Nella Larsen (17 page)

FOUR

The next morning brought with it a snowstorm that lasted throughout the day.

After a breakfast, which had been eaten almost in silence and which she was relieved to have done with, Irene Redfield lingered for a little while in the downstairs hall, looking out at the soft flakes fluttering down. She was watching them immediately fill some ugly irregular gaps left by the feet of hurrying pedestrians when Zulena came to her, saying: “The telephone, Mrs. Redfield. It's Mrs. Bellew.”

“Take the message, Zulena, please.”

Though she continued to stare out of the window, Irene saw nothing now, stabbed as she was by fear— and hope. Had anything happened between Clare and Bellew? And if so, what? And was she to be freed at last from the aching anxiety of the past weeks? Or was there to be more, and worse? She had a wrestling moment, in which it seemed that she must rush after Zulena and hear for herself what it was that Clare had to say. But she waited.

Zulena, when she came back, said: “She says, ma'am, that she'll be able to go to Mrs. Freeland's tonight. She'll be here some time between eight and nine.”

“Thank you, Zulena.”

The day dragged on to its end.

At dinner Brian spoke bitterly of a lynching that he had been reading about in the evening paper.

“Dad, why is it that they only lynch coloured people?” Ted asked.

“Because they hate 'em, son.”

“Brian!” Irene's voice was a plea and a rebuke.

Ted said: “Oh! And why do they hate 'em?”

“Because they are afraid of them.”

“But what makes them afraid of 'em?”

“Because—”

“Brian!”

“It seems, son, that is a subject we can't go into at the moment without distressing the ladies of our family,” he told the boy with mock seriousness, “but we'll take it up some time when we're alone together.”

Ted nodded in his engaging grave way. “I see. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow on the way to school.”

“That'll be fine.”

“Brian!”

“Mother,” Junior remarked, “that's the third time you've said ‘Brian' like that.”

“But not the last, Junior, never you fear,” his father told him.

After the boys had gone up to their own floor, Irene said suavely: “I do wish, Brian, that you wouldn't talk about lynching before Ted and Junior. It was really inexcusable for you to bring up a thing like that at dinner. There'll be time enough for them to learn about such horrible things when they're older.”

“You're absolutely wrong! If, as you're so determined, they've got to live in this damned country, they'd better find out what sort of thing they're up against as soon as possible. The earlier they learn it, the better prepared they'll be.”

“I don't agree. I want their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be.”

“Very laudable,” was Brian's sarcastic answer. “Very laudable indeed, all things considered. But can it?”

“Certainly it can. If you'll only do your part.”

“Stuff! You know as well as I do, Irene, that it can't. What was the use of our trying to keep them from learning the word ‘nigger' and its connotation? They found out, didn't they? And how? Because somebody called Junior a dirty nigger.”

“Just the same you're not to talk to them about the race problem. I won't have it.”

They glared at each other.

“I tell you, Irene, they've got to know these things, and it might as well be now as later.”

“They do not!” she insisted, forcing back the tears of anger that were threatening to fall.

Brian growled: “I can't understand how anybody as intelligent as you like to think you are can show evidences of such stupidity.” He looked at her in a puzzled harassed way.

“Stupid!” she cried. “Is it stupid to want my children to be happy?” Her lips were quivering.

“At the expense of proper preparation for life and their future happiness, yes. And I'd feel I hadn't done my duty by them if I didn't give them some inkling of what's before them. It's the least I can do. I wanted to get them out of this hellish place years ago. You wouldn't let me. I gave up the idea, because you objected. Don't expect me to give up everything.”

Under the lash of his words she was silent. Before any answer came to her, he had turned and gone from the room.

Sitting there alone in the forsaken dining-room, unconsciously pressing the hands lying in her lap, tightly together, she was seized by a convulsion of shivering. For, to her, there had been something ominous in the scene that she had just had with her husband. Over and over in her mind his last words: “Don't expect me to give up everything,” repeated themselves. What had they meant? What could they mean? Clare Kendry?

Surely, she was going mad with fear and suspicion. She must not work herself up. She must not! Where were all the self-control, the common sense, that she was so proud of? Now, if ever, was the time for it.

Clare would soon be there. She must hurry or she would be late again, and those two would wait for her downstairs together, as they had done so often since that first time, which now seemed so long ago. Had it been really only last October? Why, she felt years, not months, older.

Drearily she rose from her chair and went upstairs to set about the business of dressing to go out when she would far rather have remained at home. During the process she wondered, for the hundredth time, why she hadn't told Brian about herself and Felise running into Bellew the day before, and for the hundredth time she turned away from acknowledging to herself the real reason for keeping back the information.

When Clare arrived, radiant in a shining red gown, Irene had not finished dressing. But her smile scarcely hesitated as she greeted her, saying: “I always seem to keep C. P. time,
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don't I? We hardly expected you to be able to come. Felise will be pleased. How nice you look.”

Clare kissed a bare shoulder, seeming not to notice a slight shrinking.

“I hadn't an idea in the world, myself, that I'd be able to make it; but Jack had to run down to Philadelphia unexpectedly. So here I am.”

Irene looked up, a flood of speech on her lips. “Philadelphia. That's not very far, is it? Clare, I—?”

She stopped, one of her hands clutching the side of her stool, the other lying clenched on the dressing-table. Why didn't she go on and tell Clare about meeting Bellew? Why couldn't she?

But Clare didn't notice the unfinished sentence. She laughed and said lightly: “It's far enough for me. Anywhere, away from me, is far enough. I'm not particular.”

