The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen

by Nella Larsen

  “Yes, I’m sure you’ll do. I don’t really need ideas, I’ve plenty of my own. It’s just a matter of getting someone to help me get my speeches in order, correct and condense them, you know. I leave at eleven in the morning. Can you be ready by then? … That’s good. Better be here at nine. Now don’t disappoint me. I’m depending on you.

  As she stepped into the street and made her way skillfully through the impassioned human traffic, Helga reviewed the plan which she had formed, while in the lecturing one’s presence, to remain in New York. There would be twenty-five dollars, and perhaps the amount of her return ticket. Enough for a start. Surely she could get work there. Everybody did. Anyway, she would have a reference.

  With her decision she felt reborn. She began happily to paint the future in vivid colors. The world had changed to silver, and life ceased to be a struggle and became a gay adventure. Even the advertisements in the shop windows seemed to shine with radiance.

  Curious about Mrs. Hayes-Rore, on her return to the Y she went into the employment office, ostensibly to thank the girls and to report that the important woman would take her. Was there, she inquired, anything that she needed to know? Mrs. Hayes-Rore had appeared to put such faith in their recommendation of her that she felt almost obliged to give satisfaction. And she added: “I didn’t get much chance to ask questions. She seemed so—er—busy.”

  Both the girls laughed. Helga laughed with them, surprised that she hadn’t perceived before how really likable they were.

  “We’ll be through here in ten minutes. If you’re not busy, come in and have your supper with us and we’ll tell you about her,” promised Miss Ross.

  Seven

  Having finally turned her attention to Helga Crane, Fortune now seemed determined to smile, to make amends for her shameful neglect. One had, Helga decided, only to touch the right button, to press the right spring, in order to attract the jade’s notice.

  For Helga that spring had been Mrs. Hayes-Rore. Ever afterwards, on recalling that day on which with well-nigh empty purse and apprehensive heart she had made her way from the Young Women’s Christian Association to the Grand Boulevard home of Mrs. Hayes-Rore, always she wondered at her own lack of astuteness in not seeing in the woman someone who by a few words was to have a part in the shaping of her life.

  The husband of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had at one time been a dark thread in the soiled fabric of Chicago’s South Side politics, who, departing this life hurriedly and unexpectedly and a little mysteriously, and somewhat before the whole of his suddenly acquired wealth had had time to vanish, had left his widow comfortably established with money and some of that prestige which in Negro circles had been his. All this Helga had learned from the secretaries at the Y. And from numerous remarks dropped by Mrs. Hayes-Rore herself she was able to fill in the details more or less adequately.

  On the train that carried them to New York, Helga had made short work of correcting and condensing the speeches, which Mrs. Hayes-Rore as a prominent “race” woman and an authority on the problem was to deliver before several meetings of the annual convention of the Negro Women’s League of Clubs, convening the next week in New York. These speeches proved to be merely patchworks of others’ speeches and opinions. Helga had heard other lecturers say the same things in Devon and again in Naxos. Ideas, phrases, and even whole sentences and paragraphs were lifted bodily from previous orations and published works of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and other doctors of the race’s ills. For variety Mrs. Hayes-Rore had seasoned hers with a peppery dash of Du Bois and a few vinegary statements of her own. Aside from these it was, Helga reflected, the same old thing.

  But Mrs. Hayes-Rore was to her, after the first short, awkward period, interesting. Her dark eyes, bright and investigating, had, Helga noted, a humorous gleam, and something in the way she held her untidy head gave the impression of a cat watching its prey so that when she struck, if she so decided, the blow would be unerringly effective. Helga, looking up from a last reading of the speeches, was aware that she was being studied. Her employer sat leaning back, the tips of her fingers pressed together, her head a bit on one side, her small inquisitive eyes boring into the girl before her. And as the train hurled itself frantically toward smoke-infested Newark, she decided to strike.

  “Now tell me,” she commanded, “how is it that a nice girl like you can rush off on a wild goose chase like this at a moment’s notice. I should think your people’d object, or’d make inquiries, or something.”

