Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  “Dad, can I depend upon you for that? What would I want with a roadster when it frightens me to run a sewing machine? And what’s more, darling, there’re a whole lot more things that she talks about which I don’t want at all.”

  Once while she was out walking in West Park with Oliver they met Phebe and Nicholas Campbell strolling across their favorite George’s Hill. Phebe, attractive in the thinnest, smartest, palest of blue summer silks, her little dark blue hat perched saucily on her head, kissed Teresa. She rested her hand lightly on Oliver’s shoulder. People looked rather curiously at the four, at the strikingly handsome young man and boy, at the blonde fairness of Phebe and her shining hair; at the quiet, poised elegance of Teresa.

  The latter, glancing at Nicholas, thought he seemed faintly annoyed at something. After his first greeting, he took Oliver by the arm and withdrew to some distance.

  “Almost,” the girl said to herself, “as though he didn’t want to be connected with us.”

  The four went, at Phebe’s invitation, to her house. She no longer lived on the back street in the rear of the Campbell family. Her mother and she now occupied a nine-room three-story dwelling on Haverford Avenue. Phebe was meeting with success!

  “Tell me about your shop,” Teresa prompted.

  “It’s all due to Mrs. Rogers,” Phebe said happily. “She really is one white woman that’s absolutely decent. She has stood back of me all this time—since, oh since you went away, Tess. . . . And of course it isn’t my shop, not yet, though I do expect to own it some day. I even have a very small part interest in it already. I’d have had more only I wanted to pay Mrs. Rogers first what I owed her. I’ve finished with that now though and I’m concentrating on this house. I do want Mother to be able pretty soon to stop work.”

  “My goodness!” Teresa exclaimed, astounded. “Why, Phebe, you’re only a little bit older than me, aren’t you? And I have never earned a cent yet. Why, you’re wonderful, wonderful! Isn’t she, Nick?”

  Nick nodded. “A bloated plutocrat, if you ask me. Rolls in wealth every day. Makes a poor medical student feel just nowhere.” But in spite of his complaint his eyes caressed her.

  “Plutocrat nothing! Of course you know, Tessa, the real plutocrat is going to be Marise?”

  “No, I didn’t know. What about Marise? I thought from something Christopher said that she was a student too, just like the rest of us.”

  “She is a student. But just by accident she got into a production of Sol Kessler’s in New York: ‘Birds of a Feather.’ The show as a whole didn’t go . . . lasted only about a month. But the part written for Marise was marvelous. . . . Nick went up to see her. . . .”

  “Chris went up too,” the young man interrupted. “I saw him there, though I didn’t get any chance to speak to him . . . Marise was so entirely surrounded by every kind of man.” Teresa thought his face clouded a little with annoyance. . . . “But there was no question about Marise’s being a whang. . . . She’s got something, that girl. . . .”

  “She certainly got two hundred perfectly good dollars a week,” Phebe interpolated gaily. . . . “And they’re writing something around her now.”

  So they were both successful, Marise and Phebe, successful each in her chosen line. But not more successful, Teresa thought with immense satisfaction, than what she herself would be. Her line was simply to be herself and to have the opportunity of making a home for Henry and Oliver.

  “I guess we’ll be hearing of all of you pretty soon,” she said generously. “Dr. Campbell, the great consultant; Madame Grant, world famous modiste; Mademoiselle Marise, scintillating stellar attraction.”

  No one would ever say any of these things about her. . . . But she didn’t want to be talked of. . . . “Come on, Oliver, Honey.”

  Phebe held them back. “After all that speech, both you and Oliver-Honey are going to stay a little while longer until I can ‘scare’ something together as Mother says. . . . Do you realize, Teresa, that I never had you in my house in the old days? . . . We were always so terribly poor. . . . I hardly ever had any company but Nick, . . . somehow I never was ashamed to be poor before him.” The love in her glance and voice shed a radiance about the simple room.

