The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories (7 page)

“Thanks awfully,” Helga responded indifferently. She was watching the sunlight dissolve from thick orange into pale yellow. Slowly it crept across the room, wiping out in its path the morning shadows. She wasn’t interested in what the other was saying.

“If you don’t hurry, you’ll be late to your first class. Can I help
you?” Margaret offered uncertainly. She was a little afraid of Helga. Nearly everyone was.

“No. Thanks all the same.” Then quickly in another, warmer tone: “I do mean it. Thanks, a thousand times, Margaret. I’m really awfully grateful, but—you see, it’s like this, I’m not going to be late to my class. I’m not going to be there at all.”

The visiting girl, standing in relief, like old walnut against the buff-colored wall, darted a quick glance at Helga. Plainly she was curious. But she only said formally: “Oh, then you
are
sick.” For something there was about Helga which discouraged questionings.

No, Helga wasn’t sick. Not physically. She was merely disgusted. Fed up with Naxos. If that could be called sickness. The truth was that she had made up her mind to leave. That very day. She could no longer abide being connected with a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy, cruelty, servility, and snobbishness. “It ought,” she concluded, “to be shut down by law.”

“But, Helga, you can’t go now. Not in the middle of the term.” The kindly Margaret was distressed.

“But I can. And I am. Today.”

“They’ll never let you,” prophesied Margaret.

“They
can’t stop me. Trains leave here for civilization every day. All that’s needed is money,” Helga pointed out.

“Yes, of course. Everybody knows that. What I mean is that you’ll only hurt yourself in your profession. They won’t give you a reference if you jump up and leave like this now. At this time of the year. You’ll be put on the blacklist. And you’ll find it hard to get another teaching job. Naxos has enormous influence in the South. Better wait till school closes.”

“Heaven forbid,” answered Helga fervently, “that I should ever again want work anywhere in the South! I hate it.” And fell silent, wondering for the hundredth time just what form of vanity it was that had induced an intelligent girl like Margaret Creighton to turn what was probably nice live crinkly hair, perfectly suited to her smooth dark skin and agreeable round features, into a dead straight, greasy, ugly mass.

Looking up from her watch, Margaret said: “Well, I’ve really got to run, or I’ll be late myself. And since I’m staying … Better think it over, Helga. There’s no place like Naxos, you know. Pretty good salaries, decent rooms, plenty of men, and all that. Ta-ta.” The door slid to behind her.

But in another moment it opened. She was back. “I do wish you’d stay. It’s nice having you here, Helga. We all think so. Even the dead ones. We need a few decorations to brighten our sad lives.” And again she was gone.

Helga was unmoved. She was no longer concerned with what anyone in Naxos might think of her, for she was now in love with the piquancy of leaving. Automatically her fingers adjusted the Chinese-looking pillows on the low couch that served for her bed. Her mind was busy with plans for departure. Packing, money, trains, and—could she get a berth?

On one side of the long, white, hot sand road that split the flat green, there was a little shade, for it was bordered with trees. Helga Crane walked there so that the sun could not so easily get at her. As she went slowly across the empty campus she was conscious of a vague tenderness for the scene spread out before her. It was so incredibly lovely, so appealing, and so facile. The trees in their spring beauty sent through her restive mind a sharp thrill of pleasure. Seductive, charming, and beckoning as cities were, they had not this easy unhuman loveliness. The trees, she thought, on city avenues and boulevards, in city parks and gardens, were tamed, held prisoners in a surrounding maze of human beings. Here they were free. It was human beings who were prisoners. It was too bad. In the midst of all this radiant life. They weren’t, she knew, even conscious of its presence. Perhaps there was too much of it, and therefore it was less than nothing.

In response to her insistent demand she had been told that Dr. Anderson could give her twenty minutes at eleven o’clock. Well, she supposed that she could say all that she had to say in twenty minutes, though she resented being limited. Twenty minutes. In Naxos, she was as unimportant as that.

