“Carl,” she called softly.
The figure stopped suddenly.
“Won’t you come in awhile?” she urged.
Carl stood indecisively at the gate, then opened it and entered. As he greeted her a mantle of constraint like a pall fell upon them both.
“Come inside—it’s rather chilly out here,” she remarked.
He followed her into the parlour and sat silent while she adjusted the shades and switched on the light.
“Well, you’re back again even if I did have to shanghai you,” she laughed. The forced pleasantry and the laugh both fell rather flat, she felt.
“Why did you make me come in?” he demanded, sullenly.
“Make you come in?” she laughed again.
“Don’t try to be coy, Mimi, or evade my question,” Carl almost angrily charged. “You told me to stay away from you—”
She evaded the challenge.
“I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about you lately,” she sought to change the subject.
“What of it? And what’s the use of discussing it? These people here would talk about Jesus Christ himself.”
Mimi watched him closely. Here was a newer and more bitter mood than any in which she had hithertoo seen him. And he looked badly, too. His face was haggard. Under his eyes were dark circles, and the eyes themselves were sunken, reddened. Deep lines were in his face. He looked distrait, miserable. As she watched, his face became softer and he sank it in his hands. In muffled tones he began to speak again.
“Mimi, I’m a weak, vicious creature and no good to myself or anybody else. I used to fuss a lot about these people around here who talk about other people’s affairs—I still talk about them and hate them. But, after all, they’re right—I’m everything vile and low they’ve said I am—”
“You mustn’t talk that way, Carl. You’re nothing of the sort.”
She tried to comfort him but he stopped her with a gesture of mingled impatience and denial. His abjectness stirred her deeply. She felt again the wave of tenderness coming over her that she had experienced the last time she had talked with him in this very room, the time she had sent him away. She was a little frightened—her emotion was deeper, more moving than before. His unhappiness had subtly transferred itself to her and she found herself filled with an almost overwhelming desire to touch him, to hold him near her.
Carl raised his head and looked searchingly at her. His gaze disturbed her, moved her, made her uncomfortable. She remembered the day she first met him, the inclusive way in which he had surveyed her and the resentment his look had stirred in her. There was no resentment now. Instead there was a fear he might see way down beneath and know how she had missed him, how she had longed for him.
“Mimi, there’s one thing I want to tell you now that I’m here. I feel like a dog in telling you—I have no business even thinking it. But I want you to know—no matter what stories you hear—that—that—I love you!” His tone was half defiant, half tender, as he nervously flung the last three words at her.
Mimi sat silent, her eyes in her lap. With Carl’s declaration a great peace came upon her. Doubt, fear, uncertainty left her.
“And I love you, too, Carl,” she said, simply.
With a bound he crossed the room and sat beside her.
“You—love—me—too?” he asked, amazement, doubt that he had heard aright in his voice.
Mimi, her eyes filled with tears of happiness, could only nod.
“Oh, Mimi darling,” Carl half sobbed, and pillowed his face on her breast while she pressed him close to her, holding him with all the tenderness that had been pent up within her, holding him as though he would fly away never to return if she relaxed for an instant the tightness of her grasp. …
It seemed years later when Carl left.
“Mimi, I wonder if we have done right?” he asked as he stood at the door, his voice worried, uncertain.
Mimi only smiled as she kissed him. …
She had been asleep for a long time when Jean and his wife returned.
After she had undressed and turned out the light she lay in bed and thought of Carl. Life was funny, she mused. People came into one’s life, flickered like the figures in a movie thrown on an imperfect screen and passed out of one’s consciousness leaving no memories of importance behind them. Most people were like that but every so often there came those, always few in number, who stayed and, by staying, created all sorts of difficult and unpleasant or pleasant complications. She wondered why nearly everybody she knew or had read about made simple little problems into tremendous ones and harried themselves with things which, seen later, were of such slight worth. Conscience? Right? Honour? Justice? Truth? What were all these except little shibboleths which man had created in his own mind like little gods and before which he prostrated himself in abject groveling? Truth? She remembered the thing Carl had once quoted to her from Spinoza—truth is made up of the lies grown hoary with age.
But after all there must be something in these things men had lived by and for which they had died. She wondered what it all could be. Were they worth all the agony and bloodshed and sacrifice they had brought?
Here I am, she mused, a woman, a Negro. Life for me if I were white would be hard enough, but it’s going to be doubly so when I have race problems added to my own difficulties as a woman. She toyed idly with the notion as to what her lot would have been if she had been born white—if she were to cross over
