OLIVER lived in a double world. But it was a long time before he realized this. If he had understood it earlier, and if, more especially, he had learned the relative merits of each, he might have been spared many a moment of pain, many an hour of bewilderment. It was a long time before it became clear to his childish mind where he belonged, and which was his actual habitat.
Because of his mother’s indifference, he had known, before he was six years old, three widely different homes. In his childish way he had made contrasts and had long since decided which home—by which at that time, he meant environment—he truly preferred. There was the old, big house on Eleventh Street where dwelt the parents of his father, Aaron and Rebecca Cary. The rooms on the first floor were huge and rather dark. It was always necessary to have a light in the dining-room when one ate, which gave to the rite a sense of special significance and mystery.
But upstairs, the rooms, though equally large, were light and sufficiently airy. They were furnished with all sorts of objects which, young as he was, he knew perfectly well belonged to an earlier day, but to a day which was well worth preserving. He loved the life in this house, perhaps because so much of it centered around him. Grandfather and Grandmother Cary loved him with devotion and concentration; their manifestations of joy and gratitude were unlimited for this little lad who had come so miraculously to liven up their late, declining days. . . .
And in addition to their obvious affection, they poured out upon him also, a sort of fierce protective loyalty, as though they were trying to compensate him for something that he was missing—as indeed they were, for they felt very keenly Olivia’s defection where this last, dark child of hers was concerned. . . . In those days of course, Oliver was unable to define to himself either the cause of this palpable loyalty, or indeed the feeling itself. . . . He only knew he felt it.
At his Grandmother Blake’s in Boston a different spirit prevailed. In this dwelling there was more liveliness, more fun, more life, though never more love. His Uncle David and Aunt Janet were only two years older than his sister. They treated him exactly as Teresa and Christopher did, as a baby brother whom they alternately spoiled and “put in his place.”
It was through his contact with them that he learned the usages which made it possible for him to take his stand in his own family. And there was a breadth and a brightness about this household, very different from the atmosphere of the old house on Eleventh Street in Philadelphia where there was only a vast, enveloping love and a strange, palpitating, invaluable pride.
His father’s house on Thirty-eighth Street in West Philadelphia, pleased him least, though it intrigued him most. It was brighter and more modernly furnished than either of his other homes, and yet he knew, even at his tenderest age of discrimination, that it possessed less of the quality of home.
There was neither the feeling of affection and indulgence so evident in the dwelling of Grandmother Cary, nor the vivacity and fun with which Dr. Blake’s busy establishment so teemed in Boston. . . . What was wrong, he could not say, but not until Teresa came back from Chicago the year of the summer that marked her engagement to Henry was he able to enter his father’s dwelling without experiencing some sense of frustration, bafflement, futility.
Yet he was always eager to return to it. . . . This little fellow, so richly endowed by the fates at birth with beauty, ability and intellect, was gifted also with two qualities which were to prove his undoing—a great need to bestow and to receive love, and a strong instinct for family life.
On the whole he liked best, in his early childhood at least, the passage of time and events in the house on Eleventh Street. The old people instilled in him a feeling almost of princeliness. Indeed in his own eyes he came to feel himself as someone very fine and special. He was, he knew, the youngest offspring of a family which had achieved independence and success.
His grandfather and his great-grandfather had both been upholsterers. The latter of course had had no place of business. He had just gone about from place to place with his bag of tools, a tall, slender golden brown man with a fierce, wild face. . . . He had married one of the pale “Gould Girls” from that large settlement of Goulds near Bridgeton; she had been among the first to break the custom of marrying a cousin Gould or Pierce. . . .
Aaron Cary was Caleb Cary’s third son of his family of twelve children, none of whom exactly resembled the other in hue. Two of the very fair ones and one of Spanish coloring had “gone white.” . . . . They had wandered off west and north away from their old connections, not so much from any set purpose as because it was more convenient. . . .
Aaron, also fair, had married Rebecca Fidell who could “pass.” But both of these people clung to their own group. Neither one of them would have married, nor would they have wanted their sons to marry with Negroes of unmixed blood. But that was a purely personal taste manifested only in the matter of marriage. They were both strong “race people” and numbered among their friends many men and women of African strain modified only by the effects of climate and a different civilization.
There is no pride so strong, so inflexible, so complacent as the pride of the colored “old Philadelphian.” Aaron Cary taught his small grandson that bondsmen who had been enslaved, as Africans had been enslaved, need feel no shame. The burden of that was on their enslavers. But when men rose in less than half a century to positions of independence and of signal success, their children had an ancestry of which they might well be proud.
His own interests were along business lines. He liked to be able to speak of his son, “Doctor” Christopher Cary, but he would have preferred to be able to point to him as a successful business man or even as a smart “Philadelphia lawyer.” Aaron Cary liked men who possessed and knew how to exercise native ability.
He told Oliver about Philadelphia families of color who had made the most of this ability. He took him to the churches, St. Thomas’s; Crucifixion; Central Presbyterian; “Cherry St.” Baptist which was really on Christian Street; Union Methodist way up in the fastnesses of North Philadelphia. . . . After service he stood with the little boy on the sidewalk and pointed out to him the descendants of the Augustines, the Trowers, the Dutreuilles, the Baptistes, the Allmans, the Stephenses, families which had made a specialty of catering and undertaking. . . .
He showed him sites of old forgotten undertakings, Mr. Jacob White’s School where the children of Philadelphia’s best colored families had gone and in which a few of them had taught. It was the forerunner of the “separate school” in Philadelphia which, while not based on the truest spirit of either brotherhood or the much-vaunted Quaker fairness, had yet its points.
There was too an “Institute for Colored Youth” which he himself had attended—a marvelous school if his description were true. . . . He always referred to it with loving familiarity as the “I.C.Y.” And Oliver for years after connected it inextricably in his mind with the picture of sleety pavements and slipping pedestrians madly clutching the air.
As a climax old Aaron saved for the boy the story of his own success; how he had obtained to his father’s business; how he had saved time and secured patronage by the expedient of inditing letters written in his distinctive old-fashioned writing to the whole list of his customers, asking them at stated intervals, if they did not want him to come and look over their furniture. . . . To his knowledge of upholstering, he had added that of cabinet-making. . . .
He had the fine feeling of the Negro for family and catered to the very best . . . exclusively. It was known that he had declared himself unable to serve certain groups of nouveaux riches .As a result it gave, through the course of the years, a certain cachet to have it known that one’s upholstering was handled by Cary and Son.
He had no son in the business since his only boy, Christopher, had studied medicine; his assistant was the son of one of his older brothers, a man only ten years younger than himself. This latter had introduced painting into the firm’s activities. Beyond this Old Cary refused to go. He thought it best to concentrate in these fields and to give superlative service on every job.
