There was a little silence, during which Helga gave herself up to the distraction of watching the strange city and the strange crowds, trying hard to put out of her mind the vision of an easier future which her companion’s words had conjured up; for, as had been pointed out, it was, as yet, only a possibility.
Turning out of the park into the broad thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue, Mrs. Hayes-Rore said in a too carefully casual manner: “And, by the way, I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it, and after all it’s your own business. When you’ve lived as long as I have, you’ll know that what others don’t know can’t hurt you. I’ll just tell Anne that you’re a friend of mine whose mother’s dead. That’ll place you well enough and it’s all true. I never tell lies. She can fill in the gaps to suit herself and anyone else curious enough to ask.”
“Thanks,” Helga said again. And so great was her gratitude that she reached out and took her new friend’s slightly soiled hand in one of her own fastidious ones, and retained it until their cab turned into a pleasant tree-lined street and came to a halt before one of the dignified houses in the center of the block. Here they got out.
In after years Helga Crane had only to close her eyes to see herself standing apprehensively in the small cream-colored hall, the floor of which was covered with deep silver-hued carpet; to see Mrs. Hayes-Rore pecking the cheek of the tall slim creature beautifully dressed in a cool green tailored frock; to hear herself being introduced to “my niece, Mrs. Grey” as “Miss Crane, a little friend of mine whose mother’s died, and I think perhaps a while in New York will be good for her”; to feel her hand grasped in quick sympathy, and to hear Anne Grey’s pleasant voice, with its faint note of wistfulness, saying: “I’m so sorry, and I’m glad Aunt Jeanette brought you here. Did you have a good trip? I’m sure you must be worn out. I’ll have Lillie take you right up.” And to feel like a criminal.
VIII
A year thick with various adventures had sped by since that spring day on which Helga Crane had set out away from Chicago’s indifferent unkindness for New York in the company of Mrs. Hayes-Rore. New York she had found not so unkind, not so unfriendly, not so indifferent. There she had been happy, and secured work, had made acquaintances and another friend. Again she had had that strange transforming experience, this time not so fleetingly, that magic sense of having come home. Harlem, teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her and lulled her into something that was, she was certain, peace and contentment.
The request and recommendation of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had been sufficient for her to obtain work with the insurance company in which that energetic woman was interested. And through Anne it had been possible for her to meet and to know people with tastes and ideas similar to her own. Their sophisticated cynical talk, their elaborate parties, the unobtrusive correctness of their clothes and homes, all appealed to her craving for smartness, for enjoyment. Soon she was able to reflect with a flicker of amusement on that constant feeling of humiliation and inferiority which had encompassed her in Naxos. Her New York friends looked with contempt and scorn on Naxos and all its works. This gave Helga a pleasant sense of avengement. Any shreds of self-consciousness or apprehension which at first she may have felt vanished quickly, escaped in the keenness of her joy at seeming at last to belong somewhere. For she considered that she had, as she put it, “found herself.”
Between Anne Grey and Helga Crane there had sprung one of those immediate and peculiarly sympathetic friendships. Uneasy at first, Helga had been relieved that Anne had never returned to the uncomfortable subject of her mother’s death so intentionally mentioned on their first meeting by Mrs. Hayes-Rore, beyond a tremulous brief: “You won’t talk to me about it, will you? I can’t bear the thought of death. Nobody ever talks to me about it. My husband, you know.” This Helga discovered to be true. Later, when she knew Anne better, she suspected that it was a bit of a pose assumed for the purpose of doing away with the necessity of speaking regretfully of a husband who had been perhaps not too greatly loved.
After the first pleasant weeks, feeling that her obligation to Anne was already too great, Helga began to look about for a permanent place to live. It was, she found, difficult. She eschewed the Y as too bare, impersonal, and restrictive. Nor did furnished rooms or the idea of a solitary or a shared apartment appeal to her. So she rejoiced when one day Anne, looking up from her book, said lightly: “Helga, since you’re going to be in New York, why don’t you stay here with me? I don’t usually take people. It’s too disrupting. Still, it is sort of pleasant having somebody in the house and I don’t seem to mind you. You don’t bore me, or bother me. If you’d like to stay—Think it over.”
Helga didn’t, of course, require to think it over, because lodgment in Anne’s home was in complete accord with what she designated as her “aesthetic sense.” Even Helga Crane approved of Anne’s house and the furnishings which so admirably graced the big cream-colored rooms. Beds with long, tapering posts to which tremendous age lent dignity and interest, bonneted old highboys, tables that might be by Duncan Phyfe, rare spindle-legged chairs, and
