Plum Bun

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  “But you’ve got to go at once,” said Paulette, laughing but firm; “here is my friend,—isn’t she beautiful? We’ve too many things to discuss without being bothered by you.”

  “Paulette has these fits of cruelty,” said one of the three, a short, stocky fellow with an ugly, sensitive face. “She’d have made a good Nero. But anyway I’m glad I stayed long enough to see you. Don’t let her hide you from us altogether.” Another man made a civil remark; the third one standing back in the gloomy room said nothing, but the girl caught the impression of tallness and blondness and of a pair of blue eyes which stared at her intently. She felt awkward and showed it.

  “See, you’ve made her shy,” said Paulette accusingly. “I won’t bother introducing them, Angèle, you’ll meet them all too soon.” Laughing, protesting, the men filed out, and their unwilling hostess closed the door on them with sincere lack of regret. “Men,” she mused candidly. “Of course we can’t get along without them any more than they can without us, but I get tired of them,—they’re nearly all animals. I’d rather have a good woman friend any day.” She sighed with genuine sincerity. “Yet my place is always full of men. Would you rather have your chops rare or well done? I like mine cooked to a cinder.” Angela preferred hers well done. “Stay here and look around; see if I have anything to amuse you.” Catching up an apron she vanished into some smaller and darker retreat which she called her kitchen.

  The apartment consisted of the whole floor of a house on Bank Street, dark and constantly within the sound of the opening front door and the noises of the street. “But you don’t have the damned stairs when you come in late at night,” Paulette explained. The front room was, Angela supposed, the bedroom, though the only reason for this supposition was the appearance of a dressing-table and a wide, flat divan about one foot and a half from the floor, covered with black or purple velvet. The dressing table was a good piece of mahogany, but the chairs were indifferently of the kitchen variety and of the sort which, magazines affirm, may be made out of a large packing box. In the living room, where the little table was set, the same anomaly prevailed; the china was fine, even dainty, but the glasses were thick and the plating had begun to wear off the silver ware. On the other hand the pictures were unusual, none of the stereotyped things; instead Angela remarked a good copy of Breughel’s “Peasant Wedding”, the head of Bernini and two etchings whose authors she did not know. The bookcase held two paper bound volumes of the poems of Béranger and Villon and a little black worn copy of Heine. But the other books were high-brow to the point of austerity: Ely, Shaw and Strindberg.

  “Perhaps you’d like to wash your hands?” called Paulette. “There’s a bathroom down the corridor there, you can’t miss it. You may have some of my favourite lotion if you want it—up there on the shelf.” Angela washed her hands and looked up for the lotion. Her eyes opened wide in amazement. Beside the bottle stood a man’s shaving mug and brush and a case of razors.

  The meal, “for you can’t call it a dinner,” the cook remarked candidly, was a success. The chops were tender though smoky; there were spinach, potatoes, tomato and lettuce salad, rolls, coffee and cheese. Its rugged quality surprised Angela not a little; it was more a meal for a working man than for a woman, above all, a woman of the faery quality of Paulette. “I get so tired,” she said, lifting a huge mouthful, “if I don’t eat heartily; besides it ruins my temper to go hungry.” Her whole attitude toward the meal was so masculine and her appearance so daintily feminine that Angela burst out laughing, explaining with much amusement the cause of her merriment. “I hope you don’t mind,” she ended, “for of course you are conspicuously feminine. There’s nothing of the man about you.”

  To her surprise Paulette resented this last statement. “There is a great deal of the man about me. I’ve learned that a woman is a fool who lets her femininity stand in the way of what she wants. I’ve made a philosophy of it. I see what I want; I use my wiles as a woman to get it, and I employ the qualities of men, tenacity and ruthlessness, to keep it. And when I’m through with it, I throw it away just as they do. Consequently I have no regrets and no encumbrances.”

