“I made one vow and kept it—never by any chance to allow myself to become entangled with white people; never to listen to their blandishments; always to hate them with a perfect hate. Then I met you and loved you and somehow healing began. I thought, if she loves me she’ll be willing to hear me through. And if after she hears me she is willing to take me, black blood and all—but mind,” he interrupted himself fiercely, “I’m not ashamed of my blood. Sometimes I think it’s the leaven that will purify this Nordic people of their cruelty and their savage lust of power.”
She ignored this. “So you were always going to tell me.”
“Tell you? Of course I would have told you. Oh, I’m a man, Angel, with a man’s record. When I was a sailor—there’re some pages in my life I couldn’t let your fingers touch. But that I’d have told you, it was too vital, too important. Not that I think it really means this mixture of blood, as life goes, as God meant the world to go. But here in America it could make or mar life. Of course I’d have told you.”
Here was honour, here was a man! So would her father have been. Having found this comparison her mind sought no further.
A deep silence descended upon them; in his case the silence of exhaustion. But Angela was thinking of his tragic life and of how completely, how surprisingly she could change it. Smiling, she spoke to him of happiness, of the glorious future. “I’ve something amazing to tell you, but I won’t spring it on you all at once. Can’t we go out to Van Cortlandt Park tomorrow evening?”
He caught her hand. “No matter what in the goodness of your heart you may be planning, there is no future, none, none, Angel, for you and me. Don’t deceive yourself—nor me. When I’m with you I forget sometimes. But this afternoon has brought it all back to me. I’ll never forget myself and my vow again.”
A bell shrilled three, four times.
He looked about frowning. “That’s Sanchez; he’s forgotten his key again. My dear girl, my Angel, you must go—and you must not, must not come back. Hurry, hurry! I don’t want him to see you here.” He guided her towards the door, stemming her protestations. “I’ll write you at once, but you must go. God bless and keep you.”
In another moment she was out in the dim hall, passing a dark, hurrying figure on the stairs. The heavy door swung silently behind her, thrusting her inexorably out into the engulfing summer night; the shabby pretentious house was again between her and Anthony with his tragic, searing past.
V
All the next day and the next she dwelt on Anthony’s story; she tried to put herself in his place, to force herself into a dim realization of the dark chamber of torture in which his mind and thoughts had dwelt for so many years. And she had added her modicum of pain, had been so unsympathetic, so unyielding; in the midst of the dull suffering, the sickness of life to which perhaps his nerves had become accustomed she had managed to inject an extra pinprick of poignancy. Oh, she would reward him for that; she would brim his loveless, cheated existence with joy and sweetness; she would cajole him into forgetting that terrible past. Some day he should say to her: “You have brought me not merely new life, but life itself.” Those former years should mean no more to him than its prenatal existence means to a baby.
Her fancy dwelt on, toyed with all the sweet offices of love; the delicate bondage that could knit together two persons absolutely en rapport. At the cost of every ambition which she had ever known she would make him happy. After the manner of most men his work would probably be the greatest thing in the world to him. And he should be the greatest thing in the world to her. He should be her task, her “job,” the fulfilment of her ambition. A phrase from the writings of Anatole France came drifting into her mind. “There is a technique of love.” She would discover it, employ it, not go drifting haphazardly, carelessly into this relationship. And suddenly she saw her affair with Roger in a new light; she could forgive him, she could forgive herself for that hitherto unpardonable union if through it she had come one iota nearer to the understanding and the need of Anthony.
His silence—for although the middle of the week had passed she had received no letter—worried her not one whit. In the course of time he would come to her, remembering her perfect sympathy of the Sunday before and thinking that this woman was the atonement for what he considered her race. And then she would surprise him, she would tell him the truth, she would make herself inexpressibly dearer and nearer to him when he came to know that her sympathy and her tenderness were real, fixed and lasting, because they were based and rooted in the same blood, the same experiences, the same comprehension of this far-reaching, stupid, terrible race problem. How inexpressibly happy, relieved and overwhelmed he would be! She would live with him in Harlem, in Africa, anywhere, any place. She would label herself, if he asked it; she would tell every member of her little coterie of white friends about her mixed blood; she would help him keep his vow and would glory in that keeping. No sacrifice of the comforts which came to her from “passing,” of the assurance, even of the safety which the mere physical fact of whiteness in America brings, would be too great for her. She would withdraw where he withdrew, hate where he hated.
His letter which came on Thursday interrupted her thoughts, her
