Flight, page 8
“Here, there, everywhere Mrs. Daquin nodded or flung a cheerful, religiously proper phrase. Jean and Mimi owe all this to me, she was thinking. It was I who brought them into a civilized community …
It was that summer that Carl Hunter came home. Mr. Hunter told Jean why.
“That boy’s been there at school all these years, spending money and having a good time. I told him if he flunked any more of his studies he would have to come home and work. I guess he thought I was fooling but he’ll see whether I am or not. Either he’s going to come back here and work or else I’m through with him.”
“Aren’t you a little hard on the boy?” Jean ventured to inquire. “He’s young yet—hasn’t found himself—he’ll come around in time …
“Come around?” Mr. Hunter snorted. “He’s twenty-three now, and when I was his age I had been working for six years. No, I’m through coddling him and he’s got to strike out for himself or go under … ”
It was at a picnic late in June that Mimi saw Carl again. She remembered the curt manner in which he had greeted her at the party years before and she found on seeing him again that she still resented the cavalier way in which he had acted. She determined to treat him with the same coolness and lack of interest. As he spied her and Hilda a three-piece orchestra began to play in the covered pavilion.
“Hello,” he casually greeted them both. Mimi stiffened, it was the same word he had used five years before.
“How do you do?” she questioned but in a tone that said plainly she did not expect nor did she want an answer to her inquiry.
Carl grinned.
“My! You’re upstagy. Will you dance with me?”
“Thanks, no. You’d better dance with Hilda,” was Mimi’s answer as she turned away.
Hilda had stood there, saying nothing, but fighting to keep her eyes free from tears. She felt the electrical current that flashed between the two of her friends heavily charged with antagonism—but Hilda was too wise to let that ill feeling reassure her. His five years’ absence had not changed Carl—she knew he cared no more for her now than he did then. And here was Mimi, the only girl with whom she had ever felt completely happy, the girl she loved passionately, catching and holding Carl’s interest and attention. Hilda knew Mimi was not doing so deliberately. She knew Mimi too well to believe that. She knew, too, Mimi would rather have done almost anything than hurt her. Despite these reassurances of herself Hilda felt the first bitterness in her heart against her friend, the first twinges of jealousy. Her pride was hurt, it was true, but beneath that and far deeper was the pain caused by the sudden realization that Carl had never been, was not now, and never would be interested in her. She wanted to cry, to dash madly through the woods nearby, to get away from everybody and everything and cry until no more tears would come.
All this raced through her mind at Mimi’s words. She smiled bravely.
“No—no. I don’t want to dance,” she lied cheerfully. “You two go ahead.”
She watched them leave trying hard to keep from herself the certainty that her best and dearest friend had created in an instant, with two or three meaningless words, an interest which she had hoped and dreamed she would arouse. It was hard—terribly hard. Consciously, she held Mimi blameless. But underneath it was a bitterness, a feeling almost of nausea, a pain that made her think of the Spartan youth smiling while his abdomen was being gnawed underneath his tunic or shirt or whatever they wore in those days. The figure gave her a bit of cold comfort. She toyed with the idea, turning it over and over in her mind as she went and sat silent with her mother …
Mimi was wholly unaware of the emotions she and Carl had roused in Hilda. She knew of Hilda’s carefully shielded affection for him, but she had been so absorbed in her own reactions towards him she had neither noticed the expression on Hilda’s face during the brief episode nor had she caught the too elaborately casual way in which Hilda had urged her to dance with Carl. As she walked with him towards the pavilion all her old resentment against him surged through her. She detested his cool and aloof superiority, his calm assumption that she would gladly dance with him. Carl too was silent. His thoughts were of this girl who was Mimi, yet was not the Mimi he had only casually noticed before. Her flaming hair intrigued him, he had always loved that torch-like shade of gold and red. And she had a temper, too. That was fine—he liked folks to show some spirit.
