Such treatment was bound eventually to cool even his persistence. Finally he ceased his unwelcome visits and Teresa, who had not even been flattered by his attention, forgot him entirely. The spring vacation was close at hand and the girl was entirely absorbed in the thought of seeing Henry again, for she planned as usual to spend the time at her grandmother’s. . . . She came back happier than ever. Up to this time she and Henry had been so completely concerned with the marvel of their mutual discovery and their future plans that except in the field of sports where they had first met they had paid comparatively little attention to each other’s taste and predilections.
This time, in addition to making the explorations which so appealed to them both, they had spent the happy week in Art Galleries, at the Opera, at museums. Behind his whimsicalness and laughter, Henry hid a fine, keen mind remarkably alert to both scientific and social phenomena. It seemed to the young girl that no prospective wife ever glimpsed a brighter or more attractive future than she.
Perhaps it was the mellowness induced by this mood that made her greet young Seely with some hint of welcome. He came again to Northampton in the late April afternoon; glorious in the last word in sports attire and in a marvel of a roadster. Teresa, remembering the little car which Henry had borrowed despite its evil reputation from his friend in Boston, fell into a gay mood. She was, these days, so happy, so confident, so satisfied with life, that Seely stared at her in amazement. They sallied forth in the car ostensibly to gather violets. . . .
“But I don’t care really where we go,” she said. “Everything is so perfect.”
It struck her that her companion was rather quiet, his manner constrained.
In the direction of Holyoke where there was, he insisted, a woods with violets, he drew up on a quiet bypath. April sun and April beauty surrounded them, drenched them. For a moment Teresa closed her eyes—to savor more completely the peace and contentment that were upon her. . . . In that moment she felt his hard arm about her, his panting breath on her cheek . . . his hot kisses on her unwilling mouth.
And she had just told Henry, laughing, coquettish, truthful, that since their engagement she had kissed no one but him!
In a fury she struck at Seely. But he held her hands firmly, and laughing, with an ugly light in his eyes, he kissed her deliberately again and again. Resistance, she knew, for all her inexperience, would only spur him on to greater indignities. . . . About her the beautiful day turned cold and dark. Something hovered above her, indefinable, lowering.
“Jarvis,” she asked weakly, she was genuinely frightened, “What’s the matter? What does this mean?”
He looked at her, his eyes like black ice. “You know, you almost fooled me, Teresa. You seemed to set such store on yourself. You had me thinking maybe here is a real girl, a girl I’d be proud to make my wife . . .”
She interrupted him fiercely. “I don’t want to be your wife, I . . .”
“I don’t want you either, now,” he said rudely. She could see him framing a further insult. “What I want to know is why should you be so prudish with me . . . a girl who runs around with niggers!”
So this was what her mother was always talking about. It was from infamies of this sort that she was ever running to cover. . . . Teresa’s heart turned over within her. She could, she knew, burst into tears; she might easily become violently ill.
Instead with a tremendous effort she kept herself controlled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you’d say that,” he sneered. “You don’t mean to deny that you were in Boston two weeks ago and that you went to the Opera.”
“I certainly don’t mean to deny it.”
“And that you were with a nigger!”
To her own amazement she found she had done two things. In one second with one small, firm hand she had struck his hateful face and in the next she was out of the car on the road.
“I didn’t slap you for myself,” she told him passionately. “I slapped you for my friend. . . . If I choose to go out with a colored man who is more of a gentleman than you’ll ever be, that is entirely my business, Jarvis Seely.”
She took her inadequate handkerchief, rubbed it several times over her lips and flaming cheeks, threw it on the ground and stamped on it. “That’s what I think of you and your kisses. . . .” She turned. “If you try to overtake me or to molest me in any way, I’ll have this town about your ears.”
It took every penny which she had on her to get back to Northampton. Once there, shaken and sick, she locked herself up in her little room. . . . White-faced and trembling she tried to get herself together physically; her thoughts might wander as they would. She must get some perspective on this thing.
For the first time, though still disapproving, she conceded her mother’s point of view. It was horrible, crushing, to be thus despised. Why not get away from it?
On the other hand there was the general senselessness of it all. Suppose Agatha Burton had known she was colored. Probably, since theirs was a friendship founded on mutual tastes, they would still have been friends. She would have been just as welcome a guest at the Burton home and would undoubtedly have met Jarvis. In that event he would not, in all probability, have made his advances; on the other hand, he would also have failed to show his scorn. . . . What was the catch here? If then she had been her real self she might have been spared this ignominy. . . .
But then what was wrong in being colored? Whether she, as a white or a black girl, accompanied Henry to the Opera, he was still a fine man, of the stuff of which America is supposed to be proud. In point of fact with the exception of his skin, he would, with his clear, hard mind, his straight, supple body, his sense of humor, his beauty, have been labelled a typical American.
His beauty! Must he then, in order to gain universal respect and decent treatment, bleach out all that brightness, that subtlety of coloring which made him in her eyes, at least, an outstanding attraction in the midst of these pale faces?
