Plum Bun quotes

Opal Street, as streets go, is no jewel of the first water.

It is merely an imitation, and none too good at that. Narrow, unsparkling, uninviting, it stretches meekly off from dull Jefferson Street to the dingy, drab market which forms the north side of Oxford Street.

their fathers having already taken all. In houses on Opal Street these niceties of distinction are hardly to be found; there is a more direct and concrete contrast.

The satisfied ambition of maturity is a foil for the restless despair of youth.

Affairs in the Murray household were advancing towards this stage; yet not a soul in that family of four could have foretold its coming.

would have made a latter-day Iliad, but to Angela they were merely a description of a life which she at any cost would avoid living.

Somewhere in the world were paths which lead to broad thoroughfares, large, bright houses, delicate niceties of existence.

Those paths Angela meant to find and frequent. At a very early age she had observed that the good things of life are unevenly distributed; merit is not always rewarded; hard labour does not necessarily entail adequate recompense.

Somewhere in the world were paths which lead to broad thoroughfares, large, bright houses, delicate niceties of existence. Those paths Angela meant to find and frequent.

At a very early age she had observed that the good things of life are unevenly distributed; merit is not always rewarded; hard labour does not necessarily entail adequate recompense.

Certain fortuitous endowments, great physical beauty, unusual strength, a certain unswerving singleness of mind—gifts bestowed quite blindly and disproportionately by the forces which control life—these were the qualities which contributed toward a glowing and pleasant existence.

And she was sure that the knowledge once gained would flower in her case to perfection. But her gift was not for her the end of existence; rather it was an adjunct to a life which was to know light, pleasure, gaiety and freedom.

Freedom! That was the note which Angela heard oftenest in the melody of living which was to be hers.

With a wildness that fell just short of unreasonableness she hated restraint.

As it happened the children themselves quite unconsciously solved the dilemma; Virginia found shopping tiring and stupid, Angela returned from her father’s adventuring worn and bored. Gradually the rule was formed that Angela accompanied her mother and Virginia her father.

On such fortuities does life depend.

Little Angela Murray, hurrying through Saturday morning’s scrubbing of steps in order that she might have her bath at one and be with her mother on Chestnut Street at two, never realized that her mother took her pleasure among all these pale people because it …

Father, mother and children, well-dressed, well-fed, united, going to church on a beautiful Sunday morning; there was an immense cosmic rightness about all this which she sensed rather than realized.

She envied no one the incident of finer clothes or a larger home; this unity was the core of happiness, all other satisfactions must radiate from this one; greater happiness could be only a matter of degree but never of essence.

When she grew up she meant to live the same kind of life; she would marry a man exactly like her father and she would conduct her home exactly as did her mother.

Even Angela, somewhat remote and difficult at first, fell into this evening mood and asked for a special tune or a repetition: “I like the way you play that, Jinny.”

For an hour or more they were as close and united as it is possible for a family to be.

At eight o’clock or thereabouts Junius said exactly as though it had not been in his thoughts all evening: “Play the ‘Dying Christian,’ daughter.”

No one, no one, Mary least of all, should guess how completely she had been wounded. Mary and her shrinking bewilderment! Mary and her exclamation: “Coloured!”

This was a curious business, this colour. It was the one god apparently to whom you could sacrifice everything.

On account of it her mother had neglected to greet her own husband on the street. Mary Hastings could let it come between her and her friend.

She herself, appointed two years previously, had had no such luck. Strictly speaking there are no coloured schools as such in Philadelphia.

Yet, by an unwritten law, although coloured children may be taught by white teachers, white children must never receive knowledge at the hands of coloured instructors.

As the number of coloured Normal School graduates is steadily increasing, the city gets around this difficulty by manning a school in a district thickly populated by Negroes, with a coloured principal and a coloured teaching force.

“Nothing,” said Sawyer promptly, “not a thing in the world except school teaching. But that’s just what I object to.

I’m sick of planning my life with regard to being coloured.

I’m not a bit ashamed of my race. I don’t mind in the least that once we were slaves. Every race in the world has at some time occupied a servile position.

