“What you mean?” she hissed at him. “What you mean playin’ in de strit wid dose niggers?” And she struck at him wildly with her open hand.
He looked up into her brown face surmounted by a wealth of curly black hair faintly streaked with gray, but he was too frightened to question.
It had been loneliness ever since. For the parents of the little black and yellow boys, resenting the insult Grandmère had offered their offspring, sternly bade them have nothing more to do with Victor. Then when he toddled after some other little boys, whose faces were white like his own, they ran away with derisive hoots of “Nigger! Nigger!” And again, he could not understand.
Hardest of all, though, was when Grandmère sternly bade him cease speaking the soft, Creole patois that they chattered together, and forced him to learn English. The result was a confused jumble which was no language at all; that when he spoke it in the streets or in the school, all the boys, white and black and yellow, hooted at him and called him “White nigger! White nigger!”
He writhed on his cot that night and lived over all the anguish of his years until hot tears scalded their way down a burning face, and he fell into a troubled sleep wherein he sobbed over some dreamland miseries.
The next morning, Grandmère eyed his heavy, swollen eyes sharply, and a momentary thrill of compassion passed over her and found expression in a new tenderness of manner towards him as she served his breakfast. She too, had thought over the matter in the night, and it bore fruit in an unexpected way.
Some few weeks after, Victor found himself timidly ringing the doorbell of a house on Hospital Street in New Orleans. His heart throbbed in painful unison to the jangle of the bell. How was he to know that old Madame Guichard, Grandmère’s one friend in the city, to whom she had confided him, would be kind? He had walked from the river landing to the house, timidly inquiring the way of busy pedestrians. He was hungry and frightened. Never in all his life had he seen so many people before, and in all the busy streets there was not one eye which would light up with recognition when it met his own. Moreover, it had been a weary journey down the Red River, thence into the Mississippi, and finally here. Perhaps it had not been devoid of interest, after its fashion, but Victor did not know. He was too heartsick at leaving home.
However, Mme. Guichard was kind. She welcomed him with a volubility and overflow of tenderness that acted like balm to the boy’s sore spirit. Thence they were firm friends, even confidants.
Victor must find work to do. Grandmère Grabert’s idea in sending him to New Orleans was that he might “mek one man of himse’f” as she phrased it. And Victor, grown suddenly old in the sense that he had a responsibility to bear, set about his search valiantly.
It chanced one day that he saw a sign in an old bookstore on Royal Street that stated in both French and English the need of a boy. Almost before he knew it, he had entered the shop and was gasping out some choked words to the little old man who sat behind the counter.
The old man looked keenly over his glasses at the boy and rubbed his bald head reflectively. In order to do this, he had to take off an old black silk cap which he looked at with apparent regret.
“Eh, what you say?” he asked sharply, when Victor had finished.
“I — I — want a place to work,” stammered the boy again.
“Eh, you do? Well, can you read?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Victor.
The old man got down from his stool, came from behind the counter, and, putting his finger under the boy’s chin, stared hard into his eyes. They met his own unflinchingly, though there was the suspicion of pathos and timidity in their brown depths.
“Do you know where you live, eh?”
“On Hospital Street,” said Victor. It did not occur to him to give the number, and the old man did not ask.
“Trés bien,” grunted the bookseller, and his interest relaxed. He gave a few curt directions about the manner of work Victor was to do, and settled himself again upon his stool, poring into his dingy book with renewed ardor.
Thus began Victor’s commercial life. It was an easy one. At seven, he opened the shutters of the little shop and swept and dusted. At eight, the bookseller came downstairs, and passed out to get his coffee at the restaurant across the street. At eight in the evening, the shop was closed again. That was all.
Occasionally, there came a customer, but not often, for there were only odd books and rare ones in the shop, and those who came were usually old, yellow, querulous bookworms, who nosed about for hours, and went away leaving many bank notes behind them. Sometimes there was an errand to do, and sometimes there came a customer when the proprietor was out. It was an easy matter to wait on them. He had but to point to the shelves and say, “Monsieur will be in directly,” and all was settled, for those who came here to buy had plenty of leisure and did not mind waiting.
So a year went by, then two and three, and the stream of Victor’s life flowed smoothly on its uneventful way. He had grown tall and thin, and often Mme. Guichard would look at him and chuckle to herself, “Ha, he is lak one beanpole, yaas, mais — ” and there would be a world of unfinished reflection in that last word.
Victor had grown pale from much reading. Like a shadow of the old bookseller, he sat day after day poring into some dusty yellow-paged book, and his mind was a queer jumble of ideas. History and philosophy and old-fashioned social economy were tangled with French romance and classic mythology and astrology and mysticism. He had made few friends, for his experience in the village had made him chary of strangers. Every week, he wrote to Grandmère Grabert and sent her part of his earnings. In his way he was happy, and if he was lonely, he had ceased to care about it, for his world was peopled with images of his own fancying.