As a result he had for years served the same group of families: the Drews, the Charlemagne Cadwaladers, the Fultons, the Folsoms, the Chestnut Hill Nashes, the Browns on North Broad Street. . . . He had withdrawn from the active business now, but his name still remained on the little worn sign in front of the small dark shop on Locust Street.
Sometimes with the little boy he would walk around there and inspect a piece of work which had been ordered by Mrs. Francis Drew or Mrs. Charlemagne Cadwalader, ladies as old as he. And from families which had settled in Philadelphia, no earlier than his . . . though with less coercion. . . . These two elderly scions met with a touch of distinction and other day politeness which brought them together by a closer margin than their difference in station could possibly interpose between them.
Oliver was tremendously impressed by all this. He grew to have some of his grandfather’s feeling for the cultivation of the inborn talent which was one reason why his father’s efforts to interest him in the professions either of medicine or law left him cold.
He would be a musician, he told his grandfather, gravely exchanging confidences for the old man’s reminiscences, as they roamed through the latter’s happy hunting ground, down South Street, teeming with unwashed Negroes and Jews, through Ninth Street, less picturesque and primitive, down and across to Seventh and Race where they would sit in Franklin Square. . . .
He would write, not the kind of music one usually heard, not simply a medley of sweet sounds, he explained in his childish terms, but music that told something, that drew pictures, that would make you see all this. He pointed to the forms milling about the vicinity in which they happened to be.
If his grandfather was disappointed because Oliver showed no disposition to succeed to him, he never manifested it. . . . He was consistent. He meant what he said when he remarked that a man should develop his native talent. . . . It took money, he knew, to study music. And Oliver should have that. He had meant to leave his tidy fortune, which his patrons the Folsoms had so carefully invested for him, to his son Christopher. But he would never, he told his wife, his faded eyes hardening, leave his money to his son for that fool wife of his, Olivia, to enjoy. In which Rebecca Cary heartily seconded him.
The old man was no scholar. It is doubtful after his graduation from the “I.C.Y.” if he had ever read any book entirely through except Booker Washington’s “Up From Slavery.” . . . But he did read the newspapers and without having formally studied history, he had the historian’s comparative sense.
And some of this he imparted to his grandson, explaining to the boy that slavery had not been a special curse visited upon a special people. . . . It had been a cause to produce an effect, a necessity to permit a certain group of people an opportunity to glimpse and adopt another kind of civilization. All this he had gleaned for himself through a practical interpretation of newspapers and of the Bible, which he considered a guide to all situations and problems.
One other thing too he taught the boy—that greatness knew no race, no color; that real worth was the same the world over; that it was immediately recognizable and that it was a mark of genuine manhood to know no false shame.
At Grandmother Blake’s home in Boston he was subjected to a more democratic, a more catholic, influence. The members of that family were intense individualists. Dr. Blake was born so and unconsciously had forced the same rôle upon his wife Janet. . . . The twins had inherited his tendencies. In that household there was little talk of race . . . most people, most events were discussed from a cosmic sense. One heard in the same breath of Roland Hayes and John McCormack. Oliver learned of Crispus Attucks, as he learned of Paul Revere, of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, of Burghardt DuBois and More-field Storey.
Janet and David rather prided themselves on keeping au courant with modern literature. . . . They read impartially the works of Sara Teasdale, William Rose Benét, Countee Cullen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Elinor Wylie. . . . And in this household Mrs. Blake was just as apt to be entertaining at dinner, white, as colored, guests.
In the more purely social functions which the two young people managed, those invited were mainly colored since the Blakes, like the older Carys, were really in matters of moment, strong “race-people.” Janet, junior, particularly was in the habit of declaring bluntly that when it came to marriage, no white colored men need apply.
“I’m going to marry a man that looks exactly like you, Oliver-ducky. Not quite so good-looking, he’d be too hard to manage; but you’re the type, all right, all right.”
It was hard to go from the warmth and pride, the brightness and breadth of these two households to the frigid sterility of the house on Thirty-eighth Street in Philadelphia. It is possible that if Olivia, even while nursing her projects, had bestowed upon her youngest-born the most ordinary of maternal attention he would have elected to stay in these surroundings where he was undoubtedly so dear. . . .
But as it was, her coldness, her indifference intrigued and stimulated him. Baffled by the chilly riddle of her attitude he had to come back to his real home from time to time to find out what it was all about.
STILL most of the time he was happy . . . completely so if he were with his father, or Christopher or Teresa. It was only in the presence of his mother that he became suddenly discomfited, like an awkward boy who does not know what to do with ungainly hands or feet. . . . But there was nothing ungainly about Oliver. He was beautifully constructed, he knew it himself, for ever since his babyhood he had heard sung constantly the saga of his grace, his fine looks and his accomplishments. He had no conceit about these matters, accepting them quite casually as one accepts blue eyes or brown. Indeed he might never have thought of them with any degree of consciousness, if his mother’s behavior had not induced in him such a degree of introspection. His appearance, he thought, could not offend her. There must be some hidden, some inner defect, which age would reveal to him.
It could not be said that he was truly living at home until he was about ten, in the year that Teresa first went off to Christie’s. . . . By that time he had gathered from the establishments of his two grandfathers a hundred, subtle re-enforcements. His delicately sensuous nature lived for beauty and there were so many places in which beauty might be found, so many ways in which it might be fulfilled.
Because he was of a family well-educated and of comfortable means, because also of his Grandfather Cary’s promises for the future, he was able, as few people of any race or class are, to savor daily, consciously, with a whimsical deliberateness, the pleasure of being alive.
Long before he knew any Latin he spied a motto, framed on the wall of his father’s office. It read:
“Mens sana in corpore sano—”
He asked his father what it said and big Christopher translated. “A sound mind in a sound body. . . . It means,” he began.
But Oliver interrupted him. “I know what it means, Father.” He had always known.
The prospect of his life enthralled him. But he was content to live each day. Probably the only condition in the future which made him want to leap over the host of intervening days was the thought of the home which Teresa had planned to make for him and Henry. . . . Otherwise there were charming people, there were pleasantly stimulating lessons, there was the wholesomeness of outdoor sports. There were specially set apart the weary paternalness of his father; the jolly chumminess of his brother Christopher, who unlike many brothers never seemed to realize the difference in their years; and there was the sweet, tender steadfastness of Teresa.
She represented to him all that his nature so craved from his mother and more besides . . . the fulfilment of faith. If Teresa were to fail him, he could not, he knew, endure life even with all its peculiar zest and lure. . . . But of course to speak of Teresa’s failing him would be the equivalent of speaking of the falling of the heavens.
