Nicholas spoke with a conviction unwarranted by his years. “I’ll never understand that.”
He was, even at eight, a popular boy, an only child of people well-established in the undertaking business. He was indulged, active and busy with school and play. But he remembered that Friday was “fish day” and that his mother sometimes bought porgies in the alley. On the next Friday he assisted again at the operation. As the man was counting out the change, Mrs. Grant (“as she calls herself,” some people said) appeared, accompanied by a wide-eyed Phebe. The parents withdrew, the children lingered.
“My name’s Phebe,” said the young lady.
“I’m Nicholas Campbell,” countered the sturdy young man. “Do you put stuff on your hair to make it look like that?”
“Oo—ooh, no!” exclaimed Miss Phebe and immediately fled.
Baffled, Nicholas returned to his back yard. Presently glancing up he perceived a gay gold head outlined against the window-pane.
“Come on down to the gate again,” he shouted. The window was gently raised and the small girl showed some inclination to parley.
“You ain’t mad, are you?”
She shook her head.
“Well, come on down to the gate again.”
Immobile she regarded him.
“Kin I come over? . . . Say! Ask your Ma, kin I come over?”
Consultation in the remote hinterland of the second story back. Then Phebe returned, her small chin not far above the window sill.
“She says you ask your Ma, kin you come over.”
Appeal was made to Nicholas’ parent. “Why, yes, I suppose so,” Mrs. Campbell was somewhat taken back at the sudden turn of affairs. “I never knew you to be interested in any little girl before, Nicky. Put on a clean collar, son, and wash your hands. . . .”
The two children advanced a few steps toward each other. “What you got to play with?” Nicky demanded. She hadn’t much,
“Well, say, you come on over to my house. I got a baseball bat and a teeter-board and some sliced animals and a bean-bag and a lot of things.
“Say, Mis’ Grant, kin she come over to my house? I’ll take care of her.”
Phebe told her mother gravely that she would like to see the sliced animals.
Nicholas, some of the new-found admiration shining in his eyes, reminded her of this as they walked home that afternoon from Marise.
“You were the funniest little girl, Phebe. Look, did you know your name meant the sun? . . . Let’s walk through the park as far as we can. . . . So you see Phebe’s just the name for you. I hope it will always shine.”
Not a bad sentiment for a boy of fourteen.
“It should have been given to Marise,” she said in all sincerity. “She’s the only one of us three I guess who’ll ever do any shining.”
“What about you? Say, Phebe, I never saw anybody dance, I never saw anybody look like you looked this afternoon. You were wonderful, you were a peach. I never saw anybody dance like that. What are you going to do, go on the stage some day?”
Phebe stared in astonishment. “Oh my, no! Not for me. I wouldn’t have—you know, Nick—I wouldn’t have the gumption to do that. I can’t push myself enough. . . . Marise now, she would be just the one. So pretty and smart and all. And she can dance and sing.”
He frowned a little, pursuing the subject, he knew not why, so intently. “She won’t have much chance, you know. I don’t think they have colored dancers on the stage much.”
“Oh but I bet they will by the time we all grow up. There’s been a few already. And I bet there’ll be oodles by the time we’re all coming along. If not, then there wouldn’t be any chance for me either.”
“Yes, there would too. You could always pass.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t want to.”
“No, I wouldn’t want to either, but what about you? Do you think it’s so great to be colored?”
“Why, I don’t think anything about it,” said Phebe, surprised. “I think it’s all right to be what you are. . . . And then anyway something we have nothing to do with settles things for you, don’t you think? Jews and colored people—they’re the people we’re always hearing about being persecuted . . . but look at the things you read about in the histories and in the newspapers. There are a lot of other people who have a terrible hard time of it too.”
“Yes, you’re right, I guess. . . . But isn’t it funny! Here you’re a white colored girl and here’s Teresa a white colored girl. And she’s half the time trying to be white and you’re always crazy about being colored.”
