Chapter XI: Part IV (4)

The deep compassionate voice soothed her: “Ah know, Chile, Ah know--but dat all done now, yo’ wid Mamba now.” She drew the shaking girl from the room and into the heavy stillness of the night. There was something terribly complete about those two, about their entire sufficiency to each other. The enfolding devotion of the old woman covering the girl and isolating her from every evil, every alien touch--Mamba and Lissa--no one else.

Hagar stood for a moment like one who has been blinded by sudden intense light. Her eyes still held the image, quiveringly alive, of the splendid thing that was her child. The dream pattern that she had treasured of the slender little girl was shattered, and as yet she could not take in this new and marvellous being. She was dizzy from the revelation. She was also vaguely conscious of a loneliness deeper than any that had gone before.

The chaos of her mind was shot through by an instinctive warning. Suddenly her brain cleared, her body tensed. She spun around and faced Bluton. The naked fear in his face gave her an exquisite pang. Something deep and elemental broke free inside of her. She stood watching him, catlike, as he moved along the wall in the direction of the crap table which stood at the farther end of the room.

She knew what he wanted now. She let him get almost to the drawer with its brass knobs, her eyes and his locked all the time. She saw his face change, glimmer with hope, relief. Then she was before him, with the table at her back. As he had advanced slowly, with his studied attempt at casualness, so now he retreated before her, while she closed the distance between them. It was like some ghastly rehearsal, carried out with utter absorption, for some momentous event that was set for the future. It was so deliberate, so mechanical in its studied advance and retreat. Then at last the wall was against the man’s shoulder blades.

The touch of the unyielding timber seemed to turn his limbs to water. His knees gave, and he had difficulty propping his body upright. He raised his arms before his face in a weak defensive gesture.

Hagar said, “Yo’ rattlesnake! Yo’ would be dead now ’cept fuh me--an’ now--my own gal Lissa----” Then, after a pause, “_You!_”

The man found voice in a screech. It was so weak that it scarcely filled the little room--at its peak it plunged suddenly into silence.

* * * * *

Mamba wanted to be going. She wanted to get Lissa away from that horrible place, back into the ordered peace of streets and houses. But Hagar did not come. Why couldn’t the woman hurry and let them get to the automobile and away? She put the girl, who was quiet at last, out of her arms and started back to the shack. The door was open, and the draught played with the candle flame, peopling the room with lurching shadows and half lights.

The old woman entered, with Lissa peering fearfully over her shoulder. Hagar stood with her back to them, her arms hanging straight and long at her sides, her bullet head thrust forward. Her huge shoulders flung a black arch of shadow over half of the wall before her. Bluton lay in a huddle at her feet. His head was twisted at a preposterous angle. The yellow of his face had gone a dark purple, and the candle flame was flung back in two cold high lights from his wide, unblinking eyes.

Lissa screamed. Hagar turned heavily in her tracks and looked at them dully from raised eyes under lowered brows.

Mamba advanced toward her. In her extremity her voice seemed heavy with hatred for her big bungling daughter.

“Yo’ damned fool,” she said. “See what yo’ done now, eberybody at dat dance know Lissa been wid Prince. People seen me come out here. Ah ought to ha’ known if Ah turned my back on yo’, yo’d play hell----”

Hagar buried her face in the crook of an arm and commenced to sob. “Oh, Gawd, Ma, Ah ain’t stop to t’ink. Ah only know he been hurt Lissa.”

Mamba wasted no sentimental pity on the broken thing upon the floor. Her whole being was focussed on the staggering predicament that confronted her.

“Get outside,” she ordered. “Ah got to t’ink.” She blew out the candle and followed them into the open, thinking aloud: “Ah got to sen’ Lissa away quick, an’ she got to go far. But Ah can’t let she go alone, an’ she ain’t got no frien’ to go to.”

Between broken sobs Hagar said surprisingly, “Ah got a frien’.”

Mamba looked at her skeptically. “Yo’ has? Where?”

“Ah got a frien’ what’s a Reverent, an’ he lib in Noo Yo’k.”

“Yo’ know whar he house is?”

Hagar was getting herself in hand now and had stopped crying. “Ah got it writ in a book he gib me. He a good man--yo’ needn’t be ’fraid to sen’ Lissa to he.”

