QUICKSAND


OF MIC
VERSITY

. UNIVE
"THLY
AN SI
LIBRAL





HIGAN
OF MICA

BRARI
OCLAINO
HIV


QUICK SAND





QUICKS AND


THE NEGRO
IN UNUSUAL FICTION
NIGGER HEAVEN
by CARL VAN VECHTEN
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN
by JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
THE FIRE IN THE FLINT
by WALTER F, WHITE
FLIGHT
by WALTER F. WHITE
LATTERDAY SYMPHONY
by ROMER WILSON


UICKS AND
BY
NELLA LARSEN
NEW YORK & LONDON
ALFRED · A · KNOPF
1928


ima
:2:
COPYRIGHT I
BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF
AMERICA


FOR E. S. I.





QUICKS AND
My old man died in a fine big house.
My ma died in a shack.
I wonder where I'm gonna die,
Being neither white nor black?
LANGSTON HUGHES


English
Whiteniny
11-23-48
164624
QUICKS AND
ONE
P PA
Helga CRANE sat alone in her room, which .
at that hour, eight in the evening, was in soft
gloom. Only a single reading lamp, dimmed
by a great black and red shade, made a pool
of light on the blue Chinese carpet, on the
bright covers of the books which she had taken
down from their long shelves, on the white
pages of the opened one selected, on the shin-
ing brass bowl crowded with many-colored
nasturtiums beside her on the low table, -
and on the oriental silk which covered the stool
at her slim feet. It was a comfortable room,
furnished with rare and intensely personal
taste, flooded with Southern sun in the day, but
shadowy just then with the drawn curtains and
single shaded light. Large, too. So large that
the spot where Helga sat was a small oasis in
a desert of darkness. And eerily quiet. But that
1.
a


QUICKS AND
was what she liked after her taxing day's work,
after the hard classes, in which she gave will-
ingly and unsparingly of herself with no ap-
parent return. She loved this tranquillity, this
quiet, following the fret and strain of the long
hours spent among fellow members of a care-
lessly unkind and gossiping faculty, following
the strenuous rigidity of conduct required in
this huge educational community of which she
was an insignificant part. This was her rest,
this intentional isolation for a short while in
the evening, this little time in her own attrac-
tive room with her own books. To the rapping
of other teachers, bearing fresh scandals, or
seeking information, or other more concrete fa-
vors, or merely talk, at that hour Helga Crane
never opened her door.
An observer would have thought her
well fitted to that framing of light and shade.
A slight girl of twenty-two years, with narrow,
sloping shoulders and delicate, but well-turned,
arms and legs, she had, none the less, an air of


QUICKS AND
radiant, careless health. In vivid green and
gold negligee and glistening brocaded mules,
deep sunk in the big high-backed chair, against
whose dark tapestry her sharply cut face, with
skin like yellow satin, was distinctly outlined,
she was—to use a hackneyed word-attractive.
Black, very broad brows over soft, yet pene-
trating, dark eyes, and a pretty mouth, whose
sensitive and sensuous lips had a slight ques-
tioning petulance and a tiny dissatisfied droop,
were the features on which the observer's at-
tention would fasten; though her nose was
good, her ears delicately chiseled, and her
curly blue-black hair plentiful and always stray-
ing in a little wayward, delightful way. Just
then it was tumbled, falling unrestrained about
her face and on to her shoulders.
Helga Crane tried not to think of her
work and the school as she sat there. Ever since
her arrival in Naxos she had striven to keep
these ends of the days from the intrusion of
irritating thoughts and worries. Usually she
CORRER
3


QUICKS AND
ne
was successful. But not this evening. Of the
books which she had taken from their places
she had decided on Marmaduke Pickthall's
Saïd the Fisherman. She wanted forgetful-
ness, complete mental relaxation, rest from
thought of any kind. For the day had been more
than usually crowded with distasteful encoun-
ters and stupid perversities. The sultry hot
Southern spring had left her strangely tired,
and a little unnerved. And annoying beyond
all other happenings had been that affair of the
noon period, now again thrusting itself on her
already irritated mind.
She had counted on a few spare minutes
in which to indulge in the sweet pleasure of a
bath and a fresh, cool change of clothing. And
instead her luncheon time had been shortened,
as had that of everyone else, and immediately
after the hurried gulping down of a heavy hot
meal the hundreds of students and teachers had
been herded into the sun-baked chapel to listen
to the banal, the patronizing, and even the in-


QUICKS AND
:
* {.
пу
sulting remarks of one of the renowned white
preachers of the state.
Helga shuddered a little as she recalled
some of the statements made by that holy white
man of God to the black folk sitting so respect-
fully before him.
This was, he had told them with obvious
sectional pride, the finest school for Negroes
anywhere in the country, north or south; in voice of
fact, it was better even than a great many
schools for white children. And he had dared
any Northerner to come south and after look-
ing upon this great institution to say that the
Southerner mistreated the Negro. And he had
said that if all Negroes would only take a leaf
out of the book of Naxos and conduct them-
selves in the manner of the Naxos products,
there would be no race problem, because Naxos
Negroes knew what was expected of them.
They had good sense and they had good taste.
They knew enough to stay in their places, and
that, said the preacher, showed good taste. He
SO
e
1
10
n
ase


QUICK SAND
spoke of his great admiration for the Negro
race, no other race in so short a time had made
so much progress, but he had urgently besought
them to know when and where to stop. He
hoped, he sincerely hoped, that they wouldn't
become avaricious and grasping, thinking only
of adding to their earthly goods, for that would
be a sin in the sight of Almighty God. And then
he had spoken of contentment, embellishing his
words with scriptural quotations and pointing
out to them that it was their duty to be satisfied
in the estate to which they had been called,
hewers of wood and drawers of water. And
then he had prayed.
Sitting there in her room, long hours
after, Helga again felt a surge of hot anger
and seething resentment. And again it subsided
in amazement at the memory of the consider-
able applause which had greeted the speaker
just before he had asked his God's blessing
upon them.
The South. Naxos. Negro education.
vers


QUICKS AND
Suddenly she hated them all. Strange, too, for
this was the thing which she had ardently de-
sired to share in, to be a part of this monument
to one man's genius and vision. She pinned a
scrap of paper about the bulb under the lamp's
shade, for, having discarded her book in the
certainty that in such a mood even Saïd and
his audacious villainy could not charm her, she
wanted an even more soothing darkness. She
14
yished it were vacation, so that she might get
away for a time.
“No, forever!” she said aloud.
The minutes gathered into hours, but inabilir
still she sat motionless, a disdainful smile or an Art
angry frown passing now and then across her
face. Somewhere in the room a little clock ticked
time away. Somewhere outside, a whippoor-
will wailed. Evening died. A sweet smell of
early Southern flowers rushed in on a newly-
risen breeze which suddenly parted the thin
silk curtains at the opened windows. A slender,
frail glass vase fell from the sill with a tingling


Brun Mith
of cha xusus
instabilimin
nerimon's
* the
pot is
tenon le point
.
QUICKS AND
crash, but Helga Crane did not shift her posi-
tion. And the night grew cooler, and older.
cm At last she stirred, uncertainly, but with
an overpowering desire for action of some sort.
men A second she hesitated, then rose abruptly and
pressed the electric switch with determined
firmness, flooding suddenly the shadowy room
with a white glare of light. Next she made a
quick nervous tour to the end of the long room,
paused a moment before the old bow-legged
secretary that held with almost articulate pro-
test her school-teacher paraphernalia of drab
books and papers. Frantically Helga Crane
clutched at the lot and then flung them vio-
lently, scornfully toward the wastebasket. It
received a part, allowing the rest to spill un-
tidily over the floor. The girl smiled ironically,
seeing in the mess a simile of her own earnest
endeavor to inculcate knowledge into her indif-
ferent classes.
Yes, it was like that; a few of the ideas
which she tried to put into the minds behind
0105
IC
n-


QUICKS AND
WAREN
those baffling ebony, bronze, and gold faces
reached their destination. The others were left
scattered about. And, like the gay, indifferent
wastebasket, it wasn't their fault. No, it wasn't
the fault of those minds back of the diverse
colored faces. It was, rather, the fault of the
method, the general idea behind the system.
Like her own hurried shot at the basket, the
aim was bad, the material drab and badly pre-
pared for its purpose.
This great community, she thought, was
no longer a school. It had grown into a ma-
chine. It was now a show place in the black belt,
exemplification of the white man's magnanim.
ity, refutation of the black man's inefficiency. Chile
Life had died out of it. It was, Helga decided,
now only a big knife with cruelly sharp edges ?
ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white 79
man's pattern. Teachers as well as students
were subjected to the paring process, for it tol-
erated no innovations, no individualisms. Ideas
it rejected, and looked with open hostility on
SBAN
fficiency. criticija
еdgеѕ impr :
white (..! See


QUICK SAND
W6
one and all who had the temerity to offer a sug-
gestion or ever so mildly express a disapproval.
Enthusiasm, spontaneity, if not actually sup-
pressed, were at least openly regretted as
unladylike or ungentlemanly qualities. The
place was smug and fat with self-satisfaction.
A peculiar characteristic trait, cold,
slowly accumulated unreason in which all values
were distorted or else ceased to exist, had with
surprising ferociousness shaken the bulwarks of
that self-restraint which was also, curiously, a
part of her nature. And now that it had waned
as quickly as it had risen, she smiled again, and
this time the smile held a faint amusement,
which wiped away the little hardness which had
congealed her lovely face. Nevertheless she was
NYX soothed by the impetuous discharge of violence,
and a sigh of relief came from her.
She said aloud, quietly, dispassionately:
"Well, I'm through with that,” and, shutting
off the hard, bright blaze of the overhead
lights, went back to her chair and settled down
ΙΟ


een for months fighting cepat.
w
nella Moncler
it hat the Adrian yum.
anusiplaced un- ithe
QUICKS AND
with an odd gesture of sudden soft collapse,
like a person who had been for months fighting
the devil and then unexpectedly had turned u p
round and agreed to do his bidding. w eniem,
Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for the
almost two years, at first with the keen joy ola'
and zest of those immature people who have beetle!
dreamed dreams of doing good to their fellow umykieli
men. But gradually this zest was blotted out, ".
giving place to a deep hatred for the trivial
-
!!!
hypocrisies and careless cruelties which were,
unintentionally perhaps, a part of the Naxos
policy of uplift. Yet she had continued to try
not only to teach, but to befriend those happy?
singing children, whose charm and distinctive-
ness the school was so surely ready to destroy.
Instinctively Helga was aware that their smil-
ing submissiveness covered many poignant
heartaches and perhaps much secret contempt
for their instructors. But she was powerless. In
Naxos between teacher and student, between
condescending authority and smoldering re-
berita t
nes
i
nity submissive
Dynamics
Of Qunnin
are promjenest
As us hati


QUICKS AND
GRID
sentment, the gulf was too great, and too few
had tried to cross it. It couldn't be spanned by
one sympathetic teacher. It was useless to offer
her atom of friendship, which under the exist-
ing conditions was neither wanted nor under-
stood. wondering of NAYOS
Nor was the general atmosphere of
Naxos, its air of self-rightness and intolerant
dislike of difference, the best of mediums for a
pretty, solitary girl with no family connections.
Helga's essentially likable and charming per-
sonality was smudged out. She had felt this for
a long time. Now she faced with determination
that other truth which she had refused to for-
mulate in her thoughts, the fact that she was ut.
terly unfitted for teaching, even for mere exist-
ence, in Naxos. She was a failure here. She had,
she conceded now, been silly, obstinate, to per-
sist for so long. A failure. Therefore, no need,
no use, to stay longer. Suddenly she longed for
immediate departure. How good, she thought,
to go now, tonight I-and frowned to remem-
I 2


QUICKS AND
ber how impossible that would be. "The digni-
taries,” she said, "are not in their offices, and
there will be yards and yards of red tape to un-
wind, gigantic, impressive spools of it.”
And there was James Vayle to be told,
and much-needed money to be got. James,
she decided, had better be told at once. She
looked at the clock racing indifferently on. No,
too late. It would have to be tomorrow.
She hated to admit that money was the
most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it
was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the
unalterable truth that it could influence her ac-
tions, block her desires. A sordid necessity to be
grappled with. With Helga it was almost a
superstition that to concede to money its im-
portance magnified its power. Still, in spite of
her reluctance and distaste, her financial situa-
tion would have to be faced, and plans made, if
she were to get away from Naxos with anything
like the haste which she now so ardently de-
sired.
WS
13


QUICKS AND
Most of her earnings had gone into
clothes, into books, into the furnishings of the
room which held her. All her life Helga Crane
had loved and longed for nice things. Indeed,
it was this craving, this urge for beauty which
had helped to bring her into disfavor in
Naxos—"pride” and “vanity" her detractors
called it.
The sum owing to her by the school
would just a little more than buy her ticket
back to Chicago. It was too near the end of the
school term to hope to get teaching-work any-
where. If she couldn't find something else, she
would have to ask Uncle Peter for a loan.
Uncle Peter was, she knew, the one relative
who thought kindly, or even calmly, of her. Her
step-father, her step-brothers and sisters, and
the numerous cousins, aunts, and other uncles
could not be even remotely considered. She
laughed a little, scornfully, reflecting that the
antagonism was mutual, or, perhaps, just a
trifle keener on her side than on theirs. They
14


QUICKS AND
feared and hated her. She pitied and despised
them. Uncle Peter was different. In his con-
temptuous way he was fond of her. Her beauti-
ful, unhappy mother had been his favorite sis-
ter. Even so, Helga Crane knew that he would
be more likely to help her because her need
would strengthen his oft-repeated conviction
that because of her Negro blood she would
never amount to anything, than from motives
of affection or loving memory. This knowledge,
in its present aspect of truth, irritated her to an
astonishing degree. She regarded Uncle Peter
almost vindictively, although always he had
been extraordinarily generous with her and she
fully intended to ask his assistance. “A beggar,”
she thought ruefully, "cannot expect to choose.”
Returning to James Vayle, her thoughts
took on the frigidity of complete determination.
Her resolution to end her stay in Naxos would
of course inevitably end her engagement to
James. She had been engaged to him since her
first semester there, when both had been new
15


QUICKS AND
workers, and both were lonely. Together they
had discussed their work and problems in ad-
justment, and had drifted into a closer rela-
tionship. Bitterly she reflected that James had
speedily and with entire ease fitted into his
niche. He was now completely "naturalized,”
as they used laughingly to call it. Helga, on the
other hand, had never quite achieved the unmis-
takable Naxos mold, would never achieve it,
in spite of much trying. She could neither con...
sene form, nor be happy in her unconformity. This
she saw clearly now, and with cold anger at all
the past futile effort. What a wastel How pa-
thetically she had struggled in those first
months and with what small success. A lack
somewhere. Always she had considered it a
lack of understanding on the part of the com-
munity, but in her present new revolt she re-
alized that the fault had been partly hers. A
lack of acquiescence. She hadn't really wanted
to be made over. This thought bred a sense of
henne
to have to bickare


QUICKS AND
shame, a feeling of ironical disillusion. Evi-
dently there were parts of her she couldn't be
proud of. The revealing picture of her past
striving was too humiliating. It was as if she
had deliberately planned to steal an ugly thing,
for which she had no desire, and had been
found out.
Ironically she visualized the discomfort
of James Vayle. How her maladjustment had
bothered him! She had a faint notion that it
was behind his ready assent to her suggestion
anent a longer engagement than, originally, they
had planned. He was liked and approved of in
Naxos and loathed the idea that the girl he
was to marry couldn't manage to win liking and
approval also. Instinctively Helga had known
that secretly he had placed the blame upon her.
How right he had been! Certainly his attitude
had gradually changed, though he still gave her
his attentions. Naxos pleased him and he had
become content with life as it was lived there.
17


QUICKS AND
No longer lonely, he was now one of the com-
munity and so beyond the need or the desire to
discuss its affairs and its failings with an out-
sider. She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite
way, a disturbing factor. She knew too that a
something held him, a something against which
he was powerless. The idea that she was in but
one nameless way necessary to him filled her
with a sensation amounting almost to shame.
And yet his mute helplessness against that an-
cient appeal by which she held him pleased her
and fed her vanity—gave her a feeling of
power. At the same time she shrank away from
it, subtly aware of possibilities she herself
couldn't predict.
Helga's own feelings defeated inquiry,
but honestly confronted, all pretense brushed
aside, the dominant one, she suspected, was
relief. At least, she felt no regret that tomor-
row would mark the end of any claim she had
upon him. The surety that the meeting would
I 8


QUICK SAND
be a clash annoyed her, for she had no talent
for quarreling—when possible she preferred to
flee. That was all.
The family of James Vayle, in near-by
Atlanta, would be glad. They had never liked
the engagement, had never liked Helga Crane.
Her own lack of family disconcerted them. No
family. That was the crux of the whole matter.
For Helga, it accounted for everything, her
failure here in Naxos, her former loneliness in
Nashville. It even accounted for her engage-
ment to James. Negro society, she had learned,
was as complicated. and as rigid in its ramifica-
tions as the highest strata of white society. If
you couldn't prove your ancestry and connec-
tions, you were tolerated, but you didn't "be-
long." You could be queer, or even attractive,
or bad, or brilliant, or even love beauty and
such nonsense if you were a Rankin, or a Les-
lie, or a Scoville; in other words, if you had a
family. But if you were just plain Helga Crane,
19


QUICKS AND
OUS
of whom nobody had ever heard, it was pre-
sumptuous of you to be anything but inconspicu-
ous and conformable.
To relinquish James Vayle would most
certainly be social suicide, for the Vayles were
people of consequence. The fact that they were
a "first family' had been one of James's at-
tractions for the obscure Helga. She had
wanted social background, but-she had not
imagined that it could be so stuffy.
She made a quick movement of impa-
tience and stood up. As she did so, the room
whirled about her in an impish, hateful way.
Familiar objects seemed suddenly unhappily
distant. Faintness closed about her like a vise.
She swayed, her small, slender hands gripping
the chair arms for support. In a moment the
faintness receded, leaving in its wake a sharp
resentment at the trick which her strained
nerves had played upon her. And after a mo-
ment's rest she got hurriedly into bed, leaving
her room disorderly for the first time.
1.
II
20


QUICKS AND
Books and papers scattered about the
floor, fragile stockings and underthings and the
startling green and gold negligee dripping about
on chairs and stool, met the encounter of the
amazed eyes of the girl who came in the morn-
ing to awaken Helga Crane.
2 I


QUICKS AND
Two
as
She woke in the morning unrefreshed and
with that feeling of half-terrified apprehension
peculiar to Christmas and birthday mornings.
A long moment she lay puzzling under the sun
streaming in a golden flow through the yellow
curtains. Then her mind returned to the night
before. She had decided to leave Naxos. That
was it.
Sharply she began to probe her deci-
sion. Reviewing the situation carefully, frankly,
she felt no wish to change her resolution. Ex-
cept—that it would be inconvenient. Much as
she wanted to shake the dust of the place from
her feet forever, she realized that there would
be difficulties. Red tape. James Vayle. Money,
Other work. Regretfully she was forced to ac-
knowledge that it would be vastly better to wait
until June, the close of the school year. Not so
22


QUICKS AND
ASA
ht, 611.1!!
long, really. Half of March, April, May, some
of June. Surely she could endure for that much
longer conditions which she had borne for
nearly two years. By an effort of will, her will,
it could be done.
But this reflection, sensible, expedient,
though it was, did not reconcile her. To remain !!!!
seemed too hard. Could she do it? Was it pos-
sible in the present rebellious state of her feel.
ings? The uneasy sense of being engaged with
some formidable antagonist, nameless and un-
understood, startled her. It wasn't, she was sud-
denly aware, merely the school and its ways and
its decorous stupid people that oppressed her.
There was something else, some other more
ruthless force, a quality within herself, which
was frustrating her, had always frustrated her,
kept her from getting the things she had
wanted. Still wanted.
But just what did she want? Barring a
desire for material security, gracious ways of
living, a profusion of lovely clothes, and a
23


QUICKS AND
goodly share of envious admiration, Helga
Crane didn't know, couldn't tell. But there was,
she knew, something else. Happiness, she sup-
posed. Whatever that might be. What, exactly,
she wondered, was happiness. Very positively
she wanted it. Yet her conception of it had no
tangibility. She couldn't define it, isolate it, and
contemplate it as she could some other abstract
things. Hatred, for instance. Or kindness.
The strident ringing of a bell some-
where in the building brought back the fierce
resentment of the night. It crystallized her
wavering determination.
From long habit her biscuit-coloured
feet had slipped mechanically out from under
the covers at the bell's first unkind jangle.
Leisurely she drew them back and her cold
anger vanished as she decided that, now, it
didn't at all matter if she failed to appear at
the monotonous distasteful breakfast which was
provided for her by the school as part of her
wages.
24


QUICKS AND
In the corridor beyond her door was a
medley of noises incident to the rising and pre-
paring for the day at the same hour of many
schoolgirls—foolish giggling, indistinguishable
snatches of merry conversation, distant gurgle
of running water, patter of slippered feet, low-
pitched singing, good-natured admonitions to
hurry, slamming of doors, clatter of various un-
namable articles, and—suddenly—calamitous
silence.
Helga ducked her head under the covers
in the vain attempt to shut out what she knew
would fill the pregnant silence—the sharp sar-
castic voice of the dormitory matron. It came.
“Well! Even if every last one of you
did come from homes where you'weren't taught
any manners, you might at least try to pretend
that you're capable of learning some here, now
that you have the opportunity. Who slammed
the shower-baths door?”
Silence.
"Well, you needn't trouble to answer.
25


QUICKS AND
It's rude, as all of you know. But it's just as
well, because none of you can tell the truth.
Now hurry up. Don't let me hear of a single
one of you being late for breakfast. If I do
there'll be extra work for everybody on Satur-
day. And please at least try to act like ladies
and not like savages from the backwoods."
On her side of the door, Helga was
wondering if it had ever occurred to the lean
and desiccated Miss MacGooden that most of
her charges had actually come from the back-
woods. Quite recently too. Miss MacGooden,
humorless, prim, ugly, with a face like dried
leather, prided herself on being a "lady" from
one of the best families—an uncle had been a
congressman in the period of the Reconstruc-
tion. She was therefore, Helga Crane reflected,
perhaps unable to perceive that the inducement
to act like a lady, her own acrimonious example,
was slight, if not altogether negative. And
thinking on Miss MacGooden's "ladyness,"
Helga grinned a little as she remembered that
26


