“You’ll have to keep them. You’ve no money and you’ve no place to go. You ain’t got a friend in Philadelphia, and you can’t walk to New York. If you walk around the streets long enough, you’ll find there’s worse things can happen than being a gambler’s wife.” He straightened up. “If you don’t promise me to stay, I’ll tag around after you everywheres you go.”
“If I stay—for a while—will you promise me not to come back?”
“I promise.”
“Pooh, the promise of a gambler!” She hated him.
“I’ll show you. Best not to try me too far though, Maggie.”
“Well, are you going?”
He walked out, closing the door very quietly after him. She had not shed a tear, she did not now. Instead she sat, with her brow wrinkled, trying to recall something.
“Oh, yes,” she sprang up and rushed to the closet, pulling with nervous, shaking fingers at the garments hanging there. In the pocket of her little poplin suit, the suit in which she was married, she found what she was looking for.
It was an oblong business card, slightly soiled around the edges. She had come across it in Atlantic City and for some reason had kept it. Across the front ran a neat superscription
Madame Harkness
Hair Culturist
270 West 137th Street
New York City
Her glance dropped to the left-hand corner. Yes, she was right, there it was: Branch offices—Washington, DC, 1307 U Street, N. W.; Baltimore, 1816 Druid Hill Avenue; Philadelphia, 2021 South Street.
She sat all night brooding wide eyed over the purring gas-stove. In the morning she made herself tidy and walked up to Twentieth and South.
XV
Sylvia was arranging the smallest birthday cake in the world. It bore one very small candle and it was for the very small baby who, propped up in a high chair, sat and watched the birthday proceedings with round solemn eyes. A three-year-old youngster, whose nose just rose above the edge of the table, watched, too, with eyes no less round and far more interested.
“Look at the darlings!” said Sylvia. “They know just what their mother’s doing. Aren’t my children intelligent, Brian?”
“What you mistake for intelligence is hunger, much more likely,” laughed her husband. “I’ve seen Roger look that way before when there wasn’t any birthday cake, but when there certainly were eats.”
“You watch them,” said Sylvia, “and I’ll see if mother and father are ready to come. I had a telegram from Joanna this afternoon, so I know she can’t make it.” Her voice floated up to him as she ran down the back stairs.
The five years of Sylvia’s married life had brought their changes to the Marshall household. Mrs. Marshall had insisted on Sylvia’s and Brian’s remaining with them.
“Else we’d be lonely,” she complained, “what with Sandy gone for good, and Philip and Joanna everlastingly ‘on the road,’ as they express it.”
Alexander and Helena Arnold, after seeing each other constantly and unresponsively for ten years, suddenly fell completely in love on that night of the Pierce Day Nursery dance. Sandy proved himself an impulsive wooer, for he won Helena’s consent and would have married her before Sylvia’s and Brian’s wedding came off.
“Gracious, don’t spoil my thunder,” Sylvia had begged him aghast.
“Well, I’m the oldest,” Sandy had retorted. “It’s really my place to marry first.”
Helena, unaware of all this, announced that she wanted to be bridesmaid at Sylvia’s wedding, so Alec must wait till after. “Think of all the extra clothes I can get. Besides, I couldn’t possibly finish my trousseau before.”
The two had married the June following Sylvia’s wedding and had moved into a house of their own. The household had hardly become adjusted to Alexander’s absence, when Philip started on his long tours which kept him away from home a good part of the year.
He had been graduated from Harvard, with honors and with his coveted Phi Beta Kappa key. He had come home, happy though not as radiant, Joanna thought for one, as in the old days. Then he had evolved his new scheme. He proposed that an organization be started among the colored people which should reach all over the country.
“White and colored people alike may belong to it,” said Philip, his eyes kindling to his vision, “but it is to favor primarily the interests of colored people. No, I’m wrong there,” he corrected himself. “It is to favor primarily the interests of the country.”
He was speaking to a group of both white and black enthusiasts. “How shall we start it?” someone asked.
They all liked the plan. He had his project well mapped out, for he had thought of little else for the past three years. There were to be a national board and a national office, supported by local boards and membership. There would be need of organized publicity; he might suggest a magazine or a weekly newspaper. A huge campaign must be got underway, an effort at nationwide support.
“Its objects will be,” he enumerated them on his long brown fingers, “the suppression of lynching and peonage, the restoration of the ballot, equal schools and a share in civic rights.”
“A large order,” said Barney Kirchner, Philip’s classmate, “but I like it. I’ll get my uncle behind it.” Barney was wealthy in his own right, but his uncle, an Austrian Jew, had built up an immense fortune which had since supported many a notable cause.
The little nucleus worked well. From that meeting grew up all that Philip predicted, rather weak and tottering at first, but the five years had seen the awakening of a great racial consciousness. There were still tremendous possibilities almost untouched.
The organization had a magazine, The Spur, of which Philip was editor. But he was constantly called to exercise his vision and judgment in the field. His observation, his constant scrutiny of his own people helped him here, but he was the born organizer
