Nella Larsen

by Passing

  “Damned if I don’t think you’re halfway right!”

  “I’m sure I am. Completely. (Except, of course, when it’s just patronizing kindness on their part.) And I know coloured girls who’ve experienced the same thing—the other way round, naturally.”

  “And the men? You don’t subscribe to the general opinion about their reason for coming up here. Purely predatory. Or, do you?”

  “N-no. More curious, I should say.”

  Wentworth, whose eyes were a clouded amber colour, had given her a long, searching look that was really a stare. He said: “All this is awfully interestin’, Irene. We’ve got to have a long talk about it some time soon. There’s your friend from Chicago, first time up here and all that. A case in point.”

  Irene’s smile had only just lifted the corners of her painted lips. A match blazed in Wentworth’s broad hands as he lighted her cigarette and his own, and flickered out before he asked: “Or isn’t she?”

  Her smile changed to a laugh. “Oh, Hugh! You’re so clever. You usually know everything. Even how to tell the sheep from the goats. What do you think? Is she?”

  He blew a long contemplative wreath of smoke. “Damned if I know! I’ll be as sure as anything that I’ve learned the trick. And then in the next minute I’ll find I couldn’t pick some of ’em if my life depended on it.”

  “Well, don’t let that worry you. Nobody can. Not by looking.”

  “Not by looking, eh? Meaning?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t explain. Not clearly. There are ways. But they’re not definite or tangible.”

  “Feeling of kinship, or something like that?”

  “Good heavens, no! Nobody has that, except for their in-laws.”

  “Right again! But go on about the sheep and the goats.”

  “Well, take my own experience with Dorothy Thompkins. I’d met her four or five times, in groups and crowds of people, before I knew she wasn’t a Negro. One day I went to an awful tea, terribly dicty. 5 Dorothy was there. We got talking. In less than five minutes, I knew she was ‘fay.’6 Not from anything she did or said or anything in her appearance. Just—just something. A thing that couldn’t be registered.”

  “Yes, I understand what you mean. Yet lots of people ‘pass’ all the time.”

  “Not on our side, Hugh. It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white. But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for coloured.”

  “Never thought of that.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Why should you?”

  He regarded her critically through mists of smoke. “Slippin’ me, Irene?”7

  She said soberly: “Not you, Hugh. I’m too fond of you. And you’re too sincere.”

  And she remembered that towards the end of the dance Brian had come to her and said: “I’ll drop you first and then run Clare down.” And that he had been doubtful of her discretion when she had explained to him that he wouldn’t have to bother because she had asked Bianca Wentworth to take her down with them. Did she, he had asked, think it had been wise to tell them about Clare?

  “I told them nothing,” she said sharply, for she was unbearably tired, “except that she was at the Walsingham. It’s on their way. And, really, I haven’t thought anything about the wisdom of it, but now that I do, I’d say it’s much better for them to take her than you.”

  “As you please. She’s your friend, you know,” he had answered, with a disclaiming shrug of his shoulders.

  Except for these few unconnected things the dance faded to a blurred memory, its outlines mingling with those of other dances of its kind that she had attended in the past and would attend in the future.

  FOUR

  But undistinctive as the dance had seemed, it was, nevertheless, important. For it marked the beginning of a new factor in Irene Redfield’s life, something that left its trace on all the future years of her existence. It was the beginning of a new friendship with Clare Kendry.

  She came to them frequently after that. Always with a touching gladness that welled up and overflowed on all the Redfield household. Yet Irene could never be sure whether her comings were a joy or a vexation.

  Certainly she was no trouble. She had not to be entertained, or even noticed—if anyone could ever avoid noticing Clare. If Irene happened to be out or occupied, Clare could very happily amuse herself with Ted and Junior, who had conceived for her an admiration that verged on adoration, especially Ted. Or, lacking the boys, she would descend to the kitchen and, with—to Irene—an exasperating child-like lack of perception, spend her visit in talk and merriment with Zulena and Sadie.

  Irene, while secretly resenting these visits to the playroom and kitchen, for some obscure reason which she shied away from putting into words, never requested that Clare make an end of them, or hinted that she wouldn’t have spoiled her own Margery so outrageously, nor been so friendly with white servants.

  Brian looked on these things with the same tolerant amusement that marked his entire attitude toward Clare. Never since his faintly derisive surprise at Irene’s information that she was to go with them the night of the dance, had he shown any disapproval of Clare’s presence. On the other hand, it couldn’t be said that her presence seemed to please him. It didn’t annoy or disturb him, so far as Irene could judge. That was all.

  Didn’t he, she once asked him, think Clare was extraordinarily beautiful?

  “No,” he had answered. “That is, not particularly.”

  “Brian, you’re fooling!”

  “No, honestly. Maybe I’m fussy. I s’pose she’d be an unusually good-looking white woman. I like my ladies darker. Beside an A-number-one sheba, she simply hasn’t got ’em.”