QUICKS AND
one's expressed reason for never having mar-
ried, or intending to marry. There were, so she
had been given to understand, things in the
matrimonial state that were of necessity en-
entirely too repulsive for a lady of delicate and
sensitive nature to submit to.
Soon the forcibly shut-off noises began
to be heard again, as the evidently vanishing
image of Miss MacGooden evaporated from
the short memories of the ladies-in-making.
Preparations for the intake of the day's quota
of learning went on again. Almost naturally.
"So much for that!” said Helga, getting
herself out of bed.
She walked to the window and stood
looking down into the great quadrangle below,
at the multitude of students streaming from the
six big dormitories which, two each, flanked
three of its sides, and assembling into neat pha-
lanxes preparatory to marching in military or-
der to the sorry breakfast in Jones Hall on the
fourth side. Here and there a male member of
27


QUICK SAND
the faculty, important and resplendent in the
regalia of an army officer, would pause in his
prancing or strutting, to jerk a negligent or
offending student into the proper attitude or
place. The massed phalanxes increased in size
and number, blotting out pavements, bare
earth, and grass. And about it all was a de-
pressing silence, a sullenness almost, until with
a horrible abruptness the waiting band blared
into “The Star Spangled Banner.” The goose-
step began. Left, right. Left, right. Forward!
March! The automatons moved. The squares
disintegrated into fours. Into twos. Disap-
peared into the gaping doors of Jones Hall.
After the last pair of marchers had entered,
the huge doors were closed. A few unlucky late-
comers, apparently already discouraged, tugged
half-heartedly at the knobs, and finding, as
they had evidently expected, that they were in-
deed barred out, turned resignedly away.
Helga Crane turned away from the
window, a shadow dimming the pale amber
28


QUICKS AND
loveliness of her face. Seven o'clock it was now.
At twelve those children who by some accident
had been a little minute or two late would have
their first meal after five hours of work and so-
called education. Discipline, it was called.
There came a light knocking on her
door.
"Come in," invited Helga unenthusias-
tically. The door opened to admit Margaret
Creighton, another teacher in the English de-
partment and to Helga the most congenial
member of the whole Naxos faculty. Margaret,
she felt, appreciated her.
Seeing Helga still in night robe seated
on the bedside in a mass of cushions, idly
dangling a mule across bare toes like one with
all the time in the world before her, she ex-
claimed in dismay: "Helga Crane, do you
know what time it is ? Why, it's long after half
past seven. The students—".
“Yes, I know," said Helga defiantly,
"the students are coming out from breakfast,
29


QUICKS AND
Well, let them. I, for one, wish that there was
some way that they could forever stay out
from the poisonous stuff thrown at them, liter-
ally thrown at them, Margaret Creighton, for
food. Poor things."
Margaret laughed. “That's just ridicu-
lous sentiment, Helga, and you know it. But
you haven't had any breakfast, yourself. Jim
Vayle asked if you were sick. Of course nobody
knew. You never tell anybody anything about
yourself. I said I'd look in on you."
"Thanks awfully,” Helga responded,
indifferently. She was watching the sunlight dis-
solve from thick orange into pale yellow.
Slowly it crept across the room, wiping out in
its path the morning shadows. She wasn't in-
terested in what the other was saying.
"If you don't hurry, you'll be late to
your first class. Can I help you?" Margaret
offered uncertainly. She was a little afraid of
Helga. Nearly everyone was.
“No. Thanks all the same.” Then
39


QUICKS AND
quickly in another, warmer tone: "I do mean
it. Thanks, a thousand times, Margaret. I'm
really awfully grateful, but—you see, it's like
this, I'm not going to be late to my class. I'm
not going to be there at all.”.
· The visiting girl, standing in relief, like
old walnut against the buff-colored wall, darted
a quick glance at Helga. Plainly she was curi-
ous. But she only said formally: "Oh, then you
are sick.” For something there was about Helga
which discouraged questionings.
No, Helga' wasn't sick. Not physically.
She was merely disgusted. Fed up with Naxos.
If that could be called sickness. The truth was
that she had made up her mind to leave. That
very day. She could no longer abide being con-
nected with a place of shame, lies, hypocrisy,
cruelty, servility, and snobbishness. "It ought,”
she concluded, "to be shut down by law."
“But, Helga, you can't go now. Not in
the middle of the term.” The kindly Margaret
was distressed.
31


QUICKS AND
Porter Dynamics
“But I can. And I am. Today."
"They'll never let you,” prophesied
Margaret.
"They can't stop me. Trains leave here
for civilization every day. All that's needed
is money,” Helga pointed out.
“Yes, of course. Everybody knows that.
mil What I mean is that you'll only hurt yourself
in your profession. They won't give you a ref-
erence if you jump up and leave like this now.
At this time of the year. You'll be put on the
black list. And you'll find it hard to get another
teaching-job. Naxos has enormous influence in
the South. Better wait till school closes.”
"Heaven forbid," answered Helga fer-
vently, "that I should ever again want work
anywhere in the South! I hate it.” And fell
silent, wondering for the hundredth time just
what form of vanity it was that had induced an
intelligent girl like Margaret Creighton to
turn what was probably nice live crinkly hair,
perfectly suited to her smooth dark skin and
- 1310(klist
32


QUICKS AND
agreeable round features, into a dead straight,
greasy, ugly mass.
Looking up from her watch, Margaret
said: "Well, I've really got to run, or I'll be
late myself. And since I'm staying— Better
think it over, Helga. There's no place like
Naxos, you know. Pretty good salaries, decent
rooms, plenty of men, and all that. Ta-ta.”
The door slid to behind her.
But in another moment it opened. She
was back. “I do wish you'd stay. It's nice having
you here, Helga. We all think so. Even the dead
ones. We need a few decorations to brighten
our sad lives.” And again she was gone.
Helga was unmoved. She was no longer
concerned with what anyone in Naxos might
think of her, for she was now in love with the
piquancy of leaving. Automatically her fingers
adjusted the Chinese-looking pillows on the low
couch that served for her bed. Her mind was
busy with plans for departure. Packing, money,
trains, and could she get a berth?
33.


QUICK SAND
THREE
Vas c
On one side of the long, white, hot sand road
that split the flat green, there was a little shade,
for it was bordered with trees. Helga Crane
walked there so that the sun could not so easily
get at her. As she went slowly across the
empty campus she was conscious of a vague
tenderness for the scene spread out before her.
It was so incredibly lovely, so appealing, and
so facile. The trees in their spring beauty sent
through her restive mind a sharp thrill of pleas-
ure. Seductive, charming, and beckoning as
cities were, they had not this easy unhuman
loveliness. The trees, she thought, on city ave-
nues and boulevards, in city parks and gardens,
were tamed, held prisoners in a surrounding
maze of human beings. Here they were free.
It was human beings who were prisoners. It
was too bad. In the midst of all this radiant
00
oldini poser
w
34


QUICKS AND
life. They weren't, she knew, even conscious of
its presence. Perhaps there was too much of it,
and therefore it was less than nothing.
In response to her insistent demand she
had been told that Dr. Anderson could give her
twenty minutes at eleven o'clock. Well, she
supposed that she could say all that she had to
say in twenty minutes, though she resented being
limited. Twenty minutes. In Naxos, she was as
unimportant as that.
He was a new man, this principal, for
whom Helga remembered feeling unaccountably
sorry, when last September he had first been
appointed to Naxos as its head. For some
reason she had liked him, although she had seen
little of him; he was so frequently away on
publicity and money-raising tours. And as yet
he had made but few and slight changes in the
running of the school. Now she was a little
irritated at finding herself wondering just how
she was going to tell him of her decision. What
did it matter to him? Why should she mind if
35


QUICKS AND
it did? But there returned to her that indistinct
sense of sympathy for the remote silent man
with the tired gray eyes, and she wondered
again by what fluke of fate such a man, ap-
parently a humane and understanding person,
had chanced into the command of this cruel
educational machine. Suddenly, her own resolve
loomed as an almost direct unkindness. This in-
creased her annoyance and discomfort. A sense
of defeat, of being cheated of justification,
closed down on her. Absurd!
She arrived at the administration build-
ing in a mild rage, as unreasonable as it was
futile, but once inside she had a sudden attack
of nerves at the prospect of traversing that
great outer room which was the workplace of
some twenty odd people. This was a disease
from which Helga had suffered at intervals
all her life, and it was a point of honor, almost,
with her never to give way to it. So, instead
of turning away, as she felt inclined, she
walked on, outwardly indifferent. Half-way
36


QUICK SAND
down the long aisle which divided the room, the
principal's secretary, a huge black man, surged
toward her.
"Good-morning, Miss Crane, Dr. An-
derson will see you in a few moments. Sit down
right here."
She felt the inquiry in the shuttered eyes.
For some reason this dissipated her self-con-
sciousness and restored her poise. Thanking
him, she seated herself, really careless now of
the glances of the stenographers, book-keepers,
clerks. Their curiosity and slightly veiled hos-
tility no longer touched her. Her coming de-
parture had released her from the need for
conciliation which had irked her for so long.
It was pleasant to Helga Crane to be able to
sit calmly looking out of the window on to the
smooth lawn, where a few leaves quite prema-
turely fallen dotted the grass, for once uncaring
whether the frock which she wore roused dis-
approval or envy.
Turning from the window, her gaze
ze
37


QUICK SAND
a
wandered contemptuously over the dull attire
of the women workers. Drab colors, mostly
navy blue, black, brown, unrelieved, save for a
scrap of white or tan about the hands and necks.
Fragments of a speech made by the dean of
women floated through her thoughts—“Bright
colors are vulgar”—“Black, gray, brown, and
navy blue are the most becoming colors for
colored people”—“Dark-complected people
shouldn't wear yellow, or green or red."-
The dean was a woman from one of the "first
families”—a great “race" woman; she, Helga
Crane, a despised mulatto, but something intui-
tive, some unanalyzed driving spirit of loyalty
to the inherent racial need for gorgeousness
told her that bright colours were fitting and
that dark-complexioned people should wear yel-
low, green, and red. Black, brown, and gray
were ruinous to them, actually destroyed the
luminous tones lurking in their dusky skins.
One of the loveliest sights Helga had ever seen
had been a sooty black girl decked out in a flam-
38


QUICKS AND
ing orange dress, which a horrified matron had
next day consigned to the dyer. Why, she won-
dered, didn't someone write A Plea for Color?
These people yapped loudly of race, of
race consciousness, of race pride, and yet sup-
pressed its most delightful manifestations, love
of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spon-
taneous laughter. Harmony, radiance, and sim-
plicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in
the race they had marked for destruction.
She came back to her own problems.
Clothes had been one of her difficulties in
Naxos. Helga Crane loved clothes, elaborate
ones. Nevertheless, she had tried not to offend.
But with small success, for, although she had
affected the deceptively simple variety, the
hawk eyes of dean and matrons had detected
the subtle difference from their own irre-
proachably conventional garments. Too, they
felt that the colors were queer; dark purples,
royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft,
luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks. And
39:


QUICKS AND
IS
&
ney
the trimmings—when Helga used them at all
-seemed to them odd. Old laces, strange em-
broideries, dim brocades. Her faultless, slim
shoes made them uncomfortable and her small
plain hats seemed to them positively indecent.
Helga smiled inwardly at the thought that
whenever there was an evening affair for the
faculty, the dear ladies probably held their
breaths until she had made her appearance.
They existed in constant fear that she might
turn out in an evening dress. The proper eve-
ning wear in Naxos was afternoon attire. And
one could, if one wished, garnish the hair with
flowers.
Quick, muted footfalls sounded. The
secretary had returned.
"Dr. Anderson will see you now, Miss
Crane."
She rose, followed, and was ushered
into the guarded sanctum, without having de-
cided just what she was to say. For a moment
she felt behind her the open doorway and then
40


QUICK SAND,
the gentle impact of its closing. Before her at
a great desk her eyes picked out the figure of
a man, at first blurred slightly in outline in that
dimmer light. At his “Miss Crane ?” her lips
formed for speech, but no sound came. She
was aware of inward confusion. For her the
situation seemed charged, unaccountably, with
strangeness and something very like hysteria.
An almost overpowering desire to laugh seized
her. Then, miraculously, a complete ease, such
as she had never known in Naxos, possessed
her. She smiled, nodded in answer to his ques-
salutation, and with a gracious “Thank
you” dropped into the chair which he indicated.
She looked at him frankly now, this man still
young, thirty-five perhaps, and found it easy
to go on in the vein of a simple statement.
"Dr. Anderson, I'm sorry to have to
confess that I've failed in my job here. I've
made up my mind to leave. Today.”
A short, almost imperceptible silence,
then a deep voice of peculiarly pleasing reso-
41


QUICK SAND
nance, asking gently: “You don't like Naxos,
Miss Crane?"
She evaded. “Naxos, the place? Yes, I
like it. Who wouldn't like it? It's so beauti-
ful. But 1—well—I don't seem to fit here."
The man smiled, just a little. “The
school? You don't like the school?"
The words burst from her. "No, I
don't like it. I hate it !".
“Why?” The question was detached,
too detached.
In the girl blazed a desire to wound.
There he sat, staring dreamily out of the win-
dow, blatantly unconcerned with her or her an-
swer. Well, she'd tell him. She pronounced each
word with deliberate slowness.
"Well, for one thing, I hate hypocrisy. I
hate cruelty to students, and to teachers who
can't fight back. I hate backbiting, and sneak-
ing, and petty jealousy. Naxos ? It's hardly a
place at all. It's more like some loathsome,
venomous disease. Ugh! Everybody spending
42


QUICKS AND
his time in a malicious hunting for the weak-
nesses of others, spying, grudging, scratching."
"I see. And you don't think it might
help to cure us, to have someone who doesn't
approve of these things stay with us? Even
just one person, Miss Crane ?”.
She wondered if this last was irony. She
suspected it was humor and so ignored the half-
pleading note in his voice.
“No, I don't! It doesn't do the disease
any good. Only irritates it. And it makes me
unhappy, dissatisfied. It isn't pleasant to be al-
ways made to appear in the wrong, even when
I know I'm right.”
His gaze was on her now, searching.
"Queer,” she thought, “how some brown people
have gray eyes. Gives them a strange, unex-
pected appearance. A little frightening."
The man said, kindly: "Ah, you're un-
happy. And for the reasons you've stated ?”
“Yes, partly. Then, too, the people here
don't like me. They don't think I'm in the spirit
43


QUICKS AND
of the work. And I'm not, not if it means sup-
pression of individuality and beauty."
“And does it?"
"Well, it seems to work out that way.”
“How old are you, Miss Crane ?"
She resented this, but she told him,
speaking with what curtness she could command
only the bare figure: "Twenty-three."
"Twenty-three. I see. Some day you'll
learn that lies, injustice, and hypocrisy are a
part of every ordinary community. Most people
achieve a sort of protective immunity, a kind
of callousness, toward them. If they didn't, they
couldn't endure. I think there's less of these
evils here than in most places, but because we're
trying to do such a big thing, to aim so high,
the ugly things show more, they irk some of us
more. Service is like clean white linen, even the
tiniest speck shows.” He went on, explaining,
amplifying, pleading.
Helga Crane was silent, feeling a mys-
tifying yearning which sang and throbbed in
44


QUICKS AND
her. She felt again that urge for service, not
now for her people, but for this man who was
talking so earnestly of his work, his plans, his
hopes. An insistent need to be a part of them
sprang in her. With compunction tweaking at
her heart for even having entertained the no-
tion of deserting him, she resolved not only to
remain until June, but to return next year. She
was shamed, yet stirred. It was not sacrifice she
felt now, but actual desire to stay, and to come
back next year.
He came, at last, to the end of the long
speech, only part of which she had heard. “You
see, you understand ?” he urged.
“Yes, oh yes, I do."
“What we need is more people like you,
people with a sense of values, and proportion,
an appreciation of the rarer things of life. You
have something to give which we badly need
here in Naxos. You mustn't desert us, Miss
Crane."
She nodded, silent. He had won her. She
45


QUICK SAND
knew that she would stay. “It's an elusive some-
thing," he went on. "Perhaps I can best explain
it by the use of that trite phrase, 'You're a
lady.' You have dignity and breeding."
At these words turmoil rose again in
Helga Crane. The intricate pattern of the rug
which she had been studying escaped her. The
shamed feeling which had been her penance
evaporated. Only a lacerated pride remained.
She took firm hold of the chair arms to still
the trembling of her fingers.
"If you're speaking of family, Dr. An-
derson, why, I haven't any. I was born in a
Chicago slum."
The man chose his words, carefully he
thought. “That doesn't at all matter, Miss
Crane. Financial, economic circumstances can't
destroy tendencies inherited from good stock.
You yourself prove that!”
Concerned with her own angry thoughts,
which scurried here and there like trapped
rats, Helga missed the import of his words.
46


QUICKS AND
Her own words, her answer, fell like drops of
hail.
“The joke is on you, Dr. Anderson. My
father was a gambler who deserted my mother,
a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that
they were married. As I said at first, I don't be-
long here. I shall be leaving at once. This after-
noon. Good-morning."
47


QUICKS AND
FOUR
LONG, soft white clouds, clouds like shreds of
incredibly fine cotton, streaked the blue of the
early evening sky. Over the Aying landscape
hung a very faint mist, disturbed now and then
by a languid breeze. But no coolness invaded
the heat of the train rushing north. The open
windows of the stuffy day coach, where Helga
Crane sat with others of her race, seemed only
to intensify her discomfort. Her head ached
with a steady pounding pain. This, added to
her wounds of the spirit, made traveling some-
thing little short of a medieval torture. Desper-
ately she was trying to right the confusion in
her mind. The temper of the morning's inter-
view rose before her like an ugly mutilated
creature crawling horribly over the flying
landscape of her thoughts. It was no use. The
ugly thing pressed down on her, held her,
48


QUICKS AND
Leaning back, she tried to doze as others were
doing. The futility of her effort exasperated
her.
Just what had happened to her there in
that cool dim room under the quizzical gaze of
those piercing gray eyes ? Whatever it was had
been so powerful, so compelling, that but for
a few chance words she would still be in Naxos.
And why had she permitted herself to be jolted
into a rage so fierce, so illogical, so disastrous,
that now after it was spent she sat despondent,
sunk in shameful contrition? As she reviewed
the manner of her departure from his presence,
it seemed increasingly rude.
She didn't, she told herself, after all,
like this Dr. Anderson. He was too controlled,
too sure of himself and others. She detested
cool, perfectly controlled people. Well, it didn't
matter. He didn't matter. But she could not put
him from her mind. She set it down to annoy-
ance because of the cold discourtesy of her ab-
rupt action. She disliked rudeness in anyone.
49


QUICKS AND
She had outraged her own pride, and
she had terribly wronged her mother by her in-
sidious implication. Why? Her thoughts lin-
gered with her mother, long dead. A fair Scan-
dinavian girl in love with life, with love, with
passion, dreaming, and risking all in one blind
surrender. A cruel sacrifice. In forgetting all but
love she had forgotten, or had perhaps never
known, that some things the world never for-
gives. But as Helga knew, she had remem-
bered, or had learned in suffering and longing
all the rest of her life. Her daughter hoped she
had been happy, happy beyond most human
creatures, in the little time it had lasted, the
little time before that gay suave scoundrel,
Helga's father, had left her. But Helga Crane
doubted it. How could she have been? A girl
gently bred, fresh from an older, more polished
civilization, flung into poverty, sordidness, and
dissipation. She visualized her now, sad, cold,
and—yes, remote. The tragic cruelties of the
a ve
50


QUICK SAND
years had left her a little pathetic, a little hard,
and a little unapproachable.
That second marriage, to a man of her
own race, but not of her own kind—so pas-
sionately, so instinctively resented by Helga
even at the trivial age of six-she now under-
stood as a grievous necessity. Even foolish,
despised women must have food and clothing;
even unloved little Negro girls must be some-
how provided for. Memory, flown back to
those years following the marriage, dealt her
torturing stabs. Before her rose the pictures
of her mother's careful management to avoid
those ugly scarifying quarrels which even at this
far-off time caused an uncontrollable shudder,
her own childish self-effacement, the savage
unkindness of her stepbrothers and sisters, and
the jealous, malicious hatred of her mother's
husband. Summers, winters, years, passing in
one long, changeless stretch of aching misery
of soul. Her mother's death, when Helga was
51


QUICKS AND
fifteen. Her rescue by Uncle Peter, who had
sent her to school, a school for Negroes, where
for the first time she could breathe freely,
where she discovered that because one was
dark, one was not necessarily loathsome, and
could, therefore, consider oneself without re-
pulsion.
Six years. She had been happy there, as
happy as a child unused to happiness dared be.
There had been always a feeling of strangeness,
Vof outsideness, and one of holding her breath
for fear that it wouldn't last. It hadn't. It had
dwindled gradually into eclipse of painful iso-
lation. As she grew older, she became gradually
aware of a difference between herself and the
girls about her. They had mothers, fathers,
brothers, and sisters of whom they spoke fre-
quently, and who sometimes visited them. They
went home for the vacations which Helga spent
in the city where the school was located. They
visited each other and knew many of the same
people. Discontent for which there was no rem-
52


QUICK SAND
edy crept upon her, and she was glad almost
when these most peaceful years which she had
yet known came to their end. She had been
happier, but still horribly lonely.
She had looked forward with pleasant
expectancy to working in Naxos when the
chance came. And now this! What was it that
stood in her way? Helga Crane couldn't explain
it, put a name to it. She had tried in the early
afternoon in her gentle but staccato talk with
James Vayle. Even to herself her explanation
had sounded inane and insufficient; no wonder
James had been impatient and unbelieving. Dur-
ing their brief and unsatisfactory conversation
she had had an odd feeling that he felt some-
how cheated. And more than once she had been
aware of a suggestion of suspicion in his atti-
tude, a feeling that he was being duped, that
he suspected her of some hidden purpose which
he was attempting to discover.
Well, that was over. She would never
be married to James Vayle now. It flashed
53


QUICKS AND
upon her that, even had she remained in
Naxos, she would never have been married to
him. She couldn't have married him. Gradu-
ally, too, there stole into her thoughts of him a
curious sensation of repugnance, for which shem
was at a loss to account. It was new, something
unfelt before. Certainly she had never loved
him overwhelmingly, not, for example, as her
mother must have loved her father, but she
had liked him, and she had expected to love
him, after their marriage. People generally did
love then, she imagined. No, she had not loved
James, but she had wanted to. Acute nausea
rose in her as she recalled the slight quivering
of his lips sometimes when her hands had unex-
pectedly touched his; the throbbing vein in his
forehead on a gay day when they had wan-
dered off alone across the low hills and she had
allowed him frequent kisses under the shelter
of some low-hanging willows. Now she shiv-
ered a little, even in the hot train, as if she had
suddenly come out from a warm scented place
54