They danced. Mimi loved to dance. She found herself forgetting her resentment, she had to keep reminding herself that she was angry. And Carl did dance well. No stepping awkwardly all over her feet as did most of the other boys. The big bass fiddle moaned. The violin chirped. The mandolin pertly strummed. Every few minutes the players joined in the song. From near at hand came the smells of meat being barbecued. With it mingled the fragrancy of pines and the shout of children. It was going to be hard to remain aloof.
The music stopped. Its spell broken, she found her resentment rising. But Carl only stood and grinned happily at her.
“That’s the best dance I ever had,” he announced.
“How many times and to how many different girls have you said that?” she countered.
“Many, many times and to countless girls! But I meant it each time I said it.”
At any rate he didn’t protest he had never said such a thing before.
“Shall we sit over there and talk? I’d like to,” he asked, simply.
They sat down and watched the crowd. Over near the pavilion sat a little cluster of middle-aged women, heads close together but not so close that they missed anything going on around them.
“The anvil chorus commences,” Carl commented, nodding his head at the group. “The old tabbies will now proceed to dissect every soul around here.”
“Oh, they mean no real harm. Why bother about them? That’s about all they care about,” Mimi easily remarked.
“Why? The hit dog yelps. They’ve begun again on me right where they left off when I went away to school nearly six years ago. I am discovering that I’m an extremely worthless fellow—I smoke cigarettes, I don’t see much use in going to church and listening to a lot of platitudes about religion mixed with bum philosophy and worse science—the direct opposite of most of the things I learned in school. I haven’t sense enough to listen to it and keep my mouth shut—I go around mouthing my own disagreement with a lot of ignorant preachers!”
“Why go to the trouble of expressing your own opinions? Why not ignore the things that annoy you by their falseness? It would be much easier—”
“Ignore them? Lord, I’ve tried a thousand times and just when I think I’ve tied my tongue, out pops an objection and I’m in hot water again. My dad’s disgusted with me—he says I’m a conceited, useless young fool and I’m more than half-way inclined to believe he’s right. He’s yanked me out of college ’cause I flunked math and physics again even though I did fairly well in languages and literature and one or two other things. He says I’ve got to go to work in the insurance business or he’s going to wash his hands of me.”
“What makes you so restless—makes you kick against the traces all the time?” Mimi found herself taking delight in siding with Mr. Hunter against Carl.
“I don’t know,” Carl answered, a faint note of bafflement, almost of despair, creeping into his voice. “All my life I’ve been just what you called me a kicker. I’ve tried to conform—but all the time I find myself saying: ‘Is that so?’ when some greybeard starts to lecture me. And most of the things that everybody accepts as axiomatic, as truths never to be questioned, seem to me false and absolutely without value. In college I ran across a passage one day from Spinoza that fits it exactly where he says that ‘truths are the falsehoods grown hoary with age.’”
“You’re just pessimistic—you’ll settle down in time,” counselled Mimi, finding herself interested in spite of herself.
Carl picked up her words.
“Pessimistic! Settle down! I’ve heard those words with variations a thousand times! Why should I settle down? If I’d only work like a slave for ten or fifteen years, make some money, marry some respectable but dull girl who’d have a lot of babies and get fat in a few years, and then drop into a rut from which I’d never get out, then I’d meet the approval of all those tabbies over there as a ‘fine, upright, Christian young man’!” His last five words were filled with distaste for the respectability the community wished for him.
“I don’t want a lot of money,” he went on vehemently. “I want to see things and live things and—and—” He peered at Mimi, somewhat doubtfully and hesitantly, then blurted it out as though he expected to be spanked: “write.” It was almost a shout of defiance. To Mimi there was much of the childish in his gesture of defiance, but there was also something fine about it. The burden of the conversation of the other boys of her acquaintance usually was: “When I’m making such-and-such a number of dollars” or “When I’m a doctor and have established a big practice.” Carl interested her much more than she had believed he would. Indeed, she had not thought about his interesting her. There was some, thing of her own spirit in his defiance of local mores, his words made her realize just how deeply she herself had sunk into the rut of conventional standards.