Then all at once, the world he had built about him tumbled down, and he was left staring helplessly at its ruins. The little bookseller died one day, and his shop and its books were sold by an unscrupulous nephew who cared not for bindings or precious yellowed pages, but only for the grossly material things that money can buy. Victor ground his teeth as the auctioneer’s strident voice sounded through the shop where all once had been hushed quiet, and wept as he saw some of his favorite books carried away by men and women, whom he was sure could not appreciate their value.
He dried his tears, however, the next day when a grave-faced lawyer came to the little house on Hospital Street, and informed him that he had been left a sum of money by the bookseller.
Victor sat staring at him helplessly. Money meant little to him. He never needed it, never used it. After he had sent Grandmère her sum each week, Mme. Guichard kept the rest and doled it out to him as he needed it for carfare and clothes.
“The interest of the money,” continued the lawyer, clearing his throat, “is sufficient to keep you very handsomely, without touching the principal. It was my client’s wish that you should enter Tulane College, and there fit yourself for your profession. He had great confidence in your ability.”
“Tulane College!” cried Victor. “Why — why — why — ” Then he stopped suddenly, and the hot blood mounted to his face. He glanced furtively about the room. Mme. Guichard was not near; the lawyer had seen no one but him. Then why tell him? His heart leaped wildly at the thought. Well, Grandmère would have willed it so.
The lawyer was waiting politely for him to finish his sentence.
“Why — why — I should have to study in order to enter there,” finished Victor lamely.
“Exactly so,” said Mr. Buckley, “and as I have, in a way, been appointed your guardian, I will see to that.”
Victor found himself murmuring confused thanks and good-byes to Mr. Buckley. After he had gone, the boy sat down and gazed blankly at the wall. Then he wrote a long letter to Grandmère.
A week later, he changed boarding places at Mr. Buckley’s advice, and entered a preparatory school for Tulane. And still, Mme. Guichard and Mr. Buckley had not met.
It was a handsomely furnished office on Carondelet Str
eet in which Lawyer Grabert sat some years later. His day’s work done, he was leaning back in his chair and smiling pleasantly out of the window. Within was warmth and light and cheer; without, the wind howled and gusty rains beat against the windowpane. Lawyer Grabert smiled again as he looked about at the comfort, and found himself half pitying those without who were forced to buffet the storm afoot. He rose finally and, donning his overcoat, called a cab and was driven to his rooms in the most fashionable part of the city. There he found his old-time college friend, awaiting him with some impatience.
“Thought you never were coming, old man” was his greeting.
Grabert smiled pleasantly. “Well, I was a bit tired, you know,” he answered, “and I have been sitting idle for an hour or more, just relaxing, as it were.”
Vannier laid his hand affectionately on the other’s shoulder. “That was a mighty effort you made today,” he said earnestly. “I, for one, am proud of you.”
“Thank you,” replied Grabert simply, and the two sat silent for a minute.
“Going to the Charles’ dance tonight?” asked Vannier finally.
“I don’t believe I am. I am tired and lazy.”
“It will do you good. Come on.”
“No, I want to read and ruminate.”
“Ruminate over your good fortune of today?”
“If you will have it so, yes.”
But it was not simply his good fortune of that day over which Grabert pondered. It was over the good fortune of the past fifteen years. From school to college and from college to law school he had gone, and thence into practice, and he was now accredited a successful young lawyer. His small fortune, which Mr. Buckley, with generous kindness, had invested wisely, had almost doubled, and his school career, while not of the brilliant, meteoric kind, had been pleasant and profitable. He had made friends, at first, with the boys he met, and they in turn had taken him into their homes. Now and then, the Buckleys asked him to dinner, and he was seen occasionally in their box at the opera. He was rapidly becoming a social favorite, and girls vied with each other to dance with him. No one had asked any questions, and he had volunteered no information concerning himself. Vannier, who had known him in preparatory school days, had said that he was a young country fellow with some money, no connections, and a ward of Mr. Buckley’s, and somehow, contrary to the usual social custom of the South, this meagre account had passed muster. But Vannier’s family had been a social arbiter for many years, and Grabert’s personality was pleasing, without being aggressive, so he had passed through the portals of the social world and was in the inner circle.
One year, when he and Vannier were in Switzerland, pretending to climb impossible mountains and in reality smoking many cigars a day on hotel porches, a letter came to Grabert from the priest of his old-time town, telling him that Grandmère Grabert had been laid away in the parish churchyard. There was no more to tell. The little old hut had been sold to pay funeral expenses.
“Poor Grandmère,” sighed Victor. “She did care for me after her fashion. I’ll go take a look at her grave when I go back.”
But he did not go, for when he returned to Louisiana, he was too busy, then he decided that it would be useless, sentimental folly. Moreover, he had no love for the old village. Its very name suggested things that made him turn and look about him nervously. He had long since eliminated Mme. Guichard from his list of acquaintances.
And yet, as he sat there in his cosy study that night, and smiled as he went over in his mind triumph after triumph which he had made since the old bookstore days in Royal Street, he was conscious of a subtle undercurrent of annoyance; a sort of mental reservation that placed itself on every pleasant memory.
