Plum Bun

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  “Made her marry him,—didn’t she want him?”

  “Yes, she wanted him all right, but she doesn’t believe in marriage. She’s got the courage of her convictions, that girl. Why actually she lived with Starr two years while I was away doing Europe. When I came back and found out what had happened I told Starr I’d beat him into pulp if he didn’t turn around and make good.”

  “But why the violence? Didn’t he want to?”

  “Yes, only,” he remembered suddenly his own hopes, “not every man is capable of appreciating a woman who breaks through the conventions for him. Some men mistake it for cheapness but others see it for what it is and love more deeply and gratefully.” Softly, lingeringly he touched the soft hair shadowing her averted cheek. “I’m one of those others, Angèle.”

  She wanted to say: “But why shouldn’t we marry? Why not make me safe as well as Martha?” But again her pride intervened. Instead she remarked that Martha did not seem always happy.

  “No, well that’s because she’s got this fool idea of hers that now that they are bound the spontaneity is lacking. She wants to give without being obliged to give; to take because she chooses and not because she’s supposed to. Oh she’s as true as steel and the best fighter in a cause, but I’ve no doubt but that she leads old Starr a life with her temperament.”

  Angela thought that there were probably two sides to this possibility. A little breathlessly she asked Roger if he knew Anthony Cross.

  “Cross, Cross! A sallow, rather thin fellow? I think I saw him once or twice at Paulette’s. No, I don’t really know him. A sullen, brooding sort of chap I should say. Frightfully self-absorbed and all that.”

  For some reason a little resentment sprang up in her. Anthony might brood, but his life had been lived on dark, troublesome lines that invited brooding; he had never known the broad, golden highway of Roger’s existence. And anyway she did not believe, if Martha Burden had been Anthony’s lifelong friend, almost his sister, that he would have told his sweetheart or his wife either of those difficult passages in her life. Well, she would have to teach Roger many things. Aloud she spoke of Carlotta Parks.

  “She’s an interesting type. Tell me about her.”

  But Roger said rather shortly that there was nothing to tell. “Just a good-hearted, high-spirited kid, that’s all, who lets the whole world know her feelings.”

  *

  According to Paulette there was more than this to be told about Miss Parks. “I don’t know her myself, not being a member of that crowd. But I’ve always heard that she and Roger were childhood sweethearts, only they’ve just not pulled it off. Carlotta’s family is as old as his. Her people have always been statesmen, her father’s in the Senate. I don’t think they have much money now. But the main thing is she pleases old man Fielding. Nothing would give him more pleasure than to see Carlotta Roger’s wife. I may be mistaken, but I think nothing would give Carlotta more pleasure either.”

  “Doesn’t he care for her?” Queer how her heart tightened, listening for the answer.

  “Yes, but she likes him too much and shows it. So he thinks he doesn’t want her. Roger will never want any woman who comes at his first call. Don’t you hate that sort of man? They are really the easiest to catch; all you’ve got to do provided they’re attracted at all, is to give one inviting glance and then keep steadily retreating. And they’ll come—like Bo Peep’s sheep. But I don’t want a man like that; he’d cramp my style. His impudence, expecting a woman to repress or evoke her emotions just as he wants them! Hasn’t a woman as much right to feel as a man and to feel first? Never mind, some woman is going to ‘get’ Roger yet. He doesn’t think it possible because he has wealth and position. He’ll be glad to come running to Carlotta then. I don’t care very much for her,—she’s a little too loud for me,” objected the demure and conservative Miss Lister, “but I do think she likes Roger for himself and not for what he can give her!”

  Undoubtedly this bit of knowledge lent a new aspect; the adventure began to take on fresh interest. Everything seemed to be playing into her hands. Roger’s interest and longing were certainly undiminished. Martha Burden’s advice, confirmed by Paulette’s disclosure, was bound to bring results. She had only to “keep retreating”.