“But why can’t you write or do whatever you want to do and at the same time work in your father’s insurance business?” she asked sympathetically. “We’re living in a material world—money is necessary—and you don’t have to sell your soul simply to earn a living, do you?”
“The whole thing gives me a pain and I hate it—I hate it!” was his answer. “All I’ve heard since I’ve been back is a lot of men telling dirty stories and confessing the loss of their sexual powers by boasting of their amorous adventures. If it isn’t that, it’s these old women spitting out lies about every woman who isn’t present. I’ve gotten to the place I wince every time I hear something nice about a person—I know it’s liable to be only the preface to a whopping big story tearing that same person to pieces.”
“You’re exaggerating—you’re letting a handful give you an obsession that puts the same stamp on all of them,” she protested. “There are lots of women and men who’d fit into neither of the classes you’ve given.”
“I know it—there are lots of folks like Mrs. Adams, for example, and Hilda, but the trouble is they’re the kind who attend to their own affairs. It’s this other kind that sets the example and they’re the ones who do the talking you’ve got to listen to … Say, I guess we’d better not sit here too long or they’ll begin talking about you.”
“Let ’em,” retorted Mimi, and she was rewarded by his smile of thanks.
“Nope. You can’t afford it. But you’re the only person I know I could have talked to like this and who’d have understood … ”
Hilda sat beside her mother, silent for a long time. Seldom did her eyes leave Mimi and Carl. Though she could not hear what they were saying, she knew from the absorbed, eager way they were talking they had found some subject of deep mutual interest. To her their blissful ignoring of others was as excruciating as though red-hot irons were being applied to her own flesh. At first she furiously rejected the thought that Mimi was deliberately seeking to attract Carl. As the distant conversation continued she began to toy idly with the notion, turning it over and over in her mind, though it pained her, much as one will constantly probe a sore tooth with one’s tongue.
Then she hugged the belief closely to her, firm in the conviction Mimi was maliciously trying to take Carl—her, Hilda’s, Carl—away from her. She knew this wasn’t true, she hated herself for her distrust of her friend. But back she went each time to that same distrust which bordered dangerously near hatred. It was like meeting a person afflicted with some facial or bodily affliction, a harelip or a glass eye, determining not to notice the deformity, yet fascinatedly unable to keep one’s gaze from returning to the very thing one determined not to watch.
Hilda was all the more ashamed of her feeling toward Mimi because, so far as Carl knew, there was no reason why Hilda should have any claim upon him. There had never been any word of love between them, he had always been rather fond of her in an off-hand way, had called her, as long as she could remember, “Little Sister.” She hated the term not alone because it seemed to her banal but more because of the mild affection it implied, vastly inferior in intensity to her own emotion. Reason, however, plays but small part when one’s love is concerned, thought Hilda, and she returned to her brooding …
“It seems to me you’re making a mistake,” Mimi meanwhile was saying to Carl. “You keep harping on the way the women here gossip—that’s no practice peculiar only to Atlanta and the folks you and I know. Women do that everywhere, it seems to me, and I often think men do more gossiping than women. Does it ever occur to you there are a lot of things on the other side of the shield?”
“That’s the only reason I came back here,” Carl eagerly replied, the look of morbid unrest changing quickly to one of alert cheerfulness. “When I get most pessimistic about our own folks all I need to cheer me up is to look at unhappiness of white people. You ever notice that no matter how hard the luck he may be in, the Negro can laugh and sing and forget all his worries? They call it shiftlessness and laziness but, Lord, when I see the terribly unhappy way these white people live, so busy making money and keeping ‘the nigger in his place,’ I think we’re mighty well off. Say, would you like to go with me sometime to a camp-meeting or some of these other places where you’ll see the thing that’s kept the Negro from being wiped out—this thing they call ‘spirit’ or ‘soul of the race’?”
