715 Sheridan Road
Chicago, Ill.Dear Helga:
It is now over a year since you made your unfortunate call here. It was unfortunate for us all, you, Mrs. Nilssen, and myself. But of course you couldn’t know. I blame myself. I should have written you of my marriage.
I have looked for a letter, or some word from you; evidently, with your usual penetration, you understood thoroughly that I must terminate my outward relation with you. You were always a keen one.
Of course I am sorry, but it can’t be helped. My wife must be considered, and she feels very strongly about this.
You know, of course, that I wish you the best of luck. But take an old man’s advice and don’t do as your mother did. Why don’t you run over and visit your Aunt Katrina? She always wanted you. Maria Kirkeplads, No. 2, will find her.
I enclose what I intended to leave you at my death. It is better and more convenient that you get it now. I wish it were more, but even this little may come in handy for a rainy day.
Beside the brief, friendly, but none the less final, letter there was a check for five thousand dollars. Helga Crane’s first feeling was one of unreality. This changed almost immediately into one of relief, of liberation. It was stronger than the mere security from present financial worry which the check promised. Money as money was still not very important to Helga. But later, while on an errand in the big general office of the society, her puzzled bewilderment fled. Here the inscrutability of the dozen or more brown faces, all cast from the same indefinite mold, and so like her own, seemed pressing forward against her. Abruptly it flashed upon her that the harrowing irritation of the past weeks was a smoldering hatred. Then, she was overcome by another, so actual, so sharp, so horribly painful, that forever afterwards she preferred to forget it. It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk?
Back in the privacy of her own cubicle, self-loathing came upon her. “They’re my own people, my own people,” she kept repeating over and over to herself. It was no good. The feeling would not be routed. “I can’t go on like this,” she said to herself. “I simply can’t.”
There were footsteps. Panic seized her. She’d have to get out. She terribly needed to. Snatching hat and purse, she hurried to the narrow door, saying in a forced, steady voice, as it opened to reveal her employer: “Mr. Darling, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to go out. Please, may I be excused?”
At his courteous “Certainly, certainly. And don’t hurry. It’s much too hot,” Helga Crane had the grace to feel ashamed, but there was no softening of her determination. The necessity for being alone was too urgent. She hated him and all the others too much.
Outside, rain had begun to fall. She walked bareheaded, bitter with self-reproach. But she rejoiced too. She didn’t, in spite of her racial markings, belong to these dark segregated people. She was different. She felt it. It wasn’t merely a matter of color. It was something broader, deeper, that made folk kin.
And now she was free. She would take Uncle Peter’s money and advice and revisit her aunt in Copenhagen. Fleeting pleasant memories of her childhood visit there flew through her excited mind. She had been only eight, yet she had enjoyed the interest and the admiration which her unfamiliar color and dark curly hair, strange to those pink, white, and gold people, had evoked. Quite clearly now she recalled that her Aunt Katrina had begged for her to be allowed to remain. Why, she wondered, hadn’t her mother consented? To Helga it seemed that it would have been the solution to all their problems, her mother’s, her stepfather’s, her own.
At home in the cool dimness of the big chintz-hung living-room, clad only in a fluttering thing of green chiffon, she gave herself up to daydreams of a happy future in Copenhagen, where there were no Negroes, no problems, no prejudice, until she remembered with perturbation that this was the day of Anne’s return from her vacation at the seashore. Worse. There was a dinner-party in her honor that very night. Helga sighed. She’d have to go. She couldn’t possibly get out of a dinner-party for Anne, even though she felt that such an event on a hot night was little short of an outrage. Nothing but a sense of obligation to Anne kept her from pleading a splitting headache as an excuse for remaining quietly at home.
Her mind trailed off to the highly important matter of clothes. What should she wear? White? No, everybody would, because it was hot. Green? She shook her head, Anne would be sure to. The blue thing. Reluctantly she decided against it; she loved it, but she had worn it too often. There was that cobwebby black net touched with orange, which she had bought last spring in a fit of extravagance and never worn, because on getting it home both she and Anne had considered it too décolleté, and too outré. Anne’s words: “There’s not enough of it, and what there is gives you the air of something about to fly,” came back to her, and she smiled as she decided that she would certainly wear the black net. For her it would be a symbol. She was about to fly.
She busied herself with some absurdly expensive
