Standard reading response
1. Passing, Nella Larsen
Part 1, Chapter 1
2. Passing, Nela Larsen
Part 3
- What type of literature is it?
- What is the point of view?
- Identify the theme(s)
- Write a thesis statement
- Create a list of words you don’t recognize
- Define them through context / dictionary / Web
- Finish with a two-line interpretation
Part 1: Encounter
Chapter 1
It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender. Not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was. Some two years ago she had one very like it in outward appearance. Furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting. Purple ink. Foreign paper of extraordinary size.
It had been, Irene noted, postmarked in New York the day before. Her brows came together in a tiny frown. The frown, however, was more from perplexity than from annoyance; though there was in her thoughts an element of both. She was wholly unable to comprehend such an attitude towards danger as she was sure the letter’s contents would reveal; and she disliked the idea of opening and reading it.
This, she reflected, was of a piece with all that she knew of Clare Kendry. Stepping always on the edge of danger. Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside. Certainly not because of any alarms or feeling of outrage on the part of others.
And for a swift moment Irene Redfield seemed to see a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her which were not the less frightening because they were, for the most part. Ineffectual. Sometimes he did manage to reach her. But only the fact that the child had edged herself and her poor sewing over to the farthermost corner of the sofa suggested that she was in any way perturbed by this menace to herself and her work.
Clare had known well enough that it was unsafe to take a portion of the dollar that was her weekly wage for the doing of many errands for the dressmaker who lived on the top floor of the building of which Bob Kendry was janitor. But that knowledge had not deterred her. She wanted to go to her Sunday school’s picnic, and she had made up her mind to wear a new dress. So, In spite of certain unpleasant- ness and possible danger, she had taken the money to buy the material for that pathetic little red frock.
1
There had been, even In those days, nothing sacrificial In Clare Kendry’s Idea of life, no allegiance beyond her own Immediate desire. She was selfish, and cold, and hard. And yet she had, too, a strange capacity of transforming warmth and passion, verging sometimes almost on theatrical heroics.
Irene, who was a year or more older than Clare, remembered the day that Bob Kendry had been brought home dead, killed in a silly saloon-fight. Clare, who was at that time a scant fifteen years old, had just stood there with her lips pressed together, her thin arms folded across her narrow chest, staring down at the familiar pasty-white face of her parent with a sort of disdain in her slanting black eyes. For a very long time she had stood like that, silent and staring. Then, quite suddenly, she had given way to a torrent of weeping, swaying her thin body, tearing at her bright hair, and stamping her small feet. The outburst had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. She glanced quickly about the bare room, taking everyone in, even the two policemen, in a sharp look of flashing scorn. And, in the next instant, she had turned and vanished through the door.
Seen across the long stretch of years, the thing had more the appearance of an outpouring of pent-up fury than of an overflow of grief for her dead father; though she had been, Irene admitted, fond enough of him in her own rather catlike way.
Catlike. Certainly that was the word which best described Clare Kendry, if any single word could describe her. Sometimes she was hard and apparently without feeling at all; sometimes she was affectionate and rashly impulsive. And there was about her an amazing soft malice, hidden well away until provoked. Then she was capable of scratching, and very effectively too. Or, driven to anger, she would fight with a ferocity and impetuousness that disregarded or forgot any danger; superior strength, numbers, or other unfavourable circumstances. How savagely she had clawed those boys the day they had hooted her parent and sung a derisive rhyme, of their own composing, which pointed out certain eccentricities in his careening gait! And how deliberately she had –
Irene brought her thoughts back to the present, to the letter from Clare Kendry that she still held unopened in her hand. With a little feeling of apprehension, she very slowly cut the envelope, drew out the folded sheets, spread them, and began to read.
It was, she saw at once, what she had expected since learning from the postmark that Clare was in the city. An extravagantly phrased wish to see her again. Well, she needn’t and wouldn’t, Irene told herself, accede to that. Nor would she assist Clare to realize her foolish desire to return for a moment to that life which long ago, and of her own choice, she had left behind her.
She ran through the letter, puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words or making instinctive guesses at them.
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“…For I am lonely, so lonely…cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life. . . . You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of… It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases…” Sheets upon thin sheets of it. And ending finally with, “and it’s your fault, ‘Rene dear. At least partly. For I wouldn’t now, perhaps, have this terrible, this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you that time in Chicago…”
Brilliant red patches flamed in Irene Redfield’s warm olive cheeks.
“That time in Chicago.” The words stood out from among the many paragraphs of other words, bringing with them a clear, sharp remembrance, in which even now, after two years, humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled.
Part 3: Finale
Chapter 1
The year was getting on towards its end. October, November had gone. December had come and brought with it a little snow and then a freeze and after that a thaw and some soft pleasant days that had in them a feeling of spring.
It wasn’t, this mild weather, a bit Christmasy, Irene Redfield was thinking, as she turned out of Seventh Avenue into her own street. She didn’t like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudy as if snow was about to fall. The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season. Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs. It was all as soft, as like April, as possible. The kind of weather for Easter. Certainly not for Christmas.
Though, she admitted, reluctantly, she herself didn’t feel the proper Christmas spirit this year, either. But that couldn’t be helped, it seemed, any more than the weather. She was weary and depressed. And for all her trying, she couldn’t be free of that dull, indefinite misery which with increasing tenaciousness had laid hold of her. The morning’s aimless wandering through the teeming Harlem streets, long after she had ordered the flowers which had been her excuse for setting out, was but another effort to tear herself loose from it.
She went up the cream stone steps, into the house, and down to the kitchen. There were to be people in to tea. But that, she found, after a few words with Sadie and Zulena, need give her no concern. She was thankful. She didn’t want to be bothered. She went upstairs and took off her things and got into bed.
She thought: “Bother those people coming to tea!”
She thought: “If I could only be sure that at bottom it’s just Brazil.”
She thought : “Whatever It is, if I only knew what it was, I could manage it.”
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Brian again. Unhappy, restless, withdrawn. And she, who had prided herself on knowing his moods, their causes and their remedies, had found it first unthinkable, and then intolerable, that this, so like and yet so unlike those other spasmodic restlessnesses of his, should be to her incomprehensible and elusive.