“I’d love to,” answered Mimi as they walked back towards where Hilda was sitting. Hilda was able to manage a smile but Mimi noticed all during the day that she was strangely silent and aloof. The first coolness of consequence during their friendship had come between them. Mimi was at first puzzled and wondered what might have caused it. Then she remembered Hilda’s shy admissions of her interest from childhood in Carl. Mimi knew then, or rather she sensed, the reason for Hilda’s attitude. Mimi said nothing to her, knowing the unwisdom of mentioning the subject and fearing that the breach might be widened if she spoke of it. And, being human, Hilda’s pouting irritated her.
“She’s silly,” thought Mimi, “getting angry with me simply because Carl and I talked for a few minutes. If that’s the kind of friend she is—” Mimi did not complete the thought but she felt vaguely amused and annoyed at Hilda. At the same time she looked forward to talking with Carl again. He was different …
Chapter VII
To Mimi there was no more fascinating thing in the life she saw around her than the song, the laughter, the deep religious faith and the spontaneous humanity of the people of whom she was now a part. In New Orleans she had been stirred by the music which had a distinctive Negro note but which had been influenced to a definite extent by French songs that made it a sort of Africanized French. Here she felt much more vividly the rhythmic surge and sweep of the Negro music untouched by other influences the ecstatic pouring forth of melodies that often were not melodies but a wild and intoxicating thing that made little chills run up and down her spine and filled her eyes with tears. With Carl she came upon new phases of this life in out-of-the-way places which had hitherto been unknown to her. She began to see and understand the deep spirituality which lay back of this people of hers, to comprehend the gifts which had enabled them to withstand oppression which would long since have crushed a weaker race.
The day when a convict gang began to repair the street in front of their home was one Mimi never forgot. She awoke hearing a wild, plaintive, poignantly simple melody so strange she thought herself yet asleep. Drawn by the music, she dressed hastily and hurried to see from whence it came. In the street a strange sight met her eyes. A crowd of Negro convicts, clad in the broad-striped and ill-fitting garb of rough material, huge balls or iron attached to their ankles by heavy chains, were tearing up the street with synchronized strokes of their pickaxes. Up and down the sidewalks strode the guards, sawed-off shotguns on their shoulders. One of these was a stalwart fellow with stooped shoulders, unshaven, his mouth stained by the tobacco he constantly chewed. Another was of shorter and stockier build, equally unshaven and tobacco-stained, one eye missing, the empty socket shrunken until it gave his face a curiously unbalanced and evil look.
Up and down the guards strode, keeping ever-watchful eyes upon their charges, who worked and sang, apparently in blissful ignorance of guards or toil or any external thing. Occasionally one would stop for a drink of water brought by a remarkably ragged young Negro who nearly all the time was playing when he was most needed. The thirsty one would dawdle, invent all sorts of ingenious methods of delaying, take as long as he could in assuaging his thirst. If the operation consumed too much time there would come a warning from one of the guards, ominous, threatening, but shaken off as lightly as the water from the proverbial duck.
The convicts were of all shades and sizes and shapes. In the awkward garb they were a ludicrous, ill-assorted lot. Some there were with the shifty, roving eyes of tricksters. Others wore on their faces the hall-mark of the criminal of dangerous type. The faces of a few of these bore livid scars of varying lengths gained by knifings in desperate fights. But to Mimi most of the men were kindly of expression, were obviously those arrested and convicted on petty charges because the city needed them or men like them to work its streets.
There was one item only in which this motley crowd was as one. A stalwart Negro with a ringing barytone led them in the song which had awakened Mimi. On and on he sang, verse after verse of a wildly sweet and simple song, joined in the chorus by the others. Like the beat of a giant metronome there came a grunting “Hunh!” as the shining points of the pickaxes were plunged into the red clay. There was little rhyme and little melody in the song, but rhythmically it was without flaw.
