Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “I’ve decided — I’ve decided — let me think! — not to decide till I see him again! What do you

  mean by if it were my duty to give him up?”

  “It would be your duty,” Mrs. Meredith faltered, “to give him up, unless you were sure you loved him.”

  “Oh, yes; certainly. That.”

  “You wouldn’t wish him, after you’ve seen so much of his family, not to know everything about yours, if you decided to accept him?”

  “Why, you’re all there is, Aunt Caroline! You’re the end of the story. I should hope he understood that. What else is there?”

  “Nothing — nothing — There is very little. But we ought to tell Mr. Bloomingdale all we know — of your mother’s family.”

  “Why, certainly. I expected to do that. There was nothing disgraceful about them, I imagine, except their behavior toward mamma.”

  “No—”

  “You speak as if there were. What are you keeping back, Aunt Caroline?” Rhoda sat upright, and faced her aunt with a sort of sudden fierceness which she sometimes showed when she was roused to self-assertion. This was seldom, in the succession of her amiable moods, but when it happened, Mrs. Meredith saw in it the outbreak of the ancestral savagery, and shuddered at it as a self-betrayal rather than a self-assertion; but perhaps self-assertion is this with all of us. “What are you hinting at? If there was anything dishonorable—”

  Mrs. Meredith found herself launched at last. She could not go back now; she could not stop. She had only the choice, in going on, of telling the truth, or setting sail to shipwreck under some new lie. For this, both will and invention failed her; she was too weak mentally, if she was not too strong morally, for this. She went on, with a kind of mechanical force.

  “If there were something dishonorable that was not, their fault, that was their wrong, their sorrow, their burden — what should you think of your father’s marrying your mother, with a full knowledge of it?”

  “I should think he did nobly and bravely to marry her. But that’s nothing. What was the disgrace? What had they done, that they had to suffer innocently? You needn’t be afraid of telling me everything. I don’t care what Mr. Bloomingdale or any one thinks; I shall be proud of them for it; I shall be glad!” Mrs. Meredith saw with terror that the girl’s fancy had kindled with some romantic conjecture. “Who was my grandfather?”

  “I know very little about him, Rhoda,” said Mrs. Meredith, seeking to rest in this neutral truth. “Your father never told me much, except that he was a Creole, and — and rich; and — and — respected, as those things went there, among his people—”

  “Was he some old slaver, like those in Mr. Cable’s book? I shouldn’t care for that! But that would have been his fault, and it wouldn’t have been any great disgrace; and you said — And my grand- mother — who was she?”

  “She was — not his wife.”

  “Oh! “ said the girl, with a quick breath, as if she had been struck over the heart. “That was how the dishonor—” She stopped, with an absent stare fixed upon her aunt, who waited in silence for her to realize this evil which was still so far short of the worst. Where she sat she could not see the blush of shame that gradually stained the girl’s face to her throat and forehead. “Who was she?”

  Mrs. Meredith tried to think how the words would sound as she said them, and simultaneously she said them, “She was his slave.”

  The girl was silent and motionless. With her head defined against the open window, her face showed quite black toward her aunt, as if the fact of her mother’s race had remanded her to its primordial hue in touching her consciousness. Mrs. Meredith had risen, and sat with one hand grasping the wrap that still covered her feet, as if ready to cast it loose, and fly her victim’s presence, if it became intolerable. But she found herself too weak to stand up, and she waited, throbbing and quaking, for Rhoda to speak.

  The girl gave a little, low, faltering laugh, an inarticulate note of such pathetic fear and pitiful entreaty that it went through the woman’s heart. “Aunt Caroline, are you crazy?”

  “Crazy?” The word gave her an instant of strange respite. Was she really mad, and had she long dreamed this thing in the cloudy deliriums of a sick brain ? The fact of her hopeless sanity repossesses her from this tricksy conjecture. If I were only crazy!”

  “And you mean to say — to tell me — that — that — I am — black?”

