VI

At the Academy matters progressed smoothly without the flawing of a ripple. Angela looked forward to the hours which she spent there and honestly regretted their passage. Her fellow students and the instructors were more than cordial, there was an actual sense of camaraderie among them. She had not mentioned the fact of her Negro strain, indeed she had no occasion to, but she did not believe that this fact if known would cause any change in attitude. Artists were noted for their broad-mindedness. They were the first persons in the world to judge a person for his worth rather than by any hallmark. It is true that Miss Henderson, a young lady of undeniable colour, was not received with the same cordiality and attention which Angela was receiving, and this, too, despite the fact that the former’s work showed undeniable talent, even originality. Angela thought that something in the young lady’s personality precluded an approach to friendship; she seemed to be wary, almost offensively standoffish. Certainly she never spoke unless spoken to; she had been known to spend a whole session without even glancing at a fellow student.

Angela herself had not arrived at any genuine intimacies. Two of the girls had asked her to their homes but she had always refused; such invitations would have to be returned with similar ones and the presence of Jinny would entail explanations. The invitation of Mr. Shields, the instructor, to have tea at his wife’s at home was another matter and of this she gladly availed herself. She could not tell to just what end she was striving. She did not like teaching and longed to give it up. On the other hand she must make her living. Mr. Shields had suggested that she might be able to increase both her earning capacity and her enjoyments through a more practical application of her art. There were directorships of drawing in the public schools, positions in art schools and colleges, or, since Angela frankly acknowledged her unwillingness to instruct, there was such a thing as being buyer for the art section of a department store.

“And anyway,” said Mrs. Shields, “you never know what may be in store for you if you just have preparation.” She and her husband were both attracted to the pleasant-spoken, talented girl. Angela possessed an undeniable air, and she dressed well, even superlatively. Her parents’ death had meant the possession of half the house and half of three thousand dollars’ worth of insurance. Her salary was adequate, her expenses light. Indeed even her present mode of living gave her little cause for complaint except that her racial affiliations narrowed her confines. But she was restlessly conscious of a desire for broader horizons. She confided something like this to her new friends.

“Perfectly natural,” they agreed. “There’s no telling where your tastes and talents will lead you⁠—to Europe perhaps and surely to the formation of new and interesting friendships. You’ll find artistic folk the broadest, most liberal people in the world.”

“There are possibilities of scholarships, too,” Mr. Shields concluded more practically. The Academy offered a few in competition. But there were others more liberally endowed and practically without restriction.

Sundays on Opal Street bore still their aspect of something different and special. Jinny sometimes went to church, sometimes packed the car with a group of laughing girls of her age and played at her father’s old game of exploring. Angela preferred to stay in the house. She liked to sleep late, get up for a leisurely bath and a meticulous toilet. Afterwards she would turn over her wardrobe, sorting and discarding; read the week’s forecast of theatres, concerts and exhibits. And finally she would begin sketching, usually ending up with a new view of Hetty Daniels’ head.

Hetty, who lived with them now in the triple capacity, as she saw it, of housekeeper, companion, and chaperone, loved to pose. It satisfied some unquenchable vanity in her unloved, empty existence. She could not conceive of being sketched because she was, in the artistic jargon, “interesting,” “paintable,” or “difficult.” Models, as she understood it, were chosen for their beauty. Square and upright she sat, regaling Angela with tales of the romantic adventures of some remote period which was her youth. She could not be very old, the young girl thought; indeed, from some of her dates she must have been at least twelve years younger than her mother. Yet Mrs. Murray had carried with her to the end some irrefragable quality of girlishness which would keep her memory forever young.

Miss Daniels’ great fetish was sex morality. “Them young fellers was always ’round me thick ez bees; wasn’t any night they wasn’t more fellows in my kitchen then you an’ Jinny ever has in yore parlour. But I never listened to none of the’ talk, jist held out agin ’em and kept my pearl of great price untarnished. I aimed then and I’m continual to aim to be a verjous woman.”

Her unslaked yearnings gleamed suddenly out of her eyes, transforming her usually rather expressionless face into something wild and avid. The dark brown immobile mask of her skin made an excellent foil for the vividness of an emotion which was so apparent, so palpable that it seemed like something superimposed upon the background of her countenance.

