Nella Larsen (11 page)

John Bellew came into the room. The first thing that Irene noticed about him was that he was not the man that she had seen with Clare Kendry on the Drayton roof. This man, Clare's husband, was a tallish person, broadly made. His age she guessed to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. His hair was dark brown and waving, and he had a soft mouth, somewhat womanish, set in an unhealthy-looking dough-coloured face. His steel-grey opaque eyes were very much alive, moving ceaselessly between thick bluish lids. But there was, Irene decided, nothing unusual about him, unless it was an impression of latent physical power.

“Hello, Nig,” was his greeting to Clare.

Gertrude who had started slightly, settled back and looked covertly towards Irene, who had caught her lip between her teeth and sat gazing at husband and wife. It was hard to believe that even Clare Kendry would permit this ridiculing of her race by an outsider, though he chanced to be her husband. So he knew, then, that Clare was a Negro? From her talk the other day Irene had understood that he didn't. But how rude, how positively insulting, for him to address her in that way in the presence of guests!

In Clare's eyes, as she presented her husband, was a queer gleam, a jeer, it might be. Irene couldn't define it. The mechanical professions that attend an introduction over, she inquired: “Did you hear what Jack called me?”

“Yes,” Gertrude answered, laughing with a dutiful eagerness.

Irene didn't speak. Her gaze remained level on Clare's smiling face.

The black eyes fluttered down. “Tell them, dear, why you call me that.”

The man chuckled, crinkling up his eyes, not, Irene was compelled to acknowledge, unpleasantly. He explained: “Well, you see, it's like this. When we were first married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare she's gettin' darker and darker. I tell her if she don't look out, she'll wake up one of these days and find she's turned into a nigger.”

He roared with laughter. Clare's ringing bell-like laugh joined his. Gertrude after another uneasy shift in her seat added her shrill one. Irene, who had been sitting with lips tightly compressed, cried out: “That's good!” and gave way to gales of laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her sides ached. Her throat hurt. She laughed on and on and on, long after the others had subsided. Until, catching sight of Clare's face, the need for a more quiet enjoyment of this priceless joke, and for caution, struck her. At once she stopped.

Clare handed her husband his tea and laid her hand on his arm with an affectionate little gesture. Speaking with confidence as well as with amusement, she said: “My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two per cent coloured?”

Bellew put out his hand in a repudiating fling, definite and final. “Oh, no, Nig,” he declared, “nothing like that with me. I know you're no nigger, so it's all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I'm concerned, since I know you're no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be.”

Irene's lips trembled almost uncontrollably, but she made a desperate effort to fight back her disastrous desire to laugh again, and succeeded. Carefully selecting a cigarette from the lacquered box on the tea-table before her, she turned an oblique look on Clare and encountered her peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart. A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog. Absurd, her reason told her, as she accepted Bellew's proffered light for her cigarette. Another glance at Clare showed her smiling. So, as one always ready to oblige, was Gertrude.

An on-looker, Irene reflected, would have thought it a most congenial tea-party, all smiles and jokes and hilarious laughter. She said humorously: “So you dislike Negroes, Mr. Bellew?” But her amusement was at her thought, rather than her words.

John Bellew gave a short denying laugh. “You got me wrong there, Mrs. Redfield. Nothing like that at all. I don't dislike them, I hate them. And so does Nig, for all she's trying to turn into one. She wouldn't have a nigger maid around her for love nor money. Not that I'd want her to. They give me the creeps. The black scrimy devils.”

This wasn't funny. Had Bellew, Irene inquired, ever known any Negroes? The defensive tone of her voice brought another start from the uncomfortable Gertrude, and, for all her appearance of serenity, a quick apprehensive look from Clare.

Bellew answered: “Thank the Lord, no! And never expect to! But I know people who've known them, better than they know their black selves. And I read in the papers about them. Always robbing and killing people. And,” he added darkly, “worse.”