  But there was one enemy with whom she had never thought to reckon, she had never counted on the treachery of the forces of nature; she had never dreamed of the unaccountable weakening of those forces within. Her weapons were those furnished by the conventions but her fight was against conditions; impulses, yearnings which antedated both those weapons and the conventions which furnished them. Insensibly she began to see in Roger something more than a golden way out of her material difficulties; he was becoming more than a means through which she should be admitted to the elect of the world for whom all things are made. Before her eyes he was changing to the one individual who was kindest, most thoughtful of her, the one whose presence brought warmth and assurance. Furthermore, his constant attention, flatteries and caresses were producing their inevitable effect. She was naturally cold; unlike Paulette, she was a woman who would experience the grand passion only once, perhaps twice, in her life and she would always have to be kindled from without; in the last analysis her purity was a matter not of morals, nor of religion, nor of racial pride; it was a matter of fastidiousness. Bit by bit Roger had forced his way closer and closer into the affairs of her life, and his proximity had not offended that fastidiousness. Gradually his demands seemed to her to represent a very natural and beautiful impulse; his arguments and illustrations began to bear fruit; the conventions instead of showing in her eyes as the codified wisdom based on the experiences of countless generations of men and women, seemed to her prudish and unnecessary. Finally her attitude reduced itself to this: she would have none of the relationship which Roger urged so insistently, not because according to all the training which she had ever received, it was unlawful, but because viewed in the light of the great battle which she was waging for pleasure, protection and power, it was inexpedient.

  The summer and the early fall had passed. A cold, rainy autumn was closing in; the disagreeable weather made motoring almost impossible. There were always the theatres and the cabarets, but Roger professed himself as happy nowhere else but at her fireside. And she loved to have him there, tall and strong and beautiful, sometimes radiant with hope, at others sulking with the assurance of defeat. He came in one day ostensibly to have tea with her; he had an important engagement for the evening but he could not let the day pass without seeing her. Angela was tired and a little dispirited. Jinny had sold the house and had sent her twelve hundred dollars as her share, but the original three thousand was almost dissipated. She must not touch this new gift from heaven; her goal was no nearer; the unwelcome possibility of teaching, on the contrary, was constantly before her. Moreover, she was at last realising the danger of this constant proximity, she was appalled by her thoughts and longings. Upon her a great fear was creeping not only of Roger but of herself.

  Always watchful, he quickly divined her distrait mood, resolved to try its possibilities for himself. In a tense silence they drank their tea and sat gazing at the leaping, golden flames. The sullen night closed in. Angela reminded him presently that he must go but on he sat and on. At eight o’clock she reminded him again; he took out his watch and looked at it indifferently. “It’s too late for me to keep it now, besides I don’t want to go. Angèle be kind, don’t send me away.”

  “But you’ve had no dinner.”

  “Nor you either. I’m like the beasts of the field keeping you like this. Shall we go out somewhere?” But she was languid; she did not want to stir from the warm hearth out into the chilly night.

  “No, I don’t want to go. But you go, Roger. I can find something here in the house for myself, but there’s not a thing for you. I hate to be so inhospitable.”

  “Tell you what, suppose I go around to one of these delicatessens and get something. Too tired to fix up a picnic lunch?”<
br />
  In half an hour he returned, soaked. “It’s raining in torrents! Why I never saw such a night!” He shook himself, spattering rain-drops all over the tiny apartment.

  “Roger! You’ll have to take off your coat!”

  He sat in his shirt-sleeves before the fire, his hair curling and damp, his head on his hand. He looked so like a little boy that her heart shook within her. Turning he caught the expression in her eyes, sprang towards her. “Angèle you know, you know you like me a little!”

  “I like you a very great deal.” He put his arm about her, kissed her; her very bones turned to water. She freed herself, finding an excuse to go into the kitchenette. But he came and stood towering over her in the doorway, his eyes on her every motion. They ate the meal, a good one, almost as silently as they had drunk the tea; a terrible awareness of each other’s presence was upon them, the air was charged with passion. Outside the rain and wind beat and screamed.

  “It’s a terrible night,” she said, but he made no reply. She said again, “Roger, it’s getting late, you must go home.” Very reluctantly then, his eyes still on hers, he rose to his feet, got into his overcoat and, hat in hand, stooped to kiss her good-night. His arm stole about her, holding her close against him. She could feel him trembling, she was trembling herself. Another second and the door had closed behind him.

