XIV

Mimi was not greatly surprised when she received a message that she would no longer be expected on Thursdays at the Germantown home. At first it amused her. Had she resorted to tears or pleading for release or any of the usual methods of damsels in defence of their virtue, she reflected, the curt note of dismissal would not have been sent. Man is a peculiar creature. So long as by implication or any other means he is allowed to imagine himself the superior being, whether that superiority came through brute strength or intellect or wealth or any other means, he is manageable and easily gulled. But when he is made ridiculous and the little bubble of his conceit is pricked by a woman’s obvious contempt, he becomes a vengeful and ridiculous person.

Mimi was sustained by her elation at the ease with which she had escaped an unpleasant and possibly dangerous situation. She was glad she had retained her poise. She felt angry only when she remembered the nasty way in which he had implied and later definitely stated that in his opinion she should have been happy, being coloured, to have attracted his notice. For the first time she saw the reasons for Jean’s apprehension in those talks which seemed to have taken place so many years ago. Life for any woman who was unprotected and who sought to live up to certain ideals was hard. But when that woman was coloured she was more than ever at the mercy of those who were her constant pursuers. She found her old race-consciousness surging up again. Bitterness against the husband of her former employer welled in her not so much because he had assumed she would be amenable to his suggestions but more because he had so readily assumed that she, being coloured, would offer no objections whatever.

But when her joy in her victory and her bitterness at the vanquished had passed, she found that the revenue lost in this manner was seriously affecting her. She found other jobs but none of them were as regular nor did they pay as well. Every dollar counted, every fraction of a dollar earned or expended made a difference. Once or twice she had been a few days late in paying the rent for the small room in which she and Petit Jean lived. The lessened cordiality with which her landlady greeted her pleas for more time for payment made this an ordeal she avoided even when it meant, as it frequently did, the forgoing of meals for herself.

Petit Jean thrived and grew, singularly free from the maladies of childhood. With what to Mimi seemed amazing speed, his monthly birthdays sped by and accumulated⁠—the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth. As long as he was well and clothed and fed, Mimi’s own difficulties seemed of little more than passing moment. Nothing greatly matters, she comforted herself, when seen in perspective⁠—it is only when a thing is happening that it frightens and pains one. She found a new strength coming to her out of the problems and perplexities she was meeting. It was, she found, like looking into a mirror. When one did look the image was there and if one was sick or unhappy it gave back a reflection of that condition or mood. But as soon as one removed himself from a place in front of the looking-glass the image was gone. She consoled herself with this convenient philosophy and found in it a courage of which she would not have believed herself capable.

But inevitably there came to her periods of depression. Most frequently these occurred when she thought of Jean’s future. Suppose her own health failed. She could not go on indefinitely this way, common sense told her, going without food, improperly clothed, saving nothing. Her rather ample wardrobe which she had brought from Atlanta was nearly threadbare and she just could not afford to spend money on adornment for herself. Little garments for Jean, talcums, soaps, and the infinite variety of essentials which an infant required for his comfort took all she could earn and more.

It seldom occurred to her she could have asked and received aid from the Hunters, Mrs. Daquin or her Aunt Sophie. The idea at times of greatest need came fleetingly to her, hazily, but she resolutely put it from her mind before it could find lodgment there. Whatever else might come to her, she would never yield to such temptations, at least she would never permit herself to beg from her stepmother or Carl’s parents. To do so would have been surrender of the principle for which she had so bravely fought⁠—the determination to keep her own soul free. However adroitly worded, a plea to them would have been admission of defeat, of her failure to make good the lofty words of determination she had spoken. She knew they did not understand the motives which had driven her on. In truth, she sometimes wondered if she herself knew them. But when she held Jean in her arms, when his toothless smile greeted her on her calling for him at the nursery, when his warm flesh rested against her side in bed, she was happy to a degree which she knew would never have been possible had she accepted the easier way out of her difficulties. No, despite all, she knew, her course had been the only one she could have taken in the face of Carl’s abject failure to measure up to the high qualities with which she had in fancy endowed him.

