The message was from Ashley. He had been away in New Orleans. “And I came back and found that clipping. I knew you sent it. Girl, the way I’ve pursued you this day! Finally I caught up with Martha Burden, she told me where you were staying. May I come up? Be there in half an hour.”
“Not to-night, Ralph. Would you like to come to the boat to-morrow?”
“So you’re going anyhow? Bully! But not before I’ve seen you! Suppose I take you to the boat?”
“Awfully nice of you, but I’m going with my sister.”
Here Jinny in a voice full of misplaced consonants told her she was going to do nothing of the sort. “With this cold!”
Angela spoke into the receiver again. “My sister says she isn’t going, so I will fall back on you if I may.” She hung up.
Virginia wanted to hear of the trip. The two sisters sat talking far into the night, but Angela said no word about Matthew.
Monday was a day of surprises. Martha and Ladislas Starr, unable to be on hand for the sailing of the boat, came up to the house to drive down town with the departing traveller. Secretly Angela was delighted with this arrangement, but it brought a scowl to Ashley’s face.
Virginia, miserable with the wretchedness attendant on a summer cold, bore up bravely. “I don’t mind letting you go like this from the house; but I couldn’t stand the ship! Angela, you’re not to worry about me one bit. Only come back to me,—happy. I know you will. Oh how different this is from that parting years ago in Philadelphia!”
“Yes,” said Angela soberly. “Then I was to be physically ninety miles away from you, but we were really seas apart. Now—darling, three thousand miles are nothing when there is love and trust and understanding. And Jinny, listen! Life is full of surprises. If a chance for real happiness comes your way don’t be afraid to grasp at it.”
“Cryptic,” wheezed Jinny, laughing. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’ll do my best to land any happiness that comes drifting toward me.” They kissed each other gravely, almost coldly, without tears. But neither could trust herself to say the actual good-bye.
Angela was silent almost all the way down to the dock, answering her friends only in monosyllables. There, another surprise awaited her in the shape of Mrs. Denver, who remained, however, only for a few moments. “I couldn’t stand having you go,” she said pitifully, “without seeing you for one last time.” And, folding the girl in a close embrace, she broke down and murmured sadly of a lost daughter who would have been “perhaps like you, dear, had she lived.”
Elizabeth Sandburg, the gay, the complacent, the beloved of life, clung to her, weeping, “I can’t bear to lose you, Angèle.” Walter put his arm about her. “Kiss me, old girl. And mind, if you need anything, anything, you’re to call on us. If you get sick we’ll come over after you,—am I right, Lizzie?”
“Yes, of course, of course . . . and don’t call me Lizzie. . . . Come away, can’t you, and leave them a moment together. Don’t you see Ashley glaring at you?”
They withdrew to a good point of vantage on the dock.
Angela, surprised and weeping, remembering both Mrs. Denver’s words and the manifestations of kindness in her stateroom said: “They really did love me after all, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” said Ashley earnestly, “we all love you. I’m coming over to see you by and by, Angèle, may I? You know we’ve a lot of things to talk about, some things which you perhaps think mean a great deal to me but which in reality mean nothing. Then on the other hand there are some matters which actually do mean something to me but whose value to you I’m not sure of.”
“Oh,” she said, wiping her eyes and remembering her former secret. “You aren’t coming over to ask me to marry you, are you? You don’t have to do that. And anyway ‘it is not now as it hath been before’. There’s no longer a mystery about me, you know. So the real attraction’s gone. Remember, I’m not expecting a thing of you, so please, please don’t ask it. Ralph, I can’t placard myself, and I suppose there will be lots of times when in spite of myself I’ll be ‘passing’. But I want you to know that from now on, so far as sides are concerned, I am on the coloured side. And I don’t want you to come over on that side.” She shook her head finally. “Too many complications even for you.”
For though she knew he believed in his brave words, she was too sadly experienced to ask an American to put them to the test.
