Chapter XIII: Part V (2)

Her form stiffened. She eyed Grayson with distrust. Immediately she was on the defensive. “I thought I could count on you,” she said. “I thought you’d see it as my Christian duty and help me, or I wouldn’t have told you. But you can’t stop me now--nobody can--not even Grandma. I always did what other people thought. Now I am going to think for myself, and I know I’m right. I’m going.”

Grayson made no reply; then Lissa realised that he had not been listening to what she had said. He had not moved, but sat gazing past her, his eyes intent behind their glasses, his brow deeply furrowed. In one of her violent reversions she sprang to her feet.

“A hell of a lot you care for other people’s troubles!” she flung at him; then she turned to go.

“Wait!”

She was arrested by the impact of the single word and faced him again, her beautiful expressive body fixed in an attitude of fear like that of an animal at bay.

“Now sit down and keep quiet,” he commanded.

For a moment longer her defiance lasted; then suddenly she bent her head and commenced to cry softly into the crook of her arm in the manner characteristic of Hagar when faced by overwhelming difficulties. Then obediently she resumed her seat.

When Grayson broke his portentous silence his voice was compassionate but firm. He said: “I’ve thought it all out now, daughter. Look at it this way”: he picked up the clippings and selected the one which contained Hagar’s confession. Lissa raised her tear-stained face, and he pointed to the words. “That,” he said, “is your mother’s last will and testament. In it she has left you something that she has conceived to be of inestimable value. It was all that she had to give. You cannot repudiate it. You must give her silence in return.”

“But it’s a lie. I can’t go on always living a lie. What am I to do?”

“You must carry on. Make your life worth the price that has been paid for it. There’s no turning back now without breaking faith with your mother. There’s nowhere for you to go but ahead; no way to praise her but in your works.”

“I won’t go on,” she rebelled. “I hate music. If it hadn’t been for that Ma’d be alive to-day. I didn’t know until that night how much I was missing her. I was always lonely, and I didn’t know why. Grandma never gave me time to think. Now she’s gone, an’ I’m sick of everything. I’m the loneliest girl in the world.”

“I know,” said Grayson gently, “you think now that it is this great loss that makes you so. It isn’t. Like Ishmael, you were born for loneliness. But you have this to be thankful for--you were also born for success. I had a talk with Salinski yesterday. He’s extravagant in his praise of your voice. He has never taken a negro before, and it took all of the influence that I could bring to bear to interest him in giving you a trial. It’s a great chance for you. It’s more than that. It’s a great chance for the negro race. If you drop it now, go South and perhaps run the risk of being arrested as an accessory to the murder, certainly, at the least, returning to start over again handicapped by a scandal, you will have thrown that chance away. For Hagar--Mamba--all of us--you’ve got to carry on.”

He picked up the little prayer book that he had given Hagar, opened it at the flyleaf, and let his gaze rest upon the inscription. “Strange,” he said, “that this should be here with us now. When I gave it to your mother I was face to face with my great disillusionment. I had thought that the fight should start at the bottom. I had put everything that I had in me into it, and I had failed. I have learned since that the battle is on here--not in the South. Not that we receive more kindness here. There is a certain kind of cruelty that we meet in New York that is not known in South Carolina. We have been taught to expect things here, and then when we come we find these things denied us. But here we find a market for our own peculiar gifts--talents that are our heritage, and of these yours is the greatest--the gift of song. Nothing can take that from you. You must put the past behind you as I did--as all of our people must do. You must succeed.”

Lissa’s tears had ceased. She sat with her eyes fixed upon the desk before her. The room bore inward upon her, exerting an invisible force against her body--holding it powerless in the chair. Even Mamba had never been so implacable as this will that had assumed magistracy over her destinies. She knew that the moment when she met Grayson’s eyes would see her complete and ultimate surrender. And yet through sheer weakness she longed to turn to that power for support.

She knew that Grayson had risen. She heard him moving behind her, then softly the door closed, leaving her alone. Through the open window came stray notes from the complicated symphony of human existence--the shrill ecstasy of a child--deep, careless negro laughter--a piano lingering over a sentimental song in a neighbouring apartment--slow, rambling talk in two women’s voices on the pavement--Harlem obstinately opposing its lazy rhythms to the headlong theme of the metropolis--flinging an alien syncopation of laughter and song against the measured reiteration of the Elevated, the sustained monotone of hurtling traffic on the avenues. Her own people about her everywhere. But different. Singing for fun--just cutting loose--crying when they wanted to--living up to the limit and never thinking about it. Why couldn’t they let her be like that? Why couldn’t they let her alone?