“And that’s what I object to,” Angela answered perversely. “I’m sick of this business of always being below or above a certain norm.

Doesn’t anyone think that we have a right to be happy simply, naturally?

”

He had worn a stocking cap in his room all the early part of the day to enable him to perform this gesture without disaster. “There you go, Henson—service to the race and all the rest of it.

Doesn’t it ever occur to you that the race is made up of individuals and you can’t conserve the good of the whole unless you establish that of each part?

Is it better for me to be a first rate dentist and be a cabined and confined personality or a half-baked poet, as you’d call it, and be myself?”

“Just the same as I’ve always thought.

I don’t see any sense in living unless you’re going to be happy.

”

Fifth Avenue is a canyon; its towering buildings dwarf the importance of the people hurrying through its narrow confines.

But Fourteenth Street is a river, impersonally flowing, broad-bosomed, with strange and devious craft covering its expanse. To Angela the famous avenue seemed but one manifestation of living, but Fourteenth Street was the rendezvous of life itself.

Fifth Avenue is a canyon; its towering buildings dwarf the importance of the people hurrying through its narrow confines.

But Fourteenth Street is a river, impersonally flowing, broad-bosomed, with strange and devious craft covering its expanse.

To Angela the famous avenue seemed but one manifestation of living, but Fourteenth Street was the rendezvous of life itself.

For here she must make acquaintances and one of them, perhaps several, must produce some effect on her life, perhaps alter its whole tenor. And for the first time she would be seen, would be met against her new background or rather, against no background.

No boyish stowaway on a ship had a greater exuberance in going forth to meet the unknown than had Angela as she entered her class that first afternoon.

In the room were five people, working steadily and chatting in an extremely desultory way. The instructor, one of the five, motioned her to a seat whose position made her one of the group.

They were gossiping, laughing, dickering, chaffing, combining the customs of the small town with the astonishing cosmopolitanism of their clothes and manners. Nowhere down town did she see life like this.

Oh, all this was fuller, richer, not finer but richer with the difference in quality that there is between velvet and silk.

Harlem was a great city, but after all it was a city within a city, and she was glad, as she strained for last glimpses out of the lurching “L” train, that she had cast in her lot with the dwellers outside its dark and …

But this pleased the girl, for she had been afraid that Paulette would insist on offering to share her own apartment and she would not have known how to refuse.

She had the complete egoist’s desire for solitude.

Paulette lived on Bank Street; she found for her new friend “a duck—just a duck—no other word will describe it—of an apartment” on Jayne Street, two rooms, bath and kitchenette. There was also a tiny balcony giving on a mews.

To her surprise Paulette resented this last statement. “There is a great deal of the man about me.

I’ve learned that a woman is a fool who lets her femininity stand in the way of what she wants.

I’ve made a philosophy of it. I see what I want; I use my wiles as a woman to get it, and I employ the qualities of men, tenacity and ruthlessness, to keep it.

“You’ll get used to them if you go about with these men. You’ll be drinking along with the rest of us.”

She had practically no curiosity and on the other hand no reticences.

And she had met with every conceivable experience, had visited France, Germany and Sweden; she was now contemplating a trip to Italy and might go to Russia;

She didn’t relish the prospect of such an event in a foreign land, it put you too much at the man’s mercy.

An affair, if you were going to have one, was much better conducted on your own pied à terre.

“Yes—why, haven’t you ever had a lover?”

“Oh I don’t say that; but what’s the use of tying yourself up now while you’re young? And then, too, this way you don’t always have them around your feet; you can always leave them or they’ll leave you.

But it’s better for you to leave them first. It insures your pride.

” With her babyish face and her sweet, high voice she was like a child babbling precociously. Yet she seemed bathed in intensity.

It was impossible to realize what she would be like if impassioned or deeply stirred to anger. There would probably be something implacable, godlike about her; she would be capable of a long, slow, steady burning of passion.

Few men would love Martha though many might admire her. But a man once enchanted might easily die for her.