QUICKS AND
into cool, clear air. She must have been mad, she
thought; but she couldn't tell why she thought
so. This, too, bothered her.
Laughing conversation buzzed about
her. Across the aisle a bronze baby, with
bright staring eyes, began a fretful whining,
which its young mother essayed to silence by a
low droning croon. In the seat just beyond, a
black and tan young pair were absorbed in the
eating of a cold fried chicken, audibly crunch-
ing the ends of the crisp, browned bones. A lit-
tle distance away a tired laborer slept noisily.
Near him two children dropped the peelings of
oranges and bananas on the already soiled floor.
The smell of stale food and ancient tobacco
irritated Helga like a physical pain. A man, a
white man, strode through the packed car and
spat twice, once in the exact centre of the dingy
door panel, and once into the receptacle which
held the drinking-water. Instantly Helga be-
came aware of stinging thirst. Her eyes sought
the small watch at her wrist. Ten hours to Chi-
55


QUICK SAND
Her
as unsucces
cago. Would she be lucky enough to prevail
upon the conductor to let her occupy a berth,
or would she have to remain here all night,
without sleep, without food, without drink, and
with that disgusting door panel to which her
purposely averted eyes were constantly, invol-
untarily straying ?
r first effort was unsuccessful. An
ill-natured "No, you know you can't," was the
answer to her inquiry. But farther on along the
road, there was a change of men. Her rebuff
had made her reluctant to try again, but the
entry of a farmer carrying a basket containing
live chickens, which he deposited on the seat
"(the only vacant one) beside her, strength-
ened her weakened courage. Timidly, she ap-
proached the new conductor, an elderly gray-
mustached man of pleasant appearance, who
subjected her to a keen, appraising look, and
then promised to see what could be done. She
thanked him, gratefully, and went back to her
shared seat, to wait anxiously. After half an
an
56


QUICKS AND
hour he returned, saying he could "fix her up,”
there was a section she could have, adding:
“It'll cost you ten dollars.” She murmured:
"All right. Thank you.” It was twice the price,
and she needed every penny, but she knew she
was fortunate to get it even at that, and so was
very thankful, as she followed his tall, loping
figure out of that car and through seemingly
endless others, and at last into one where she
could rest a little.
She undressed and lay down, her
thoughts still busy with the morning's encoun-
ter. Why hadn't she grasped his meaning?
Why, if she had said so much, hadn't she said
more about herself and her mother? He would,
she was sure, have understood, even sympa-
thized. Why had she lost her temper and given
way to angry half-truths ?— Angry half-
truths- Angry half-
57


QUICKSAN D
FIVE
Gray Chicago seethed, surged, and scurried
about her. Helga shivered a little, drawing her
light coat closer. She had forgotten how cold
March could be under the pale skies of the
North. But she liked it, this blustering wind.
She would even have welcomed snow, for it
would more clearly have marked the contrast
between this freedom and the cage which
Naxos had been to her. Not but what it was
marked plainly enough by the noise, the dash,
the crowds.
Helga Crane, who had been born in this
dirty, mad, hurrying city, had no home here.
She had not even any friends here. It would
have to be, she decided, the Young Women's
Christian Association. “Oh dear! The uplift.
Poor, poor colored people. Well, no use stew-
ing about it. I'll get a taxi to take me out, bag
58


QUICKS A N D
and baggage, 'then I'll have a hot bath and a
really good meal, peep into the shops—mustn't
buy anything and then for Uncle Peter. Guess
I won't phone. More effective if I surprise
him."
It was late, very late, almost evening,
when finally Helga turned her steps northward,
in the direction of Uncle Peter's home. She had
put it off as long as she could, for she detested
her errand. The fact that that one day had
shown her its acute necessity did not decrease
her distaste. As she approached the North
Side, the distaste grew. Arrived at last at
the familiar door of the old stone house, her
confidence in Uncle Peter's welcome deserted
her. She gave the bell a timid push and then de-
cided to turn away, to go back to her room and
phone, or, better yet, to write. But before she
could retreat, the door was opened by a strange
red-faced maid, dressed primly in black and
white. This increased Helga's mistrust. Where,
she wondered, was the ancient Rose, who had,
59


QUICKS AND
ever since she could remember, served her
uncle.
The hostile "Well?” of this new sery-
ant forcibly recalled the reason for her pres-
ence there. She said firmly: "Mr. Nilssen,
please.”
"Mr. Nilssen's not in,” was the pert
retort. “Will you see Mrs. Nilssen ?”.
Helga was startled. “Mrs. Nilssen! I
beg your pardon, did you say Mrs. Nilssen ?"
"I did," answered the maid shortly, be-
ginning to close the door.
“What is it, Ida ?” A woman's soft
voice sounded from within.
"Someone for Mr. Nilssen, m'am.”
The girl looked embarrassed.
In Helga's face the blood rose in a
deep-red stain. She explained: “Helga Crane,
his niece."
"She says she's his niece, m'am.”
"Well, have her come in."
There was no escape. She stood in the
SC
60


QUICKS AND
large reception hall, and was annoyed to find
herself actually trembling. A woman, tall, ex-
quisitely gowned, with shining gray hair piled
high, came forward murmuring in a puzzled
voice: "His niece, did you say?".
“Yes, Helga Crane. My mother was his
sister, Karen Nilssen. I've been away. I didn't
know Uncle Peter had married.” Sensitive to
atmosphere, Helga had felt at once the latent
antagonism in the woman's manner.
"Oh, yes! I remember about you now.
I'd forgotten for a moment. Well, he isn't ex-
actly your uncle, is he? Your mother wasn't
married, was she? I mean, to your father?”
"I—I don't know,” stammered the girl,
feeling pushed down to the uttermost depths
of ignominy.
“Of course she wasn't.” The clear, low
voice held a positive note. “Mr. Nilssen has
been very kind to you, supported you, sent you
to school. But you mustn't expect anything else.
And you mustn't come here any more. It-
mar
61


QUICKS AND
well, frankly, it isn't convenient. I'm sure an
intelligent girl like yourself can understand
that.”
“Of course,” Helga agreed, coldly,
freezingly, but her lips quivered. She wanted
to get away as quickly as possible. She reached
the door. There was a second of complete
silence, then Mrs. Nilssen's voice, a little agi-
tated: “And please remember that my husband
is not your uncle. No indeed! Why, that, that
would make me your aunt! He's not—".
But at last the knob had turned in
Helga's fumbling hand. She gave a little un-
premeditated laugh and slipped out. When she
was in the street, she ran. Her only impulse
was to get as far away from her uncle's house,
and this woman, his wife, who so plainly
wished to dissociate herself from the outrage
of her very existence. She was torn with mad
fright, an emotion against which she knew but
two weapons: to kick and scream, or to flee.
The day had lengthened. It was evening
62


QUICKS AND
and much colder, but Helga Crane was un-
conscious of any change, so shaken she was and
burning. The wind cut her like a knife, but she
did not feel it. She ceased her frantic running,
aware at last of the curious glances of passers-
by. At one spot, for a moment less frequented
than others, she stopped to give heed to her
disordered appearance. Here a man, well
groomed and pleasant-spoken, accosted her.
On such occasions she was wont to reply scath-
ingly, but, tonight, his pale Caucasian face
struck her breaking faculties as too droll.
Laughing harshly, she threw at him the words:
"You're not my uncle."
He retired in haste, probably thinking
her drunk, or possibly a little mad.
Night fell, while Helga Crane in the
rushing swiftness of a roaring elevated train
sat numb. It was as if all the bogies and goblins
that had beset her unloved, unloving, and un-
happy childhood had come to life with tenfold
power to hurt and frighten. For the wound was
63


QUICKS AND
deeper in that her long freedom from their
presence had rendered her the more vulner-
able. Worst of all was the fact that under the
stinging hurt she understood and sympathized
with Mrs. Nilssen's point of view, as always
she had been able to understand her mother's,
her stepfather's, and his children's points of
view. She saw herself for an obscene sore in all
their lives, at all costs to be hidden. She under-
stood, even while she resented. It would have
been easier if she had not.
Later in the bare silence of her tiny
room she remembered the unaccomplished ob-
ject of her visit. Money. Characteristically,
while admitting its necessity, and even its un-
'deniable desirability, she dismissed its impor-
tance. Its elusive quality she had as yet never
known. She would find work of some kind. Per-
haps the library. The idea clung. Yes, certainly
the library. She knew books and loved them.
She stood intently looking down into
the glimmering street, far below, swarming
64


QUICKS AND
with people, merging into little eddies and dis-
engaging themselves to pursue their own indi-
vidual ways. A few minutes later she stood
in the doorway, drawn by an uncontrollable
desire to mingle with the crowd. The purple
sky showed tremulous clouds piled up, drifting
here and there with a sort of endless lack of
purpose. Very like the myriad human beings
pressing hurriedly on. Looking at these, Helga
caught herself wondering who they were, what
they did, and of what they thought. What was
passing behind those dark molds of flesh. Did
they really think at all? Yet, as she stepped out
into the moving multi-colored crowd, there
came to her a queer feeling of enthusiasm, as if
she were tasting some agreeable, exotic food-
sweetbreads, smothered with truffles and mush-
rooms—perhaps. And, oddly enough, she felt,
too, that she had come home. She, Helga
Crane, who had no home.
e
.
65


QUICKS AND
SIX
Helga woke to the sound of rain. The day
was leaden gray, and misty black, and dullish
white. She was not surprised, the night had
promised it. She made a little frown, remem-
bering that it was today that she was to search
for work.
She dressed herself carefully, in the
plainest garments she possessed, a suit of fine
blue twill faultlessly tailored, from whose left
pocket peeped a gay kerchief, an unadorned,
heavy silk blouse, a small, smart, fawn-colored
hat, and slim, brown oxfords, and chose a
brown umbrella. In a near-by street she sought
out an appealing little restaurant, which she
had noted in her last night's ramble through
the neighborhood, for the thick cups and the
queer dark silver of the Young Women's
Christian Association distressed her.
66


QUICK SAND
After a slight breakfast she made her
way to the library, that ugly gray building,
where was housed much knowledge and a lit-
tle wisdom, on interminable shelves. The
friendly person at the desk in the hall bestowed
on her a kindly smile when Helga stated her
business and asked for directions.
"The corridor to your left, then the sec-
ond door to your right,” she was told.
Outside the indicated door, for half a
second she hesitated, then braced herself and
went in. In less than a quarter of an hour
she came out, in surprised disappointment.
"Library training”—“civil service”—“library
school" – "classification" "cataloguing” —
“training class"—"examination”—“probation
period”-Aitted through her mind.
"How erudite they must be!" she re-
marked sarcastically to herself, and ignored the
smiling curiosity of the desk person as she went
through the hall to the street. For a long mo-
ment she stood on the high stone steps above
67


QUICKS AND
the avenue, then shrugged her shoulders and
stepped down. It was a disappointment, but of
course there were other things. She would find
something else. But what? Teaching, even sub-
stitute teaching, was hopeless now, in March.
She had no business training, and the shops
didn't employ colored clerks or sales-people,
not even the smaller ones. She couldn't sew, she
couldn't cook. Well, she could do housework,
or wait on table, for a short time at least. Un-
til she got a little money together. With this
thought she remembered that the Young
Women's Christian Association maintained an
employment agency.
"Of course, the very thing!” She ex-
claimed, aloud. “I'll go straight back.”
But, though the day was still drear, rain
had ceased to fall, and Helga, instead of re-
turning, spent hours in aimless strolling about
the hustling streets of the Loop district. When
at last she did retrace her steps, the business
day had ended, and the employment office was
68


QUICKS AND
sat scattered about on the long rows of chairs.
Some were plainly uninterested, others wore
an air of acute expectancy, which disturbed
Helga. Behind a desk two alert young women,
both wearing a superior air, were busy writ-
ing upon and filing countless white cards. Now
and then one stopped to answer the telephone.
“Y. W. C. A. employment. ... Yes.
... Spell it, please. . . . Sleep in or out?
Thirty dollars ? ... Thank you, I'll send one
right over."
: Or, “I'm awfully sorry, we haven't
anybody right now, but I'll send you the first
one that comes in.”
Their manners were obtrusively busi-
ness-like, but they ignored the already embar-
rassed Helga. Diffidently she approached the
desk. The darker of the two looked up and
turned on a little smile.
“Yes ?” she inquired.
"I wonder if you can help me? I want
work," Helga stated simply.
70


QUICKS AND
“Maybe. What kind ? Have you refer-
ences ?”
Helga explained. She was a teacher. A
graduate of Devon. Had been teaching in
Naxos.
The girl was not interested. “Our kind
of work wouldn't do for you," she kept repeat-
ing at the end of each of Helga's statements.
“Domestic mostly."
When Helga said that she was willing
to accept work of any kind, a slight, almost im-
perceptible change crept into her manner and
her perfunctory smile disappeared. She re-
peated her question about the reference. On
learning that Helga had none, she said sharply,
finally: “I'm sorry, but we never send out help
without references.”
With a feeling that she had been
slapped, Helga Crane hurried out. After some
lunch she sought out an employment agency on
State Street. An hour passed in patient sitting.
Then came her turn to be interviewed. She'
71


QUICKS AND
said, simply, that she wanted work, work of any
kind. A competent young woman, whose eyes
stared frog-like from great tortoise-shell-
rimmed glasses, regarded her with an apprais-
ing look and asked for her history, past and
present, not forgetting the “references.” Helga
told her that she was a graduate of Devon,
had taught in Naxos. But even before she ar-
rived at the explanation of the lack of refer-
ences, the other's interest in her had faded.
"I'm sorry, but we have nothing that
you would be interested in,” she said and mo-
tioned to the next seeker, who immediately
came forward, proffering several much worn
papers.
“References," thought Helga, resent-
fully, bitterly, as she went out the door into
the crowded garish street in search of another
agency, where her visit was equally vain. .
Days of this sort of thing. Weeks of it.
And of the futile scanning and answering of
newspaper advertisements. She traversed acres
7 2


QUICKS AND
of streets, but it seemed that in that whole en-
ergetic place nobody wanted her services. At
least not the kind that she offered. A few men,
both white and black, offered her money, but
the price of the money was too dear. Helga
Crane did not feel inclined to pay it.
She began to feel terrified and lost. And
she was a little hungry too, for her small money
was dwindling and she felt the need to econo-
mize somehow. Food was the easiest.
In the midst of her search for work she
felt horribly lonely too. This sense of loneli-
ness increased, it grew to appalling propor-
tions, encompassing her, shutting her off from
all of life around her. Devastated she was, and
always on the verge of weeping. It made her
feel small and insignificant that in all the climb-
ing massed city no one cared one whit about
her.
Helga Crane was not religious. She
took nothing on trust. Nevertheless on Sundays
she attended the very fashionable, very high
73


QUICKS AND
services in the Negro Episcopal church on
Michigan Avenue. She hoped that some good
Christian would speak to her, invite her to re-
turn, or inquire kindly if she was a stranger in
the city. None did, and she became bitter, dis-
trusting religion more than ever. She was her.
self unconscious of that faint hint of offishness
which hung about her and repelled advances,
an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar
irritation. They noticed her, admired her
clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient
uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a
protective measure for her acute sensitiveness,
in her child days, still clung to her.
An agitated feeling of disaster closed
in on her, tightened. Then, one afternoon, com-
ing in from the discouraging round of agencies
and the vain answering of newspaper wants
to the stark neatness of her room, she found
between door and sill a small folded note.
Spreading it open, she read:
74


QUICKS AND
Mis Ś Crane:
Please come into the employment office
as soon as you return.
Ida Ross
Helga spent some time in the contem-
plation of this note. She was afraid to hope.
Its possibilities made her feel a little hyster-
ical. Finally, after removing the dirt of the
dusty streets, she went down, down to that
room where she had first felt the smallness of
her commercial value. Subsequent failures had
augmented her feeling of incompetence, but she
resented the fact that these clerks were evi-
dently aware of her unsuccess. It required all
the pride and indifferent hauteur she could sum-
mon to support her in their presence. Her addi-
tional arrogance passed unnoticed by those for
whom it was assumed. They were interested
only in the business for which they had sum-
moned her, that of procuring a traveling-com-
75


QUICKS AND
e
panion for a lecturing female on her way to
a convention.
“She wants," Miss Ross told Helga,
"someone intelligent, someone who can help
her get her speeches in order on the train. We
thought of you right away. Of course, it isn't
permanent. She'll pay your expenses and
there'll be twenty-five dollars besides. She
leaves tomorrow. Here's her address. You're
to go to see her at five o'clock. It's after four
now. I'll phone that you're on your way.”
The presumptuousness of their cer-
tainty that she would snatch at the opportunity
galled Helga. She became aware of a desire
to be disagreeable. The inclination to fling the
address of the lecturing female in their face
stirred in her, but she remembered the lone five-
dollar bill in the rare old tapestry purse swing-
ing from her arm. She couldn't afford anger.
So she thanked them very politely and set out
for the home of Mrs. Hayes-Rore on Grand
Boulevard, knowing full well that she intended
76


QUICK SAND
to take the job, if the lecturing one would take
her. Twenty-five dollars was not to be looked at
with nose in air when one was the owner of
but five. And meals—meals for four days at
least.
Mrs. Hayes-Rore proved to be a plump
lemon-colored woman with badly straightened
hair and dirty finger-nails. Her direct, pene-
trating gaze was somewhat formidable. Note-
book in hand, she gave Helga the impression
of having risen early for consultation with
other harassed authorities on the race problem,
and having been in conference on the subject
all day. Evidently, she had had little time or
thought for the careful donning of the five-
years-behind-the-mode garments which covered
her, and which even in their youth could hardly
have fitted or suited her. She had a tart person-
ality, and prying. She approved of Helga, after
asking her endless questions about her educa-
tion and her opinions on the race problem, none
of which she was permitted to answer, for Mrs.
77


QUICKS AND
Hayes-Rore either went on to the next or an-
swered the question herself by remarking: “Not
that it matters, if you can only do what I want
done, and the girls at the 'Y' said that you
could. I'm on the Board of Managers, and I
know they wouldn't send me anybody who
wasn't all right.” After this had been repeated
twice in a booming, oratorical voice, Helga felt
that the Association secretaries had taken an
awful chance in sending a person about whom
they knew as little as they did about her.
“Yes, I'm sure you'll do. I don't really
need ideas, I've plenty of my own. It's just a
matter of getting someone to help me get my
speeches in order, correct and condense them,
you know. I leave at eleven in the morning. Can
you be ready by then? ... That's good. Bet-
ter be here at nine. Now, don't disappoint me.
I'm depending on you.”
As she stepped into the street and made
her way skillfully through the impassioned
78


QUICKS AND
human traffic, Helga reviewed the plan which
she had formed, while in the lecturing one's
presence, to remain in New York. There would
be twenty-five dollars, and perhaps the amount
of her return ticket. Enough for a start. Surely
she could get work there. Everybody did. Any-
way, she would have a reference.
With her decision she felt reborn. She
began happily to paint the future in vivid col.
ors. The world had changed to silver, and life
ceased to be a struggle and became a gay ad-
venture. Even the advertisements in the shop
windows seemed to shine with radiance.
Curious about Mrs. Hayes-Rore, on her
return to the “Y” she went into the employ-
ment office, ostensibly to thank the girls and
to report that that important woman would
take her. Was there, she inquired, anything
that she needed to know? Mrs. Hayes-Rore
had appeared to put such faith in their recom-
mendation of her that she felt almost obliged
79


QUICKS AND
to give satisfaction. And she added: "I didn't
get much chance to ask questions. She seemed
50-er-busy."
Both the girls laughed. Helga laughed
with them, surprised that she hadn't perceived
before how really likable they were.
"We'll be through here in ten minutes.
If you're not busy, come in and have your sup-
per with us and we'll tell you about her,” prom-
ised Miss Ross.
80


QUICKS AND
SE V EN
Having finally turned her attention to Helga
Crane, Fortune now seemed determined to
smile, to make amends for her shameful neglect.
One had, Helga decided, only to touch the right
button, to press the right spring, in order to
attract the jade's notice.
For Helga that spring had been Mrs.
Hayes-Rore. Ever afterwards on recalling that
day on which with wellnigh empty purse and
apprehensive heart she had made her way from
the Young Women's Christian Association to
the Grand Boulevard home of Mrs. Hayes-
Rore, always she wondered at her own lack of
astuteness in not seeing in the woman someone
who by a few words was to have a part in the
shaping of her life.
The husband of Mrs. Hayes-Rore had
at one time been a dark thread in the soiled
81


QUICKS AND
fabric of Chicago's South Side politics, who,
departing this life hurriedly and unexpectedly
and a little mysteriously, and somewhat before
the whole of his suddenly acquired wealth had
had time to vanish, had left his widow comfort-
ably established with money and some of that
prestige which in Negro circles had been his.
All this Helga had learned from the secretaries
at the “Y.” And from numerous remarks
dropped by Mrs. Hayes-Rore herself she was
able to fill in the details more or less ade-
quately.
On the train that carried them to New
York, Helga had made short work of correct-
ing and condensing the speeches, which Mrs.
Hayes-Rore as a prominent “race" woman and
an authority on the problem was to deliver be-
fore several meetings of the annual convention
of the Negro Women's League of Clubs, con-
vening the next week in New York. These
speeches proved to be merely patchworks of
others' speeches and opinions. Helga had heard
82


QUICKS AND
other lecturers say the same things in Devon
and again in Naxos. Ideas, phrases, and even
whole sentences and paragraphs were lifted
bodily from previous orations and published
works of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass,
Booker T. Washington, and other doctors of
the race's ills. For variety Mrs. Hayes-Rore
had seasoned hers with a peppery dash of Du
Bois and a few vinegary statements of her own.
Aside from these it was, Helga reflected, the
same old thing.
But Mrs. Hayes-Rore was to her, after
the first short, awkward period, interesting.
Her dark eyes, bright and investigating, had,
Helga noted, a humorous gleam, and some-
thing in the way she held her untidy head gave
the impression of a cat watching its prey so that
when she struck, if she so decided, the blow
would be unerringly effective. Helga, looking
up from a last reading of the speeches, was
aware that she was being studied. Her em-
ployer sat leaning back, the tips of her fingers
83


QUICKS AND
pressed together, her head a bit on one side,
her small inquisitive eyes boring into the girl
before her. And as the train hurled itself franti-
cally toward smoke-infested Newark, she de-
cided to strike.
"Now tell me," she commanded, “how
is it that a nice girl like you can rush off on a
wildgoose chase like this at a moment's notice.
I should think your people'd object, or'd make
inquiries, or something."
At that command Helga Crane could
not help sliding down her eyes to hide the anger
that had risen in them. Was she to be forever
explaining her people—or lack of them? But
she said courteously enough, even managing a
hard little smile: "Well you see, Mrs. Hayes-
Rore, I haven't any people. There's only me, so
I can do as I please.”
“Ha!” said Mrs. Hayes-Rore.
Terrific, thought Helga Crane, the
power of that sound from the lips of this
woman. How, she wondered, had she suc-
84