“If I could just get that look for Mr. Shields,” Angela said half aloud to herself, “I bet I could get any of their old scholarships.⁠ ⁠… So you had lots more beaux than we have, Hetty? Well you wouldn’t have to go far to outdo us there.”

The same half dozen young men still visited the Murray household on Sundays. None of them except Matthew Henson came as a suitor; the others looked in partly from habit, partly, Jinny used to say, for the sake of Hetty Daniels’ good gingerbread, but more than for any other reason for the sake of having a comfortable place in which to argue and someone with whom to conduct the argument.

“They certainly do argue,” Angela grumbled a little, but she didn’t care. Matthew was usually the leader in their illimitable discussions, but she much preferred him at this than at his clumsy and distasteful lovemaking. Of course she could go out, but there was no place for her to visit and no companions for her to visit with. If she made calls there would be merely a replica of what she was finding in her own household. It was true that in the ultramodern set Sunday dancing was being taken up. But she and Virginia did not fit in here any too well. Her fancy envisaged a comfortable drawing-room (there were folks who used that term), peopled with distinguished men and women who did things, wrote and painted and acted⁠—people with a broad, cultural background behind them, or, lacking that, with the originality of thought and speech which comes from failing, deliberately failing, to conform to the pattern. Somewhere, she supposed, there must be coloured people like that. But she didn’t know any of them. She knew there were people right in Philadelphia who had left far, far behind them the economic class to which her father and mother had belonged. But their thoughts, their actions were still cramped and confined; they were sitting in their new, even luxurious quarters, still mental parvenus, still discussing the eternal race question even as these boys here.

Tonight they were hard at it again with a new phase which Angela, who usually sat only half attentive in their midst, did not remember ever having heard touched before. Seymour Porter had started the ball by forcing their attention to one of his poems. It was not a bad poem; as modern verse goes it possessed a touch distinctly above the mediocre.

“Why don’t you stop that stuff and get down to brass tacks, Porter?” Matthew snarled. “You’ll be of much more service to your race as a good dentist than as a half-baked poet.” Henson happened to know that the amount of study which the young poet did at the University kept him just barely registered in the dental college.

Porter ran his hand over his beautifully groomed hair. He had worn a stocking cap in his room all the early part of the day to enable him to perform this gesture without disaster. “There you go, Henson⁠—service to the race and all the rest of it. Doesn’t it ever occur to you that the race is made up of individuals and you can’t conserve the good of the whole unless you establish that of each part? Is it better for me to be a first rate dentist and be a cabined and confined personality or a half-baked poet, as you’d call it, and be myself?”

Henson reasoned that a coloured American must take into account that he is usually living in a hostile community. “If you’re only a half-baked poet they’ll think that you’re a representative of your race and that we’re all equally no account. But if you’re a fine dentist, they won’t think, it’s true, that we’re all as skilled as you, but they will respect you and concede that probably there’re a few more like you. Inconsistent, but that’s the way they argue.”

Arthur Sawyer objected to this constant yielding to an invisible censorship. “If you’re coloured you’ve just got to straddle a bit; you’ve got to consider both racial and individual integrity. I’ve got to be sure of a living right now. So in order not to bring the charge of vagrancy against my family I’m going to teach until I’ve saved enough money to study engineering in comfort.”

“And when you get through?” Matthew asked politely.

“When I get through, if this city has come to its senses, I’ll get a big job with Baldwin. If not I’ll go to South America and take out naturalization papers.”

“But you can’t do that,” cried Jinny, “we’d need you more than ever if you had all that training. You know what I think? We’ve all of us got to make up our minds to the sacrifice of something. I mean something more than just the ordinary sacrifices in life, not so much for the sake of the next generation as for the sake of some principle, for the sake of some immaterial quality like pride or intense self-respect or even a saving complacency; a spiritual tonic which the race needs perhaps just as much as the body might need iron or whatever it does need to give the proper kind of resistance. There are some things which an individual might want, but which he’d just have to give up forever for the sake of the more important whole.”