Angela liked her house with its simple elegance, its fine, soft curtains and steady, shaded glow of light that stood somehow for home.

Thus she gave the effect of a flame herself; intense and opaque at the heart where her dress gleamed and shone, transparent and fragile where her white warm neck and face rose into the tenuous shadow of her hair.

Her appearance excited herself.

Roger found her delightful. As to women he considered himself a connoisseur. This girl pleased him in many respects. She was young; she was, when lighted from within by some indescribable mechanism, even beautiful;

… which she—a young woman in the high tide of her youth, her health, and her beauty—would be feeling at receiving in the proper setting the devotion and attention which all women crave, she was swimming in the flood of excitement created by her unique position.

Stolen waters are the sweetest. And Angela never forgot that they were stolen.

She thought: “Here I am having everything that a girl ought to have just because I had sense enough to suit my actions to my appearance.”

He’s a good bit of a rotter, and he doesn’t care what he says or spends to gain his ends.” She laughed at the inquiry in her friend’s eyes. “No, I’ve never given Roger five minutes’ thought. But I know his kind. They’re dangerous.

It’s wrong for men to have both money and power; they’re bound to make some woman suffer.

Come on up the Avenue with me and I’ll buy a hat. I can’t wear this whang any longer. It’s too small, looks like a peanut on a barrel.”

Now it was Spring, Spring in New York. Washington Square was a riot of greens that showed up bravely against the great red brick houses on its north side.

The Arch viewed from Fifth Avenue seemed a gateway to Paradise.

The long deep streets running the length of the city invited an exploration to the ends where pots of gold doubtless gleamed. On the short crosswise streets the April sun streamed in splendid banners of deep golden light.

Now it was Spring, Spring in New York. Washington Square was a riot of greens that showed up bravely against the great red brick houses on its north side. The Arch viewed from Fifth Avenue seemed a gateway to Paradise.

The long deep streets running the length of the city invited an exploration to the ends where pots of gold doubtless gleamed.

On the short crosswise streets the April sun streamed in splendid banners of deep golden light.

Oh if you only knew how happy it makes me to be content, to be satisfied like this. I could get down on my knees and thank God for it like a little boy.” He looked like a little boy as he said it. “

Happiness is a hard thing to find and harder still to keep.

”

“It is a game, and the hardest game in the world for a woman, but the most fascinating; the hardest in which to strike a happy medium. You see, you have to be careful not to withhold too much and yet to give very little.

If we don’t give enough we lose them. If we give too much we lose ourselves.

Oh, Angèle, God doesn’t like women.”

the hardest in which to strike a happy medium. You see, you have to be careful not to withhold too much and yet to give very little. If we don’t give enough we lose them. If we give too much we lose ourselves.

Oh, Angèle, God doesn’t like women.

”

They ought to get down on their knees every day and thank God for permitting them to be their normal selves and not having to play a game.” For a moment her still, proud face broke into deeps of pain. “

Oh, Angèle, think of loving and never, never being able to show it until you’re asked for it; think of living a game every hour of your life!

” Her face quivered back to its normal immobility.

“But I fixed that. There were three or four people passing near us. I drew back until they were well within hearing range, and then I said to her: ‘I beg pardon but what did you say your last name was?’

Well, when a person’s named Spewer she can’t shout it across a hotel lobby!

Oh, she came climbing down off her high horse; she respects me to this day, I tell you.”

And they’ll come—like Bo Peep’s sheep. But I don’t want a man like that; he’d cramp my style. His impudence, expecting a woman to repress or evoke her emotions just as he wants them!

Hasn’t a woman as much right to feel as a man and to feel first?

Never mind, some woman is going to ‘get’ Roger yet. He doesn’t think it possible because he has wealth and position. He’ll be glad to come running to Carlotta then.

Life had somehow come to a standstill; gone was its quality of high adventure and yet with the sense of tameness came no compensating note of assurance, of permanence.

Angela pondered much about this; with her usual instinct for clarity, for a complete understanding of her own emotional life, she took to probing her inner consciousness. The fault, she decided, was bound up in her relationship with Roger.