  “Oh, no, poor child! You are as white as I am — as any one. No one would ever think—”

  “But I have that blood in me? It is the same thing!” An awful silence followed again, and then the girl said: “And you let me grow up thinking I was white, like other girls, when you knew — You let we pass myself off on myself and every one else, for what I wasn’t! Oh, Aunt Caroline, what are you telling me this ghastly thing for? It isn’t true! You couldn’t have let me live on all these years thinking I was a white person, when — You would have told me from the very beginning, as soon as I could begin to understand anything. You wouldn’t have told me all those things about my mother’s family, and their being great people, and disowning her, and all that! If this is true you wouldn’t have let me believe that, you and Uncle Meredith?”

  “We let you believe it, but you made it up yourself ; we never told you anything.”

  “But you couldn’t have thought that was being honest, and so you couldn’t have done it — you couldn’t. And so it isn’t any of it true that you’ve just told me. But why did you tell me such a thing? I don’t believe you have told me it. Why, I must be dreaming. It’s as if — as if — you were to come to a perfectly well person, and tell them that they were going to die in half an hour. Don’t you see? How can you tell me such a thing ? Don’t you understand that it tears my whole life up, and flings it out on the ground? But you know it isn’t true. Oh, my, I think my head will burst! Why don’t you speak to me, and tell me why you said such a thing? Is it because you don’t want me to marry Mr. Bloomingdale? Well, I won’t marry him. Now will you say it?”

  “Rhoda!” her aunt began, “whether you married Mr. Bloomingdale or not, the time had come—”

  “No! The time had gone. It had come as soon as I could speak or understand the first word. Then would have been the time for you to tell me such a thing if it were true, so that I might have grown up knowing it, and trying to bear it. But it isn’t true, and you’re just saying it for some other reason. What has happened to you, Aunt Caroline? I am going to send for Dr. Olney; you’re not well. It’s something in that medicine of his, I know it is. Let me look at you!” She ran suddenly toward Mrs. Meredith, who recoiled, crouching back into the corner of her sofa. The girl broke into a hysterical laugh. “Do you think I will hurt you? Oh, Aunt Caroline, take it back, take it back! See, I’ll get on my knees to you!” She threw herself down before the sofa where Mrs. Meredith crouched. “Oh, you couldn’t have been so wicked as to live such a lie as that!”

  “It was a lie, the basest, the vilest,” said Mrs. Meredith, with a sort of hopeless gasp. “But I never saw the time when I must tell you the truth — and so I couldn’t.”

  “Oh, no, no! Don’t take yourself from me!” The girl dropped her head on the woman’s knee, and broke into a wild sobbing. “I don’t know what you’re doing this for. It can’t be true — it can’t be real. Shall I never wake from it, and have you back ? You were all I had in the world, and now, if you were not what I thought you, so true and good, I haven’t even you any more. Oh, oh, oh!”

  “Oh, it was all wrong,” said Mrs. Meredith, in a tearless misery, a dry pang of the heart for which her words were no relief. “There hasn’t been a day or an hour when I haven’t felt it; and I have always prayed for light to see my duty, and strength to do it. God knows that if I could bear this for you, how gladly I would do it. I have borne it all these years, and the guilt of the concealment besides; that is something, though it is nothing to what you are suffering. I know that — I know that!”

  The girl sobbed on
and on, and the woman repeated the same things over and over, a babble of words in which there was no comfort, no help, but which sufficed to tide them both over from the past which had dropped into chaos behind them to a new present in which they must try to gain a footing once more.

  The girl suddenly ceased to bemoan herself, and lifted her head, to look into her aunt’s face. “And my mother,” she said, ignoring the piteous sympathy she saw, “was she my father’s slave, too?”

  “She was your father’s wife. Slavery was past then, and he was too good a man for anything else, though he knew his marriage would ruin him, as it did.”

  “At least there is some one I can honor, then; I can’t honor him,” said the girl, with an unpitying hardness in her tone. She rose to her feet,. and turned toward the door of her own room.

  “Is there — is there anything else that I can tell that you wish to know?” her aunt entreated.

  “Oh, child! If you could only understand—”

  “I do understand,” said the girl.

