Jessie Fauset, "Emmy" (1912) (full text)
by Jessie Fauset
I
“There are five races,” said Emmy confidently. “The white or Caucasian, the yellow or
Mongolian, the red or Indian, the brown or Malay, and the black or Negro.”
“Correct,” nodded Miss Wenzel mechanically. “Now to which of the five do you belong?”
And then immediately Miss Wenzel reddened.
Emmy hesitated. Not because hers was the only dark face in the crowded schoolroom,
but because she was visualizing the pictures with which the geography had illustrated its
information. She was not white, she knew that—nor had she almond eyes like the Chinese,
nor the feathers which the Indian wore in his hair and which, of course, were to Emmy a
racial characteristic. She regarded the color of her slim brown hands with interest—she had
never thought of it before. The Malay was a horrid, ugly-looking thing with a ring in his
nose. But he was brown, so she was, she supposed, really a Malay.
And yet the Hottentot, chosen with careful nicety to represent the entire Negro race,
had on the whole a better appearance.
“I belong,” she began tentatively, “to the black or Negro race.”
“Yes,” said Miss Wenzel with a sigh of relief, for if Emmy had chosen to ally herself
with any other race except, of course, the white, how could she, teacher though she was, set
her straight without embarrassment? The recess bell rang and she dismissed them with a
brief but thankful “You may pass.”
Emmy uttered a sigh of relief, too, as she entered the schoolyard. She had been terribly
near failing.
“I was so scared,” she breathed to little towheaded Mary Holborn. “Did you see what
a long time I was answering? Guess Eunice Leeks thought for sure I’d fail and she’d get my
place.”
“Yes, I guess she didn’t,” agreed Mary. “I’m so glad you didn’t fail—but, oh, Emmy,
didn’t you mind?”
Emmy looked up in astonishment from the orange she was peeling.
“Mind what? Here, you can have the biggest half. I don’t like oranges anyway—sort of
remind me of niter. Mind what, Mary?”
“Why, saying you were black and”—she hesitated, her little freckled face getting pinker
and pinker—“a Negro, and all that before the class.” And then mistaking the look on Emmy’s
face, she hastened on. “Everybody in Plainville says all the time that you’re too nice and
smart to be a—er—I mean, to be colored. And your dresses are so pretty, and your hair isn’t
all funny either.” She seized one of Emmy’s hands—an exquisite member, all bronze outside,
and within a soft pink}'- white.
“Oh, Emmy, don’t you think if you scrubbed real hard you could get some of the brown
off?”
“But I don’t want to,” protested Emmy. “I guess my hands are as nice as yours, Mary
Holborn. We’re just the same, only you’re white and I’m brown. But I don’t see any difference.
Eunice Leeks’ eyes are green and yours are blue, but you can both see.”
“Oh, well,” said Mary Holborn, “if you don’t mind—.”
If she didn’t mind—but why should she mind?
“Why should I mind, Archie,” she asked the faithful squire as they walked home in the
afternoon through the pleasant “main” street. Archie had brought her home from school ever
since she could remember. He was two years older than she; tall, strong and beautiful, and
her final arbiter.
Archie stopped to watch a spider.
“See how he does it, Emmy! See him bring that thread over! Gee, if I could swing a
bridge across the pond as easy as that! Oh, I don’t guess there’s anything for us to mind
about. It’s white people, they’re always minding—I don’t know why. If any of the boys in
your class say anything to you, you let me know. I licked Bill Jennings the other day for
calling me a ‘guiney.’ Wish I were a good, sure-enough brown like you, and then everybody’d
know just what I am.”
Archie’s clear olive skin and aquiline features made his Negro ancestry difficult of belief.
“But,” persisted Emmy, “what difference does it make?”
“Oh, I’ll tell you some other time,” he returned vaguely. “Can’t you ask questions though?
Look, it’s going to rain. That means uncle won’t need me in the field this afternoon. See
here, Emmy, bet I can let you run ahead while I count fifteen, and then beat you to your
house. Want to try?”
They reached the house none too soon, for the soft spring drizzle soon turned into gusty
torrents. Archie was happy—he loved Emmy’s house with the long, high rooms and the
books and the queer foreign pictures. And Emmy had so many sensible playthings. Of course,
a great big fellow of 13 doesn’t care for locomotives and blocks in the ordinary way, but when
one is trying to work out how a bridge must be built over a lop-sided ravine, such things are
by no means to be despised. When Mrs. Carrel, Emmy’s mother, sent Celeste to tell the
children to come to dinner, they raised such a protest that the kindly French woman finally
set them a table in the sitting room and left them to their own devices.
Don’t you love little fresh green peas?” said Emmy ecstatically. “Oh, Archie, won’t you
tell me now what difference it makes whether you are white or colored?” She peered into the
vegetable dish. “Do you suppose Celeste would give us some more peas? There’s only about
a spoonful left.”
I don t believe she would,” returned the boy, evading the important part of her question.
There were lots of them to start with, you know. Look, if you take up each pea separately on
your fork—like that—they’ll last longer. It’s hard to do, too. Bet I can do it better than you.”
And in the exciting contest that followed both children forgot all about the “problem.”
II
Miss Wenzel sent for Emmy the next day. Gently but insistently, and altogether from a mistaken sense of duty, she tried to make the child see wherein her lot differed from that of her white schoolmates. She felt herself that she hadn’t succeeded very well. Emmy, immaculate in a white frock, her bronze elfin face framed in its thick curling black hair, alert to interest, had listened very attentively. She had made no comments till toward the end.
"Then because I’m brown,” she had said, “I’m not as good as you.” Emmy was at all times severely logical.
“Well, I wouldn’t—quite say that,” stammered Miss Wenzel miserably. “You’re really very nice, you know, especially nice for a colored girl, but—well, you’re different.”
Emmy listened patiently. “I wish you’d tell me how, Miss Wenzel,” she began. “Archie Ferrers is different, too, isn’t he? And yet he’s lots nicer than almost any of the boys in Plainville. And he’s smart, you know. I guess he’s pretty poor—I shouldn’t like to be that—but my mother isn’t poor, and she’s handsome. I heard Celeste say so, and she has beautiful clothes. I think, Miss Wenzel, it must be rather nice to be different.”
It was at this point that Miss Wenzel had desisted and, tucking a little tissue-wrapped
oblong into Emmy’s hands, had sent her home.
“I don’t think I did any good,” she told her sister wonderingly. “I couldn’t make her see what being colored meant.”
“I don’t see why you didn’t leave her alone,” said Hannah Wenzel testily. “I don’t guess she’ll meet with much prejudice if she stays here in central Pennsylvania. And if she goes away she’ll meet plenty of people who’ll make it their business to see that she understands what being colored means. Those things adjust themselves.”
“Not always,” retorted Miss Wenzel, “and anyway, that child ought to know. She’s got to have some of the wind taken out of her sails, some day, anyhow. Look how her mother dresses her. I suppose she does make pretty good money—I’ve heard that translating pays well. Seems so funny for a colored woman to be able to speak and write a foreign language.”
She returned to her former complaint.
“Of course it doesn’t cost much to live here, but Emmy’s clothes! White frocks all last winter, and a long red coat—broadcloth it was Hannah. And big bows on her hair—she has got pretty hair, I must say.”
