At eight o’clock or thereabouts Junius said exactly as though it had not been in his thoughts all evening: “Play the ‘Dying Christian,’ daughter.” And Virginia, her treble sounding very childish and shrill against her father’s deep, unyielding bass, began Pope’s masterpiece on the death of a true believer. The magnificently solemn words: “Vital spark of heavenly flame,” strangely appropriate minor music filled the little house with an awesome beauty which was almost palpable. It affected Angela so that in sheer self-defence she would go out in the kitchen and eat her share of the cold supper set by her mother. But Mattie, although she never sang this piece, remained while her husband and daughter sang on. Death triumphant and mighty had no fears for her. It was inevitable, she knew, but she would never have to face it alone. When her husband died, she would die too, she was sure of it; and if death came to her first it would be only a little while before Junius would be there stretching out his hand and guiding her through all the rough, strange places just as years ago, when he had been a coachman to the actress for whom she worked, he had stretched out his good, honest hand and had saved her from a dangerous and equivocal position. She wiped away happy and grateful tears.
“The world recedes, it disappears,” sang Virginia. But it made no difference how far it drifted away as long as the four of them were together; and they would always be together, her father and mother and she and Angela. With her visual mind she saw them proceeding endlessly through space; there were her parents, arm in arm, and she and—but tonight and other nights she could not see Angela; it grieved her to lose sight thus of her sister, she knew she must be there, but grope as she might she could not find her. And then quite suddenly Angela was there again, but a different Angela, not quite the same as in the beginning of the picture.
And suddenly she realized that she was doing four things at once and each of them with all the intentness which she could muster; she was singing, she was playing, she was searching for Angela and she was grieving because Angela as she knew her was lost forever.
“Oh Death, oh Death, where is thy sting!” the hymn ended triumphantly—she and the piano as usual came out a little ahead of Junius which was always funny. She said, “Where’s Angela?” and knew what the answer would be. “I’m tired, mummy! I guess I’ll go to bed.”
“You ought to, you got up so early and you’ve been going all day.”
Kissing her parents good night she mounted the stairs languidly, her whole being pervaded with the fervid yet delicate rapture of the day.
III
Monday morning brought the return of the busy, happy week. It meant washday for Mattie, for she and Junius had never been able to raise their ménage to the status either of a maid or of putting out the wash. But this lack meant nothing to her—she had been married fifteen years and still had the ability to enjoy the satisfaction of having a home in which she had full sway instead of being at the beck and call of others. She was old enough to remember a day when poverty for a coloured girl connoted one of three things: going out to service, working as ladies’ maid, or taking a genteel but poorly paid position as seamstress with one of the families of the rich and great on Rittenhouse Square, out West Walnut Street or in one of the numerous impeccable, aristocratic suburbs of Philadelphia.
She had tried her hand at all three of these possibilities, had known what it meant to rise at five o’clock, start the laundry work for a patronizing indifferent family of people who spoke of her in her hearing as “the girl” or remarked of her in a slightly lower but still audible tone as being rather better than the usual run of niggers—“She never steals, I’d trust her with anything and she isn’t what you’d call lazy either.” For this family she had prepared breakfast, gone back to her washing, served lunch, had taken down the clothes, sprinkled and folded them, had gone upstairs and made three beds, not including her own and then had returned to the kitchen to prepare dinner. At night she nodded over the dishes and finally stumbling up to the third floor fell into her unmade bed, sometimes not even fully undressed. And Tuesday morning she would begin on the long and tedious strain of ironing. For this she received four dollars a week with the privilege of every other Sunday and every Thursday off. But she could have no callers.
As a seamstress, life had been a little more endurable but more precarious. The wages were better while they lasted, she had a small but comfortable room; her meals were brought up to her on a tray and the young girls of the households in which she was employed treated her with a careless kindness which while it still had its element of patronage was not offensive. But such families had a disconcerting habit of closing their households and departing for months at a time, and there was Mattie stranded and perilously
