Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  If he could only sail before his mother came home . . . how wonderful it would be to pass her somewhere on the sea; to know that he need never see her again! . . . But he would have to wait and see his father. If he’d had enough money to pay his passage he would have bought his ticket immediately. But all his resources, even the two dollars which Christopher owed him, would net him only eight dollars.

  Christopher could not understand what had happened to him. At first he was greatly worried but finally in the face of the younger boy’s repeated denials, he concluded that his abstractedness, his quietness were due either to unanticipated fatigue after a strenuous summer, or, much more likely, to interest in some secret artistic composition. As far as he could see the boy ate, studied and practiced with accustomed regularity. Perhaps he did spend a little more time out walking in the Park. But he had always been conspicuously fond of that district.

  Teresa’s letter came in the last mail of a Saturday afternoon, on the day on which Dr. Cary and Olivia were expected home. Quickly he put the rather thin envelope in his pocket and went up to his room. . . . His breath came short and fast . . . he had not known how much he was depending on this. . . . But of course she would want him to come.

  His eyes ran quickly over her first phrases, her delight in his letter, the briefness of this reply because she wanted to catch a certain boat. Then she wrote:

  “Darling, I’m so sorry I can’t do what you want. It is a little early to be talking in this way . . . so soon . . . and I don’t want you to tell Father. . . . But I’m afraid my marriage is going to be different from what I had expected. Perhaps no marriage is what one thinks it is going to be. But you can’t understand that yet. . . .

  “The funny thing is, Oliver, that even before I received your letter I had begun to cast about for ways and means of bringing you over here . . . we could have enjoyed life here so much together. But the one thing that I never meant to come between you and me prevents it. . . .

  “I have been so foolish. I might have foreseen it. Oliver, my husband doesn’t know I’m colored. Perhaps I might have got around that. But just the other day he talked to me very bitterly about people of mixed blood, especially Americans. So, darling, you see with your tell-tale color . . .”

  He let the letter drop. . . .

  She went on to say many things about the future . . . perhaps he could come, when older, to Paris and she could go to visit him . . . perhaps later on she would return to United States . . . and never go back. Surely God would not hold her forever to her mistake.

  He read none of it. Instead he took out his mother’s letter which he had never returned. She too had spoken of his color . . . she had said “Oliver and his unfortunate color.”

  With cold hands he laid the two letters together on the bureau. Then he looked in the mirror. . . . With one chill finger he touched his beautiful, golden skin. No, certainly it wasn’t ugly. His eye, trained to the recognition of loveliness, told him that it was much more beautiful than the pinkish, yellowed, grayish or drab skins by which he was usually surrounded. Yet it had kept him from the enjoyment of that most ordinary and universal possession, a mother’s tenderness. . . . It had separated him from his sister.

  Teresa had failed him! His faith in all that was good in the world lay dead within him.

  After a while he walked over to the window and looked down on his beloved garden. It lay, as it did two weeks ago, bathed in the gold of the sun, chilly now and without heat. Above it hung no haze, but a very clear unclouded light. . . . Its loveliness left him untouched. . . . He turned his gaze within, but his eyes met the soft, mute regard of his cherished trappings without delight. For a moment he sat in the big arm-chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees. . . . There was something he meant to do. When he could collect his thoughts, he would remember. . . .

  At last, with a smile, he rose, crossed over to his chiffonier and took out the pistol with which he had done his target practice this summer. . . . He would like to fall by the window, he thought. . . . Christopher, running up, as he heard the shot, found him lying there, the light of the declining day athwart his smiling face.

  V

  PHEBE’S ACT

  CHAPTER I

  ON THE corner of Thirteenth and Spruce Streets stood Llewellyn Nash. A tall, rather drooping, excessively slender young man of perhaps twenty-eight, he seemed to dominate the place. In his very white, aristocratic countenance his thin lips were twisted in a slightly sardonic smile of intense amusement, directed toward himself. . . . He was a great believer in class-distinctions; he was firmly convinced that certain people in the world were born to serve; others as definitely born to rule. Heir to what he considered a small but completely adequate fortune, he was stubbornly convinced that even if his money should vanish he would still be a superior person—entitled to the best consideration. Which might easily have been true.