He was restless and he was not restless. He was discontented, yet there were times when she felt he was possessed of some intense secret satisfaction, like a cat who had stolen the cream. He was irritable with the boys, especially Junior, for Ted, who seemed to have an uncanny knowledge of his father’s periods of off moods, kept out of his way when possible. They got on his nerves, drove him to violent outbursts of temper, very different from his usual gently sarcastic remarks that constituted his idea of discipline for them. On the other hand, with her he was more than customarily considerate and abstemious. And it had been weeks since she had felt the keen edge of his irony.
He was like a man marking time, waiting. But what was he waiting for? It was extraordinary that, after all these years of accurate perception, she now lacked the talent to discover what that appearance of waiting meant. It was the knowledge that, for all her watching, all her patient study, the reason for his humour still eluded her which filled her with foreboding dread. That guarded reserve of his seemed to her unjust, inconsiderate, and alarming. It was as if he had stepped out beyond her reach into some section, strange and walled, where she could not get at him.
She closed her eyes, thinking what a blessing it would be if she could get a little sleep before the boys came in from school. She couldn’t, of course, though she was so tired, having had, of late, so many sleepless nights. Nights filled with questionings and premonitions.
But she did sleep – several hours.
She wakened to find Brian standing at her bedside looking down at her, an unfathomable expression in his eyes.
She said: “I must have dropped off to sleep,” and watched a slender ghost of his old amused smile pass over his face.
“It’s getting on to four,” he told her, meaning, she knew, that she was going to be late again.
She fought back the quick answer that rose to her lips and said instead: “I’m getting right up. It was good of you to think to call me.” She sat up.
He bowed. “Always the attentive husband, you see.” “Yes indeed. Thank goodness, everything’s ready.” “Except you. Oh, and Clare’s downstairs.”
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“Clare ! What a nuisance ! I didn’t ask her. Purposely.”
“I see. Might a mere man ask why? Or is the reason so subtly feminine that it wouldn’t be understood by him?”
A little of his smile had come back.
Irene, who was beginning to shake off some of her depression under his familiar banter, said, almost gaily: “Not at all. It just happens that this party happens to be for Hugh, and that Hugh happens not to care a great deal for Clare; therefore I, who happen to be giving the party, didn’t happen to ask her. Nothing could be simpler. Could it?”
“Nothing. It’s so simple that I can easily see beyond your simple explanation and surmise that Clare, probably, just never happened to pay Hugh the admiring attention that he happens to consider no more than his just due. Simplest thing in the world.”
Irene exclaimed in amazement: “Why, I thought you liked Hugh! You don’t, you can’t, believe anything so idiotic!”
“Well, Hugh does think he’s God, you know.”
“That,” Irene declared, getting out of bed, “is absolutely not true. He thinks ever so much better of himself than that, as you, who know and have read him, ought to be able to guess. If you remember what a low opinion he has of God, you won’t make such a silly mistake.”
She went into the closet for her things and, coming back, hung her frock over the back of a chair and placed her shoes on the floor beside it. Then she sat down before her dressing-table.
Brian didn’t speak. He continued to stand beside the bed, seeming to look at nothing in particular. Certainly not at her. True, his gaze was on her, but in it there was some quality that made her feel that at that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. At what? She didn’t know, couldn’t guess. And this made her uncomfortable. Piqued her.
She said: “It just happens that Hugh prefers intelligent women.”
Plainly he was startled. “D’you mean that you think Clare is stupid?” he asked, regarding her with lifted eyebrows, which emphasized the disbelief of his voice.
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She wiped the cold cream from her face, before she said: “No, I don’t. She isn’t stupid. She’s intelligent enough In a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro.”
“I see. Intelligent enough to wear a tight bodice and keep bowing swains whispering compliments and retrieving dropped fans. Rather a pretty picture. I take it, though, as slightly feline in Its Implication.”
*’Well, then, all I can say is that you take it wrongly. Nobody admires Clare more than I do, for the kind of Intelligence she has, as well as for her decorative qualities. But she’s not – She isn’t – She hasn’t – Oh, I can’t explain it. Take Bianca, for example, or, to keep to the race, Felise Freeland. Looks and brains. Real brains that can hold their own with anybody. Clare has got brains of a sort, the kind that are useful too. Acquisitive, you know. But she’d bore a man like Hugh to suicide. Still, I never thought that even Clare would come to a private party to which she hadn’t been asked. But, it’s like her.”
For a minute there was silence. She completed the bright red arch of her full lips. Brian moved towards the door. His hand was on the knob. He said: “I’m sorry, Irene. It’s my fault entirely. She seemed so hurt at being left out that I told her I was sure you’d forgotten and to just come along.”
Irene cried out: “But, Brian, I – ” and stopped, amazed at the fierce anger that had blazed up in her. Brian’s head came round with a jerk. His brows lifted in an odd surprise.
Her voice, she realized, had gone queer. But she had an instinctive feeling that it hadn’t been the whole cause of his attitude. And that little straightening motion of the shoulders. Hadn’t it been like that of a man drawing himself up to receive a blow? Her fright was like a scarlet spear of terror leaping at her heart.
Clare Kendry! So that was it! Impossible. It couldn’t be.
In the mirror before her she saw that he was still regarding her with that air of slight amazement. She dropped her eyes to the jars and bottles on the table and began to fumble among them with hands whose fingers shook slightly.
”Of course,” she said carefully, “I’m glad you did. And in spite of my recent remarks, Clare does add to any party. She’s so easy on the eyes.”
When she looked again, the surprise had gone from his face and the expectancy from his bearing. “Yes,” he agreed. “Well, I guess I’ll run along. One of us ought to be down, I s’pose.”
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“You’re right. One of us ought to.” She was surprised that it was in her normal tones she spoke, caught as she was by the heart since that dull indefinite fear had grown suddenly into sharp panic. “I’ll be down before you know it,” she promised.
“All right.” But he still lingered. “You’re quite certain. You don’t mind my asking her? Not awfully, I mean? I see now that I ought to have spoken to you. Trust women to have their reasons for everything.”
She made a little pretence at looking at him, managed a tiny smile, and turned away. Clare! How sickening!
“Yes, don’t they?” she said, striving to keep her voice casual. Within her she felt a hardness from feeling, not absent, but repressed. And that hardness was rising, swelling. Why didn’t he go? Why didn’t he?
He had opened the door at last. “You won’t be long?” he asked, admonished.
She shook her head, unable to speak, for there was a choking in her throat, and the confusion in her mind was like the beating of wings. Behind her she heard the gentle impact of the door as it closed behind him, and knew that he had gone. Down to Clare.