  Mrs. Meredith, in her millionfold prefigurations of this moment, had often suffered from the necessity of insinuating to the ignorance of girlhood all the sad details of the social tragedy of which she was the victim. But she perceived that this at least was to be spared her, that the girl had somehow instantly realized the whole affair in these aspects. In middle life we often forget, amidst the accumulations of experience, how early the main bases of it were laid in our consciousness. We suppose, when we are experienced, that knowledge comes solely from experience; but knowledge, or if not knowledge, then truth, comes largely from perception, from instinct, from divination, from the intelligence of our mere potentialities. A man can be anything along the vast range from angel to devil; without living either the good thing or the bad thing in which his fancy dramatizes him, he can perceive it. His intelligence may want accuracy, though after-experience often startlingly verifies it; but it does not want truth. The materials of knowledge accumulate from innumerable unremembered sources. All at once, some vital interest precipitates the latent electricity of the cloudy mass in a flash that illumines the world with a shadowless brilliancy and shows everything in its very form and meaning. Then the witness perceives that somehow from the beginning of conscious being he had understood all this before, and every influence and circumstance had tended to the significance revealed.

  The proud, pure girl who had been told that her mother was slave-born and sin-born, had lived as carefully sheltered from the guilt and shame that are in the world as tender love and pitying fear could keep her; but so much of the sad fact of evil had somehow reached her that she stood in a sudden glare of the reality. She understood, and she felt all scathed within by the intelligence, by whatever the cruelest foe could have told her with the most unsparing fulness, whatever the fondest friend could have wished her not to know. The swiftness of these mental processes no words can suggest; we can portray life, not living.

  “‘I am going to my room, now,” she said to her aunt, “and whatever happens, don’t follow me, don’t call me. If you are dying, don’t speak to me. I have a right to be alone.”

  She crossed to the door of her chamber opening from the little parlor, and closed it behind her, and her aunt fell back again on her sofa. She was too weak to follow her if she had wished, and she was too wise to wish it, She lay there revolving the whole misery in her mind, turning it over and over ten thousand times. She said to herself that it was worse, far worse, than she had ever pictured it; but in fact it was better, for her. She pretended otherwise, but for her there was the relief in the situation of a lie owned, a truth spoken, and with whatever heart-wrung drops she told the throes of the anguish beyond that door, for herself she was glad. It was monstrous to be glad, she knew that; but she knew that she was glad.

  After awhile she began to be afraid of the absolute silence that continued in Rhoda’s room, and then she did what men would say a man would not have done; she crept to the door and peeped and listened. She could not hear anything, but she saw Rhoda sitting by the table writing. She went back to her sofa, and lay there more patiently now; but as the time passed she began to be hungry; with shame that did not suffer her to ring and ask for anything to eat, she began to feel the weak and self-pitiful craving of an invalid for food.

  The time passed till the travelling-clock on the mantel showed her that it was half-past seven. Then Rhoda’s door was flung open, and the girl stood before her with her hat on, and dressed to go out. She had a letter in her hand, and she said, with a mechanical hardness, “I have written to him, and I am going out with the letter. When I come back—”

  “You can send your letter out,” pleaded her aunt; she knew what the girl had written too well to ask. “It’s almost dark; it’s too late for you to be out on the streets alone.”

  “Oh, what could happen to me?” demanded Rhoda, scornfully. “Or if some one insulted a colored girl, what of it? When I come back I will pack for you, and in the morning we will start for New Orleans, and try to find out my mother’s family.”

  Her aunt said nothing to this, but she set herself earnestly to plead with the girl not to go out. “It will be dark, Rhoda, and you don’t know the streets. Indeed you mustn’t go out. You haven’t had any dinner — For my sake—”

  “For your sake!” said Rhoda. She went on, as if that were answer enough, “I have written to him that all is over between us — it was, even before this: I could never have married him — and that when he arrives we shall be gone, and he must never try to see me again. I’ve told you all that you could ask, Aunt Caroline, and now there is one thing I want you to answer me. Is there any one else who knows this?”

  “No, indeed, child!” answered Mrs. Meredith instantly, and she thought for the instant that she was telling the truth. “Not another living soul. No one ever knew but your uncle—”

  “Be careful, Aunt Caroline,” said the girl, coming up to her sofa, and looking gloomily down upon her. “You had better always tell me the truth, now. Have you told no one else?”

  “No one.”

  “Not Dr. Olney?”

