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.”
CHAPTER V
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 lett
er 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.
CHAPTER VI
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.
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