest truths.
Especially it had its uses for the poor—and the blacks.
For the blacks. The Negroes.
And this, Helga decided, was what ailed the whole Negro race in America,
this fatuous belief in the white man’s God, this child-like trust in
full compensation for all woes and privations in “kingdom come.” Sary
Jones’s absolute conviction, “In de nex’ worl’ we’s all recompense’,”
came back to her. And ten million souls were as sure of it as was Sary.
How the white man’s God must laugh at the great joke he had played on
them! Bound them to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made them
bear it unresistingly, uncomplainingly almost, by sweet promises of
mansions in the sky by and by.
“Pie in the sky,” Helga said aloud derisively, forgetting for the moment
Miss Hartley’s brisk presence, and so was a little startled at hearing
her voice from the adjoining room saying severely: “My goodness! No! I
should say you can’t have pie. It’s too indigestible. Maybe when you’re
better—”
“That,” assented Helga, “is what I said. Pie—by and by. That’s the
trouble.”
The nurse looked concerned. Was this an approaching relapse? Coming to
the bedside, she felt at her patient’s pulse while giving her a
searching look. No. “You’d better,” she admonished, a slight edge to her
tone, “try to get a little nap. You haven’t had any sleep today, and you
can’t get too much of it. You’ve got to get strong, you know.”
With this Helga was in full agreement. It seemed hundreds of years since
she had been strong. And she would need strength. For in some way she
was determined to get herself out of this bog into which she had
strayed. Or—she would have to die. She couldn’t endure it. Her
suffocation and shrinking loathing were too great. Not to be borne.
Again. For she had to admit that it wasn’t new, this feeling of
dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had experienced
before. In Naxos. In New York. In Copenhagen. This differed only in
degree. And it was of the present and therefore seemingly more
reasonable. The other revulsions were of the past, and now less
explainable.
The thought of her husband roused in her a deep and contemptuous hatred.
At his every approach she had forcibly to subdue a furious inclination
to scream out in protest. Shame, too, swept over her at every thought of
her marriage. Marriage. This sacred thing of which parsons and other
Christian folk ranted so sanctimoniously, how immoral—according to their
own standards—it could be! But Helga felt also a modicum of pity for
him, as for one already abandoned. She meant to leave him. And it was,
she had to concede, all of her own doing, this marriage. Nevertheless,
she hated him.
The neighbors and churchfolk came in for their share of her
all-embracing hatred. She hated their raucous laughter, their stupid
acceptance of all things, and their unfailing trust in “de Lawd.” And
more than all the rest she hated the jangling Clementine Richards, with
her provocative smirkings, because she had not succeeded in marrying the
preacher and thus saving her, Helga, from that crowning idiocy.
Of the children Helga tried not to think. She wanted not to leave
them—if that were possible. The recollection of her own childhood,
lonely, unloved, rose too poignantly before her for her to consider
calmly such a solution. Though she forced herself to believe that this
was different. There was not the element of race, of white and black.
They were all black together. And they would have their father. But to
leave them would be a tearing agony, a rending of deepest fibers. She
felt that through all the rest of her lifetime she would be hearing
their cry of “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy,” through sleepless nights. No. She
couldn’t desert them.
How, then, was she to escape from the oppression, the degradation, that
her life had become? It was so difficult. It was terribly difficult. It
was almost hopeless. So for a while—for the immediate present, she told
herself—she put aside the making of any plan for her going. “I’m still,”
she reasoned, “too weak, too sick. By and by, when I’m really strong—”
It was so easy and so pleasant to think about freedom and cities, about
clothes and books, about the sweet mingled smell of Houbigant and
cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with inconsequential chatter
and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music. It was so hard to think
out a feasible way of retrieving all these agreeable, desired things.
Just then. Later. When she got up. By and by. She must rest. Get strong.
Sleep. Then, afterwards, she could work out some arrangement. So she
dozed and dreamed in snatches of sleeping and waking, letting time run
on. Away.
And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without
pain, hardly had the children returned from the homes of the neighbors,
when she began to have her fifth child.