“Oh, well,” said Miss Hannah, “I suppose Celeste makes her clothes. I guess colored people want to look nice just as much as anybody else. I heard Mr. Holborn say Mrs. Carrel used to live in France; I suppose that’s where she got all her stylish ways.” “Yes, just think of that,” resumed Miss Wenzel vigorously, “a colored woman with a French maid. Though if it weren’t for her skin you’d never tell by her actions what she was.
It’s the same way with that Archie Ferrers, too, looking for all the world like some foreigner. I must say I like colored people to look and act like what they are.”
She spoke the more bitterly because of her keen sense of failure. What she had meant to do was to show Emmy kindly—oh, very kindly—her proper place, and then, using the object in the little tissue-wrapped parcel as a sort of text, to preach a sermon on humility without aspiration.
The tissue-wrapped oblong proved to Emmy’s interested eyes to contain a motto of Robert Louis Stevenson, entitled: “A Task”—the phrase picked out in red and blue and gold, under glass and framed in passepartout. Everybody nowadays has one or more of such mottoes in his house, but the idea was new then to Plainville. The child read it through carefully as she passed by the lilac-scented “front yards.” She read well for her age, albeit a trifle uncomprehendingly.
“To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less;”—“there,” thought Emmy, “is a semi-colon—let’s see—the semi-colon shows that the thought”—and she went on through the definition Miss Wenzel had given her, and returned happily to her motto:
“To make upon the whole a family happier for his presence”—thus far the lettering was in blue. “To renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered”—this phrase was in gold. Then the rest went on in red: “To keep a few friends, but these without capitulation; above all, on the same given condition to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.”
“It’s all about some man,” she thought with a child’s literalness. “Wonder why Miss Wenzel gave it to me? That big word, cap-it-u-la-tion”—she divided it off into syllables, doubtfully—“must mean to spell with capitals I guess. I’ll say it to Archie some time.” But she thought it very kind of Miss Wenzel. And after she had shown it to her mother, she hung it up in the bay window of her little white room, where the sun struck it every morning.
III
Afterward Emmy always connected the motto with the beginning of her own realization
of what color might mean. It took her quite a while to find it out, but by the time she was
ready to graduate from the high school she had come to recognize that the occasional impasse
which she met now and then might generally be traced to color. This knowledge, however,
far from embittering her, simply gave to her life keener zest. Of course she never met with
any of the grosser forms of prejudice, and her personality was the kind to win her at least
the respect and sometimes the wondering admiration of her schoolmates. For unconsciously
she made them see that she was perfectly satisfied with being colored. She could never under¬
stand why anyone should think she would want to be white.
One day a girl—Elise Carter—asked her to let her copy her French verbs in the test
they were to have later in the day. Emmy, who was both by nature and by necessity inde¬
pendent, refused bluntly.
“Oh, don’t be so mean, Emmy,” Elise had wailed. She hesitated. “If you’ll let me copy
them—I’ll—I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll see that you get invited to our club spread Friday
afternoon.”
“Well, I guess you won’t,” Emmy had retorted. “I’ll probably be asked anyway. ’Most
everybody else has been invited already.”
Elise jeered. “And did you think as a matter of course that we’d ask you? Well, you have
got something to learn.”
There was no mistaking the “you.”
Emmy took the blow pretty calmly for all its unexpectedness. “You mean,” she said
slowly, the blood showing darkly under the thin brown of her skin, “because I’m colored?”
Elise hedged—she was a little frightened of such directness.
Oh, well, Emmy, you know colored folks can’t expect to have everything we have, or
if they do, they must pay extra for it.”
“I—I see,” said Emmy, stammering a little, as she always did when she was angry. “I
begin to see the first time why you think it’s so awful to be colored. It’s because you think
we are willing to be mean and sneaky and”—with a sudden drop to schoolgirl vernacular—
soup-y. Why, Elise Carter, I wouldn’t be in your old club with girls like you for worlds.”
There was no mistaking her sincerity.
That was the day,” she confided to Archie a long time afterward, “that I learned the
meaning of making friends ‘without capitulation.’ Do you remember Miss Wenzel’s motto,
Archie?”
He assured her he did. “And of course you know, Emmy, you were an awful brick to
answer that Carter girl like that. Didn’t you really want to go to the spread?”
“Not one bit,” she told him vigorously, “after I found out why I hadn’t been asked. And
look, Archie, isn’t it funny, just as soon as she wanted something she didn’t care whether I
was colored or not.”
Archie nodded. “They’re all that way,” he told her briefly.
“And if I’d gone she’d have believed that all colored people were sort of—well, you know,
‘meachin’— just like me. It’s so odd the ignorant way in which they draw their conclusions.
Why, I remember reading the most interesting article in a magazine—the Atlantic Monthly
I think it was. A woman had written it and at this point she was condemning universal suf¬
frage. And all of a sudden, without any warning, she spoke of that ’fierce, silly, amiable crea¬
ture, the uneducated Negro,’ and—think of it, Archie—of‘his baser and sillier female.’ It
made me so angry. I’ve never forgotten.”
Archie whistled. “That was pretty tough,” he acknowledged. “I suppose the truth is,”
he went on smiling at her earnestness, “she has a colored cook who drinks.”
“That’s just it,” she turned emphatically. “She probably has. But, Archie, just think of
all the colored people we’ve both seen here and over in Newton, too; some of them just as
poor and ignorant as they can be. But not one of them is fierce or base or silly enough for
that to be considered his chief characteristic. I’ll wager that woman never spoke to fifty
colored people in her life. No, thank you, if that’s what it means to belong to the ‘superior
race,’ I’ll come back, just as I am, to the fiftieth reincarnation.”
Archie sighed. “Oh, well, life is very simple for you. You see, you’ve never been up
against it like I’ve been. After all, you’ve had all you wanted practically—those girls even
came around finally in the high school and asked you into their clubs and things. While
I—” he colored sensitively.
“You see, this plague—er—complexion of mine doesn’t tell anybody what I am. At first—
and all along, too, if I let them—fellows take me for a foreigner of some kind—Spanish or
something, and they take me up hail-fellow-well-met. And then, if I let them know—I hate
to feel I’m taking them in, you know, and besides that I can’t help being curious to know
what’s going to happen—”
“What does happen?” interrupted Emmy, all interest.
“Well, all sorts of things. You take that first summer just before I entered preparatory
school. You remember I was working at the camp in Cottage City. All the waiters were
fellows just like me, working to go to some college or other. At first I was just one of them
swam with them, played cards—oh you know, regularly chummed with them. Well, the cook
was a colored man—sure enough, colored you know—and one day one of the boys called
him a—of course I couldn’t tell you, Emmy, but he swore at him and called him a Nigger.
And when I took up for him the fellow said—he was angry, Emmy, and he said it was the
worst insult he could think of—‘Anybody would think you had black blood in your veins, too.
“Anybody would think right,” I told him.
“Well?” asked Emmy.
He shrugged his shoulders. “That was all there was to it. The fellows dropped me completely-left me to the company of the cook, who was all right enough as cooks go, I suppose, but he didn’t want me any more than I wanted him. And finally the manager came and told me he was sorry, but he guessed I’d have to go.” He smiled grimly as at some unpleasant reminiscence.
