Flight quotes

His gratitude to him in the train began to vanish. He wished fervently his father-in-law had remained in Chicago. He hated his high-handed method of interfering in his and Mary’s and Mimi’s most private affairs.

Money⁠—money⁠—money⁠—how much is it worth?⁠—how much can I make out of it?⁠—these were the first, last and intermediate stages of Mr. Robertson’s every thought, every statement, every action.

I’ll go through with it, thought Jean, but I’ll never let my soul be turned into a moneygrubber’s. The resolution, even though he knew it couldn’t possibly be carried out completely in this new world he was entering, nevertheless gave Jean some comfort. …

“Mimi, you’d better run upstairs and get your face and hands washed. Mrs. Plummer tells me she’s fixed supper for us and we don’t want it to get cold. Jean, you and papa’d better do the same thing and don’t take all night getting back.”

Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander never spoke to common soldiers more brusquely nor with greater assurance that their commands would be obeyed.

Nor did it occur to Mimi or Jean to protest—both were too much under the domination of this person who would never be familiar to either of them.

Mimi’s mother died when she was nine. His beloved Margot gone, Jean had floundered about, terrified by loneliness, panic-stricken when he found himself the sole keeper and guardian and nurse of a perturbingly active child of nine.

He felt as though some malevolent power had inveigled him into a boat, rowed him far from shore and then deftly removed the bottom of the craft.

He felt himself splashing, treading water, frantically feeling for solid earth beneath his feet and finding none.

… death how she had planted the seed of these ideas in his head, watched them grow until they met the little crises which arose and then flattered his gentle and simple soul by telling him how cleverly he had solved the perplexities of the moment.

Jean had often told Mimi how Mary Robertson had come to New Orleans on a visit at Mardi Gras time two years after Margot had died and just when he had become most lonely and afraid.

His grief had dulled his senses so completely that for more than a year after his wife had died Jean had lived in a state that bordered on coma. When he grieved most was at night and then he sought forgetfulness in wine.

“What difference does it make if André or Raoul or Emile have finer carriages than we?—have more money in the bank?—does that mean they are happier than we? No—no—chère Marie!

Happiness cannot be bought with dollars⁠—look at the Americans north of Canal Street and you’ll see I am right.

They scramble and fight and scheme to gain a few dollars and when they have them what do they do? They fight and scramble and scheme for more!”

They grew in number. They shot higher. They combined in volume until one great peal of implacable Negro-phobia went up like the din of a continuous thunderclap, like a pipe organist treading angrily on his foot-pedals in dissonant roaring.

The entire city was as a huge boil, packed tight with putrescence.

A pinprick was applied, the festering, purulent tumour burst open and flung high its venom. Spattering, smearing, befouling matter came down and sprang, like the sown dragon’s teeth, into howling, murder-bent mobs. …

The death before her very eyes of that unknown man shook from her all the apathy of the past.

There flashed through her mind in letters that seared her brain the words, “I too am a Negro!”

…

“Mon Dieu!” he cried, in dismay.

“ ’Scuse me, brother! I thought you were a nigger!” apologized Jean’s tormentor, handing Jean his hat.

…

Mimi dated thereafter her consciousness of being coloured from September, nineteen hundred and six.

For her the old order had passed, she was now definitely of a race set apart. At times this created within her moods of introspection which veered dangerously near the morbid.

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.

…

“But, Jean dear,” she pleaded, her tone changing miraculously, “I’m only thinking of our good name—”

“Damn your good name!” the unfamiliar Jean snapped.

“I’m sick and tired of your petty bickering with these little folks you’re so mad about—these busybodies so worried keeping track of other people and meddling into their affairs. As for this present matter, I want it stopped right here.

She felt she would cheerfully have given ten years of her life to have him back for one year, for one month, even for one day. Then she would show him the quality of her love for him.

Holy Mother, why did one see these things only when it was too late?

She was glad they had had their talk yesterday afternoon. It had been like old times, she and Jean had been so happy together.

Gone was the sense of being a depraved, a disgraced, a low creature which had assailed her those last few days in Atlanta.

She was free! Free! Free!

Round and round she twisted the wide gold band on her left hand. This she was ashamed of after a fashion. Mrs. Manning, with whom she lived, had glanced significantly one day at her left hand as she sought gently to induce Mimi to talk.

She eluded him with the same coolness and remarked as she left the room: “It doesn’t really seem wise, does it, to create a scene in your own home where your wife is within hearing distance?”

A faint, mocking laugh trailed back to him as he stood there after she had gone.

…

At first it amused her. Had she resorted to tears or pleading for release or any of the usual methods of damsels in defence of their virtue, she reflected, the curt note of dismissal would not have been sent.

Man is a peculiar creature.

So long as by implication or any other means he is allowed to imagine himself the superior being, whether that superiority came through brute strength or intellect or wealth or any other means, he is manageable and easily gulled.