For a long minute she sat in strained stiffness. The face in the mirror vanished from her sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind. Impossible for her to put it immediately into words or give it outline, for, prompted by some impulse of self-protection, she recoiled from exact expression.
She closed her unseeing eyes and clenched her fists. She tried not to cry. But her lips tightened and no effort could check the hot tears of rage and shame that sprang into her eyes and flowed down her cheeks; so she laid her face in her arms and wept silently.
When she was sure that she had done crying, she wiped away the warm remaining tears and got up. After bathing her swollen face in cold, refreshing water and carefully applying a stinging splash of toilet water, she went back to the mirror and regarded herself gravely. Satisfied that there lingered no betray- ing evidence of weeping, she dusted a little powder on her dark-white face and again examined it carefully, and with a kind of ridiculing contempt.
“I do think,” she confided to it, “that you’ve been something – oh, very much – of a damned fool.”
Downstairs the ritual of tea gave her some busy moments, and that, she decided, was a blessing. She wanted no empty spaces of time in which her mind would immediately return to that horror which she had not yet gathered sufficient courage to face. Pouring tea properly and nicely was an occupation that required a kind of well-balanced attention.
5
In the room beyond, a clock chimed. A single sound. Fifteen minutes past five o’clock. That was all! And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its colour, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn’t that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.
“Oh, Mrs. Runyon. … So nice to see you. . . . Two? . . . Really? . . . How exciting! . . . Yes, I think Tuesday’s all right. . . .”
Yes, life went on precisely as before. It was only she that had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.
Chatter, chatter, chatter. Someone asked her a question. She glanced up with what she felt was a rigid smile.
“Yes . . . Brian picked it up last winter in Haiti. Terribly weird, isn’t it? … It is rather marvellous in its own hideous way… Practically nothing, I believe. A few cents… ”
Hideous. A great weariness came over her. Even the small exertion of pouring golden tea into thin old cups seemed almost too much for her. She went on pouring. Made repetitions of her smile. Answered questions. Manufactured conversation. She thought: “I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.”
“Josephine Baker? …No. I’ve never seen her… Well, she might have been in Shuffle Along when I saw it, but if she was, I don’t remember her… Oh, but you’re wrong I… I do think Ethel Waters is aw-
fully good…”
There were the familiar little tinkling sounds of spoons striking against frail cups, the soft running sounds of inconsequential talk, punctuated now and then with laughter. In irregular small groups, disin- tegrating, coalescing, striking just the right note of disharmony, disorder in the big room, which Irene had furnished with a sparingness that was almost chaste, moved the guests with that slight familiarity that makes a party a success. On the floor and the walls the sinking sun threw long, fantastic shadows.
So like many other tea-parties she had had. So unlike any of those others. But she mustn’t think yet. Time enough for that after. All the time in the world. She had a second’s flashing knowledge of what those words might portend. Time with Brian. Time without him. It was gone, leaving in its place an almost uncontrollable impulse to laugh, to scream, to hurl things about. She wanted, suddenly, to shock people, to hurt them, to make them notice her, to be aware of her suffering.
”Hello, Dave… Felise… Really your clothes are the despair of half the women in Harlem… How do you do it? …
Lovely, is it Worth or Lanvin? … Oh, a mere Babani. …”
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“Merely that,” Felise Freeland acknowledged. “Come out of it, Irene, whatever it is. You look like the second grave-digger”
“Thanks, for the hint, Felise. I’m not feeling quite up to par. The weather, I guess.”
“Buy yourself an expensive new frock, child. It always helps. Any time this child gets the blues, it means money out of Dave’s pocket. How’re those boys of yours?”
The boys! For once she’d forgotten them.
They were, she told Felise, very well. Felise mumbled something about that being awfully nice, and said she’d have to fly, because for a wonder she saw Mrs. Bellew sitting by herself, “and I’ve been trying to get her alone all afternoon. I want her for a party. Isn’t she stunning today?”
Clare was. Irene couldn’t remember ever having seen her look better. She was wearing a superlatively simple cinnamon-brown frock which brought out all her vivid beauty, and a little golden bowl of a hat. Around her neck hung a string of amber beads that would easily have made six or eight like one Irene owned. Yes, she was stunning.
The ripple of talk flowed on. The fire roared. The shadows stretched longer.
Across the room was Hugh. He wasn’t, Irene hoped, being too bored. He seemed as he always did, a bit aloof, a little amused, and somewhat weary. And as usual he was hovering before the book-shelves. But he was not, she noticed, looking at the book he had taken down. Instead, his dull amber eyes were held by something across the room. They were a little scornful. Well, Hugh had never cared for Clare Kendry. For a minute Irene hesitated, then turned her head, though she knew what it was that held Hugh’s gaze. Clare, who had suddenly clouded all her days. Brian, the father of Ted and Junior.
Clare’s ivory face was what It always was, beautiful and caressing. Or maybe today a little masked. Unrevealing. Unaltered and undisturbed by any emotion within or without. Brian’s seemed to Irene to be pitiably bare. Or was it too as it always was? That half-effaced seeking look, did he always have that? Queer, that now she didn’t know, couldn’t recall. Then she saw him smile, and the smile made his face all eager and shining. Impelled by some inner urge of loyalty to herself, she glanced away. But only for a moment. And when she turned towards them again, she thought that the look on his face was the most melancholy and yet the most scoffing that she had ever seen upon it.
In the next quarter of an hour she promised herself to Bianca Wentworth in Sixty-second Street, Jane Tenant at Seventh Avenue and a Hundred and Fiftieth Street, and the Dashields in Brooklyn for dinner all on the same evening and at almost the same hour.
7
Oh well, what did it matter? She had no thoughts at all now, and all she felt was a great fatigue. Before her tired eyes Clare Kendry was talking to Dave Freeland. Scraps of their conversation, in Clare’s husky voice, floated over to her: “… always admired you… so much about you long ago… everybody says so … no one but you…” And more of the same. The man hung rapt on her words, though he was the husband of Felise Freeland, and the author of novels that revealed a man of perception and a devastating irony. And he fell for such pish-posh ! And all because Clare had a trick of sliding down ivory lids over aston- ishing black eyes and then lifting them suddenly and turning on a caressing smile. Men like Dave Freeland fell for it. And Brian.
Her mental and physical languor receded. Brian. What did it mean? How would it affect her and the boys? The boys! She had a surge of relief. It ebbed, vanished. A feeling of absolute unimportance followed. Actually, she didn’t count. She was, to him, only the mother of his sons. That was all. Alone she was nothing. Worse. An obstacle.