QUICK SAND
1 ac-
ceeded in investing it with so much incredulity.
"If you didn't have people, you wouldn't
be living. Everybody has people, Miss Crane.
Everybody."
"I haven't, Mrs. Hayes-Rore.”
Mrs. Hayes-Rore screwed up her eyes.
"Well, that's mighty mysterious, and I detest
mysteries.” She shrugged, and into those eyes
there now came with alarming quickness an ac-
cusing criticism.
"It isn't,” Helga said defensively, "a
mystery. It's a fact and a mighty unpleasant
one. Inconvenient too," and she laughed a little,
not wishing to cry.
Her tormentor, in sudden embarrass-
ment, turned her sharp eyes to the window.
She seemed intent on the miles of red clay slid-
ing past. After a moment, however, she asked
gently: “You wouldn't like to tell me about it,
would you? It seems to bother you. And I'm
interested in girls.”
Annoyed, but still hanging, for the sake
85


QUICKS AND
of the twenty-five dollars, to her self-control,
Helga gave her head a little toss and Aung out
her hands in a helpless, beaten way. Then she
shrugged. What did it matter? "Oh, well, if
you really want to know. I assure you, it's
nothing interesting. Or nasty,” she added
maliciously. "It's just plain horrid. For me.”
And she began mockingly to relate her story.
But as she went on, again she had that
sore sensation of revolt, and again the torment
which she had gone through loomed before her
as something brutal and undeserved. Passion-
ately, tearfully, incoherently, the final words
tumbled from her quivering petulant lips.
The other woman still looked out of the
window, apparently so interested in the outer
aspect of the drab sections of the Jersey manu-
facturing city through which they were passing
that, the better to see, she had now so turned
her head that only an ear and a small portion of
cheek were visible.
During the little pause that followed
10.
86


QUICKS AND
Helga's recital, the faces of the two women,
which had been bare, seemed to harden. It was
almost as if they had slipped on masks. The
girl wished to hide her turbulent feeling and to
appear indifferent to Mrs. Hayes-Rore's opin-
ion of her story. The woman felt that the story,
dealing as it did with race intermingling and
possibly adultery, was beyond definite discus-
sion. For among black people, as among white
people, it is tacitly understood that these things
are not mentioned—and therefore they do not
exist.
Sliding adroitly out from under the
precarious subject to a safer, more decent one,
Mrs. Hayes-Rore asked Helga what she was
thinking of doing when she got back to Chi-
cago. Had she anything in mind ?
Helga, it appeared, hadn't. The truth
was she had been thinking of staying in New
York. Maybe she could find something there.
Everybody seemed to. At least she could make
the attempt.
87


QUICKS AND
ous reas
W
Mrs. Hayes-Rore sighed, for no obvi-
ous reason. “Um, maybe I can help you. I know
people in New York. Do you?”
"No."
"New York's the lonesomest place in
the world if you don't know anybody."
"It couldn't possibly be worse than Chi-
cago,” said Helga savagely, giving the table
support a violent kick.
They were running into the shadow of
the tunnel. Mrs. Hayes-Rore murmured
thoughtfully: “You'd better come uptown and
stay with me a few days. I may need you.
Something may turn up."
It was one of those vicious mornings,
windy and bright. There seemed to Helga, as
they emerged from the depths of the vast sta-
tion, to be a whirling malice in the sharp air
of this shining city. Mrs. Hayes-Rore's words
about its terrible loneliness shot through her
mind. She felt its aggressive unfriendliness.
Even the great buildings, the flying cabs, and
882


QUICKS AND
the swirling crowds seemed manifestations of
purposed malevolence. And for that first short
minute she was awed and frightened and in-
clined to turn back to that other city, which,
though not kind, was yet not strange. This
New York seemed somehow more appalling,
more scornful, in some inexplicable way even
more terrible and uncaring than Chicago.
Threatening almost. Ugly. Yes, perhaps she'd
better turn back. .
The feeling passed, escaped in the sur-
prise of what Mrs. Hayes-Rore was saying.
Her oratorical voice boomed above the city's
roar. “I suppose I ought really to have phoned
Anne from the station. About you, I mean.
Well, it doesn't matter. She's got plenty of
room. Lives alone in a big house, which is
something Negroes in New York don't do.
They fill 'em up with lodgers usually. But
Anne's funny. Nice, though. You'll like her,
and it will be good for you to know her if
you're going to stay in New York. She's a
89


QUICKS AND
“They're not being made," contradicted
Mrs. Hayes-Rore. "I intended to let them
have the money anyway, and I'll tell Mr. Dar-
ling so—after he takes you. They ought to be
glad to get you. Colored organizations always
need more brains as well as more money. Don't
worry. And don't thank me again. You haven't
got the job yet, you know.”
There was a little silence, during which
Helga gave herself up to the distraction of
watching the strange city and the strange
crowds, trying hard to put out of her mind the
vision of an easier future which her compan-
ion's words had conjured up; for, as had been
pointed out, it was, as yet, only a possibility.
Turning out of the park into the broad
thoroughfare of Lenox Avenue, Mrs. Hayes-
Rore said in a too carefully casual manner:
“And, by the way, I wouldn't mention that my
people are white, if I were you. Colored people
won't understand it, and after all it's your own
business. When you've lived as long as I have,
II
9,


QUICKS AND
you'll know that what others don't know can't
hurt you. I'll just tell Anne that you're a friend
of mine whose mother's dead. That'll place you
well enough and it's all true. I never tell lies.
She can fill in the gaps to suit herself and any-
one else curious enough to ask.”
"Thanks,” Helga said again. And so
great was her gratitude that she reached out
and took her new friend's slightly soiled hand
in one of her own fastidious ones, and retained
it until their cab turned into a pleasant tree-
lined street and came to a halt before one of the
dignified houses in the center of the block.
Here they got out.
In after years Helga Crane had only
to close her eyes to see herself standing appre-
hensively in the small cream-colored hall, the
floor of which was covered with deep silver-
hued carpet; to see Mrs. Hayes-Rore pecking
the cheek of the tall slim creature beautifully
dressed in a cool green tailored frock; to hear
herself being introduced to "my niece, Mrs.
92


QUICKS AND
Grey" as "Miss Crane, a little friend of mine
whose mother's died, and I think perhaps a
while in New York will be good for her”; to
feel her hand grasped in quick sympathy, and
to hear Anne Grey's pleasant voice, with its
faint note of wistfulness, saying: “I'm so sorry,
and I'm glad Aunt Jeanette brought you here.
Did you have a good trip? I'm sure you must be
worn out. I'll have Lillie take you right up.”
And to feel like a criminal.
93


QUICK SAND
EIGHT
A YEAR thick with various adventures had sped
by since that spring day on which Helga Crane
had set out away from Chicago's indifferent
unkindness for New York in the company of
Mrs. Hayes-Rore. New York she had found
not so unkind, not so unfriendly, not so indif-
ferent. There she had been happy, and secured
work, had made acquaintances and another
friend. Again she had had that strange trans-
forming experience, this time not so fleetingly,
that magic sense of having come home. Harlem,
teeming black Harlem, had welcomed her and
lulled her into something that was, she was
certain, peace and contentment.
The request and recommendation of
Mrs. Hayes-Rore had been sufficient for her to
obtain work with the insurance company in
which that energetic woman was interested.
94


QUICKS AND
nev
never returned to the uncomfortable subject
of her mother's death so intentionally men-
tioned on their first meeting by Mrs. Hayes-
Rore, beyond a tremulous brief: “You won't
talk to me about it, will you? I can't bear the
thought of death. Nobody ever talks to me
about it. My husband, you know." This Helga
discovered to be true. Later, when she knew
Anne better, she suspected that it was a bit of
a pose assumed for the purpose of doing away
with the necessity of speaking regretfully of a
husband who had been perhaps not too greatly
loved.
After the first pleasant weeks, feeling
that her obligation to Anne was already too
great, Helga began to look about for a perma-
nent place to live. It was, she found, difficult.
She eschewed the “Y” as too bare, impersonal,
and restrictive. Nor did furnished rooms or the
idea of a solitary or a shared apartment appeal
to her. So she rejoiced when one day Anne,
looking up from her book, said lightly: "Helga,


QUICKS AND
since you're going to be in New York, why
don't you stay here with me? I don't usually
take people. It's too disrupting. Still, it is sort
of pleasant having somebody in the house and
I don't seem to mind you. You don't bore me,
or bother me. If you'd like to stay— Think it
over.”
Helga didn't, of course, require to
think it over, because lodgment in Anne's
home was in complete accord with what she
designated as her "æsthetic sense.” Even Helga
Crane approved of Anne's house and the fur-
nishings which so admirably graced the big
cream-colored rooms. Beds with long, tapering
posts to which tremendous age lent dignity and
interest, bonneted old highboys, tables that
might be by Duncan Phyfe, rare spindle-legged
chairs, and others whose ladder backs grace-
fully climbed the delicate wall panels. These
historic things mingled harmoniously and com-
fortably with brass-bound Chinese tea-chests,
luxurious deep chairs and davenports, tiny
97


QUICKS AND
tables of gay color, a lacquered jade-green set-
tee with gleaming black satin cushions, lustrous
Eastern rugs, ancient copper, Japanese prints,
some fine etchings, a profusion of precious bric-
a-brac, and endless shelves filled with books.
Anne Grey herself was, as Helga ex-
pressed it, “almost too good to be true.”
Thirty, maybe, brownly beautiful, she had the
face of a golden Madonna, grave and calm and
sweet, with shining black hair and eyes. She
carried herself as queens are reputed to bear
themselves, and probably do not. Her manners
were as agreeably gentle as her own soft name.
She possessed an impeccably fastidious taste
in clothes, knowing what suited her and wear-
ing it with an air of unconscious assurance.
The unusual thing, a native New Yorker, she
was also a person of distinction, financially in-
dependent, well connected and much sought
after. And she was interesting, an odd confu-
sion of wit and intense earnestness; a vivid and
remarkable person. Yes, undoubtedly, Anne
98


QUICK SAND
ma
near, she asked only indifference. No, not at
all did she crave, from those pale and powerful
people, awareness. Sinister folk, she considered
them, who had stolen her birthright. Their past
contribution to her life, which had been but
shame and grief, she had hidden away from
brown folk in a locked closet, "never," she told
herself, “to be reopened.”
Some day she intended to marry one of
those alluring brown or yellow men who danced
attendance on her. Already financially success-
ful, any one of them could give to her the
things which she had now come to desire, a
home like Anne's, cars of expensive makes such
as lined the avenue, clothes and furs from
Bendel's and Revillon Frères', servants, and
leisure.
Always her forehead wrinkled in dis-
taste whenever, involuntarily, which was some-
how frequently, her mind turned on the specula-
tive gray eyes and visionary uplifting plans of
Dr. Anderson. That other, James Vayle, had
100


QUICKS AND
slipped absolutely from her consciousness. Of
him she never thought. Helga Crane meant,
now, to have a home and perhaps laughing,
appealing dark-eyed children in Harlem. Her
existence was bounded by Central Park, Fifth
Avenue, St. Nicholas Park, and One Hundred
and Forty-fifth street. Not at all a narrow life,
as Negroes live it, as Helga Crane knew it.
Everything was there, vice and goodness, sad-
ness and gayety, ignorance and wisdom, ugli-
ness and beauty, poverty and richness. And it
seemed to her that somehow of goodness, gay-
ety, wisdom, and beauty always there was a lit-
tle more than of vice, sadness, ignorance, and
ugliness. It was only riches that did not quite
transcend poverty.
“But,” said Helga Crane, “what of
that? Money isn't everything. It isn't even the
half of everything. And here we have so much
else—and by ourselves. It's only outside of
Harlem among those others that money really
counts for everything."
IOI


QUICKS AND
In the actuality of the pleasant present
and the delightful vision of an agreeable future
she was contented, and happy. She did not
analyze this contentment, this happiness, but
vaguely, without putting it into words or even so
tangible a thing as a thought, she knew it sprang
from a sense of freedom, a release from the
feeling of smallness which had hedged her in,
first during her sorry, unchildlike childhood
among hostile white folk in Chicago, and later
during her uncomfortable sojourn among snob-
bish black folk in Naxos.
IO2


QUICKS AND
NINE
lane s.
But it didn't last, this happiness of Helga
Crane's.
Little by little the signs of spring ap-
peared, but strangely the enchantment of the
season, so enthusiastically, so lavishly greeted
by the gay dwellers of Harlem, filled her only
with restlessness. Somewhere, within her, in a
deep recess, crouched discontent. She began to
lose confidence in the fullness of her life, the
glow began to fade from her conception of it.
As the days multiplied, her need of something,
something vaguely familiar, but which she could
not put a name to and hold for definite ex-
amination, became almost intolerable. She went
through moments of overwhelming anguish.
She felt shut in, trapped. "Perhaps I'm tired,
need a tonic, or something,” she reflected. So
she consulted a physician, who, after a long,
103


QUICKS AND
solemn examination, said that there was noth-
ing wrong, nothing at all. “A change of scene,
perhaps for a week or so, or a few days away
from work,” would put her straight most
likely. Helga tried this, tried them both, but it
was no good. All interest had gone out of liv-
ing. Nothing seemed any good. She became
a little frightened, and then shocked to discover
that, for some unknown reason, it was of her-
self she was afraid.
Spring grew into summer, languidly at
first, then flauntingly. Without awareness on
her part, Helga Crane began to draw away
from those contacts which had so delighted her.
More and more she made lonely excursions
to places outside of Harlem. A sensation of
estrangement and isolation encompassed her.
As the days became hotter and the streets more
swarming, a kind of repulsion came upon her.
She recoiled in aversion from the sight of the
grinning faces and from the sound of the easy
laughter of all these people who strolled, aim-
104


QUICKS AND
lessly now, it seemed, up and down the avenues.
Not only did the crowds of nameless folk on
the street annoy her, she began also actually
to dislike her friends.
. Even the gentle Anne distressed her.
Perhaps because Anne was obsessed by the race
problem and fed her obsession. She frequented
all the meetings of protest, subscribed to all the
complaining magazines, and read all the lurid
newspapers spewed out by the Negro yellow
press. She talked, wept, and ground her teeth
dramatically about the wrongs and shames of
her race. At times she lashed her fury to sur-
prising heights for one by nature so placid and
gentle. And, though she would not, even to her-
self, have admitted it, she reveled in this orgy
of protest.
"Social equality," "Equal opportunity
for all,” were her slogans, often and emphatic-
ally repeated. Anne preached these things and
honestly thought that she believed them, but
she considered it an affront to the race, and to
105


QUICKS AND
all the vari-colored peoples that made Lenox
and Seventh Avenues the rich spectacles which
they were, for any Negro to receive on terms
of equality any white person.
“To me,” asserted Anne Grey, "the
most wretched Negro prostitute that walks One
Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street is more than
any president of these United States, not ex-
cepting Abraham Lincoln.” But she turned up
her finely carved nose at their lusty churches,
their picturesque parades, their naïve clowning
on the streets. She would not have desired or
even have been willing to live in any section
outside the black belt, and she would have re-
fused scornfully, had they been tendered, any
invitation from white folk. She hated white
people with a deep and burning hatred, with
the kind of hatred which, finding itself held in
sufficiently numerous groups, was capable some
day, on some great provocation, of bursting
into dangerously malignant flames.
But she aped their clothes, their man-
106


QUICKS AND
ners, and their gracious ways of living. While
proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all
things Negro, she yet disliked the songs, the
dances, and the softly blurred speech of the race.
Toward these things she showed only a dis-
dainful contempt, tinged sometimes with a faint
amusement. Like the despised people of the
white race, she preferred Pavlova to Florence
Mills, John McCormack to Taylor Gordon,
Walter Hampden to Paul Robeson. Theoretic-
ally, however, she stood for the immediate ad-
vancement of all things Negroid, and was in
revolt against social inequality.
Helga had been entertained by this
racial ardor in one so little affected by racial
prejudice as Anne, and by her inconsistencies.
But suddenly these things irked her with a great
irksomeness and she wanted to be free of this
constant prattling of the incongruities, the in-
justices, the stupidities, the viciousness of white
people. It stirred memories, probed hidden
wounds, whose poignant ache bred in her sur-
re
107


QUICKS AND
prising oppression and corroded the fabric of
her quietism. Sometimes it took all her self-
control to keep from tossing sarcastically at
Anne Ibsen's remark about there being as-
suredly something very wrong with the drains,
but after all there were other parts of the edi-
fice. .
It was at this period of restiveness that
Helga met again Dr. Anderson. She was gone,
unwillingly, to a meeting, a health meeting, held
in a large church—as were most of Harlem's
uplift activities—as a substitute for her em-
ployer, Mr. Darling. Making her tardy arrival
during a tedious discourse by a pompous saffron-
hued physician, she was led by the irritated
usher, whom she had roused from a nap in which
he had been pleasantly freed from the intricacies
of Negro health statistics, to a very front seat.
Complete silence ensued while she subsided into
her chair. The offended doctor looked at the
ceiling, at the floor, and accusingly at Helga,
108


QUICKS AND
r ra
and finally continued his lengthy discourse.
When at last he had ended and Helga had
dared to remove her eyes from his sweating
face and look about, she saw with a sudden
thrill that Robert Anderson was among her
nearest neighbors. A peculiar, not wholly dis-
agreeable, quiver ran down her spine. She felt
an odd little faintness. The blood rushed to her
face. She tried to jeer at herself for being so
moved by the encounter.
He, meanwhile, she observed, watched
her gravely. And having caught her attention,
he smiled a little and nodded.
When all who so desired had spouted to
their hearts' content—if to little purpose—and
the meeting was finally over, Anderson detached
himself from the circle of admiring friends and
acquaintances that had gathered around him
and caught up with Helga half-way down the
long aisle leading out to fresher air.
"I wondered if you were really going
109


QUICKS AND
to cut me. I see you were,” he began, with that
half-quizzical smile which she remembered so
well.
She laughed. “Oh, I didn't think you'd
remember me." Then she added: "Pleasantly,
I mean.”
The man laughed too. But they couldn't
talk yet. People kept breaking in on them. At
last, however, they were at the door, and then
he suggested that they share a taxi "for the sake
of a little breeze.” Helga assented.
Constraint fell upon them when they
emerged into the hot street, made seemingly
hotter by a low-hanging golden moon and the
hundreds of blazing electric lights. For a mo-
ment, before hailing a taxi, they stood together
looking at the slow moving mass of perspiring
human beings. Neither spoke, but Helga was
conscious of the man's steady gaze. The promi-
nent gray eyes were fixed upon her, studying her,
appraising her. Many times since turning her
back on Naxos she had in fancy rehearsed this
en
IIO


QUICK SAND
scene, this re-encounter. Now she found that
rehearsal helped not at all. It was so abso-
lutely different from anything that she had
imagined.
In the open taxi they talked of imper-
sonal things, books, places, the fascination of
New York, of Harlem. But underneath the ex-
change of small talk lay another conversation
of which Helga Crane was sharply aware. She
was aware, too, of a strange ill-defined emotion,
a vague yearning rising within her. And she
experienced a sensation of consternation and
keen regret when with a lurching jerk the cab
pulled up before the house in One Hundred
and Thirty-ninth Street. So soon, she thought.
But she held out her hand calmly, coolly.
Cordially she asked him to call some time. “It
is,” she said, “a pleasure to renew our ac-
quaintance.” Was it, she was wondering, merely
an acquaintance?
He responded seriously that he too
thought it a pleasure, and added: "You haven't
III


QUICKS AND
their next meeting, so that it was long before
drowsiness advanced upon her.
When he did call, Sunday, three days
later, she put him off on Anne and went out,
pleading an engagement, which until then she
had not meant to keep. Until the very moment
of his entrance she had had no intention of
running away, but something, some imp of con-
tumacy, drove her from his presence, though
she longed to stay. Again abruptly had come
the uncontrollable wish to wound. Later, with
a sense of helplessness and inevitability, she
realized that the weapon which she had chosen
had been a boomerang, for she herself had felt
the keen disappointment of the denial. Better
to have stayed and hurled polite sarcasms at
him. She might then at least have had the joy
of seeing him wince.
In this spirit she made her way to the
corner and turned into Seventh Avenue. The
warmth of the sun, though gentle on that after-
noon, had nevertheless kissed the street into
113


QUICK SAND
marvelous light and color. Now and then, greet-
ing an acquaintance, or stopping to chat with a
friend, Helga was all the time seeing its soft
shining brightness on the buildings along its
sides or on the gleaming bronze, gold, and cop-
per faces of its promenaders. And another
vision, too, came haunting Helga Crane; level
gray eyes set down in a brown face which stared
out at her, coolly, quizzically, disturbingly. And
she was not happy.
The tea to which she had so suddenly
made up her mind to go she found boring be-
yond endurance, insipid drinks, dull conversa-
tion, stupid men. The aimless talk glanced
from John Wellinger's lawsuit for discrimina-
tion because of race against a downtown ·
restaurant and the advantages of living in
Europe, especially in France, to the significance,
if any, of the Garvey movement. Then it sped
to a favorite Negro dancer who had just then
secured a foothold on the stage of a current
white musical comedy, to other shows, to a new
114


QUICKS AND
book touching on Negroes. Thence to costumes
for a coming masquerade dance, to a new jazz
song, to Yvette Dawson's engagement to a
Boston lawyer who had seen her one night at a
party and proposed to her the next day at noon.
Then back again to racial discrimination.
Why, Helga wondered, with unreason-
ing exasperation, didn't they find something else
to talk of? Why must the race problem always
creep in? She refused to go on to another
gathering. It would, she thought, be simply the
same old thing.
On her arrival home she was more dis-
appointed than she cared to admit to find the
house in darkness and even Anne gone off some-
where. She would have liked that night to have
talked with Anne. Get her opinion of Dr.
Anderson.
Anne it was who the next day told her
that he had given up his work in Naxos; or
rather that Naxos had given him up. He had
been too liberal, too lenient, for education as
I 15


QUICKS AND
it was inflicted in Naxos. Now he was per-
manently in New York, employed as welfare
worker by some big manufacturing concern,
which gave employment to hundreds of Negro
men.
“Uplift,” sniffed Helga contemptuously,
and Aled before the onslaught of Anne's ha-
rangue on the needs and ills of the race.
I 16


QUICKS AND
T EN
With the waning summer the acute sensitive-
ness of Helga Crane's frayed nerves grew
keener. There were days when the mere sight
of the serene tan and brown faces about her
stung her like a personal insult. The care-free
quality of their laughter roused in her the
desire to scream at them: "Fools, fools! Stupid
fools!” This passionate and unreasoning pro-
test gained in intensity, swallowing up all else
like some dense fog. Life became for her only
a hateful place where one lived in intimacy with
people one would not have chosen had one been
given choice. It was, too, an excruciating agony.
She was continually out of temper. Anne, thank
the gods! was away, but her nearing return
filled Helga with dismay.
Arriving at work one sultry day, hot and
dispirited, she found waiting a letter, a letter
117