* * * * *

Saint Julien de Chatigny Wentworth, up from Charleston with his wife and his mother for a fortnight of music and the theatre, settled the ladies of his party in the third orchestra row of the new Metropolitan Opera House, and, appropriating the vacant seat between them, abandoned himself to the mood of the unique performance. Individual as he appeared in the heterogeneous audience, he yet had upon him the mark of a type. Upon him a dinner jacket seemed a more formal garment than it did when worn by the men who were seated near him, and his tie, too wide for the prevailing mode, had about it the quaint suggestion of a stock. Already, while only in the middle thirties, his figure was commencing to show the comfortable outlines of one who appreciates the pleasant things of life at their full value and who has learned to meet the unpleasant ones with an amiable acquiescence. Yet the face, with its high forehead and thoughtful slate-coloured eyes, showed evidences of having passed through some spiritual conflict. The strong line of the chin indicated sufficient courage for an individual course of action, but the sensitive mouth suggested that when this course violated the standard of good taste of his class its pursuit would be at a cost that would amount to a minor heroism.

It was now seven years since his marriage. Seven years since he had responded to Mamba’s summons and had placed Lissa in the care of Thomas Grayson. That this should occur to him now was natural enough, for the performance, which had already commenced, was the occasion of Lissa Atkinson’s début. Presently, with that faculty of submergence of self in the contemplation of a work of art, which is in itself an art, he became a disembodied presence moving in a realm of illusion upon the darkened stage, and, by the stage’s magical power of projection, beyond that again into a pine barren of the coastal South.

Beyond the pines glimmered a faint red dawn that cast a vague radiance over the bent or recumbent figures of a number of people. From the figures came a chant, hypnotic in its interminable reiteration of a single strongly syncopated phrase. A limpid mezzo-soprano drew upward from the monotonous level of the chant. Instantly Wentworth recognised the voice--Lissa’s--Hagar’s--Mamba’s. The song lifted and hovered above the shadowed figures in a repressed agony of yearning and supplication. Wentworth’s emotions attained that height at which delight and pain are fused into one and become pure ecstasy. Then the curtain descended in a swift obliterating rush and stilled the voice. But in the wide silence of the auditorium its vibrations kept beating on like a pulse.

High in the dome constellations of incandescents commenced to glow faintly. A stir went over the audience. Saint felt sudden anger. Why couldn’t they leave him alone in the actuality of the music? Why drag him back into the make-believe of people, walls, lights? The glow brightened and flooded the auditorium, calling him back into full possession of his faculties, and he became aware of the well-dressed audience that seemed to be pressing in upon him. For a moment longer they hung breathless, then shattered the silence with a spontaneous thunder of applause.

From the people near Wentworth stray ejaculations and comments leaped clear of the clamour and impinged upon his consciousness. “Good God, where’d she come from?” some one queried. “What’s it anyway, a play--an opera--a pageant?” And the rejoinder, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t label it. That’s the trouble with us. What we can’t label we damn. Can’t you see it’s new--different? Can’t you feel that it’s something of our own--American--something that Stallings and Harley got a glimmer of in ‘Deep River’--that the Theatre Guild caught the pictorial side of in _Porgy_; that Gershwin actually got his hands on in spots of his ‘Rhapsody in Blue’? It’s epoch-making, I tell you.” Behind Wentworth a man said in a tone of finality: “Well, they’ve done it. It’s native from the dirt up--it’s art--and it’s ours.” “Ours?” a voice inquired. “Do you mean negro?” “Negro, if you will, yes, but first, American.”