  “Oliver, tell me, what do you like most in the way of sandwiches?”

  Oliver, it turned out, was entirely catholic in the matter of food. “But I would like it if Nick would sing something for me.”

  Without a word Nicholas sat down at the old piano. He sang in a thrilling baritone and he accompanied himself. His performance, lacking the studied perfection of the professional, had about it a quality of spontaneity and assurance, adding immeasurably to its charm. He sang, at first, two or three of the popular airs of the day. Then without any warning he changed to Schubert’s Ave Maria. . . . After the strains had died away they all sat silent. . . . And suddenly, very softly, almost without volition he began in his passionate melting voice:

  “Last night I lay dreaming

  Of you, Love, lay dreaming

  • • • • •

  • • • • •

  Your soft auburn tresses

  And tender caresses

  Stilled me, and thrilled me

  And lulled me to rest. . . .”

  Teresa with almost maternal happiness had been watching the too intense rapture on Oliver’s face. . . . But when Nicholas sang

  Of you, Love, lay dreaming”

  she lost track of time and place. She saw only Henry that last night in the boat on the shores of Lake Michigan. She heard him strumming, strumming on his guitar; his gay reckless glance softened with real feeling, his young thrilling voice intoning:

  “. . . I lay dreaming

  Of you, Love, lay dreaming. . . .”

  In an ecstasy she accepted sandwiches and iced punch. But whether the food consisted of Philadelphia scrapple and boiled tea, or whether, after all, it really was nectar and ambrosia, she never knew.

  CHAPTER VII

  MOST girls think of college as an objective. It is true that they hear many times that the four years which they plan to spend there are “in preparation for the realities of life.” But such is the stress and storm and strain of the years-of high and preparatory schools before they arrive at this goal, that very few, save the clearest thinking, consider that bright and beautiful interval as anything other than a haven.

  In Teresa’s eyes it was neither preparation nor consummation. . . . It was merely an interim, to be spent by great good luck in pleasant and advantageous circumstances, until the great moment of her life should be reached.

  She was tremendously excited and happy. . . . On her way up to school she had stopped in Boston, ostensibly to visit her Grandmother Blake and her youthful Uncle David and Aunt Janet. But once there it was tremendously easy to evade them; to spend whole delightful days with Henry and more than one heavenly and blissful evening. The time like that other time, two years before when she had first left Philadelphia to go to Christie’s, was September. . . .

  The time was the same . . . but was she, could she possibly be the same girl? The weather was warm, but with the tang of a more northern zone . . . for the first time she understood what the poets meant when they spoke of the “winy” air. . . . The evenings, spent usually loafing along the Charles, were enchanted.

  Useless to tell these young lovers that such days and such nights had always existed in all ages, in all climes, for people in their glorious plight . . . these hours, they knew, had been made for them alone. . . .

  Henry knew “a fellow in Boston who had a little car.” With the free masonry of youth the car became Henry’s at any time, for any occasion which he might require it. . . . It was an awful little car, a very demon of a little car, with strange and unexpected internal failings as frequent and as current as the complaints of a hypochondriac old woman. . . . These failings were retailed by the “fellow” to Henry in very certain and lurid detail.

  But marvelously in his hands with Teresa by his side, the m
echanical little wretch gave, so it seemed to the lovers, the performance of a Hispano-Suiza. . . . With its sympathetic aid they explored the farthest reaches of Boston; they wound through and around lovely Dedham and Brook-line. On one happy, happy day it bore them to Portsmouth in New Hampshire; where they parked the car on some narrow winding lane and went by foot through the teeming streets, over a bridge, stopping to talk and plan new and ever new plans by the side of the Piscataqua out Kittery way.

  Between the memory of a week like this and the anticipation of a marriage now miraculously only twenty-one months off, “Why,” asked Teresa happily, “bother about college?”

  College of course did prove well worth bothering about. . . . And there was no homesickness, no readjustment to be experienced. That phase she had known once for all at Christie’s. The life of course was fuller, maturer, more sophisticated. Lecturers used universal terms. Their attitude was more cosmopolitan. . . .