Even when her material safety and security were at stake and she had dreamed vaguely of yielding to Roger’s entreaties to ensure that safety and security, there might have been some excuse.

Life, she considered, came before creed or code or convention.

Or if she had loved and there had been no other way she might have argued for this as the supreme experience of her life. But she was no longer conscious of striving for marriage with Roger;

Better a wound to her passion than later this terrible gash in her proud assurance, this hurt in the core of herself. “God!” she said, raging in her tiny apartment as a tiger in a menagerie rages in its inadequate cage,

“God, isn’t there any place where man’s responsibility to woman begins?”

But she had grown too much into the habit of deliberately ordering her life, of hewing her own path, of removing the difficulties that beset that path, to let herself be sickened, utterly prostrated by what had befallen her. Roger, her companion, had gone;

She remembered the people in Union Square on whom she had spied so blithely when she had first come to New York. Then she had thought of them as being “down and out,” mere idlers, good for nothing.

It had not occurred to her that their chief disaster might be loneliness.

Her office was on Twenty-third Street and often at the noon-hour she walked down to the dingy Square and looked again in on the sprawling, half-recumbent, dejected figures. And between them and herself she was able to detect a terrifying relationship.

New York, it appeared, had two visages. It could offer an aspect radiant with promise or a countenance lowering and forbidding. With its flattering possibilities it could elevate to the seventh heaven, or lower to the depths of hell with its crushing negations.

And loneliness! Loneliness such as that offered by the great, noisy city could never be imagined.

To realize it one would have to experience it. Coming home from work Angela used to study the people on the trains, trying to divine what cause had engraved a given expression on their faces, particularly on the faces of young women.

But the urge to wander was no longer in the ascendant. The prospect of Europe did not seem as alluring now as the prospect of New York had appeared when she lived in Philadelphia.

It would be nice to stay put, rooted; to have friends, experiences, memories.

Paulette, triumphant to the last, had left with Hudson for Russia. Martha and Ladislas were spending the summer with Martha’s people on Long Island. Roger had dropped into the void, but she could not make herself miss him;

She was twenty-six years old and the fact that after having lived all those years she was still solitary appalled her. Perhaps some curse such as one reads of in medieval legends had fallen upon her.

“Perhaps I’m not meant to have friends,”

she told herself lying face downwards in her pillows on the sweltering June nights. And a great nostalgia for something real and permanent swept upon her;

Supper over, the dishes cleared away, she sat down and prepared to think. Callers were unlikely; indeed there was no one to call, since Ashley was out of town for the weekend, but the pathos of this fact left her untouched.

Tonight she courted loneliness.

An oft heard remark of her mother’s kept running through her mind:

Life, life was what she was struggling for, the right to live and be happy. And once more her mother’s dictum flashed into her mind.

“Life is more important than colour.”

This, she told herself, was an omen, her mother was watching over her, guiding her. And, burying her face in her hands, she fell on her knees and wept and prayed.

Indeed she made no scruple of furthering these same interests by her unusual and pervasive sex charm. But this was Paulette, a remarkable personage, a woman apart. But for most women there must be the safety, the assurance of relationship that marriage affords.

Indeed, most women must be able to say as did men, “You are mine,” not merely, “I am yours.”

A certain scorching humility thrust itself upon her. In all her manifestations of human relationships, how selfish she had been! She had left Virginia, she had taken up with Roger to further her own interests.

Then she remembered that Anthony was white and, bewildered, she ceased trying to cogitate, to unravel, decipher, evaluate.

She was lonely, she loved. She meant to find a companion; she meant to be beloved.

None of her new friends was acquainted with Anthony. Ralph Ashley in response to a tentative question could not recall ever having seen him. The time was August, consequently he could not be at the school. Telephone books revealed nothing. “Lost in a great city!”

With something shamefaced in her manner she took it from him. “I’m not sure yet whether I’ll develop it. I—it’s an idea that has slowly taken possession of me since I’ve been in New York.

The tall woman is Life and the idea is that she laughs at us; laughs at the poor people who fall into the traps which she sets for us.