Irene passed a hand over her eyes to shut out the accusing face in the glass before her. With one corner of her mind she wondered how long she had looked like that, drawn and haggard and—yes, frightened. Or was it only imagination?

“Clare,” she asked, “have you ever seriously thought what it would mean if he should find you out?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! You have! And what you'd do in that case?”

“Yes.” And having said it, Clare Kendry smiled quickly, a smile that came and went like a flash, leaving untouched the gravity of her face.

That smile and the quiet resolution of that one word, “yes,” filled Irene with a primitive paralysing dread. Her hands were numb, her feet like ice, her heart like a stone weight. Even her tongue was like a heavy dying thing. There were long spaces between the words as she asked: “And what should you do?”

Clare, who was sunk in a deep chair, her eyes far away, seemed wrapped in some pleasant impenetrable reflection. To Irene, sitting expectantly upright, it was an interminable time before she dragged herself back to the present to say calmly: “I'd do what I want to do more than anything else right now. I'd come up here to live. Harlem, I mean. Then I'd be able to do as I please, when I please.”

Irene leaned forward, cold and tense. “And what about Margery?” Her voice was a strained whisper.

“Margery?” Clare repeated, letting her eyes flutter over Irene's concerned face. “Just this, 'Rene. If it wasn't for her, I'd do it anyway. She's all that holds me back. But if Jack finds out, if our marriage is broken, that lets me out. Doesn't it?”

Her gentle resigned tone, her air of innocent candour, appeared, to her listener, spurious. A conviction that the words were intended as a warning took possession of Irene. She remembered that Clare Kendry had always seemed to know what other people were thinking. Her compressed lips grew firm and obdurate. Well, she wouldn't know this time.

She said: “Do go downstairs and talk to Brian. He's got a mad on.”

Though she had determined that Clare should not get at her thoughts and fears, the words had sprung, unthought of, to her lips. It was as if they had come from some outer layer of callousness that had no relation to her tortured heart. And they had been, she realized, precisely the right words for her purpose.

For as Clare got up and went out, she saw that that arrangement was as good as her first plan of keeping her waiting up there while she dressed—or better. She would only have hindered and rasped her. And what matter if those two spent one hour, more or less, alone together, one or many, now that everything had happened between them?

Ah! The first time that she had allowed herself to admit to herself that everything had happened, had not forced herself to believe, to hope, that nothing irrevocable had been consummated! Well, it had happened. She knew it, and knew that she knew it.

She was surprised that, having thought the thought, conceded the fact, she was no more hurt, cared no more, than during her previous frenzied endeavours to escape it. And this absence of acute, unbearable pain seemed to her unjust, as if she had been denied some exquisite solace of suffering which the full acknowledgment should have given her.

Was it, perhaps, that she had endured all that a woman could endure of tormenting humiliation and fear? Or was it that she lacked the capacity for the acme of suffering? “No, no!” she denied fiercely. “I'm human like everybody else. It's just that I'm so tired, so worn out, I can't feel any more.” But she did not really believe that.

Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?

Irene didn't know, couldn't decide, though for a long time she sat questioning and trying to understand. Yet all the while, in spite of her searchings and feeling of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it. She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.

Now that she had relieved herself of what was almost like a guilty knowledge, admitted that which by some sixth sense she had long known, she could again reach out for plans. Could think again of ways to keep Brian by her side, and in New York. For she would not go to Brazil. She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American. She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted. Not even because of Clare Kendry, or a hundred Clare Kendrys.

Brian, too, belonged here. His duty was to her and to his boys.

Strange, that she couldn't now be sure that she had ever truly known love. Not even for Brian. He was her husband and the father of her sons. But was he anything more? Had she ever wanted or tried for more? In that hour she thought not.

Nevertheless, she meant to keep him. Her freshly painted lips narrowed to a thin straight line. True, she had left off trying to believe that he and Clare loved and yet did not love, but she still intended to hold fast to the outer shell of her marriage, to keep her life fixed, certain. Brought to the edge of distasteful reality, her fastidious nature did not recoil. Better, far better, to share him than to lose him completely. Oh, she could close her eyes, if need be. She could bear it. She could bear anything. And there was March ahead. March and the departure of Clare.

Horribly clear, she could now see the reason for her instinct to withhold—omit, rather—her news of the encounter with Bellew. If Clare was freed, anything might happen.

She paused in her dressing, seeing with perfect clearness that dark truth which she had from that first October afternoon felt about Clare Kendry and of which Clare herself had once warned her—that she got the things she wanted because she met the great condition of conquest, sacrifice. If she wanted Brian, Clare wouldn't revolt from the lack of money or place. It was as she had said, only Margery kept her from throwing all that away. And if things were taken out of her hands—Even if she was only alarmed, only suspected that such a thing was about to occur, anything might happen. Anything.

No! At all costs, Clare was not to know of that meeting with Bellew. Nor was Brian. It would only weaken her own power to keep him.

They would never know from her that he was on his way to suspecting the truth about his wife. And she would do anything, risk anything, to prevent him from finding out that truth. How fortunate that she had obeyed her instinct and omitted to recognize Bellew!

“Ever go up to the sixth floor, Clare?” Brian asked as he stopped the car and got out to open the door for them.

“Why, of course! We're on the seventeenth.”

“I mean, did you ever go up by nigger-power?”
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“That's good!” Clare laughed. “Ask 'Rene. My father was a janitor, you know, in the good old days before every ramshackle flat had its elevator. But you can't mean we've got to walk up? Not here!”

“Yes, here. And Felise lives at the very top,” Irene told her.