He was a new man, this principal, for whom Helga remembered feeling unaccountably sorry, when last September he had first been appointed to Naxos as its head. For some reason she had liked him, although she had seen little of him; he was so frequently away on publicity and money-raising tours. And as yet he had made but few and slight changes in the running of the school. Now she was a little irritated at finding herself wondering just how she was going to tell him of her decision. What did it matter to him? Why should she mind if it did? But there returned to her that indistinct sense of sympathy for the remote silent man with the tired gray eyes, and she wondered again by what fluke of fate such a man, apparently a humane and understanding person, had chanced into the command of this cruel educational machine. Suddenly, her own resolve loomed as an almost direct unkindness. This increased her annoyance and discomfort. A sense of defeat, of being cheated of justification, closed down on her. Absurd!

She arrived at the administration building in a mild rage, as unreasonable as it was futile, but once inside she had a sudden attack of nerves at the prospect of traversing that great outer room which was the workplace of some twenty-odd people. This was a disease from which Helga had suffered at intervals all her life, and it was a point of honor, almost, with her never to give way to it. So, instead of turning away, as she felt inclined, she walked on, outwardly in-different. Halfway down the long aisle which divided the room, the principal’s secretary, a huge black man, surged toward her.

“Good morning, Miss Crane, Dr. Anderson will see you in a few moments. Sit down right here.”

She felt the inquiry in the shuttered eyes. For some reason this dissipated her self-consciousness and restored her poise. Thanking him, she seated herself, really careless now of the glances of the
stenographers, bookkeepers, clerks. Their curiosity and slightly veiled hostility no longer touched her. Her coming departure had released her from the need for conciliation which had irked her for so long. It was pleasant to Helga Crane to be able to sit calmly looking out of the window onto the smooth lawn, where a few leaves quite prematurely fallen dotted the grass, for once uncaring whether the frock which she wore roused disapproval or envy.

Turning from the window, her gaze wandered contemptuously over the dull attire of the women workers. Drab colors, mostly navy blue, black, brown, unrelieved, save for a scrap of white or tan about the hands and necks. Fragments of a speech made by the dean of women floated through her thoughts—“Bright colors are vulgar”—“Black, gray, brown, and navy blue are the most becoming colors for colored people”—“Dark-complected people shouldn’t wear yellow, or green or red.”—The dean was a woman from one of the “first families”—a great “race” woman; she, Helga Crane, a despised mulatto; but something intuitive, some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty to the inherent racial need for gorgeousness told her that bright colors
were
fitting and that dark-complexioned people
should
wear yellow, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the luminous tones lurking in their dusky skins. One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever seen had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flaming orange dress, which a horrified matron had next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she wondered, didn’t someone write
A Plea for Color?

These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naive, spontaneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they had marked for destruction.

She came back to her own problems. Clothes had been one of her difficulties in Naxos. Helga Crane loved clothes, elaborate ones. Nevertheless, she had tried not to offend. But with small success, for, although she had affected the deceptively simple variety, the hawk eyes of dean and matrons had detected the subtle difference
from their own irreproachably conventional garments. Too, they felt that the colors were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft, luxurious woolens or heavy, clinging silks. And the trimmings—when Helga used them at all—seemed to them odd. Old laces, strange embroideries, dim brocades. Her faultless, slim shoes made them uncomfortable and her small plain hats seemed to them positively indecent. Helga smiled inwardly at the thought that whenever there was an evening affair for the faculty the dear ladies probably held their breaths until she had made her appearance. They existed in constant fear that she might turn out in an evening dress. The proper evening wear in Naxos was afternoon attire. And one could, if one wished, garnish the hair with flowers.

Quick, muted footfalls sounded. The secretary had returned.

“Dr. Anderson will see you now, Miss Crane.”