She thought of two fallacies—how her pale skin had kept her free from indignities; how earnestly and deliberately Americans every summer exposed themselves on shore and water to the burning sun in order to obtain the effect which, when natural, they affected so to despise.
No, beyond cavil there was something wrong here, only she could not put her finger on it. . . . But of this she was sure; she would not by silent acquiescence, even, lend her small weight toward furthering this iniquitous thing. She would be her own self!
Of course since she was already accepted as a white girl in college she would not tell her secret now . . . her time here would be so short. But she was through with deception. She thought of the blow which she had planted on Jarvis’ face . . . for Henry, she had said. Hereafter she would strike such blows for herself. The world should know her for what she was if she had to wear a placard.
Swiftly her mood turned into one of revolt at the general idiocy of a scheme which could make such an idea possible. For the first time she fell into a brief passion of sobs and unrestrained laughter, burying her head in her pillow to keep the girl next door from suspecting her hysteria.
In that moment she saw brightly and clearly one fundamental cause for the lagging of colored people in America. This senseless prejudice, this silly scorn, this unwelcome patronage, this tardiness on the part of her country to acknowledge the rights of its citizens . . . all these combined into a crushing load under which a black man must struggle to get himself upright before he could even attempt the ordinary businesses of life.
CHAPTER IX
SPRING of her second year in college . . . and for Teresa her last term. How glorious it all was! . . . She looked with love, minus the anguish of longing, at every dear familiar class-room, at her favorite seat in the library, at dear cherished walks and hideaways. She found herself performing acts of kindness and thoughtfulness, quite at variance with her habitude, for Teresa, while always courteous, was usually too completely absorbed in her own plans to mark too clearly th
e needs of others. Oliver, Henry, her father alone, struck in her a note of attention.
But now, very much as one under sad necessity, begins to temper deliberately with kindness one’s actions toward some dear, failing friend, so she shed about her the concrete manifestation of the happiness and hope that so constantly sang within her.
“You know,” Agatha Burton said to her one day, “I never thought of you as a sweet girl, before, Tessa. But you really are one, you grand old sport!”
She could afford to be “sweet” in spite of its saccharine implications which she, in common with the forthright youth of her day, professed to loath.
Everything was working marvelously. In two of her courses she was to hand in papers—no examinations there. The other finals came early. Three days before Henry’s commencement she would be free to go to Boston. There she would make her final preparations. For months she had been saving for this end, not only her pocket money but part of sums which had been sent for her clothes. Olivia, in accordance with her own cherished plans, had been very generous along this score and Teresa, to her mother’s immense satisfaction, had apparently fallen in line with her wishes.
What the girl really hoped for was to bring Henry a little dowry—the smallest possible of dowries she knew, but enough to tide them over the first few possibly difficult months. Anything might slip. One could not expect such unparalleled good luck to go on forever. . . .
The break with her mother, she knew, would be absolute. Olivia probably would never forgive her for marrying not only a man of Henry’s color but any colored man at all; she had hoped in Teresa’s marriage to break away altogether from this cruelly marked group.
Of her father Teresa had no fear; he might resent, to a degree, her failure to take him into her confidence and her marriage at such an age. But Dad, she knew, would come around. Besides he would be delighted with Henry. . . . As for Christopher and Oliver! Dear Oliver! he was just as anxious for her marriage as she . . . for one of his years he had kept her secret with amazing loyalty; yet he had spoken of it to her in every letter.
Regrettably she had, in order to insure such an uninterrupted flow of felicity, been obliged to practice some deceptions. Her mother, finally taking note of her persistent trips to Boston, began to make some inquiries. In a desperate effort to lull suspicion, Teresa had, with considerable coyness, made mention of Phineas Burton at Harvard. Nothing, she knew, could please her mother more than such a possibility. The consummation of a romance with young Burton would bring upon her lavish and unrestrained maternal blessings.
Olivia might even bring herself to the bestowal of some kind of love. . . . She would see nothing of the lad’s gawkiness, his red pimpliness, his agonized shyness before people. It was true that in every other respect he was most commendable, being gentle, honest and without the horrible ruthlessness of so many young men of his day and station. Mrs. Cary would be neither disgusted with his physical unattractiveness, nor impressed by his native manliness. She would see in him only two things, his whiteness and his connection with a privileged group.
Teresa, her bags packed, her adieus made, left for Boston. She had purposely failed to acquaint her grandmother’s family with the time of her arrival. Only Henry knew this. With the exception of one large bag she was leaving everything in the check-room at the station . . . until called for. Henry started to pocket the check, but she took it.
“You’re just as likely to put that suit in the very bottom of your trunk and then where would we be that night? Everything I value most, except the clothes I’m going to be married in, is in those bags,” she told him happily.
“Including your flannels, I trust,” he bantered. “You know, Tess, you sounded just like a wife when you said that. But I loved it.” They entered the taxi. His laughing face grew serious and very tender. “You know, darling, I never had any intention of marrying for ages and ages, not until I was a veteran of thirty-five or thereabouts. But as it is,” he said, looking amazingly boyish and shamefaced, “I really thank my lucky stars every minute that we’re marrying now; that we’re really going to ‘commence’ life together. I never saw the sense of calling graduation time ‘Commencement’ before, but I do now.