At night, and in the early morning too, he liked to lie thinking on these and many things, quite deliberately shutting his mother out from his thoughts. . . . In the deep quiet places of his mind he could not think about his mother. . . . It hurt him too much. . . . But presently at these moments of secret meditation, he found himself unable too, to think of anything tangible at all. So engrossed was he with the touch of fresh, smooth linen on his young cheek; the alluring warmth of the spot where his tousled hair nested; the virgin coolness of that part of the pillow which he had not yet touched.
Through the open window strange provocative sounds would stray in; at night a party of revellers speeding through the quiet street . . . he tried to picture where they had been, whither they were going to cause them to be so unrestrained. . . . In the mornings the sounds were different; very new and fresh and vaguely hopeful as if everybody were going to have a chance to begin again.
What he enjoyed most at these moments, the phenomenon which made him least unwilling to go to bed and most willing to waken, were the lights. At the close of the day they were so different from what they were at its beginning.
The arc-light on the corner cut out a large square space on his ceiling. . . . Against the velvet darkness of the shadowy room it remained there steadfast and immovable. But very early in the morning the daylight came in, whimsically, fitfully, moving uncertainly and timidly on wall and picture and ceiling . . . on his bedspread. . . . Now when he was quite a lad he recalled how it had escaped his grasping fingers when he was a little boy. Of all the wonders of nature he liked light best. . . . When life should leave him, it would be light that he would hate most to lose. . . . He hoped it would rest long and lovingly across his face when he lay dead.
In his waking hours he liked best music and people . . . all sorts of music and all sorts of people. Even people who were unkind or ugly, fascinated him when they wounded his delicate spirit. . . . And he liked to watch quite rough working folks, the people one saw down on Front Street along the river; colored men working on the perpetually uprooted streets in the terrible dog-days of late June and July. Such people labored with a sureness and willingness, a healthy acknowledgment of the necessity and blessedness of toil.
All this he would translate some day into music . . . the song, the rhythm, the grunt of the colored men whom he had seen working one day on Woodland Avenue near the University where he had been waiting for Christopher.
And there was something else too that he must get into melody . . . the calmness, the peace, the utter satisfaction that he had glimpsed on early summer mornings on the faces of laborers trudging serenely to work in the cool of the day before the sun had made a fiery furnace of the city. . . . He used to sit on the steps of the house on Eleventh Street and watch them walking off, off into the light, into new and unknown distances as though questing the ultimate adventure. . . .
They seemed so happy. . . . Translating this look into music would, he knew, be for him the ultimate adventure. It would take years of study, long, feverish hours of en deavor before he could make horn and harp and piano, oboe, clarinet and viol tell to the ear the vision which his eyes had seen.
BUT of course there were those chilly spaces, those blank moments when his mother’s indifference, her almost obvious dislike, cast their shadows about him. There were moments, especially when he first came home to live, when half harboring in his mind the memory of the constant attention and tenderness of his two sets of grandparents he would rush home from school to seek his mother. She would perhaps be in her room. Sally would tell him and he would go thundering up the stairs.
“Say, Mother, I got a hundred in Algebra again today.”
“Oliver, you are getting too big a boy to come rushing into my room without knocking on the door. . . .”
“I’m so sorry, Mother. I’ll try not to do it again. . . . But now I’m here, may I stay awhile?”
“I suppose so. . . . What was it you wanted to see me about?”
Well, what was it he wanted to see her about!
“I thought you might like to hear how I had done in school today. I was the only one that understood how to transpose the equation without help. The teacher said she was proud of me. She said it twice. She said: ‘If every boy would work as intelligently as Oliver Cary . . .’”
He turned his golden appealing face up to her; his face which itself could not show pride until her own had ratified his teacher’s pronouncement,
“That’s very nice, Oliver.”
After that, impossible to go on with other recitals of praise and glory.
“Well, I guess I’ll go downstairs, Mother.”
“Very well, and when you do go, close the door, so I won’t be interrupted again.” . “Aren’t you going to eat lunch now, Mother, with me?”
Abstractedly she would look up from the papers to which her glance had so quickly strayed. “Lunch? I’ve already had mine. I told Sally to put some aside for you.”
Choking back the tears he would go down. He knew it would be impossible for him to eat. But Sally’s cunning hand was usually able to offset this impossibility.
There was the day when he saw her, when he saw his own mother standing on the corner of Fortieth and Aspen Streets. He was coming out of school and he spied her wine-colored coat. Almost without volition his legs went tearing up the street. “Mother,” he shouted, “Mother!” With the other ladies (he did not know whether they were white or colored since there were none fairer than she), she turned and faced him, let her eyes, like theirs, rest on his face with a strange and awful lack of recognition. Then she turned away again. He stood still. . . .
Afterwards he went home, rushed up to the long mirror in the bathroom door, surveyed himself intently. Yes, he was clean and neat. His heart palpitating, he met her as she came in the hall.
“Mother, why didn’t you speak to me? I called and called. . . .”
“That’s precisely the reason I didn’t speak to you,” she began coldly.
“What reason?”
“Because you called and called. . . . You don’t suppose I want my friends, my friends, those ladies, to think I was the—the mother of a wild Indian, do you?”
She reduced him as always to a state of abject submission. He knew he had committed no wrong, that her explanation was inadequate, trivial. But he was only a little boy and the sense of filial duty was strong upon him.
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
Cruelly she followed up her advantage. “And anyway what could you have had so important to tell me that it couldn’t wait. Those ladies and I were talking on matters of the utmost consequence. . . . Why should they have been interrupted by a little boy?”
If he had been older he would have known enough to ask her: “What could be of more consequence than a little boy, particularly your own little boy?”
One would have expected him with his delicate feelings to betake himself to his room for an orgy of tears and self-pity. But he had long since learned that no tears could wash away the anguish of the wounds which his mother knew so well to inflict. . . . Instead he put on his wind-breaker and walked over to Mrs. Davies. . . . He had not expected to see Marise, but amazingly she was home.
She was blue, she told him, “But I won’t be blue anymore now that you’re here, Honey. You’re a sight for bad eyes.”
Kissing him lightly on his forehead, she brushed back his curling, crisp hair, helped him off with his coat.
“Look,” she said, watching intently his dejected countenance, “I couldn’t make up my mind whether to eat lunch first or to practice my dance-steps. Now that you’re here to help me to do both, you shall decide for me.”
He told her, thinking shyly how grand she was and how he meant some day to marry someone just like her, that he thought it was better to lunch first.