Rage boiled up in her.
There was a slight crash. On the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup. Dark stains dotted the bright rug. Spread. The chatter stopped. Went on. Before her, Zulena gathered up the white fragments.
As from a distance Hugh Wentworth’s dipt voice came to her, though he was, she was aware, somehow miraculously at her side. “Sorry,” he apologized. “Must have pushed you. Clumsy of me. Don’t tell me it’s priceless and irreplaceable.”
It hurt. Dear God! How the thing hurt! But she couldn’t think of that now. Not with Hugh sitting there mumbling apologies and lies. The significance of his words, the power of his discernment, stirred in her a sense of caution. Her pride revolted. Damn Hugh! Something would have to be done about him. Now. She couldn’t, it seemed, help his knowing. It was too late for that. But she could and would keep him from knowing that she knew. She could, she would bear it. She’d have to. There were the boys. Her whole body went taut. In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear. It hurt. It frightened her, but she could bear it.
She turned to Hugh. Shook her head. Raised innocent dark eyes to his concerned pale ones. “Oh, no,” she protested, “you didn’t push me. Cross your heart, hope to die, and I’ll tell you how it happened.”
”Done!”
“Did you notice that cup? Well, you’re lucky. It was the ugliest thing that your ancestors, the charming Confederates ever owned. I’ve forgotten how many thousands of years ago it was that Brian’s great- great-grand-uncle owned it. But it has, or had, a good old hoary history. It was brought North by way of the subway. Oh, all right! Be English if you want to and call it the underground. What I’m coming to is the fact that I’ve never figured out a way of getting rid of it until about five minutes ago. I had an
8
inspiration. I had only to break it, and I was rid of it for ever. So simple! And I’d never thought of it before.”
Hugh nodded and his frosty smile spread over his features. Had she convinced him?
“Still,” she went on with a little laugh that didn’t, she was sure, sound the least bit forced, ”I’m perfectly willing for you to take the blame and admit that you pushed me at the wrong moment. What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins? Brian will certainly be told that it was your fault.
“More tea, Clare? … I haven’t had a minute with you… Yes, it is a nice party… You’ll stay to dinner, I hope… Oh, too bad! … I’ll be alone with the boys… They’ll be sorry. Brian’s got a medical meeting, or something… Nice frock you’re wearing… Thanks… Well, good-bye; see you soon, I hope.”
The clock chimed. One. Two, Three. Four. Five. Six. Was it, could it be, only a little over an hour since she had come down to tea? One little hour.
“Must you go? … Good-bye… Thank you so much… So nice to see you… Yes, Wednesday… My love to Madge… Sorry, but I’m filled up for Tuesday… Oh, really? … Yes… Good-bye… Good-bye…”
It hurt. It hurt like hell. But it didn’t matter, if no one knew. If everything could go on as before. If the boys were safe.
It did hurt.
But it didn’t matter.
Chapter 2
But it did matter. It mattered more than anything had ever mattered before.
What bitterness! That the one fear, the one uncertainty, that she had felt, Brian’s ache to go somewhere else, should have dwindled to a childish triviality! And with it the quality of the courage and resolution with which she had met it. From the visions and dangers which she now perceived she shrank away. For them she had no remedy or courage. Desperately she tried to shut out the knowledge from which had risen this turmoil, which she had no power to moderate or still, within her. And half succeeded.
For, she reasoned, what was there, what had there been, to show that she was even half correct in her tormenting notion? Nothing. She had seen nothing, heard nothing. She had no facts or proofs. She was only making herself unutterably wretched by an unfounded suspicion. It had been a case of looking for trouble and finding it in good measure. Merely that.
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With this self-assurance that she had no real knowledge, she redoubled her efforts to drive out of her mind the distressing thought of faiths broken and trusts betrayed which every mental vision of Clare, of Brian, brought with them. She could not, she would not, go again through the tearing agony that lay just behind her.
She must, she told herself, be fair. In all their married life she had had no slightest cause to suspect her husband of any infidelity, of any serious flirtation even. If – and she doubted it – he had had his hours of outside erratic conduct, they were unknown to her. Why begin now to assume them? And on nothing more concrete than an idea that had leapt into her mind because he had told her that he had invited a friend, a friend of hers, to a party in his own house. And at a time when she had been, it was likely, more asleep than awake. How could she without anything done or said, or left undone or unsaid, so easily believe him guilty? How be so ready to renounce all confidence in the worth of their life together?
And if, perchance, there were some small something – well, what could it mean? Nothing. There were the boys. There was John Bellew. The thought of these three gave her some slight relief. But she did not look the future in the face. She wanted to feel nothing, to think nothing; simply to believe that it was all silly invention on her part. Yet she could not. Not quite.
Christmas, with its unreality, its hectic rush. Its false gaiety, came and went. Irene was thankful for the confused unrest of the season. Its irksomeness, its crowds, its inane and insincere repetitions of genialities, pushed between her and the contemplation of her growing unhapplness.
She was thankful, too, for the continued absence of Clare, who, John Bellew having returned from a long stay in Canada, had withdrawn to that other life of hers, remote and inaccessible. But beating against the walled prison of Irene’s thoughts was the shunned fancy that, though absent, Clare Kendry was still present, that she was close.
Brian, too, had withdrawn. The house contained his outward self and his belongings. He came and went with his usual noiseless irregularity. He sat across from her at table. He slept in his room next to hers at night. But he was remote and inaccessible. No use pretending that he was happy, that things were the same as they had always been. He wasn’t and they weren’t. However, she assured herself, it needn’t necessarily be because of anything that involved Clare. It was, it must be, another manifestation of the old longing.
But she did wish it were spring, March, so that Clare would be sailing, out of her life and Brian’s. Though she had come almost to believe that there was nothing but generous friendship between those two, she was very tired of Clare Kendry. She wanted to be free of her, and of her furtive comings and goings. If something would only happen, something that would make John Bellew decide on an earlier departure, or that would remove Clare. Anything. She didn’t care what. Not even if it were that Clare’s Margery were ill, or dying. Not even if Bellew should discover—
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She drew a quick, sharp breath. And for a long time sat staring down at the hands in her lap. Strange, she had not before realized how easily she could put Clare out of her life! She had only to tell John Bellew that his wife— No. Not that! But if he should somehow learn of these Harlem visits – Why should she hesitate? Why spare Clare?