”

As long as she had considered it successful, she had been able to relegate it to the uttermost limbo of her self-consciousness. But now that it seemed to avail nothing it loomed up before her in all its social significance.

She was that creature whom men, in their selfish fear, have contrived to paint as the least attractive of human kind⁠—“a girl who runs after men.”

It seemed to her that she could not stand the application of the phrase, no matter how unjustly, how inaptly used in her own case.

He began obediently. “It was not long after I—I lost you. She came to me out of nowhere, came walking to me into my room by mistake; she didn’t see me. And she put her head down on her hands and began to cry terribly.

I had been crying too⁠—in my heart, you understand⁠—and for a moment I thought she might be the echo of that cry, might be the cry itself.

You see, I’d been drinking a little—you were so far removed, white and all that sort of thing. I couldn’t marry a white woman, you know, not a white American. I owed that to my father.

“The worst of it is I’ll always be thinking of you. Oh Angèle, what does it matter, what does anything matter if we just have each other?

This damned business of colour, is it going to ruin all chances of happiness?

I’ve known trouble, pain, terrible devastating pain all my life. You’ve suffered too. Together perhaps we could find peace. We’d go to your sister and explain. She is kind and sweet; surely she’d understand.”

Minutely, bit by bit, in the long forty-eight hours she went over her life; was there anything, any overt act, any crime which she had committed and for which she might atone? She had been selfish, yes; but, said her reasoning and unwearied mind,

“Everybody who survives at all is selfish, it is one of the prerequisites of survival.”

In “passing” from one race to the other she had done no harm to anyone. Indeed she had been forced to take this action. But she should not have forsaken Virginia.

Or no, she was still studying with the same old absorption—an absorption terribly, painfully concentrated—the lessons set down by life. It was useless to revolve in her head the causes for her suffering, they were so trivial, so silly.

She said to herself, “There is no sorrow in the world like my sorrow,” and knew even as she said it that someone else, perhaps only in the next block, in the next house, was saying the same thing.

Mrs. Denver tapped lightly, opened the door, came in closing it mysteriously behind her.

It was a delicate situation; Angela had to feel her way; she could think of nothing but the trite and obvious. “

After all, Rachel, your parents have lived their lives; they have no business trying to live yours.

Personally I think all this pother about race and creed and colour, tommyrot. In your place I should certainly follow my own wishes; John seems to be the man for you.”

Their lives, she thought now would never, could never touch and she was quite reconciled. Moreover, in some of Virginia’s remarks there was the hint of the acceptance of such a condition. Something had brought an irrevocable separation.

They would always view each other from the two sides of an abyss, narrow but deep, deep.

The younger girl prattled on. “I don’t know whether Sara told you his name—Anthony Cross? Isn’t it a dear name?”

About this she had her own ideas. Mystery might add to the charm of personality but it certainly could not be said to add to the charm of living.

Once she thought that stolen waters were sweetest, but now it was the unwinding road and the open book that most intrigued.

Ashley, she found, for all his shyness, possessed very definite ideas and convictions of his own, was absolutely unfettered in his mode of thought, and quite unmoved by social traditions and standards.

About this she had her own ideas.

Mystery might add to the charm of personality but it certainly could not be said to add to the charm of living.

Once she thought that stolen waters were sweetest, but now it was the unwinding road and the open book that most intrigued.

Of course some of this propinquity was due to outer pressure, but there was present, too, a hidden consciousness of race-duty, a something which if translated said:

“Perhaps you do pull me down a little from the height to which I have climbed. But on the other hand, perhaps, I’m helping you to rise.”

There was a hairdresser’s establishment on 136th Street where Virginia used to have her beautiful hair treated; where Sara Penton, whose locks were of the same variety as Matthew’s, used to repair to have their unruliness “pressed.”

The eternal routine of life went on⁠—meals, slumber, talk, work⁠—and all of it meaning nothing; a void starting nowhere and leading nowhither; a “getting through” with the days.