  A packet of cigarettes lay open on the table and she motioned to her friend to have one. Angela refused, and sat watching her inhale in deep respirations; she had never seen a woman more completely at ease, more assuredly mistress of herself and of her fate. When they had begun eating Paulette had poured out two cocktails, tossing hers off immediately and finishing Angela’s, too, when the latter, finding it too much like machine oil for her taste, had set it down scarcely diminished. “You’ll get used to them if you go about with these men. You’ll be drinking along with the rest of us.”

  She had practically no curiosity and on the other hand no reticences. And she had met with every conceivable experience, had visited France, Germany and Sweden; she was now contemplating a trip to Italy and might go to Russia; she would go now, in fact, if it were not that a friend of hers, Jack Hudson, was about to go there, too, and as she was on the verge of having an affair with him she thought she’d better wait. She didn’t relish the prospect of such an event in a foreign land, it put you too much at the man’s mercy. An affair, if you were going to have one, was much better conducted on your own pied à terre.

  “An affair?” gasped Angela.

  “Yes,—why, haven’t you ever had a lover?”

  “A lover?”

  “Goodness me, are you a poll parrot? Why yes, a lover. I’ve had”—she hesitated before the other’s complete amazement,—“I’ve had more than one, I can tell you.”

  “And you’ve no intention of marrying?”

  “Oh I don’t say that; but what’s the use of tying yourself up now while you’re young? And then, too, this way you don’t always have them around your feet; you can always leave them or they’ll leave you. But it’s better for you to leave them first. It insures your pride.” With her babyish face and her sweet, high voice she was like a child babbling precociously. Yet she seemed bathed in intensity. But later she began to talk of her books and of her pictures, of her work and on all these subjects she spoke with the same subdued excitement; her eyes flashed, her cheeks grew scarlet, all experience meant life to her in various manifestations. She had been on a newspaper, one of the New York dailies; she had done press-agenting. At present she was illustrating for a fashion magazine. There was no end to her versatilities.

  Angela said she must go.

  “But you’ll come again soon, won’t you, Angèle?”

  A wistfulness crept into her voice. “I do so want a woman friend. When a woman really is your friend she’s so dependable and she’s not expecting anything in return.” She saw her guest to the door. “We could have some wonderful times. Good-night, Angèle.” Like a child she lifted her face to be kissed.

  Angela’s first thought as she walked down the dark street was for the unfamiliar name by which Paulette had called her. For though she had signed herself very often as Angèle, no one as yet used it. Her old familiar formula came to her: “I wonder what she would think if she knew.” But of one thing she was sure: if Paulette had been in her place she would have acted in exactly the same way. “She would have seen what she wanted and would have taken it,” she murmured and fell to thinking of the various confidences which Paulette had bestowed upon her,—though so frank and unreserved were her remarks that “confidences” was hardly the name to apply to them. Certainly, Angela thought, she was in a new world and with new people. Beyond question some of the coloured people of her acquaintance must have lived in a manner which would not bear inspection, but she could not think of one who would thus have discussed it calmly with either friend or stranger. Wondering what it would be like to conduct oneself absolutely according to one’s own laws, she turned into the dark little vestibule on Jayne Street. As usual the Jewish girl who lived above her was standing blurred in the thick blackness of the hall, and as usual Angela did not realize this until, touching the button and turning on the li
ght, she caught sight of Miss Salting straining her face upwards to receive her lover’s kiss.

  Chapter III

  FROM the pinnacle of her satisfaction in her studies, in her new friends and in the joke which she was having upon custom and tradition she looked across the class-room at Miss Powell who preserved her attitude of dignified reserve. Angela thought she would try to break it down; on Wednesday she asked the coloured girl to have lunch with her and was pleased to have the invitation accepted. She had no intention of taking the girl up as a matter either of patronage or of loyalty. But she thought it would be nice to offer her the ordinary amenities which their common student life made natural and possible. Miss Powell it appeared ate generally in an Automat or in a cafeteria, but Angela knew of a nice tea-room. “It’s rather arty, but they do serve a good meal and it’s cheap.” Unfortunately on Wednesday she had to leave before noon; she told Miss Powell to meet her at the little restaurant. “Go in and get a table and wait for me, but I’m sure I’ll be there as soon as you will.” After all she was late, but, what was worse, she found to her dismay that Miss Powell, instead of entering the tea-room, had been awaiting her across the street. There were no tables and the two had to wait almost fifteen minutes before being served.