One extravagance, a pitifully small one, she permitted herself. In the late spring she passed an old secondhand book shop on a side street. She lingered at the weather-beaten old table outside the shop, fingering, examining, peeping into the battered and worn books displayed there. Volume after volume she looked into but most of them were dull and prosy stuff which bored her. She lingered so long the proprietor came to the door and stood there looking everywhere except at her, with too great casualness, Mimi reflected with a smile. It amused her to watch him with equal lack of obviousness, knowing that his suspiciousness led him to remain there. She named him “Old Scrooge,” for he looked as though he had stepped from Dickens’ pages with his fringe of dusty grey hair, his square, steel-rimmed spectacles, his baggy and nondescript clothing.

The game interested her and she lingered, idly fingering book after book. Her delay was repaid when a dingy, much-handled volume seemed to spring from the table, bringing with it a strange thrill. Jean had had a copy of this same book. So had Carl. Both of them had with elaborate indirection kept it from her and, with natural curiosity, she had always been eager to know why. And, with equal naturalness, she had made a solemn vow to read it from cover to cover when she could put her hands upon a copy. It was Leaves of Grass. She opened it eagerly. Her eyes fell on the yellowed page. They read:

O Me! O Life!

O Me! O Life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself for ever reproaching myself (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?),
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring⁠—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer

That you are her⁠—that life exists and identify,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

The old man, the shop, the passersby, everything was blotted out by the words, powerful, true, so applicable to her own case. “That the powerful play goes on, and I may contribute a verse,” she repeated softly, consciously changing the pronoun. She paid the man for the book, cheerfully giving up the food which the book would cost, and hurried home with it.

When she had put Jean to bed she sat and read over and over again the words. “Foolish and faithless.” “For who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?” She had been foolish, to the dead Jean she had been faithless. To herself, but a wild happiness filled her that in the hour of difficulty, at the time when she had been forced to make the biggest decision of her life, she may have been foolish but not faithless. She fell asleep whispering: “That the powerful play goes on, and I, Mimi Daquin, may contribute a verse.”

The words gave her a comforting sense of direction. She had been blindly wandering, groping, striving towards a goal that had never been clear, indeed she had never even vaguely visualized any destination other than the struggle to do those things which seemed to her to be right. Even for this indefinite rightness or wrongness she had no tangible definition⁠—she sought only by instinct or conscience or some other indefinable guide the path to truth and beauty and happiness.⁠ ⁠…

This new consciousness gave her faith and courage at a time when she needed these things more than she had ever needed them before. Summer came with the usual migration of the few regular customers she had to the seashore or the mountains. Mimi no longer called on the Mannings, for she could no longer conceal even from their unsuspecting eyes the extent of her distress. She saved the small fee at the day nursery, for it was seldom now that she had to be away from home. Her rent was several weeks overdue and the relations between Mimi and her landlady had reached an actually strained point.

“Stuck-up niggers think they can sponge off of common ones⁠—humph! I’ll show her she can’t make no footmat out of me!” she overheard her landlady saying to her husband one evening. “An’ I ain’t never been satisfied she’s respectable⁠—if that baby’s got a daddy he must have had some relatives she could get money from. I’m tired of foolin’ with her and if she don’t pay me by Sad’dy I’m goin’ to put her and her baby right out there in the street!”

Sick at heart, hungry, discouraged, Mimi slowly struggled up the stairs to her room. Even Petit Jean’s coos of welcome could not cheer her up. She lay on the bed beside him and wept.

And as though she had not already enough to bear, she found new trouble awaiting her that dwarfed all that had gone before, when she returned to the house the following evening after another day of fruitless search for work. Mrs. Williams, her landlady, had volunteered to care for Jean while she was out, despite her words of the night before. When the rickety screen door banged behind her, Mimi heard Mrs. Williams calling from the rear of the house. On an old davenport lay Jean, vomiting wretchedly. Intermittently he screamed, writhing in the paroxysmal pain which recurred every few minutes. On his face was a ghastly pallor and he seemed in a state of complete collapse.

Mimi rushed to the cot and fell on her knees beside Jean as she flung anxious questions at the perspiring, frightened woman above her.

“Yes’m, I called a doctor⁠—my doctor⁠—and he said it wasn’t nothing but cramps. He gave your baby some castor oil, but soon as the doctor left he began throwin’ up and yellin’ mo’ than ever.”⁠ ⁠…

Mimi, frightened as she was, remained calm.

