With a shaking sigh and a frantic dab at her eyes, in which had come a despairing look, she had agreed that perhaps it was foolish, but she couldn’t help it. “Can’t you, won’t you understand, Uncle Poul?” she begged, with a pleading look at the kindly worldly man who at that moment had been thinking that this strange exotic niece of his wife’s was indeed charming. He didn’t blame Olsen for taking it rather hard.
The thought passed. She was weeping. With no effort at restraint. Charming, yes. But insufficiently civilized. Impulsive. Imprudent. Selfish.
“Try, Helga, to control yourself,” he had urged gently. He detested tears. “If it distresses you so, we won’t talk of it again. You, of course, must do as you yourself wish. Both your aunt and I want only that you should be happy.” He had wanted to make an end of this fruitless wet conversation.
Helga had made another little dab at her face with the scrap of lace and raised shining eyes to his face. She had said, with sincere regret: “You’ve been marvelous to me, you and Aunt Katrina. Angelic. I don’t want to seem ungrateful. I’d do anything for you, anything in the world but this.”
Herr Dahl had shrugged. A little sardonically he had smiled. He had refrained from pointing out that this was the only thing she could do for them, the only thing that they had asked of her. He had been too glad to be through with the uncomfortable discussion.
So life went on. Dinners, coffees, theaters, pictures, music, clothes. More dinners, coffees, theaters, clothes, music. And that nagging aching for America increased. Augmented by the uncomfortableness of Aunt Katrina’s and Uncle Poul’s disappointment with her, that tormenting nostalgia grew to an unbearable weight. As spring came on with many gracious tokens of following summer, she found her thoughts straying with increasing frequency to Anne’s letter and to Harlem, its dirty streets, swollen now, in the warmer weather, with dark, gay humanity.
Until recently she had had no faintest wish ever to see America again. Now she began to welcome the thought of a return. Only a visit, of course. Just to see, to prove to herself that there was nothing there for her. To demonstrate the absurdity of even thinking that there could be. And to relieve the slight tension here. Maybe when she came back—
Her definite decision to go was arrived at with almost bewildering suddenness. It was after a concert at which Dvořák’s New World Symphony had been wonderfully rendered. Those wailing undertones of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” were too poignantly familiar. They struck into her longing heart and cut away her weakening defenses. She knew at least what it was that had lurked formless and undesignated these many weeks in the back of her troubled mind. Incompleteness.
“I’m homesick, not for America, but for Negroes. That’s the trouble.”
For the first time Helga Crane felt sympathy rather than contempt and hatred for that father, who so often and so angrily she had blamed for his desertion of her mother. She understood, now, his rejection, his repudiation, of the formal calm her mother had represented. She understood his yearning, his intolerable need for the inexhaustible humor and the incessant hope of his own kind, his need for those things, not material, indigenous to all Negro environments. She understood and could sympathize with his facile surrender to the irresistible ties of race, now that they dragged at her own heart. And as she attended parties, the theater, the opera, and mingled with people on the streets, meeting only pale serious faces when she longed for brown laughing ones, she was able to forgive him. Also, it was as if in this understanding and forgiving she had come upon knowledge of almost sacred importance.
Without demur, opposition, or recrimination Herr and Fru Dahl accepted Helga’s decision to go back to America. She had expected that they would be glad and relieved. It was agreeable to discover that she had done them less than justice. They were, in spite of their extreme worldliness, very fond of her, and would, as they declared, miss her greatly. And they did want her to come back to them, as they repeatedly insisted. Secretly they felt as she did, that perhaps when she returned—So it was agreed upon that it was only for a brief visit, “for your friend’s wedding,” and that she was to return in the early fall.
The last day came. The last goodbyes were said. Helga began to regret that she was leaving. Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place? Now that she was actually off, she felt heavy at heart. Already she looked back with infinite regret at the two years in the country which had given her so much, of pride, of happiness, of wealth, and of beauty.
Bells rang. The gangplank was hoisted. The dark strip of water widened. The running figures of friends suddenly grown very dear grew smaller, blurred into a whole, and vanished. Tears rose in Helga Crane’s eyes, fear in her heart.
Goodbye Denmark! Goodbye. Goodbye!
XVII
A summer had ripened and fall begun. Anne and Dr. Anderson had returned from their short Canadian wedding journey. Helga Crane, lingering still in America, had tactfully removed herself from the house in One Hundred and Thirty-ninth Street to a hotel. It was, as she could point out to curious acquaintances, much better for the newly-married Andersons not to be bothered with a guest, not even with such a close friend as she, Helga, had been to Anne.
Actually, though she herself had truly wanted to get out of the house when they came back, she had been a little surprised and a great deal hurt that Anne had consented so readily to her going. She might at least, thought Helga indignantly,