“All right,” he said, smiling at her naïve assumptions. “I won’t ask you to marry me,—at least not yet. But I’m coming over just the same. I don’t suppose you’ve got a lien on Paris.”
“Of course I haven’t,” she giggled a little. “You know perfectly well I want you to come.” Her face suddenly became grave. “But if you do come you won’t come to make love without meaning anything either, will you? I’d hate that between you and me.”
“No,” he said gently, instantly comprehending. “I won’t do that either.”
“You’ll come as a friend?”
“Yes, as a friend.”
A deck hand came up then and said civilly that in a few minutes they would be casting off and all visitors must go ashore.
Chapter III
AMONG her steamer-letters was a brief note from Anthony:
“Angela, my angel, my dear girl, good-bye. These last few weeks have been heaven and hell. I couldn’t bear to see you go,—so I’ve taken myself off for a few hours . . . don’t think I’ll neglect Jinny. I’ll never do that. Am I right in supposing that you still care a little? Oh Angela, try to forget me,—but don’t do it! I shall never forget you!”
There were letters and flowers from the Burdens, gifts of all sorts from Ashley and Mrs. Denver, a set of notes for each day out from Virginia. She read letters, examined her gifts and laid them aside. But all day long Anthony’s note reposed on her heart; it lay at night beneath her head.
Paris at first charmed and wooed her. For a while it seemed to her that her old sense of joy in living for living’s sake had returned to her. It was like those first few days which she had spent in exploring New York. She rode delightedly in the motor-buses on and on to the unknown, unpredictable terminus; she followed the winding Seine; crossing and re-crossing the bridges each with its distinctive characteristics. Back of the Panthéon, near the church of St. Geneviève she discovered a Russian restaurant where strange, exotic dishes were served by tall blond waiters in white, stiff Russian blouses. One day, wandering up the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse, she found at its juncture with the Boulevard Raspail the Café Dome, a student restaurant of which many returned students had spoken in the Art School in New York. On entering she was recognized almost immediately by Edith Martin, a girl who had studied with her in Philadelphia.
Miss Martin had lived in Paris two years; knew all the gossip and the characters of the Quarter; could give Angela points on pensions, cafés, tips and the Gallic disposition. On all these topics she poured out perpetually a flood of information, presented her friends, summoned the new comer constantly to her studio or camped uninvited in the other girl’s tiny quarters at the Pension Franciana. There was no chance for actual physical loneliness, yet Angela thought after a few weeks of persistent comradeship that she had never felt so lonely in her life. For the first time in her adventuresome existence she was caught up in a tide of homesickness.
Then this passed too with the summer, and she found herself by the end of September engrossed in her work. She went to the Academy twice a day, immersed herself in the atmosphere of the Louvre and the gallery of the Luxembourg. It was hard work, but gradually she schooled herself to remember that this was her life, and that her aim, her one ambition, was to become an acknowledged, a significant painter of portraits. The instructor, renowned son of a still more renowned father, almost invariably praised her efforts.
With the coming of the fall the sense of adventure left her. Paris, so beautiful in the summer, so gay with its thronging thousands, its hosts bent on pleasure, took on another garb in the sulle
n greyness of late autumn. The tourists disappeared and the hard steady grind of labour, the intent application to the business of living, so noticeable in the French, took the place of a transient, careless freedom. Angela felt herself falling into line; but it was good discipline as she herself realized. Once or twice, in periods of utter loneliness or boredom, she let her mind dwell on her curiously thwarted and twisted life. But the ability for self-pity had vanished. She had known too many others whose lives lay equally remote from goals which had at first seemed so certain. For a period she had watched feverishly for the incoming of foreign mail, sure that some word must come from Virginia about Matthew, but the months crept sullenly by and Jinny’s letters remained the same artless missives prattling of school-work, Anthony, Sara Penton, the movies and visits to Maude the inimitable.