Gradually however two points fixed themselves in her horizon, and about these her life revolved. One was her work—her art. Every week found her spending three or four of its nights at her easel.

“I’m one of them—do you find me worthless or dishonest or offensive in any way?” Such a dénouement would have, she felt, been a fine gesture.

But life she knew had a way of allowing grand gestures to go unremarked and unrewarded.

Would it be worth while to throw away the benefits of casual whiteness in America when no great issue was at stake? Would it indeed be worth while to forfeit them when a great issue was involved?

Would it indeed be worth while to forfeit them when a great issue was involved? Remembering the material age in which she lived and the material nation of which she was a member, she was doubtful.

Her mother’s old dictum recurred: “Life is more important than colour.”

The year slipped by. Virginia seemed in no haste to marry. Anthony whom Angela saw occasionally at the Art School shared apparently in this cool deliberateness. Yet there was nothing in his action or manner to make her feel that he was anticipating a change.

… understand that sometimes they have to stop their fight for the trimmings of life in order to hang on to the essentials which they’ve got to have and for which they must contend too every day just as hard as they did the first day.

No, they’re not quitters, they’ve merely learned to let go so they can conserve their strength for another bad day.

I’m coloured and I know.”

in spite of my efforts to break away I really don’t, Virginia. But because this country of ours makes it so important, against my own conviction I was beginning to feel as though I were laden down with a great secret.

Yet when I begin to delve into it, the matter of blood seems nothing compared with individuality, character, living.

The truth of the matter is, the whole business was just making me fagged to death.”

… way it would have been a fine thing if she could have held on, but she was perfectly justified in letting go so she could avoid still greater bitterness and disappointment and so she could have something left in her to devote to her art.

You can’t fight and create at the same time.

And I understand, too, why your Anthony bestirs himself every little while and makes his confession; simply so he won’t have to be bothered with the trappings of pretence and watchfulness. I suppose he told you about that night down at Martha Burden’s?”

Of course I don’t mind admitting that at any time I’d have given up even you for Matthew. But next to being his wife I’d rather live with you, and next to that I’d like to marry Anthony.

I don’t like to be alone; for though I can fend for myself I don’t want to.

”

Martha, for instance, is keenly disappointed because I won’t let the committee which had been working for Miss Powell take up my case. I suspect she thinks we’re all quitters. But I know when I’ve had enough.

I told her I wanted to spend my life doing something besides fighting.

Moreover, the Committee, like myself, is pretty sick of the whole affair, though not for the same reason, and I think there’d be even less chance for a readjustment in my case than there was in Miss Powell’s.”

She walked up toward Sixteenth Street.

It was Sunday and the beautiful melancholy of the day was settling on the quiet city.

There was a freshness and a solemnity in the air as though even the atmosphere had been rarified and soothed. A sense of loneliness invaded her; this was the city of her birth, of her childhood and of most of her life.

The Sixteenth Street car set her down at Jefferson Street and slowly she traversed the three long blocks. Always quiet, always respectable, they were doubly so in the sanctity of Sunday morning.

What a terrible day Sunday could be without friends, ties, home, family.

Only five years ago, less than five years, she had had all the simple, stable fixtures of family life, the appetizing breakfast, the music, the church with its interesting, paintable types, long afternoons and evenings with visitors and discussions beating in the void.

And Matthew Henson, would he, she wondered, give her welcome? But she thought that still she did not want to see him.

She was not happy, but she was not through adventuring, through tasting life.

And she knew that a life spent with Matthew Henson would mean a cessation of that. After all, was he, with his steadiness, his uprightness, his gift for responsibility any happier than she? She doubted it.

“No, no, of course not. I just wanted to look at it again. I used to live here, you see. I wondered—” Even if she did get permission to go inside, could she endure it?

If she could just stand once in that little back room and cry and cry⁠—perhaps her tears would flood away all that mass of regret and confusion and futile memories, and she could begin life all over with a blank page.

Thank God she was young! Suddenly it seemed to her that entering the house once more, standing in that room would be a complete panacea. Raising her eyes expectantly to the woman’s face she began: “Would you be so kind—?”