  The student body, too, was much fuller and more varied. From association with a group composed at Christie’s only of Americans gathered, it is true, from many states, Teresa found herself rubbing shoulders with Canadian, Mexican, Russian, Italian, several Chinese and Japanese, and an occasional French or English girl.

  In spite of herself she began to be interested. At first consciously so. For must she not unfailingly be able to compose clever and sophisticated documents to send to her Henry? But later her awareness of both student and subject grew apace for the intrinsic value of each itself. . . . But she never lost completely her slight detachment from the life around her. She possessed her mother’s single-mindedness without her mother’s objective.

  And the days had to be filled in. One could not go on aimlessly from hour to hour waiting for Henry Bates to be graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for the arrival of nine P.M. on that same day. For they had decided on the very moment of their marriage! . . .

  Teresa would have sent her trunk on that morning to Henry’s parents in Chicago; she would have only a little handbag. As yet she did not know how the dates of the closing of the two schools would compare. But she meant to eschew everything and meet and marry Henry. Perhaps they would get on the train and, picking out from the window, some quaint New England town, would descend there and spend the night.

  “Only I’m not sure,” quoth Henry meditatively, “whether we’ll be able to find a hotel to take colored people or not. You never can tell, you know.”

  This was the kind of thing that her mother would hate, Teresa recalled vaguely. But she was too enthralled with the thought of herself and Henry going off alone without espionage to spend the night somewhere, anywhere. . . . People would never guess that they had just married . . . she would see to that. She would be very matter of fact and reasonable and would scold Henry quite audibly about his flannels.

  He had gone off into gales of laughter when she had told him this.

  “Men don’t wear flannels in June, darling little dumb bunny! What would you be scolding me about? For putting them on, or taking them off?”

  With such thoughts, memories, anticipations in the back of her head she went on gravely, dutifully day after day, studying her French with great care, especially and deliberately perfecting her accent. It was just before the day of Lindbergh, and Henry, she was quite sure, would be the first aviator to make the Atlantic passage. . . . They would of course visit France. He would need her as an interpreter . . . having made no secret of his own aversion to all “old foreign languages,” except Spanish, in which he really excelled.

  During these days too she began her acquaintance with the social sciences. She would, she thought, in the new free life which one day was to be hers, devote such time, as she could spare from her ministrations to Henry and Oliver, to helping people, colored people, her own people.

  She knew that at first she would be able to do very little in the way of material aid, for she and Henry would be poor. But that would make no difference for she would always be able to give them something more than that—complete sympathy, spiritual understanding. No girl, she knew, would ever be in a position, an impasse so difficult that she could not achieve a rescue.

  Once again as in those first days at Christie’s she filled her days with tasks and studies. Thanksgiving and Christmas she would spend in Boston with David and Janet in the huge house on Massachusetts Avenue. She would even contrive to meet Henry at a party. . . . He could be immediately “stricken” and his attention thereafter would be natural. She thought it best not to acquaint even her grandmother—a most understanding woman, if ever there was one—with the real state of affairs. No, it was best for this secret to belong to the two of them alone. . . .

  But there were other interests, happenings, which made her wonder what life really meant and whether her own existence was as important as she and her mother had made it appear. Sometimes she spent a week-end in the home of a school-mate with an entirely unimaginative, placid New England family who took life entirely at its face value; whose members went through the motions of living, she was convinced, in exactly the same fashion and with exactly the same set of reactions, day in and day out, three hundred and sixty-five times in a year.

  There was the strange and fascinating and bewildering experience of passing three bitter January days, after her own mid-year examinations were over, at the house of a girl whose family was devoted to the teachings of a prophet of a new, religious cult. At least it was a cult of which she herself had never heard before.