“I don’t think that’s Teresa’s fault, do you? That’s her mother. I don’t know why she’s like that.” She was silent a moment. Then she added, the hot blood creeping up into her face: “You know, Nicky, white people haven’t treated my mother very well. Perhaps that’s why I can’t get excited about them.”
He nodded, feeling himself suddenly very grown-up and protecting. “That’s all right, Phebe. Don’t you care.” He patted her arm boyishly. “Here we are. Gosh, I’m hungry! After all those sandwiches I ate, too! Here, let me go through your house so I won’t have to go around the block.”
“Sure, come on.” She saw him through the gate. “G’bye, Nicky; maybe I’ll see you tomorrow at Marise’s.”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’ll see me tonight. Shouldn’t wonder.”
CHAPTER IV
NOW they were all in the high school. Nicholas was almost ready to graduate. He was a year older than any of the girls. Later he would go to college and study medicine. He would do it all right there in the Old Quaker City. . . . Young Christopher Cary was to be shipped off to a preparatory school in New England. His mother’s doings; he was sure of that. She talked about his making contacts! . . . Tight-lipped but outwardly calm he talked about it to his father.
“It doesn’t make any difference whom I meet, Dad. I know there are lots of swell white guys. I’ve met plenty of them. But she can’t change me. I’m not going to be white. I’m perfectly satisfied the way I am. Dad, can’t I stay right here and go off to college somewhere else, later on?”
Dr. Cary hesitated a moment. “I’d keep you here in a moment, Chris, but your mother has set her heart on your going away. I know it won’t change you any. You’ve got too much common sense for that. . . .” He placed his hand on the lad’s shoulder. “It’s really on account of Oliver, son, that I want you to go. . . .”
“Oliver? What’s he got to do with it?”
His father consumed some time lighting a cigarette and watching the end of it deepen and glow. “You know how she is, Chris. . . . You know how she’s always been about Oliver? . . . . Well, it seems she’s set her heart on having you and Teresa go off to school. I told her I didn’t like it and when I objected she . . . er . . . well, she expressed a willingness to have Oliver come home and stay. She said she felt she had sort of neglected him and now with you two off her hands she would make it up to him. . . . Well, I thought Oliver might like that.”
“I know he would, Dad. . . . That makes it quite different. All right then, since it’s for Oliver. . . . But, Father, I want to come back to the University of Pennsylvania for college and medicine.”
“I thought you might like Harvard, but I’ll let you decide on that when you’re older.”
“Honor bright, Dad?”
“Honor bright. That’ll be entirely up to you.”
Christopher, as his father had secretly hoped, explained the matter to Teresa.
“See, Tess, it won’t be so bad; you won’t mind it so much when you think it’s for Oliver.”
His sister looked at him wanly; shook her young head. “I’m glad for Oliver, that is if she’ll really be nice to him. . . . But she won’t be, Chris, she just can’t bear any dark people . . . she simply doesn’t see them. And I think she’s mad at Oliver for being as brown as he is and daring to be her son! And he’s so crazy about her! . . . But anyway Oliver and you are boys; you can get out of it all. But I’m a girl and I
know myself, Chris. I’m not stubborn and I’m not willful. I know it’s the end of everything for me. Mother’s not going to let me rest until I’ve made some of her old ‘contacts’ that she’s always talking about. . . . I know what she’s hoping. She thinks either you or I, or both of us, will marry white; and then she’ll come and live with us.”
Christopher’s eyes showed his astonishment. “You know I never thought of that! She’ll never live with me. I’ll show her. . . . And I won’t marry any of her white girls either.”
“That’s just what I said. But she’ll keep after me. . . . Chris, do you know,” she said solemnly, “I can just feel that I’m going to be awfully unhappy. I can feel it closing in on me.”
He scoffed at her, but he was impressed.
“What nonsense! What’s closing in on you?”
“Life,” she said seriously. “I feel like a fly in a spider’s web. I know I’m going to be caught and I know I’m going to hang there. I won’t have a lot of pain. I’ll just live on stupid and dull and unable to stir. Hating everything.”