“Of course not everything can come right,” she told herself. Matthew evidently had, on second thought, deemed it wisest to consult the evidence of his own senses rather than be guided by the hints which in the nature of things she could offer only vaguely.
Within those six months she lost forever the blind optimism of youth. She did not write Anthony nor did she hear from him.
*
Christmas Eve day dawned or rather drifted greyly into the beholder’s perception out of the black mistiness of the murky night. In spite of herself her spirits sank steadily. Virginia had promised her a present,—“I’ve looked all over this whole town,” she wrote, “to find you something good enough, something absolutely perfect. Anthony’s been helping me. And at last I’ve found it. We’ve taken every possible precaution against the interference of wind or rain or weather, and unless something absolutely unpredictable intervenes, it will be there for you Christmas Eve or possibly the day before. But remember, don’t open until Christmas.”
But it was now six o’clock on Christmas Eve and no present had come, no letter, no remembrance of any kind. “Oh,” she said to herself “what a fool I was to come so far away from home!” For a moment she envisaged the possibility of throwing herself on the bed and sobbing her heart out. Instead she remembered Edith Martin’s invitation to make a night of it over at her place, a night which was to include dancing and chaffing, a trip just before midnight to hear Mass at St. Sulpice, and a return to the studio for doubtless more dancing and jesting and laughter, and possibly drunkenness on the part of the American male.
At ten o’clock as she stood in her tiny room rather sullenly putting the last touches to her costume, the maid, Héloise, brought her a cable. It was a long message from Ashley wishing her health, happiness and offering to come over at a week’s notice. Somehow the bit of blue paper cheered her, easing her taut nerves. “Of course they’re thinking about me. I’ll hear from Jinny any moment; it’s not her fault that the delivery is late. I wonder what she sent me.”
Returning at three o’clock Christmas morning from the party she put her hand cautiously in the door to switch on the light for fear that a package lay near the threshold, but there was no package there. “Well, even if it were there I couldn’t open it,” she murmured, “for I’m too sleepy.” And indeed she had drugged herself with dancing and gaiety into an overwhelming drowsiness. Barely able to toss aside her pretty dress, she tumbled luxuriously into bed, grateful in the midst of her somnolence for the fatigue which would make her forget. . . . In what seemed to her less than an hour, she heard a tremendous knocking at the door.
“Entrez,” she called sleepily and relapsed immediately into slumber. The door, as it happened, was unlocked; she had been too fatigued to think of it the night before. Héloise stuck in a tousled head. “My God,” she told the cook afterwards, “such a time as I had to wake her! There she was asleep on both ears and the gentleman downstairs waiting!”
Angela finally opened bewildered eyes. “A gentleman,” reiterated Héloise in her staccato tongue. “He awaits you below. He says he has a present which he must put into your own hands. Will Mademoiselle then descend or shall I tell him to come back?”
“Tell him to come back,” she murmured, then opened her heavy eyes. “Is it really Christmas, Héloise? Where is the gentleman?”
“As though I had him there in my pocket,” said Héloise later in her faithful report to the cook.
But finally the message penetrated. Grasping a robe and slippers, she half leaped, half fell down the little staircase and plunged into the five foot square drawing-room. Anthony sitting on the tremendously disproportionate tan and maroon sofa rose to meet her.
His eyes on her astonished countenance, he began searching about in his pockets, slapping his vest, pulling out keys and handkerchiefs. “There ought to be a tag on me somewhere,” he remarked apologetically, “but anyhow Virginia and Matthew sent me with their love.”