“While I take him up to my room, will you get Dr. Newton?” she asked. She knew him by sight, having seen him at church often when she had gone there with the Mannings. His name came instantly to her, for she had been told many times of his eminence among the coloured physicians of Philadelphia. He came at once, trim, alert, intelligent. His brown face was a mask as he asked questions and examined Jean. Long brown fingers probed the baby’s abdomen, methodically, confidently he measured pulse and temperature. Coolly he recited the symptoms as he found them:

“… vomiting, at first contents of stomach, then bilious⁠ ⁠… collapse⁠ ⁠… pallor⁠ ⁠… feeble pulse⁠ ⁠… temperature normal⁠ ⁠… abdomen relaxed⁠ ⁠… increasing prostration⁠ ⁠… rising temperature⁠ ⁠… tumour, sausage-shaped, curving⁠ ⁠…” He turned to Mimi. “What’s been done for him?” Mimi told him of the doctor called by Mrs. Williams, of the administration of castor oil.

“He said somepin about ’fectious diarrhea,” Mrs. Williams added, her fright now gone with the coming of Dr. Newton.

“Gave him castor oil?” Dr. Newton asked, incredulously. “The blithering fool!”

Mimi and Mrs. Williams showed their dismay at his words.

“Thank goodness he’s probably vomited it all up by now.” His words were punctuated by Jean’s pathetic screams.

“Mrs. Daquin, your baby’s got a bad case of intussusception⁠—folding back of a part of the intestine over another part,” he added as she showed her lack of comprehension of the longer word. “Or, to make it simpler, it’s acute intestinal obstruction. The only chance of saving him is through an operation⁠—and it’ll have to be done without an hour’s delay.”

Mimi sank her head into her hands. Had she just heard the death sentence pronounced on her, she would have felt not half as terrified as the thought of her Petit Jean going under the knife. She felt sick, disheartened, beaten. She raised a haggard face, her hair dishevelled, to the doctor.

“Isn’t there anything else than operating?” she pleaded.

“Nothing,” he told her. “And even then the chances are somewhat less than one in ten. This sounds hard and brutally frank⁠—but it’s best you know the truth,” he added kindly, deep pity in his voice for her distress.

“Then operate,” she declared, firmly, all panic gone from her face and voice.⁠ ⁠…

They drove rapidly to the coloured hospital where Dr. Newton was to operate on Jean. Mimi held his tiny form close to her, stifling its screams in the softness of her breast. On her face was fear, despair, agony without hope. She was haunted by the spectre of death, she saw before her Petit Jean lifeless, never again to coo and smile and welcome her with soft little cries. Not until now did she realize how much he meant to her. She felt guilty of a great crime, of putting food into her own body when it might have averted this horrible thing. Even Dr. Newton’s assurance in answer to her timid questioning that physicians did not know the cause of the malady other than that it was due to the thinness of the intestinal walls of an infant, that most frequently it occurred in apparently perfectly healthy and well-cared-for children, her feeling of guilt did not leave her. Jean’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be in a deep stupor from which he roused only when another spasm of pain came over him. Mimi kissed him feverishly, madly, as the nurse took him gently from her.⁠ ⁠…

Up and down the hall she paced oblivious of everything save the tragic scene being enacted on the other side of the closed door. The odour of the anaesthetic stifled her, choked her, made her want to cry out in suffocation. The feeble little cries and groans as Jean slowly passed into unconsciousness made her frantic. She wanted to burst open the door, snatch him from the cruel knives, take him and the two of them plunge to simultaneous death in the waters of the river nearby. The immaculate nurses who passed rapidly infuriated her, they seemed so calm, so callous. She wanted to seize them and shake them until their teeth rattled, screaming: “Don’t you realize that my Jean⁠—mon pauvre Petit Jean⁠—is being cut to pieces in there!”⁠ ⁠… She wanted to do all these things but she did none of them. She paced frantically back and forth, back and forth, for hours, days, centuries, past the closed door⁠ ⁠…

“Operation’s a success⁠—he’s resting easily⁠—won’t know until a day or two.⁠ ⁠…” The words came to her as from a great distance. “You’d better go home⁠—there’s no good you can do here⁠—it’ll be half an hour or so before he comes out from under the anaesthetic⁠ ⁠… and then he’ll probably sleep.⁠ ⁠…”

“Mother of God! Save him! Save him!”