He considered this, shifting her toilet articles about on her little dressing table. “You don’t have to do everything mother says, you know. Of course you’ll have to now. But when you’re older. . . .”
“I haven’t got the stuff in me to disobey her. And Fm not smart, Christopher. . . . If I were just someone like Marise.”
“Oh, you don’t want to be like Marise . . . she’s a great girl, but not the kind of girl I’d like you to be,” said Christopher, an advocate of conservative sisters.
“I thought you liked her, Chris!”
“I do . . . sort of so-so. You know. But she ain’t the girl of my dreams, not by a long shot.”
“Well, anyway I wish I were like her and I wish I looked like her.”
“She is easy to look at, I’ll admit. . . . Brace up, sis. We’re having our hard times now. Ten years from now we’ll be on the top of the world.”
But Teresa had her own visions and they included no such lofty station.
Marise wanted to give her a farewell party. To Teresa’s immense surprise, Olivia was willing for her to go. Her mother was bland now because she was going to have matters her own way and because, according to her way of thinking, her life-long project was at last within her range of vision. Her daughter had never known her so complaisant and so beneficent. Teresa was to choose her own dress, material, and style. As a rule her mother dressed her in pastel shades with the thought that in some way this brought out every possible delicacy of coloring and even of feature; refining her and taking away every possible vestige of connection with a cruder race.
The result was that Teresa usually presented something of the personality, if not the appearance, of a mouse. The light pinks and blues and tans of her mother’s choice dulled the creaminess of her rather thick but perfect mat skin; they killed the sheen and the tone of her soft, abundant chestnut hair. In common with most girls the child felt that she needed warmth; she realized how even the sight of the glowing, gay colors adopted by Marise cheered and enlivened her. . . .
She chose then a very soft, supple silk of the shade known as burnt orange . . . the blouse was made simply with round girlish neck and baby puff sleeves. A brown velvet girdle, fine and glowing, was to surround her slender waist and for her nice narrow feet there were bronze slippers and cobwebby bronze stockings. . . . Phebe, who had a natural gift for sewing, made the dress and indeed bought her own with the money she received for it.
Teresa never forgot that evening. The time was September; the weather was soft, melancholy, wistfully sweet. The glow of the summer remained without its heat; evenings were periods of sensuous delight; the air, balmy and scented, afforded the stimulus of wine; stars, twinkling like huge fireflies, seemed as near as the lanterns in the Davies’ small but perfect backyard. . . .
Teresa knew that in appearance and feeling she was in perfect harmony with her surroundings. Her dress, said a boy, a student at the Art School in Cherry Street, was the incarnation of the season. . . . There were some small, rather hard but perfect, little flowers of the aster variety scattered about in bowls and vases. Of these young Warwick thoughtfully selected a tiny nosegay in graduated shades of gold and yellow . . . he brought them to her and fastened them into the folds of her glowing girdle. They struck an inspired note of transition between the brown of the girdle and the orange of her dress that made him for the moment surfeit with happiness.
“After I’ve had the pleasure of a couple of dances with you,” he told her gravely, “my evening will be complete. I shall just sit down and watch you and that dress until the party is over.”
Afterwards a laughing comparison with Phebe and Marise disclosed the fact that he had made somewhat similar remarks to them with regard to their dresses of white and red respectively, though he did not bring them flowers. Teresa did not mind. . . . Usually she did not even share the compliments which other girls took casually as their accepted portion.
Her joy, her increased and tingling vitality, her complete satisfaction in being openly and without apology with the people she preferred in no wise took from her that quality which she had unconsciously cultivated, of being the interested and thoughtful spectator. . . . Besides, tonight, she wanted to etch this picture on her mind. She wanted to remember this warmth and gayety and happiness; the rich mingling and contrast of coloring not only in clothing but in faces. . . .
Long afterward for no particular reason she remembered the vividness of Marise’s nut-brown skin with its hint of red on the cheek-bones beside the pale lemon-clear skin of Sylvia Raymond. For a moment her brother Christopher’s head with his extraordinarily white skin and his burnt hair was thrust between them as he engaged both girls for succeeding dances.
