Plum Bun

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  Weakly he murmured that it was foolish for them to take up each other’s time; he was going away.

  “All the more reason, then, why we should be seeing each other.”

  His glance fell on the formless sketch. “If I could only get one laugh on life. . . . When are you going to let me see you again? I’m my own man just now; my time is at your disposal.”

  The next afternoon they met outside her office building and dined together. On Friday they sailed to the Atlantic Highlands. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday flashed by, meaning nothing to either except for the few hours which they spent in each other’s company. Thursday was a slack day; she arranged her work so as to be free for the afternoon, and they passed the hurrying, glamorous hours in Van Cortlandt Park, laughing, jesting, relating old dreams, relapsing into silences more intimate than talk, blissfully aware of each other’s presence, still more throbbingly aware of a conversation held in this very Park years ago. Back again in the little hall on Jayne Street he took her in his arms and kissed her slowly, with rapture, with adoration and she returned his kisses. For a long time he held her close against his pounding heart; she opened her languid eyes to meet his burning gaze which she could feel rather than see. Slowly he took her arms from his neck, let them drop.

  “Angel, Angel, I shall love you always. Life cannot rob me of that. Good-bye, my sweetest.”

  He was lost in the shadowy night.

  The next day passed and the next. A week sped. Absolute silence. No sign of him by either word or line.

  At the end of ten days, on a never to be forgotten Sunday afternoon, she went to see him. Without conscious volition on her part she was one moment in her apartment on Jayne Street; and at the end of an hour she was pressing a button above the name Cross in a hall on One Hundred and Fourteenth Street, hearing the door click, mounting the black well of a stair-way, tapping on a door bearing the legend “Studio”.

  A listless voice said “Come in.”

  Presently the rather tall, slender young man sitting in his shirt sleeves, his back toward her, staring dejectedly but earnestly at a picture on the table before him asked: “What can I do for you?”

  The long and narrow room boasted a rather good parquet floor and a clean plain wall paper covered with unframed pictures and sketches. In one corner stood an easel; the furniture for the most part was plain but serviceable and comfortable, with the exception of an old-fashioned horse-hair sofa which Angela thought she had never seen equalled for its black shininess and its promise of stark discomfort.

  On entering the apartment she had felt perturbed, but as soon as she saw Anthony and realized that the picture at which he was gazing was an unfinished sketch of herself, her worry fled. He had asked his question without turning, so she addressed his back:

  “You can tell me where you found that terrible sofa; I had no idea there were any in existence. Thought they had died out with the Dodo.”

  The sound of her voice brought him to her side. “Angèle, tell me what are you doing here?”

  She tried to keep the light touch: “Not until you have told me about the sofa.” But his dark, tormented face and the strain under which she had been suffering for the past week broke down her defence. Swaying, she caught at his hand. “Anthony, Anthony, how could you?”

  He put his arm about her and led her to the despised sofa; looked at her moodily. “Why did you come to see me, Angèle?”

  Ordinarily she would have fenced, indulged in some fancy skirmishing; but this was no ordinary occasion; indeed in ordinary circumstances she would not have been here. She spoke gravely and proudly.

  “Because I love you. Because I think you love me.” A sudden terrible fear assailed her. “Oh, Anthony, don’t tell me you were only playing!”

  “With you? So little was I playing that the moment I began to suspect you cared,—and I never dreamed of it until that last day in the park,—I ran away from you. I knew you had so many resources; men will always adore you, want you, that I thought you’d soon forget; turn to someone else just as you had turned for a sudden whim to me from God knows how many admirers.”

  She shook her head, but she was frightened; some nameless fear knocking at her heart. “I turned to you from no one, Anthony. I’ve had only one ‘admirer’ as you call it in New York and I had long, long since ceased thinking of him. No, Anthony, I came to you because I needed you; you of all men in New York. I think in the world. And I thought you needed me.”

  They sat in silence on the terrible sofa. He seized her hand and covered it with kisses; started to take her in his arms, then let them fall in a hopeless gesture.