It had been a long time since a prayer had passed Mimi’s lips. But now she prayed⁠—prayed with the fervour of Luther, of Savonarola, of St. John, of all the martyrs, yea, with a fervour greater than all of these, the plea of a mother for her child.⁠ ⁠…

All night she alternately tossed in her narrow bed or sat by the window looking into the darkness outside. Above, a pale moon was sheathed in dusky blue swirls of clouds, so delicate and wispy they looked like graceful twistings of chiffon, but this beauty she did not see. From near at hand the fast-dying noises of the city came to her, the hum imperceptibly fading away as the crowds thinned out, but she heard none of these. Any minute Jean might be dying, she thought with a shiver. And then she would hurry down the stairs to telephone the hospital. Always she received the same answer, he’s resting easily.

Though she tried to keep the thought from her mind, she knew she had come to the parting of the ways. I wonder I ever thought I could go through with it, she reflected. For my own sake I don’t care. But I’m not making enough money to keep us and I won’t be able to save anything at this rate for the future⁠—for Petit Jean’s future, she amended. Rent due Mrs. Williams, the surgeon’s fee, bills for the hospital. She cudgelled her brains for some way of making money. The Hunters? No! Mrs. Daquin? A thousand times no! The man in Germantown? A bitter smile came over her face. It wouldn’t be wise for him to make such an offer now.

The thought brought her to herself with a shock. Defiantly she answered her own question⁠—I’d do even that if it would save Jean! She had reached the stage of desperation. The long months of anxious toil and uncertainty, of worry and undernourishment, had gathered their toll. Now that Jean’s life hung in the balance, she felt that there were no means to which she would not go. But all the possible sources of help she could think of would serve only to help her out of her present dilemma and would offer no lasting solution. Only one thing was certain⁠—it was not only impossible to go on as she had during the last few months but she was seriously jeopardizing Jean and his future. She did not know but that she might have a serious accident or become dangerously ill, perhaps die. What then would happen to him if he should live? She had sacrificed so much for him already, she would under no circumstances want him to go to the Hunters or to her stepmother, even if either of them would take him.

She wrestled with her problem but morning found her no nearer its solution. As soon as daylight came she dressed and went to the hospital. Jean had come out from under the anaesthetic. He greeted her with a faint smile, infinitely pathetic in its unconscious bravery. She sank to her knees gazing into his face as though he had died and had come to life again before her very eyes. And as she looked deep into his brown eyes and pallid face she offered a prayer of thanksgiving to the Virgin for life for Jean.⁠ ⁠…

Dr. Newton found her there.

“Well, he pulled through all right and, barring setbacks or complications, he’ll be well before long,” he cheerfully told her.

After they left the room Mimi told Dr. Newton frankly of her financial position. It galled her to be forced to confess her poverty but she could see no other way out of it and she was unwilling to do other than be truthful about it.

“Oh, that’s all right,” he assured her. “We doctors are used to waiting for our money. And the Mannings have told me about you, I’m not worried. Pay me when you can⁠—no, I’ll tell you what. Operations like the one I did on your baby are mighty rare. I’ve been practising medicine for fourteen years now and it’s the first one I’ve ever seen outside of a clinic. You pay the hospital bills and I’ll just dismiss the bill. The case is so remarkable a one that I’ll gladly let the fee go⁠—”

She protested vigorously against his proposal. She was grateful, so grateful the tears stood in her eyes. But, following so closely upon her confession of poverty, it smacked too much of charity, and she would not, she could not permit that.

“Well, have it your own way,” he finally agreed. “But don’t hurry.”

She was touched by his kindness. He hurried away. When he was gone a dozen phrases of thanks came to her mind, vexing her that she had been too stunned by his generosity to think of them before he had gone.⁠ ⁠…

As if Fate felt ashamed of the blows it had dealt her, there came to Mimi several profitable jobs during the four weeks Jean was in the hospital. One of these lasted more than a week, the making of the trousseau of a girl who belonged to one of the old Philadelphia coloured families. She never knew that she had been recommended by Dr. Newton, but the money she earned enabled her to pay not only the hospital bill but to settle a part of the debt she owed Mrs. Williams. Now that Jean was out of danger and well on the road to recovery, Mimi worked with a song in her heart and happiness in the belief that her darkest days were past. And when he was returned from the hospital she bought little things for his amusement, toys, games, dainty bits of the foods he was allowed to eat. She was envious of everything which separated her from him even for a short time, she begrudged the hours they spent in sleep, for they robbed her, she felt, of so many moments of conscious knowledge of and contact with him.