From Gertrude's direction came a queer little suppressed sound, a snort or a giggle. Irene couldn't tell which. There was a brief silence, during which she feared that her self control was about to prove too frail a bridge to support her mounting anger and indignation. She had a leaping desire to shout at the man beside her: “And you're sitting here surrounded by three black devils, drinking tea.”

The impulse passed, obliterated by her consciousness of the danger in which such rashness would involve Clare, who remarked with a gentle reprovingness: “Jack dear, I'm sure 'Rene doesn't care to hear all about your pet aversions. Nor Gertrude either. Maybe they read the papers too, you know.” She smiled on him, and her smile seemed to transform him, to soften and mellow him, as the rays of the sun does a fruit.

“All right, Nig, old girl. I'm sorry,” he apologized. Reaching over, he playfully touched his wife's pale hands, then turned back to Irene. “Didn't mean to bore you, Mrs. Redfield. Hope you'll excuse me,” he said sheepishly. “Clare tells me you're living in New York. Great city, New York. The city of the future.”

In Irene, rage had not retreated, but was held by some dam of caution and allegiance to Clare. So, in the best casual voice she could muster, she agreed with Bellew. Though, she reminded him, it was exactly what Chicagoans were apt to say of their city. And all the while she was speaking, she was thinking how amazing it was that her voice did not tremble, that outwardly she was calm. Only her hands shook slightly. She drew them inward from their rest in her lap and pressed the tips of her fingers together to still them.

“Husband's a doctor, I understand. Manhattan, or one of the other boroughs?”

Manhattan, Irene informed him, and explained the need for Brian to be within easy reach of certain hospitals and clinics.

“Interesting life, a doctor's.”

“Ye-es. Hard, though. And, in a way, monotonous. Nerve-racking too.”

“Hard on the wife's nerves at least, eh? So many lady patients.” He laughed, enjoying, with a boyish heartiness, the hoary joke.

Irene managed a momentary smile, but her voice was sober as she said: “Brian doesn't care for ladies, especially sick ones. I sometimes wish he did. It's South America that attracts him.”

“Coming place, South America, if they ever get the niggers out of it. It's run over—”

“Really, Jack!” Clare's voice was on the edge of temper.

“Honestly, Nig, I forgot.” To the others he said: “You see how hen-pecked I am.” And to Gertrude: “You're still in Chicago, Mrs.—er—Mrs. Martin?”

He was, it was plain, doing his best to be agreeable to these old friends of Clare's. Irene had to concede that under other conditions she might have liked him. A fairly good-looking man of amiable disposition, evidently, and in easy circumstances. Plain and with no nonsense about him.

Gertrude replied that Chicago was good enough for her. She'd never been out of it and didn't think she ever should. Her husband's business was there.

“Of course, of course. Can't jump up and leave a business.”

There followed a smooth surface of talk about Chicago, New York, their differences and their recent spectacular changes.

It was, Irene, thought, unbelievable and astonishing that four people could sit so unruffled, so ostensibly friendly, while they were in reality seething with anger, mortification, shame. But no, on second thought she was forced to amend her opinion. John Bellew, most certainly, was as undisturbed within as without. So, perhaps, was Gertrude Martin. At least she hadn't the mortification and shame that Clare Kendry must be feeling, or, in such full measure, the rage and rebellion that she, Irene, was repressing.

“More tea, 'Rene,” Clare offered.

“Thanks, no. And I must be going. I'm leaving tomorrow, you know, and I've still got packing to do.”

She stood up. So did Gertrude, and Clare, and John Bellew.

“How do you like the Drayton, Mrs. Redfield?” the latter asked.

“The Drayton? Oh, very much. Very much indeed,” Irene answered, her scornful eyes on Clare's unrevealing face.

“Nice place, all right. Stayed there a time or two myself,” the man informed her.

“Yes, it is nice,” Irene agreed. “Almost as good as our best New York places.” She had withdrawn her look from Clare and was searching in her bag for some non-existent something. Her understanding was rapidly increasing, as was her pity and her contempt. Clare was so daring, so lovely, and so “having.”