Her face cleared. “Just what I hoped you would say, Oliver. I’m so hungry. Would you like to watch me get things together?” She did not make the mistake of some horrible older people, always thinking that a boy was a machine to be sent immediately out on an errand. She did not even ask him to unscrew a stubborn lid from a pickle-jar.
“I was so afraid,” she said, her beautiful hands working so nimbly, “that you might choose the music first . . . you’re such an artist.”
He flushed and stammered. “Please don’t make fun of me, Marise.”
She turned her lovely face toward him. He had never seen it more serious. “None of us could make fun of you, Oliver. . . . Everybody in Philadelphia, everybody that we know anyway, is waiting for you to do something great.”
Abashed and happy he hid his confusion by eating large quantities of devilled eggs. But his eyes were bright and shining. . . . Afterwards she showed him the music for her dance, a rather intricate routine with an especially unusual accent. . . . He took it and read it through as someone else might read a manuscript, humming absently a phrase here and there. . . . He had the gift of absolute pitch. . . . Then he sat down and played it, his phrasing, his artistry, his perfect touch converting it into a thing of beauty.
“It sounds so different when you play it!” Marise told him admiringly. Then with the same serious intentness which he had shown she began to rehearse. The room was large enough for him to be able to see her every gesture. . . . Presently, for the music was simply a repetition of three or four patterns, he was able to give her his undivided attention.
“You’re simply grand, Marise,” he told her unenviously. “How do you think it would be if I were to play this part very rapidly, and the other very legato. . . . You’d get a chance to try a different step then, wouldn’t you?”
He stayed there until the dusk fell and she was a little worried but she would not tell him to go. Her mother came in, however, and affectionately shooed him home.
“Time for all boys your age to be thinking about lessons and bed. . . . Did Marise give you anything to eat?”
“Oh, yes, Mrs. Davies.”
“And you’ve been here helping her?”
“I hope I’ve been helping her.”
“And now you’re happy?”
He hesitated for a moment. “Why, yes,” he said in surprise as though testing his feelings. “I believe I am.”
“Well then, I’m going to tell you good-night.” She gave him a motherly hug and kiss. “And mind you stay happy.”
He went off through the thin tingling November rain, loving them both for their sweet tactfulness.
Slowly, thoughtfully Mrs. Davies mounted the stairs, stopping a moment before the sitting-room where her daughter sat at the piano, absently touching a key or two in the soft light.
“Poor little tyke,” she said, “poor little tyke . . . ain’t he too pitiful? . . . I wish he was my little boy.”
“I wish to goodness he was,” said Marise. She went over to a small desk and began to write a note to Christopher.
Gradually as one who, in order to get rid of a distasteful object, hides it from sight, so Oliver, in sheer self-defense, began to hide from himself the consciousness of his mother’s distaste. In the morning he had breakfast with his father, who, this last year, had returned to his former practice of early office hours. . . .
It was then time for school which he adored. . . . Philadelphia is in many respects unkind to her colored denizens but, except in the case of the more rabid moving-picture houses, Oliver never met with discrimination. . . . There was really something about him which transcended ordinary prejudice. . . . Like Marise in her school-days the boy was the favorite of both his teachers and classmates. There was no position in the miniature polity of the school which might not have been his for the asking.
He learned too to refrain from seeking his mother on his return from school. Very often she was home, but unless their paths crossed directly he did not bid her even good-day. To his own gently inclined mind, this seemed at first a terrible breach, but she never seemed to notice it. . . . Sally, who loved him like a son, preferring him infinitely to the other children whom she had known much longer, prepared his lunch with more care and thoughtfulness than she arranged Mrs. Cary’s teas for her committee women. . . .
After lunch there was his music . . . his grandfather had sent him the baby grand which was formerly installed in the house on Eleventh Street. The piano was in his room, a large one on the third floor. So he was able to practice at his ease. Then there were the long letters from Christopher and Teresa to be read and to be answered. Lovely tasks these. At six o’clock his father would come in from his last round and the exquisite evening would set in.
He might, he knew it, have been infinitely worse off. And although never once did he in chagrin or bravado say that he did not care if he did not have his mother’s love; never once did he pretend to himself to be indifferent—yet his mind was sufficiently and maturely enough balanced to tell him that he was an exceedingly fortunate boy, leading save in one respect a singularly blest existence.
TO HERSELF Olivia never acknowledged her inadequacy as a mother. It is doubtful if she was ever even aware of it. Strange as it may seem never once did she see Oliver’s side of the matter, never once was she aware of having withheld from her child his natural heritage. On the contrary she believed that Fate had perpetrated on her a very Cruel Hoax of which Oliver was the perpetual reminder. When he was away from her she was actually able to forget he was hers. But his presence in the house fretted and humiliated her.
Just as years ago she had felt that Christopher was the sign apparent of her white blood, so now she felt that Oliver was the totality of that black blood which she so despised. And there was too much of it. In her own eyes it frightened and degraded her to think that within her veins, her arteries, her blood-vessels, coursed enough black blood to produce a child with skin as shadowed as Oliver’s.
As enough water in a vessel absorbs and dissolves a stain, so that eventually one thinks there is nothing there but the liquid itself, so she had been positive that all her Negro blood had been wrought by her white blood to a consistency as pure, as limpid as that which flowed through the heart of the whitest woman she knew.
To her Oliver meant shame. He meant more than that; he meant the expression of her failure to be truly white. There was some taint in her, she told herself once, not long after Oliver’s birth. . . . For she belonged to that group of Americans which thinks that God or Nature created only one perfect race—the Caucasians. . .
The idea that there were more unwhite than white people in the world had for her no significance. Chinese, Negro, Indian, Malay . . . all of them as far as she was concerned were imperfections, base metals, misfits, garbage. Any union with them meant the introduction into the social order of something corrupt, repulsive.
Still she had to live with her husband. She was no fool. She did not care for whiteness to the ultimate degree of facing starvation. But she had thought in the early days of her obsession that if a child of hers could just marry a white person that everything else would fall into line. She would of course live with this new combination; there would be no question of their standing in that powerful and fortunate white world; it would be so easy with the money which, as a matter of course, she expected her husband to furnish, to push forward to newer heights of affluence and privilege.
She never paused to think of the thousands of unsuccessful white families pressing in on her from every side. With all her will, and wit and native intelligence she never once saw that the fate of these indigent people, whom she and her precious welfare committees served, might so easily be hers.
Of late most annoyingly her husband, usually so generous, had been less responsive to her demands for money. He had given her, it is true, all she had asked for the children. But he had turned a deaf ear to her requests for a sum sufficiently large to run the house on an entirely revolutionized basis.
