To this tirade there were economic reasons to oppose, tenets of justice, high ideals of humanity. But she could think of none of them. Speechless, she listened to him, her appetite fled.
“What’s the matter, Angèle? Did it make you sick to see them?”
“No, no not that. I—I don’t mind them; you’re mistaken about me and that girl at Martha Burden’s. It’s you, you’re so violent. I didn’t know you were that way!”
“And I’ve made you afraid of me? Oh, I don’t want to do that.” But he was flattered to think that he had affected her. “See here, let’s get some air. I’ll take you for a spin around the Park and then run you home.”
But she did not want to go to the Park; she wanted to go home immediately. His little blue car was outside; in fifteen minutes they were at Jayne Street. She would not permit him to come inside, not even in the vestibule; she barely gave him her hand.
“But Angèle, you can’t leave me like this; why what have I done? Did it frighten you because I swore a little? But I’d never swear at you. Don’t go like this.”
She was gone, leaving him staring and nonplussed on the sidewalk. Lighting a cigarette, he climbed back in his car. “Now what the devil!” He shifted his gears. “But she likes me. I’d have sworn she liked me tonight. Those damn niggers! I bet she’s thinking about me this minute.”
He would have lost his bet. She was thinking about the coloured people.
She could visualize them all so plainly; she could interpret their changing expressions as completely as though those changes lay before her in a book. There were a girl and two men, one young, the other the father perhaps of either of the other two. The fatherly-looking person, for so her mind docketed him, bore an expression of readiness for any outcome whatever. She knew and understood the type. His experiences of surprises engendered by this thing called prejudice had been too vast for them to appear to him as surprises. If they were served this was a lucky day; if not he would refuse to let the incident shake his stout spirit.
It was to the young man and the girl that her interest went winging. In the mirror behind Roger she had seen them entering the room and she had thought: “Oh, here are some of them fighting it out again. O God! please let them be served, please don’t let their evening be spoiled.” She was so happy herself and she knew that the reception of fifty other maîtres d’hotel could not atone for a rebuff at the beginning of the game. The young fellow was nervous, his face tense—thus might he have looked going to meet the enemy’s charge in the recent Great War; but there the odds were even; here the cards were already stacked against him. Presently his expression would change for one of grimness, determination and despair. Talk of a lawsuit would follow; apparently did follow; still a lawsuit at best is a poor substitute for an evening’s fun.
But the girl, the girl in whose shoes she herself might so easily have been! She was so clearly a nice girl, with all that the phrase implies. To Angela watching her intently and yet with the indifference of safety she recalled Virginia, so slender, so appealing she was and so brave. So very brave! Ah, that courage! It affected at first a gay hardihood: “Oh I know it isn’t customary for people like us to come into this café, but everything is going to be all right.” It met Angela’s gaze with a steadiness before which her own quailed, for she thought: “Oh, poor thing! perhaps she thinks that I don’t want her either.” And when the blow had fallen the courage had had to be translated anew into a comforting assurance. “Don’t worry about me, Jimmy,” the watching guest could just hear her. “Indeed, indeed it won’t spoil the evening, I should say not; there’re plenty of places where they’d be all right. We just happened to pick a lemon.”
The three had filed out, their heads high, their gaze poised and level. But the net result of the evening’s adventure would be an increased cynicism in the elderly man, a growing bitterness for the young fellow, and a new timidity in the girl, who, even after they had passed into the street, could not relieve her feelings, for she must comfort her baffled and goaded escort.
Angela wondered if she had been half as consoling to Matthew Henson—was it just a short year ago? And suddenly, sitting immobile in her armchair, her evening cloak slipping unnoticed to the floor, triumph began to mount in her. Life could never cheat her as it had cheated that coloured girl this evening, as it had once cheated her in Philadephia with Matthew. She was free, free to taste life in all its fullness and sweetness, in all its minutest details. By exercising sufficient courage to employ the unique weapon which an accident of heredity had placed in her grasp she was able to master life. How she blessed her mother for showing her the way! In a country where colour or the lack of it meant the difference between freedom and fetters how lucky she was!
But, she told herself, she was through with Roger Fielding.
V
Now it was Spring, Spring in