They gave their hands to Clare with appropriate murmurs. “So good to have seen you.” . . . “I do hope I'll see you again soon.”

“Good-bye,” Clare returned. “It was good of you to come, 'Rene dear. And you too, Gertrude.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Bellew.” . . . “So glad to have met you.” It was Gertrude who had said that. Irene couldn't, she absolutely couldn't bring herself to utter the polite fiction or anything approaching it.

He accompanied them out into the hall, summoned the elevator.

“Good-bye,” they said again, stepping in.

Plunging downward they were silent.

They made their way through the lobby without speaking.

But as soon as they had reached the street Gertrude, in the manner of one unable to keep bottled up for another minute that which for the last hour she had had to retain, burst out: “My God! What an awful chance! She must be plumb crazy.”

“Yes, it certainly seems risky,” Irene admitted.

“Risky! I should say it was. Risky! My God! What a word! And the mess she's liable to get herself into!”

“Still, I imagine she's pretty safe. They don't live here, you know. And there's a child. That's a certain security.”

“It's an awful chance, just the same,” Gertrude insisted. “I'd never in the world have married Fred without him knowing. You can't tell what will turn up.”

“Yes, I do agree that it's safer to tell. But then Bellew wouldn't have married her. And, after all, that's what she wanted.”

Gertrude shook her head. “I wouldn't be in her shoes for all the money she's getting out of it, when he finds out. Not with him feeling the way he does. Gee! Wasn't it awful? For a minute I was so mad I could have slapped him.”

It had been, Irene acknowledged, a distinctly trying experience, as well as a very unpleasant one. “I was more than a little angry myself.”

“And imagine her not telling us about him feeling that way! Anything might have happened. We might have said something.”

That, Irene pointed out, was exactly like Clare Kendry. Taking a chance, and not at all considering anyone else's feelings.

Gertrude said: “Maybe she thought we'd think it a good joke. And I guess you did. The way you laughed. My land! I was scared to death he might catch on.”

“Well, it was rather a joke,” Irene told her, “on him and us and maybe on her.”

“All the same, it's an awful chance. I'd hate to be her.”

“She seems satisfied enough. She's got what she wanted, and the other day she told me it was worth it.”

But about that Gertrude was sceptical. “She'll find out different,” was her verdict. “She'll find out different all right.”

Rain had begun to fall, a few scattered large drops.

The end-of-the-day crowds were scurrying in the directions of street-cars and elevated roads.

Irene said: “You're going south? I'm sorry. I've got an errand. If you don't mind, I'll just say good-bye here. It has been nice seeing you, Gertrude. Say hello to Fred for me, and to your mother if she remembers me. Good-bye.”

She had wanted to be free of the other woman, to be alone; for she was still sore and angry.

What right, she kept demanding of herself, had Clare Kendry to expose her, or even Gertrude Martin, to such humiliation, such downright insult?

And all the while, on the rushing ride out to her father's house, Irene Redfield was trying to understand the look on Clare's face as she had said good-bye. Partly mocking, it had seemed, and partly menacing. And something else for which she could find no name.
⁴
For an instant a recrudescence of that sensation of fear which she had had while looking into Clare's eyes that afternoon touched her. A slight shiver ran over her.

“It's nothing,” she told herself. “Just somebody walking over my grave, as the children say.” She tried a tiny laugh and was annoyed to find that it was close to tears.

What a state she had allowed that horrible Bellew to get her into!

And late that night, even, long after the last guest had gone and the old house was quiet, she stood at her window frowning out into the dark rain and puzzling again over that look on Clare's incredibly beautiful face. She couldn't, however, come to any conclusion about its meaning, try as she might. It was unfathomable, utterly beyond any experience or comprehension of hers.

She turned away from the window, at last, with a still deeper frown. Why, after all, worry about Clare Kendry? She was well able to take care of herself, had always been able. And there were, for Irene, other things, more personal and more important to worry about.