  “It’s no good, Angel; there’s no use trying to buck fate. Life has caught us again. What you’re talking about is absolutely impossible.”

  “What do you mean, impossible?” The little mute fear that had lain within her for a long time as a result of an earlier confidence of his bestirred itself, spoke.

  “Anthony, those men, those enemies that killed your father,—did you kill one of them?” She had her arms about him. “You know it’s nothing to me. Don’t even tell me about it. Your past belongs to you; it’s your future I’m interested in, that I want.”

  He pushed her from him, finally, even roughly. “No, I’ve never killed a man. Though I’ve wanted to. But I was a little boy when it all happened and afterwards I wouldn’t go back because of my mother.” He went over to a drawer and took out a revolver. “I’ve half a mind to kill myself now, now before I go mad thinking how I’ve broken my promise, broken it after all these years.” He looked at her wistfully, yet implacably. “I wish that I had died long before it was given to me to see that beautiful, loving look on your face change into one of hatred and dread and anger.”

  She thought he must be raving; she tried to sooth him. “Never mind, Anthony; I don’t care a rap about what you’ve done. Only tell me why do you say everything’s impossible for us? Why can’t we mean everything to each other, be married——”

  “Because I’m coloured.” In her bewildered relief she fell away from him.

  “Yes, that’s right, you damned American! I’m not fit for you to touch now, am I? It was all right as long as you thought I was a murderer, a card sharp, a criminal, but the black blood in me is a bit too much, isn’t it?” Beside himself he rushed to the windows, looked on the placid Sunday groups festooning the front steps of the brown stone houses. “What are you going to do, alarm the neighbourhood? Well, let me tell you, my girl, before they can get up here I’ll be dead.” His glance strayed to the revolver. “They’ll never catch me as they did my father.”

  It was on the point of her tongue to tell him her great secret. Her heart within her bubbled with laughter to think how quickly she could put an end to this hysteria, how she could calm this black madness which so seethed within him, poisoning the very spring of his life. But his last words turned her thoughts to something else, to another need. How he must have suffered, loving a girl who he felt sure would betray him; yet scorning to keep up the subterfuge.

  She said to him gently: “Anthony, did you think I would do that?”

  His answer revealed the unspeakable depths of his acquaintance with prejudice; his incurable cynicism. “You’re a white American. I know there’s nothing too dastardly for them to attempt where colour is involved.”

  A fantastic notion seized her. Of course she would tell him that she was coloured, that she was willing to live with coloured people. And if he needed assurance of her love, how much more fully would he believe in her when he realized that not even for the sake of the conveniences to be had by passing would she keep her association with white people secret from him. But first she must try to restore his faith in human goodness. She said to him gently: “Tell me about it, Anthony.”

  And sitting there in the ugly, tidy room in the sunshot duskiness of the early summer evening, the half-subdued noises of the street mounting up to them, he told her his story. An old story it was, but in its new setting, coup
led with the fact that Angela for years had closed her mind to the penalty which men sometimes pay for being “different”, it sounded like some unbelievable tale from the Inquisition.

  His father, John Hall, of Georgia, had been a sailor and rover, but John’s father was a well-known and capable farmer who had stayed in his little town and slowly amassed what seemed a fortune to the poor and mostly ignorant whites by whom he was surrounded. In the course of John’s wanderings he had landed at Rio de Janeiro and he had met Maria Cruz, a Brazilian with the blood of many races in her veins. She herself was apparently white, but she looked with favour on the brown, stalwart sailor, thinking nothing of his colour, which was very much the same as that of her own father. The two married and went to many countries. But finally John, wearying of his aimless life, returned to his father, arriving a month before it was time to receive the old man’s blessing and his property. Thence all his troubles. Certain white men in the neighbourhood had had their eyes turned greedily on old Anthony Hall’s possessions. His son had been a wanderer for many years; doubtless he was dead. Certainly it was not expected that he would return after all these years to his native soil; most niggers leaving the South left for ever. They knew better than to return with their uppity ways.