But she shrank away from the idea of telling that man, Clare Kendry’s white husband, anything that would lead him to suspect that his wife was a Negro. Nor could she write it, or telephone it, or tell it to someone else who would tell him.
She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing, she Imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.
Sitting alone In the quiet living-room in the pleasant fire-light, Irene Redfield wished, for the first time In her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham’s dark children.
Nevertheless, her weakness, her shrinking, her own inability to compass the thing, did not prevent her from wishing fervently that. In some way with which she had no concern, John Bellew would discover, not that his wife had a touch of the tar-brush – Irene didn’t want that – but that she was spending all the time that he was out of the city in black Harlem. Only that. It would be enough to rid her forever of
Clare Kendry.
As if in answer to her wish, the very next day Irene came face to face with Bellew.
She had gone downtown with Felise Freeland to shop. The day was an exceptionally cold one, with a strong wind that had whipped a dusky red into Felise’s smooth golden cheeks and driven moisture into Irene’s soft brown eyes.
Clinging to each other, with heads bent against the wind, they turned out of the Avenue into Fifty- seventh Street. A sudden bluster flung them around the corner with unexpected quickness and they collided with a man.
“Pardon,” Irene begged laughingly, and looked up into the face of Clare Kendry’s husband. “Mrs. Redfield!”
His hat came off. He held out his hand, smiling genially.
11
But the smile faded at once. Surprise, incredulity, and – was it understanding? – passed over his features.
He had, Irene knew, become conscious of Felise, golden, with curly black Negro hair, whose arm was still linked in her own. She was sure, now, of the understanding in his face, as he looked at her again and then back at Felise. And displeasure.
He didn’t, however, withdraw his outstretched hand. Not at once.
But Irene didn’t take it. Instinctively, in the first glance of recognition, her face had become a mask. Now she turned on him a totally uncomprehending look, a bit questioning. Seeing that he still stood with hand outstretched, she gave him the cool appraising stare which she reserved for mashers, and drew Felise on.
Felise drawled: “Aha! Been ‘passing,’ have you? Well, I’ve queered that.” “Yes, I’m afraid you have.”
“Why, Irene Redfield! You sound as if you cared terribly. I’m sorry.”
“I do, but not for the reason you think. I don’t believe I’ve ever gone native in my life except for the sake of convenience, restaurants, theatre tickets, and things like that. Never socially I mean, except once. You’ve just passed the only person that I’ve ever met disguised as a white woman.”
“Awfully sorry. Be sure your sin will find you out and all that. Tell me about it.” “I’d like to. It would amuse you. But I can’t.”
Felise’s laughter was as languidly nonchalant as her cool voice. “Can it possible that the honest Irene has – Oh, do look at that coat! There. The red one. Isn’t it a dream?”
Irene was thinking: “I had my chance and didn’t take it. I had only to speak and to introduce him to Felise with the casual remark that he was Clare’s husband. Only that. Fool. Fool.” That instinctive loyalty to a race. Why couldn’t she get free of It? Why should it include Clare? Clare, who’d shown little enough consideration for her, and hers. What she felt was not so much resentment as a dull despair because she could not change herself in this respect, could not separate individuals from the race, herself from Clare Kendry.
“Let’s go home, Felise. I’m so tired I could drop.” “Why, we haven’t done half the things we planned.”
12
“I know, but it’s too cold to be running all over town. But you stay down if you want to. “I think I’ll do that, if you don’t mind.”
And now another problem confronted Irene. She must tell Clare of this meeting. Warn her. But how? She hadn’t seen her for days. Writing and telephoning were equally unsafe. And even if it was possible to get in touch with her, what good would it do? If Bellew hadn’t concluded that he’d made a mistake, if he was certain of her Identity – and he was nobody’s fool – telling Clare wouldn’t avert the results of the encounter. Besides, it was too late. Whatever was in store for Clare Kendry had already overtaken her.
Irene was conscious of a feeling of relieved thankfulness at the thought that she was probably rid of Clare, and without having lifted a finger or uttered one word.
But she did mean to tell Brian about meeting John Bellew.
But that, it seemed, was impossible. Strange. Something held her back. Each time she was on the verge of saying: “I ran into Clare’s husband on the street downtown today. I’m sure he recognized me, and Felise was with me,” she failed to speak. It sounded too much like the warning she wanted it to be. Not even in the presence of the boys at dinner could she make the bare statement.
The evening dragged. At last she said good-night and went upstairs, the words unsaid.
She thought: *’Why didn’t I tell him? Why didn’t I? If trouble comes from this, I’ll never forgive myself. I’ll tell him when he comes up.”
She took up a book, but she could not read, so oppressed was she by a nameless foreboding.
What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case. But in France, in Paris, such things were very easy. If he divorced her – if Clare were free – But of all the things that could happen, that was the one she did not want. She must get her mind away from that possibility. She must.
Then came a thought which she tried to drive away. If Clare should die! Then – Oh, it was vile! To think, yes, to wish that! She felt faint and sick. But the thought stayed with her. She could not get rid of it.
She heard the outer door open. Close. Brian had gone out. She turned her face into her pillow to cry. But no tears came.
She lay there awake, thinking of things past. Of her courtship and marriage and Junior’s birth. Of the time they had bought the house in which they had lived so long and so happily. Of the time Ted had passed his pneumonia crisis and they knew he would live. And of other sweet painful memories that would never come again.
13
Above everything else she had wanted, had striven, to keep undisturbed the pleasant routine of her life. And now Clare Kendry had come into it, and with her the menace of impermanence.
”Dear God,” she prayed, “make March come quickly.”
By and by she slept.
Chapter 4
THE NEXT MORNING brought with it a snowstorm that lasted throughout the day.
After a breakfast, which had been eaten almost in silence and which she was relieved to have done with, Irene Redfield lingered for a little while in the downstairs hall, looking out at the soft flakes fluttering down. She was watching them immediately fill some ugly irregular gaps left by the feet of hurrying pedestrians when Zulena came to her, saying: “The telephone, Mrs. Redfield. It’s Mrs. Bellew.”
“Take the message, Zulena, please.” Though she continued to stare out of the window, Irene saw nothing now, stabbed as she was by fear – and hope. Had anything happened between Clare and Bellew? And if so, what? And was she to be freed at last from the aching anxiety of the past weeks? Or was there to be more, and worse? She had a wrestling moment, in which it seemed that she must rush after Zulena and hear for herself what it was that Clare had to say. But she waited.