“It beats me,” said Sawyer indulgently, “how a little thing like you can catch hold of such a big thought. I don’t know about a man’s giving up his heart’s desire forever, though, just because he’s coloured. That seems to me a pretty large order.”

“Large order or not,” Henson caught him up, “she comes mighty near being right. What do you think, Angela?”

“Just the same as I’ve always thought. I don’t see any sense in living unless you’re going to be happy.”

Angela took the sketch of Hetty Daniels to school. “What an interesting type!” said Gertrude Quale, the girl next to her. “Such cosmic and tragic unhappiness in that face. What is she, not an American?”

“Oh yes she is. She’s an old coloured woman who’s worked in our family for years and she was born right here in Philadelphia.”

“Oh coloured! Well, of course I suppose you would call her an American though I never think of darkies as Americans. Coloured⁠—yes that would account for that unhappiness in her face. I suppose they all mind it awfully.”

It was the afternoon for the life class. The model came in, a short, rather slender young woman with a faintly pretty, shrewish face full of a certain dark, mean character. Angela glanced at her thoughtfully, full of pleasant anticipation. She liked to work for character, preferred it even to beauty. The model caught her eye; looked away and again turned her full gaze upon her with an insistent, slightly incredulous stare. It was Esther Bayliss who had once been in the High School with Angela. She had left not long after Mary Hastings’ return to her boarding school.

Angela saw no reason why she should speak to her and presently, engrossed in the portrayal of the round, yet pointed little face, forgot the girl’s identity. But Esther kept her eyes fixed on her former schoolmate with a sort of intense, angry brooding so absorbing that she forgot her pose and Mr. Shield spoke to her two or three times. On the third occasion he said not unkindly, “You’ll have to hold your pose better than this, Miss Bayliss, or we won’t be able to keep you on.”

“I don’t want you to keep me on.” She spoke with an amazing vindictiveness. “I haven’t got to the point yet where I’m going to lower myself to pose for a coloured girl.”

He looked around the room in amazement; no, Miss Henderson wasn’t there, she never came to this class he remembered. “Well after that we couldn’t keep you anyway. We’re not taking orders from our models. But there’s no coloured girl here.”

“Oh yes there is, unless she’s changed her name.” She laughed spitefully. “Isn’t that Angela Murray over there next to that Jew girl?” In spite of himself, Shields nodded. “Well, she’s coloured though she wouldn’t let you know. But I know. I went to school with her in North Philadelphia. And I tell you I wouldn’t stay to pose for her not if you were to pay me ten times what I’m getting. Sitting there drawing from me just as though she were as good as a white girl!”

Astonished and disconcerted, he told his wife about it. “But I can’t think she’s really coloured, Mabel. Why she looks and acts just like a white girl. She dresses in better taste than anybody in the room. But that little wretch of a model insisted that she was coloured.”

“Well she just can’t be. Do you suppose I don’t know a coloured woman when I see one? I can tell ’em a mile off.”

It seemed to him a vital and yet such a disgraceful matter. “If she is coloured she should have told me. I’d certainly like to know, but hang it all, I can’t ask her, for suppose she should be white in spite of what that little beast of a model said?” He found her address in the registry and overcome one afternoon with shamed curiosity drove up to Opal Street and slowly past her house. Jinny was coming in from school and Hetty Daniels on her way to market greeted her on the lower step. Then Virginia put the key in the lock and passed inside. “She is coloured,” he told his wife, “for no white girl in her senses would be rooming with coloured people.”

“I should say not! Coloured, is she? Well, she shan’t come here again, Henry.”

Angela approached him after class on Saturday. “How is Mrs. Shields? I can’t get out to see her this week but I’ll be sure to run in next.”

He blurted out miserably, “But, Miss Murray, you never told me that you were coloured.”

She felt as though she were rehearsing a well-known part in a play. “Coloured! Of course I never told you that I was coloured. Why should I?”

But apparently there was some reason why she should tell it; she sat in her room in utter dejection trying to reason it out. Just as in the old days she had not discussed the matter with Jinny, for what could the latter do? She wondered if her mother had ever met with any such experiences. Was there something inherently wrong in “passing”?