  Added to the signal injustice of John Hall’s return and the disappointment caused thereby, was the iniquity of his marriage to a beautiful and apparently white wife. Little Anthony could remember his father’s constant admonition to her never to leave the house; the latter had, in his sudden zeal for home, forgotten what a sojourn in Georgia could mean. But his memory was soon refreshed and he was making every effort to dispose of his new possessions without total loss. This required time and patience, but he hoped that only a few months need elapse before they might shake off the dust of this cursed hole for ever.

  “Just a little patience, Maria,” he told his lovely wife.

  But she could not understand. True, she never ventured into the town, but an infrequent visit to the little store was imperative and she did not mind an occasional admiring glance. Indeed she attributed her husband’s admonitions to his not unwelcome jealousy. Anthony, always a grave child, constituted himself her constant guardian; his father, he knew, had to be away in neighbouring townships where he was trying to put through his deal, so the little boy accompanied his silly trusting mother everywhere. When they passed a group of staring, mouthing men he contrived to hurt his finger or stub his toe so as to divert his mother’s attention. In spite of his childish subterfuges, indeed because of them, his mother attracted the notice of Tom Haley, son of the magistrate. Anthony apparently had injured his hand and his beautiful mother, bending over it with great solicitude, made a picture too charming, too challenging to be overlooked. Haley stepped forward, actually touched his cap. “Can I do anything to help you, ma’am?” She looked at him with her lovely, melting eyes, spoke in her foreign liquid voice. He was sure he had made a conquest. Afterwards, chagrined by the gibes of the bystanders who jeered at him for his courtesy to a nigger wench “for that’s all she is, John Hall’s wife”, he ground his heel in the red dust; he would show her a thing or two.

  In the hot afternoon, awakened from her siesta by a sudden knock, she came to the door, greeted her admirer of the early morning. She was not quite pleased with the look in his eyes, but she could not suspect evil. Haley, who had done some wandering on his own account and had picked up a few words of Spanish, let fall an insulting phrase or two. Amazed and angry she struck him across his face. The boy, Anthony, uneasily watching, screamed; there was a sudden tumult of voices and Haley fled, forgetting for the moment that these were Negro voices and so need not be dreaded. An old coloured man, mumbling and groaning “Gawd forgive you, Honey; we’se done fer now” guided the child and the panic-stricken mother into the swamp. And lying there hidden at night they could see the sparks and flames rising from the house and buildings, which represented the labour of Anthony Hall’s sixty years. In a sudden lull they caught the sounds of the pistol shots which riddled John Hall’s body.

  “Someone warned my father,” said Anthony Cross wearily, “but he would go home. Besides, once back in town he would have been taken anyway, perhaps mobbed and burned in the public square. They let him get into his house; he washed and dressed himself for death. Before nightfall the mob came to teach this man their opinion of a nigger who hadn’t taught his wife her duty toward white men. First they set fire to the house, then called him to the window. He stepped out on a little veranda; Haley opened fire. The body fell over the railing dead before it could touch the ground, murdered by the bullets from twenty pistols. Souvenir hunters cut off fingers, toes, his ears,—a friend of my grandfather found the body at night and buried it. They said it was unlike anything they had ever seen before, totally dehumanized. After I heard that story I was unable to sleep for nights on end. As for my mother,——’ ”

  Angela pressed his head close against her shoulder. There were no words for a thing like this, only warm human contact.

  He went on wanly. “As for my mother, she was like a madwoman. She has gone all the rest of her life haunted by a terrible fear.”

  “Of white people,” Angela supplemented softly. “Yes, I can see how she would.”

  He glanced at her sombrely. “No, of coloured people. She believes that we, particularly the dark ones, are cursed, otherwise, why should we be so abused, so hounded. Two years after my father’s death she married a white man, not an American—that was spared me,—but a German who, I believe, treats her very kindly. I was still a little boy but I begged and pleaded with her to leave the whole race alone; I told her she owed it to the memory of my father. But she only said women were poor, weak creatures; they must take protection where they could get it.”

  Horrified, mute with the tragedy of it all, she could only stare at him white-lipped.