  Hence his amusement that he, with these convictions, should yet be attracted to a little sewing-girl. “If I were a hero in an English novel,” he said to himself, still smiling, “I should be calling her ‘a little milliner.’” He had been waiting for Phebe fifteen minutes. . . . But that was his own fault . . . he knew she could not be there so early. It was just that his eagerness to see her thus impelled him.

  Leaning negligently on his slight stick, smoking his specially-made cigarette, he reviewed his meeting with the girl. With his cousin Aline Disston, he had visited the small, dainty, intensely feminine shop on Walnut Street. And Phebe had waited on them. She had come forward, exquisite in an appealing blue frock, her bright fair hair a trifle blown, as though she had been walking in the wind. Nash considered her small white face with its deep blue eyes and its air of contentment; its anticipation of happiness.

  “Gosh,” he thought, “I had forgotten a girl could look like that!”

  In the street Aline turned her sparkling, slightly hard face toward him. “Wasn’t she a picture, Llew? . . . That’s why I never let myself fall in love with you. I know I couldn’t compete with newcomers fresh and fair. If she belonged to our set I’ve an idea that even now I’d be walking up Walnut Street by myself.”

  His gallant smile, his gallant voice reassured her. “You’d never be walking up Walnut Street by yourself in any circumstances unless you wanted it.”

  To his surprise the image of Phebe remained with him. In less than two weeks he was back in the shop. Phebe came to meet him. . . . His cousin, Miss Disston, with whom he had visited the store recently had dropped somewhere an imported handkerchief.

  “Do you remember Miss Disston . . . Miss . er. . . .”

  “Grant,” said Phebe succinctly, recognizing the ruse for what it was.

  “Grant!” he echoed, quick to seize the opening. “Any relation to the Grant of screen fame?”

  “Not a bit,” she laughed. “I’m thinking of having a card printed to that effect to hand to young men like you.”

  “They ask you that question often, then?”

  “Always. . . . I’m sorry, Mr. Disston, but I haven’t seen your cousin’s handkerchief.”

  “My name is Llewellyn Nash. . . . You have some very nice handkerchiefs here. . . . Could you spare time to help me select some?”

  “I should say so.”

  The next day he was back. “Did you lose something else?” Phebe asked wickedly.

  In spite of his worldliness, his insouciance, he had the grace to flush a little. “No, no, not at all, Miss Grant. But I lost something—my manners. I forgot to thank you for the time and patience which you spent on my simple purchase. I was wondering if I could make some slight return . . . if I could give you a lift in the evenings when you leave the shop . . .” Her expression warned him, and he changed, floundering.

  “Or if I might take you to lunch . . . could you go today?”

  “Well,” said Phebe considering, “we might go to lunch. Together, that is, but not as host and guest. But I shall have to wait until Madame returns.” For only the tw
o of them ran the shop. Madame always went out to lunch first and stayed long and late.

  “Suppose I meet you at one forty-five at Wanamaker’s, Chestnut Street entrance.”

  He nodded gratefully. . . . Lunch in a department store! He was unable to imagine what that would be like.

  They had met; they had lunched. . . . He could not remember when he had enjoyed himself so much nor when his laughter had bubbled up so spontaneously.

  Today she came tripping toward him on light feet. Her brown suit gave her fair hair a brighter tone; there was a green feather in her small brown hat.

  He threw away his cigarette, standing a moment, hat in hand, to do her homage. “Phebe, you look good enough to eat.”

  “I’m glad my appearance pleases you, sir,” she said demurely.

  “I wish you’d call me Llewellyn!”