“A house,” she said bitterly, “run on the same scale as the houses of all the other women I know.”
When she talked like this he despised her. He turned a hard gaze upon her. “Those other women have husbands who could buy and sell me. John D. Sturtevant has a seat on the stock-exchange in New York. He can’t conceive of living on a doctor’s paltry income.”
“Mrs. Berklebach’s husband is a doctor.”
“Look at his connections,” he said angrily. “The mayor is his brother-in-law and he has three cousins who are aldermen. . . . No use kidding yourself, Olivia. It takes wealth to play around with that class of white people. Colored folks simply don’t handle that amount of money. Perhaps they will some day. They seem eventually to get a finger in most pies. But if I had it I wouldn’t want to spend it in that manner. Trailing about with a lot of people who would drop you like a hot potato if they knew what you really are.”
That, he knew perfectly well, would bring an end to the discussion. She did become quiet, but not, as he judged, because she was annoyed at his remarks. Only she was thinking that she mustn’t try him too far. The household bills this week were bound to be enormous. She was giving three luncheons; they were supposed to be simple; but in her mind the words expanded to “elaborate simplicity.” The new tablecloth alone would run into money. . . . Sally would be cross at the thought of so much extra cooking and the dishes and all. It would take something to calm her ruffled spirits. . . . If she just had a butler! Well, she’d just have to hire an extra waiter that was all.
She told her husband of her decision. . . . “But I should think you would see, Christopher, that it would be cheaper to have a butler of our own. . . . Those Filipino butlers come very cheap.”
“What would three people of our tastes be doing with a Filipino butler? You talk like a fool, Olivia!” About this conversation there was none of the gay badinage with which some couples discuss their expenses. “Then you’d be giving more parties to show off your butler. . . .”
She said inattentively: “There’s Oliver’s money.” Grandfather and Grandmother Cary had recently passed on and the old man true to his promise had left everything to his youngest grandson, naming Dr. Cary as executor. The boy, however, with the exception of a definite sum set aside for his music and education, was to receive nothing until he was twenty-one.
Her husband stared at her. “I should think you’d be ashamed to mention him!” Turning he left the room. He could not endure the thought of discussing this child.
She did not even notice his departure . . . Oliver . . . there was a thought! . . . He was coming down the stairs, whistling. She called him.
“Oliver, come here! Here in my room!”
The whistling ceased. Rather apprehensively he stood on the doorsill of her room. “I—I hope my whistling didn’t annoy you, Mother.”
“No, of course not, of course not. Come on in the room.”
Still wary he advanced, still standing. Probably for the first time in years she looked at him attentively. How tall he was, she thought, surprised. And he was, he really was, just the color of that Filipino butler at Mrs. Berklebach’s. In his white shirt-sleeves he was immaculate. She half-closed her eyes, visualizing him in a white linen suit.
“Oliver,” she said, “sit down. I want you to help me.”
He was surprised, pleasantly so, his senses wanted to tell him. But he was a boy who needed few lessons. He kept his pleasure in check.
“Oliver, I’m going to have a lot of ladies here this week; ladies on my committees, you know. . . . There’s a convention going on in Philadelphia and I’m on the Committee of Entertainment. I think you know what it means to me to do it well?”
Privately he thought her committee meetings rather silly; just a lot of old women gabbing together. He had barely seen them, for when they were there she insisted on his keeping his room or else staying out the entire afternoon. She didn’t want any noisy boys about, she had said coldly. . . . Once he had peeped over the banisters to see if any of them were pretty, like Marise, or jolly, like her mother. A single glance had sufficed and he had retired to his room and his books disgusted and thenceforth incurious. . . . Well, he couldn’t tell her that. He waited.
“I wanted your father to let me get a butler but he says he’s unable to do that . . . he can’t afford it. . . .”
Under his golden skin he flushed painfully, thinking that she was referring to his little allowance. “But, Mother, you know I don’t have very much. . . . Grandfather said I couldn’t spend my money till I was twenty-one. If I had my way you could have it all to get as many butlers as you wanted. . . .”
“As though I’d take your money! . . . No, I was wondering if you could help me out . . . if you knew some boy . . . if he was tall enough, no one would notice that he was very young . . . about your color. Somebody who wasn’t awkward . . . and of course he’d have to be very clean. . . .”
He said, doubtfully, looking at her with his candid eyes: “There’s Ted Rutherford. He’s about my color and my height . . . only I don’t think he’s so awfully clean.”
“Oh,” she said, watching him intently, “that settles him. I couldn’t think of an untidy boy.”
“No, of course you couldn’t,” he acquiesced warmly. “But I can’t think of anyone else. Unless . . . unless you’d be willing for me to do it.”
Even as she hesitated she permitted her face to show her relief. “I hardly feel like asking you to do that, Oliver. . . . And then what would your father say? But it would help me out a lot if you would. And it would be kind of fun too. . . .”
“Well then, let me do it, Mother! Father doesn’t have to know.” Ordinarily he would have been the last person in the world to suggest keeping anything a secret from his father. . . . But it was so wonderful to have that secret with his mother! . . . “You know I’m clean and I’m tall enough and you can tell me every little thing you want me to do. And I’ll do it just right.”
She was a little bit frightened and anxious . . . her half-thought-out plan was almost too successful. “You know, you’d have to take orders, Oliver, from the ladies and from—from me—just like somebody really hired.” In her heart, hard and containing nothing but her hateful obsession, she had the grace to be ashamed of herself.
In his innocence, his trustfulness, he had no idea of what she meant. “That would be all right, Mother. I’ll probably never see those ladies again. They’ll never dream I’m your son.” . . .
No, she thought, now they would never dream it.
She bought him the white linen suit. Of his own volition he purchased “Congolene” and slicked back his thick, wild, curly hair. . . . On these three occasions he waited at table laughing and joking so about it in the kitchen that unwittingly he dispelled Sally’s surprise and made her take her additional tasks as pleasantly as he. . . . Later on in the fall afternoons his mother had a little series of “at homes” and expected and received his help as a matter of course. It was quite a joke between them and made his surface life in the house much more endurable.
Teresa did not come home for that Christmas vacation, but Christopher did. He was resolved at first to spend all his time with his brother; there was no end in his mind to the half-formed plans he had in store for him. But when he saw the smile, when he heard the occasional playful word which Olivia directed toward the lad a load rolled from his spirit. . . . Perhaps after all he need not have taken so seriously the note which Marise had sent him two months ago. . . . He began to make plans of his own; plans which did not include Oliver.