QUICKS AND
from Uncle Peter. It had originally been sent to
Naxos, and from there it had made the journey
back to Chicago to the Young Women's Chris-
tian Association, and then to Mrs. Hayes-Rore.
That busy woman had at last found time be-
tween conventions and lectures to readdress it
and had sent it on to New York. Four months,
at least, it had been on its travels. Helga felt no
curiosity as to its contents, only annoyance at
the long delay, as she ripped open the thin
edge of the envelope, and for a space sat star-
ing at the peculiar foreign script of her uncle.
715 Sheridan Road
Chicago, Ill.
Dear Helga :
It is now over a year since you made
your unfortunate call here. It was unfor-
tunate for us all, you, Mrs. Nilssen, and
myself. But of course you couldn't know.
I blame myself. I should have written you
of my marriage.
I 18


QUICKS AND
Beside the brief, friendly, but none the
less final, letter there was a check for five thou-
sand dollars. Helga Crane's first feeling was
one of unreality. This changed almost imme-
diately into one of relief, of liberation. It was
stronger than the mere security from present
financial worry which the check promised.
Money as money was still not very important
to Helga. But later, while on an errand in the
big general office of the society, her puzzled be-
wilderment fied. Here the inscrutability of the
dozen or more brown faces, all cast from the
same indefinite mold, and so like her own,
seemed pressing forward against her. Abruptly
it flashed upon her that the harrowing irrita-
tion of the past weeks was a smoldering
hatred. Then, she was overcome by another, so
actual, so sharp, so horribly painful, that for-
ever afterwards she preferred to forget it. It
was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with
hundreds of her race, closed up with that some-
thing in the racial character which had always
I 20


QUICKS AND
been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she de-
manded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked,
to these despised black folk?
Back in the privacy of her own cubicle,
self-loathing came upon her. "They're my own
people, my own people,” she kept repeating
over and over to herself. It was no good. The
feeling would not be routed. "I can't go on like
this,” she said to herself. "I simply can't.”
There were footsteps. Panic seized her.
She'd have to get out. She terribly needed to.
Snatching hat and purse, she hurried to the
narrow door, saying in a forced, steady voice,
as it opened to reveal her employer: “Mr. Dar-
ling, I'm sorry, but I've got to go out. Please,
may I be excused ?”
At his courteous “Certainly, certainly.
And don't hurry. It's much too hot,” Helga
Crane had the grace to feel ashamed, but there
was no softening of her determination. The
necessity for being alone was too urgent. She
hated him and all the others too much.
I 2 I


QUICKS AND
Outside, rain had begun to fall. She
walked bare-headed, bitter with self-reproach.
But she rejoiced too. She didn't, in spite of her
racial markings, belong to these dark segregated
people. She was different. She felt it. It wasn't
merely a matter of color. It was something
broader, deeper, that made folk kin.
And now she was free. She would take
Uncle Peter's money and advice and revisit her
aunt in Copenhagen. Fleeting pleasant mem-
ories of her childhood visit there flew through
her excited mind. She had been only eight, yet
she had enjoyed the interest and the admiration
which her unfamiliar color and dark curly hair,
strange to those pink, white, and gold people,
had evoked. Quite clearly now she recalled that
her Aunt Katrina had begged for her to be al-
lowed to remain. Why, she wondered, hadn't
her mother consented? To Helga it seemed
that it would have been the solution to all their
problems, her mother's, her stepfather's, her
own.
I
2
2


QUICKS AND
At home in the cool dimness of the big
chintz-hung living-room, clad only in a futter-
ing thing of green chiffon, she gave herself up
to day-dreams of a happy future in Copenhagen,
where there were no Negroes, no problems, no
prejudice, until she remembered with perturba-
tion that this was the day of Anne's return from
her vacation at the sea-shore. Worse. There
was a dinner-party in her honor that very
night. Helga sighed. She'd have to go. She
couldn't possibly get out of a dinner-party for
Anne, even though she felt that such an event
on a hot night was little short of an outrage.
Nothing but a sense of obligation to Anne kept
her from pleading a splitting headache as an
excuse for remaining quietly at home.
Her mind trailed off to the highly im-
portant matter of clothes. What should she
wear? White? No, everybody would, because
it was hot. Green? She shook her head, Anne
would be sure to. The blue thing. Reluctantly
she decided against it; she loved it, but she had
W
luse
123


QUICKS AND
worn it too often. There was that cobwebby
black net touched with orange, which she had
bought last spring in a fit of extravagance and
never worn, because on getting it home both
she and Anne had considered it too décolleté,
and too outré. Anne's words: “There's not
enough of it, and what there is gives you the
air of something about to fly," came back to
her, and she smiled as she decided that she
would certainly wear the black net. For her it
would be a symbol. She was about to fly.
She busied herself with some absurdly
expensive roses which she had ordered sent in,
spending an interminable time in their arrange-
ment. At last she was satisfied with their appro-
priateness in some blue Chinese jars of great
age. Anne did have such lovely things, she
thought, as she began conscientiously to prepare
for her return, although there was really little
to do; Lillie seemed to have done everything.
But Helga dusted the tops of the books, placed
the magazines in ordered carelessness, re-
I 24


QUICKS AND
dressed Anne's bed in fresh-smelling sheets of
cool linen, and laid out her best pale-yellow
pajamas of crêpe de Chine. Finally she set out
two tall green glasses and made a great pitcher
of lemonade, leaving only the ginger-ale and
claret to be added on Anne's arrival. She was a
little conscience-stricken, so she wanted to be
particularly nice to Anne, who had been so kind
to her when first she came to New York, a for-
lorn friendless creature. Yes, she was grateful
to Anne; but, just the same, she meant to go.
At once.
Her preparations over, she went back
to the carved chair from which the thought of
Anne's home-coming had drawn her. Character-
istically she writhed at the idea of telling Anne
of her impending departure and shirked the
problem of evolving a plausible and inoffensive
excuse for its suddenness. “That,” she decided
lazily, "will have to look out for itself; I can't
be bothered just now. It's too hot.”
She began to make plans and to dream
125


QUICKS AND
delightful dreams of change, of life somewhere
else. Some place where at last she would be
permanently satisfied. Her anticipatory thoughts
waltzed and eddied about to the sweet silent
music of change. With rapture almost, she let
herself drop into the blissful sensation of vis-
ualizing herself in different, strange places,
among approving and admiring people, where
she would be appreciated, and understood.
1 26


QUICKS AND
quarreling cats, cackling phonographs, raucous
laughter, complaining motor-horns, low sing-
ing, mingled in the familiar medley that is
Harlem. Black figures, white figures, little
forms, big forms, small groups, large groups,
sauntered, or hurried by. It was gay, grotesque,
and a little weird. Helga Crane felt singularly
apart from it all. Entering the waiting door-
way, they descended through a furtive, narrow
passage, into a vast subterranean room. Helga
smiled, thinking that this was one of those
places characterized by the righteous as a hell.
A glare of light struck her eyes, a blare
of jazz split her ears. For a moment every-
thing seemed to be spinning round; even she
felt that she was circling aimlessly, as she fol-
lowed with the others the black giant who led
them to a small table, where, when they were
seated, their knees and elbows touched. Helga
wondered that the waiter, indefinitely carved
out of ebony, did not smile as he wrote their
order-"four bottles of White Rock, four
I 28


QUICKS AND
bottles of ginger-ale.” Bahl Anne giggled, the
others smiled and openly exchanged knowing
glances, and under the tables flat glass bottles
were extracted from the women's evening scarfs
and small silver flasks drawn from the men's
hip pockets. In a little moment she grew accus-
tomed to the smoke and din.
They danced, ambling lazily to a croon-
ing melody, or violently twisting their bodies,
like whirling leaves, to' a sudden streaming
rhythm, or shaking themselves ecstatically to
a thumping of unseen tomtoms. For the while,
Helga was oblivious of the reek of flesh, smoke,
and alcohol, oblivious of the oblivion of other
gyrating pairs, oblivious of the color, the noise,
and the grand distorted childishness of it all.
She was drugged, lifted, sustained, by the ex-
traordinary music, blown out, ripped out, beaten
out, by the joyous, wild, murky orchestra. The
essence of life seemed bodily motion. And when
suddenly the music died, she dragged herself
back to the present with a conscious effort; and
129


QUICKS AND
a shameful certainty that not only had she been
in the jungle, but that she had enjoyed it, began
to taunt her. She hardened her determination
to get away. She wasn't, she told herself, a
jungle creature. She cloaked herself in a faint
disgust as she watched the entertainers throw
themselves about to the bursts of syncopated
jangle, and when the time came again for the
patrons to dance, she declined. Her rejected
partner excused himself and sought an acquaint-
ance a few tables removed. Helga sat looking
curiously about her as the buzz of conversation
ceased, strangled by the savage strains of music,
and the crowd became a swirling mass. For the
hundredth time she marveled at the gradations
within this oppressed race of hers. A dozen
shades slid by. There was sooty black, shiny
black, taupe, mahogany, bronze, copper, gold,
orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white, pastry
white. There was yellow hair, brown hair, black
hair; straight hair, straightened hair, curly hair,
crinkly hair, woolly hair. She saw black eyes
130


QUICKS AND
in white faces, brown eyes in yellow faces, gray
eyes in brown faces, blue eyes in tan faces.
Africa, Europe, perhaps with a pinch of Asia,
in a fantastic motley of ugliness and beauty,
semi-barbaric, sophisticated, exotic, were here.
But she was blind to its charm, purposely aloof
and a little contemptuous, and soon her interest
in the moving mosaic waned.
She had discovered Dr. Anderson sit-
ting at a table on the far side of the room, with
a girl in a shivering apricot frock. Seriously he
returned her tiny bow. She met his eyes, gravely
smiling, then blushed, furiously, and averted
her own. But they went back immediately to the
girl beside him, who sat indifferently sipping a
colorless liquid from a high glass, or puffing a
precariously hanging cigarette. Across dozens
of tables, littered with corks, with ashes, with
shriveled sandwiches, through slits in the sway-
ing mob, Helga Crane studied her.
. She was pale, with a peculiar, almost
deathlike pallor. The brilliantly red, softly curv.
131


QUICKS AND
ing mouth was somehow sorrowful. Her pitch-
black eyes, a little aslant, were veiled by long,
drooping lashes and surmounted by broad
brows, which seemed like black smears. The
short dark hair was brushed severely back from
the wide forehead. The extreme décolleté of her
simple apricot dress showed a skin of unusual
color, a delicate, creamy hue, with golden tones.
"Almost like an alabaster," thought Helga.
Bang! Again the music died. The mov-
ing mass broke, separated. The others returned.
Anne had rage in her eyes. Her voice trembled
as she took Helga aside to whisper: "There's
your Dr. Anderson over there, with Audrey
Denney."
“Yes, I saw him. She's lovely. Who is
she?”
"She's Audrey Denney, as I said, and
she lives downtown. West Twenty-second
Street. Hasn't much use for Harlem any more.
It's a wonder she hasn't some white man hang-
ing about. The disgusting creature! I wonder
132


QUICKS AND
how she inveigled Anderson? But that's Aud-
rey! If there is any desirable man about, trust
her to attach him. She ought to be ostracized.”
“Why?" asked Helga curiously, noting
at the same time that three of the men in their
own party had deserted and were now congre-
gated about the offending Miss Denney.
"Because she goes about with white
people," came Anne's indignant answer, "and
they know she's colored.”
"I'm afraid I don't quite see, Anne.
Would it be all right if they didn't know she
was colored ?"
“Now, don't be nasty, Helga. You
know very well what I mean." Anne's voice was
shaking. Helga didn't see, and she was greatly
interested, but she decided to let it go. She
didn't want to quarrel with Anne, not now,
when she had that guilty feeling about leaving
her. But Anne was off on her favorite subject,
race. And it seemed, too, that Audrey Denney
was to her particularly obnoxious.
133


QUICK SAND
“Why, she gives parties for white and
colored people together. And she goes to white
people's parties. It's worse than disgusting, it's
positively obscene.”
"Oh, come, Anne, you haven't been to
any of the parties, I know, so how can you be
so positive about the matter?”
"No, but I've heard about them. I know
people who've been."
"Friends of yours, Anne?"
Anne admitted that they were, some of
them.
"Well, then, they can't be so bad. I
mean, if your friends sometimes go, can they?
Just what goes on that's so terrible?”
“Why, they drink, for one thing. Quan-
tities, they say."
“So do we, at the parties here in Har-
lem," Helga responded. An idiotic impulse
seized her to leave the place, Anne's presence,
then, forever. But of course she couldn't. It
would be foolish, and so ugly.
134


QUICKS AND
“And the white men dance with the
colored women. Now you know, Helga Crane,
that can mean only one thing." Anne's voice
was trembling with cold hatred. As she ended,
she made a little clicking noise with her tongue,
indicating an abhorrence too great for words.
"Don't the colored men dance with the
white women, or do they sit about, impolitely,
while the other men dance with their women?”
inquired Helga very softly, and with a slow-
ness approaching almost to insolence. Anne's
insinuations were too revolting. She had a
slightly sickish feeling, and a flash of anger
touched her. She mastered it and ignored
Anne's inadequate answer.
“It's the principle of the thing that I
object to. You can't get round the fact that her
behavior is outrageous, treacherous, in fact.
That's what's the matter with the Negro race.
They won't stick together. She certainly ought
to be ostracized. I've nothing but contempt for
her, as has every other self-respecting Negro."
135


QUICK SAND
The other women and the lone man left
to them—Helga's own escort—all seemingly
agreed with Anne. At any rate, they didn't pro-
test. Helga gave it up. She felt that it would
be useless to tell them that what she felt for
the beautiful, calm, cool girl who had the as-
surance, the courage, so placidly to ignore racial
barriers and give her attention to people, was
not contempt, but envious admiration. So she
remained silent, watching the girl.
At the next first sound of music Dr.
Anderson rose. Languidly the girl followed his
movement, a faint smile parting her sorrow-
ful lips at some remark he made. Her long,
slender body swayed with an eager pulsing mo-
tion. She danced with grace and abandon,
gravely, yet with obvious pleasure, her legs, her
hips, her back, all swaying gently, swung by
that wild music from the heart of the jungle.
Helga turned her glance to Dr. Anderson. Her
disinterested curiosity passed. While she still
felt for the girl envious admiration, that feel-
136


QUICKS AND
TWELVE
Helga CRANE felt no regret as the cliff-like
towers faded. The sight thrilled her as beauty,
grandeur, of any kind always did, but that was
all.
The liner drew out from churning slate-
colored waters of the river into the open sea.
The small seething ripples on the water's sur-
face became little waves. It was evening. In
the western sky was a pink and mauve light,
which faded gradually into a soft gray-blue ob-
scurity. Leaning against the railing, Helga
stared into the approaching night, glad to be at
last alone, free of that great superfluity of hu-
man beings, yellow, brown, and black, which,
as the torrid summer burnt to its close, had so
oppressed her. No, she hadn't belonged there.
Of her attempt to emerge from that inherent
aloneness which was part of her very being,
138


QUICKS AND
only dullness had come, dullness and a great
aversion.
Almost at once it was time for dinner.
Somewhere a bell sounded. She turned and with
buoyant steps went down. Already she had be-
gun to feel happier. Just for a moment, outside
the dining-salon, she hesitated, assailed with a
tiny uneasiness which passed as quickly as it
had come. She entered softly, unobtrusively.
And, after all, she had had her little fear for
nothing. The purser, a man grown old in the
service of the Scandinavian-American Line, re-
membered her as the little dark girl who had
crossed with her mother years ago, and so she
must sit at his table. Helga liked that. It put
her at her ease and made her feel important.
Everyone was kind in the delightful
days which followed, and her first shyness
under the politely curious glances of turquoise
eyes of her fellow travelers soon slid from her.
The old forgotten Danish of her childhood
began to come, awkwardly at first, from her
139


QUICKS AND
lips, under their agreeable tutelage. Evidently
they were interested, curious, and perhaps a
little amused about this Negro girl on her way
to Denmark alone.
Helga was a good sailor, and mostly
the weather was lovely with the serene calm
of the lingering September summer, under
whose sky the sea was smooth, like a length of
watered silk, unruffled by the stir of any wind.
But even the two rough days found her on
deck, reveling like a released bird in her re-
turned feeling of happiness and freedom, that
blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and
not to a race. Again, she had put the past be-
hind her with an ease which astonished even
herself. Only the figure of Dr. Anderson ob-
truded itself with surprising vividness to irk
her because she could get no meaning from
that keen sensation of covetous exasperation
that had so surprisingly risen within her on the
night of the cabaret party. This question Helga
Crane recognized as not entirely new; it was
140


QUICKS AND
se
but a revival of the puzzlement experienced
when she had fled so abruptly from Naxos more
than a year before. With the recollection of
that previous flight and subsequent half-
questioning a dim disturbing notion came to
her. She wasn't, she couldn't be, in love with
the man. It was a thought too humiliating, and
so quickly dismissed. Nonsense! Sheer non-
sense! When one is in love, one strives to
please. Never, she decided, had she made an
effort to be pleasing to Dr. Anderson. On the
contrary, she had always tried, deliberately, to
irritate him. She was, she told herself, a senti-
mental fool.
Nevertheless, the thought of love stayed
with her, not prominent, definite; but shadowy,
incoherent. And in a remote corner of her con-
sciousness lurked the memory of Dr. Ander-
son's serious smile and gravely musical voice.
On the last morning Helga rose at
dawn, a dawn outside old Copenhagen. She
lay lazily in her long chair watching the feeble
141


QUICKS AND
there in the crowd below, would have no dif-
ficulty in singling her out. But—had she been
met? When she descended the gangplank she
was still uncertain and was trying to decide on
a plan of procedure in the event that she had
not. A telegram before she went through the
customs ? Telephone? A taxi ?
But, again, she had all her fears and
questionings for nothing. A smart woman in
olive-green came toward her at once. And, even
in the fervent gladness of her relief, Helga took
in the carelessly trailing purple scarf and cor-
rect black hat that completed the perfection of
her aunt's costume, and had time to feel her-
self a little shabbily dressed. For it was her
aunt; Helga saw that at once, the resemblance
to her own mother was unmistakable. There
was the same long nose, the same beaming blue
eyes, the same straying pale-brown hair so like
sparkling beer. And the tall man with the fierce
mustache who followed carrying hat and stick
must be Herr Dahl, Aunt Katrina's husband,
1 44


QUICKS AND
How gracious he was in his welcome, and how
anxious to air his faulty English, now that her
aunt had finished kissing her and exclaimed in
Danish: "Little Helga! Little Helga! Good-
ness! But how you have grown!”
Laughter from all three.
"Welcome to Denmark, to Copenhagen,
to our home," said the new uncle in queer,
proud, oratorical English. And to Helga's
smiling, grateful “Thank you,” he returned:
"Your trunks? Your checks?” also in English,
and then lapsed into Danish.
"Where in the world are the Fishers?
We must hurry the customs."
Almost immediately they were joined
by a breathless couple, a young gray-haired
man and a fair, tiny, doll-like woman. It de-
veloped that they had lived in England for
some years and so spoke English, real English,
well. They were both breathless, all apologies
and explanations.
"So early!" sputtered the man, Herr
I 45


QUICK SAND
Fisher, “We inquired last night and they said
nine. It was only by accident that we called
again this morning to be sure. Well, you can
imagine the rush we were in when they said
eight! And of course we had trouble in finding
a cab. One always does if one is late.” All this
in Danish. Then to Helga in English: “You see,
I was especially asked to come because Fru
Dahl didn't know if you remembered your Dan-
ish, and your uncle's English-well—"
More laughter.
At last, the customs having been hur-
ried and a cab secured, they were off, with much
chatter, through the toy-like streets, weaving
perilously in and out among the swarms of
bicycles.
It had begun, a new life for Helga
Crane.
146


QUICKS AND
THIRTEEN :
She liked it, this new life. For a time it blotted
from her mind all else. She took to luxury as
the proverbial duck to water. And she took to
admiration and attention even more eagerly.
It was pleasant to wake on that first
afternoon, after the insisted-upon nap, with that
sensation of lavish contentment and well-being
enjoyed only by impecunious sybarites waking
in the houses of the rich. But there was some-
thing more than mere contentment and well-
being. To Helga Crane it was the realization of
a dream that she had dreamed persistently
ever since she was old enough to remember
such vague things as day-dreams and long-
ings. Always she had wanted, not money, but
the things which money could give, leisure, at-
tention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things.
Things.
147


QUICKS AND
Another knocking. Aunt Katrina en-
tered, smiling at Helga's quick, lithe spring
from the bed. They were going out to tea, she
informed Helga. What, the girl inquired, did
one wear to tea in Copenhagen, meanwhile
glancing at her aunt's dark purple dress and
bringing forth a severely plain blue crêpe frock.
But no! It seemed that that wouldn't at all do.
"Too sober," pronounced Fru Dahl.
"Haven't you something lively, something
bright?” And, noting Helga's puzzled glance
at her own subdued costume, she explained
laughingly: "Oh, I'm an old married lady, and
a Dane. But you, you're young. And you're a
foreigner, and different. You must have bright
things to set off the color of your lovely brown
skin. Striking things, exotic things. You must
make an impression.”
"I've only these,” said Helga Crane, timidly
displaying her wardrobe on couch and chairs.
"Of course I intend to buy here. I didn't want
to bring over too much that might be useless."
149


QUICKS AND
Chinese red dressing-gown in which Helga had
wrapped herself when at last the fitting was
over, “suits you. Tomorrow we'll shop. Maybe
we can get something that color. That black
and orange thing there is good too, but too
high. What a prim American maiden you are,
Helga, to hide such a fine back and shoulders.
Your feet are nice too, but you ought to have
higher heels and buckles.”
Left alone, Helga began to wonder.
She was dubious, too, and not a little resent-
ful. Certainly she loved color with a passion
that perhaps only Negroes and Gypsies know.
But she had a deep faith in the perfection of
her own taste, and no mind to be bedecked in
flaunting flashy things. Still—she had to admit
that Fru Dahl was right about the dressing-
gown. It did suit her. Perhaps an evening dress.
And she knew that she had lovely shoulders,
and her feet were nice.
When she was dressed in the shining
black taffeta with its bizarre trimmings of pur-
151


QUICKS AND
across the pavement from the shop to the wait-
ing motor. This feeling was intensified by the
many pedestrians who stopped to stare at the
queer dark creature, strange to their city. Her
reddened, but both Herr and Fru Dahl
seemed oblivious of the stares or the audi-
ble whispers in which Helga made out the
one frequently recurring word “sorte," which
she recognized as the Danish word for
“black."
Her Aunt Katrina merely remarked:
“A high color becomes you, Helga. Per-
haps tonight a little rouge-" To which her
husband nodded in agreement and stroked
his mustache meditatively. Helga Crane said
nothing.
They were pleased with the success she
was at the tea, or rather the coffee—for no tea
was served-and later at dinner. Helga her-
self felt like nothing so much as some new and
strange species of pet dog being proudly ex-
hibited. Everyone was very polite and very
153