  “It’s a nice name, but not for the likes of me to be bandying about. I hopes I knows my place, may it please your worship.” She was always mocking him.

  “My dear, I don’t like to hear you talk that way . . . not even in fun.”

  “I’m not talking in fun. I mean what I say. Between you and me there is a great gulf fixed, like those people in the Bible. Do you ever read it?”

  “That’s no great gulf,” he returned, suddenly traitorous to his innermost convictions. “I’m rich and you’re poor, but. . . .”

  “You’re Llewellyn Nash, heir to three millions, and I am Phebe the poor working-girl. . . . Kings and beggar-maids don’t consort any more. It does make a difference.” She thought of her dark mother. . . . “No matter what you say there’s a great gulf . . . two gulfs between us.”

  “I don’t know what you mean when you talk that way,” he began despairingly.

  “Let’s not talk that way, then.” She was airy, almost dancing. “Here we are at Logan Square . . . that’s as far as you can go. Let’s sit here and watch the people.”

  Silent, he sat beside her watching the play of emotions over her mobile face. For an hour she entertained with gossip about the shop; the stout woman who insisted that she had always worn a thirty-eight. “This model simply must be marked wrong!” . . . There was the thin intensely feminine girl insisting on the most mannish of tweeds. . . .

  “I won’t tell you the names of any of them, except Mrs. Hendrick Harrison. She’s so mean about paying her bills. She has a ‘little dressmaker’ on the side who ‘really could turn out any of these models and much more reasonably.’ ” Phebe imitated Mrs. Harrison’s thick suety voice; her pompous manner. . . . “And half the time she sends the dresses back again. And I know she has had them copied by the little dressmaker. . . .”

  He nodded. “Yes, Mrs. Harrison is just like that. She was drinking tea at my mother’s not long ago; she was wearing something terrible then which she said came from your place, but I’m sure it didn’t.”

  “No, of course it didn’t,” the girl said indignantly. “She’s going to ruin our trade if she keeps that up.” She glanced at her little chromium wrist-watch. “Goodness gracious! I must go! I have an engagement.”

  He rose, looking at her crossly. “You needn’t be so glad to be leaving me!”

  “But I am glad . . . not to be leaving you, no, not that, never that. You’re nice and I like you. Only I’m awfully glad to be going where I’m going.”

  For the first time he voiced his secret fear. “A man?”

  “A man! The world’s finest. . . .”

  “Anybody I know?” His voice broke a little.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! Where would you meet anybody in my world? Why, you didn’t even go to public school. Let’s see, what did you tell me? . . . Tutors, a couple of years in France, Moses Brown Preparatory in Providence . . . Harvard, Oxford, Vienna. . . . No, my friend had all his training right here in Philadelphia.”

  She remembered the difficulties that colored men in the old Quaker City experienced in getting interneships. . . . “He may have to go to New York finally.”

  “What is he, for pity’s sake?”

  “A doctor. He hasn’t finished yet. He’s at a school uptown.”

  “If you’d tell me the name of the school, I bet I’d be able to go up and pick him out. What’s he like?”

  “Like all the things my kind of girl likes best. Tall, dark, strong, smart. . . .”

  “And you’re going to marry him?”

  It was true he hadn’t asked her, but she knew. “As sure as shooting. . . . Good-bye, Mr. Nash.”

  CHAPTER II

  ON A day like this she did not want to be in the subway. The Market Street car set her down at Fifty-second Street; she purchased some things for lunch in a Horn and Hardart Retail Shop. Then boarding another car, she sped to Parkside Avenue and George’s Hill. And Nicholas!

  He was sitting there, wearing the dark blue suit that she loved so well. His head on his slim firm neck rose sculptured, Apollo-like from his soft white collar. . . . She was so happy to be with him.

  “Nick, it’s grand to be alive!”

  He caught her hand, kissed her lightly. “I’ll say! What do you want to do?”