“What’s the joke?” his listener wondered.
“He also told me that I was the blankest kind of a blank fool—oh, you couldn’t dream
how he swore, Emmy. He said why didn’t I leave well enough alone.
“And don’t you know that’s the thought I’ve had ever since—why not leave well enough
alone?—and not tell people what I am. I guess you’re different from me,” he broke off wistfully,
noting her look of disapproval; “you’re so complete and satisfied in yourself. Just being Emilie
Carrel seems to be enough for you. But you just wait until color keeps you from the thing
you want the most, and you’ll see.”
“You needn’t be so tragic,” she commented succinctly. “Outside of that one time at Cot¬
tage City, it doesn’t seem to have kept you back.”
For Archie’s progress had been miraculous. In the seven years in which he had been
from home, one marvel after another had come his way. He had found lucrative work each
summer, he had got through his preparatory school in three years, he had been graduated
number six from one of the best technical schools in the country—and now he had a position.
He was to work for one of the biggest engineering concerns in Philadelphia.
This last bit of good fortune had dropped out of a clear sky. A guest at one of the hotels
one summer had taken an interest in the handsome, willing bellboy and inquired into his
history. Archie had hesitated at first, but finally, his eye alert for the first sign of dislike or
superiority, he told the man of Negro blood.
“If he turns me down,” he said to himself boyishly, “I’ll never risk it again.”
But Mr. Robert Fallon—young, wealthy and quixotic—had become more interested
than ever.
“So, it’s all a gamble with you, isn’t it? By George! How exciting your life must be—now
white and now black—standing between ambition and honor, what? Not that I don’t think
you’re doing the right thing—it’s nobody’s confounded business anyway. Look here, when
you get through look me up. I may be able to put you wise to something. Here’s my card.
And say, mums the word, and when you’ve made your pile you can wake some fine morning
and find yourself famous simply by telling what you are. All rot, this beastly prejudice, I say.”
And when Archie had graduated, his new friend, true to his word, had gotten for him
from his father a letter of introduction to Mr. Nicholas Fields in Philadelphia, and Archie
was placed. Young Robert Fallon had gone laughing on his aimless, merry way.
Be sure you keep your mouth shut, Ferrers,” was his only enjoinment.
Archie, who at first had experienced some qualms, had finally completely acquiesced.
For the few moments’ talk with Mr. Fields had intoxicated him. The vision of work, plenty
of it, his own chosen kind and the opportunity to do it as a man—not an exception, but as a plain ordinary man among other men—was too much for him.
"It was my big chance, Emmy,” he told her one day. He was spending his brief vacation
in Plainville, and the two, having talked themselves out on other things, had returned to
their old absorbing topic. He went on a little pleadingly, for she had protested. “I couldn’t
resist it. You dont know what it means to me. I don’t care about being white in itself any
more than you do—but I do care about a white man’s chances. Don’t let’s talk about it any
more though; here it’s the first week in September and I have to go the 15th. I may not be
back till Christmas. I should hate to think that you—you were changed toward me, Emmy.”
"I m not changed, Archie, she assured him gravely, “only somehow it makes me feel that you re different. I can’t quite look up to you as I used. I don’t like the idea of considering the end justified by the means.”
She was silent, watching the falling leaves flutter like golden butterflies against her
white dress. As she stood there in the old-fashioned garden, she seemed to the boy’s adoring
eyes like some beautiful but inflexible bronze goddess.
“I couldn’t expect you to look up to me, Emmy, as though I were on a pedestal,” he
began miserably, “but I do want you to respect me, because—oh, Emmy, don’t you see? I
love you very much and I hope you will—I want you to—oh, Emmy, couldn’t you like me a
little? I —I’ve never thought ever of anyone but you. I didn’t mean to tell you all about this
now—I meant to wait until I really was successful, and then come and lay it all at your beau¬
tiful feet. You’re so lovely, Emmy. But if you despise me—” he was very humble.
For once in her calm young life Emmy was completely surprised. But she had to get to
the root of things. “You mean,” she faltered, “you mean you want”—she couldn’t say it.
“I mean I want you to marry me,” he said, gaining courage from her confusion. “Oh,
have I frightened you, Emmy, dearest—of course you couldn’t like me well enough for that
all in a heap—it’s different with me. I’ve always loved you, Emmy. But if you’d only think
about it.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “There’s Celeste. Oh, Archie, I don’t know, it’s all so funny. And
we’re so young. I couldn’t really tell anything about my feelings anyway—you know, I’ve
never seen anybody but you.” Then as his face clouded—“Oh, well, I guess even if I had I
wouldn’t like him any better. Yes, Celeste, we’re coming in. Archie, mother says you’re to
have dinner with us every night you’re here, if you can.”
There was no more said about the secret that Archie was keeping from Mr. Fields.
There were too many other things to talk about—reasons why he had always loved Emmy;
reasons why she couldn’t be sure just yet; reasons why, if she were sure, she couldn’t say yes.
Archie hung between high hope and despair, while Emmy, it must be confessed, enjoyed
herself, albeit innocently enough, and grew distractingly pretty. On the last day as they sat
in the sitting room, gaily recounting childish episodes, Archie suddenly asked her again. He
was so grave and serious that she really became frightened.
“Oh, Archie, I couldn’t—I don’t really want to. It’s so lovely just being a girl. I think I
do like you—of course I like you lots. But couldn’t we just be friends and keep going on—
so?”
“No,” he told her harshly, his face set and miserable; “no, we can’t. And Emmy—I’m
not coming back any more—I couldn’t stand it.” His voice broke, he was fighting to keep
back his boyish tears. After all he was only 21. “I’m sorry I troubled you,” he said proudly.
She looked at him pitifully. “I don’t want you to go away forever, Archie,” she said
tremulously. She made no effort to keep back the tears. “I’ve been so lonely this last year
since I’ve been out of school—you can’t think.”
He was down on his knees, his arms around her. “Emmy, Emmy, look up—are you cry¬
ing for me, dear? Do you want me to come back—you do—a little.” He kissed her slim fingers.
“Are you going to marry me? Look at me, Emmy—you are! Oh, Emmy, do you know
I’m—I’m going to kiss you.”
The stage came lumbering up not long afterward, and bore him away to the train—tri¬
umphant and absolutely happy.
“My heart,” sang Emmy rapturously as she ran up the broad, old-fashioned stairs to her
room—“my heart is like a singing bird.”
IV
The year that followed seemed to her perfection. Archie’s letters alone would have made
it that. Emmy was quite sure that there had never been any other letters like them. She used
to read them aloud to her mother.
Not all of them, though, for some were too precious for any eye but her own. She used
to pore over them alone in her room at night, planning to answer them with an abandon
equal to his own, but always finally evolving the same shy, almost timid epistle, which never
failed to awaken in her lover’s breast a sense equally of amusement and reverence. Her shyness
seemed to him the most exquisite thing in the world—so exquisite, indeed, that he almost
wished it would never vanish, were it not that its very disappearance would be the measure
of her trust in him. His own letters showed plainly his adoration.
