“Ha!” said Mrs. Hayes-Rore.
Terrific, thought Helga Crane, the power of that sound from the lips of this woman. How, she wondered, had she succeeded in investing it with so much incredulity.
“If you didn’t have people, you wouldn’t be living. Everybody has people, Miss Crane. Everybody.”
“I haven’t, Mrs. Hayes-Rore.”
Mrs. Hayes-Rore screwed up her eyes. “Well, that’s mighty mysterious, and I detest mysteries.” She shrugged, and into those eyes there now came with alarming quickness an accusing criticism.
“It isn’t,” Helga said defensively, “a mystery. It’s a fact and a mighty unpleasant one. Inconvenient too,” and she laughed a little, not wishing to cry.
Her tormentor, in sudden embarrassment, turned her sharp eyes to the window. She seemed intent on the miles of red clay sliding past. After a moment, however, she asked gently: “You wouldn’t like to tell me about it, would you? It seems to bother you. And I’m interested in girls.”
Annoyed, but still hanging, for the sake of the twenty-five dollars, to her self-control, Helga gave her head a little toss and flung out her hands in a helpless, beaten way. Then she shrugged. What did it matter? “Oh, well, if you really want to know. I assure you, it’s nothing interesting. Or nasty,” she added maliciously. “It’s just plain horrid. For me.” And she began mockingly to relate her story.
But as she went on, again she had that sore sensation of revolt, and again the torment which she had gone through loomed before her as something brutal and undeserved. Passionately, tearfully, incoherently, the final words tumbled from her quivering petulant lips.
The other woman still looked out of the window, apparently so interested in the outer aspect of the drab sections of the Jersey manufacturing city through which they were passing that, the better to see, she had now so turned her head that only an ear and a small portion of cheek were visible.
During the little pause that followed Helga’s recital, the faces of the two women, which had been bare, seemed to harden. It was almost as if they had slipped on masks. The girl wished to hide her turbulent feeling and to appear indifferent to Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s opinion of her story. The woman felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not mentioned—and therefore they do not exist.
Sliding adroitly out from under the precarious subject to a safer, more decent one, Mrs. Hayes-Rore asked Helga what she was thinking of doing when she got back to Chicago. Had she anything in mind?
Helga, it appeared, hadn’t. The truth was she had been thinking of staying in New York. Maybe she could find something there. Everybody seemed to. At least she could make the attempt.
Mrs. Hayes-Rore sighed, for no obvious reason. “Um, maybe I can help you. I know people in New York. Do you?”
“No.”
“New York’s the lonesomest place in the world if you don’t know anybody.”
“It couldn’t possibly be worse than Chicago,” said Helga savagely, giving the table support a violent kick.
They were running into the shadow of the tunnel. Mrs. Hayes-Rore murmured thoughtfully: “You’d better come uptown and stay with me a few days. I may need you. Something may turn up.”
It was one of those vicious mornings, windy and bright. There seemed to Helga, as they emerged from the depths of the vast station, to be a whirling malice in the sharp air of this shining city. Mrs. Hayes-Rore’s words about its terrible loneliness shot through her mind. She felt its aggressive unfriendliness. Even the great buildings, the flying cabs, and the swirling crowds seemed manifestations of purposed malevolence. And for that first short minute she was awed and frightened and inclined to turn back to that other city, which, though not kind, was yet not strange. This New York seemed somehow more appalling, more scornful, in some inexplicable way even more terrible and uncaring than Chicago. Threatening almost. Ugly. Yes, perhaps she’d better turn back.
The feeling passed, escaped in the surprise of what Mrs. Hayes-Rore was saying. Her oratorical voice boomed above the city’s roar. “I suppose I ought really to have phoned Anne from the station. About you, I mean. Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s got plenty of room. Lives alone in a big house, which is something Negroes in New York don’t do. They fill ’em up with lodgers usually. But Anne’s funny. Nice, though. You’ll like her, and it will be good for you to know her if you’re going to stay in New York. She’s a widow, my husband’s sister’s son’s wife. The war, you know.”
“Oh,” protested Helga Crane, with a feeling of acute misgiving, “but won’t she be annoyed and inconvenienced by having me brought in on her like this? I supposed we were going to the Y or a hotel or something like that. Oughtn’t we really to stop and phone?”
The woman at her side in the swaying cab smiled, a peculiar invincible, self-reliant smile, but gave Helga Crane’s suggestion no other attention. Plainly she was a person accustomed to having things her way. She merely went on talking of other plans. “I think maybe I can get you some work. With a new Negro insurance company. They’re after me to put quite a tidy sum into it. Well, I’ll just tell them that they may as well take you with the money,” and she laughed.
“Thanks awfully,” Helga said, “but will they like it? I mean being made to take me because of the money.”
“They’re not being made,” contradicted Mrs. Hayes-Rore. “I intended to let them have the money anyway,
