III

Monday morning brought the return of the busy, happy week. It meant washday for Mattie, for she and Junius had never been able to raise their ménage to the status either of a maid or of putting out the wash. But this lack meant nothing to her⁠—she had been married fifteen years and still had the ability to enjoy the satisfaction of having a home in which she had full sway instead of being at the beck and call of others. She was old enough to remember a day when poverty for a coloured girl connoted one of three things: going out to service, working as ladies’ maid, or taking a genteel but poorly paid position as seamstress with one of the families of the rich and great on Rittenhouse Square, out West Walnut Street or in one of the numerous impeccable, aristocratic suburbs of Philadelphia.

She had tried her hand at all three of these possibilities, had known what it meant to rise at five o’clock, start the laundry work for a patronizing indifferent family of people who spoke of her in her hearing as “the girl” or remarked of her in a slightly lower but still audible tone as being rather better than the usual run of niggers⁠—“She never steals, I’d trust her with anything and she isn’t what you’d call lazy either.” For this family she had prepared breakfast, gone back to her washing, served lunch, had taken down the clothes, sprinkled and folded them, had gone upstairs and made three beds, not including her own and then had returned to the kitchen to prepare dinner. At night she nodded over the dishes and finally stumbling up to the third floor fell into her unmade bed, sometimes not even fully undressed. And Tuesday morning she would begin on the long and tedious strain of ironing. For this she received four dollars a week with the privilege of every other Sunday and every Thursday off. But she could have no callers.

As a seamstress, life had been a little more endurable but more precarious. The wages were better while they lasted, she had a small but comfortable room; her meals were brought up to her on a tray and the young girls of the households in which she was employed treated her with a careless kindness which while it still had its element of patronage was not offensive. But such families had a disconcerting habit of closing their households and departing for months at a time, and there was Mattie stranded and perilously trying to make ends meet by taking in sewing. But her clientele was composed of girls as poor as she, who either did their own dressmaking or could afford to pay only the merest trifle for her really exquisite and meticulous work.

The situation with the actress had really been the best in many, in almost all, respects. But it presented its pitfalls. Mattie was young, pretty and innocent; the actress was young, beautiful and sophisticated. She had been married twice and had been the heroine of many affairs; maidenly modesty, virtue for its own sake, were qualities long since forgotten, high ideals and personal self-respect were too abstract for her slightly coarsened mind to visualize, and at any rate they were incomprehensible and even absurd in a servant, and in a coloured servant to boot. She knew that in spite of Mattie’s white skin there was black blood in her veins; in fact she would not have taken the girl on had she not been coloured; all her servants must be coloured, for hers was a carelessly conducted household, and she felt dimly that all coloured people are thickly streaked with immorality. They were naturally loose, she reasoned, when she thought about it at all. “Look at the number of mixed bloods among them; look at Mattie herself for that matter, a perfectly white nigger if ever there was one. I’ll bet her mother wasn’t any better than she should be.”

When the girl had come to her with tears in her eyes and begged her not to send her as messenger to the house of a certain Haynes Brokinaw, politician and well-known man about town, Madame had laughed out loud. “How ridiculous! He’ll treat you all right. I should like to know what a girl like you expects. And anyway, if I don’t care, why should you? Now run along with the note and don’t bother me about this again. I hire you to do what I want, not to do as you want.” She was not even jealous⁠—of a coloured working girl! And anyway, constancy was no virtue in her eyes; she did not possess it herself and she valued it little in others.

Mattie was in despair. She was receiving twenty-five dollars a month, her board, and a comfortable, pleasant room. She was seeing something of the world and learning of its amenities. It was during this period that she learned how very pleasant indeed life could be for a person possessing only a very little extra money and a white skin. But the special attraction which her present position held for her was that every day she had a certain amount of time to call her own, for she was Madame’s personal servant; in no wise was she connected with the routine of keeping the house. If Madame elected to spend the whole day away from home, Mattie, once she had arranged for the evening toilette, was free to act and to go where she pleased.