  “Oh, just anything, as the spirit moves us.”

  “Let’s eat,” he recommended most unspiritually.

  Afterwards they did all the things they always did and in the same order. They rode in the little rattling, rocking Park-trolley to Strawberry Mansion. They boarded the street-car on Ridge Avenue and dismounted at the Wissahickon. Here in the silvery, unearthly twilight Nicholas hired a boat and rowed her along the stream. . . . Presently he shipped oars and they drifted awhile. He liked two of his new professors very much.

  “Very human; they are quite unlike Hughes and Long, whom I had in the same subjects last year. Always so afraid to give a colored fellow any extra help. . . . I’ve seen them lend white fellows the most invaluable books; things I couldn’t find in any of the stores here even if I could afford them.”

  She was sorry and told him so softly. “I wish it was me, Nick! I wish we could change places.”

  “I know you do, Phebe, you’re so sweet . . . but I’d hate to think of your enduring this kind of thing. It’s enough to break many a man’s spirit. So many little meannesses, unexpected insults. Like the man the week before, demonstrating on Pellagra. . . . He was from Georgia. Afterwards we were all standing around asking questions. He said he’d never seen such an enthusiastic bunch. And Holland—he’s the only other colored man in my group—asked him a question, a good one. He turned to answer it and when he saw he was colored, damn it, he pulled out his watch and said he’d overstayed his time; he had a dinner engagement.”

  She laid her soft hand on his arm. “But, Nick, just think how wonderful of you, and Pete Holland too, to struggle on in the face of such difficulties.”

  “Well, of course,” he said simply, “there’s nothing else for us to do. No colored man with an ounce of grit is going to let himself be cheated out of an education by a bunch of crackers.”

  “They’re not all like that, though,” she reminded him gently. “Look how wonderful Mrs. Morgan Rogers has been to me. . . . And you know how grand lots of people have been to Marise in New York.”

  He acquiesced, lighting his cigarette. “Mrs. Rogers is one white woman in a thousand, in a million. But even she advised you not to let anybody know you had Negro blood in your veins. You see she knows her own people. . . . As for Marise,” he went on, scowling in the darkness, “she’s a beautiful woman. . . . And there are always men ready to help a beautiful woman . . . for reasons of their own.”

  “Really, Nicholas, I don’t think you ought to talk like that. I am sure in lots of instances you’re misjudging them.”

  “In all of them perhaps,” he amended but without penitence. “And that’s my own special grudge against this whole color situation. I can’t for the life of me tell whether a slight is unwitting or intentional; whether a kindness is real or done in patronage. . . . After all, fellows like Christopher Cary are the only colored men
who can live their lives as they want. They are the freest men, white or black, in America.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. . . .”

  “I mean just this. He can go where he pleases, move where he pleases, meet whom he will, marry in either race. If he wants to be colored, he is colored. If he wants to be white, he’s that too. If he wants to marry a white girl he can do that . . . and he may or may not tell her about his strain of Negro blood. Today there are plenty of white women in America who wouldn’t give a hoot about it.

  “On the other hand, if he prefers to remain connected with his own group, as I think Cary does in spite of his mother and Teresa, he can marry a girl who looks like you and still meet with no inconveniences in his life outside his home. . . . But then suppose he does like a different type of girl—a girl who shows color, he can even marry her without losing caste, for, after all, he is colored. Whereas, if he did the same thing as a white man he’d be anathema, in this country at least.”

  Phebe admitted that this was to her an absolutely new idea. “Though I confess I’ve never given the matter much thought. Really, Nick,” she said uneasily, “I think we all spend too much time on color. . . . It doesn’t seem to make sense to me. . . . We’re all people, aren’t we? It’s like that thing we had to learn in the Merchant of Venice. . . . ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions’ . . . and all the rest of it. Perhaps some day the world will see how silly it all is. . . . Maybe a new religion will arise.”