Zulena, when she came back, said: “She says, ma’am, that she’ll be able to go to Mrs. Freeland’s tonight. She’ll be here some time between eight and nine.”
“Thank you, Zulena.”
The day dragged on to its end.
At dinner Brian spoke bitterly of a lynching that he had been reading about in the evening paper. “Dad, why is it that they only lynch coloured people?” Ted asked.
“Because they hate ’em, son.”
“Brian !” Irene’s voice was a plea and a rebuke.
Ted said: “Oh! And why do they hate em?
“Because they are afraid of them.”
“But what makes them afraid of ’em?”
14
“Because – ” “Brian!”
“It seems, son, that is a subject we can’t go into at the moment without distressing the ladies of our family,” he told the boy with mock seriousness, “but we’ll take it up some time when we’re alone together.”
Ted nodded in his engaging grave way. “I see. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow on the way to school.”
‘That’ll be fine.”
“Brian!”
“Mother,” Junior remarked, “that’s the third time you’ve said ‘Brian’ like that.” “But not the last. Junior, never you fear,” his father told him.
After the boys had gone up to their own floor, Irene said suavely: “I do wish, Brian, that you wouldn’t talk about lynching before Ted and Junior. It was really inexcusable for you to bring up a thing like that at dinner. There’ll be time enough for them to learn about such horrible things when they’re older.”
“You’re absolutely wrong! If, as you’re so determined, they’ve got to live in this damned country, they’d better find out what sort of thing they’re up against as soon as possible. The earlier they learn it, the better prepared they’ll be.”
“I don’t agree. I want their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be.”
“Very laudable,” was Brian’s sarcastic answer. “Very laudable indeed, all things considered. But can it?” “Certainly It can. If you’ll only do your part.”
“Stuff ! You know as well as I do, Irene, that it can’t. What was the use of our trying to keep them from learning the word ‘nigger’ and its connotation? They found out, didn’t they? And how? Because somebody called Junior a dirty nigger.”
“Just the same you’re not to talk to them about the race problem. I won’t have it.” They glared at each other.
15
“I tell you, Irene, they’ve got to know these things, and it might as well be now as later.” “They do not!” she insisted, forcing back the tears of anger that were threatening to fall.
Brian growled : “I can’t understand how anybody as intelligent as you like to think you are can show evidences of such stupidity.” He looked at her in a puzzled harassed way.
“Stupid!” she cried. “Is it stupid to want my children to be happy?” Her lips were quivering.
“At the expense of proper preparation for life and their future happiness, yes. And I’d feel I hadn’t done my duty by them if I didn’t give them some inkling of what’s before them. It’s the least I can do. I wanted to get them out of this hellish place years ago. You wouldn’t let me. I gave up the idea, because you objected. Don’t expect me to give up everything.”
Under the lash of his words she was silent. Before any answer came to her, he had turned and gone from the room.
Sitting there alone in the forsaken dining-room, unconsciously pressing the hands lying in her lap, tightly together, she was seized by a convulsion of shivering. For, to her, there had been something ominous in the scene that she had just had with her husband. Over and over in her mind his last words: “Don’t expect me to give up everything,” repeated themselves. What had they meant? What could they mean? Clare Kendry?
Surely, she was going mad with fear and suspicion. She must not work herself up. She must not! Where were all the self-control, the common sense, that she was so proud of? Now, if ever, was the time for it.
Clare would soon be there. She must hurry or she would be late again, and those two would wait for her downstairs together, as they had done so often since that first time, which now seemed so long ago. Had it been really only last October? Why, she felt years, not months, older.
Drearily she rose from her chair and went upstairs to set about the business of dressing to go out when she would far rather have remained at home. During the process she wondered, for the hundredth time, why she hadn’t told Brian about herself and Felise running into Bellew the day before, and for the hun- dredth time she turned away from acknowledging to herself the real reason for keeping back the information.
When Clare arrived, radiant in a shining red gown, Irene had not finished dressing. But her smile scarcely hesitated as she greeted her, saying: ”I always seem to keep C. P. time, don’t I? We hardly expected you to be able to come. Felise will be pleased. How nice you look.”
Clare kissed a bare shoulder, seeming not to notice a slight shrinking.
16
“I hadn’t an idea in the world, myself, that I’d be able to make it; but Jack had to run down to Philadelphia unexpectedly. So here I am.”
Irene looked up, a flood of speech on her lips. “Philadelphia. That’s not very far, is it? Clare, I –?”
She stopped, one of her hands clutching the side of her stool, the other lying clenched on the dressing- table. Why didn’t she go on and tell Clare about meeting Bellew? Why couldn’t she?
But Clare didn’t notice the unfinished sentence. She laughed and said lightly: “It’s far enough for me. Anywhere, away from me, is far enough. I’m not particular.”
Irene passed a hand over her eyes to shut out the accusing face in the glass before her. With one corner of her mind she wondered how long she had looked like that, drawn and haggard and – yes, frightened. Or was it only imagination?
“Clare,” she asked, “have you ever seriously thought what it would mean if he should find you out?”
“Yes.”
“Oh! You have! And what you’d do in that case?”
“Yes.” And having said it, Clare Kendry smiled quickly, a smile that came and went like a flash, leaving untouched the gravity of her face.
That smile and the quiet resolution of that one word, ”yes,” filled Irene with a primitive paralysing dread. Her hands were numb, her feet like ice, her heart like a stone weight. Even her tongue was like a heavy dying thing. There were long spaces between the words as she asked: “And what should you do?”
Clare, who was sunk in a deep chair, her eyes far away, seemed wrapped in some pleasant impenetrable reflection. To Irene, sitting expectantly upright, it was an interminable time before she dragged herself back to the present to say calmly: “I’d do what I want to do more than anything else right now. I’d come up here to live. Harlem, I mean. Then I’d be able to do as I please, when I please.”
Irene leaned forward, cold and tense. ”And what about Margery?” Her voice was a strained whisper.
“Margery?” Clare repeated, letting her eyes flutter over Irene’s concerned face. “Just this, ‘Rene. If it wasn’t for her, I’d do it anyway. She’s all that holds me back. But if Jack finds out, if our marriage is broken, that lets me out. Doesn’t it?”