Only once had a letter of his caused a fleeting pang of misapprehension. He had been
speaking of the persistent good fortune which had been his in Philadelphia.
“You can’t think how lucky I am anyway,” the letter ran on. “The other day I was standing
on the corner of fourth and Chestnut Streets at noon—you ought to see Chestnut Street at
12 o’clock, Emmy—and someone came up, looked at me and said: ‘Well, if isn’t Archie Fer¬
rers!’ And guess who it was, Emmy? Do you remember the Higginses who used to live over
in Newtown? I don’t suppose you ever knew them, only they were so queer looking that you
must recall them. They were all sorts of colors from black with ‘good’ hair to yellow with
the red, kinky kind. And then there was Maude, clearly a Higgins, and yet not looking like
any of them, you know; perfectly white, with blue eyes and fair hair. Well, this was Maude,
and, say, maybe she didn’t look good. I couldn’t tell you what she had on, but it was all right,
and I was glad to take her over to the Reading Terminal and put her on a train to New York.
“I guess you’re wondering where my luck is in all this tale, but you wait. Just as we
started up the stairs of the depot, whom should we run into but young Peter Fields, my boss’s
son and heir, you know. Really, I thought I’d faint, and then I remembered that Maude was
whiter than he in looks, and that there was nothing to give me away. He wanted to talk to
us, but I hurried her off to her train. You know, it’s a queer thing, Emmy; some girls are just
naturally born stylish. Now there are both you and Maude Higgins, brought up from little
things in a tiny inland town, and both of you able to give any of these city girls all sorts of
odds in the matter of dressing.”
Emmy put the letter down, wondering what had made her grow so cold.
“I wonder,” she mused. She turned and looked in the glass to be confronted by a charming vision, slender—and dusky.
“I am black,” she thought, “but comely.” She laughed to herself happily. “Archie loves
you, girl,” she said to the face in the glass, and put the little fear behind her. It met her insis¬
tently now and then, however, until the next week brought a letter begging her to get her
mother to bring her to Philadelphia for a week or so.
“I can’t get off till Thanksgiving, dearest, and I’m so lonely and disappointed. You know,
I had looked forward so to spending the 15th of September with you—do you remember
that date, sweetheart? I wouldn’t have you come now in all this heat—you can’t imagine how
hot Philadelphia is, Emmy—but it’s beautiful here in October. You’ll love it, Emmy. It’s
such a big city—miles and miles of long, narrow streets, rather ugly, too, but all so interesting.
You’ll like Chestnut and Market Streets, where the big shops are, and South Street, teeming
with Jews and colored people, though there are more of these last on Lombard Street. You
never dreamed of so many colored people, Emmy Carrel—or such kinds.
And then there are the parks and the theatres, and music and restaurants. And Broad
Street late at night, all silent with gold, electric lights beckoning you on for miles and miles.
Do you think your mother will let me take you out by yourself, Emmy? You’d be willing,
wouldn’t you?”
If Emmy needed more reassurance than that she received it when Archie, a month later,
met her and her mother at Broad Street station in Philadelphia. The boy was radiant. Mrs. Carrel, too, put aside her usual reticence, and the three were in fine spirits by the time they reached the rooms which Archie had procured for them on Christian Street. Once ensconced,
the older woman announced her intention of taking advantage of the stores.
“I shall be shopping practically all day,” she informed them. “I’ll be so tired in the after¬
noons and evenings, Archie, that I’ll have to get you to take my daughter off'my hands.”
Her daughter was delighted, but not more transparently so than her appointed cavalier.
He was overjoyed at the thought of playing host and of showing Emmy the delights of city
life.
“By the time I’ve finished showing you one-fifth of what I’ve planned you’ll give up the
idea of waiting ’way till next October and marry me Christmas. Say, do it anyway, Emmy,
won’t you? He waited tensely, but she only shook her head.
“Oh, I couldn’t, Archie, and anyway you must show me first your wonderful city.”
They did manage to cover a great deal of ground, though their mutual absorption made
its impression on them very doubtful. Some things though Emmy never forgot. There was
a drive one wonderful, golden October afternoon along the Wissahickon. Emmy, in her per¬
fectly correct gray suit and smart little gray hat, held the reins—in itself a sort of measure
of Archie’s devotion to her, for he was wild about horses. He sat beside her ecstatic, ringing
all the changes from a boy’s nonsense of the most mature kind of seriousness. And always
he looked at her with his passionate though reverent eyes. They were very happy.
There was some wonderful music, too, at the Academy. That was by accident though.
For they had started for the theatre—had reached there in fact. The usher was taking the
tickets.
“This way, Emmy,” said Archie. The usher looked up aimlessly, then, as his eyes traveled
from the seeming young foreigner to the colored girl beside him, he flushed a little.
“Is the young lady with you?” he whispered politely enough. But Emmy, engrossed in
a dazzling vision in a pink decollete gown, would not in any event have heard him.
“She is,” responded Archie alertly. “What’s the trouble, isn’t to-night the 17th?”
The usher passed over this question with another—who had bought the tickets? Archie
of course had, and told him so, frankly puzzled.
“I see. Well, I’m sorry,” the man said evenly, “but these seats are already occupied, and
the rest of the floor is sold out besi des. There’s a mistake somewhere. Now if you’ll take these
tickets back to the office I can promise you they’ll give you the best seats left in the balcony.”
“What’s the matter” asked Emmy, tearing her glance from the pink vision at last. “Oh,
Archie, you’re hurting my arm; don’t hold it that tight. Why—why are we going away from
the theatre? Oh, Archie, are you sick? You’re just as white!”
“There was some mistake about the tickets,” he got out, trying to keep his voice steady.
“And a fellow in the crowd gave me an awful dig just then; guess that’s why I’m pale. I’m so sorry, Emmy—I was so stupid, it’s all my fault.”
“What was the matter with the tickets?” she asked, incuriously. “That’s the BellevueStratford over there, isn’t it? Then the Academy of Music must be near here. See how fast I’m learning? Let’s go there; I’ve never heard a symphony concert. And, Archie, I’ve always heard that the best way to hear big music like that is at a distance, so get gallery tickets.”
He obeyed her, fearful that if there were any trouble this time she might hear it. Emmy enjoyed it all thoroughly, wondering a little, however, at his silence.
I guess he s tired, she thought. She would have been amazed to know his thoughts as he sat there staring moodily
at the orchestra. “This damnation color business,” he kept saying over and over.
That night as they stood in the vestibule of the Christian Street house Emmy, for the first time, volunteered him a kiss. “Such a nice, tired boy,” she said gently. Afterward he stood for a long time bareheaded on the steps looking at the closed door. Nothing he felt could crush him as much as that kiss had lifted him up.
V
Not even for lovers can a week last forever. Archie had kept till this last day what he
considered his choicest bit of exploring. This was to take Emmy down into old Philadelphia
and show her how the city had grown up from the waterfront—and by means of what tortuous
self-governing streets. It was a sight at once dear and yet painful to his methodical, mathematical mind. They had explored Dock and Beach Streets, and had got over the Shackamaxon, where he showed her Penn Treaty Park, and they had sat in the little pavilion overlooking the Delaware.