QUICKS AND
friendly, but she felt the massed curiosity and
interest, so discreetly hidden under the polite
greetings. The very atmosphere was tense
with it. “As if I had horns, or three legs,"
she thought. She was really nervous and a little
terrified, but managed to present an outward
smiling composure. This was assisted by the
fact that it was taken for granted that she
knew nothing or very little of the language. So
she had only to bow and look pleasant. Herr
and Fru Dahl did the talking, answered the
questions. She came away from the coffee feel-
ing that she had acquitted herself well in the
first skirmish. And, in spite of the mental
strain, she had enjoyed her prominence.
If the afternoon had been a strain, the
evening was something more. It was more ex-
citing too. Marie had indeed "cut down" the
prized green velvet, until, as Helga put it,
it was “practically nothing but a skirt.” She
was thankful for the barbaric bracelets, for
the dangling ear-rings, for the beads about her
154


QUICKS AND
JO
neck. She was even thankful for the rouge on
her burning cheeks and for the very powder
on her back. No other woman in the stately
pale-blue room was so greatly exposed. But
she liked the small murmur of wonder and ad-
miration which rose when Uncle Poul brought
her in. She liked the compliments in the men's
eyes as they bent over her hand. She liked the
subtle half-understood flattery of her dinner
partners. The women too were kind, feeling no
need for jealousy. To them this girl, this Helga
Crane, this mysterious niece of the Dahls, was
not to be reckoned seriously in their scheme of
things. True, she was attractive, unusual, in an
exotic, almost savage way, but she wasn't one
of them. She didn't at all count.
Near the end of the evening, as Helga
sat effectively posed on a red satin sofa, the
center of an admiring group, replying to ques-
tions about America and her trip over, in halt-
ing, inadequate Danish, there came a shifting
of the curious interest away from herself. Fol-
155


QUICKS AND
lowing the others' eyes, she saw that there had
entered the room a tallish man with a flying
mane of reddish blond hair. He was wearing a
great black cape, which swung gracefully from
his huge shoulders, and in his long, nervous
hand he held a wide soft hat. An artist, Helga
decided at once, taking in the broad streaming
tie. But how affected! How theatrical!
With Fru Dahl he came forward and
was presented. “Herr Olsen, Herr Axel Ol-
sen.” To Helga Crane that meant nothing.
The man, however, interested her. For an im-
perceptible second he bent over her hand. After
that he looked intently at her for what seemed
to her an incredibly rude length of time from
under his heavy drooping lids. At last, remov-
ing his stare of startled satisfaction, he wagged
his leonine head approvingly.
“Yes, you're right. She's amazing.
Marvelous,” he muttered.
Everyone else in the room was deliber-
ately not staring. About Helga there sputtered
mov-
156


QUICKS AND
her personally? She, Helga Crane, who almost
all her life had looked after herself, was she
now to be looked after by Aunt Katrina and
her husband? It didn't seem real.
It was late, very late, when finally she
climbed into the great bed after having received
an auntly kiss. She lay long awake reviewing the
events of the crowded day. She was happy
again. Happiness covered her like the lovely
quilts under which she rested. She was mysti-
fied too. Her aunt's words came back to her.
"You're young and a foreigner and—and dif-
ferent.” Just what did that mean, she won-
dered. Did it mean that the difference was to
be stressed, accented? Helga wasn't so sure
that she liked that. Hitherto all her efforts had
been toward similarity to those about her.
“How odd,” she thought sleepily, “and
how different from America !"
159


QUICKS AND
Crane. Her dark, alien appearance was to most
people an astonishment. Some stared surrepti-
tiously, some openly, and some stopped dead in
front of her in order more fully to profit by
their stares. “Den Sorte” dropped freely, au-
dibly, from many lips.
The time came when she grew used to
the stares of the population. And the time came
when the population of Copenhagen grew used
to her outlandish presence and ceased to stare.
But at the end of that first day it was with
thankfulness that she returned to the sheltering
walls of the house on Maria Kirkplads.
They were followed by numerous pack-
ages, whose contents all had been selected or
suggested by Olsen and paid for by Aunt Ka-
trina. Helga had only to wear them. When
they were opened and the things spread out
upon the sedate furnishings of her chamber,
they made a rather startling array. It was al-
most in a mood of rebellion that Helga faced
the fantastic collection of garments incongru-
161


QUICKS AND
ously laid out in the quaint, stiff, pale old room.
There were batik dresses in which mingled in-
digo, orange, green, vermilion, and black;
dresses of velvet and chiffon in screaming col-
ors, blood-red, sulphur-yellow, sea-green; and
one black and white thing in striking combina-
tion. There was a black Manila shawl strewn
with great scarlet and lemon flowers, a leopard-
skin coat, a glittering opera-cape. There were
turban-like' hats of metallic silks, feathers and
furs, strange jewelry, enameled or set with odd
semi-precious stones, a nauseous Eastern per-
fume, shoes with dangerously high heels. Grad-
ually Helga's perturbation subsided in the un-
usual pleasure of having so many new and ex-
pensive clothes at one time. She began to feel
a little excited, incited.
Incited. That was it, the guiding prin-
ciple of her life in Copenhagen. She was incited
to make an impression, a voluptuous impres-
sion. She was incited to inflame attention and
admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly
162


QUICKS AND
S
One
in the so-called poor sections there was none
of that untidiness and squalor which she re-
membered as the accompaniment of poverty in
Chicago, New York, and the Southern cities
of America. Here the door-steps were always
white from constant scrubbings, the women
neat, and the children washed and provided
with whole clothing. Here were no tatters and
rags, no beggars. But, then, begging, she
learned, was an offense punishable by law. In-
deed, it was unnecessary in a country where
everyone considered it a duty somehow to sup-
port himself and his family by honest work; or,
if misfortune and illness came upon one, every-
one else, including the State, felt bound to give
assistance, a lift on the road to the regaining
of independence.
After the initial shyness and consterna-
tion at the sensation caused by her strange
presence had worn off, Helga spent hours driv-
ing or walking about the city, at first in the
protecting company of Uncle Poul or Aunt
166


QUICK SAND
Katrina or both, or sometimes Axel Olsen. But
later, when she had become a little familiar
with the city, and its inhabitants a little used to
her, and when she had learned to cross the
streets in safety, dodging successfully the in-
numerable bicycles like a true Copenhagener,
she went often alone, loitering on the long
bridge which spanned the placid lakes, or watch-
ing the pageant of the blue-clad, sprucely tail-
ored soldiers in the daily parade at Amielen-
borg Palace, or in the historic vicinity of the
long, low-lying Exchange, a picturesque struc-
ture in picturesque surroundings, skirting as it
did the great canal, which always was alive with
many small boats, flying broad white sails and
pressing close on the huge ruined pile of the
Palace of Christiansborg. There was also the
Gammelstrand, the congregating-place of the
venders of fish, where daily was enacted a spir-
ited and interesting scene between sellers and
buyers, and where Helga's appearance always
roused lively and audible, but friendly, interest,
167


QUICKS AND
long after she became in other parts of the city
an accepted curiosity. Here it was that one day
an old countrywoman asked her to what man-
ner of mankind she belonged and at Helga's re-
plying: "I'm a Negro,” had become indignant,
retorting angrily that, just because she was old
and a countrywoman she could not be so easily
fooled, for she knew as well as everyone
else that Negroes were black and had woolly
hair.
Against all this walking the Dahls had
at first uttered mild protest. “But, Aunt dear,
I have to walk, or I'll get fat,” Helga asserted.
“I've never, never in all my life, eaten so
much.” For the accepted style of entertainment
in Copenhagen seemed to be a round of dinner-
parties, at which it was customary for the host-
ess to tax the full capacity not only of her
dining-room, but of her guests as well. Helga
enjoyed these dinner-parties, as they were usu-
ally spirited affairs, the conversation brilliant
and witty, often in several languages. And al-
168


QUICKS AND
MO
ways she came in for a goodly measure of flat-
tering attention and admiration.
There were, too, those popular after-
noon gatherings for the express purpose of
drinking coffee together, where between much
talk, interesting talk, one sipped the strong and
steaming beverage from exquisite cups fash-
ioned of Royal Danish porcelain and partook
of an infinite variety of rich cakes and smørre-
brød. This smørrebrød, dainty sandwiches of
an endless and tempting array, was distinctly a
Danish institution. Often Helga wondered just
how many of these delicious sandwiches she had
consumed since setting foot on Denmark's soil.
Always, wherever food was served, appeared
the inevitable smørrebrød, in the home of the
Dahls, in every other home that she visited, in
hotels, in restaurants.
At first she had missed, a little, danc-
ing, for, though excellent dancers, the Danes
seemed not to care a great deal for that pas-
time, which so delightfully combines exercise
169


QUICKS AND
Bust
and pleasure. But in the winter there was skat-
ing, solitary, or in gay groups. Helga liked this
sport, though she was not very good at it.
There were, however, always plenty of efficient
and willing men to instruct and to guide her
over the glittering ice. One could, too, wear
such attractive skating-things.
But mostly it was with Axel Olsen that
her thoughts were occupied. Brilliant, bored,
elegant, urbane, cynical, worldly, he was a type
entirely new to Helga Crane, familiar only, and
that but little, with the restricted society of
American Negroes. She was aware, too, that
this amusing, if conceited, man was interested
in her. They were, because he was painting her,
much together. Helga spent long mornings in
the eccentric studio opposite the Folkemuseum,
and Olsen came often to the Dahl home, where,
as Helga and the man himself knew, he was
something more than welcome. But in spite of
his expressed interest and even delight in her
exotic appearance, in spite of his constant at-
170


QUICKS AND
са
ma
tendance upon her, he gave no sign of the more
personal kind of concern which encouraged by
Aunt Katrina's mild insinuations and Uncle
Poul's subtle questionings—she had tried to se-
cure. Was it, she wondered, race that kept him
silent, held him back. Helga Crane frowned on
this thought, putting it furiously from her, be-
cause it disturbed her sense of security and per-
manence in her new life, pricked her self-assur-
ance.
Nevertheless she was startled when on
a pleasant afternoon while drinking coffee in
the Hotel Vivili, Aunt Katrina mentioned, al-
most casually, the desirability of Helga's mak-
ing a good marriage.
"Marriage, Aunt dear!"
"Marriage,” firmly repeated her aunt,
helping herself to another anchovy and olive
sandwich. “You are," she pointed out, "twenty-
five.”
"Oh, Aunt, I couldn't! I mean, there's
nobody here for me to marry.” In spite of her.
171


QUICKS AND
Fru Dahl thoughtfully lit a cigarette.
Eventually, after a satisfactory glow had mani-
fested itself, she announced: "Because your
mother was a fool. Yes, she was! If she'd come
home after she married, or after you were
born, or even after your father-er-went off
like that, it would have been different. If even
she'd left you when she was here. But why in the
world she should have married again, and a per-
son like that, I can't see. She wanted to keep
you, she insisted on it, even over his protest, I
think. She loved you so much, she said.And so
she made you unhappy. Mothers, I suppose, are
like that. Selfish. And Karen was always stupid.
If you've got any brains at all they came from
your father.”
Into this Helga would not enter. Be-
cause of its obvious partial truths she felt the
need for disguising caution. With a detachment
that amazed herself she asked if Aunt Katrina
didn't think, really, that miscegenation was
wrong, in fact as well as principle.
173


QUICKS AND
"Don't," was her aunt's reply, “be a
fool too, Helga. We don't think of those things
here. Not in connection with individuals, at
least.” And almost immediately she inquired:
“Did you give Herr Olsen my message about
dinner tonight?”
“Yes, Aunt.” Helga was cross, and try-
ing not to show it.
“He's coming?"
“Yes, Aunt,” with precise politeness.
“What about him?"
"I don't know. What about him?"
“He likes you ?”
"I don't know. How can I tell that?”
Helga asked with irritating reserve, her con-
centrated attention on the selection of a sand-
wich. She had a feeling of nakedness. Outrage.
Now Fru Dahl was annoyed and showed
it. “What nonsense! Of course you know. Any
girl does,” and her satin-covered foot tapped,
a little impatiently, the old tiled floor.
"Really, I don't know, Aunt," Helga
174


QUICK SAND
TO
responded in a strange voice, a strange manner,
coldly formal, levelly courteous. Then suddenly
contrite, she added: "Honestly, I don't. I can't
tell a thing about him," and fell into a little
silence. “Not a thing,” she repeated. But the
phrase, though audible, was addressed to no
one. To herself.
She looked out into the amazing order-
liness of the street. Instinctively she wanted to
combat this searching into the one thing which,
here, surrounded by all other things which for
so long she had so positively wanted, made
her a little afraid. Started vague premonitions.
Fru Dahl regarded her intently. It
would be, she remarked with a return of her
outward casualness, by far the best of all pos-
sibilities. Particularly desirable. She touched
Helga's hand with her fingers in a little af.
fectionate gesture. Very lightly.
Helga Crane didn't immediately reply.
There was, she knew, so much reason—from
one viewpoint-in her aunt's statement. She
17.5


QUICKS AND
before turning to greet Fru Fischer she said
quietly, meaningly: "Or else stop wasting your
time, Helga."
Helga Crane said: "Ah, Fru Fischer.
It's good to see you.” She meant it. Her whole
body was tense with suppressed indignation.
Burning inside like the confined fire of a hot
furnace. She was so harassed that she smiled in
self-protection. And suddenly she was oddly
cold. An intimation of things distant, but none
the less disturbing, oppressed her with a faintly
sick feeling. Like a heavy weight, a stone
weight, just where, she knew, was her stomach.
Fru Fischer was late. As usual. She apol-
ogized profusely. Also as usual. And, yes, she
would have some coffee. And some smørrebrød.
Though she must say that the coffee here at
the Vivili was atrocious. Simply atrocious. "I
don't see how you stand it.” And the place was
getting so common, always so many Bolsheviks
and Japs and things. And she didn't—"begging
your pardon, Helga”—like that hideous Amer-
177


QUICKS AND
ican music they were forever playing, even if
it was considered very smart. “Give me," she
said, “the good old-fashioned Danish melodies
of Gade and Heise. Which reminds me, Herr
Olsen says that Nielsen's “Helios” is being
performed with great success just now in Eng-
land. But I suppose you know all about it,
Helga. He's already told you. What?” This
last was accompanied with an arch and insinu-
ating smile.
A shrug moved Helga Crane's shoul-
ders. Strange she'd never before noticed what
a positively disagreeable woman Fru Fischer
was. Stupid, too.
178


QUICKS AND
FIFTEEN
Well into Helga's second year in Denmark,
came an indefinite discontent. Not clear, but
vague, like a storm gathering far on the hori-
zon. It was long before she would admit that
she was less happy than she had been during
her first year in Copenhagen, but she knew that
it was so. And this subconscious knowledge
added to her growing restlessness and little
mental insecurity. She desired ardently to com-
bat this wearing down of her satisfaction with
her life, with herself. But she didn't know how.
Frankly the question came to this: what
was the matter with her? Was there, without
her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her ? Ab-
surd. But she began to have a feeling of dis-
couragement and hopelessness. Why couldn't
she be happy, content, somewhere? Other peo-
ple managed, somehow, to be. To put it plainly,
179


QUICK SAND
Go back to America, where they hated
Negroes! To America, where Negroes were
not people. To America, where Negroes were:
allowed to be beggars only, of life, of happi-
ness, of security. To America, where everything
had been taken from those dark ones, liberty,
respect, even the labor of their hands. To
America, where if one had Negro blood, one
mustn't expect money, education, or, sometimes,
even work whereby one might earn bread. Per-
haps she was wrong to bother about it now that
she was so far away. Helga couldn't, however,
help it. Never could she recall the shames and
often the absolute horrors of the black man's
existence in America without the quickening of
her heart's beating and a sensation of disturb-
ing nausea. It was too awful. The sense of
dread of it was almost a tangible thing in her
throat.
And certainly she wouldn't go back for
any such idiotic reason as Anne's getting mar-
ried to that offensive Robert Anderson. Anne
OL
1 81


QUICKS AND
was really too amusing. Just why, she won-
dered, and how had it come about that he was
being married to Anne. And why did Anne,
who had so much more than so many others—
more than enough-want Anderson too? Why
couldn't she— "I think,” she told herself, "I'd
better stop. It's none of my business. I don't
care in the least. Besides,” she added irrele-
vantly, “I hate such nonsensical soul-searching."
One night not long after the arrival of
Anne's letter with its curious news, Helga went
with Olsen and some other young folk to the
great Circus, a vaudeville house, in search of
amusement on a rare off night. After sitting
through several numbers they reluctantly ar-
rived at the conclusion that the whole enter-
tainment was dull, unutterably dull, and appar-
ently without alleviation, and so not to be
borne. They were reaching for their wraps
when out upon the stage pranced two black
men, American Negroes undoubtedly, for as
they danced and cavorted, they sang in the
182


QUICKS AND
But later, when she was alone, it be-
came quite clear to her that all along they had
divined its presence, had known that in her was
something, some characteristic, different from
any that they themselves possessed. Else why
had they decked her out as they had? Why
subtly indicated that she was different? And
they hadn't despised it. No, they had admired
it, rated it as a precious thing, a thing to be
enhanced, preserved. Why? She, Helga Crane,
didn't admire it. She suspected that no Negroes,
no Americans, did. Else why their constant
slavish imitation of traits not their own? Why
their constant begging to be considered as exact
copies of other people ? Even the enlightened,
the intelligent ones demanded nothing more.
They were all beggars like the motley crowd
in the old nursery rhyme:
Hark! Hark!
The dogs do bark.
The beggars are coming to town.
184


QUICKS AND
Some in rags,
Some in tags,
And some in velvet gowns.
The incident left her profoundly dis-
quieted. Her old unhappy questioning mood
came again upon her, insidiously stealing away
more of the contentment from her transformed
existence.
But she returned again and again to the
Circus, always alone, gazing intently and sol-
emnly at the gesticulating black figures, an iron-
ical and silently speculative spectator. For she
knew that into her plan for her life had thrust
itself a suspensive conflict in which were fused
doubts, rebellion, expediency, and urgent long-
ings.
It was at this time that Axel Olsen asked
her to marry him. And now Helga Crane was
surprised. It was a thing that at one time she
had much wanted, had tried to bring about,
and had at last relinquished as impossible of
185


QUICK SA N D
achievement. Not so much because of its ap-
parent hopelessness as because of a feeling,
intangible almost, that, excited and pleased as
he was with her, her origin a little repelled him,
and that, prompted by some impulse of racial
antagonism, he had retreated into the fastness
of a protecting habit of self-ridicule. A mor-
dantly personal pride and sensitiveness deterred
Helga from further efforts at incitation.
True, he had made, one morning, while
holding his brush poised for a last, a very last
stroke on the portrait, one admirably draped
suggestion, speaking seemingly to the pictured
face. Had he insinuated marriage, or something
less—and easier? Or had he paid her only a
rather florid compliment, in somewhat dubious
taste? Helga, who had not at the time been
quite sure, had remained silent, striving to ap-
pear unhearing.
Later, having thought it over, she flayed
herself for a fool. It wasn't, she should have
known, in the manner of Axel Olsen to pay
186


QUICKS AND
florid compliments in questionable taste. And
had it been marriage that he had meant, he
would, of course, have done the proper thing.
He wouldn't have stopped-or, rather, have
begun—by making his wishes known to her
when there was Uncle Poul to be formally con-
sulted. She had been, she told herself, insulted.
And a goodly measure of contempt and wari-
ness was added to her interest in the man. She
was able, however, to feel a gratifying sense
of elation in the remembrance that she had
been silent, ostensibly unaware of his utterance,
and therefore, as far as he knew, not affronted.
This simplified things. It did away with
the quandary in which the confession to the
Dahls of such a happening would have involved
her, for she couldn't be sure that they, too,
might not put it down to the difference of her
ancestry. And she could still go attended by
him, and envied by others, to openings in Kon-
igen's Nytorv, to showings at the Royal Acad-
emy or Charlottenborg's Palace. He could still
nawal
187


QUICKS AND
now. She was too amazed to discover suddenly
how intensely she disliked him, disliked the
shape of his head, the mop of his hair, the line
of his nose, the tones of his voice, the nervous
grace of his long fingers; disliked even the very
look of his irreproachable clothes. And for
some inexplicable reason, she was a little fright-
ened and embarrassed, so that when he had fin-
ished speaking, for a short space there was
only stillness in the small room, into which
Aunt Katrina had tactfully had him shown.
Even Thor, the enormous Persian, curled on
the window ledge in the feeble late afternoon
sun, had rested for the moment from his in-
cessant purring under Helga's idly stroking
fingers.
Helga, her slight agitation vanished,
told him that she was surprised. His offer was,
she said, unexpected. Quite.
A little sardonically, Olsen interrupted
her. He smiled too. “But of course I expected
surprise. It is, is it not, the proper thing? And
199


QUICKS AND
always you are proper, Frøkken Helga, al-
ways."
Helga, who had a stripped, naked feel-
ing under his direct glance, drew herself up
stiffly. Herr Olsen needn't, she told him, be
sarcastic. She was surprised. He must under-
stand that she was being quite sincere, quite
truthful about that. Really, she hadn't expected
him to do her so great an honor.
He made a little impatient gesture.
Why, then, had she refused, ignored, his other,
earlier suggestion ?
At that Helga Crane took a deep in-
dignant breath and was again, this time for an
almost imperceptible second, silent. She had,
then, been correct in her deduction. Her sen-
suous, petulant mouth hardened. That he
should so frankly—so insolently, it seemed to
her-admit his outrageous meaning was too
much. She said, coldly: "Because, Herr Olsen,
in my country the men, of my race, at least,
don't make such suggestions to decent girls.
191


QUICK SAND
And thinking that you were a gentleman, in-
troduced to me by my aunt, I chose to think
myself mistaken, to give you the benefit of the
doubt."
“Very commendable, my Helga—and
wise. Now you have your reward. Now I offer
you marriage.”
“Thanks,” she answered, "thanks, aw-
fully."
"Yes," and he reached for her slim
cream hand, now lying quiet on Thor's broad
orange and black back. Helga let it lie in his
large pink one, noting their contrast. “Yes, be-
cause I, poor artist that I am, cannot hold out
against the deliberate lure of you. You disturb
me. The longing for you does harm to my
work. You creep into my brain and madden
me," and he kissed the small ivory hand. Quite
decorously, Helga thought, for one so mad-
dened that he was driven, against his inclina-
tion, to offer her marriage. But immediately, in
extenuation, her mind leapt to the admirable
I 92