The auditorium was aglare now, and the fused single entity of the audience had melted back into its component atoms. The ugly blur of confused talk swelled suddenly and drowned individual voices. Wentworth let himself go back into his chair. The experience had left him shaken. He hoped that Valerie and his mother wouldn’t talk. Sometimes they didn’t seem to understand that there were moments when silence can be richer than speech. His emotion had broken his thoughts free from their habitual moorings. Now he’d like just to let them drift. With relief he saw that his companions remained silent, evidently lost in their own thoughts; Valerie with a bright, forward look in her eyes; his mother’s lost in reverie. He returned to himself: “God! What music!” he thought. “Primitive?--Sophisticated?--Neither--both. Savage, tender, reckless. Something saved whole from a race’s beginnings and raised to the _n_th degree by Twentieth Century magic--a blues gone grand opera.... Not a bad idea that. Make a note of it and use it when I start to write.... No, it’s too late now--Mother--Valerie--the _boy_.... By God, he’ll have his chance--painting--music--literature--it’s up to him now.... Three generations to make a gentleman. Rot. Five. Ten. Then, war. Two more generations to gather up the pieces--to carry on until the tide turns. Well, those two can’t expect everything.... Lissa! What a voice--power--beauty--everything, and that heart-breaking pure negro quality--Hagar--Mamba. Rotten time of it, like as not, for all the laughter and singing--climbing up out of the mud--making a gallant fight of it.... Others too--back at home--different kinds with different sorts of trouble. That banker Broaden, for instance--good citizen--hoeing a hard row and not bellyaching about it--precious little recognition.... What would he think if I addressed him as Mister?... What would my white friends think? That’s easy: ‘Turn their heads,’ ‘Black menace.’ Absurd, looking from this distance.... ‘Good morning, _Mister Broaden_,’ saying it like that--meaning it.... Why not?... Little enough, God knows!...”

* * * * *

And Kate Wentworth, sitting close to her son, where she could feel the warmth of his arm touching her own, not understanding his mood, but sensing its existence, feeling him asking to be let alone. “What in the world is opera coming to!” she is thinking. “This mania to be different is at the bottom of it, I suppose.... Verdi--now he gave us music.... Or if one wants to be modern, there is Puccini. But this--outlandish, I call it.... Libel on the South--nothing less than plain libel.... Who, in pity’s name, from a section which is famous for its aristocracy, elected to go and hunt up negroes to be sung about?... Mamba’s Lissa! Hagar’s! Still more incredible. The girl’s air of distinction--style--they must have come from somewhere.... I wonder who could have been her--No, don’t say it--don’t _think_ it. Shame upon you, Kate Wentworth. You are forgetting yourself. To a lady, the ----’s of mulattoes do not exist.... But if it had to be negro music, why not, at least, the beautiful old spirituals?... Lissa--what a remarkable looking child she was, with her speaking eyes and that air of being at ease in the drawing room when Mamba brought her in.... Now a famous person.... ‘Practically born in my back yard.’... Well, then, ‘_raised_ in my back yard.’... Well, then, ‘the grandchild of _our_ dear old Mamba.’... Now that song of hers at the end of the act--no, I wouldn’t call that outlandish--strange and different.... Perhaps after all they did suffer at times on the plantations.... But not at the hands of the aristocracy--overseers--poor-whites--and, of course, traders.... Saint--how distinguished he is looking now--so like his father--a Wentworth! Silly of me to sit here crying when I’m so happy--when the fight is all over--when my children have won.... What a sensitive profile he has--a thoroughbred--a success--a manager of the St. Cecilia Society--youngest on the board.... Valerie--a fitting mate for my boy--lovely now with that smile on her lips--living in the memory of the music, no doubt--well, she’s of the new generation, perhaps she gets more out of it than I do.... A good mother to my boy’s son--a good daughter to me.... Shall I go behind the scenes with Saint afterward? Shall I take Valerie instead right after the curtain and leave him to follow?... These new negroes--so different--wouldn’t understand who I am--something awkward might happen--expect to be addressed as Mr. and Mrs. no doubt--No, I couldn’t manage that.... Now, Lissa, she would understand with her Southern raising.... But the others! No, it would not be wise to stay. Saint can wait if he wants to and join us later. It is different, less complicated, with a man.”

And on Wentworth’s left, with the smooth ivory of her shoulder brushing his broadcloth sleeve, sits Valerie, lost in her own reverie. “The boy,” she is wondering. “Is Miss Jones taking proper care of him? He’s such a restless sleeper--needs watching.... He’s so absurdly like Saint.... It is good to know that once, at an important turning, you thought straight, acted for the best, threw your weight on the right side.... Good to know that your child will have every comfort--every chance--that your husband is happy--respected--successful.... Lissa! What a strange upside-down place the world is.... Mamba! That night when she took Saint and me to her church.... I knew then that I had to have him.... Funny old thing, Mamba--knew my heart before I did--wanted to help us along.... The wedding.... The boy! Is he missing me? Wish I knew more about Miss Jones--still she _was_ well recommended--looked competent.... Will he sing, I wonder, or paint--or write?--It means so much to his father.... But I’m not so sure.... Dad’s failure! Yes, but money makes such a difference--gives talent its chance. We’re secure now--Saint--_the boy_....”