  Alone, she sat looking at the fire and thinking: “This is awful. I don’t believe anything is going to come of this. I believe I’ll send him a note to-morrow and tell him not to come any more.”

  Someone tapped on the door; astonished that a caller should appear at such an hour, but not afraid, she opened it. It was Roger. He came striding into the room, flinging off his wet coat, and yet almost simultaneously catching her up in his arms. “It’s such a terrible night, Angèle; you can’t send me out in it. Why should I go when the fire is here and you, so warm and soft and sweet!”

  All her strength left her; she could not even struggle, could not speak. He swept her up in his arms, cradling her in them like a baby with her face beneath his own. “You know that we were meant for each other, that we belong to each other!”

  A terrible lassitude enveloped her out of which she heard herself panting: “Roger, Roger let me go! Oh, Roger, must it be like this? Can’t it be any other way?”

  And from a great distance she heard his voice breaking, pleading, promising: “Everything will be all right, darling, darling. I swear it. Only trust me, trust me!”

  Life rushed by on a great, surging tide. She could not tell whether she was utterly happy or utterly miserable. All that she could do was to feel; feel that she was Roger’s totally. Her whole being turned toward him as a flower to the sun. Without him life meant nothing; with him it was everything. For the time being she was nothing but emotion; he was amazed himself at the depth of feeling which he had aroused in her.

  Now for the first time she felt possessive; she found herself deeply interested in Roger’s welfare because, she thought, he was hers and she could not endure having a possession whose qualities were unknown. She was not curious about his money nor his business affairs but she thirsted to know how his time away from her was spent, whom he saw, what other places he frequented. Not that she begrudged him a moment away from her side, but she must be able to account for that moment.

  Yet if she felt possessive of him her feeling also recognized his complete absorption of her, so completely, so exhaustively did his life seem to envelop hers. For a while his wishes, his pleasure were the end and aim of her existence; she told herself with a slight tendency toward self-mockery that this was the explanation of being, of her being; that men had other aims, other uses but that the sole excuse for being a woman was to be just that,—a woman. Forgotten were her ideals about her Art; her ambition to hold a salon; her desire to help other people; even her intention of marrying in order to secure her future. Only something quite outside herself, something watchful, proud, remote from the passion and rapture which flamed within her, kept her free and independent. She would not accept money, she would not move to the apartment on Seventy-second Street; she still refused gifts so ornate that they were practically bribes. She made no explanations to Roger, but he knew and she knew too that her surrender was made out of the lavish fullness and generosity of her heart; there was no calculation back of it; if this were free love the freedom was the quality to be stressed rather than the emotion.

  Sometimes, in her inchoate, wordless intensity of feeling which she took for happiness, she paused to take stock of that other life, those other lives which once she had known; that life which had been hers when she had first come to New York before she had gone to Cooper Union, in those days when she had patrolled Fourteenth Street and had sauntered through Union Square. And that other life which she knew in Opal Street,—æons ago, almost in another existence. She passed easily over those first few months in New York because even then she had been approaching a threshold, getting ready to enter on a new, undreamed of phase of being. But sometimes at night she lay for hours thinking over her restless, yearning childhood, her fruitless days at the Academy, the abortive wooing of Matthew Henson. The Hensons, the Hallowells, Hetty Daniels,—Jinny! How far now she was beyond their pale! Before her rose the eager, starved face of Hetty Daniels; now she herself was cognizant of phases of life for which Hetty longed but so contemned. Angela could imagine the envy back of the tone in which Hetty, had she but known it, would have expressed her disapproval of her former charge’s manner of living. “Mattie Murray’s girl, Angela, has gone straight to the bad; she’s living a life of sin with some man in New York.” And then the final, blasting indictment. “He’s a white man, too. Can you beat that?”

  Chapter III

  ROGER’S father, it appeared, had been greatly pleased with his son’s management of the saw-mills in Georgia; as a result he was making more and more demands on his time. And the younger man half through pride, half through that steady determination never to offend his father, was always ready to do his bidding. Angela liked and appreciated her lover’s filial attitude, but even in the period of her warmest interest she resented, secretly despised, this tendency to dependence. He was young, superbly trained; he had the gift of forming friendships whose strength rested on his own personality, yet he distrusted too much his own powers or else he was lazy—Angela could never determine which. During this phase of their acquaintanceship she was never sure that she loved him, but she was positive that if at this time he had been willing to fling aside his obsequious deference to his father’s money and had said to her: “Angèle, if you’ll help me, we’ll build up a life, a fortune of our own,” she would have adored him.