Not many colored people came through this vicinity, and the striking pair caught many
a wondering, as well as admiring, glance. They caught, too, the aimless, wandering eye of
Mr. Nicholas Fields as he lounged, comfortably smoking, on the rear of a “Gunner’s Run”
car, on his way to Shackamaxon Ferry. Something in the young fellow’s walk seemed vaguely
familiar to him, and he leaned way out toward the sidewalk to see who that he knew could
be over in this cheerless, forsaken locality.
“Gad!” he said to himself in surprise, “if it isn’t young Ferrers, with a lady, too! Hello,
why it’s a colored woman! Ain’t he a rip? Always thought he seemed too proper. Got her
dressed to death, too; so that’s how his money goes!” He dismissed the matter with a smile
and a shrug of his shoulders.
Perhaps he would never have thought of it again had not Archie, rushing into the office
a trifle late the next morning, caromed directly into him.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, receiving his clerk’s smiling apology. “What d’you mean by
knocking into anybody like that?” Mr. Fields was facetious with his favorite employees. “Evi¬
dently your Shackamaxon trip upset you a little. Where’d you get your black Venus, my boy?
I’ll bet you don’t have one cent to rub against another at the end of a month. Oh, you needn’t
get red; boys will be boys, and everyone to his taste. Clarkson,” he broke off, crossing to his
secretary, if Mr. Hunter calls me up, hold the ’phone and send over the bank for me.”
He had gone, and Archie, white now and shaken, entered his own little room. He sat
down at the desk and sank his head in his hands. It had taken a moment for the insult to
Emmy to sink in, but even when it did the thought of his own false position had held him
back. The shame of it bit into him.
"I m a coward,” he said to himself, staring miserably at the familiar wall. “I’m a wretched cad to let him think that of Emmy
purity incarnate. for the door. Emmy! And she the whitest angel that ever lived. His cowardice made him sick. “I’ll go and tell him,” he said, and started.
If you do, whispered common sense, “you’ll lose your job and then what would become
of you? After all Emmy need never know.”
But I'll always know I didn’t defend her,” he answered back silently. He's gone out to the bank anyhow,” went on the inward opposition. “What’s the use of rushing in there and telling him before the whole board of directors?”
“Well, then, when he comes back,” he capitulated, but he felt himself weaken.
But Mr. Fields didn't come back. When Mr. Hunter called him up, Clarkson connected
him with the bank, with the result that Mr. Fields left for Reading in the course of an hour.
He didn’t come back for a week.
Meanwhile Archie tasted the depths of self-abasement. “But what am I to do?” he
groaned to himself at nights. “If I tell him I’m colored he’ll kick me out, and if I go anywhere
else I’d run the same risk. If I’d only knocked him down! After all she’ll never know and I’ll
make it up to her. I’ll be so good to her—dear little Emmy! But how could I know that he
would take that view of it—beastly low mind he must have!” He colored up like a girl at the
thought of it.
He passed the week thus, alternately reviling and defending himself. He knew now
though that he would never have the courage to tell. The economy of the things he decided
was at least as important as the principle. And always he wrote to Emmy letters of such pas¬
sionate adoration that the girl for all her natural steadiness was carried off her feet.
“How he loves me,” she thought happily. “If mother is willing I believe—yes, I will—
I’ll marry him Christmas. But I won’t tell him till he comes Thanksgiving.”
When Mr. Fields came back he sent immediately for his son Peter. The two held some
rather stormy consultations, which were renewed for several days. Peter roomed in town,
while his father lived out at Chestnut Hill. Eventually Archie was sent for.
“You’re not looking very fit, my boy.” Mr. Fields greeted him kindly; “working too hard
I suppose over those specifications. Well, here’s a tonic for you. This last week has shown
me that I need someone younger than myself to take a hand in the business. I’m getting too
old or too tired or something. Anyhow I’m played out.
“I’ve tried to make this young man here,”—with an angry glance at his son—“see that
the mantle ought to fall on him, but he won’t hear of it. Says the business can stop for all
he cares; he’s got enough money anyway. Gad, in my day young men liked to work, instead
of dabbling around in this filthy social settlement business—with a lot of old maids.”
Peter smiled contentedly. “Sally in our alley, what?” he put in diabolically. The older
man glared at him, exasperated.
“Now look here, Ferrers,” he went on abruptly. “I’ve had my eye on you ever since you
first came. I don’t know a thing about you outside of Mr. Fallon’s recommendation, but I
can see you’ve got good stuff in you—and what’s more, you’re a born engineer. If you had
some money, I’d take you into partnership at once, but I believe you told me that all you had
was your salary.” Archie nodded.
“Well, now, I tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to take you in as a sort of silent
partner, teach you the business end of the concern, and in the course of a few years, place
the greater part of the management in your hands. You can see you won’t lose by it. Of
course, I’ll still be head, and after I step out Peter will take my place, though only nominally
I suppose.”
He sighed; his son’s business defection was a bitter point with him. But that imper¬
turbable young man only nodded.
“The boss guessed right the very first time,” he paraphrased cheerfully. “You bet I’ll be
head in name only. Young Ferrers, there’s just the man for the job. What d’you say, Archie?”
The latter tried to collect himself. “Of course I accept it, Mr. Fields, and I—I don’t
think you’ll ever regret it.” He actually stammered. Was there ever such wonderful luck?
“Oh, that’s all right,” Mr. Fields went on, “you wouldn’t be getting this chance if you
didn’t deserve it. See here, what about your boarding out at Chestnut Hill for a year or two?
Then I can lay my hands on you any time, and you can get hold of things that much sooner.
You live on Green Street, don’t you? Well, give your landlady a month’s notice and quit the
1st of December. A young man coming on like you ought to be thinking of a home anyway.
Can’t find some nice girl to marry you, what?”
Archie, flushing a little, acknowledged his engagement.
“Good, that’s fine!” Then with sudden recollection—“Oh, so you’re reformed. Well, I
thought you’d get over that. Can’t settle down too soon. A lot of nice little cottages out there
at Chestnut Hill. Peter, your mother says she wished you’d come out to dinner to-night. The
youngest Wilton girl is to be there, I believe. Guess that’s all for this afternoon, Ferrers.”
VI
Archie walked up Chestnut Street on air. “It’s better to be born lucky than rich,” he
reflected. “But I’ll be rich, too—and what a lot I can do for Emmy. Glad I didn’t tell Mr.
Fields now. Wonder what those ‘little cottages’ out to Chestnut Hill sell for. Emmy—” He
stopped short, struck by a sudden realization.
“Why, I must be stark staring crazy,” he said to himself, standing still right in the middle
of Chestnut Street. A stout gentleman whom his sudden stopping had seriously incommoded
gave him, as he passed by, a vicious prod with his elbow. It started him on again.
“If I hadn’t clean forgotten all about it. Oh, Lord, what am I to do? Of course Emmy
can’t go out to Chestnut hill to live—well, that would be a give-away. And he advised me
to live out there for a year or two—and he knows I’m engaged, and—now—making more
than enough money to marry on.”
He turned aimlessly down 19th Street, and spying Rittenhouse Square sat down in it.
The cutting November wind swirled brown, crackling leaves right into his face, but he never
saw one of them.