“Oh, he dat Yankee nigger what use’ to be down here?”

Hagar nodded assent.

“Come, den,” Mamba commanded. “We ain’t got no time to lose.”

They waked Slim, who grinned sleepily and leered when he saw the girl, and started him back to the village. When they reached Hagar’s cabin she ran inside and returned in a moment with a small black book in her hand. She pressed it on Mamba, who had followed her to the door.

“De name an’ number is writ inside,” she said. “Lissa can tell he dat she Baxter gal--an’ to ’member what he say ’bout always bein’ my frien’.”

Then Mamba handed Hagar a ten-dollar bill from her pocketbook and gave her instructions: “Listen! Ah been t’inkin’ hard. Now yo’ hit it out an’ hide. Dat’s bad, but if yo’ stay roun’ here, you’ll be gibbin’ yo’self away by mornin’; so dere ain’t nuttin’ fo’ it. If Baggart catch yo’, keep yo’ mout’ shet. Don’t say so much as yes or no ’til Ah sen’ my boss or Mr. Saint to talk for yo’. Ef yo’ open dat fool mout’ ob yourn, nottin’ Ah can do’ll sabe Lissa. Now you unnerstan’?”

Full of her plan-making, Mamba turned to leave her daughter. She felt a gentle tug at her sleeve and faced Hagar again, impatient at the delay.

“Well,” she snapped, “what yo’ want now?”

Hagar made one of her gauche childish gestures toward the automobile. “She wouldn’t care so much--ef Ah go an’ tell she good-bye?”

Mamba caught her breath sharply, and suddenly she was no longer merely the fierce intelligence that drove that inarticulate, powerful machine in the service of the grandchild, but Hagar’s own mother, feeling her child’s loneliness and sorrow in her own spirit.

She took one of the big, beautifully made hands and drew Hagar forward, speaking gently as they plodded through the heavy white sand: “Ah sorry, Daughter, Ah mighty sorry--Ah get t’inkin’ so hahd Ah fuhget. Ah say hahd t’ings Ah ain’t mean. It ain’t fuh me--Ah jes study all de time ’bout dat gal, an’ my mind seem like it dry up on odder t’ing.”

Hagar stopped beside the car. The girl sitting alone on the rear seat looked up, and the eyes of the two met. For a moment they stood so in a silence that was eloquent with emotions that speech could only have cheapened and tarnished. So long since the cord had been severed. Centuries lay between them now--and yet, in that fractional part of a minute life beat out again from the heart of the big black woman, throbbed in her child, and coursed refluent and warm back through her own being. Hagar lifted one of Lissa’s hands and humbly, yet with a certain possessive pride, kissed it upon the open palm. But in a sudden tumult of emotion the girl snatched her hand away, flung her arms around her mother’s neck, and kissed her again and again.

The car gave a warning shudder, and the women separated. Hagar said, “Good-bye, chile. Don’t be ’fraid. Nuttin’ goin’ hahm yo’.” And the next moment they were gone among the mists and shadows.

* * * * *

Saint Wentworth sat in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel and impatiently watched the hands of a clock that seemed to have been stricken with creeping paralysis. At noon he was to meet Valerie over on the Avenue and select the ring. It was a terribly complicated business, getting married in New York. Saturday they had got the license. Simple enough, he had been told--a few minutes at the Municipal Building--that was all. They had gone together, blinded by a new glamour in the air, and feeling themselves marked for public notice by the magnitude and unusual nature of the step that they contemplated. But upon their arrival at the vast downtown structure, they had been both reassured and chagrined to find themselves in a queue half a block long, sandwiched between a frankly infatuated negro couple and a pair who made love in foreign liquid syllables. It was odd how many people had the same idea. Then there was the big room with long tables where couples sat, while Eros, in the guise of an officious elderly man, leaned between them and explained in lucid and complete detail the meaning of certain perfectly obvious and embarrassingly personal questions. Saint, very red, tried to forestall him by explaining that they both understood. It was no use. The man was filled with the zeal of a public servant who glories in doing well and conspicuously work that occasions no effort.

And now to-day there were more details--more complications. The minister had to be seen again, and forms prepared. Saint had telegraphed home for a copy of his birth certificate and had not received a reply. It seemed that you could not be married in New York without documentary evidence that you had been born. The fact that you could be seen, touched, even separated from a fee, were inconclusive evidences of existence. Only eleven-twenty. No use to start yet and have to cool his heels on the Avenue.