  “Don’t ask me how I came up. Angèle, for a time I was nothing, worthless, only I have never denied my colour; I have always taken up with coloured causes. When I’ve had a special point to make I’ve allowed the world to think of me as it would but always before severing my connections I told of the black blood that was in my veins. And then it came to me that for my father’s sake I would try to make something of myself. So I sloughed off my evil ways, they had been assumed only in bravado,—and came to New York where I’ve been living quietly, I hope usefully, keeping my bitterness within myself where it could harm no one but me.

  “I made one vow and kept it,—never by any chance to allow myself to become entangled with white people; never to listen to their blandishments; always to hate them with a perfect hate. Then I met you and loved you and somehow healing began. I thought, if she loves me she’ll be willing to hear me through. And if after she hears me she is willing to take me, black blood and all,—but mind,” he interrupted himself fiercely, “I’m not ashamed of my blood. Sometimes I think it’s the leaven that will purify this Nordic people of their cruelty and their savage lust of power.”

  She ignored this. “So you were always going to tell me.”

  “Tell you? Of course I would have told you. Oh, I’m a man, Angel, with a man’s record. When I was a sailor,—there’re some pages in my life I couldn’t let your fingers touch. But that I’d have told you, it was too vital, too important. Not that I think it really means this mixture of blood, as life goes, as God meant the world to go. But here in America it could make or mar life. Of course I’d have told you.”

  Here was honour, here was a man! So would her father have been. Having found this comparison her mind sought no further.

  A deep silence descended upon them; in his case the silence of exhaustion. But Angela was thinking of his tragic life and of how completely, how surprisingly she could change it. Smiling, she spoke to him of happiness, of the glorious future. “I’ve something amazing to tell you, but I won’t spring it on you all at once. Can’t we go out to Van Cortlandt Park to-morrow evening?”

  He caught her hand. “No matt
er what in the goodness of your heart you may be planning, there is no future, none, none, Angel, for you and me. Don’t deceive yourself,—nor me. When I’m with you I forget sometimes. But this afternoon has brought it all back to me. I’ll never forget myself and my vow again.”

  A bell shrilled three, four times.

  He looked about frowning. “That’s Sanchez; he’s forgotten his key again. My dear girl, my Angel, you must go,—and you must not, must not come back. Hurry, hurry! I don’t want him to see you here.” He guided her towards the door, stemming her protestations. “I’ll write you at once, but you must go. God bless and keep you.”

  In another moment she was out in the dim hall, passing a dark, hurrying figure on the stairs. The heavy door swung silently behind her, thrusting her inexorably out into the engulfing summer night; the shabby pretentious house was again between her and Anthony with his tragic, searing past.

  Chapter V

  ALL the next day and the next she dwelt on Anthony’s story; she tried to put herself in his place, to force herself into a dim realization of the dark chamber of torture in which his mind and thoughts had dwelt for so many years. And she had added her modicum of pain, had been so unsympathetic, so unyielding; in the midst of the dull suffering, the sickness of life to which perhaps his nerves had become accustomed she had managed to inject an extra pinprick of poignancy. Oh, she would reward him for that; she would brim his loveless, cheated existence with joy and sweetness; she would cajole him into forgetting that terrible past. Some day he should say to her: “You have brought me not merely new life, but life itself.” Those former years should mean no more to him than its pre-natal existence means to a baby.

  Her fancy dwelt on, toyed with all the sweet offices of love; the delicate bondage that could knit together two persons absolutely en rapport. At the cost of every ambition which she had ever known she would make him happy. After the manner of most men his work would probably be the greatest thing in the world to him. And he should be the greatest thing in the world to her. He should be her task, her “job”, the fulfilment of her ambition. A phrase from the writings of Anatole France came drifting into her mind. “There is a technique of love.” She would discover it, employ it, not go drifting haphazardly, carelessly into this relationship. And suddenly she saw her affair with Roger in a new light; she could forgive him, she could forgive herself for that hitherto unpardonable union if through it she had come one iota nearer to the understanding and the need of Anthony.