  At that command Helga Crane could not help sliding down her eyes to hide the anger that had risen in them. Was she to be forever explaining her people—or lack of them? But she said courteously enough, even managing a hard little smile: “Well, you see, Mrs. Hayes-Rore, I haven’t any people. There’s only me, so I can do as I please.”

  “Ha!” said Mrs. Hayes-Rore.

  Terrific, thought Helga Crane, the power of that sound from the lips of this woman. How, she wondered, had she succeeded in investing it with so much incredulity?

  “If you didn’t have people, you wouldn’t be living. Everybody has people, Miss Crane. Everybody.”

  “I haven’t, Mrs. Hayes-Rore.”

  Mrs. Hayes-Rore screwed up her eyes. “Well, that’s mighty mysterious, and I detest mysteries.” She shrugged, and into those eyes there now came with alarming quickness an accusing criticism.

  “It isn’t,” Helga said defensively, “a mystery. It’s a fact and a mighty unpleasant one. Inconvenient too,” and she laughed a little, not wishing to cry.

  Her tormentor, in sudden embarrassment, turned her sharp eyes to the window. She seemed intent on the miles of red clay sliding past. After a moment, however, she asked gently: “You wouldn’t like to tell me about it, would you? It seems to bother you. And I’m interested in girls.”

  Annoyed, but still hanging, for the sake of the twenty-five dollars, to her self-control, Helga gave her head a little toss and flung out her hands in a helpless, beaten way. Then she shrugged. What did it matter? “Oh, well, if you really want to know. I assure you, it’s nothing interesting. Or nasty,” she added maliciously. “It’s just plain horrid. For me.” And she began mockingly to relate her story.

  But as she went on, again she had that sore sensation of revolt, and again the torment which she had gone through loomed before her as something brutal and undeserved. Passionately, tearfully, incoherently, the final words tumbled from her quivering petulant lips.

  The other woman still looked out of the window, apparently so interested in the outer aspect of the drab sections of the Jersey manufacturing city through which they were passing that, the better to see, she had now so turned her head that only an ear and a small portion of cheek were visible.

  During the little pause that followed Helga’s recital, the faces of the two women, which had been bare, seemed to harden. It was almost as if they had slipped on masks. The girl wished to hide her turbulent feeling and to appear indifferent to Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s opinion of her story. The woman felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not mentioned—and therefore they do not exist.

  Sliding adroitly out from under the precarious subject to a safer, more decent one, Mrs. Hayes-Rore asked Helga what she was thinking of doing when she got back to Chicago. Had she anything in mind?

  Helga, it appeared, hadn’t. The truth was she had been thinking of staying in New York. Maybe she could find something there. Everybody seemed to. At least she could make the attempt.

  Mrs. Hayes-Rore sighed, for no obvious reason. “Um, maybe I can help you. I know people in New York. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “New York’s the lonesomest place in the world if you don’t know anybody.”

  “It couldn’t possibly be worse than Chicago,” said Helga savagely, giving the table support a violent kick.


  They were running into the shadow of the tunnel. Mrs. Hayes-Rore murmured thoughtfully: “You’d better come uptown and stay with me a few days. I may need you. Something may turn up.”

  It was one of those vicious mornings, windy and bright. There seemed to Helga, as they emerged from the depths of the vast station, to be a whirling malice in the sharp air of this shining city. Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s words about its terrible loneliness shot through her mind. She felt its aggressive unfriendliness. Even the great buildings, the flying cabs, and the swirling crowds seemed manifestations of purposed malevolence. And for that first short minute she was awed and frightened and inclined to turn back to that other city, which, though not kind, was yet not strange. This New York seemed somehow more appalling, more scornful, in some inexplicable way even more terrible and uncaring than Chicago. Threatening almost. Ugly. Yes, perhaps she’d better turn back.