  “Why on earth didn’t you go in?” asked Angela a trifle impatiently, “you could have held the table.” Miss Powell answered imperturbably: “Because I didn’t know how they would receive me if I went in by myself.” Angela could not pretend to misunderstand her. “Oh, I think they would have been all right,” she murmured blushing at her stupidity. How quickly she had forgotten those fears and uncertainties. She had never experienced this sort of difficulty herself, but the certainly knew of them from Virginia and others.

  The lunch was not a particularly pleasant one. Either Miss Powell was actually dull or she had made a resolve never to let herself go in the presence of white people; perhaps she feared being misunderstood, perhaps she saw in such encounters a lurking attempt at sociological investigations; she would lend herself to no such procedure, that much was plain. Angela could feel her effort to charm, to invite confidence, glance upon and fall back from this impenetrable armour. She had been amazed to find both Paulette and Martha Burden already gaining their living by their sketches. Miss Burden indeed was a caricaturist of no mean local reputation; Anthony Cross was frankly a commercial artist, though he hoped some day to be a recognised painter of portraits. She was curious to learn of Miss Powell’s prospects. Inquiry revealed that the young lady had one secret aspiration; to win or earn enough money to go to France and then after that, she said with sudden ardour, “anything could happen”. To this end she had worked, saved, scraped, gone without pleasures and clothes. Her work was creditable, indeed above the average, but not sufficiently imbued, Angela thought, with the divine promise to warrant this sublimation of normal desires.

  Miss Powell seemed to read her thought. “And then it gives me a chance to show America that one of us can stick; that we have some idea above the ordinary humdrum of existence.”

  She made no attempt to return the luncheon but she sent Angela one day a bunch of beautiful jonquils,—and made no further attempt at friendship. To one versed in the psychology of this proud, sensitive people the reason was perfectly plain. “You’ve been awfully nice to me and I appreciate it but don’t think I’m going to thrust myself upon you. Your ways and mine lie along different paths.”

  Such contacts, such interpretations and investigations were making up her life, a life that for her was interesting and absorbing, but which had its perils and uncertainties. She had no purpose, for it was absurd for her, even with her ability, to consider Art an end. She was using it now deliberately, as she had always used it vaguely, to get in touch with interesting people and with a more attractive atmosphere. And she was spending money too fast; she had been in New York eight months, and she had already spent a thousand dollars. At this rate her little fortune which had seemed at first inexhaustible would last her less than two years; at best, eighteen months more. Then she must face,—what? Teaching again? Never, she’d had enough of that. Perhaps she could earn her living with her brush, doing menu cards, Christmas and birthday greetings, flowers, Pierrots and Pierrettes on satin pillow tops. She did not relish that. True there were the specialities of Paulette and of Martha Burden, but she lacked the deft sureness of the one and the slightly mordant philosophy underlying the work of the other. Her own speciality she felt sure lay along the line of reproducing, of interpreting on a face the emotion which lay back of that expression. She thought of her Fourteenth Street “types”,—that would be the sort of work which she would really enjoy, that and the depicting of the countenance of a purse-proud but lonely man, of the silken inanity of a society girl, of the smiling despair of a harlot. Even in her own mind she hesitated before the use of that terrible word, but association was teaching her to call a spade a spade.