* * * * *

Slowly the light in the big auditorium commenced to ebb, dimming the modern decorations and endowing them with a mysterious beauty, then plunging the audience into interstellar night. The slow throb of music filled the dark, then the curtain of the final act drew up on a stage of swirling mists and vague half lights. Instantly the mood of the play was re-established, fixing the watchers in attitudes of rigid expectancy.

Dawn again, but no longer the red of an old despair. A thin essential radiance breathed upward behind the massed towers of a metropolis. It gathered strength, spraying out like the corona of an aurora, gilding the towers, then dominating them. The music caught the mood of the sky. The arresting dissonances, the sharp syncopations of the early acts, were no longer individually evident but seemed to merge into a broader irresistible current of sound. The rhythm, too, was no longer a thing separate. It became a force as indistinguishable and pervasive as the life current. It was a fundamental law that moved light, music, the sway of the crowd, the passage of time, in a concerted and inevitable progression. The artificial declamations of operatic convention were gone. The cast was reduced to two elemental forces. The crowd with its heavy mass rhythms and reiterated choruses was the body, and the single transcendent mezzo-soprano that soared above it was the spirit, aspiring, daring, despairing, lifting again. The movement became faster. The voice commenced to lift the chorus from its inertia and carry it along on short, daring flights. Then, in a final acceleration, the scene soared toward its tremendous climax. The light, the movement, the music, merged into a sweeping crescendo, the chorus sprang from its lethargy, while the voice of the woman climbed triumphantly above it until it shook the air like a storm of beating wings. Then the curtain shot downward.

When Wentworth recovered from his trancelike absorption the house was applauding; the large negro chorus was taking a curtain call. The demands of the audience became deafening. Lissa’s great hour! She advanced to the footlights and bowed. Now, in the full light she was plainly visible for the first time, a mulatto, a little above medium height, and of superb proportions. Wentworth noticed that she wore no make-up except a slight darkening of the lips that made them seem fuller, more deliberately negroid. This struck him as significant. From the light bronze of her face her eyes looked out, large, expressive, and extraordinarily brilliant--Mamba’s eyes--yes, and Hagar’s. Now, for the first time, he noticed that she appeared self-conscious, anxious to be away. She bowed for the second time, and without waiting for the curtain, withdrew among the chorus.

But the audience would not let it rest at that. They got to their feet and cheered. They kept the clamour going with a sort of mad persistence. After five minutes of it the curtain was seen to move, rising slowly on a bright vacant stage.

Lissa stepped from the wings, and the clamour plunged into silence. The trace of embarrassed self-consciousness was gone. She seemed detached, oblivious of both herself and her audience. The conductor rose and looked up to her for his cue. Apparently she did not see him, for she gave no sign. Instead she stopped where she was just out of the wings, and unaccompanied commenced to sing the National Anthem of the American Negro.

Apparently most of the audience had never heard of it. Wentworth never had. From the first note he was aware of an absolutely new sensation. Against his perception beat the words of James Weldon Johnson’s inspiring poem swept forward in the marching rhythm of Rosamond Johnson’s music:

“Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us:
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.”

Wentworth, listening, felt suddenly the impact of something tremendously and self-consciously racial; something that had done with apologies for being itself, done with imitations, reaching back into its own origin, claiming its heritage of beauty from the past.

On the stage, as the song progressed toward its conclusion, the singer commenced to sway--sway as Mamba always did toward the end of a spiritual. Only in this young voice to which art had brought discipline there was a difference. It wasted nothing in hysteria, but released the full torrent of its pent emotion into the words and music. Now she was singing the final stanza:

“God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us ever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.”

The song ceased, and the curtain descended. In the auditorium the audience paid it the tribute of a breathless silence. Then they rose quietly and filed out into the street.

* * * * *

It is a Saturday in late May, and Mamba, happy in the gifts that the gods have left her, sits upon the doorstep of her crumbling mansion and lets the new and altogether mad world go hurtling past. Beneath her feet the multi-coloured flagstones have given place to a cement pavement. Before her eyes the old cobbles have been superseded by an asphalt roadway from which the heat quivers visibly upward, shaking the geometric perfection of lines that converge toward vanishing points northward and southward. Upon the buildings to her right and left the restorers have been at work. It is now several years since this army of invasion appeared, determined and zealous, to restore the district to its ancient high estate. Strangely enough, Mamba recognises among the invaders faces of those who, earlier in the century, came to tear the cobbles from their century-old beds, to smash the flagstones to atoms and haul them away. But now they are bent upon a frenzied quest for the antique, buying the ruined mansions, banishing the negroes, and preparing the street for white occupancy. Only the great four-story structure where Mamba sits and suns herself, and which is said to contain some of the finest Georgian panelling and ironwork in the city, is impregnable, for its title stands in the name of one Lissa Atkinson, and Saint Julien Wentworth, who manages the property, states definitely that it is not for sale.

