XXIV

Carnegie Hall was surrounded by streams of people, white and black, that were swallowed up in the vast building. Their car finally edged its way towards the curb close enough for them to alight. Inside, Mimi noted that every seat seemed to be taken as she followed Jimmie down the aisle in the wake of the grey-clad usher. The tiers of seats on the platform too were rapidly filling. The rumble of voices hushed. Out of a door on one side of the platform came a short dark figure followed by a taller one whose skin was brown. A salvo of applause welled up and swept over the bowing figure as he faced the shifting panorama of upturned faces.

Silence. The pianist leaned low over his instrument, and long brown fingers lightly touched ivory keys, prodding them gently in light, gentle touches. A chord. The immobile figure of the singer galvanized into tense attentiveness. Back went the head on which crisply curled hair hung close. Eyes shut, gleaming teeth were revealed as a thin pure note poured from parted lips. The harsh guttural tones of the German were transmuted into a finespun sound as pure and delicate as a silken thread. Out it poured.

If thou art near me, I will go with joy to death and rest;
Ah, how happy were my end, with the pressure of thy fair hands and the glance of thy true eyes.

Through songs by Bach and Schubert, by Brahms and Franck, by Quilter and Jensen, the singer made his way. And then he sang the songs of his own people. Not a sound disturbed the spell he had woven, the auditors dared hardly breathe. “Nobody Knows de Trouble I See,” he sang, a strange, wistful sadness pervading the music.

As from a fountain of bronze, tiny jets of gold and silver sound were flung in a pellucid stream high above the heads of the silent throng. It broke against the ceiling, the iridescent bubbles bursting in radiant glory, dissolving into myriad little drops of sound, each perfect and complete in itself. Down they were wafted in gentle benediction upon the heads of the listeners. Soothing, comforting, they brought peace and rest and happiness. Before them fled all worries, all cares, all lines of sex and class and race melting the heterogeneous throng into a perfect unity.

Upon Mimi the music served as magic metal keys which opened before her eyes mystic rooms, some of them long closed, some of them never opened for her before, all of them musty through long dark days and longer nights of disuse.

“Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Nobody knows but Jesus⁠ ⁠…”

Ghostly figures moved shadowily across the rooms⁠—figures with eyes sad with the tragedies of a thousand years, eyes bright with the faith which is born of strength in trial. Figures which by some strange legerdemain began as she watched them to lose their unearthly diaphanousness and, like Galatea, to become flesh and blood. The transformation did not startle nor alarm her⁠—instead, held fast in the spell woven by the black singer, the recreation of life in the figures before her seemed the most natural thing in the world.

A vast impenetrable tangle of huge trees appeared, their pithy bulk rising in ebon beauty to prodigious heights. As she gazed, half afraid of the wild stillness, the trees became less and less blackly solid, shading off into ever lighter greys. Then the trees were white, then there were none at all. In their stead an immense circular clearing in which moved at first slowly, then with increasing speed, a ring of graceful, rounded, lithe women and stalwart, magnificently muscled men, all with skins of midnight blackness. To music of barbaric sweetness and rhythm they danced with sinuous grace and abandon. Soft little gurgling cries punctuated the music, cries which came more sharply, like little darting arrows, as the ecstatic surrender of the figures to the dance increased.

A loud cry of alarm and of warning came from afar. The dance stopped, the dancers poised in wonder and indecision. Another cry, nearer, more intelligible. The black men seized their spears and short swords. The women were huddled in the middle of the living ring. From the murky darkness of the trees there burst weird creatures shouting. Weird, for their faces were not black as all men’s faces were, but obviously covered with some white substance to make them more terrible, their hair not curly and black but straight and yellow. The fight was on. Gorily it went on and on. Back the ebon fighters were swept before the strange, diabolic weapons like black reeds which spurted lead and flame. Back they were swept treading on the bodies of their dead and dying comrades. Soon but a few were left. The invaders seized these, overpowering them through numbers. The women too were seized and hurried away to huge, stinking hulks of ships, vessels a hundred times as huge as the craft hewn from great trees of the black warriors.⁠ ⁠…

“Sometimes I’m up,
Sometimes I’m down,
Oh, yes, Lord;
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground⁠ ⁠…”

Another door was opened for Mimi. This time she saw a ship wallowing in the trough of immense waves. Aboard there strode up and down unshaven, deep-eyed, fierce-looking sailors who sought with oath and blow and kick to still the clamorous outcries of their black passengers. These were close packed in ill-smelling, inadequate quarters where each day stalked the spectre whose visit meant one mouth less to feed. Black bodies were tossed carelessly overboard. No sooner did one of them touch the water than came sinister streaks of grey and white which seized the body long before the wails from the ship had died in the distance.

Under the spell of the music other doors opened one by one. This time it was an expansive field covered with white blossoms brilliant against the dusty green foliage of the cotton plants. Black figures bent low while near them stood with watchful eye and ready whip an overseer.

Another time it was at the “big house”; another, at muscle-wearying and spirit-crushing toil of another kind. But from them all there came these same weirdly sweet notes which now were being voiced by the slender dark figure on the platform yonder. A world of motion and of labour was caught up and held immobile in the tenuous, reluctant notes. Over them hovered that overtone of hope too great for extinction by whatever hardship or sorrow which might come to the singers. It was the personification of faith, a faith strong and immovable, a faith unshakable, a faith which made a people great. Against that faith, Mimi felt, contumely, brutality, oppression, scorn could do naught but dash and break like angry waves against huge granite cliffs.

To her sitting there in the semidarkness came a vision of her own people which made her blood run fast. Whatever other faults they might possess, her own people had not been deadened and dehumanized by bitter hatred of their fellow men. The venom born of oppression practiced upon others weaker than themselves had not entered their souls. These songs were of peace and hope and faith, and in them she felt and knew the peace which so long she had been seeking and which so long had cluded her grasp.

Tears crept unnoticed to Mimi’s eyes and made little cascades down her cheeks. A line of verse sprang to her mind with poignant appropriateness: “The music yearning like a God in pain.” She knew she had found the answer to the riddle which had puzzled her. She looked at Jimmie as he gruffly cleared his throat, ashamed of the emotion which too had seized him. He seemed alien, a total stranger. She marvelled that she had married this man, had lived with him, he whom she did not know. Silently they drove home through the quiet emptiness of lower Fifth Avenue. Mimi without speaking went to her room and closed the door. Calm peace filled her. She knew now why she had been ill at ease, restless, dissatisfied with the life which at first had seemed so happy a one.

She knew too that Jimmie would not, could not understand. Should she try to tell him? No, she decided. It were better to leave his dreams and illusions undisturbed⁠—he had little enough real happiness as it was. And his convictions, his prejudices were too deeply rooted, she was sure, to enable him to comprehend without pain and suffering. He had done all he could⁠—it was not wholly his fault.⁠ ⁠…

A brilliant but cold sun was creeping over the housetops out of the East as she softly closed the door behind her and stood upon the topmost step. Another book in her life was being closed with the shutting of the door. Mimi raised her eyes to the cross on the church across the Square. Her head went up and her shoulders straightened. She joyously drew into her lungs deep draughts of the cold air. “Free! Free! Free!” she whispered exultantly as with firm tread she went down the steps. “Petit Jean⁠—my own people⁠—and happiness!” was the song in her heart as she happily strode through the dawn, the rays of the morning sun dancing lightly upon the more brilliant gold of her hair.⁠ ⁠…