His thoughts drifted to another matter.

He was brought to earth by the sound of his own name droned in a loud monotonous voice. Good: that would be the wire about the certificate. He signalled the boy and tore open the envelope. The telegram was from his mother. It said:

Mamba’s granddaughter Lissa in trouble arrives New York noon train.
Mamba begs you to meet and assist her.

Good God: Couldn’t he even be safe from the old responsibilities here, and at the one time in life when a man should be free? And Val--just about their biggest moment--buying the ring--then blissful hours at the stores and decorators, planning for the new furnishings. And now at the exact hour when she would be awaiting him he was expected to respond to this unreasonable and insane summons. Well, he’d be damned if he would. Mamba, yes--but not to the third generation.

Perhaps he could still catch Val by ’phone and postpone the engagement. But why think of that when he had decided against going? He tore the yellow slip, balled it up, and volleyed it at a waste-paper basket. Then he went through an instinctive hand-washing gesture. Well, that was that.

He got up and strode restlessly about the vast lobby. When he came to a standstill he found to his dismay and anger that he had paused before a telephone booth. “Go to hell!” he apostrophised it fiercely under his breath, and turned away. But a power that he was at a loss to explain kept dragging him back, filling him with a deep and inexplicable misery as long as he moved away. Mamba out of the long past with the funny string-wrapped hair, the solitary fang--her savagery--her understanding tenderness. Mamba with her one idea and her everlasting persistence. What did she care if it upset his plans?--Lissa--Lissa! He was reminded of the time she had made him take Hagar in at the mines. Would he never be free of Mamba’s daughters? What was there about her that could hound a man across the miles and make him feel like a cur until he did her bidding? A comical old negress a thousand miles away, and yet, somehow, he felt that he dare not go back and meet her eyes unless he had responded to her summons for help.

He found himself calling a familiar number. Valerie’s voice--even over the ’phone, that dewy early morning quality that made his heart hang a beat. Good God! he hadn’t thought yet what to say. How could he put it?

“Val, I’m desolated, broken-hearted. Promise you’ll forgive me for what I am going to say. No. Not that--not that--I am sorry I scared you. It’s that I can’t meet you at noon. There’s something else I have to do.... Well, it’s awfully hard to explain over the ’phone. There’s a girl coming up from Charleston I’ve got to go and meet.... Mamba’s granddaughter Lissa. You remember her, don’t you?... Yes, she’s in some sort of trouble, and Mamba has gotten Mother to telegraph asking me to meet her at the noon train.... Jove, you’re a dear. Three o’clock, then--at Tiffany’s. You’re an angel, Val.”

Wentworth did not at once recognise his protégée when she came up the stair from the lower level in the stream of passengers. He had been looking for the girl whom he remembered vaguely as being slender and pretty with eyes like those of Mamba and Hagar, and who, alas, would now be in trouble. It was not until he could have touched her with his hand that he recognised her. Taken from her familiar matrix and placed before Saint against the novel setting of the vast station, she stood out for the first time, not as Mamba’s grandchild to be taken as a matter of course, but as Lissa Atkinson, with an individuality of her own. Wentworth was startled. It was as though he saw her for the first time.

She was clad in a modish tailored suit of dark blue with a flash of bright embroidery on collar and cuffs, and carried a small blue silk umbrella suspended from her wrist by a loop. Wentworth’s glance took in the slender, superbly carried figure and the expressive face with its small full-lipped mouth and Mamba’s eyes.

She met his gaze and flashed him a look of surprised, almost incredulous, recognition. “Why, Mr. Saint!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Hello, Lissa,” he answered. “Didn’t you know that Mamba sent me a message to meet you and help you get settled?”

“Why, no. You see I left in a hurry. She must have heard of your being here after she told me good-bye. That’s just like Grandma. She thinks of everything.”

The girl’s self-possession was colossal, almost disconcerting. Saint took her small valise. There was something at once flattering and embarrassing about the unquestioning way that she put herself in his hands.

They stood under the vast dome, with scurrying humanity brushing past them, and Wentworth wondered what to do next.

“Have you any place to go?” he asked.