  The feeling passed, escaped in the surprise of what Mrs. Hayes-Rore was saying. Her oratorical voice boomed above the city’s roar. “I suppose I ought really to have phoned Anne from the station. About you, I mean. Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s got plenty of room. Lives alone in a big house, which is something Negroes in New York don’t do. They fill ’em up with lodgers usually. But Anne’s funny. Nice, though. You’ll like her, and it will be good for you to know her if you’re going to stay in New York. She’s a widow, my husband’s sister’s son’s wife. The war, you know.”

  “Oh,” protested Helga Crane, with a feeling of acute misgiving, “but won’t she be annoyed and inconvenienced by having me brought in on her like this? I supposed we were going to the Y or a hotel or something like that. Oughtn’t we really to stop and phone?”

  The woman at her side in the swaying cab smiled, a peculiar invincible, self-reliant smile, but gave Helga Crane’s suggestion no other attention. Plainly she was a person accustomed to having things her way. She merely went on talking of other plans. “I think maybe I can get you some work. With a new Negro insurance company. They’re after me to put quite a tidy sum into it. Well, I’ll just tell them that they may as well take you with the money,” and she laughed.

  “Thanks awfully,” Helga said, “but will they like it? I mean being made to take me because of the money.”

  “They’re not being made,” contradicted Mrs. Hayes-Rore. “I intended to let them have the money anyway, and I’ll tell Mr. Darling so—after he takes you. They ought to be glad to get you. Colored organizations always need more brains as well as more money. Don’t worry. And don’t thank me again. You haven’t got the job yet, you know.”

  There was a little silence, during which Helga gave herself up to the distraction of watching the strange city and the strange crowds, trying hard to put out of her mind the vision of an easier future which her companion’s words had conjured up; for, as had been pointed out, it was, as yet, only a possibility.

  Turning out of the park into the broad thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue, Mrs. Hayes-Rore said in a too carefully casual manner: “And, by the way, I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it, and after all it’s your own business. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll know that what others don’t know can’t hurt you. I’ll just tell Anne that you’re a friend of mine whose mother’s dead. That’ll place you well enough and it’s all true. I never tell lies. She can fill in the gaps to suit herself and anyone else curious enough to ask.”

  “Thanks,” Helga said again. And so great was her gratitude that she reached out and took her new friend’s slightly soiled hand in one of her own fastidious ones, and retained it until their cab turned into a pleasant tree-lined street and came to a halt before one of the dignified houses in the center of the block. Here they got out.

  In after years Helga Crane had only to close her eyes to see herself standing apprehensively in the small cream-colored hall, the floor of which was covered with deep silver-hued carpet; to see Mrs. Hayes-Rore pecking the cheek of the tall slim creature beautifully dressed in a cool green tailored frock; to hear herself being introduced to “my niece, Mrs. Grey” as “Miss Crane, a little friend of mine whose mother’s died, and I think perhaps a while in New York will be good for her;” to feel her hand grasped in quick sympathy, and to hear Anne Grey’s pleasant voice, with its faint note of wistfulness, saying: “I’m so sorry, and I’m glad Aunt Jeanette brought you here. Did you have a good trip? I’m sure you must be worn out. I’ll have Lillie take you right up.” And to feel like a criminal.

  Eight

  A year thick with various adventures had sped by since that spring day on which Helga Crane had set out away from Chicago’s indifferent unkindness for New York in the company of Mrs. Hayes-Rore. New York she had found not so unkind, not so unfriendly, not so indifferent. There she had been happy, and secured work, had made acquaintances and another friend. Again she had had that strange transforming experience, this time not so fleetingly, that magic sense of having come home. Harlem, teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her and lulled her into something that was, she was certain, peace and contentment.

  The request and recommendation of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had been sufficient for her to obtain work with the insurance company in which that energetic woman was interested. And through Anne it had been possible for her to meet and to know people with tastes and ideas similar to her own. Their sophisticated cynical talk, their elaborate parties, the unobtrusive correctness of their clothes and homes, all appealed to her craving for smartness, for enjoyment. Soon she was able to reflect with a flicker of amusement on that constant feeling of humiliation and inferiority which had encompassed her in Naxos. Her New York friends looked with contempt and scorn on Naxos and all its works. This gave Helga a pleasant sense of avengement. Any shreds of self-consciousness or apprehension which at first she may have felt vanished quickly, escaped in the keenness of her joy at seeming at last to belong somewhere. For she considered that she had, as she put it, “found herself.”