Her mother had never seemed to consider it as anything but a lark. And on the one occasion, that terrible day in the hospital when passing or not passing might have meant the difference between good will and unpleasantness, her mother had deliberately given the whole show away. But her mother, she had long since begun to realize, had not considered this business of colour or the lack of it as pertaining intimately to her personal happiness. She was perfectly satisfied, absolutely content whether she was part of that white world with Angela or up on little Opal Street with her dark family and friends. Whereas it seemed to Angela that all the things which she most wanted were wrapped up with white people. All the good things were theirs. Not, some coldly reasoning instinct within was saying, because they were white. But because for the present they had power and the badge of that power was whiteness, very like the colours on the escutcheon of a powerful house. She possessed the badge, and unless there was someone to tell she could possess the power for which it stood.

Hetty Daniels shrilled up: “Mr. Henson’s down here to see you.”

Tiresome though his presence was, she almost welcomed him tonight, and even accepted his eager invitation to go to see a picture. “It’s in a little gem of a theatre, Angela. You’ll like the surroundings almost as much as the picture, and that’s very good. Sawyer and I saw it about two weeks ago. I thought then that I’d like to take you.”

She knew that this was his indirect method of telling her that they would meet with no difficulty in the matter of admission; a comforting assurance, for Philadelphia theatres, as Angela knew, could be very unpleasant to would-be coloured patrons. Henson offered to telephone for a taxi while she was getting on her street clothes, and she permitted the unnecessary extravagance, for she hated the conjectures on the faces of passengers in the streetcars; conjectures, she felt in her sensitiveness, which she could only set right by being unusually kind and friendly in her manner to Henson. And this produced undesirable effects on him. She had gone out with him more often in the Ford, which permitted a modicum of privacy. But Jinny was off in the little car tonight.

At Broad and Ridge Avenue the taxi was held up; it was twenty-five minutes after eight when they reached the theatre. Matthew gave Angela a bill. “Do you mind getting the tickets while I settle for the cab?” he asked nervously. He did not want her to miss even the advertisements. This, he almost prayed, would be a perfect night.

Cramming the change into his pocket, he rushed into the lobby and joined Angela who, almost as excited as he, for she liked a good picture, handed the tickets to the attendant. He returned the stubs. “All right, good seats there to your left.” The theatre was only one storey. He glanced at Matthew.

“Here, here, where do you think you’re going?”

Matthew answered unsuspecting: “It’s all right. The young lady gave you the tickets.”

“Yes, but not for you; she can go in, but you can’t.” He handed him the torn ticket, turned and took one of the stubs from Angela, and thrust that in the young man’s unwilling hand. “Go over there and get your refund.”

“But,” said Matthew and Angela could feel his very manhood sickening under the silly humiliation of the moment, “there must be some mistake. I sat in this same theatre less than three weeks ago.”

“Well, you won’t sit in there tonight; the management’s changed hands since then, and we’re not selling tickets to coloured people.” He glanced at Angela a little uncertainly. “The young lady can come in⁠—”

Angela threw her ticket on the floor. “Oh, come Matthew, come.”

Outside he said stiffly, “I’ll get a taxi, we’ll go somewhere else.”

“No, no! We wouldn’t enjoy it. Let’s go home and we don’t need a taxi. We can get the Sixteenth Street car right at the corner.”

She was very kind to him in the car; she was so sorry for him, suddenly conscious of the pain which must be his at being stripped before the girl he loved of his masculine right to protect, to appear the hero.

She let him open the two doors for her but stopped him in the box of a hall. “I think I’ll say good night now, Matthew; I’m more tired than I realized. But⁠—but it was an adventure, wasn’t it?”

His eyes adored her, his hand caught hers: “Angela, I’d have given all I hope to possess to have been able to prevent it; you know I never dreamed of letting you in for such humiliation. Oh how are we ever going to get this thing straight?”

“Well, it wasn’t your fault.” Unexpectedly she lifted her delicate face to his, so stricken and freckled and woebegone, and kissed him; lifted her hand and actually stroked his reddish, stiff, “bad” hair.