“I wonder what’s the matter with me?” he asked himself as he rose and paced the floor impatiently. Then he tried to recall his other triumph, the one of the day. The case of Tate vs. Tate, a famous will contest, had been dragging through the courts for seven years and his speech had decided it that day. He could hear the applause of the courtroom as he sat down, but it rang hollow in his ears, for he remembered another scene. The day before he had been in another court, and found himself interested in the prisoner before the bar. The offense was a slight one, a mere technicality. Grabert was conscious of something pleasant in the man’s face; a scrupulous neatness in his dress, an unostentatious conforming to the prevailing style. The Recorder, however, was short and brusque.
“Wilson — Wilson — ” he growled. “Oh, yes, I know you, always kicking up some sort of a row about theatre seats and cars. Hum-um. What do you mean by coming before me with a flower in your buttonhole?”
The prisoner looked down indifferently at the bud on his coat, and made no reply.
“Hey?” growled the Recorder. “You niggers are putting yourselves up too much for me.”
At the forbidden word, the blood rushed to Grabert’s face, and he started from his seat angrily. The next instant, he had recovered himself and buried his face in a paper. After Wilson had paid his fine, Grabert looked at him furtively as he passed out. His face was perfectly impassive, but his eyes flashed defiantly. The lawyer was tingling with rage and indignation, although the affront had not been given him.
“If Recorder Grant had any reason to think that I was in any way like Wilson, I would stand no better show,” he mused bitterly.
However, as he thought it over tonight, he decided that he was a sentimental fool. “What have I to do with them?” he asked himself. “I must be careful.”
The next week, he discharged the man who cared for his office. He was a Negro, and Grabert had no fault to find with him generally, but he found himself with a growing sympathy towards the man, and since the episode in the courtroom, he was morbidly nervous lest something in his manner betray him. Thereafter, a round-eyed Irish boy cared for his rooms.
The Vanniers were wont to smile indulgently at his every move. Elise Vannier, particularly, was more than interested in his work. He had a way of dropping in of evenings and talking over his cases and speeches with her in a cosy corner of the library. She had a gracious sympathetic manner that was soothing and a cheery fund of repartee to whet her conversation. Victor found himself drifting into sentimental bits of talk now and then. He found himself carrying around in his pocketbook a faded rose which she had once worn, and when he laughed at it one day and started to throw it in the wastebasket, he suddenly kissed it instead, and replaced it in the pocketbook. That Elise was not indifferent to him he could easily see. She had not learned yet how to veil her eyes and mask her face under a cool assumption of superiority. She would give him her hand when they met with a girlish impulsiveness, and her color came and went under his gaze. Sometimes, when he held her hand a bit longer than necessary, he could feel it flutter in his own, and she would sigh a quick little gasp that made his heart leap and choked his utterance.
They were tucked away in their usual cosy corner one evening, and the conversation had drifted to the problem of where they would spend the summer.
“Papa wants to go to the country house,” pouted Elise, “and Mama and I don’t want to go. It isn’t fair, of course, because when we go so far away, Papa can be with us only for a few weeks when he can get away from his office, while if we go to the country place, he can run up every few days. But it is so dull there, don’t you think so?”
Victor recalled some pleasant vacation days at the plantation home and laughed. “Not if you are there.”
“Yes, but you see, I can’t take myself for a companion. Now if you’ll promise to come up sometimes, it will be better.”
“If I may, I shall be delighted to come.”
Elise laughed intimately. “If you ‘may’ ” she replied, “as if such a word had to enter into our plans. Oh, but Victor, haven’t you some sort of plantation somewhere? It seems to me that I heard Steven years ago speak of your home in the country, and I wondered sometimes that you never spoke of it, or ever mentioned having visited it.”
The girl’s a
rtless words were bringing cold sweat to Victor’s brow, his tongue felt heavy and useless, but he managed to answer quietly, “I have no home in the country.”
“Well, didn’t you ever own one, or your family?”
“It was old quite a good many years ago,” he replied, and a vision of the little old hut with its tumbledown steps and weed-grown garden came into his mind.
“Where was it?” pursued Elise innocently.
“Oh, away up in St. Landry parish, too far away from civilization to mention.” He tried to laugh, but it was a hollow, forced attempt that rang false. But Elise was too absorbed in her own thoughts of the summer to notice.
“And you haven’t a relative living?” she continued.
“Not one.”
“How strange. Why it seems to me if I did not have half a hundred cousins and uncles and aunts that I should feel somehow out of touch with the world.”
He did not reply, and she chattered away on another topic.
When he was alone in his room that night, he paced the floor again, chewing wildly at a cigar that he had forgotten to light.
“What did she mean? What did she mean?” he asked himself over and over. Could she have heard or suspected anything that she was trying to find out about? Could any action, any unguarded expression of his have set the family thinking? But he soon dismissed the thought as unworthy of him. Elise was too frank and transparent a girl to stoop to subterfuge. If she wished to know anything, she was wont to ask out at once, and if she had once thought anyone was sailing under false colors, she would say so frankly, and dismiss them from her presence.
Well, he must be prepared to answer questions if he were going to marry her. The family would want to know all about him, and Elise herself would be curious for more than her brother, Steven Vannier’s meagre account. But was he going to marry Elise? That was the question.
Great Short Stories by American Women Page 18