In the late afternoon he came back from a crowded day spent with Pete Holland, the Talliver boys and Kid Hastings. There had been many reminiscences, a few hands of “Black Jack,” a tasty lunch which the Talliver boys’ mother had provided. . . . A small enough price, she considered it, to pay for the knowledge of the presence of her boys in the house, instead of the fearful suspicion that they were on some street corner. They had talked gravely of different brands of cigarettes; of their schools; of their futures; of the season’s quota of dances; of some girls. . . .
Christopher was to see Marise that night. She was having a little party. He would get his bath early; lie around the house a little; maybe the kid would play for him. He walked down Girard Avenue, noticing the stark trees against the clear winter light; the sky was very blue and deep. The air struck cold against his cheek but his hands and heart were warm. . . .
He happened to be one of those people who find Philadelphia perfect. A city of homes, he thought gratefully; he was glad his own home was so quiet and peaceful . . . and pleasant. Why, the kid and his mother were doing fine. It was better that he and Teresa had cleared out; in that way his mother had come to realize the preciousness of her younger son.
In the dim half-light in the hall he was surprised to see carefully descending the stairs a tall, slender figure carrying a large, rather heavy tray. Somebody in a white suit. . . . From above came a babel of voices, evidently his mother was throwing a party; well, he wouldn’t be expected at that, thank the Lord. . . . She must have hired a waiter; pretty swanky. He looked rather sharply as the man, no, it was a boy, drew closer. He couldn’t believe his senses.
“Oliver! Well, for Pete’s sake, what’s all this?”
“Mother’s giving a tea and I was helping her.”
Christopher’s eye, travelling over his brother’s form, darkened stormily. “In those clothes? Just what are you supposed to be doing anyhow? Here give me that tray!”
Oliver yielded, suddenly feeling himself very tired. “It isn’t anything really, Chris. She wanted a Filipino butler and Dad said he couldn’t afford it. So she told me about it . . .”
“And asked you to be the butler!”
“No, she didn’t ask me,” said Oliver, not understanding the rage which seemed to have taken possession of his brother. “I offered to do it for her. Really I did, Chris. . . . You’ll have to let me go, they’re waiting for more tea. Mother won’t like it.”
“There are a lot of other things she won’t like either,” the older boy returned grimly. “Here, show me where all this stuff is. . . .” With Sally’s aid he crowded the tray incontinently with tea, hot water, cakes and sandwiches. He strode into the sitting-room wishing that he were the color of jet and that they could all hear him calling her Mother.
She paled as she saw him, came forward to meet him. “What’s the matter, Chris? Did anything happen?”
“No,” he said scornfully. “I just thought the tray was too heavy for that little Filipino; so I brought it up.”
She thought him very distinguished, standing there with his dead white face, his flashing dark eyes, his burnished hair. In his presence too she felt so much more securely white.
Facing the roomful of women she stood beside him. “Ladies, this is my big boy, Christopher.”
Mockingly he bowed low, hating them for the stupid traditions of themselves and their kind which had made of his mother a traitor to her own flesh and blood.
Forgetful of the bath, of the party, of Marise, he faced her in her bedroom when they had all gone.
“Mother,” he said, “how could you do this—to Oliver of all people!” He repeated the title. “Mother! You ought to be called anything but that!”
Clearly she was frightened. “You won’t say anything about this to your father, will you, Christopher? After all he was willing. . . . Christopher, promise me, you won’t tell your father?”
He said briefly, irrelevantly: “You’ve made me despise you! I never expect to know a sadder day than this!”
At the close of the holidays he returned to school. But before the coming of February he was back again in Philadelphia. His father and he talked for a long time in the inner office. To his mother he said, meeting her casually in the hall: “I’m home for good, Mother. Guess you’ll have to put up with me. I failed all my examinations and they put me out.”
NOW of a sudden it seemed to Oliver all the days of his life were flashing by in an ecstasy of pleasure and excitement. . . . First of all while there were no repetitions of the butler episode, he was established in a secret understanding with his mother. He did not of course understand the deeper significance of what she had done. He merely thought that he had performed for her, something which, in his eyes, was very important and which he had loyally kept from his father.
Then there were the home-comings of Christopher and Teresa. And the confidence which his sister had bestowed on him alone and the promise that some day soon he would go to live with her and Henry in a new place, at the inauguration of a new life. . . . Even when all this was changed and Teresa had returned home heartsick and wan, he could not suffer too acutely. . . . He adored his sister; she represented to him not only the perfection of femininity, and tenderness, she was also his rock on which he raised the whole structure of his hopes, his expected joys, his confidence.
In a curiously shifting world, a world in which one’s own mother was different from the accepted pattern, she was the one sure thing. She had not married Henry, she had not spirited her small brother off to a new environment. . . . But she had done better than that; she had come back to make a real home for him in his end surroundings. You could always depend on Teresa.
Finally his school-life was affording him endless joy. He was reading poetry now with relish and gusto. . . . “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” He did not care for the “Ancient Mariner,” although rather taken with its simplicity and quaintness, nor was he greatly charmed with the lush deliberate beauty of Shelley and Gabriel Rossetti.
But the “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality” left him speechless with awe and satisfaction. There were whole passages which he could not quite interpret and for which he refused to seek an explanation. Life, he rightly judged, would eventually discover all their inner meaning . . . and he would read it all his life.
What so pleasantly shocked and thrilled him now was the realization of how rightly, with what authenticity, Wordsworth had written. The instinctive artistry in the lad did reverence to another artist who had the insight and the genius both to perceive the changing pageantry of the journey from infancy to old age, and the delicacy, the fitness of thought and word with which to express it.
The beauty of his readings lay about him always. That quite other beauty of people and of places to which he was so receptive carried him by analogy back in his thoughts to this loveliness . . . if once he had ever forsaken it. . . . Thus constantly he lived in a world made magical by the mingling of rare philosophy enchantingly expressed.
Even when Teresa went to Europe, he experienced no pang at the separation. She would be back in three months or less; she would tell him very specially and in detail of her adventures. She would even make him cognizant of her non-adventures so that he would be able to live all over again with her the entire journey. . . .
For himself he moved in a maze of delight and anticipation at the thought of his summer in camp with Christopher. . . . His father had decided to drive them up . . . they could easily accomplish the trip in a day and a night . . . three men, Oliver proudly thought, relieving each other at the wheel.
The camp was situated in New Hampshire, not far from the site of some of Teresa’s visits. . . . There was a shining river both fresh and salt since it flowed directly into the ocean. It wound its way through every variety of evergreen. . . . Above it the sky curved deep and clear and blue; time spent on its banks was time enchanted passed in a world too beautiful to be true.