Unmindful of the direct rays of the morning sun, Mamba is sitting, as is her custom, to watch the New York steamer put to sea. As though in mute protest against the invasion of law and order, she is attired in an old wrapperlike garment, faded and far from immaculate. Her legs, thrust straight out before her, are stockingless, and her feet disappear into disreputable-looking men’s shoes. An old clay pipe juts at a rakish angle from between her toothless jaws, and from it smoke fumes in a lazy cloud about her face and drifts away to offend the sensitive nostrils of the white passers-by, who are becoming more and more numerous as the houses fall one by one into the hands of the restorers. Her age is a matter for speculation, as it is a subject upon which there is no one left to speak with authority. Her body is shrunken with the actual physical contraction of age. Under the tired flesh the bones are commencing to assume undue prominence, foreshadowing their grim survival. Through gaps in the sparse gray hair the skull shows in sharp outline, and the brows are ridges beneath which the eyes are lost when the head is lowered. But this inevitable physical mutation which in another would denote senility has, instead of diminishing the force of her personality, in some strange way intensified it, so that those who speak to the old woman as she sits there feel it in the air about her like an aura. The negro children who come and go sense it and grin delightedly at her word of affectionate abuse. The cur now lying beneath her knees with only his muzzle showing under the folds of the wrapper knows it, and has gone there for refuge from a world that has no pity upon an unlicensed mongrel.

Mamba has at last accomplished what she believes to be her final adjustment to the changing exigencies of life, and she has no complaint with Fate. The old room one flight up where Lissa was born, and from which Hagar was led to her banishment, is again her stronghold. But now how different in appearance! Papered with pictures of Lissa--Lissa at a steamer’s rail, off to Europe--Lissa smiling from the centre of a rotogravure page in the costume of her latest opera--Lissa in a hundred poses, a hundred settings.

But Mamba, scorner of limitations, has at last learned the necessity of their acceptance, for only by so doing can she project her memory back into a past shared by her daughters. Across the way, where the muddy beach once lay, where the mosquito fleet was wont to dock, and where the negroes would swarm and chaffer; where the smacks, when they were sea-weary, would leave their bones awash in the warm tides, all is now quiet--barren--orderly. If she moves her gaze ever so slightly to the north it encounters the long line of a modern pier; to the south, and her happiness is ambushed by the spectacle of a dozen gleaming yachts belonging to rich Yankees who have invaded her familiar precincts. And so she has schooled her eyes to span the distance and dwell unimpeded upon a rectangle of sunny harbour. Beautiful, familiar, unchangeable, it lies as always mirroring the first dim fires of dawn or sparkling in the bright windy afternoons. And across it, as they used to do when Lissa was a baby, the New York steamers come and go, bellowing their deep hails and farewells.

Over the hot roofs come the measured tones of St. Michael’s chimes announcing the hour of ten. From behind the pier sound shouts and commands. Mamba sits forward, tense, expectant. Then, majestically, across her rectangle of harbour moves the lofty cut-water of the New York steamer, folding back the flat blue into a thin green line lipped with white, drawing after it the steep, black wall of the hull, the high, gleaming superstructure.

This is the moment for which Mamba has been waiting. Now that the vessel has drawn its full length into her sphere of vision she sees in it more than the form of a familiar friend out of a loved past. It is no longer a great and mysterious adventurer putting forth from her little world into a vast unknown. No. To-day she is watching a sure voyager of that fabulous distance which lies between the wish and the rainbow’s end--between her first fantastic dream for Lissa and the consummation of that dream.

Now from the whistle a plume of steam is blown against the stark blue of the sky, and a hoarse, baying note wakes the echoes along the waterfront. Far below the crowded decks, the soaring funnel, on her own private doorstep, Mamba draws herself together, and her eyes light with a gleam of her old impudent spirit. “Git along, den,” she says patronisingly. “Git along. Ah ain’t holdin’ yo’. An’ when yo’ get whar yo’ is goin’, ’member what Ah tol’ you’ an’ gib my gal huddy fuh me.”

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Perceived typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.