The acuteness of her desire to be with Jean was rooted not alone in the to her more than miraculous escape he had had. It was, too, in the decision she had reached through that illness and the inevitability of execution of that decision pained her beyond measure. Mimi had faced during her dark hours when Jean’s life hung in the balance the practical situation before her. Ruthlessly she had cut away all the entangling meshes created by her love for Jean and had considered as dispassionately as she could the question as to what course would be for his greatest good. She found she could not approach the Hunters or her stepmother and she would rather have died herself than to have surrendered Jean to either of them. Those contingencies therefore were definitely out of the question.

So too was the possibility of her attempting to carry on the struggle she had now been making for more than a year. If only I could get some money saved and secure a steady income, perhaps start a small dressmaking establishment of my own, I could see my way clear. But these possibilities seemed to her much more remote than the probability of her jumping safely to the moon. Another thing was certain. There was little chance of her making any great progress in Philadelphia. New York to her seemed the only field in which any marked advance could be made, but here again there were the same problems if not greater ones.

Mimi found a certain grim amusement in remembering the tenuous plans she had so confidently builded and which now had tumbled about her. Realizing her own weakness for the first time, comprehending that she could not make the fight alone, she wrote tentatively of her distress to her Aunt Sophie. The second day after her letter was posted there came an answer⁠—a warmingly cordial letter⁠—scolding Mimi because she had not called upon her aunt for aid long before, offering Mimi whatever aid she needed. From the envelope there fell a cheque of generous size. And the letter ended:

“Alone you will have little trouble, especially if you come to New York. But with the baby it will be harder⁠—you would have to be away all day⁠—and people, even here, do talk. I know just how you feel about it, but why don’t you put Jean in a home until you can get on your feet? I don’t urge this⁠—I merely suggest it. Do what you think is wisest and best.”

Finally a decision had been made, the only possible way out, and she wept many bitter tears before she would let herself even consider this solution. Always, however, she had come back to it⁠—the suggestion of Aunt Sophie⁠—the one stable thing in a sea of uncertainties. She would put Jean in a children’s home, work as hard as mortal could toil, save her money until she had accumulated enough to assure herself and him freedom from their more immediate wants, and then get him again when she had gained her objective.

And here she was confronted with another problem. She was unwilling to put him in a Negro orphanage, for their all too-slender resources made it problematical if he would receive the care and attention he needed. She would rather struggle along in her present hopeless way than have him neglected. Nor would she want to place him in a white orphanage as a Negro child⁠—she knew the insults and slights he would be forced to suffer. The only recourse left to her and the one she decided upon was to place him in a Catholic orphanage and say nothing about his Negro blood. This had been done, she knew, even with children not nearly so fair as Jean. His French name would be an additional safeguard to him and further assurance he would be given all the advantages available.

She had had some qualms of conscience about this procedure. She had wondered if she were doing the right thing, if she were not placing Jean at such a disadvantage in the event his coloured blood were discovered that it would be greater than if his race were told of at the beginning. But she soon dismissed these fears from her mind. In the first place, it would be only for a short time, and in the second, he had so little coloured blood there was really little question that could be raised. Overshadowing both of these was the mood of desperation in which her ill fortune had forced her. Just as in the hours of that night when Jean was lying at the hospital she had been willing to go to any length to save him, so now she was willing to take any step, legal or illegal, to secure for him as much security and comfort as was possible. It was the relentless, the ruthless, the uncompromising logic of a mother fighting for its own, and obstacles of whatever size were bowled over in eagerness to gain that end.⁠ ⁠…

She had decided on a home in Baltimore, for she felt that there where so many Catholics lived there would be greater advantages for the unfortunate children of that faith. The bleak November day when she carried Jean there was no more cold and dreary than Mimi’s heart. Petit Jean seemed to feel the impending separation. He clung to Mimi, showering little affections upon her that tore her heart with pain. Her eyes filled with tears, she rushed from the place as though it were plague-stricken to take the train to New York. She had written her Aunt Sophie telling her plans and she had received a letter, short, but warm and sincere. Her aunt had approved her plans and urged her to come to New York and live with her while she was working out a solution to her problems. Mimi had accepted gratefully, glad of the haven to which she could go.