  It was too late, now that Mrs. Meredith perceived her error. She could not draw back from it, and say that she had forgotten; Rhoda would never believe that. She could only say, “No, not Dr. Olney.”

  “Tell me the truth, if you expect ever to see me again, in this world or the next. Is it the truth? Swear it!”

  “It is the truth,” said the poor woman, feeling this now and astonishing lie triply riveted upon her soul; and she sank down upon the pillow from which she had partly lifted herself, and lay there as if crushed under the burden suddenly rolled back upon her.

  “Then I forgive you,” said the girl, stooping down to kiss her.

  The woman pushed her feebly away. “Oh, I don’t want your forgiveness, now,” she whimpered, and she began to cry.

  Rhoda made no answer, but turned and went out of the room.

  Mrs. Meredith lay exhausted. She was no longer hungry, but she was weak for want of food. After a while she slid from the sofa, and then on her hands and knees she crept to the table where the bottle that held Dr. Olney’s sleeping medicine stood. She drank it all off. She felt the need of escaping from herself; she did not believe it would kill her; but she must escape at any risk. So men die who mean to take their lives; but it is not certain that death even is an escape from ourselves.

  VIII

  In the street where Rhoda found herself the gas was already palely burning in the shops, and the moony glare of an electric globe was invading the flush of the sunset, whose after-glow still filled the summer air in the western perspective. She did not know where she was going, but she went that way, down the slope of the slightly curving thoroughfare. She had the letter which she meant to post in her hand, but she passed the boxes on the lamp-posts without putting it in. She no longer knew what else she meant to do, in any sort, or what she desired; but out of the turmoil of horror, which she whirled round and ro
und in, some purpose that seemed at first exterior to herself began to evolve. The street was one where she would hardly have met ladies of the sort she had always supposed herself of; gentility fled it long ago, and the houses that had once been middle-class houses had fallen in the social scale to the grade of mechanics’ lodgings, and the shops, which had never been fashionable, were adapted strictly to the needs of a neighborhood of poor and humble people. They were largely provision stores, full of fruit, especially watermelons; there were some groceries, and some pharmacies of that professional neatness which pharmacies are of everywhere. The, roadway was at this hour pretty well deserted by the express wagons and butcher carts that bang through it in the earlier day; and the horse-cars coming and going on its incline and its final westward level, were in the unrestricted enjoyment of the company’s monopoly of the best part of its space.

  At the first corner Rhoda had to find her way through groups of intense-faced suburbans who were waiting for their respective cars, and who heaped themselves on board as these arrived, and hurried to find places, more from force of habit than from necessity, for the pressure of the evening travel was already over. When she had passed these groups she began to meet the proper life of the street — the women who had come out to cheapen the next day’s provisions at the markets, the men, in the brief leisure that their day’s work had left them before bedtime, lounging at the lattice doors of the drinking-shops, or standing listlessly about on the curb-stones smoking. Numbers of young fellows, of the sort whose leisure is day-long, exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with the house walls, and stared at her as she hurried by; and then she began to encounter in greater and greater number the colored people who descended to this popular promenade from the up-hill streets opening upon it. They politely made way for her, and at the first meeting that new agony of interest in them possessed her.

  This was intensified by the deference they paid her as a young white lady, and the instant sense that she had no right to it in that quality. She could have borne better to have them rude and even insolent; there was something in the way they turned their black eyes in their large disks of white upon her, like dogs, with a mute animal appeal in them, that seemed to claim her one of them, and to creep nearer and nearer and possess her in that late-found solidarity of race. She never know before how hideous they were, with their flat wide-nostriled noses, their out-rolled thick lips, their mobile, bulging eyes set near together, their retreating chins and foreheads, and their smooth, shining skin; they seemed burlesques of humanity, worse than apes, because they were more like. But the men were not half so bad as the women, from the shrill-piped young girls, with their grotesque attempts at fashion, to the old grandmothers, wrinkled or obese, who came down the sloping sidewalks in their bare heads, out of the courts and alleys where they lived, to get the evening air. Impish black children swarmed on these uphill sidewalks and played their games, with shrill cries racing back and forth, catching and escaping one another.