Lissa opened her handbag and produced a Book of Common Prayer. Then she opened it at the flyleaf and presented it to Saint.

He studied the inscription for a moment. Of course--the Reverend Thomas Grayson. In his mind’s eye arose a picture of a broad imaginative face with heavy earnestness of purpose.

“What luck!” he exclaimed, his expression clearing. “We’ll hop in a taxi and go right up.”

Safely in the cab, which was threading its way toward Harlem, Wentworth was free to give his whole attention to the problem of his travelling companion.

“What’s the trouble, Lissa?” he asked.

She sat back in her corner and with that complete faith in his willingness to assume her responsibilities that had embarrassed him in the station, told him simply and with complete self-possession what had occurred.

When she had finished he gave a low expressive whistle.

“Well, I must say,” he commented, “you don’t seem to be afraid of the consequences as far as you are concerned.”

“I am not,” she replied confidently. “Grandma and Mamma’ll fix it at home; there’s nothing they can’t fix. And I have you to look after me here.”

This alarming surrender to his care provoked a very pertinent question.

“How are you fixed for money?” he asked bluntly.

She opened her handbag and gave him a roll of bills and a pass book on a Charleston bank. He counted the money--three hundred dollars. Then he opened the pass book. It showed an account in the name of Lissa Atkinson that had been opened nineteen years previously. He spun the pages that exhibited columns of deposits of one dollar--sometimes two--here and there a week was skipped. That was when Hagar was up for a fine, he thought. After each of these eloquent breaks the amounts would run to one fifty or even two fifty until the deficit had been made good. He came to the final page and found the balance: fourteen hundred and twenty-five dollars. For a moment he sat struck dumb by the utter beauty of the thing that lay behind the prosaic columns of figures. Mamba--a maker of bricks without straw, a disciple of a single transcendent ideal, in the name of which she had worked her obscure miracles, with none to know, none to applaud.

Wentworth turned with a new curiosity to examine the girl who had been the cause of such devotion. The very magnitude of the sacrifices which she represented endowed her with an importance out of proportion to herself as an individual. She was a symbol into which had gone the blind upward urges, the stumbling aspirations, the great fantastically conceived dreams of the old woman, and behind Mamba, of millions of her inarticulate kin.

During the brief space of time that he had been with the girl Wentworth had been conscious of a growing annoyance at her calm acceptance of the sacrifices that were being made for her, at the coolness with which she had precipitated a wreck, then left the débris for others to clear away. Mamba, Hagar, Grayson, himself, would attend to details. Why should she worry? Now the little book that he held suddenly explained her attitude. It went farther and convinced him in some inexplicable fashion that her assumption was justified.

Lissa would attain her goal because she, like her grandmother, had never once removed her gaze from it. He knew, of course, of the girl’s reputation in coloured circles as a singer, and of Mamba’s faith in her future. Now he saw that this faith was the only thing that mattered in their lives. It had been born and bred into the girl. Her own belief in herself was supreme. Of the great faith that she and Mamba held in common there were certain articles that she must perform. Mamba had others. It was their job to carry through together: the job of believing in a thing so intensely, so single-mindedly, that the day would come when that belief should become an accomplished fact. If Lissa hesitated now, if she removed her gaze from the steady light to which it had become accustomed, and turned back, dazzled and blundering, she would have broken faith with Mamba. She would be guilty of unpardonable weakness. She must look only forward, and leave the road that she had travelled to the watchful eyes of the old woman.

A pang of envy assailed Wentworth. Of late he had been enormously pleased with himself. He was a success. Charleston said so, and, as it had watched him from boyhood, it ought to know. The symbols of conquest were his. Next week he would return to town with Valerie; then comfort--love--probably children--an ordered and beautifully complete existence. Yet there he sat envying an unknown mulatto girl, and seeing with a sudden and terrible clarity a seedy youth in a country store hunched over a guitar, groping for the unattainable with eager, clumsy fingers. But the past had reached dead hands after him, guiding him imperceptibly this way and that. Forces that had driven forward in grooves for generations had pulled against his amorphous longings, his only half-realised dreams--had held him true to form and tradition. Behind Lissa there had been nothing; before her, Mamba’s one immovable idea. An old loneliness that he had known in that far-gone time stabbed up through his complacence, and now he knew that it had been a singular and beautiful thing, and that there exists for certain solitary spirits a loneliness that holds more ecstasy than the delight of any human companionship. And so to-morrow was to be his wedding day. And there was Lissa following her dream.