  She was staying in a little half-empty village near the town of Dover in Maine. . . . All about were leaden sky, ghostly trees and snow as dry and powdery as dust. All day long the wind blew a terrible gale. It soughed in the rattling tree-tops all night.

  Mary Giles, her hostess, lived in a great beautiful place; she was a member of a large family, with several rich and idle uncles and aunts. And all day and half of every night the entire Giles family discussed the teachings of the new cult. . . . They talked endlessly at table; over unfinished rubbers of bridge and tea in the sullen afternoons; at night before crackling fires in the big living-room.

  In addition, they discussed familiar things in a combination of which Teresa had never dreamed. Occasionally their talk made her think of some new, deeply significant and terrible version of Alice In Wonderland. . . . Someone reminded the others that nine was the perfect number; someone else passionately retorted that ten was the perfect digit since on it was based the entire decimal system and it, in turn, was based on the fact that man possessed ten fingers.

  An elderly uncle was for the abolishing of ten as a unit of measure and all for the introduction of twelve since, he reiterated a dozen times, it was divisible by three, four and six. (The girl was never able to understand why he never mentioned the figure two in this connection.) Inexplicably this led to the discussion of the measurements of the pyramids, of the solar system, of “British Israelites,” of manifestations . . . and threading in and out of the whole bewildering discussion were frequent allusions and quotations from the sayings of the great prophet.

  Through all the maddening controversy Teresa never doubted the sincerity, kindliness and honest conviction of the whole group. Amazedly she realized that the placid serenity of Mary Giles’ deportment and attitude was due to her own acceptance of these unfamiliar tenets.

  CHAPTER VIII

  HER adventure with Jarvis Seely was not so pleasant. She had met him on Saturday and Sunday over one of the February holidays. She had gone in Agatha Burton’s car to Newburyport and Jarvis had come up from Harvard with Phineas Burton to spend the same occasion. Phineas, in spite of his staid name, was without distinction or poise, a gawky, shy youth most unlike the much vaunted product of his famous school. Perhaps that was why he himself had formed such a violent attachment for Jarvis.

  Young Seely, rather short and square, gave from his very compactness an effect of steadiness and deliberateness, with, however, more than a hint of suppressed fire and emotion. . .
. Teresa had found him interesting at sight. She could not say whether or not she liked him. . . . Her complete absorption in Henry left her pretty indifferent to the good qualities of most young men. And she was no person to try her powers in useless experimentation.

  At night she danced in the square, brightly-lighted parlor with both boys; in the morning she walked with Jarvis in the direction of the harbor and, in the grey afternoon, talked with him before the cheerful fire. It was with no unfeigned surprise that she drew back startled from his ardent kiss of farewell.

  “Why, I can’t think what you mean! I’m not . . .”

  He interrupted cynically. “For Heaven’s sake don’t say you’re not that kind of a girl!”

  “Well, as it happens, that was just what I was going to say because I’m not!”

  “You’re playing a good game but I’ve met girls like you before-”

  “Then,” she interrupted angrily, “it seems to me it’s high time you had learned how to deal with them. I can’t imagine what you can be thinking about.” Turning she left him lowering before the fire.

  Agatha, to whom she related her adventure in indignant amazement, laughed and explained. “You see, he’s so beastly rich. His father is sole manufacturer of a bronzing powder, which it seems is immensely important in finishing metal articles. Your own radiator in Philadelphia is probably covered with it . . . Jarvis is the only boy in a large family of girls . . . he’s horribly spoiled . . . thinks the world is his oyster. I don’t know what Phiney sees in him.”

  To Teresa’s amazement he came over to Northampton to see her. If she had planned deliberately she could not have chosen a better attitude. She refused absolutely to be alone with him but spent the long cold afternoon at skating and hockey with a half dozen other girls and some young men who had come over from Amherst. Also she pled a previous engagement so as to avoid dinner with him. In spite of her treatment he came at least three times more and even wrote her letters in which he veiled his arrogance, though probably nothing in the world could ever conceal his assurance.