  Her strong, independent nature, buffeted and sickened and strengthened by the constant attrition of colour prejudice, was unable to visualise or to pardon the frame of mind which kept Roger from joining battle with life when the odds were already so overwhelmingly in his favour. Alone, possessed of a handicap which if guessed at would have been as disabling as a game leg or an atrophied body, she had dared enter the lists. And she was well on the way to winning a victory. It was to cost her, she was beginning to realize, more than she had anticipated. But having entered she was not one to draw back,—unless indeed she changed her goal. Hers was a curious mixture of materialism and hedonism, and at this moment the latter quality was uppermost in her life. But she supposed that in some vague future she and Roger would marry. His ardour rendered her complacent.

  But she was not conscious of any of these inner conflicts and criticisms; she was too happy. Now she was adopting a curious detachment toward life tempered by a faint cynicism,—a detachment which enabled her to say to herself: “Rules are for ordinary people but not for me.” She remembered a verse from a poet, a coloured woman about whom she had often wondered. The lines ran:

  “The strong demand, contend, prevail.

  The beggar is a fool!”

  She would never be a beggar. She would ask no further counsel nor advice of anyo
ne. She had been lucky thus far in seeking advice only from Paulette and Martha Burden, two people of markedly independent methods of thought and action. They had never held her back. Now she would no longer consult even them. She would live her life as an individualist, to suit herself without regard for the conventions and established ways of life. Her native fastidiousness, she was sure, would keep her from becoming an offence in her own eyes.

  In spite of her increasing self-confidence and self-sufficiency Roger’s frequent absences left her lonely. Almost then, without any conscious planning on her part, she began to work at her art with growing vigour and interest. She was gaining in assurance; her technique showed an increased mastery, above all she had gained in the power to compose, a certain sympathy, a breadth of comprehension, the manifestation of that ability to interpret which she had long suspected lay within her, lent themselves to her hand. Mr. Paget, the instructor, spoke of her paintings with increased respect; the attention of visitors was directed thereto. Martha Burden and even Paulette, in the intervals of her ecstatic preparations, admitted her to the freemasonry of their own assured standing. Anthony Cross reminded her of the possibilities for American students at Fontainebleau. But she only smiled wisely; she would have no need of such study, but she hoped with all her heart that Miss Powell would be the recipient of a prize which would enable her to attend there.

  “If she isn’t,” she promised herself, “I’ll make Roger give her her expenses. I’d be willing to take the money from him for that.”

  To her great surprise her other interest besides her painting lay in visiting Jinny. If anyone had asked her if she were satisfied with her own life, her reply would have been an instant affirmative. But she did not want such a life for her sister. For Virginia there must be no risks, no secrets, no irregularities. Her efforts to find out how her sister spent her free hours amazed herself; their fruitlessness filled her with a constant irritation which Virginia showed no inclination to allay. The younger girl had passed her examination and had been appointed; she was a successful and enthusiastic teacher; this much Angela knew, but beyond this nothing. She gathered that Virginia spent a good deal of time with a happy, intelligent, rather independent group of young coloured men and women; there was talk occasionally of the theatre, of a dance, of small clubs, of hikes, of classes at Columbia or at New York City College. Angela even met a gay, laughing party, consisting of Virginia and her friends en route to Brooklyn, she had been later informed briefly. The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist’s eye noted, were gay, vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless. Angela began tardily to recognize that her sister had made her way into that curious, limited, yet shifting class of the “best” coloured people; the old Philadelphia phrase came drifting back to her, “people that you know.” She was amazed at some of the names which Virginia let drop from her lips in her infrequent and laconic descriptions of certain evenings which she had spent in the home of Van Meier, a great coloured American, a littérateur, a fearless and dauntless apostle of the rights of man; his name was known, Martha Burden had assured her, on both sides of the water.