He realised that his hands were trembling, and he tensed them savagely. He was a sentimental fool. His mother had been right. Val had been right. Life would still be an adventure.

He stole a glance at his companion and realised that she was no longer conscious of his presence. She was sitting forward with her gaze fastened upon the crowds, the towering buildings, the surging traffic. Over their heads the Elevated hurled its mechanical thunders. From a yawning excavation almost directly under their hurrying wheels thudded the heavy detonations of blasting. Faces hurtled by in taxis. Faces intent and watchful swept in full tide along the pavements. After a while the girl turned toward Saint, and in her first remark showed that already she had sensed a thing that the Southern white man had never felt, that in the vast unconcern of this city there was escape; that in the very heart of this crowd there was a strange and private hiding place where no one had time to wonder who you were or what you were doing.

“This is where I belong, Mr. Saint,” she said. “Nobody here has time to wonder whether I am even white or coloured.”

Presently they were on Lenox Avenue north of the line, and the white faces were behind them. Lissa saw the change instantly, and her composure vanished. She clapped her hands with a delight like that of a child. “Here are my folks, Mr. Saint,” she exclaimed. “See, everywhere--and such big houses.”

The taxi swerved to the right, and they were in a street that showed a glimpse of the East River under the high-flung bridge of the Elevated. Then they drew to the curb and stopped.

Wentworth awakened to the realisation that he was sitting with Lissa’s money and bank book still in his hands. He put them hastily back into her bag, took the valise, got out, and discharged the driver.

They found themselves on the pavement before a three-story brownstone building. Over a push button beside the door was a brass plate which stated: “Rectory of St. John’s Episcopal Church.”

The mulatto maid who admitted them said that the Reverend Thomas Grayson lived there, was at home, and would be with them presently.

In the few minutes during which they sat in the quietly furnished room Saint was again impressed by Lissa’s ease and appearance of belonging. Once their eyes met, and she gave him the bright transfiguring smile that linked her with Mamba and Hagar, but, except in that moment, he felt she was already at home in the alien metropolis and that he was the provincial visitor.

Grayson entered, holding Saint’s card in his hand. He was older than as Wentworth remembered him, and his expression of seriousness had deepened almost to one of solemnity. His shoulders and chest had grown heavy with his greater maturity. The large head set firmly on his short neck gave an impression of rock-like solidity to the figure. His ears were small and close-set, and the closely clipped graying hair revealed the lines of his skull and stressed the negroid formation. The years that had passed since his residence in the South had produced in some subtle way an appearance more characteristically negro, a race consciousness that had become definitely assertive. He conveyed a sense of power, but it was the power of one who moves slowly, predicating action upon a laborious logic, not to be swayed by an appeal to the emotions until the matter had been thoroughly weighed. Knowing his history, one would have said that his experience in the South had taught him to fear and distrust emotional hysteria, and had swung him to pure reason as a basis for behaviour. As a result his position in Harlem was one of unique importance, for his church had attracted the rising intellectual element, and through them he was in contact with the leaders of advanced thought among the white people of the metropolis, thus profiting by this first opportunity of the race in America to meet the Caucasian upon an equal basis of give and take.

Grayson showed no surprise at the visit, and sat in an attitude of easy attention while Lissa told him her story. Then the girl drew the little prayer book from her bag, opened it at the flyleaf, and handed it to him.

“My mother said to show you this,” she said simply, “and ask you to look out for me.”

He sat looking at the page for a moment, then he raised his eyes to Saint’s. “The mills of the gods, Mr. Wentworth,” he said; “perhaps my venture into the mission field has borne fruit after all.”

He turned to Lissa. “And you will stay here for a while, at any rate, with my wife and me. We have no children of our own. She will be glad.”

Saint thanked him and, feeling an enormous relief from the burden of responsibility, took his departure.

The maid appeared to show him out, and while she was handing him stick and hat he caught from the drawing room a fragment of conversation that he was never to forget: the deep voice of Grayson said, “And you, my child, have you any plans? Is there anything that you can do?” And immediately into the ensuing hush like the cry of a bird at dawn came the answer:

“I can sing.”

PART V