And now here was this impasse looming up with Brokinaw. More than once Mattie had felt his covetous eyes on her; she had dreaded going to his rooms from the very beginning. She had even told his butler, “I’ll be back in half an hour for the answer”; and she would wait in the great square hall as he had indicated for there she was sure that danger lurked. But the third time Brokinaw was standing in the hall. “Just come into my study,” he told her, “while I read this and write the answer.” And he had looked at her with his cold, green eyes and had asked her why she was so out of breath. “There’s no need to rush so, child; stay here and rest. I’m in no hurry, I assure you. Are you really coloured? You know, I’ve seen lots of white girls not as pretty as you. Sit here and tell me all about your mother⁠—and your father. Do⁠—do you remember him?” His whole bearing reeked with intention.

Within a week Madame was sending her again and she had suggested fearfully the new coachman. “No,” said Madame. “It’s Wednesday, his night off, and I wouldn’t send him anyway; coachmen are too hard to keep nowadays; you’re all getting so independent.” Mattie had come down from her room and walked slowly, slowly to the corner where the new coachman, tall and black and grave, was just hailing a car. She ran to him and jerked down the arm which he had just lifted to seize the railing. “Oh, Mr. Murray,” she stammered. He had been so astonished and so kind. Her halting explanation done, he took the note in silence and delivered it, and the next night and for many nights thereafter they walked through the silent, beautiful square, and Junius had told her haltingly and with fear that he loved her. She threw her arms about his neck: “And I love you too.”

“You don’t mind my being so dark then? Lots of coloured girls I know wouldn’t look at a black man.”

But it was partly on account of his colour that she loved him; in her eyes his colour meant safety. “Why should I mind?” she asked with one of her rare outbursts of bitterness, “my own colour has never brought me anything but insult and trouble.”

The other servants, it appeared, had told him that sometimes she⁠—he hesitated⁠—“passed.”

“Yes, yes, of course I do,” she explained it eagerly, “but never to them. And anyway when I am alone what can I do? I can’t label myself. And if I’m hungry or tired and I’m near a place where they don’t want coloured people, why should I observe their silly old rules, rules that are unnatural and unjust⁠—because the world was made for everybody, wasn’t it, Junius?”

She had told him then how hard and joyless her girlhood life had been⁠—she had known such dreadful poverty and she had been hard put to it to keep herself together. But since she had come to live with Madame Sylvio she had glimpsed, thanks to her mistress’s careless kindness, something of the life of comparative ease and beauty and refinement which one could easily taste if he possessed just a modicum of extra money and the prerequisite of a white skin.

“I’ve only done it for fun but I won’t do it any more if it displeases you. I’d much rather live in the smallest house in the world with you, Junius, than be wandering around as I have so often, lonely and unknown in hotels and restaurants.” Her sweetness disarmed him. There was no reason in the world why she should give up her harmless pleasure unless, he added rather sternly, some genuine principle were involved.

It was the happiest moment of her life when Junius had gone to Madame and told her that both he and Mattie were leaving. “We are going to be married,” he announced proudly. The actress had been sorry to lose her, and wanted to give her a hundred dollars, but the tall, black coachman would not let his wife accept it. “She is to have only what she earned,” he said in stern refusal. He hated Madame Sylvio for having thrown the girl in the way of Haynes Brokinaw.

They had married and gone straight into the little house on Opal Street which later was to become their own. Mattie her husband considered a perfect woman, sweet, industrious, affectionate and illogical. But to her he was God.

When Angela and Virginia were little children and their mother used to read them fairy tales she would add to the ending, “And so they lived happily ever after, just like your father and me.”

All this was passing happily through her mind on this Monday morning. Junius was working somewhere in the neighbourhood; his shop was down on Bainbridge Street, but he tried to devote Mondays and Tuesdays to work up town so that he could run in and help Mattie on these trying days. Before the advent of the washing machine he used to dart in and out two or three times in the course of a morning to lend a hand to the heavy sheets and the bedspreads. Now those articles were taken care of in the laundry, but Junius still kept up the pleasant fiction.