She danced every dance but between the lovely, lively numbers she took particular note of Phebe’s ethereal fairness with her thick straight cap of pale gold hair against the background of Nicholas Campbell’s statuesque darkness. . . .
Later on when she came to know the classics she realized that there was about him a peculiar faun-like quality that would never be held though it might be caught for a day, for a month, for a year, by a woman’s obvious devotion. . . . He would need an attraction, as errant, as willful, as pre-emptive as his own, with perhaps more deliberateness, even more selfishness behind it.
But this the young girl could not clearly foresee. . . . She only marked the happiness shining so vividly from behind Phebe’s face and personality and soul, and felt with a certain chilling knowledge about her heart that no one could both know such bliss as that and have it last.
But it was great to feel such joy as that, she reflected soberly, dancing through her second engagement with young Holland . . . a great deal better, her sadly fatalistic sensibilities told her, than to go through life drably, knowing nothing, feeling less. But on matters such as these she would not allow herself to linger.
She danced with Nicholas, surrendering herself sensuously, consciously to the male charm of him. He was the type that holds his partner lightly but firmly, so closely that a girl’s soft shoulder must know faintly the hardness of his own, the steeliness of his arm. Instead of revolving dizzily and senselessly, he partly guided her, partly drove her before him, in long forward strides, something on the order of the redowa, an older and statelier mode of dancing. . . . Something in all this of the notion of a faun pursuing a nymph, with the latter like the classic maiden of Keats’ Grecian Urn forever and tantalizingly out of his reach. Thus, unconsciously revealing, Nicholas’ manner epitomized the type his real self would be seeking. . . . Even though his head might be telling him: “Here are Happiness, Peace, Sincerity . . . here, here within your grasp! Stay with them.” . . . But he would not be able to stay.
Teresa, pursuing determinedly, even under the soft badinage of Nicholas’ charming voice, her storing up of little pictures to be reviewed another day, noticed the swift, keen look with which her hostess surveyed her chief guest,
clasped for the moment in her partner’s arms. Marise had been rather ostentatiously unobservant of Nicholas as long as he was with Phebe.
Now her manner seemed to say: “As long as I ignore this other thing it does not exist. . . . But what is this interest in someone else whom he has never noticed before?”
Teresa recalled then that in all the years she had been coming to play with Marise, never once before had she danced with Nicholas. Indeed beyond his pleasantly familiar: “Hello, Treese,” she could not recall ever having sustained any conversation with him. At the recollection of this she glanced up at him; at the moment he happened to be looking down on her with the intent, engrossed look which was as much a part of his dancing equipment as his dancing shoes.
Something in her prompted her to smile into his eyes . . . and immediately he asked her for another dance. “I think I’m engaged,” she told him sweetly, “but you may try the fourth from now and if I’m free you may have it.” . . . Promptly at the fourth he was there to claim her but she gave it to Bob Allan, who declared aggrievedly that she had cut him all evening. . . .
Nicholas gave her a look which made the blood come to her face. “I’m sorry you’re going away, Teresa,” he murmured. “We might have been great pals!”
Toward the close of the evening, things began to blur a little; she could not carry away with her all the bright, gay scene. . . . She saw Christopher for the third or fourth time dancing with Marise, a slow dreaming waltz which mysteriously they seemed to convert into a ritual more than usually sinuous and significant.
Nicholas drifted over to Phebe where she stood, all snow-white and crystal, listening to Pete Holland’s stereotyped compliments. . . . With immediate radiance and confidence she turned to meet his light touch . . . her arms went out in a touching gesture of willingness and satisfaction. . . . You knew she would have danced with him over burning plowshares. . . .
Later on there was supper . . . such salad! such sandwiches! superlative cakes! Philadelphia ice-cream—the best! slightly heady punch! . . . Someone made a speech about Teresa’s beauty and charm. . . . Someone else said she was leaving just as they were all getting to know her better. But when she came back! After all their present loss—who knew?—might be their future gain!
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