Her gentle resigned tone, her air of innocent candour, appeared, to her listener, spurious. A conviction that the words were intended as a warning took possession of Irene. She remembered that Clare Kendry had always seemed to know what other people were thinking. Her compressed lips grew firm and ob-
17
durate. Well, she wouldn’t know this time.
She said: “Do go downstairs and talk to Brian. He’s got a mad on.”
Though she had determined that Clare should not get at her thoughts and fears, the words had sprung, unthought of, to her lips. It was as if they had come from some outer layer of callousness that had no relation to her tortured heart. And they had been, she realized, precisely the right words for her purpose.
For as Clare got up and went out, she saw that that arrangement was as good as her first plan of keeping her waiting up there while she dressed – or better. She would only have hindered and rasped her. And what matter if those two spent one hour, more or less, alone together, one or many, now that everything had happened between them?
Ah ! The first time that she had allowed herself to admit to herself that everything had happened, had not forced herself to believe, to hope, that nothing irrevocable had been con- summated! Well, it had happened. She knew it, and knew that she knew it.
She was surprised that, having thought the thought, conceded the fact, she was no more hurt, cared no more, than during her previous frenzied endeavours to escape it. And this absence of acute, unbearable pain seemed to her unjust, as If she had been denied some exquisite solace of suffering which the full acknowledgment should have given her.
Was it, perhaps, that she had endured all that a woman could endure of tormenting humiliation and fear? Or was it that she lacked the capacity for the acme of suffering? “No, no!” she denied fiercely. “I’m human like everybody else. It’s just that I’m so tired, so worn out, I can’t feel any more.” But she did not really believe that.
Security. Was it just a word? If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained? And did too much striving, too much faith in safety and permanence, unfit one for these other things?
Irene didn’t know, couldn’t decide, though for a long time she sat questioning and trying to understand. Yet all the while, in spite of her searchlngs and feeling of frustration, she was aware that, to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life. Not for any of the others, or for all of them, would she exchange it. She wanted only to be tranquil. Only, unmolested, to be allowed to direct for their own best good the lives of her sons and her husband.
Now that she had relieved herself of what was almost like a guilty knowledge, admitted that which by some sixth sense she had long known, she could again reach out for plans. Could think again of ways to keep Brian by her side, and in New York. For she would not go to Brazil. She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American. She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted.
18
Not even because of Clare Kendry, or a hundred Clare Kendrys. Brian, too, belonged here. His duty was to her and to his boys.
Strange, that she couldn’t now be sure that she had ever truly known love. Not even for Brian. He was her husband and the father of her sons. But was he anything more? Had she ever wanted or tried for more? In that hour she thought not.
Nevertheless, she meant to keep him. Her freshly painted lips narrowed to a thin straight line. True, she had left off trying to believe that he and Clare loved and yet did not love, but she still intended to hold fast to the outer shell of her marriage, to keep her life fixed, certain. Brought to the edge of distasteful reality, her fastidious nature did not recoil.
Better, far better, to share him than to lose him completely. Oh, she could close her eyes, if need be. She could bear it. She could bear anything. And there was March ahead. March and the departure of Clare.
Horribly clear, she could now see the reason for her instinct to withhold – omit, rather – her news of the encounter with Bellew. If Clare was freed, anything might happen.
She paused in her dressing, seeing with perfect clearness that dark truth which she had from that first October afternoon felt about Clare Kendry and of which Clare herself had once warned her – that she got the things she wanted because she met the great condition of conquest, sacrifice. If she wanted Brian, Clare wouldn’t revolt from the lack of money or place. It was as she had said, only Margery kept her from throwing all that away. And if things were taken out of her hands – even if she was only alarmed, only suspected that such a thing was about to occur, anything might happen. Anything.
No! At all costs, Clare was not to know of that meeting with Bellew. Nor was Brian. It would only weaken her own power to keep him.
They would never know from her that he was on his way to suspecting the truth about his wife. And she would do anything, risk anything, to prevent him from finding out that truth. How fortunate that she had obeyed her instinct and omitted to recognize Bellew!
“Ever go up to the sixth floor, Clare?” Brian asked as he stopped the car and got out to open the door for them.
“Why, of course! We’re on the seventeenth.” “I mean, did you ever go up by nigger-power?”
19
‘That’s good!” Clare laughed. “Ask ‘Rene. My father was a janitor, you know. In the good old days before every ramshackle flat had its elevator. But you can’t mean we’ve got to walk up? Not here!”
“Yes, here. And Felise lives at the very top,” Irene told her. “What on earth for?”
“I believe she claims it discourages the casual visitor.” “And she’s probably right. Hard on herself, though.”
Brian said “Yes, a bit. But she says she’d rather be dead than bored.”
“Oh, a garden! And how lovely with that undisturbed snow I”
“Yes, isn’t it? But keep to the walk with those foolish thin shoes. You too, Irene.”
Irene walked beside them on the cleared cement path that split the whiteness of the courtyard garden. She felt a something in the air, something that had been between those two and would be again. It was like a live thing pressing against her. In a quick furtive glance she saw Clare clinging to Brian’s other arm. She was looking at him with that provocative upward glance of hers, and his eyes were fastened on her face with what seemed to Irene an expression of wistful eagerness.
“It’s this entrance, I believe,” she informed them in quite her ordinary voice.
”Mind,” Brian told Clare, “you don’t fall by the wayside before the fourth floor. They absolutely refuse to carry anyone up more than the last two flights.”
”Don’t be silly!” Irene snapped. The party began gaily.
Dave Freeland was at his best, brilliant, crystal clear, and sparkling. Felise, too, was amusing, and not so sarcastic as usual, because she liked the dozen or so guests that dotted the long, untidy living-room. Brian was witty, though, Irene noted, his remarks were somewhat more barbed than was customary even with him. And there was Ralph Hazelton, throwing nonsensical shining things into the pool of talk, which the others, even Clare, picked up and flung back with fresh adornment.
Only Irene wasn’t merry. She sat almost silent, smiling now and then, that she might appear amused.
“What’s the matter, Irene?” someone asked. “Taken a vow never to laugh, or something? You’re as sober as a judge.”
20
“No. It’s simply that the rest of you are so clever that I’m speechless, absolutely stunned.”
“No wonder,” Dave Freeland remarked, “that you’re on the verge of tears. You haven’t a drink. What’ll you take?”
“Thanks. If I must take something, make it a glass of ginger-ale and three drops of Scotch. The Scotch first, please. Then the ice, then the ginger ale.”