  Between Anne Grey and Helga Crane there had sprung one of those immediate and peculiarly sympathetic friendships. Uneasy at first, Helga had been relieved that Anne had never returned to the uncomfortable subject of her mother’s death so intentionally mentioned on their first meeting by Mrs. Hayes-Rore, beyond a tremulous brief: “You won’t talk to me about it, will you? I can’t bear the thought of death. Nobody ever talks to me about it. My husband, you know.” This Helga discovered to be true. Later, when she knew Anne better, she suspected that it was a bit of a pose assumed for the purpose of doing away with the necessity of speaking regretfully of a husband who had been perhaps not too greatly loved.

  After the first pleasant weeks, feeling that her obligation to Anne was already too great, Helga began to look about for a permanent place to live. It was, she found, difficult. She eschewed the Y as too bare, impersonal, and restrictive. Nor did furnished rooms or the idea of a solitary or a shared apartment appeal to her. So she rejoiced when one day Anne, looking up from her book, said lightly: “Helga, since you’re going to be in New York, why don’t you stay here with me? I don’t usually take people. It’s too disrupting. Still, it is sort of pleasant having somebody in the house and I don’t seem to mind you. You don’t bore me, or bother me. If you’d like to stay—Think it over.”

  Helga didn’t, of course, require to think it over, because lodgment in Anne’s home was in complete accord with what she designated as her “aesthetic sense.” Even Helga Crane approved of Anne’s house and the furnishings which so admirably graced the big cream-colored rooms. Beds with long, tapering posts to which tremendous age lent dignity and interest, bonneted old highboys, tables that might be by Duncan Phyfe, rare spindle-legged chairs, and others whose ladder backs gracefully climbed the delicate wall panels. These historic things mingled harmoniously and comfortably with brass-bound Chinese tea chests, luxurious deep chairs and davenports, tiny tables of gay color, a lacquered jade-green settee with gleaming black satin cushions, lustrous Eastern rugs, anci
ent copper, Japanese prints, some fine etchings, a profusion of precious bric-a-brac, and endless shelves filled with books.

  Anne Grey herself was, as Helga expressed it, “almost too good to be true.” Thirty, maybe, brownly beautiful, she had the face of a golden Madonna, grave and calm and sweet, with shining black hair and eyes. She carried herself as queens are reputed to bear themselves, and probably do not. Her manners were as agreeably gentle as her own soft name. She possessed an impeccably fastidious taste in clothes, knowing what suited her and wearing it with an air of unconscious assurance. The unusual thing, a native New Yorker, she was also a person of distinction, financially independent, well connected and much sought after. And she was interesting, an odd confusion of wit and intense earnestness; a vivid and remarkable person. Yes, undoubtedly, Anne was almost too good to be true. She was almost perfect.

  Thus established, secure, comfortable, Helga soon became thoroughly absorbed in the distracting interests of life in New York. Her secretarial work with the Negro insurance company filled her day. Books, the theater, parties, used up the nights. Gradually in the charm of this new and delightful pattern of her life she lost that tantalizing oppression of loneliness and isolation which always, it seemed, had been a part of her existence.

  But, while the continuously gorgeous panorama of Harlem fascinated her, thrilled her, the sober mad rush of white New York failed entirely to stir her. Like thousands of other Harlem dwellers, she patronized its shops, its theaters, its art galleries, and its restaurants, and read its papers, without considering herself a part of the monster. And she was satisfied, unenvious. For her this Harlem was enough. Of that white world, so distant, so near, she asked only indifference. No, not at all did she crave, from those pale and powerful people, awareness. Sinister folk, she considered them, who had stolen her birthright. Their past contribution to her life, which had been but shame and grief, she had hidden away from brown folk in a locked closet, “never,” she told herself, “to be reopened.”