When he arose again, long after his dinner hour, he had made his decision. After all
Emmy was a sensible girl; she knew he had only his salary to depend on. And, of course, he
wouldn’t have to stay out in Chestnut Hill forever. They could buy, or perhaps—he smiled
proudly—even build now, far out in West Philadelphia, as far as possible away from Mr.
Fields. He’d just ask her to postpone their marriage—perhaps for two years. He sighed a
little, for he was very much in love.
“It seems funny that prosperity should make a fellow put off his happiness,” he thought
ruefully, swinging himself aboard a North 19th Street car.
He decided to go to Plainville and tell her about it—he could go up Saturday afternoon.
“Let’s see, I can get an express to Harrisburg, and a sleeper to Plainville, and come back
Sunday afternoon. Emmy’ll like a surprise like that.” He thought of their improvised trip
to the Academy and how she had made him buy gallery seats. “Lucky she has that little
saving streak in her. She 11 see through the whole thing like a brick.” His simile made him
smile. As soon as he reached home he scribbled her a note:
I m coming Sunday, he said briefly, “and I have something awfully important to ask you. 111 be there only from 3 to 7. ‘When Time let’s slip one little perfect hour,’ that’s that Omar thing you re always quoting, isn’t it? Well, there’ll be four perfect hours this trip.”
All the way on the slow poky local from Harrisburg he pictured her surprise. “I guess
she wont mind the postponement one bit,” he thought with a brief pang. “She never was
keen on marrying. Girls certainly are funny. Here she admits she’s in love and willing to
marry, and yet she s always hung fire about the date.” He dozed fitfully.
As a matter of fact Emmy had fixed the date. “Of course,” she said to herself happily
the something important is that he wants me to marry him right away Well, I’ll tell him
that I will, Christmas. Dear old Archie coming all this distance to ask me that. I’ll let him
beg me two or three times first, and then I’ll tell him. Won’t he be pleased? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he went down on his knees again.” She flushed a little, thinking of that first wonderful time.
“Being in love is just—dandy,” she decided. “I guess I’ll wear my red dress.”
Afterward the sight of that red dress always caused Emmy a pang of actual physical
anguish. She never saw it without seeing, too, every detail of that disastrous Sunday afternoon.
Archie had come—she had gone to the door to meet him—they had lingered happily in the
hall a few moments, and then she had brought him in to her mother and Celeste.
The old French woman had kissed him on both cheeks. “See, then it’s thou, my cherished
one!” she cried ecstatically. “How long a time it is since thou art here.”
Mrs. Carrel’s greeting, though not so demonstrative, was no less sincere, and when the
two were left to themselves “the cherished one” was radiant.
“My, but your mother can make a fellow feel welcome, Emmy. She doesn’t say much
but what she does, goes.”
Emmy smiled a little absently. The gray mist outside the somber garden, the fire crack¬
ling on the hearth and casting ruddy shadows on Archie’s hair, the very red of her dress,
Archie himself—all this was making for her a picture, which she saw repeated on endless
future Sunday afternoons in Philadelphia. She sighed contentedly.
“I’ve got something to tell you, sweetheart,” said Archie.
“It’s coming,” she thought. “Oh, isn’t it lovely! Of all the people in the world—he loves
me, loves me!” She almost missed the beginning of his story. For he was telling her of Mr.
Fields and his wonderful offer.
When she finally caught the drift of what he was saying she was vaguely disappointed.
He was talking business, in which she was really very little interested. The “saving streak”
which Archie had attributed to her was merely sporadic, and was due to a nice girl’s delicacy
at having money spent on her by a man. But, of course, she listened.
“So you see the future is practically settled—there’s only one immediate drawback,” he
said earnestly. She shut her eyes—it was coming after all.
He went on a little puzzled by her silence; “only one drawback, and that is that, of
course, we can’t be married for at least two years yet.”
Her eyes flew open. “Not marry for two years! Why—why ever not?”
Even then he might have saved the situation by telling her first of his own cruel disap¬
pointment, for her loveliness, as she sat there, all glowing red and bronze in the fire-lit dusk,
smote him very strongly.
But he only floundered on.
“Why, Emmy, of course, you can see—you’re so much darker than I—anybody can tell
at a glance what you—er—are.” He was crude, he knew it, but he couldn’t see how to help
himself. “And we’d have to live at Chestnut Hill, at first, right there near the Fields,’ and
there’d be no way with you there to keep people from knowing that I—that—oh, confound
it all—Emmy, you must understand! You don’t mind, do you? You know you never were keen
on marrying anyway. If we were both the same color—why, Emmy, what is it?
For she had risen and was looking at him as though he were someone entirely strange.
Then she turned and gazed unseeingly out the window. So that was it—the “something
important”—he was ashamed of her, of her color; he was always talking about a white man’s
chances. Why, of course, how foolish she’d been all along—how could he be white with her
at his side? And she had thought he had come to urge her to marry him at once—the sting
of it sent her head up higher. She turned and faced him, her beautiful silhouette distinctly
outlined against the gray blur of the window. She wanted to hurt him—she was quite cool
now.
“I have something to tell you, too, Archie,” she said evenly. “I’ve been meaning to tell
you for some time. It seems I’ve been making a mistake all along. I don’t really love you”—
she was surprised dully that the words didn’t choke her—“so, of course, I can’t marry. I was
wondering how I could get out of it—you can’t think how tiresome it’s all been.” She had to
stop.
He was standing, frozen, motionless like something carved.
“This seems as good an opportunity as any—oh, here’s your ring,” she finished, holding
it out to him coldly It was a beautiful diamond, small but flawless—the only thing he’d ever
gone into debt for.
The statue came to life. “Emmy you’re crazy,” he cried passionately, seizing her by the
wrist. “You’ve got the wrong idea. You think I don’t want you to marry me. What a cad you
must take me for. I only asked you to postpone it a little while, so we’d be happier afterward.
I’m doing it all for you, girl. I never dreamed—it’s preposterous, Emmy! And you can’t say
you don’t love me—that’s all nonsense!”
But she clung to her lie desperately.
“No, really Archie, I don’t love you one bit; of course I like you awfully—let go my
wrist, you can think how strong you are. I should have told you long ago, but I hadn’t the
heart—and it really was interesting.” No grand lady on the stage could have been more
detached. He should know, too, how it felt not to be wanted.
He was at her feet now, clutching desperately, as she retreated, at her dress—the red
dress she had donned so bravely. He couldn’t believe her heartlessness. “You must love me,
Emmy, and even if you don’t you must marry me anyway. Why you promised—you don’t
know what it means to me, Emmy—it’s my very life—I’ve never even dreamed of another
woman but you! Take it back, Emmy you can’t mean it.”
But she convinced him that she could. “I wish you’d stop, Archie,” she said wearily; “this
is awfully tiresome. And, anyway I think you’d better go now if you want to catch your train.”
He stumbled to his feet, the life all out of him. In the hall he turned around: “you’ll
say good-by to your mother for me,” he said mechanically. She nodded. He opened the front
door. It seemed to close of its own accord behind him.