“Heavens! Don’t attempt to mix that yourself, Dave darling. Have the butler in,” Felise mocked.
“Yes, do. And the footman.” Irene laughed a little, then said: “It seems dreadfully warm in here. Mind if I open this window?” With that she pushed open one of the long casement-windows of which the Freelands were so proud.
It had stopped snowing some two or three hours back. The moon was just rising, and far behind the tall buildings a few stars were creeping out. Irene finished her cigarette and threw it out, watching the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below.
Someone in the room had turned on the phonograph. Or was it the radio? She didn’t know which she disliked more. And nobody was listening to its blare. The talking, the laughter never for a minute ceased. Why must they have more noise?
Dave came with her drink. “You ought not,” he told her, “to stand there like that. You’ll take cold. Come along and talk to me, or listen to me gabble.” Taking her arm, he led her across the room. They had just found seats when the door-bell rang and Felise called over to him to go and answer it.
In the next moment Irene heard his voice in the hall, carelessly polite: “Your wife? Sorry. I’m afraid you’re wrong. Perhaps next –”
Then the roar of John Bellew’s voice above all the other noises of the room: “I’m not wrong! I’ve been to the Redfields and I know she’s with them. You’d better stand out of my way and save yourself trouble in the end.”
“What is it, Dave?” Felise ran out to the door.
And so did Brian. Irene heard him saying: “I’m Redfield. What the devil’s the matter with you?”
But Bellew didn’t heed him. He pushed past them all into the room and strode towards Clare. They all looked at her as she got up from her chair, backing a little from his approach.
21
“So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!” His voice was a snarl and a moan, an expression of rage and of pain.
Everything was in confusion. The men had sprung forward. Felise had leapt between them and Bellew. She said quickly: “Careful. You’re the only white man here.” And the silver chill of her voice, as well as her words, was a warning.
Clare stood at the window, as composed as if everyone were not staring at her in curiosity and wonder, as if the whole structure of her life were not lying in fragments before her. She seemed unaware of any danger or uncaring. There was even a faint smile on her full, red lips, and in her shining eyes.
It was that smile that maddened Irene. She ran across the room, her terror tinged with ferocity, and laid a hand on Clare’s bare arm. One thought possessed her. She couldn’t have Clare Kendry cast aside by Bellew. She couldn’t have her free.
Before them stood John Bellew, speechless now in his hurt and anger. Beyond them the little huddle of other people, and Brian stepping out from among them.
What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly.
One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone.
There was a gasp of horror, and above it a sound not quite human, like a beast in agony. “Nig! My God! Nig!”
A frenzied rush of feet down long flights of stairs. The slamming of distant doors. Voices.
Irene stayed behind. She sat down and remained quite still, staring at a ridiculous Japanese print on the wall across the room.
Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile, the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. That beauty that had torn at Irene’s placid life. Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry of her pose, the ringing bells of her laughter.
Irene wasn’t sorry. She was amazed, incredulous almost.
What would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backward? Certainly one or the other. Not—
But she mustn’t, she warned herself, think of that. She was too tired, and too shocked. And, indeed, both were true. She was utterly weary, and she was violently staggered.
22
But her thoughts reeled on. If only she could be as free of mental as she was of bodily vigour; could only put from her memory the vision of her hand on Clare’s arm!
“It was an accident, a terrible accident,” she muttered fiercely. “It was.”
People were coming up the stairs. Through the still open door their steps and talk sounded nearer,
nearer.
Quickly she stood up and went noiselessly into the bedroom and closed the door softly behind her.
Her thoughts raced. Ought she to have stayed? Should she go back out there to them? But there would be questions. She hadn’t thought of them, of afterwards, of this. She had thought of nothing in that sudden moment of action.
It was cold. Icy chills ran up her spine and over her bare neck and shoulders.
In the room outside there were voices. Dave Freeland’s and others that she did not recognize.
Should she put on her coat? Felise had rushed down without any wrap. So had all the others. So had Brian. Brian! He mustn’t take cold. She took up his coat and left her own. At the door she paused for a moment, listening fearfully. She heard nothing. No voices. No footsteps. Very slowly she opened the door. The room was empty. She went out.
In the hall below she heard dimly the sound of feet going down the steps, of a door being opened and closed, and of voices far away.
Down, down, down, she went, Brian’s great coat clutched in her shivering arms and trailing a little on each step behind her.
What was she to say to them when at last she had finished going down those endless stairs? She should have rushed out when they did. What reason could she give for her dallying behind? Even she didn’t know why she had done that. And what else would she be asked? There had been her hand reaching out towards Clare. What about that?
In the midst of her wonderings and questionings came a thought so terrifying, so horrible, that she had had to grasp hold of the banister to save herself from pitching downwards. A cold perspiration drenched her shaking body. Her breath came short in sharp and painful gasps.
What if Clare was not dead?
She felt nauseated, as much at the idea of the glorious body mutilated as from fear.
23
How she managed to make the rest of the journey without fainting she never knew. But at last she was down. Just at the bottom she came on the others, surrounded by a little circle of strangers. They were all speaking in whispers, or in the awed, discreetly lowered tones adapted to the presence of disaster. In the first instant she wanted to turn and rush back up the way she had come. Then a calm desperation came over her. She braced herself, physically and mentally.
“Here’s Irene now,” Dave Freeland announced, and told her that, having only just missed her, they had concluded that she had fainted or something like that, and were on the way to find out about her. Felise, she saw, was holding on to his arm, all the insolent nonchalance gone out of her, and the golden brown of her handsome face changed to a queer mauve colour.
Irene made no Indication that she had heard Freeland, but went straight to Brian. His face looked aged and altered, and his lips were purple and trembling. She had a great longing to comfort him, to charm away his suffering and horror. But she was helpless, having so completely lost control of his mind and heart.
She stammered: “Is she – is she –?”
It was Felise who answered. “Instantly, we think.”
Irene struggled against the sob of thankfulness that rose in her throat. Choked down, it turned to a whimper, like a hurt child’s. Someone laid a hand on her shoulder in a soothing gesture. Brian wrapped his coat about her. She began to cry rackingly, her entire body heaving with convulsive sobs. He made a slight perfunctory attempt to comfort her.
“There, there, Irene. You mustn’t. You’ll make yourself sick. She’s – ” His voice broke suddenly.
As from a long distance she heard Ralph Hazelton’s voice saying: “I was looking right at her. She just tumbled over and was gone before you could say ‘Jack