QUICKS AND
casualness of Aunt Katrina's expressed desire
for this very thing, and recalled the unruffled
calm of Uncle Poul under any and all circum-
stances. It was, as she had long ago decided,
security. Balance.
“But,” the man before her was saying,
"for me it will be an experience. It may be that
with you, Helga, for wife, I will become great.
Immortal. Who knows? I didn't want to love
you, but I had to. That is the truth. I make of
myself a present to you. For love." His voice
held a theatrical note. At the same time he
moved forward putting out his arms. His hands
touched air. For Helga had moved back. In-
stantly he dropped his arms and took a step
away, repelled by something suddenly wild in
her face and manner. Sitting down, he passed
a hand over his face with a quick, graceful ges-
ture.
Tameness returned to Helga Crane.
Her ironic gaze rested on the face of Axel
Olsen, his leonine head, his broad nosem
ma
193


QUICKS AND
"broader than my own"—his bushy eyebrows,
surmounting thick, drooping lids, which hid, she
knew, sullen blue eyes. He stirred sharply, shak-
ing off his momentary disconcertion.
In his assured, despotic way he went on:
“You know, Helga, you are a contradiction.
You have been, I suspect, corrupted by the good
Fru Dahl, which is perhaps as well. Who
knows? You have the warm impulsive nature
of the women of Africa, but, my lovely, you
have, I fear, the soul of a prostitute. You sell
yourself to the highest buyer. I should of course
be happy that it is I. And I am.” He stopped,
contemplating her, lost apparently, for the sec-
ond, in pleasant thoughts of the future.
To Helga he seemed to be the most dis-
tant, the most unreal figure in the world. She
suppressed a ridiculous impulse to laugh. The
effort sobered her. Abruptly she was aware that
in the end, in some way, she would pay for this
hour. A quick brief fear ran through her, leav-
ing in its wake a sense of impending calamity.
ес.
194


QUICKS AND
She wondered if for this she would pay all
that she'd had.
And, suddenly, she didn't at all care.
She said, lightly, but firmly: “But you see, Herr
Olsen, I'm not for sale. Not to you. Not to
any white man. I don't at all care to be owned.
Even by you.”
The drooping lids lifted. The look in
the blue eyes was, Helga thought, like the sur-
prised stare of a puzzled baby. He hadn't at
all grasped her meaning.
She proceeded, deliberately: "I think
you don't understand me. What I'm trying to
say is this, I don't want you. I wouldn't under
any circumstances marry you," and since she
was, as she put it, being brutally frank, she
added: "Now."
He turned a little away from her, his
face white but composed, and looked down into
the gathering shadows in the little park before
the house. At last he spoke, in a queer frozen
voice: "You refuse me?"
195


QUICKS AND
“Yes,” Helga repeated with intentional
carelessness. “I refuse you."
The man's full upper lip trembled. He
wiped his forehead, where the gold hair was
now lying flat and pale and lusterless. His eyes
still avoided the girl in the high-backed chair
before him. Helga felt a shiver of compunction.
For an instant she regretted that she had not
been a little kinder. But wasn't it after all the
greatest kindness to be cruel ? But more gently,
less indifferently, she said: “You see, I couldn't
marry a white man. I simply couldn't. It isn't
just you, not just personal, you understand. It's
deeper, broader than that. It's racial. Some day
maybe you'll be glad. We can't tell, you know;
if we were married, you might come to be
ashamed of me, to hate me, to hate all dark
people. My mother did that."
"I have offered you marriage, Helga
Crane, and you answer me with some 'strange
talk of race and shame. What nonsense is this?"
Helga let that pass because she couldn't,
ma
196


QUICKS AND
she felt, explain. It would be too difficult, too
mortifying. She had no words which could ade-
quately, and without laceration to her pride,
convey to him the pitfalls into which very easily
they might step. “I might,” she said, "have con-
sidered it once—when I first came. But you,
hoping for a more informal arrangement,
waited too long. You missed the moment. I had
time to think. Now I couldn't. Nothing is worth
the risk. We might come to hate each other.
I've been through it, or something like it. I
know. I couldn't do it. And I'm glad."
Rising, she held out her hand, relieved
that he was still silent. "Good afternoon," she
said formally. "It has been a great honor—"
“A tragedy," he corrected, barely touch-
ing her hand with his moist finger-tips.
"Why?" Helga countered, and for an
instant felt as if something sinister and inter-
necine flew back and forth between them like'
poison.
"I mean,” he said, and quite solemnly,
197


QUICKS AND
"that though I don't entirely understand you,
yet in a way I do too. And—” He hesitated.
Went on. "I think that my picture of you is,
after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore—a
tragedy. For someone. For me? Perhaps.”
"Oh, the picture!" Helga lifted her
shoulders in a little impatient motion.
Ceremoniously Axel Olsen bowed him-
self out, leaving her grateful for the urbanity
which permitted them to part without too much
awkwardness. No other man, she thought, of
her acquaintance could have managed it so
well—except, perhaps, Robert Anderson.
"I'm glad,” she declared to herself in
another moment, "that I refused him. And,”
she added honestly, “I'm glad that I had the
chance. He took it awfully well, though—for a
tragedy.” And she made a tiny frown.
The picture—she had never quite, in
spite of her deep interest in him, and her desire
for his admiration and approval, forgiven Ol-
198


QUICKS AND
but no, I don't like that picture. It looks bad,
wicked. Begging your pardon, Frøkken.”
"Thanks, Marie, I don't like it either."
Yes, anyone with half an eye could see
that it wasn't she.
200


QUICKS AND
SIXTEEN
Glad though the Dahls may have been that
their niece had had the chance of refusing the
hand of Axel Olsen, they were anything but
glad that she had taken that chance. Very
plainly they said so, and quite firmly they
pointed out to her the advisability of retrieving
the opportunity, if, indeed, such a thing were
possible. But it wasn't, even had Helga been
so inclined, for, they were to learn from the
columns of Politikken, Axel Olsen had gone off
suddenly to some queer place in the Balkans.
To rest, the newspapers said. To get Frøkken
Crane out of his mind, the gossips said.
Life in the Dahl ménage went on,
smoothly as before, but not so pleasantly. The
combined disappointment and sense of guilt of
the Dahls and Helga colored everything.
Though she had resolved not to think that
201


QUICKS AND
odd or unkind of you or him. Come now,
Helga, it isn't this foolishness about race. Not
here in Denmark. You've never spoken of it
before. It can't be just that. You're too sensible.
It must be something else. I wish you'd try to
explain. You don't perhaps like Olsen ?”
Helga had been silent, thinking what a
severe wrench to Herr Dahl's ideas of decency
was this conversation. For he had an almost
fanatic regard for reticence, and a peculiar
shrinking from what he looked upon as inde-
cent exposure of the emotions.
“Just what is it, Helga ?” he asked
again, because the pause had grown awkward,
for him.
"I can't explain any better than I have,”
she had begun tremulously, "it's just some-
thing—something deep down inside of me,”
and had turned away to hide a face convulsed
by threatening tears.
But that, Uncle Poul had remarked with
203


QUICKS AND
a reasonableness that was wasted on the miser-
able girl before him, was nonsense, pure non-
sense.
With a shaking sigh and a frantic dab
at her eyes, in which had come a despairing
look, she had agreed that perhaps it was fool-
ish, but she couldn't help it. “Can't you, won't
you understand, Uncle Poul?" she begged, with
a pleading look at the kindly worldly man who
at that moment had been thinking that this
strange exotic niece of his wife's was indeed
charming. He didn't blame Olsen for taking it
rather hard.
The thought passed. She was weeping.
With no effort at restraint. Charming, yes. But
insufficiently civilized. Impulsive. Imprudent.
Selfish.
“Try, Helga, to control yourself," he
had urged gently. He detested tears. “If it dis-
tresses you so, we won't talk of it again. You,
of course, must do as you yourself wish. Both
your aunt and I want only that you should be
204


QUICK SAND
happy.” He had wanted to make an end of this
fruitless wet conversation.
Helga had made another little dab at
her face with the scrap of lace and raised shin-
ing eyes to his face. She had said, with sincere
regret: “You've been marvelous to me, you
and Aunt Katrina. Angelic. I don't want to
seem ungrateful. I'd do anything for you, any.
thing in the world but this."
Herr Dahl had shrugged. A little sar-
donically he had smiled. He had refrained from
pointing out that this was the only thing she
could do for them, the only thing that they
had asked of her. He had been too glad to
be through with the uncomfortable discussion.
So life went on. Dinners, coffees,
theaters, pictures, music, clothes. More din-
ners, coffees, theaters, clothes, music. And that
nagging aching for America increased. Aug-
mented by the uncomfortableness of Aunt Ka-
trina's and Uncle Poul's disappointment with
her, that tormenting nostalgia grew to an un-
205


QUICK SAND
bearable weight. As spring came on with many
gracious tokens of following summer, she
found her thoughts straying with increasing
frequency to Anne's letter and to Harlem, its
dirty streets, swollen now, in the warmer
weather, with dark, gay humanity.
Until recently she had had no faintest
wish ever to see America again. Now she began
to welcome the thought of a return. Only a
visit, of course. Just to see, to prove to herself
that there was nothing there for her. To dem-
onstrate the absurdity of even thinking that
there could be. And to relieve the slight tension
here. Maybe when she came back-
Her definite decision to go was arrived
at with almost bewildering suddenness. It was
after a concert at which Dvorák's “New World
Symphony” had been wonderfully rendered.
Those wailing undertones of "Swing Low,
Sweet Chariot” were too poignantly familiar.
They struck into her longing heart and cut
away her weakening defenses. She knew at least
206


QUICK SAND
what it was that had lurked formless and un-
designated these many weeks in the back of her
troubled mind. Incompleteness.
"I'm homesick, not for America, but
for Negroes. That's the trouble."
For the first time Helga Crane felt
sympathy rather than contempt and hatred for
that father, who so often and so angrily she
had blamed for his desertion of her mother.
She understood, now, his rejection, his repudi-
ation, of the formal calm her mother had repre-
sented. She understood his yearning, his in-
tolerable need for the inexhaustible humor and
the incessant hope of his own kind, his need for
those things, not material, indigenous to all
Negro environments. She understood and could
sympathize with his facile surrender to the
irresistible ties of race, now that they dragged
at her own heart. And as she attended par-
ties, the theater, the opera, and mingled with
people on the streets, meeting only pale seri-
ious faces when she longed for brown laugh-
CO
207


QUICKS AND
ing ones, she was able to forgive him. Also, it
was as if in this understanding and forgiving
she had come upon knowledge of almost sacred
importance.
Without demur, opposition, or recrimi-
nation Herr and Fru Dahl accepted Helga's de-
cision to go back to America. She had expected
that they would be glad and relieved. It was
agreeable to discover that she had done them
less than justice. They were, in spite of their
extreme worldliness, very fond of her, and
would, as they declared, miss her greatly. And
they did want her to come back to them, as
they repeatedly insisted. Secretly they felt as
she did, that perhaps when she returned— So
it was agreed upon that it was only for a brief
visit, "for your friend's wedding,” and that she
was to return in the early fall.
The last day came. The last good-byes
were said. Helga began to regret that she was
leaving. Why couldn't she have two lives, or
why couldn't she be satisfied in one place?
208


QUICKS AND
Now that she was actually off, she felt heavy
at heart. Already she looked back with infinite
regret at the two years in the country which
had given her so much, of pride, of happiness,
of wealth, and of beauty.
Bells rang. The gangplank was hoisted.
The dark strip of water widened. The running
figures of friends suddenly grown very dear
grew smaller, blurred into a whole, and van-
ished. Tears rose in Helga Crane's eyes, fear
in her heart.
Good-bye Denmark! Good-bye. Good-
bye!
209


QUICKS AND
sec
had wanted her to stay. After writing for her
to come, too.
Pleasantly unaware was Helga that
Anne, more silently wise than herself, more de-
termined, more selfish, and less inclined to
leave anything to chance, understood perfectly
that in a large measure it was the voice of
Robert Anderson's inexorable conscience that
had been the chief factor in bringing about her
second marriage-his ascetic protest against
the sensuous, the physical. Anne had perceived
that the decorous surface of her new husband's
mind regarded Helga Crane with that intellec-
tual and ästhetic appreciation which attractive
and intelligent women would always draw from
him, but that underneath that well-managed sec-
tion, in a more lawless place where she herself
never hoped or desired to enter, was another,
a vagrant primitive groping toward something
shocking and frightening to the cold asceticism
of his reason. Anne knew also that though she
herself was lovely-more beautiful than Helga
2
I
I


QUICKS AND
---and interesting, with her he had not to strug-
gle against that nameless and to him shameful
impulse, that sheer delight, which ran through
his nerves at mere proximity to Helga. And
Anne intended that her marriage should be a
success. She intended that her husband should
be happy. She was sure that it could be managed
by tact and a little cleverness on her own part.
She was truly fond of Helga, but seeing how
she had grown more charming, more aware of
her power, Anne wasn't so sure that her sin-
cere and urgent request to come over for her
wedding hadn't been a mistake. She was, how-
ever, certain of herself. She could look out for
her husband. She could carry out what she
considered her obligation to him, keep him un-
disturbed, unhumiliated. It was impossible that
she could fail. Unthinkable.
Helga, on her part, had been glad to get
back to New York. How glad, or why, she did
not truly realize. And though she sincerely
meant to keep her promise to Aunt Katrina and
2 1 2


QUICK'S AND
Uncle Poul and return to Copenhagen, summer,
September, October, slid by and she made no
move to go. Her uttermost intention had been
a six or eight weeks' visit, but the feverish rush
of New York, the comic tragedy of Harlem,
still held her. As time went on, she became a
little bored, a little restless, but she stayed on.
Something of that wild surge of gladness that
had swept her on the day when with Anne and
Anderson she had again found herself sur-
rounded by hundreds, thousands, of dark-eyed
brown folk remained with her. These were her
people. Nothing, she had come to understand
now, could ever change that. Strange that she
had never truly valued this kinship until dis-
tance had shown her its worth. How absurd
she had been to think that another country,
other people, could liberate her from the ties
which bound her forever to these mysterious,
these terrible, these fascinating, these lovable,
dark hordes. Ties that were of the spirit. Ties
not only superficially entangled with mere out-
213


QUICKS AND
line of features or color of skin. Deeper. Much
deeper than either of these.
Thankful for the appeasement of that
loneliness which had again tormented her like
a fury, she gave herself up to the miraculous
joyousness of Harlem. The easement which its
heedless abandon brought to her was a real,
a very definite thing. She liked the sharp con-
trast to her pretentious stately life in Copen-
hagen. It was as if she had passed from the
heavy solemnity of a church service to a gor-
geous care-free revel.
Not that she intended to remain. No.
Helga Crane couldn't, she told herself and
others, live in America. In spite of its glamour,
existence in America, even in Harlem, was for
Negroes too cramped, too uncertain, too cruel;
i something not to be endured for a lifetime if
one could escape; something demanding a cour-
age greater than was in her. No. She couldn't
stay. Nor, she saw now, could she remain away.
Leaving, she would have to come back.
2 1 4


QUICKS AND
Anderson- Why not she? It would serve Anne
right if she married a white man. But she knew
in her soul that she wouldn't. “Because I'm a
fool,” she said bitterly.
217


QUICKS AND
EIGHTEEN
One November evening, impregnated still with
the kindly warmth of the dead Indian summer,
Helga Crane was leisurely dressing in pleasant
anticipation of the party to which she had been
asked for that night. It was always amusing at
the Tavenors'. Their house was large and com-
fortable, the food and music always of the
best, and the type of entertainment always un-
expected and brilliant. The drinks, too, were
sure to be safe.
And Helga, since her return, was more
than ever popular at parties. Her courageous
clothes attracted attention, and her deliberate
lure—as Olsen had called it-held it. Her life
in Copenhagen had taught her to expect and
accept admiration as her due. This attitude, she
found, was as effective in New York as across
the sea. It was, in fact, even more so. And it
ven more
218


QUICK SAND
nes
the fact that Helga knew that Anne disap-
proved of her. Without words Anne had man-
aged to make that evident. In her opinion,
Helga had lived too long among the enemy, the
detestable pale faces. She understood them too
well, was too tolerant of their ignorant stupid-
ities. If they had been Latins, Anne might con-
ceivably have forgiven the disloyalty. But Nor-
dics ! Lynchers! It was too traitorous. Helga
smiled a little, understanding Anne's bitter-
ness and hate, and a little of its cause. It was of
a piece with that of those she so virulently
hated. Fear. And then she sighed a little, for
she regretted the waning of Anne's friend-
ship. But, in view of diverging courses of their
lives, she felt that even its complete extinction
would leave her undevastated. Not that she
wasn't still grateful to Anne for many things.
It was only that she had other things now.
And there would, forever, be Robert Anderson
between them. A nuisance. Shutting them off
from their previous confident companionship
220


QUICKS AND
NA
A
and understanding. “And anyway,” she said
again, aloud, "he's nobody much to have mar-
ried. Anybody could have married him. Any- .
body. If a person wanted only to be married
If it had been somebody like Olsen- That
would be different something to crow over,
perhaps.”
The party was even more interesting
than Helga had expected. Helen, Mrs. Ta-
venor, had given vent to a malicious glee, and
had invited representatives of several opposing
Harlem political and social factions, including
the West Indian, and abandoned them help-
lessly to each other. Helga's obserying eyes
picked out several great and near-great sulking
or obviously trying hard not to sulk in widely
separated places in the big rooms. There were
present, also, a few white people, to the open
disapproval or discomfort of Anne and several
others. There too, poised, serene, certain, sur-
rounded by masculine black and white, was Au-
drey Denney.
2 2 1


QUICKS AND
“Do you know, Helen,” Helga con-
fided, “I've never met Miss Denney. I wish
you'd introduce me. Not this minute. Later,
when you can manage it. Not somer-appar-
ently by request, you know.”
Helen Tavenor laughed. “No, you
wouldn't have met her, living as you did with
Anne Grey. Anderson, I mean. She's Anne's
particular pet aversion. The mere sight of
Audrey is enough to send her into a frenzy for
a week. It's too bad, too, because Audrey's an
awfully interesting person and Anne's said
some pretty awful things about her. You'll like
her, Helga.”
Helga nodded. “Yes, I expect to. And
I know about Anne. One night—" She stopped,
for across the room she saw, with a stab of sur-
prise, James Vayle. “Where, Helen did you get
him?"
"Oh, that? That's something the cat
brought in. Don't ask which one. He came with
somebody, I don't remember who. I think he's
2 2 2


QUICKS AND
shocked to death. Isn't he lovely? The dear
baby. I was going to introduce him to Audrey
and tell her to do a good job of vamping on
him as soon as I could remember the darling's
name, or when it got noisy enough so he
wouldn't hear what I called him. But you'll do
just as well. Don't tell me you know him!”
Helga made a little nod. “Welll And I sup-
pose you met him at some shockingly wicked
place in Europe. That's always the way with
those innocent-looking men.”
Not quite. I met him ages ago in
Naxos. We were engaged to be married. Nice,
isn't he? His name's Vayle. James Vayle."
“Nice,” said Helen throwing out her
hands in a characteristic dramatic gesture-she
had beautiful hands and arms—"is exactly the
word. Mind if I run off? I've got somebody
here who's going to sing. Not spirituals. And
I haven't the faintest notion where he's got to.
The cellar, I'll bet.”
James Vayle hadn't, Helga decided,
223


QUICKS AND
He was, she saw, getting himself together. "It's
only another way of saying that everybody, al-
most, some time sooner or later comes to Har-
lem, even you."
He laughed. “Yes, I guess that is true
enough. I didn't come to stay, though.” And
then he was grave, his earnest eyes searchingly
upon her.
"Well, anyway, you're here now, so let's
find a quiet corner if that's possible, where we
can talk. I want to hear all about you."
For a moment he hung back and a glint
of mischief shone in Helga's eyes. "I see," she
said, "you're just the same. However, you
needn't be anxious. This isn't Naxos, you know.
Nobody's watching us, or if they are, they don't
care a bit what we do.”
At that he flushed a little, protested a
little, and followed her. And when at last they
had found seats in another room, not so
crowded, he said: "I didn't expect to see you
here. I thought you were still abroad."
2 25


QUICKS AND
"I still maintain that they nearly all
come back here eventually to live.”
"That's because they can't help it,”
Helga Crane said firmly. “Money, you know.”
"Perhaps, I'm not so sure. I was in the
war. Of course, that's not really living over
there, but I saw the country and the difference
in treatment. But, I can tell you, I was pretty
darn glad to get back. All the fellows were."
He shook his head solemnly. “I don't think any-
thing, money or lack of money, keeps us here.
If it was only that, if we really wanted to leave,
we'd go all right. No, it's something else, some-
thing deeper than that."
“And just what do you think it is ?”
"I'm afraid it's hard to explain, but I
suppose it's just that we like to be together. I
simply can't imagine living forever away from
colored people.”
A suspicion of a frown drew Helga's
brows. She threw out rather tartly: "I'm
a Negro too, you know."
2 27


QUICKS AND
"Well, Helga, you were always a little
different, a little dissatisfied, though I don't
pretend to understand you at all. I never did,"
he said a little wistfully.
And Helga, who was beginning to feel
that the conversation had taken an impersonal
and disappointing tone, was reassured and
gave him her most sympathetic smile and said
almost gently: “And now let's talk about you.
You're still at Naxos ?"
“Yes I'm still there. I'm assistant prin-
cipal now.”
Plainly it was a cause for enthusiastic
congratulation, but Helga could only manage
a tepid “How nice !" Naxos was to her too re-
mote, too unimportant. She did not even hate
it now.
How long, she asked, would James be
in New York?
He couldn't say. Business, important
business for the school, had brought him. It
was, he said, another tone creeping into his
228


QUICKS AND
guests: “And I don't like that sort of thing. In
fact I detest it.”
"Why?” Helga was striving hard to be
casual in her manner.
James Vayle, it was evident, was begin-
ning to be angry. It was also evident that Helga
Crane's question had embarrassed him. But
he seized the bull by the horns and said: "You
know as well as I do, Helga, that it's the
colored girls these men come up here to see.
They wouldn't think of bringing their wives.”
And he blushed furiously at his own implica-
tion. The blush restored Helga's good temper.
James was really too funny.
“That,” she said softly, “is Hugh
Wentworth, the novelist, you know.” And she
indicated a tall olive-skinned girl being whirled
about to the streaming music in the arms of a
towering black man. “And that is his wife. She
isn't colored, as you've probably been think-
ing. And now let's change the subject again."
"All right! And this time let's talk
230