Virginia attended school just around the corner, and presently she would come in too, not so much to get her own lunch as to prepare it for her mother. She possessed her father’s attitude toward Mattie as someone who must be helped, indulged and protected. Moreover she had an unusually keen sense of gratitude toward her father and mother for their kindness and their unselfish ambitions for their children. Jinny never tired of hearing of the difficult childhood of her parents. She knew of no story quite so thrilling as the account of their early trials and difficulties. She thought it wonderfully sweet of them to plan, as they constantly did, better things for their daughters. “My girls shall never come through my experiences,” Mattie would say firmly. They were both to be schoolteachers and independent.

It is true that neither of them felt any special leaning toward this calling. Angela frankly despised it, but she supposed she must make her living some way. The salary was fairly good⁠—in fact, very good for a poor girl⁠—and there would be the long summer vacation. At fourteen she knew already how much money she would save during those first two or three years and how she would spend those summer vacations. But although she proffered this much information to her family she kept her plans to herself. Mattie often pondered on this lack of openness in her older daughter. Virginia was absolutely transparent. She did not think she would care for teaching either, that is, not for teaching in the ordinary sense. But she realized that for the present that was the best profession which her parents could have chosen for them. She would spend her summers learning all she could about methods of teaching music.

“And a lot of good it will do you,” Angela scoffed. “You know perfectly well that there are no coloured teachers of music in the public schools here in Philadelphia.” But Jinny thought it possible that there might be. “When Mamma was coming along there were very few coloured teachers at all, and now it looks as though there’d be plenty of chance for us. And anyway you never know your luck.”

By four o’clock the day’s work was over and Mattie free to do as she pleased. This was her idle hour. The girls would get dinner, a Monday version of whatever the main course had been the day before. Their mother was on no account to be disturbed or importuned. Today as usual she sat in the Morris chair in the dining-room, dividing her time between the Sunday paper and the girls’ chatter. It was one of her most cherished experiences⁠—this sense of a day’s hard labour far behind her, the happy voices of her girls, her joyous expectation of her husband’s homecoming. Usually the children made a game of their preparations, recalling some nonsense of their early childhood days when it had been their delight to dress up as ladies. Virginia would approach Angela: “Pardon me, is this Mrs. Henrietta Jones?” And Angela, drawing herself up haughtily would reply: “Er⁠—really you have the advantage of me.” Then Virginia: “Oh pardon! I thought you were Mrs. Jones and I had heard my friend Mrs. Smith speak of you so often and since you were in the neighbourhood and passing, I was going to ask you in to have some ice-cream.” The game of course being that Angela should immediately drop her haughtiness and proceed for the sake of the goodies to ingratiate herself into her neighbour’s esteem. It was a poor joke, long since worn thin, but the two girls still used the greeting and for some reason it had become part of the Monday ritual of preparing the supper.

But tonight Angela’s response lacked spontaneity. She was absorbed and reserved, even a little sulky. Deftly and swiftly she moved about her work, however, and no one who had not attended regularly on those Monday evening preparations could have guessed that there was anything on her mind other than complete absorption in the problem of cutting the bread or garnishing the warmed over roast beef. But Mattie was aware of the quality of brooding in her intense concentration. She had seen it before in her daughter but tonight, though to her practised eye it was more apparent than ever, she could not put her hand on it. Angela’s response, if asked what was the matter, would be “Oh, nothing.” It came to her suddenly that her older daughter was growing up; in a couple of months she would be fifteen. Children were often absorbed and moody when they were in their teens, too engaged in finding themselves to care about their effect on others. She must see to it that the girl had plenty of rest; perhaps school had been too strenuous for her today; she thought the high school programme very badly arranged, five hours one right after the other were much too long. “Angela, child, I think you’d better not be long out of bed tonight; you look very tired to me.”

Angela nodded. But her father came in then and in the little hubbub that arose about his homecoming and the final preparations for supper her listlessness went without further remark.