With what to Mimi seemed amazing speed, his monthly birthdays sped by and accumulated—the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth. As long as he was well and clothed and fed, Mimi’s own difficulties seemed of little more than passing moment.

Nothing greatly matters, she comforted herself, when seen in perspective⁠—it is only when a thing is happening that it frightens and pains one.

She found a new strength coming to her out of the problems and perplexities she was meeting. It was, she found, like looking into a mirror.

Mrs. Rogers smiled. “You say that now. But wait awhile. Youth and especially youth like yours can work wonders. Standards are changing—New York isn’t New Orleans or Atlanta—the man who may come may have sense enough to see what’s back of your—well, your so-called misfortune.

Men are simple creatures after all though we women make of them in our own minds an insoluble riddle.

”

Only Hilda and Mrs. Adams championed the cause of Mimi, but soon, because their views were well known, the subject was not mentioned to them.

Scandal thrives only when it is retailed to those with open ears and credulous minds.

…

Sometimes she remembered the phrase they had used in Atlanta when coloured people were subjected to indignities and injustice—

“You can get used to being hung if you’re only hung often enough.”

Or, at other times, she accepted the stories of slaughter with a fatalistic, a not altogether hopeless philosophy which might be summed up in the words: “Oh, well, it’s white people killing white people—the more they kill, the better the chance for coloured peoples.”

This was the first time she had ever had time to gaze upon this magnificent, awe-inspiring creature so close at hand. Mimi, with her usual irreverence for the majestic, before which most others bowed the knee abjectly, could not refrain from the inward comment that

Madame Francine, if subjected to a psychological test, would assay about forty percent sheer bluff, thirty percent knowledge of her business, and thirty percent sound common sense.

She was tall, slender, simply clad in a close-fitting gown of grey. A string of amber beads and a touch of colour at the wrists accentuated the greyness of the dress and made its simple dignity all the more impressive.

Tired of dancing, she sat and watched the dancers. Grimly they went about the task of acquiring pleasure, their faces set in hard, nervous lines as they executed or attempted to execute quick, jerky, ungraceful and intricate new steps.

They are working at pleasure and happiness just as though it were a trade

, she concluded. “They dance,” she told Jimmie when he had come back to the table puffing and blowing after dancing with Mrs. Shepherd, a young and rather pretty divorcee, “as though they were saying:

She tried to talk once or twice with Jimmie when they sat at home on the occasional evenings they were not scheduled to dine or dance. She desisted when he laughed at her worries and jocularly remarked:

“You cannot serve Rolls-Royce and Mammon!”

He repeated the phrase with a satisfied smile, adding: “Not so bad, eh?” Thereafter, she never ventured to mention her thoughts to him again.

“No, I don’t mean anything of the kind,” he said, leaning towards Jimmie. “Our civilization has undoubted advantages—we have developed the sciences and we have developed machinery and invention to a point the world’s never reached before.

Our gods are steam and electricity and steel

—we have combated plagues and disease, we have greater material comfort, we can travel farther and faster than ever before. But when that’s granted—”

To Mimi’s surprise Meekins proved an excellent dancer and a jovial companion, even Jimmie laughing with reluctance at his witticisms. When they returned home and were preparing for bed, she commented on Meekins’ joviality.

“Humph! About as funny as a baby breaking its leg,”

was Jimmie’s comment. Mimi knew he was thinking of the way in which Meekins had stuck to his contentions, which, she was aware from experience, had not been altogether pleasing to Jimmie. All of us hate to hear unpleasant truths, she thought forgivingly.

“I was once a devout Catholic but I’m not any more. Such religion as I have is to seek truth but I know now I shall never find it—I can only keep on seeking.”

“The search for truth in life and life in truth is, after all, the perfect religion, for in seeking truth we attain that which we can never find in formal creeds,”

was his answer. “We of the East have been—we are interested in Christianity not as a religion so much as the religion of the nations which have developed science and power.

Crosby nor even with Bert Bellamy, product of the sophistication of his age. She remembered a phrase she had read in an essay by James Branch Cabell—“

Man is, they say, the only animal that has reason; and so he must have also, if he is to stay sane, diversion to prevent his using it.

” Cynical, scoffing, it was true, but after all was that not the premise upon which life nowadays seemed to be conducted?

They have thrown overboard, she reflected, all the spiritual anchorages which gave them security in the past and made them strong. Religion had failed them, for they had made of religion an outer form useful only when it served their own selfish purposes.

Men, as always, prayed to a God of their own creation, a Divinity which only mirrored the petty minds of its worshippers.

This man, avid of wealth and power, prayed devoutly and absentmindedly to his conception of God, a being of unlimited wealth, plastered with diamonds, fat, vulgar and, through his wealth, able to dictate the lives of countless millions of creatures scattered throughout a boundless universe.