QUICKS AND
Later she had to go upstairs to pin up
a place in the hem of her dress which had
caught on a sharp chair corner. She finished the
temporary repair and stepped out into the hall,
and somehow, she never quite knew exactly just
how, into the arms of Robert Anderson. She
drew back and looked up smiling to offer an
apology.
And then it happened. He stooped and
kissed her, a long kiss, holding her close. She
fought against him with all her might. Then,
strangely, all power seemed to ebb away, and
a long-hidden, half-understood desire welled
up in her with the suddenness of a dream. Helga
Crane's own arms went up about the man's
neck. When she drew away, consciously con-
fused and embarrassed, everything seemed to
have changed in a space of time which she knew
to have been only seconds. Sudden anger
seized her. She pushed him indignantly aside
and with a little pat for her hair and dress went
slowly down to the others.
233


QUICKS AND
Sa
incomprehensible experience of last night. She
still liked her in the same degree and in the
same manner. She still felt slightly annoyed
with her. She still did not envy her marriage.
with Anderson. By some mysterious process the
emotional upheaval which had racked her had
left all the rocks of her existence unmoved. Out-
wardly nothing had changed.
Days, weeks, passed; outwardly serene;
inwardly tumultous. Helga met Dr. Anderson
at the social affairs to which often they were
both asked. Sometimes she danced with him,
always in perfect silence. She couldn't, she ab-
solutely couldn't, speak a word to him when
they were thus alone together, for at such times
lassitude encompassed her; the emotion which
had gripped her retreated, leaving a strange
tranquillity, troubled only by a soft stir of de-
sire. And shamed by his silence, his apparent
forgetting, always after these dances she tried
desperately to persuade herself to believe what
she wanted to believe: that it had not hap-
2 35


QUICKS AND
He hesitated a second and then said
quickly: “Why, yes, that's all right.”
"Eight o'clock ?”
“Eight o'clock,” he agreed.
Eight o'clock tomorrow came. Helga
Crane never forgot it. She had carried away
from yesterday's meeting a feeling of increas-
ing elation. It had seemed to her that she hadn't
been so happy, so exalted, in years, if ever. All
night, all day, she had mentally prepared her-
self for the coming consummation; physically
too, spending hours before the mirror.
Eight o'clock had come at last and with
it Dr. Anderson. Only then had uneasiness
come upon her and a feeling of fear for pos-
sible exposure. For Helga Crane wasn't, after
all, a rebel from society, Negro society. It did
mean something to her. She had no wish to
stand alone. But these late fears were over-
whelmed by the hardiness of insistent desire;
and she had got herself down to the hotel's
small reception room.
mean
238


QUICKS AND
contrition or apology, Helga Crane had gone
out of the room and upstairs.
She had, she told herself, been per-
fectly justified in slapping Dr. Anderson, but
she was not convinced. So she had tried hard
to make herself very drunk in order that sleep
might come to her, but had managed only to
make herself very sick.
Not even the memory of how all living
had left his face, which had gone a taupe gray
hue, or the despairing way in which he had
lifted his head and let it drop, or the trembling
hands which he had pressed into his pockets,
brought her any scrap of comfort. She had
ruined everything. Ruined it because she had
been so silly as to close her eyes to all indica-
tions that pointed to the fact that no matter
what the intensity of his feelings or desires
might be, he was not the sort of man who would
for any reason give up one particle of his own
good opinion of himself. Not even for her. Not
241


QUICKS AND
even though he knew that she had wanted so
terribly something special from him.
Something special. And now she had
forfeited it forever. Forever. Helga had an
instantaneous shocking perception of what for-
ever meant. And then, like a flash, it was gone,
leaving an endless stretch of dreary years be-
fore her appalled vision.
242


QUICKS AND
direct refusal of the offering. Whatever out-
come she had expected, it had been something
else than this, this mortification, this feeling of
ridicule and self-loathing, this knowledge that
she had deluded herself. It was all, she told her-
self, as unpleasant as possible.
Almost she wished she could die. Not
quite. It wasn't that she was afraid of death,
which had, she thought, its picturesque aspects.
It was rather that she knew she would not die.
And death, after the debacle, would but in-
tensify its absurdity. Also, it would reduce her,
Helga Crane, to unimportance, to nothingness.
Even in her unhappy present state, that did
not appeal to her. Gradually, reluctantly, she
began to know that the blow to her self-esteem,
the certainty of having proved herself a silly
fool, was perhaps the severest hurt which she
had suffered. It was her self-assurance that had
gone down in the crash. After all, what Dr.
Anderson thought didn't matter. She could
escape from the discomfort of his knowing gray
2 44


QUICKS AND
eyes. But she couldn't escape from sure knowl-
edge that she had made a fool of herself. This
angered her further and she struck the wall
with her hands and jumped up and began hastily
to dress herself. She couldn't go on with the
analysis. It was too hard. Why bother, when
she could add nothing to the obvious fact that
she had been a fool ?
"I can't stay in this room any longer.
I must get out or I'll choke.” Her self-
knowledge had increased her anguish. Dis-
tracted, agitated, incapable of containing her-
self, she tore open drawers and closets trying
desperately to take some interest in the selec-
tion of her apparel.
It was evening and still raining. In the
streets, unusually deserted, the electric lights
cast dull glows. Helga Crane, walking rapidly,
aimlessly, could decide on no definite destina-
tion. She had not thought to take umbrella or
even rubbers. Rain and wind whipped cruelly
about her, drenching her garments and chill-
2 4 5


QUICK SAND
gutter. So, though she was very tired and very
weak, she dragged herself up and succeeded
finally in making her way to the store whose
blurred light she had marked for her destina-
tion.
She had opened the door and had en-
tered before she was aware that, inside, people
were singing a song which she was conscious of
having heard years ago–hundreds of years it
seemed. Repeated over and over, she made out
the words:
... Showers of blessings,
Showers of blessings ...
She was conscious too of a hundred pairs
of eyes upon her as she stood there, drenched
and disheveled, at the door of this improvised
meeting-house.
... Showers of blessings ...
The appropriateness of the song, with
its constant reference to showers, the ridic-
247


QUICKS AND
ее
dainful, as she sat there, listening to the
preacher praying for her soul. But though she
was contemptuous, she was being too well en-
tertained to leave. And it was, at least, warm
and dry. So she stayed, listening to the fervent
exhortation to God to save her and to the
zealous shoutings and groanings of the con-
gregation. Particularly she was interested in
the writhings and weepings of the feminine
portion, which seemed to predominate. Little
by little the performance took on an almost
v Bacchic vehemence. Behind her, before her,
beside her, frenzied women gesticulated,
screamed, wept, and tottered to the praying of
the preacher, which had gradually become a
cadenced chant. When at last he ended, another
took up the plea in the same moaning chant,
and then another. It went on and on without
pause with the persistence of some unconquer-
able faith exalted beyond time and reality.
Fascinated, Helga Crane watched until
there crept upon her an indistinct horror of an
2 52


QUICKS AND
unknown world. She felt herself in the presence
of a nameless people, observing rites of a re-
mote obscure origin. The faces of the men and
women took on the aspect of a dim vision.
"This,” she whispered to herself, “is terrible.
I must get out of here.” But the horror held
her. She remained motionless, watching, as if
she lacked the strength to leave the place-foul,
vile, and terrible, with its mixture of breaths,
its contact of bodies, its concerted convulsions,
all in wild appeal for a single soul. Her soul.
And as Helga watched and listened,
gradually a curious influence penetrated her;
she felt an echo of the weird orgy resound in
her own heart; she felt herself possessed by the
same madness; she too felt a brutal desire to
shout and to sling herself about. Frightened at
the strength of the obsession, she gathered her-
self for one last effort to escape, but vainly.
In rising, weakness and nausea from last night's
unsuccessful attempt to make herself drunk
overcame her. She had eaten nothing since
2 53


QUICKS AND
yesterday. She fell forward against the crude
railing which enclosed the little platform. For
a single moment she remained there in silent
stillness, because she was afraid she was going
to be sick. And in that moment she was lost-
or saved. The yelling figures about her pressed
forward, closing her in on all sides. Maddened,
she grasped at the railing, and with no previous
intention began to yell like one insane, drown-
ing every other clamor, while torrents of tears
streamed down her face. She was unconscious
of the words she uttered, or their meaning:
“Oh God, mercy, mercy. Have mercy on me!"
but she repeated them over and over.
From those about her came a thunder-
clap of joy. Arms were stretched toward her
with savage frenzy. The women dragged them-
selves upon their knees or crawled over the
floor like reptiles, sobbing and pulling their
hair and tearing off their clothing. Those who
succeeded in getting near to her leaned forward
to encourage the unfortunate sister, dropping
254


QUICK SAND
TWENTY-ONE
On leaving the mission Helga Crane had
started straight back to her room at the hotel.
With her had gone the fattish yellow man who
had sat beside her. He had introduced himself
as the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green in prof-
fering his escort for which Helga had been
grateful because she had still felt a little dizzy
and much exhausted. So great had been this
physical weariness that as she had walked be-
side him, without attention to his verbose in-
formation about his own "field," as he called
it, she had been seized with a hateful feeling of
vertigo and obliged to lay firm hold on his arm
to keep herself from falling. The weakness had
passed as suddenly as it had come. Silently they
had walked on. And gradually Helga had re-
called that the man beside her had himself
swayed slightly at their close encounter, and
256


QUICK SAND
mon
that frantically for a fleeting moment he had
gripped at a protruding fence railing. That
man! Was it possible ? As easy as that?
Instantly across her still half-hypnotized
consciousness little burning darts of fancy had
shot themselves. No. She couldn't. It would be
too awful. Just the same, what or who was
there to hold her back? Nothing. Simply noth-
ing. Nobody. Nobody at all.
Her searching mind had become in a
moment quite clear. She cast at the man a specu-
lative glance, aware that for a tiny space she
had looked into his mind, a mind striving to
be calm. A mind that was certain that it was
secure because it was concerned only with things
of the soul, spiritual things, which to him meant
religious things. But actually a mind by habit
at home amongst the mere material aspect of
things, and at that moment consumed by some
longing for the ecstasy that might lurk behind
the gleam of her cheek, the flying wave of her
hair, the pressure of her slim fingers on his
se
257


QUICKS AND
nal
heavy arm. An instant's flashing vision it had
been and it was gone at once. Escaped in the
aching of her own senses and the sudden dis-
turbing fear that she herself had perhaps
missed the supreme secret of life.
After all, there was nothing to hold her
back. Nobody to care. She stopped sharply,
shocked at what she was on the verge of con-
sidering. Appalled at where it might lead her.
The man-what was his name?-think-
ing that she was almost about to fall again, had
reached out his arms to her. Helga Crane had
deliberately stopped thinking. She had only.
smiled, a faint provocative smile, and pressed
her fingers deep into his arms until a wild look
had come into his slightly bloodshot eyes.
The next morning she lay for a long
while, scarcely breathing, while she reviewed the
happenings of the night before. Curious. She
couldn't be sure that it wasn't religion that had
made her feel so utterly different from dread-
ful yesterday. And gradually she became a
258


QUICKS AND
little sad, because she realized that with every
hour she would get a little farther away from
this soothing haziness, this rest from her long
trouble of body and of spirit; back into the
clear bareness of her own small life and being,
from which happiness and serenity always faded
just as they had shaped themselves. And slowly
bitterness crept into her soul. Because, she
thought, all I've ever had in life has been things
except just this one time. At that she closed
her eyes, for even remembrance caused her to
shiver a little.
Things, she realized, hadn't been,
weren't, enough for her. She'd have to have
something else besides. It all came back to that
old question of happiness. Surely this was it.
Just for a fleeting moment Helga Crane, her
eyes watching the wind scattering the gray-
white clouds and so clearing a speck of blue
sky, questioned her ability to retain, to bear,
this happiness at such cost as she must pay for
it. There was, she knew, no getting round that.
259


QUICKS AND
ture like that, hold out against her? If she
pretended to distress? To fear? To remorse?
He couldn't. It would be useless for him even
to try. She screwed up her face into a little grin,
remembering that even if protestations were to
fail, there were other ways.
And, too, there was God.
262


QUICKS AND
TWENTY-TWO
And so in the confusion of seductive repent-
ance Helga Crane was married to the grand-
iloquent Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, that
rattish yellow man, who had so kindly, so unc-
tuously, proffered his escort to her hotel on
the memorable night of her conversion. With
him she willingly, even eagerly, left the sins
and temptations of New York behind her to,
as he put it, “labor in the vineyard of the Lord"
in the tiny Alabama town where he was pastor
to a scattered and primitive flock. And where,
as the wife of the preacher, she was a person of
relative importance. Only relative.
Helga did not hate him, the town, or
the people. No. Not for a long time.
As always, at first the novelty of the
thing, the change, fascinated her. There was a
recurrence of the feeling that now, at last, she
263


QUICKS AND
Her young joy and zest for the uplifting of her
fellow men came back to her. She meant to
subdue the cleanly scrubbed ugliness of her own
surroundings to soft inoffensive beauty, and to
help the other women to do likewise. Too, she
would help them with their clothes, tactfully
point out that sunbonnets, no matter how gay,
and aprons, no matter how frilly, were not
quite the proper things for Sunday church wear.
There would be a sewing circle. She visualized
herself instructing the children, who seemed
most of the time to run wild, in ways of gentler
deportment. She was anxious to be a true help.
mate, for in her heart was a feeling of obliga-
tion, of humble gratitude.
In her ardor and sincerity Helga even
made some small beginnings. True, she was not
very successful in this matter of innovations.
When she went about to try to interest the
women in what she considered more appropriate
clothing and in inexpensive ways of improving
their homes according to her ideas of beauty,
h
vas
265


QUICKS AND
of magnificent Amazon proportions and bold
shining eyes of jet-like hardness. A person of
awesome appearance. All chains, strings of
beads, jingling bracelets, flying ribbons, feathery
neck-pieces, and flowery hats. Clementine was
inclined to treat Helga with an only partially
concealed contemptuousness, considering her a
poor thing without style, and without proper
understanding of the worth and greatness of
the man, Clementine's own adored pastor,
whom Helga had somehow had the astounding
good luck to marry. Clementine's admiration of
the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green was open.
Helga was at first astonished. Until she learned
that there was really no reason why it should
be concealed. Everybody was aware of it. Be-
sides, open adoration was the prerogative, the
almost religious duty, of the female portion
of the flock. If this unhidden and exaggerated
approval contributed to his already oversized
pomposity, so much the better. It was what they
expected, liked, wanted. The greater his own
267


QUICK SAND
wonder of life, of love, and of God's goodness.
For the preacher, her husband, she had
a feeling of gratitude, amounting almost to sin.
Beyond that, she thought of him not at all. But
she was not conscious that she had shut him
out from her mind. Besides, what need to think
of him? He was there. She was at peace, and
secure. Surely their two lives were one, and
the companionship in the Lord's grace so per-
fect that to think about it would be tempting
providence. She had done with soul-searching.
What did it matter that he consumed his
food, even the softest varieties, audibly? What
did it matter that, though he did no work with
his hands, not even in the garden, his finger-
nails were always rimmed with black? What did
it matter that he failed to wash his fat body,
or to shift his clothing, as often as Helga her-
self did? There were things that more than out-
weighed these. In the certainty of his goodness,
his righteousness, his holiness, Helga somehow
overcame her first disgust at the odor of sweat
271


QUICKS AND
and stale garments. She was even able to be
unaware of it. Herself, Helga had come to
look upon as a finicky, showy thing of unneces-
sary prejudices and fripperies. And when she
sat in the dreary structure, which had once been
a stable belonging to the estate of a wealthy
horse-racing man and about which the odor of
manure still clung, now the church and social
center of the Negroes of the town, and heard
him expound with verbal extravagance the
gospel of blood and love, of hell and heaven,
of fire and gold streets, pounding with clenched
fists the frail table before him or shaking those
fists in the faces of the congregation like direct
personal threats, or pacing wildly back and
forth and even sometimes shedding great tears
as he besought them to repent, she was, she
told herself, proud and gratified that he be-
longed to her. In some strange way she was able
to ignore the atmosphere of self-satisfaction
which poured from him like gas from a leaking
pipe.
27 2


QUICKS AND
been, deferentially kind and incredulously proud
of her—and verbally encouraging. Helga tried
not to see that he had rather lost any personal
interest in her, except for the short spaces be-
tween the times when she was preparing for or
recovering from childbirth. She shut her eyes to
the fact that his encouragement had become a
little platitudinous, limited mostly to “The
Lord will look out for you,” “We must accept
what God sends,” or “My mother had nine
children and was thankful for every one.” If
she was inclined to wonder a little just how
they were to manage with another child on
the way, he would point out to her that her
doubt and uncertainty were a stupendous in-
gratitude. Had not the good God saved her
soul from hell-fire and eternal damnation ? Had
He not in His great kindness given her three
small lives to raise up for His glory? Had He
not showered her with numerous other mercies
(evidently too numerous to be named sepa-
rately) ?
276


QUICKS AND
“Thanks, Sary,” she said, rising in re-
treat from the coffee, "you've done me a world
of good. I'm really going to try to be more
patient.”
So, though with growing yearning she
longed for the great ordinary things of life,
hunger, sleep, freedom from pain, she resigned
herself to the doing without them. The pos-
sibility of alleviating her burdens by a greater
faith became lodged in her mind. She gave her.
self up to it. It did help. And the beauty of
leaning on the wisdom of God, of trusting, gave
to her a queer sort of satisfaction. Faith was
really quite easy. One had only to yield. To
ask no questions. The more weary, the more
weak, she became, the easier it was. Her re-
ligion was to her a kind of protective coloring,
shielding her from the cruel light of an un-
bearable reality.
This utter yielding in faith to what had
been sent her found her favor, too, in the eyes
of her neighbors. Her husband's flock began to
1
U
281


QUICKS AND
approve and commend this submission and
humility to a superior wisdom. The womenfolk
spoke more kindly and more affectionately of
the preacher's Northern wife. "Pore Mis'
Green, wid all dem small chilluns at once. She
suah do hab it ha'd. An' she don' nebah com-
plains an' frets no mo'e. Jes' trus' in de Lawd
lak de Good Book say. Mighty sweet lil' 'oman
too."
Helga didn't bother much about the
preparations for the coming child. Actually and
metaphorically she bowed her head before God,
trusting in Him to see her through. Secretly she
was glad that she had not to worry about her-
self or anything. It was a relief to be able to
put the entire responsibility on someone else.
282


QUICKS AND
a long time somewhere in that delightful bor-
derland on the edge of unconsciousness, an en-
chanted and blissful place where peace and in-
credible quiet encompassed her.
After weeks she grew better, returned
to earth, set her reluctant feet to the hard path
of life again.
"Well, here you are!" announced Miss
Hartley in her slightly harsh voice one after-
noon just before the fall of evening. She had
for some time been standing at the bedside gaz-
ing down at Helga with an intent speculative
look.
“Yes,” Helga agreed in a thin little
voice, "I'm back.” The truth was that she had
been back for some hours. Purposely she had
lain silent and still, wanting to linger forever
in that serene haven, that effortless calm where
nothing was expected of her. There she could
watch the figures of the past drift by. There
was her mother, whom she had loved from a
distance and finally so scornfully blamed, who
28 6


QUICK SAND
the scorched melon-patch, ruined because Helga
had been ill so long and unable to tend it, were
confirmation of that.
“The Lord be praised,” he said, and
came forward. It was distinctly disagreeable.
It was even more disagreeable to feel his moist
hand on hers. A cold shiver brushed over her.
She closed her eyes. Obstinately and with all
her small strength she drew her hand away
from him. Hid it far down under the bed-
covering, and turned her face away to hide a
grimace of unconquerable aversion. She cared
nothing, at that moment, for his hurt surprise.
She knew only that, in the hideous agony that
for interminable hours-no, centuries-she had
borne, the luster of religion had vanished; that
revulsion had come upon her; that she hated
this man. Between them the vastness of the
universe had come.
Miss Hartley, all-seeing and instantly
aware of a situation, as she had been quite
aware that her patient had been conscious for
288


QUICKS AND
some time before she herself had announced the
fact, intervened, saying firmly: “I think it might
be better if you didn't try to talk to her now.
She's terribly sick and weak yet. She's still
got some fever and we mustn't excite her or
she's liable to slip back. And we don't want
that, do we?”
No, the man, her husband, responded,
they didn't want that. Reluctantly he went from
the room with a last look at Helga, who was
lying on her back with one frail, pale hand
under her small head, her curly black hair scat-
tered loose on the pillow. She regarded him
from behind dropped lids. The day was hot,
her breasts were covered only by a nightgown
of filmy crêpe, a relic of prematrimonial days,
which had slipped from one carved shoulder.
He Alinched. Helga's petulant lip curled, for
she well knew that this fresh reminder of her
desirability was like the flick of a whip.
Miss Hartley carefully closed the door
after the retreating husband. “It's time," she
289


QUICKS AND
"... For to this day the women
bring down doves to the altar as their vic-
tims....!"
Helga closed her eyes.
"... Africa and Asia have already
enriched us with a considerable number of
gods. ...»
Miss Hartley looked up. Helga had
slipped into slumber while the superbly ironic
ending which she had so desired to hear was
yet a long way off. A dull tale, was Miss Hart-
ley's opinion, as she curiously turned the pages
to see how it turned out.
“Jesus? ... Jesus—of Nazareth? I
cannot call him to mind.'"
"Huh! she muttered, puzzled. "Silly.”
And closed the book.
295


QUICK SAND
i
blunted the perceptions. Robbed life of its
crudest truths. Especially it had its uses for the
poor—and the blacks.
For the blacks. The Negroes.
And this, Helga decided, was what
ailed the whole Negro race in America, this
fatuous belief in the white man's God, this
childlike trust in full compensation for all woes
and privations in "kingdom come.” Sary
Jones's absolute conviction, "In de nex' worl'
we's all recompense'," came back to her. And
ten million souls were as sure of it as was Sary.
How the white man's God must laugh at the
great joke he had played on them ! Bound them
to slavery, then to poverty and insult, and made
them bear it unresistingly, uncomplainingly al-
most, by sweet promises of mansions in the sky
by and by.
"Pie in the sky," Helga said aloud de-
risively, forgetting for the moment Miss Hart-
ley's brisk presence, and so was a little startled
at hearing her voice from the adjoining room
297


QUICK SAND
satisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it
she had experienced before. In Naxos. In New
York. In Copenhagen. This differed only in de-
gree. And it was of the present and therefore
seemingly more reasonable. The other re-
vulsions were of the past, and now less ex-
plainable.
The thought of her husband roused in
her a deep and contemptuous hatred. At his
every approach she had forcibly to subdue a
furious inclination to scream out in protest.
Shame, too, swept over her at every thought of
her marriage. Marriage. This sacred thing of
which parsons and other Christian folk ranted
so sanctimoniously, how immoral-according
to their own standards—it could be! But
Helga felt also a modicum of pity for him, as
for one already abandoned. She meant to leave
him. And it was, she had to concede, all of her
own doing, this marriage. Nevertheless, she
hated him.
The neighbors and churchfolk came in
299