The situation with the actress had really been the best in many, in almost all, respects. But it presented its pitfalls. Mattie was young, pretty and innocent; the actress was young, beautiful and sophisticated. She had been married twice and had been the heroine of many affairs; maidenly modesty, virtue for its own sake, were qualities long since forgotten, high ideals and personal self-respect were too abstract for her slightly coarsened mind to visualize, and at any rate they were incomprehensible and even absurd in a servant, and in a coloured servant to boot. She knew that in spite of Mattie’s white skin there was black blood in her veins; in fact she would not have taken the girl on had she not been coloured; all her servants must be coloured, for hers was a carelessly conducted household, and she felt dimly that all coloured people are thickly streaked with immorality. They were naturally loose, she reasoned, when she thought about it at all. “Look at the number of mixed bloods among them; look at Mattie herself for that matter, a perfectly white nigger if ever there was one. I’ll bet her mother wasn’t any better than she should be.”
When the girl had come to her with tears in her eyes and begged her not to send her as messenger to the house of a certain Haynes Brokinaw, politician and well-known man about town, Madame had laughed out loud. “How ridiculous! He’ll treat you all right. I should like to know what a girl like you expects. And anyway, if I don’t care, why should you? Now run along with the note and don’t bother me about this again. I hire you to do what I want, not to do as you want.” She was not even jealous—of a coloured working girl! And anyway, constancy was no virtue in her eyes; she did not possess it herself and she valued it little in others.
Mattie was in despair. She was receiving twenty-five dollars a month, her board, and a comfortable, pleasant room. She was seeing something of the world and learning of its amenities. It was during this period that she learned how very pleasant indeed life could be for a person possessing only a very little extra money and a white skin. But the special attraction which her present position held for her was that every day she had a certain amount of time to call her own, for she was Madame’s personal servant; in no wise was she connected with the routine of keeping the house. If Madame elected to spend the whole day away from home, Mattie, once she had arranged for the evening toilette, was free to act and to go where she pleased.
And now here was this impasse looming up with Brokinaw. More than once Mattie had felt his covetous eyes on her; she had dreaded going to his rooms from the very beginning. She had even told his butler, “I’ll be back in half an hour for the answer”; and she would wait in the great square hall as he had indicated for there she was sure that danger lurked. But the third time Brokinaw was standing in the hall. “Just come into my study,” he told her, “while I read this and write the answer.” And he had looked at her with his cold, green eyes and had asked her why she was so out of breath. “There’s no need to rush so, child; stay here and rest. I’m in no hurry, I assure you. Are you really coloured? You know, I’ve seen lots of white girls not as pretty as you. Sit here and tell me all about your mother—and your father. Do—do you remember him?” His whole bearing reeked with intention.
Within a week Madame was sending her again and she had suggested fearfully the new coachman. “No,” said Madame. “It’s Wednesday, his night off, and I wouldn’t send him anyway; coachmen are too hard to keep nowadays; you’re all getting so independent.” Mattie had come down from her room and walked slowly, slowly to the corner where the new coachman, tall and black and grave, was just hailing a car. She ran to him and jerked down the arm which he had just lifted to seize the railing. “Oh, Mr. Murray,” she stammered. He had been so astonished and so kind. Her halting explanation done, he took the note in silence and delivered it, and the next night and for many nights thereafter they walked through the silent, beautiful square, and Junius had told her haltingly and with fear that he loved her. She threw her arms about his neck: “And I love you too.”
“You don’t mind my being so dark then? Lots of coloured girls I know wouldn’t look at a black man.”
But it was partly on account of his colour that she loved him; in her eyes his colour meant safety. “Why should I mind?” she asked with one of her rare outbursts of bitterness, “my own colour has never brought me anything but insult and trouble.”
The other servants, it appeared, had told him that sometimes she—he hesitated—“passed.”
“Yes, yes, of course I do,” she explained it eagerly, “but never to them. And anyway when I am alone what can I do? I can’t label myself. And if I’m hungry or tired and I’m near a place where they don’t want coloured people, why should I observe their silly old rules, rules that are unnatural and unjust—because the world was made for everybody, wasn’t it, Junius?”
She had told him then how hard and joyless her girlhood life had been—she had known such dreadful poverty and she had been hard put to it to keep herself together. But since she had