“I don’t know about flirting,” he went on ruminating. “Something tells me you’re not much given to that; and something tells me equally that I probably shall do some. But I want you to believe me, Tess—I know I’m saying this awkwardly—no girl will ever be able to laugh at you or pity you. I want you to believe that.”
“I do, oh I do,” she assured him radiantly. “I like all you said, Henry, but what I like best is what you said about our beginning everything together. You can’t imagine how completely my real life is going to begin with you.”
At the corner of Boylston Street he left her, thrusting a bill into her hand for fare, darting out of the cab with his dear recklessness. “This evening,” he reminded her, “be ready to talk business.”
Her youthful Uncle David met her at the door. “Hello!” he said, kissing her fondly, “how’s my contemporary niece?”
“Fine and dandy,” she told him. “Where’s Gran? I want to say hello to her and plunge right into a tub. . . . Whoever said Boston is cool in summer?”
“No one to my knowledge.” He laid a detaining hand on her arm. “Hold on a sec, kid. . . . Surprise!”
“Surprise?” Her heart fluttered a moment. . . . But of course it couldn’t be about Henry . . . she had just left him.
“What do you mean, surprise?”
“H’m! Two years of college hasn’t affected your diction much!” He came closer, his face growing momentarily serious, for his older sister made little appeal to him. “Olivia’s here.”
“Mother’s here! Dave, you can’t mean it. Here! Why, what for?”
“She came last night. Hope you haven’t been up to anything, my girl! She’s been raving about some egg at Harvard named Burton. I think I know him. Sort of too bad edition of Ichabod Crane, but a pretty good sort after you know him. He was very nice to me when I was a freshman.”
“You’re still a freshman, silly! You’re certainly not a sophomore with all those conditions you carry! . . . David, where is she?”
“Up in the room you always have, waiting for her dear daughter. You’d better spill everything to your Uncle David! You don’t suppose Jane and I believe you’re interested in any white boy that ever stepped. And particularly not in that old white boy! . . . And another thing, Miss Teresa Cary, you don’t think your Aunt Janet and I ever believed you were so taken up with museums and art. Museums and Art with a capital M and a capital A! No, no, my child: Et ego in Arcadia, or words to that effect.”
“Oh, stop showing off that little Latin! . . . Dave, this is serious. Where’s Janet?”
“Your aunt, my dear niece, is probably in her room.”
“Well, I’m going up there. Here, you bring my bag! And don’t you say one word about my being here to Mother before we get this fixed up.”
Janet met her with outstretched arms. “I see,” she said maddeningly, “your Uncle David’s been giving you the works. . . .”
“Jane, do stop that nonsense. . . . Shut the door, Dave. . . . Whatever do you suppose made her come?”
“Something tells me you’ve been laying it on too thick about this Burton fellow. Who is he, anyhow? Just clear matters up a little. Of course you never had us completely fooled but a few details wouldn’t hurt.”
“Well, I was interested in someone . . . someone here you know. . . .”
“So we gathered.”
“And Granny must have mentioned to Mother every time I came here. You know how Mother is. Finally she asked why and I thought the best way to keep her off was to tell her I was interested in some boy at Harvard. So I picked out Phineas Burton because his sister Agatha and I are great chums and I have visited them at times at Newburyport. . . .”
“You seem to have brought her on instead of off. . . . Darling infant she is babbling abo
ut taking a place for the summer in the town where your beloved Phineas lives and entertaining some of your little school-mates there. She’s willing to have Dave and me come down for a while since we can both ‘get by.’
“‘But none of your nonsense,’ sez she, ‘remember!’”
Teresa was really pale with horror. “Can you think of anything worse? I doubt if Phineas remembers I exist unless I’m with Agatha.”
“Who’s the real one, Tessie?” David asked her kindly.
“Don’t call me ‘Tessie,’” she reminded him irritably. “You two can be the most provoking! Thank heaven Christopher isn’t twins! . . . You’ve really got to help me. . . . It’s Henry, Henry Bates. . . . We’re awfully in love. We’re going to marry; we’re engaged.” Even yet she could not bring herself to speak of the proposed elopement.
Janet’s eyebrows rose. “Engaged! So soon! Nice work, my dear. Very great dispatch. You might let your old aunt in on your technique. Let’s see; you met him less than a year ago, didn’t you? And you’ve seen him perhaps six times?”
“Don’t be silly! I met him in Chicago that summer after I left Christie’s. You know, the time Mother went to Switzerland.”
“In Chicago! What was Henry Bates doing around the grand white folks?”
“He wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t with any grand white folks. That girl, Alicia Barrett, isn’t white, she is colored, and Henry is a friend of her brother’s. . . . I thought what Mother didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.”
The twins broke out into happy laughter. “Just a little, old, gay deceiver!” David chuckled. “You know, Janey, this is really good. Can’t you imagine old Olivia perishing if she ever finds this out!”
Comedy_American Style Page 11
