Short Fiction quotes

This, she reflected, was of a piece with all that she knew of Clare Kendry.

Stepping always on the edge of danger.

Always aware, but not drawing back or turning aside. Certainly not because of any alarms or feeling of outrage on the part of others.

Chicago. August. A brilliant day, hot, with a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like molten rain.

A day on which the very outlines of the buildings shuddered as if in protest at the heat.

Quivering lines sprang up from baked pavements and wriggled along the shining car-tracks. The automobiles parked at the kerbs were a dancing blaze, and the glass of the shopwindows threw out a blinding radiance.

The automobiles parked at the kerbs were a dancing blaze, and the glass of the shopwindows threw out a blinding radiance. Sharp particles of dust rose from the burning sidewalks, stinging the seared or dripping skins of wilting pedestrians.

What small breeze there was seemed like the breath of a flame fanned by slow bellows.

It was on that day of all others that Irene set out to shop for the things which she had promised to take home from Chicago to her two small sons, Brian junior and Theodore.

As if aware of her desire and her hesitation, Clare remarked, thoughtfully: “You know, ’Rene, I’ve often wondered why more coloured girls, girls like you and Margaret Hammer and Esther Dawson and—oh, lots of others—never ‘passed’ over. It’s such a frightfully easy thing to do.

If one’s the type, all that’s needed is a little nerve.

”

“Have I?” Clare exclaimed. “It, they, made me what I am today.

For, of course, I was determined to get away, to be a person and not a charity or a problem, or even a daughter of the indiscreet Ham.

Then, too, I wanted things. I knew I wasn’t bad-looking and that I could ‘pass.’ You can’t know, ’Rene, how, when I used to go over to the south side, I used almost to hate all of you.

Clare Kendry was still leaning back in the tall chair, her sloping shoulders against the carved top. She sat with an air of indifferent assurance, as if arranged for, desired.

About her clung that dim suggestion of polite insolence with which a few women are born and which some acquire with the coming of riches or importance.

Clare, it gave Irene a little prick of satisfaction to recall, hadn’t got that by passing herself off as white. She herself had always had it.

A tempting mouth. The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre. And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes.

Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.

Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes! mysterious and concealing. And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic.

She was through with Clare Kendry.

On Tuesday morning a dome of grey sky rose over the parched city, but the stifling air was not relieved by the silvery mist that seemed to hold a promise of rain, which did not fall.

To Irene Redfield this soft foreboding fog was another reason for doing nothing about seeing Clare Kendry that afternoon.

At that, Irene, who was still hugging her unhappy don’t-care feeling of rightness, broke in, saying bitingly: “It evidently doesn’t occur to either you or Gertrude that he might possibly be sincere in changing his religion.

Surely everyone doesn’t do everything for gain.

”

Clare began to talk, steering carefully away from anything that might lead towards race or other thorny subjects.

It was the most brilliant exhibition of conversational weightlifting that Irene had ever seen.

Her words swept over them in charming well-modulated streams. Her laughs tinkled and pealed. Her little stories sparkled.

… 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.

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.

If, at the time of choosing, Clare hadn’t precisely reckoned the cost, she had, nevertheless, no right to expect others to help make up the reckoning.

The trouble with Clare was, not only that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too, but that she wanted to nibble at the cakes of other folk as well.

Irene Redfield found it hard to sympathize with this new tenderness, this avowed yearning of Clare’s for “my own people.”

She said: “

It’s funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it.

It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”

“Rot!

Everything can’t be explained by some general biological phrase.

”

Not with that dark secret forever crouching in the background of her consciousness. And yet she hadn’t the air of a woman whose life had been touched by uncertainty or suffering. Pain, fear, and grief were things that left their mark on people.

Even love, that exquisite torturing emotion, left its subtle traces on the countenance.

But Clare—she had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, somewhat lonely child—selfish, wilful, and disturbing.

“Yes,” Wentworth said, “that’s it.

Everybody seems to be here and a few more.

But what I’m trying to find out is the name, status, and race of the blonde beauty out of the fairytale. She’s dancing with Ralph Hazelton at the moment. Nice study in contrasts, that.”

It was.

Clare fair and golden, like a sunlit day. Hazelton dark, with gleaming eyes, like a moonlit night.

“She’s a girl I used to know a long time ago in Chicago. And she wanted especially to meet you.”

She was generally liked. She was so friendly and responsive, and so ready to press the sweet food of flattery on all. Nor did she object to appearing a bit pathetic and ill-used, so that people could feel sorry for her.

And, no matter how often she came among them, she still remained someone apart, a little mysterious and strange, someone to wonder about and to admire and to pity.

Her visits were undecided and uncertain, being, as they were, dependent on the presence or absence of John Bellew in the city. But she did, once in a while, manage to steal uptown for an afternoon even when he was not away.

“Children aren’t everything,” was Clare Kendry’s answer to that. “

There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.

” And she laughed, more, it seemed, at some secret joke of her own than at her words.

“But it’s true, ’Rene. Can’t you realize that I’m not like you a bit?

Why, to get the things I want badly enough, I’d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away.

Really, ’Rene, I’m not safe.” Her voice as well as the look on her face had a beseeching earnestness that made Irene vaguely uncomfortable.

She didn’t like it to be warm and springy when it should have been cold and crisp, or grey and cloudy as if snow was about to fall.

The weather, like people, ought to enter into the spirit of the season.

Here the holidays were almost upon them, and the streets through which she had come were streaked with rills of muddy water and the sun shone so warmly that children had taken off their hats and scarfs.

Hideous. A great weariness came over her. Even the small exertion of pouring golden tea into thin old cups seemed almost too much for her. She went on pouring. Made repetitions of her smile. Answered questions. Manufactured conversation. She thought: “

I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.

”

Now. She couldn’t, it seemed, help his knowing. It was too late for that. But she could and would keep him from knowing that she knew. She could, she would bear it. She’d have to. There were the boys. Her whole body went taut.

In that second she saw that she could bear anything, but only if no one knew that she had anything to bear.

It hurt. It frightened her, but she could bear it.

For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race.

It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well.

It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham’s dark children.

“Stupid!” she cried. “

Is it stupid to want my children to be happy?

” Her lips were quivering.

Or was it that she lacked the capacity for the acme of suffering? “No, no!” she denied fiercely. “I’m human like everybody else. It’s just that I’m so tired, so worn out, I can’t feel any more.” But she did not really believe that.

Security. Was it just a word?

If not, then was it only by the sacrifice of other things, happiness, love, or some wild ecstasy that she had never known, that it could be obtained?

Could think again of ways to keep Brian by her side, and in New York. For she would not go to Brazil.

She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American.

She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted. Not even because of Clare Kendry, or a hundred Clare Kendrys.