CHRONOLOGY
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
NOTE ON THE TEXT
NOTES
Chronology
1919
February 17: Returning veterans of the Fifteenth Regiment of New York’s National Guard march triumphally through Harlem. February 19–21: While the Paris Peace Conference is taking place, W.E.B. Du Bois organizes Pan-African Conference in Paris, attended by fifty-seven delegates from the United States, the West Indies, Europe, and Africa; conference calls for acknowledgment and protection of the rights of Africans under colonial rule. March: Release of The Homesteader, directed and produced by self-published novelist and entrepreneur Oscar Micheaux, first feature-length film by an African American. May: Hair-care entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker dies at her estate in Irvington, New York; her daughter A’Lelia Walker assumes control of the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. May–October: In what becomes known as “the Red Summer,” racial conflicts boil over in the wake of the return of African American veterans; incidents of racial violence erupt across the United States, including outbreaks in Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; Omaha; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Knoxville; and Elaine, Arkansas. June: Marcus Garvey establishes his Black Star Line (the shipping concern will operate until 1922). July: Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die,” written in response to the summer of violence, appears in Max Eastman’s magazine The Liberator. September: Jessie Redmon Fauset joins staff of The Crisis, the literary magazine of the NAACP founded in 1910, as literary editor.
1920
January: The Brownie’s Book, a magazine for African American children, founded by W.E.B. Du Bois with Jessie Redmon Fauset and Augustus Dill, begins its run of twenty-four issues. Oscar Micheaux releases the anti-lynching film, Within Our Gates, an answer both to D. W. Griffith’s inflammatory The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the Red Summer of 1919. April: In an article in The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois writes: “A renaissance of American Negro literature is due.” August: The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), founded by Jamaican immigrant and Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, holds its first convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City, attended by some 25,000 delegates. November: James Weldon Johnson becomes executive secretary (and first black officer) of the NAACP. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” is released by Okeh Records. Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, starring Charles Gilpin, opens at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village.
Books
W.E.B. Du Bois: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (Harcourt, Brace & Howe)
Claude McKay: Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (Grant Richards)
1921
February: Max Eastman invites Claude McKay, just returned from England, to become associate editor of The Liberator. March: Harry Pace forms Black Swan Phonograph Company, one of the first black-owned record companies in Harlem; its most successful recording artist is Ethel Waters. May: Shuffle Along, a pioneering all–African American production, with book by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles and music and lyrics by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, opens on Broadway and becomes a hit. It showcases such stars as Florence Mills and Josephine Baker. June: Langston Hughes publishes his poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in The Crisis. Au
gust–September: Exhibit of African American art at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library, including work by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Meta Fuller, and Laura Wheeler Waring. December: René Maran, a native of Martinique, becomes the first black recipient of the Prix Goncourt, for his novel Batouala; soon translated into English, it will be widely discussed in the African American press.
1922
January: The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill is passed by the House of Representatives; it is subsequently blocked in the Senate. Spring: Birthright, novel of African American life by the white novelist T. S. Stribling, is published by Century Publications. (Oscar Micheaux will make two films based on the book, in 1924 and 1938.) White real estate magnate William E. Harmon establishes the Harmon Foundation to advance African American achievements.
Books
Georgia Douglas Johnson: Bronze (B. J. Brimmer)
James Weldon Johnson, editor: The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace)
Claude McKay: Harlem Shadows (Harcourt, Brace; expanded version of Spring in New Hampshire)
T. S. Stribling: Birthright (Century)
1923
January: Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, published by the National Urban League and edited by sociologist Charles S. Johnson, is founded. Claude McKay addresses the Fourth Congress of the Third International in Moscow. February: Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues” (written and originally recorded by Alberta Hunter) is released by Columbia Records and sells nearly a million copies within six months. May: Willis Richardson’s The Chip Woman, produced by the National Ethiopian Art Players, becomes the first serious play by an African American playwright to open on Broadway. June: Marcus Garvey receives a five-year sentence for mail fraud. December: Tenor Roland Hayes, having won acclaim in London as a singer of classical music, gives a concert of lieder and spirituals at Town Hall in New York. The Messenger, founded in 1917 by Asa Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen as a black trade unionist magazine with socialist sympathies, begins publishing more literary material under editorial guidance of George S. Schuyler and Theophilus Lewis.
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