Like a man in a dream he walked down the street wondering how long it would be before they married.

Angela, waking in the middle of the night and reviewing to herself the events of the day, said aloud: “This is the end,” and fell asleep again.

The little back room was still Jinny’s, but Angela, in order to give the third storey front to Hetty Daniels, had moved into the room which had once been her mother’s. She and Virginia had placed the respective headboards of their narrow, virginal beds against the dividing wall so that they could lie in bed and talk to each other through the communicating doorway, their voices making a circuit from speaker to listener in what Jinny called a hairpin curve.

Angela called in as soon as she heard her sister moving, “Jinny, listen. I’m going away.”

Her sister, still half asleep, lay intensely quiet for another second, trying to pick up the continuity of this dream. Then her senses came to her.

“What’d you say, Angela?”

“I said I was going away. I’m going to leave Philadelphia, give up school teaching, break away from our loving friends and acquaintances, and bust up the whole shooting match.”

“Haven’t gone crazy, have you?”

“No, I think I’m just beginning to come to my senses. I’m sick, sick, sick of seeing what I want dangled right before my eyes and then of having it snatched away from me and all of it through no fault of my own.”

“Darling, you know I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re driving at.”

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Out came the whole story, an accumulation of the slights, real and fancied, which her colour had engendered throughout her lifetime; though even then she did not tell of that first hurt through Mary Hastings. That would always linger in some remote, impenetrable fastness of her mind, for wounded trust was there as well as wounded pride and love. “And these two last happenings with Matthew and Mr. Shields are just too much; besides they’ve shown me the way.”

“Shown you what way?”

Virginia had arisen and thrown an old rose kimono around her. She had inherited her father’s thick and rather coarsely waving black hair, enhanced by her mother’s softness. She was slender, yet rounded; her cheeks were flushed with sleep and excitement. Her eyes shone. As she sat in the brilliant wrap, cross-legged at the foot of her sister’s narrow bed, she made the latter think of a strikingly dainty, colourful robin.

“Well you see as long as the Shields thought I was white they were willing to help me to all the glories of the promised land. And the doorman last night⁠—he couldn’t tell what I was, but he could tell about Matthew, so he put him out; just as the Shields are getting ready in another way to put me out. But as long as they didn’t know it didn’t matter. Which means it isn’t being coloured that makes the difference, it’s letting it be known. Do you see?

“So I’ve thought and thought. I guess really I’ve had it in my mind for a long time, but last night it seemed to stand right out in my consciousness. Why should I shut myself off from all the things I want most⁠—clever people, people who do things, Art⁠—” her voice spelt it with a capital⁠—“travel and a lot of things which are in the world for everybody really but which only white people, as far as I can see, get their hands on. I mean scholarships and special funds, patronage. Oh Jinny, you don’t know, I don’t think you can understand the things I want to see and know. You’re not like me⁠—”

“I don’t know why I’m not,” said Jinny looking more like a robin than ever. Her bright eyes dwelt on her sister. “After all, the same blood flows in my veins and in the same proportion. Sure you’re not laying too much stress on something only temporarily inconvenient?”

“But it isn’t temporarily inconvenient; it’s happening to me every day. And it isn’t as though it were something that I could help. Look how Mr. Shields stressed the fact that I hadn’t told him I was coloured. And see how it changed his attitude toward me; you can’t think how different his manner was. Yet as long as he didn’t know, there was nothing he wasn’t willing and glad, glad to do for me. Now he might be willing but he’ll not be glad though I need his assistance more than some white girl who will find a dozen people to help her just because she is white.” Some faint disapproval in her sister’s face halted her for a moment. “What’s the matter? You certainly don’t think I ought to say first thing: ‘I’m Angela Murray. I know I look white but I’m coloured and expect to be treated accordingly!’ Now do you?”

“No,” said Jinny, “of course that’s absurd. Only I don’t think you ought to mind quite so hard when they do find out the facts. It seems sort of an insult to yourself. And then, too, it makes you lose a good chance to do something for⁠—for all of us who can’t look like you but who really have the same combination of blood that you have.”