She rose, followed, and was ushered into the guarded sanctum, without having decided just what she was to say. For a moment she felt behind her the open doorway and then the gentle impact of its closing. Before her at a great desk her eyes picked out the figure of a man, at first blurred slightly in outline in that dimmer light. At his “Miss Crane?” her lips formed for speech, but no sound came. She was aware of inward confusion. For her the situation seemed charged, unaccountably, with strangeness and something very like hysteria. An almost overpowering desire to laugh seized her. Then, miraculously, a complete ease, such as she had never known in Naxos, possessed her. She smiled, nodded in answer to his questioning salutation, and with a gracious “Thank you” dropped into the chair which he indicated. She looked at him frankly now, this man still young, thirty-five perhaps, and found it easy to go on in the vein of a simple statement.

“Dr. Anderson, I’m sorry to have to confess that I’ve failed in my job here. I’ve made up my mind to leave. Today.”

A short, almost imperceptible silence, then a deep voice of peculiarly pleasing resonance, asking gently: “You don’t like Naxos, Miss Crane?”

She evaded. “Naxos, the place? Yes, I like it. Who wouldn’t like it? It’s so beautiful. But I—well—I don’t seem to fit here.”

The man smiled, just a little. “The school? You don’t like the school?”

The words burst from her. “No, I don’t like it. I hate it!”

“Why?” The question was detached, too detached.

In the girl blazed a desire to wound. There he sat, staring dreamily out of the window, blatantly unconcerned with her or her answer. Well, she’d tell him. She pronounced each word with deliberate slowness.

“Well, for one thing, I hate hypocrisy. I hate cruelty to students, and to teachers who can’t fight back. I hate backbiting, and sneaking, and petty jealousy. Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some loathsome, venomous disease. Ugh! Everybody spending his time in a malicious hunting for the weaknesses of others, spying, grudging, scratching.”

“I see. And you don’t think it might help to cure us, to have someone who doesn’t approve of these things stay with us? Even just one person, Miss Crane?”

She wondered if this last was irony. She suspected it was humor and so ignored the half-pleading note in his voice.

“No, I don’t! It doesn’t do the disease any good. Only irritates it. And it makes me unhappy, dissatisfied. It isn’t pleasant to be always made to appear in the wrong, even when I know I’m right.”

His gaze was on her now, searching. “Queer,” she thought, “how some brown people have gray eyes. Gives them a strange, unexpected appearance. A little frightening.”

The man said kindly: “Ah, you’re unhappy. And for the reasons you’ve stated?”

“Yes, partly. Then, too, the people here don’t like me. They don’t think I’m in the spirit of the work. And I’m not, not if it means suppression of individuality and beauty.”

“And does it?”

“Well, it seems to work out that way.”

“How old are you, Miss Crane?”

She resented this, but she told him, speaking with what curtness she could command only the bare figure: “Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three. I see. Someday you’ll learn that lies, injustice, and
hypocrisy are a part of every ordinary community. Most people achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind of callousness, toward them. If they didn’t, they couldn’t endure. I think there’s less of these evils here than in most places, but because we’re trying to do such a big thing, to aim so high, the ugly things show more, they irk some of us more. Service is like clean white linen, even the tiniest speck shows.” He went on, explaining, amplifying, pleading.

Helga Crane was silent, feeling a mystifying yearning which sang and throbbed in her. She felt again that urge for service, not now for her people, but for this man who was talking so earnestly of his work, his plans, his hopes. An insistent need to be a part of them sprang in her. With compunction tweaking at her heart for even having entertained the notion of deserting him, she resolved not only to remain until June but to return next year. She was shamed yet stirred. It was not sacrifice she felt now, but actual desire to stay, and to come back next year.

He came, at last, to the end of the long speech, only part of which she had heard. “You see, you understand?” he urged.

“Yes, oh yes, I do.”

“What we need is more people like you, people with a sense of values, and proportion, an appreciation of the rarer things of life. You have something to give which we badly need here in Naxos. You mustn’t desert us, Miss Crane.”

She nodded, silent. He had won her. She knew that she would stay. “It’s an elusive something,” he went on. “Perhaps I can best explain it by the use of that trite phrase, ‘You’re a lady.’ You have dignity and breeding.”