  Clare went, sometimes with Irene and Brian, to parties and dances, and on a few occasions when Irene hadn’t been able or inclined to go out, she had gone alone with Brian to some bridge party or benefit dance.

  Once in a while she came formally to dine with them. She wasn’t, however, in spite of her poise and air of worldliness, the ideal dinner-party guest. Beyond the æsthetic pleasure one got from watching her, she contributed little, sitting for the most part silent, an odd dreaming look in her hypnotic eyes. Though she could for some purpose of her own—the desire to be included in some party being made up to go cabareting, or an invitation to a dance or a tea—talk fluently and entertainingly.

  She was generally liked. She was so friendly and responsive, and so ready to press the sweet food of flattery on all. Nor did she object to appearing a bit pathetic and ill-used, so that people could feel sorry for her. And, no matter how often she came among them, she still remained someone apart, a little mysterious and strange, someone to wonder about and to admire and to pity.

  Her visits were undecided and uncertain, being, as they were, dependent on the presence or absence of John Bellew in the city. But she did, once in a while, manage to steal uptown for an afternoon even when he was not away. As time went on without any apparent danger of discovery, even Irene ceased to be perturbed about the possibility of Clare’s husband’s stumbling on her racial identity.

  The daughter, Margery, had been left in Switzerland in school, for Clare and Bellew would be going back in the early spring. In March, Clare thought. “And how I do hate to think of it!” she would say, always with a suggestion of leashed rebellion; “but I can’t see how I’m going to get out of it. Jack won’t hear of my staying behind. If I could have just a couple of months more in New York, alone I mean, I’d be the happiest thing in the world.”

  “I imagine you’ll be happy enough, once you get away,” Irene told her one day when she was bewailing her approaching departure. “Remember, there’s Margery. Think how glad you’ll be to see her after all this time.”

  “Children aren’t everything,” was Clare Kendry’s answer to that. “There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.” And she laughed, more, it seemed, at some secret joke of her own than at her words.

  Irene
replied: “You know you don’t mean that, Clare. You’re only trying to tease me. I know very well that I take being a mother rather seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys and the running of my house. I can’t help it. And, really, I don’t think it’s anything to laugh at.” And though she was aware of the slight primness in her words and attitude, she had neither power nor wish to efface it.

  Clare, suddenly very sober and sweet, said: “You’re right. It’s no laughing matter. It’s shameful of me to tease you, ’Rene. You are so good.” And she reached out and gave Irene’s hand an affectionate little squeeze. “Don’t think,” she added, “whatever happens, that I’ll ever forget how good you’ve been to me.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Oh, but you have, you have. It’s just that I haven’t any proper morals or sense of duty, as you have, that makes me act as I do.”

  “Now you are talking nonsense.”

  “But it’s true, ’Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit? Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. Really, ’Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable.

  She said: “I don’t believe it. In the first place what you’re saying is so utterly, so wickedly wrong. And as for your giving up things—” She stopped, at a loss for an acceptable term to express her opinion of Clare’s “having” nature.

  But Clare Kendry had begun to cry, audibly, with no effort at restraint, and for no reason that Irene could discover.

  PART THREE

  FINALE

  ONE

  The year was getting on towards its end. October, November had gone. December had come and brought with it a little snow and then a freeze and after that a thaw and some soft pleasant days that had in them a feeling of spring.

  It wasn’t, this mild weather, a bit Christmasy, Irene Redfield was thinking, as she turned out of Seventh Avenue into her own street. She didn’t like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudy as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all as soft, as like April, as possible. The kind of weather for Easter. Certainly not for Christmas.

  Though, she admitted, reluctantly, she herself didn’t feel the proper Christmas spirit this year, either. But that couldn’t be helped, it seemed, any more than the weather. She was weary and depressed. And for all her trying, she couldn’t be free of that dull, indefinite misery which with increasing tenaciousness had laid hold of her. The morning’s aimless wandering through the teeming Harlem streets, long after she had ordered the flowers which had been her excuse for setting out, was but another effort to tear herself loose from it.

  She went up the cream stone steps, into the house, and down to the kitchen. There were to be people in to tea. But that, she found, after a few words with Sadie and Zulena, need give her no concern. She was thankful. She didn’t want to be bothered. She went upstairs and took off her things and got into bed.

  She thought: “Bother those people coming to tea!”

  She thought: “If I could only be sure that at bottom it’s just Brazil.”

  She thought: “Whatever it is, if I only knew what it was, I could manage it.”

  Brian again. Unhappy, restless, withdrawn. And she, who had prided herself on knowing his moods, their causes and their remedies, had found it first unthinkable, and then intolerable, that this, so like and yet so unlike those other spasmodic restlessnesses of his, should be to her incomprehensible and elusive.