She came back into the sitting room, wondering why the place had suddenly grown so
intolerably hot. She opened a window. From somewhere out of the gray mists came the
strains of Alice, Where Art Thou?” executed with exceeding mournfulness on an organ.
The girl listened with a curious detached intentness.
That must be Willie Holborn, ’ she thought; “no one else could play as wretchedly as that.
She crossed heavily to the armchair and flung herself in it. Her mind seemed to go on acting as though it were clockwork and she were watching it.
Once she said: “Now this, I suppose, is what they call a tragedy.” And again: “He did get down on his knees.”
VII
There was nothing detached or impersonal in Archie’s consideration of his plight. All
through the trip home, through the long days that followed and the still longer nights, he
was in torment. Again and again he went over the scene.
She was making a plaything out of me,” he chafed bitterly. “All these months she’s
een only fooling. And yet I wonder if she really meant it, if she didn’t just do it to make it
easier for me to be white. If that’s the case what an insufferable cad she must take me for. No, she couldn’t have cared for me, because if she had she’d have seen through it all right away.”
By the end of ten days he had worked himself almost into a fever. His burning face and
shaking hands made him resolve, as he dressed that morning, to ’phone the office that he
was too ill to come to work.
“And I’ll stay home and write her a letter that she’ll have to answer.” For although he
had sent her one and sometimes two letters every day ever since his return, there had been
no reply.
“She must answer that,” he said to himself at length, when the late afternoon shadows
were creeping in. He had torn up letter after letter—he had been proud and beseeching by
turns. But in this last he had laid his very heart bare.
“And if she doesn’t answer it”—it seemed to him he couldn’t face the possibility. He
was at the writing desk where her picture stood in its little silver frame. It had been there
all day. As a rule he kept it locked up, afraid of what it might reveal to his landlady’s vigilant
eye. He sat there, his head bowed over the picture, wondering dully how he should endure
his misery.
Someone touched him on the shoulder.
“Gad, boy,” said Mr. Nicholas Fields, “here I thought you were sick in bed, and come
here to find you mooning over a picture. What’s the matter? Won’t the lady have you? Let’s
see who it is that’s been breaking you up so.” Archie watched him in fascinated horror, while
he picked up the photograph and walked over to the window. As he scanned it his expression
changed.
“Oh,” he said, with a little puzzled frown and yet laughing, too, “it’s your colored lady
friend again. Won’t she let you go? That’s the way with these black women, once they get
hold of a white man—bleed ’em to death. I don’t see how you can stand them anyway; it’s
the Spanish in you, I suppose. Better get rid of her before you get married. Hello—” he
broke off.
For Archie was standing menacingly over him. “If you say another word about that girl
I’ll break every rotten bone in your body.”
“Oh, come,” said Mr. Fields, still pleasant, “isn’t that going it a little too strong? Why,
what can a woman like that mean to you?”
“She can mean,” said the other slowly, “everything that the woman who has promised
to be my wife ought to mean.” The broken engagement meant nothing in a time like this.
Mr. Fields forgot his composure. “To be your wife! Why, you idiot, you—you’d ruin
yourself—marry a Negro—have you lost your senses? Oh, I suppose it’s some of your crazy
foreign notions. In this country white gentlemen don’t marry colored women.”
Archie had not expected this loophole. He hesitated, then with a shrug he burnt all his
bridges behind him. One by one he saw his ambitions flare up and vanish.
“No, you’re right,” he rejoined. “White gentlemen don’t, but colored men do.” Then he
waited calmly for the avalanche.
It came. “You mean,” said Mr. Nicholas Fields, at first with only wonder and then with
growing suspicion in his voice, “you meant that you’re colored?” Archie nodded and watched
him turn into a maniac.
“Why, you low-lived young blackguard, you—” he swore horribly. “And you’ve let me
think all this time—” He broke off again, hunting for something insulting enough to say.
“You Nigger!” he hurled at him. He really felt there was nothing worse, so he repeated it
again and again with fresh imprecations.
“I think,” said Archie, “that that will do. I shouldn’t like to forget myself, and I’m in a pretty reckless mood to-day. You must remember, Mr. Fields, you didn’t ask me who I was, and I had no occasion to tell you. Of course I won’t come back to the office.”
“If you do,” said Mr. Fields, white to the lips, “I’ll have you locked up if I have to per¬
jure my soul to find a charge against you. I’ll show you what a white man can do—you—”
But Archie had taken him by the shoulder and pushed him outside the door.
“And that’s all right,” he said to himself with a sudden heady sense of liberty. He
surveyed himself curiously in the mirror. “Wouldn’t anybody think I had changed into some
horrible ravening beast. Lord, how that one little word changed him.” He ruminated over
the injustice—the petty, foolish injustice of the whole thing.
“I don’t believe,” he said slowly, “it’s worth while having a white man’s chances if one
has to be like that. I see what Emmy used to be driving at now.” The thought of her sobered
him.
“If it should be on account of my chances that you’re letting me go,” he assured the pic¬
ture gravely, “it’s all quite unnecessary, for I’ll never have another opportunity like that.”
In which he was quite right. It even looked as though he couldn’t get any work at all
along his own line. There was no demand for colored engineers.
“If you keep your mouth shut,” one man said, “and not let the other clerks know what
you are I might try you for awhile.” There was nothing for him to do but accept. At the end
of two weeks—the day before Thanksgiving—he found out that the men beside him, doing
exactly the same kind of work as his own, were receiving for it five dollars more a week. The
old injustice based on color had begun to hedge him in. It seemed to him that his unhappiness
and humiliation were more than he could stand.
VIII
But at least his life was occupied. Emmy, on the other hand, saw her own life stretching
out through endless vistas of empty, useless days. She grew thin and listless, all the brightness
and vividness of living toned down for her into one gray, flat monotony. By Thanksgiving
Day the strain showed its effects on her very plainly.
Her mother, who had listened to her usual silence when her daughter told her the cause
of the broken engagement, tried to help her.
“Emmy,” she said, “you’re probably doing Archie an injustice. I don’t believe he ever
dreamed of being ashamed of you. I think it is your own willful pride that is at fault. You’d
better consider carefully—if you are making a mistake you’ll regret it to the day of your death.
The sorrow of it will never leave you.”
Emmy was petulant. Oh, mother, what can you know about it? Celeste says you married
when you were young, even younger than I—married to the man you loved, and you were
with him, I suppose, till he died. You couldnt know how I feel.” She fell to staring absently
out the window. It was a long time before her mother spoke again.
“No, Emmy,” she finally began again very gravely, “I wasn’t with your father till he died.
That is why I m speaking to you as I am. I had sent him away—we had quarreled—oh, I was
passionate enough when I was your age, Emmy. He was jealous—he was a West Indian—I
suppose Celeste has told you—and one day he came past the sitting room—it was just like
this one, overlooking the garden. Well, as he glanced in the window he saw a man, a white
man, put his arms around me and kiss me. When he came in through the side door the man
had gone. J was just about to explain-no, tell him-for I didn’t know he had seen me when
he began. She paused a little, but presently went on in her even, dispassionate voice:
“He was furious, Emmy; oh, he was so angry, and he accused me—oh, my dear! He was almost insane. But it was really because he loved me. And then I became angry and I wouldn’t tell him anything. And finally, Emmy, he struck me—you mustn’t blame him, child; remember, it was the same spirit showing in both of us, in different ways. I was doing all I could to provoke him by keeping silence and he merely retaliated in his way. The blow wouldn’t have harmed a little bird. But—well, Emmy, I think I must have gone crazy. I ordered him from the house—it had been my mother’s—and I told him never, never to let me see him again.” She smiled drearily.