Oliver, who combined with his artistic leanings the love of the genuine boy for sports, swam, played tennis, hiked and took lessons in target practice. There was no chance for archery here, but he enjoyed with every ounce of him the new experience of combining eye and nerve and finger. In his heart he felt he would never endure to go hunting, but it pleased him to know that if ever he did decide to accompany his father he could prove a finished companion.
In the cold nights he wrapped himself in his blankets and thought peacefully and happily of Teresa, of his music, of The Ode. He did not want even the morrow to hasten on its appointed way, he would not of his own accord sacrifice one hour to arrive more quickly at an expected pleasure. So completely was life just what he would have it be.
The news of his sister’s marriage did not affect him as it did his father and Christopher. He had, even yet, no concept of her long struggle; of how complete a capitulation this must seem to the two astounded elder men.
Dr. Cary shook his head doubtfully: “I should have foreseen this. Young people so often marry on the rebound. . . . However, we’ll just have to wait and see.” For it was too late then to change anything, the marriage having been consummated before the letter arrived.
Christopher, who usually permitted nothing, except his mother’s defections, to mar his healthy satisfaction, was undoubtedly stricken. Like many people of mixed blood and of his appearance, he had no very decided racial predilections. His preferences were all based on his own feeling. He felt within him no obligation to identify himself with one race more than the other. He simply liked his own group best. Invariably, he spoke, if circumstances permitted it, of his racial connections, but merely because he detested the rigor and discomfort, no matter how innocently practiced, of deception. In his own eyes he was simply an American man with unusual latitude of choice of associates. . . . His dark blood made it possible for him to range where he would among people of color; his white blood made possible a similar procedure among the others.
But his sister, he knew, was not like that. Hers was a decided leaning toward a definite, marked connection with colored people. So he feared for her happiness and blamed his mother bitterly for the part which he was sure she had to play in this mésalliance.
But of all these thoughts the two elder men made no mention to Oliver.
Of course he shared none of their fears and apprehensions. To him his sister’s marriage meant one chief thing—the new home which she had promised him with herself and husband. He was quite prepared to substitute Aristide for Henry. The home-life since it was with Teresa, could not but be the same.
AFTERWARDS events moved so swiftly. . . . As it happened Dr. Cary, in the anguished light of such knowledge as was vouchsafed him, did reconstruct them correctly. But it was months before he could accomplish this and meanwhile his hair silvered, his mien altered, his stature drooped. Something within him, up to this time incurably young, died completely; something optimistic
never renewed its hope.
In the late October afternoon Oliver, alone in his room and in the house, was playing. Often those days he worked on little themes, odd bits of composition, sketches of his musical thoughts . . . to be laid away, carefully guarded, perhaps to be assembled one day in something complete and wholly beautiful.
Sally was out marketing. His father had left at last for his hunting trip. He was to meet Pete Slocum and two other cronies at Front and Market. They would cross the river and drive in Pete’s car through Jersey to Long Island.
Christopher had accompanied his father as far as the ferry in order to drive the Cary car back. With Sally’s aid the two boys were to keep house until the return of their parents. Within the next two weeks Olivia was returning from Europe and Dr. Cary would complete his vacation by meeting her in New York.
With his faculty for savoring to the fullest any new experience, the scheme appealed wonderfully to Oliver. This afternoon he was not composing . . . he was simply playing, reading through his albums, a snatch of Chopin, a few phrases of Schumann. A long time he lingered over the sweet tunelessness of Debussy and his echoes of wind and water. The icy melodiousness of Scriabine held him so in thrall . . . the rays of the late autumn sun seemed to lose their warmth. . . .
Jumping up he wandered to the window and hands in pockets looked down from the height of his room on the little garden which he and Sally so sedulously tended. It lay drowsing in the thick swimming haze of autumn. Across it the light, his precious light, lay like a benison. . . . On the little rustic table a magazine rested and on the bench beside it his racquet.
“I know what I’ll do,” he said out loud. “I’ll make myself a good big sandwich and eat it out there in the yard. . . .” He looked at the bushes already a little sere; noted again the light. . . . “Trailing clouds of glory,” he said to himself softly and ran downstairs whistling.
On the next flight he remembered his father’s final hurried words. He had told the boy to take two suits to the cleaners. . . . “Better look through them for letters or bills. . . .”
“Or money,” Oliver interposed gaily. “And remember, finding’s keeping.”
He might just as well get the clothes together now, he thought; when Chris came he’d pile them in the car and run around to the tailor’s. . . . His practiced hand moved deftly through the pockets. Nothing in the blue suit. Now for the grey. Of this one the breast pocket contained a telephone bill, a circular with some addresses scribbled on it, and a letter, minus its envelope, from his mother.
Crossing the room he started to put the papers in the small drawer of his father’s chiffonier when his eyes fell on the phrase . . . “if it just weren’t for Oliver.” . . .
Slowly he closed the drawer and as slowly walked downstairs. . . . What . . . if it weren’t for Oliver? “Well, it’s none of my business,” he said to himself firmly and went into the pantry. With the thick untidy sandwich of a boy’s making, he drifted out into the yard, sat on the bench, opened the magazine. After all he was not so hungry. Mechanically he broke off bits of bread and ham; mechanically he swallowed them. The words swam before him; he had not read them aloud, but they rang in his ears. . . . Well, he was going to read the letter eventually, he might just as well do it first as last. . . .
The letter was an old one. “Just think,” he said to himself, “whatever it is, Father’s known of it for a month, but I don’t know anything about it. And I’m the one whom it concerns.”
It was a letter full of dissatisfactions, of demands for money, of little regrets, of unfulfilled fancies. Then suddenly his mother began praising the beautiful country of the Riviera:
“It is too heavenly here for words, Christopher. I wish you could see it too. The little towns are like jewels, each one lovelier than the other. . . . Yes, I know you’re surprised to hear me talk like that but that’s what these places do to you. Even their names please, Villefranche, Beaulieu, Cagnes, Monte Carlo, Juan-les-Pins.
“I like Juan-les-Pins best . . . and they say property is marvelously cheap there. I’d be willing to live there all the rest of my life. And I bet you would too. There’s a nice colony resident the whole year round.
“If you and Chris would come and settle down over here we could all be as white as we look . . . if it just weren’t for Oliver. I know you don’t like me to talk about this . . . but really, Chris, Oliver and his unfortunate color has certainly been a mill-stone around our necks all our lives, . . . And now that Teresa is going to marry her Frenchman it would be easy enough for us to establish a pied à terre here. . . . You see my French is coming along too. . . .”
With the letter in his hand he went back upstairs, very slowly, very carefully. He was sixteen years old, but no man of sixty-six ever felt so aged, so finished as he. “If it just weren’t for Oliver.” . . . Why, of course he had always been in her way, in their way.