“Oh that’s some more of your and Matthew Henson’s philosophy. Now be practical, Jinny; after all I am both white and Negro and look white. Why shouldn’t I declare for the one that will bring me the greatest happiness, prosperity and respect?”

“No reason in the world except that since in this country public opinion is against any infusion of black blood it would seem an awfully decent thing to put yourself, even in the face of appearances, on the side of black blood and say: ‘Look here, this is what a mixture of black and white really means!’ ”

Angela was silent and Virginia, feeling suddenly very young, almost childish in the presence of this issue, took a turn about the room. She halted beside her sister.

“Just what is it you want to do, Angela? Evidently you have some plan.”

She had. Her idea was to sell the house and to divide the proceeds. With her share of this and her half of the insurance she would go to New York or to Chicago, certainly to some place where she could by no chance be known, and launch out “into a freer, fuller life.”

“And leave me!” said Jinny astonished. Somehow it had not dawned on her that the two would actually separate. She did not know what she had thought, but certainly not that. The tears ran down her cheeks.

Angela, unable to endure either her own pain or the sight of it in others, had all of a man’s dislike for tears.

“Don’t be absurd, Jinny! How could I live the way I want to if you’re with me. We’d keep on loving each other and seeing one another from time to time, but we might just as well face the facts. Some of those girls in the art school used to ask me to their homes; it would have meant opportunity, a broader outlook, but I never dared accept because I knew I couldn’t return the invitation.”

Under that Jinny winced a little, but she spoke with spirit. “After that, Angela dear, I’m beginning to think that you have more white blood in your veins than I, and it was that extra amount which made it possible for you to make that remark.” She trailed back to her room and when Hetty Daniels announced breakfast she found that a bad headache required a longer stay in bed.

For many years the memory of those next few weeks lingered in Virginia’s mind beside that other tragic memory of her mother’s deliberate submission to death. But Angela was almost tremulous with happiness and anticipation. Almost as though by magic her affairs were arranging themselves. She was to have the three thousand dollars and Jinny was to be the sole possessor of the house. Junius had paid far less than this sum for it, but it had undoubtedly increased in value. “It’s a fair enough investment for you, Miss Virginia,” Mr. Hallowell remarked gruffly. He had disapproved heartily of this summary division, would have disapproved more thoroughly and openly if he had had any idea of the reasons behind it. But the girls had told no one, not even him, of their plans. “Some sisters’ quarrel, I suppose,” he commented to his wife. “I’ve never seen any coloured people yet, relatives that is, who could stand the joint possession of a little money.”

A late Easter was casting its charm over the city when Angela, trim, even elegant, in her conventional tailored suit, stood in the dining-room of the little house waiting for her taxi. She had burned her bridges behind her, had resigned from school, severed her connection with the Academy, and had permitted an impression to spread that she was going West to visit indefinitely a distant cousin of her mother’s. In reality she was going to New York. She had covered her tracks very well, she thought; none of her friends was to see her off; indeed, none of them knew the exact hour of her departure. She was even leaving from the North Philadelphia station so that none of the porters of the main depot, friends perhaps of the boys who came to her house, and, through some far flung communal instinct familiar to coloured people, acquainted with her by sight, would be able to tell of her going. Jinny, until she heard of this, had meant to accompany her to the station, but Angela’s precaution palpably scotched this idea; she made no comment when Virginia announced that it would be impossible for her to see her sister off. An indefinable steeliness was creeping upon them.

Yet when the taxi stood rumbling and snorting outside, Angela, her heart suddenly mounting to her throat, her eyes smarting, put her arm tightly about her sister who clung to her frankly crying. But she only said: “Now, Jinny, there’s nothing to cry about. You’ll be coming to New York soon. First thing I know you’ll be walking up to me: ‘Pardon me! Isn’t this Mrs. Henrietta Jones?’ ”

Virginia tried to laugh, “And you’ll be saying: ‘Really you have the advantage of me.’ Oh, Angela, don’t leave me!”

The cabby was honking impatiently. “I must, darling. Goodbye, Virginia. You’ll hear from me right away.”

She ran down the steps, glanced happily back. But her sister had already closed the door.