VII

Thursday came and Thursday sped as Thursdays will. For a long time Angela saw it as a little separate entity of time shut away in some hidden compartment of her mind, a compartment whose door she dreaded to open.

On Friday she called up her sister early in the morning. “Is that you, Jinny? Did you get my letter? Is it all right for me to come up?”

“Yes,” said Jinny noncomittally, to all questions, then laconically: “But you’d better come right away if you want to catch me. I take the examination today and haven’t much time.”

Something in the matter-of-factness of her reply disconcerted Angela. Yet there certainly was no reason why her sister should show any enthusiasm over seeing her. Only she did want to see her, to talk to someone of her very own today. She would like to burrow her head in Virginia’s shoulder and cry! But a mood such as Jinny’s voice indicated did not invite confidences.

A stout brown-skinned bustling woman suggesting immense assurance and ability opened the door. “Miss Murray told me that she was expecting someone. You’re to go right on up. Hers is the room right next to the third storey front.”

“She was expecting someone.” Evidently Virginia had been discreet. This unexpected, unsought for carefulness carried a sting with it.

“Hello,” said Jinny, casually thrusting a dishevelled but picturesque head out of the door. “Can you find your way in? This room’s larger than any two we ever had at home, yet already it looks like a ship at sea.” She glanced about the disordered place. “I wonder if this is what they mean by ‘shipshape.’ Here I’ll hang up this suit, then you can sit down. Isn’t it a sweetie? Got it at Snellenburg’s.”

She had neither kissed nor offered to shake hands with her sister, yet her manner was friendly enough, even cordial. “See I’ve bobbed my hair,” she went on. “Like it? I’m wild about it even if it does take me forever to fix it.” Standing before a mirror she began shaping the ends under with a curling iron.

Angela thought she had never seen anyone so pretty and so colourful. Jinny had always shown a preference for high colours; today she was revelling in them; her slippers were high heeled small red mules; a deep green dressing-gown hung gracefully from her slim shoulders and from its open collar flamed the rose and gold of her smooth skin. Her eyes were bright and dancing. Her hair, black, alive and curling, ended in a thick velvety straightness like cut plush.

Angela said stiffly, “I hope I didn’t get you up, telephoning so early.”

Virginia smiled, flushing a little more deeply under the dark gold of her skin. “Oh dear no! I’d already had an earlier call than that this morning.”

“You had!” exclaimed Angela, astonished. “I didn’t know you knew anyone in New York.” She remembered her sister’s mysterious disappearance the first night of her arrival. “And see here, Jinny, I’m awfully sorry about what happened the other night. I wouldn’t have had it happen for a great deal. I wish I could explain to you about it.” How confidently she had counted on having marvellous news to tell Virginia and now how could she drag to the light yesterday’s sorry memory? “But I called you up again and again and you hadn’t arrived and then when they finally did tell me that you had come, it appeared that you had gone out. Where on earth did you go?”

Jenny began to laugh, to giggle in fact. For a moment she was the Virginia of her school days, rejoicing in some innocent mischief, full of it. “I wasn’t out. There’s a washroom down the hall and I went there to wash my face⁠—” it clouded a moment. “And when I came back I walked as I thought into my room. Instead of that I had walked into the room of another lodger. And there he sat⁠—”

“Oh,” said Angela inattentively. “I’m glad you weren’t out. I was quite worried. Listen, Virginia,” she began desperately, “I know you think that what I did in the station the other day was unspeakable; it seems almost impossible for me to explain it to you. But that man with me was a very special friend⁠—”

“He must have been indeed,” Jinny interrupted drily, “to make you cut your own sister.” She was still apparently fooling with her hair, her head perched on one side, her eyes glued to the mirror. But she was not making much progress and her lips were trembling.

Angela proceeded unheeding, afraid to stop. “A special friend, and we had come to a very crucial point in our relationship. It was with him that I had the engagement yesterday.”

“Well, what about it? Were you expecting him to ask you to marry him? Did he?”

“No,” said Angela very low, “that’s just what he didn’t do though he⁠—he asked everything else.”

Virginia, dropping the hairbrush, swung about sharply. “And you let him talk like that?”

“I couldn’t help it once he had begun⁠—I was so taken by surprise, and, besides, I think that his ultimate intentions are all right.”

“His ultimate intentions! Why, Angela what are you talking about? You know perfectly well what his ultimate intentions are. Isn’t he a white man? Well, what kind of intentions would he have toward a coloured woman?”

“Simple! He doesn’t know I’m coloured. And besides some of them are decent. You must remember that I know something about these people and you don’t, you couldn’t, living that humdrum little life of yours at home.”

“I know enough about them and about men in general to recognize an insult when I hear one. Some men bear their character stamped right on their faces. Now this man into whose room I walked last night by mistake⁠—”

“I don’t see how you can do very much talking walking into strange men’s rooms at ten o’clock at night.”

The triviality of the retort left Jinny dumb.

It was their first quarrel.

They sat in silence for a few minutes; for several minutes. Virginia, apparently completely composed, was letting the tendrils of her mind reach far, far out to the ultimate possibilities of this impasse in relationship between herself and her sister. She thought: “I really have lost her, she’s really gone out of my ken just as I used to lose her years ago when father and I would be singing ‘The Dying Christian.’ I’m twenty-three years old and I’m really all alone in the world.” Up to this time she had always felt she had Angela’s greater age and supposedly greater wisdom to fall back on, but she banished this conjecture forever. “Because if she could cut me when she hadn’t seen me for a year for the sake of a man who she must have known meant to insult her, she certainly has no intention of openly acknowledging me again. And I don’t believe I want to be a sister in secret. I hate this hole and corner business.”