  Yes, she might do worse than follow the example of Mr. Cross and become a portrait painter. But somehow she did not want to have to do this; necessity would, she was sure, spoil her touch; besides, she hated the idea of the position in which she would be placed, fearfully placating and flattering possible patrons, hurrying through with an order because she needed the cheque, accepting patronage and condescension. No, she hoped to be sought after, to have the circumstances which would permit her to pick and choose, to refuse if the whim pleased her. It should mean something to be painted by “Mory”. People would say, “I’m going to have my portrait done by ‘Mory’”. But all this would call for position, power, wealth. And again she said to herself . . . “I might marry—a white man. Marriage is the easiest way for a woman to get those things, and white men have them.” But she knew only one white man, Anthony Cross, and he would never have those qualities, at least not by his deliberate seeking. They might come eventually but only after long years. Long, long years of struggle with realities. There was a simple, genuine steadfastness in him that made her realize that he would seek for the expression of truth and of himself even at the cost of the trimmings of life. And she was ashamed, for she knew that for the vanities and gewgaws of a leisurely and irresponsible existence she would sacrifice her own talent, the integrity of her ability to interpret life, to write down a history with her brush.

  *

  Martha Burden was as strong and as pronounced a personage as Paulette; even stronger perhaps because she had the great gift of silence. Paulette, as Angela soon realized, lived in a state of constant defiance. “I don’t care what people think,” was her slogan; men and women appealed to her in proportion to the opposition which they, too, proclaimed for the established thing. Angela was surprised that she clung as persistently as she did to a friendship with a person as conventional and reactionary as herself. But Martha Burden was not like that. One could not tell whether or not she was thinking about other people’s opinions. It was probable that the other people and their attitude never entered her mind. She was cool and slightly aloof, with the coolness and aloofness of her slaty eyes and her thick, tawny hair. Neither the slatiness nor the tawniness proclaimed warmth—only depth, depth and again depth. It was impossible to realize what she would be like if impassioned or deeply stirred to anger. There would probably be something implacable, god-like about her; she would be capable of a long, slow, steady burning of passion. Few men would love Martha though many might admire her. But a man once enchanted might easily die for her.

  Angela liked her house with its simple elegance, its fine, soft curtains and steady, shaded glow of light that stood somehow for home. She liked her husband, Ladislas Starr, whom Martha produced without a shade of consciousness that this was the first intimation she had given of being married. They were strong individualists, molten and blended in a design which failed to obscure their emphatic personalities. Their apartment in the Village was large and neat and sunny; it bore no trace of palpable wealth, yet nothing conducing to comfort was lacking. Book-cases in the dining-room and l
iving-room spilled over; the Nation, the Mercury, the Crisis, a magazine of the darker races, left on the broad arm of an easy chair, mutely invited; it was late autumn, almost winter, but there were jars of fresh flowers. The bedroom where Angela went to remove her wrap was dainty and restful.

  The little gathering to which Martha had invited her was made up of members as strongly individual as the host and hostess. They were all specialists in their way, and specialists for the most part in some offshoot of a calling or movement which was itself already highly specialized. Martha presented a psychiatrist, a war correspondent,—“I’m that only when there is a war of course,” he explained to Angela’s openly respectful gaze,—a dramatist, a corporation lawyer, a white-faced, conspicuously beautiful poet with a long evasive Russian name, two press agents, a theatrical manager, an actress who played only Shakespeare rôles, a teacher of defective children and a medical student who had been a conscientious objector and had served a long time at Leavenworth. He lapsed constantly into a rapt self-communing from which he only roused himself to utter fiery tirades against the evils of society.

  In spite of their highly specialised interests they were all possessed of a common ground of knowledge in which such subjects as Russia, Consumers’ Leagues, and the coming presidential election figured most largely. There was much laughter and chaffing but no airiness, no persiflage. One of the press agents, Mrs. Cecil, entered upon a long discussion with the corporation lawyer on a Bill pending before Congress; she knew as much as he about the matter and held her own in a long and almost bitter argument which only the coming of refreshments broke up.