  He was restless and he was not restless. He was discontented, yet there were times when she felt he was possessed of some intense secret satisfaction, like a cat who had stolen the cream. He was irritable with the boys, especially Junior, for Ted, who seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of his father’s periods of off moods, kept out of his way when possible. They got on his nerves, drove him to violent outbursts of temper, very different from his usual gently sarcastic remarks that constituted his idea of discipline for them. On the other hand, with her he was more than customarily considerate and abstemious. And it had been weeks since she had felt the keen edge of his irony.

  He was like a man marking time, waiting. But what was he waiting for? It was extraordinary that, after all these years of accurate perception, she now lacked the talent to discover what that appearance of waiting meant. It was the knowledge that, for all her watching, all her patient study, the reason for his humour still eluded her which filled her with foreboding dread. That guarded reserve of his seemed to her unjust, inconsiderate, and alarming. It was as if he had stepped out beyond her reach into some section, strange and walled, where she could not get at him.

  She closed her eyes, thinking what a blessing it would be if she could get a little sleep before the boys came in from school. She couldn’t, of course, though she was so tired, having had, of late, so many sleepless nights. Nights filled with questionings and premonitions.

  But she did sleep—several hours.

  She wakened to find Brian standing at her bedside looking down at her, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.

  She said: “I must have dropped off to sleep,” and watched a slender ghost of his old amused smile pass over his face.

  “It’s getting on to four,” he told her, meaning, she knew, that she was going to be late again.

  She fought back the quick answer that rose to her lips and said instead: “I’m getting right up. It was good of you to think to call me.” She sat up.

  He bowed. “Always the attentive husband, you see.”

  “Yes indeed. Thank goodness, everything’s ready.”

  “Except you. Oh, and Clare’s downstairs.”

  “Clare! What a nuisance! I didn’t ask her. Purposely.”

  “I see. Might a mere man ask why? Or is the reason so subtly feminine that it wouldn’t be understood by him?”

  A little of his smile had come back. Irene, who was beginning to shake off some of her depression under his familiar banter, said, almost gaily: “Not at all. It just happens that this party happens to be for Hugh, and that Hugh happens not to care a great deal for Clare; therefore I, who happen to be giving the party, didn’t happen to ask her. Nothing could be simpler. Could it?”

  “Nothing. It’s so simple that I can easily see beyond your simple explanation and surmise that Clare, probably, just never happened to pay Hugh the admiring attention that he happens to consider no more than his just due. Simplest thing in the world.”

  Irene exclaimed in amazement: “Why, I thought you liked Hugh! You don’t, you can’t, believe anything so idiotic!”

  “Well, Hugh does think he’s God, you know.”

  “That,” Irene declared, getting out of bed, “is absolutely not true. He thinks ever so much better of himself than that, as you, who know and have read him, ought to be able to guess. If you remember what a low opinion he has of God, you won’t make such a silly mistake.”

  She went into the closet for her things and, coming back, hung her frock over the back of a chair and placed her shoes on the floor beside it. Then she sat down before her dressing-table.

  Brian didn’t speak. He continued to stand beside the bed, seeming to look at nothing in particular. Certainly not at her. True, his gaze was on her, but in it there was some quality that made her feel that at that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. At what? She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. And this made her uncomfortable. Piqued her.

  She said: “It just happens that Hugh prefers intelligent women.”

  Plainly he was startled. “D’you mean that you think Clare is stupid?” he asked, regarding her with lifted eyebrows, which emphasized the disbelief of his voice.

&nb
sp; She wiped the cold cream from her face, before she said: “No, I don’t. She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro.”

  “I see. Intelligent enough to wear a tight bodice and keep bowing swains whispering compliments and retrieving dropped fans. Rather a pretty picture. I take it, though, as slightly feline in its implication.”

  “Well, then, all I can say is that you take it wrongly. Nobody admires Clare more than I do, for the kind of intelligence she has, as well as for her decorative qualities. But she’s not—She isn’t— She hasn’t— Oh, I can’t explain it. Take Bianca, for example, or, to keep to the race, Felise Freeland. Looks and brains. Real brains that can hold their own with anybody. Clare has got brains of a sort, the kind that are useful too. Acquisitive, you know. But she’d bore a man like Hugh to suicide. Still, I never thought that even Clare would come to a private party to which she hadn’t been asked. But, it’s like her.”

  For a minute there was silence. She completed the bright red arch of her full lips. Brian moved towards the door. His hand was on the knob. He said: “I’m sorry, Irene. It’s my fault entirely. She seemed so hurt at being left out that I told her I was sure you’d forgotten and to just come along.”

  Irene cried out: “But, Brian, I—” and stopped, amazed at the fierce anger that had blazed up in her.

  Brian’s head came round with a jerk. His brows lifted in an odd surprise.

  Her voice, she realized, had gone queer. But she had an instinctive feeling that it hadn’t been the whole cause of his attitude. And that little straightening motion of the shoulders. Hadn’t it been like that of a man drawing himself up to receive a blow? Her fright was like a scarlet spear of terror leaping at her heart.