“I never did see him again. After he left Celeste and I packed up our things and came
here to America. You were the littlest thing, Emmy. You can’t remember living in France at
all, can you? Well, when your father found out where I was he wrote and asked me to forgive
him and to let him come back. ‘I am on my knees,’ the letter said. I wrote and told him yes—
I loved him, Emmy; oh, child, you know what love is. If you really loved Archie you’d let
him marry you and lock you off, away from all the world, just so long as you were with him.
“I was so happy,” she resumed. “I hadn’t seen him for two years. Well, he started—he
was in Hayti then; he got to New York safely and started here. There was a wreck—just a
little one—only five people killed, but he was one of them. He was so badly mangled, they
wouldn’t even let me see him.”
“Oh!” breathed Emmy. “Oh, mother!” After a long time she ventured a question. “Who
was the other man, mother?”
“The other man? Oh! That was my father; my mother’s guardian, protector, everything,
but not her husband. She was a slave, you know, in New Orleans, and he helped her to get
away. He took her to Hayti first, and then, afterward, sent her over to France, where I was
born. He never ceased in his kindness. After my mother’s death, I didn’t see him for ten
years, not till after I was married. That was the time Emile—you were named for your father,
you know—saw him kiss me. Mr. Pechegru, my father, was genuinely attached to my mother,
I think, and had come after all these years to make some reparation. It was through him I
first began translating for the publishers. You know yourself how my work has grown.”
She was quite ordinary and matter of fact again. Suddenly her manner changed.
“I lost him when I was 22. Emmy—think of it—and my life has been nothing ever
since. That’s why I want you to think—to consider—” She was weeping passionately now.
Her mother in tears! To Emmy it was as though the world lay in ruins about her feet.
IX
As it happened Mrs. Carrel’s story only plunged her daughter into deeper gloom.
“It couldn’t have happened at all if we hadn’t been colored,” she told herself moodily.
“If grandmother hadn’t been colored she wouldn’t have been a slave, and if she hadn’t been
a slave—that’s what it is, color—color—it’s wrecked mother’s life and now it’s wrecking
mine.”
She couldn’t get away from the thought of it. Archie’s words, said so long ago, came
back to her: “Just wait till color keeps you from the thing you want the most,” he had told
her.
“It must be wonderful to be white,” she said to herself, staring absently at the Stevenson
motto on the wall of her little room. She went up close and surveyed it unseeingly. “If only
I weren’t colored,” she thought. She checked herself angrily, enveloped by a sudden sense of
shame. “It doesn’t seem as though I could be the same girl.”
A thin ray of cold December sunlight picked out from the motto a little gilded phrase:
“To renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered.” She read it over and over
and smiled whimsically.
“I’ve renounced—there’s no question about that,” she thought, “but no one could expect
me not to be bitter.”
If she could just get up strength enough, she reflected, as the days passed by, she would
try to be cheerful in her mother’s presence. But it was so easy to be melancholy.
About a week before Christmas her mother went to New York. She would see her pub¬
lishers and do some shopping and would be back Christmas Eve. Emmy was really glad to
see her go.
“I’ll spend that time in getting myself together,” she told herself, “and when mother
comes back I’ll be all right.” Nevertheless, for the first few days she was, if anything, more
listless than ever. But Christmas Eve and the prospect of her mother’s return gave her a sud¬
den brace.
“Without bitterness,” she kept saying to herself, “to renounce without bitterness.” Well,
she would—she would. When her mother came back she should be astonished. She would
even wear the red dress. But the sight of it made her weak; she couldn’t put it on. But she
did dress herself very carefully in white, remembering how gay she had been last Christmas
Eve. She had put mistletoe in her hair and Archie had taken it out.
“I don’t have to have mistletoe,” he had whispered to her proudly.
In the late afternoon she ran out to Holborn’s. As she came back ’round the corner she
saw the stage drive away. Her mother, of course, had come. She ran into the sitting room
wondering why the door was closed.
“I will be all right,” she said to herself, her hand on the knob, and stepped into the
room—to walk straight into Archie’s arms.
She clung to him as though she could never let him go.
“Oh, Archie, you’ve come back, you really wanted me.”
He strained her closer. “I’ve never stopped wanting you,” he told her, his lips on her
hair.
Presently, when they were sitting by the fire, she in the armchair and he at her feet, he
began to explain. She would not listen at first, it was all her fault, she said.
“No, indeed,” he protested generously, “it was mine. I was so crude; it’s a wonder you
can care at all about anyone as stupid as I am. And I think I was too ambitious—though in
a way it was all for you, Emmy; you must always believe that. But I’m at the bottom rung
now, sweetheart; you see, I told Mr. Fields everything and—he put me out.”
Oh, Archie, she praised him, that was really noble, since you weren’t obliged to tell him.”
“Well, but in one sense I was obliged to—to keep my self-respect, you know. So there
wasn’t anything very noble about it after all.” He couldn’t tell her what had really happened.
I m genuinely poor now, dearest, but your mother sent for me to come over to New York.
She knows some pretty all-right people there—she’s a wonderful woman, Emmy—and I’m
to go out to the Philippines. Could you—do you think you could come out there, Emmy?”
She could, she assured him, go anywhere. “Only don’t let it be too long, Archie—!”
He was ecstatic. “Emmy—you—you don’t mean you would be willing to start out there
with me, do you? Why, that’s only three months off. When—” He stopped, peering out the
window. “Who is that coming up the path?”
"Willie Holborn?” said Emmy. “I suppose Mary sent him around with my present. Wait, 111 let him in.”
But it wasn’t Willie Holborn, unless he had been suddenly converted into a small and
very grubby special-delivery boy.
“Mr. A. Ferrers,” he said laconically, thrusting a book out at her. “Sign here.”
She took the letter back into the pleasant room, and A Ferrers, scanning the postmark,
tore it open. “It’s from my landlady; she’s the only person in Philadelphia who knows where
I am. Wonder what’s up?” he said incuriously. “I know I didn’t forget to pay her my bill.
Hello, what’s this?” For within was a yellow envelope—a telegram.
Together they tore it open.
Don’t be a blooming idiot, the governor says come back and receive apologies and accept
job. Merry Christmas. PETER FIELDS
“Oh,” said Emmy, “isn’t it lovely? Why does he say ‘receive apologies,’ Archie?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he quibbled, reflecting that if Peter hadn’t said just that his return
would have been as impossible as ever. “It’s just his queer way of talking. He’s the funniest
chap! Looks as though I wouldn’t have to go to the Philippines after all. But that doesn’t
alter the main question. How soon do you think you can marry me, Emmy?”
His voice was light, but his eyes—
“Well,” said Emmy bravely, “what do you think of Christmas?”
Published in The Crisis 5.2 (December 1912): 79-87; 5.3 (January 1913): 134-142