She saw again the scene in the station, herself at first so serene, so self-assured, Angela’s confused coldness, Roger’s insolence. Something hardened, grew cold within her. Even his arrogance had failed to bring Angela to her senses, and suddenly she remembered that it had been possible in slavery times for white men and women to mistreat their mulatto relations, their own flesh and blood, selling them into deeper slavery in the far South or standing by watching them beaten, almost, if not completely, to death. Perhaps there was something fundamentally different between white and coloured blood after all. Aloud she said: “You know before you went away that Sunday morning you said that you and I were different. Perhaps you’re right, Angela; perhaps there is an extra infusion of white blood in your veins which lets you see life at another angle. If that’s the case I have no right to judge you. You must forgive my ignorant comments.”

She began slipping into a ratine dress of old blue trimmed with narrow collars and cuffs and a tiny belt of old rose. Above the soft shades the bronze and black of her head etched themselves sharply; she might have been a dainty bird of Paradise cast in a new arrangement of colours but her tender face was set in strange and implacable lines.

Angela looked at her miserably. She had not known just what, in her wounded pride and humiliation, she had expected to gain from her sister, but certainly she had hoped for some balm. And in any event not this cool aloofness. She had forgotten that her sister might be suffering from a wound as poignant as her own. The year had made a greater breach than she had anticipated; she had never been as outspoken, as frank with Virginia as the latter had been with her, but there had always been a common ground between them, a meeting place. In the household Jinny had had something of a reputation for her willingness to hear all sides of a story, to find an excuse or make one.

An old aphorism of Hetty Daniels returned to her. “He who would have friends must show himself friendly.” And she had done anything but that; she had neglected Jinny, had failed to answer her letters, had even planned⁠—was it only day before yesterday!⁠—to see very little of her in what she had dreamed would be her new surroundings. Oh she had been shameful! But she would make it up to Jinny now⁠—and then she could come to her at this, this crisis in her life which so frightened and attracted her. She was the more frightened because she felt that attraction. She would make her sister understand the desires and longings which had come to her in this strange, dear, free world, and then together they would map out a plan of action. Jinny might be a baby but she had strength. So much strength, said something within her, that just as likely as not she would say: “Let the whole thing go, Angela, Angela! You don’t want to be even on the outskirts of a thing like this.”

Before she could begin her overtures Jinny was speaking. “Listen, Angela, I’ve got to be going. I don’t know when we’ll be seeing each other again, and after what happened Wednesday you can hardly expect me to be looking you up, and as you doubtless are very busy you’d hardly be coming ’way up here. But there are one or two things I want to talk to you about. First about the house.”

“About the house? Why it’s yours. I’ve nothing more to do with it.”

“I know, but I’m thinking of selling it. There is such a shortage of houses in Philadelphia just now; Mr. Hallowell says I can get at least twice as much as father paid for it. And in that case you’ve some more money coming to you.”

If only she had known of this⁠—when?⁠—twenty-four hours earlier, how differently she might have received Roger’s proposition. If she had met Virginia Wednesday and had had the talk for which she had planned!

“Well of course it would be awfully nice to have some more money. But what I don’t understand is how are you going to live? What are you going to do?”

“If I pass this examination I’m coming over here, my appointment would be only a matter of a few months. I’m sure of that. This is May and I’d only have to wait until September. Well, I wouldn’t be working this summer anyway. And there’s no way in the world which I could fail to pass. In fact I’m really thinking of taking a chance and coming over here to substitute. Mr. Holloster, the University of Pennsylvania man, has been investigating and he says there’s plenty of work. And I guess I’m due to have a change; New York rather appeals to me. And there certainly is something about Harlem!” In spite of her careless manner Angela knew she was thinking about Matthew Henson. She stretched out her hand, pulled Jinny’s head down on her shoulder. “Oh darling, don’t worry about him. Matthew really wasn’t the man for you.”

“Well,” said Virginia, “as long as I think he was, the fact that he wasn’t doesn’t make any real difference, does it? At least not at first. But I certainly shan’t worry about it.”

“No don’t⁠—I⁠—” It was on the tip of her tongue to say “I know two or three nice young men whom you can play around with. I’ll introduce you to them.” But could she? Jinny understood her silence; smiled and nodded. “It’s all right, honey, you can’t do anything; you would if you could. We’ve just got to face the fact that you and I are two separate people and we’ve got to live our lives apart, not like the Siamese twins. And each of us will have to go her chosen way. After all each of us is seeking to get all she can out of life! and if you can get more out of it by being white, as you undoubtedly can, why, why shouldn’t you? Only it seems to me that there are certain things in living that are more fundamental even than colour⁠—but I don’t know. I’m all mixed up. But evidently you don’t feel that way, and you’re just as likely to be right as me.”

“Jinny!”

“My dear, I’m not trying to reproach you. I’m trying to look at things without sentiment. After all, in a negative way, merely by saying nothing, you’re disclaiming your black blood in a country where it is an inconvenience⁠—oh! there’s not a doubt about that. You may be proud of it, you may be perfectly satisfied with it⁠—I am⁠—but it certainly can shut you out of things. So why shouldn’t you disclaim a living manifestation of that blood?”

Before this cool logic Angela was silent. Virginia looked at her sister, a maternal look oddly apparent on her young face. When she was middle-aged she would be the embodiment of motherhood. How her children would love her!

“Angela, you’ll be careful!”

“Yes; darling. Oh if only I could make you understand what it’s all about.”

“Yes, well, perhaps another time. I’ve got to fly now.” She hesitated, took Angela by the arms and gazed into her eyes. “About this grand white party that you were in the station with. Are you awfully in love with him?”

“I’m not in love with him at all.”

“Oh, pshaw!” said innocent Virginia, “you’ve got nothing to worry about! Why, what’s all the shooting for?”