He flung himself face-downwards across the bed. Across his shadowed eyes the kaleidoscope of his life flashed. He saw himself, a tiny child, a baby, at the house of first one grandparent and then another. He remembered vague words, broken whispers, suppressed phrases, which now he translated into pity. All these years they had been pitying him! . . . And there had been his life here in this house with his mother. He could see and understand it now—all so plainly.
This was the cause of her dislike, her immutable coldness. Boy as he was it made him smile with bitter amusement to think how he had tortured himself; how he had tried desperately to make himself all over, hoping to please her. Meanwhile of course the thing which he could not change—his color—remained!
The only time she had ever been nice to him, had ever spontaneously smiled at him, had been when he had played butler for her . . . when he had been her servant! The thought of this bathed him with a dark humiliation, changed his very marrow into shame, transmuted all that native sweetness of his into gall. He was not only ashamed of his mother, he was ashamed for himself to have a mother like her.
He could hear Christopher letting himself in downstairs. He called up: “Oliver! Hey there! Oliver!”
On a sudden impulse he rose from the bed, stealthily entered his closet and closed the door. Christopher came bursting in. Oliver could imagine his bewilderment from his tone.
“Oliver!” he called unnecessarily into the empty room. He muttered: “He’s gone out. Don’t that beat all!” Evidently he met Sally in the lower hall. Oliver, his ears unconsciously straining, heard him tell her that they would both be out and she needn’t worry about supper. . . . Presently he heard the door closing behind her also.
Limply he let himself fall in the big arm-chair. His eyes rested vacantly on the bright, clean room, on his music, his pictures, the piano. He had never liked this house as well as that of either of his grandparents but at least he had thought it home. . . . And it had been a place where he had barely been tolerated.
A new thought rose to torment him. His mother had induced him to accept the rôle of butler not only to satisfy her vanity but to make sure that none of those complacent white women would suspect their relationship. . . . How he hated her!
His brain was growing very cold and keen—he could feel it. . . . He must look more deeply into this matter. . . . His father now. But try as he might in the light of this new knowledge to turn and twist the actions and attitude of the older man, he could not find in them a single flaw. And it was the same way with Christopher and Teresa. No one, he was sure, could have a brother, a sister, truer, kinder than they. Nothing, nothing he knew could change Teresa. . . . For a fleeting moment he wondered about her new husband. He was white. And then he remembered the traditional fondness of the French for the Negro. . . .
After a while he undressed and went to bed. Very quiet, very still, he lay there, and chill too, despite the warmth of the October night. . . . And for the first time in his conscious life failed to notice the play of lights on his walls.
In the morning he woke as he had gone to bed; his mind cold and clear. But at least he had found a solution. He would write to Teresa; he would say nothing whatever about his discovery, at least not until he could talk to her in person. He would remind her of her promise to make a home for him. . . . How grateful he felt to Grandfather Cary, who had made him, a boy of sixteen, so independent. All his life he had heard of the inexpensiveness of living in France. The sums left for his education should certainly see him through these next five years. . . . He would write the letter this morning now before school. He ought to receive an answer within two weeks.
If he could only sail before his mother came home . . . how wonderful it would be to pass her somewhere on the sea; to know that he need never see her again! . . . But he would have to wait and see his father. If he’d had enough money to pay his passage he would have bought his ticket immediately. But all his resources, even the two dollars which Christopher owed him, would net him only eight dollars.
Christopher could not understand what had happened to him. At first he was greatly worried but finally in the face of the younger boy’s repeated denials, he concluded that his abstractedness, his quietness were due either to unanticipated fatigue after a strenuous summer, or, much more likely, to interest in some secret artistic composition. As far as he could see the boy ate, studied and practiced with accustomed regularity. Perhaps he did spend a little more time out walking in the Park. But he had always been conspicuously fond of that district.
Teresa’s letter came in the last mail of a Saturday afternoon, on the day on which Dr. Cary and Olivia were expected home. Quickly he put the rather thin envelope in his pocket and went up to his room. . . . His breath came short and fast . . . he had not known how much he was depending on this. . . . But of course she would want him to come.
His eyes ran quickly over her first phrases, her delight in his letter, the briefness of this reply because she wanted to catch a certain boat. Then she wrote:
“Darling, I’m so sorry I can’t do what you want. It is a little early to be talking in this way . . . so soon . . . and I don’t want you to tell Father. . . . But I’m afraid my marriage is going to be different from what I had expected. Perhaps no marriage is what one thinks it is going to be. But you can’t understand that yet. . . .
“The funny thing is, Oliver, that even before I received your letter I had begun to cast about for ways and means of bringing you over here . . . we could have enjoyed life here so much together. But the one thing that I never meant to come between you and me prevents it. . . .
“I have been so foolish. I might have foreseen it. Oliver, my husband doesn’t know I’m colored. Perhaps I might have got around that. But just the other day he talked to me very bitterly about people of mixed blood, especially Americans. So, darling, you see with your tell-tale color . . .”
He let the letter drop. . . .
She went on to say many things about the future . . . perhaps he could come, when older, to Paris and she could go to visit him . . . perhaps later on she would return to United States . . . and never go back. Surely God would not hold her forever to her mistake.
He read none of it. Instead he took out his mother’s letter which he had never returned. She too had spoken of his color . . . she had said “Oliver and his unfortunate color.”
With cold hands he laid the two letters together on the bureau. Then he looked in the mirror. . . . With one chill finger he touched his beautiful, golden skin. No, certainly it wasn’t ugly. His eye, trained to the recognition of loveliness, told him that it was much more beautiful than the pinkish, yellowed, grayish or drab skins by which he was usually surrounded. Yet it had kept him from the enjoyment of that most ordinary and universal possession, a mother’s tenderness. . . . It had separated him from his sister.
Teresa had failed him! His faith in all that was good in the world lay dead within him.
After a while he walked over to the window and looked down on his beloved garden. It lay, as it did two weeks ago, bathed in the gold of the sun, chilly now and without heat. Above it hung no haze, but a very clear unclouded light. . . . Its loveliness left him untouched. . . . He turned his gaze within, but his eyes met the soft, mute regard of his cherished trappings without delight. For a moment he sat in the big arm-chair, his hands dangling loosely between his knees. . . . There was something he meant to do. When he could collect his thoughts, he would remember. . . .
At last, with a smile, he rose, crossed over to his chiffonier and took out the pistol with which he had done his target practice this summer. . . . He would like to fall by the window, he thought. . . . Christopher, running up, as he heard the shot, found him lying there, the light of the declining day athwart his smiling face.