Cane by Jean Toomer (100 best novels of all time .TXT) 📕

the funny looks that Boynton gives her, or about what they say about, well, hell, you know, Paul. And say, Paul, she’s a sweetheart. Tall, not puffy and pretty, more serious and deep⁠—the kind you like these days. And they say she’s got a car. And say, she’s on fire. But you know all about that. She got Helen to fix it up with me. The four of us⁠—remember the last party? Crimson Gardens! Boy!”

Paul’s eyes take on a light that Art can settle in.

III

Art has on his patent-leather pumps and fancy vest. A loose fall coat is swung across his arm. His face has been massaged, and over a close shave, powdered. It is a healthy pink the blue of evening tints a purple pallor. Art is happy and confident in the good looks that his mirror gave him. Bubbling over with a joy he must spend now if the night is to contain it all. His bubbles, too, are curiously tinted purple as Paul watches them. Paul, contrary to what he had thought he would be like, is cool like the dusk, and like the dusk, detached. His dark face is a floating shade in evening’s shadow. He sees Art, curiously. Art is a purple fluid, carbon-charged, that effervesces besides him. He loves Art. But is it not queer, this pale purple facsimile of a red-blooded Norwegian friend of his? Perhaps for some reason, white skins are not supposed to live at night. Surely, enough nights would transform them fantastically, or kill them. And their red passion? Night paled that too, and made it moony. Moony. Thats what Art thought of him. Bona didnt, even in the daytime. Bona, would she be pale? Impossible. Not that red glow. But the conviction did not set his emotion flowing.

“Come right in, wont you? The young ladies will be right down. Oh, Mr. Carlstrom, do play something for us while you are waiting. We just love to listen to your music. You play so well.”

Houses, and dorm sitting-rooms are places where white faces seclude themselves at night. There is a reason⁠ ⁠…

Art sat on the piano and simply tore it down. Jazz. The picture of Our Poets hung perilously.

Paul: I’ve got to get the kid to play that stuff for me in the daytime. Might be different. More himself. More nigger. Different? There is. Curious, though.

The girls come in. Art stops playing, and almost immediately takes up a petty quarrel, where he had last left it, with Helen.

Bona, black-hair curled staccato, sharply contrasting with Helen’s puffy yellow, holds Paul’s hand. She squeezes it. Her own emotion supplements the return pressure. And then, for no tangible reason, her spirits drop. Without them, she is nervous, and slightly afraid. She resents this. Paul’s eyes are critical. She resents Paul. She flares at him. She flares to poise and security.

“Shall we be on our way?”

“Yes, Bona, certainly.”

The Boulevard is sleek in asphalt, and, with arc-lights and limousines, aglow. Dry leaves scamper behind the whir of cars. The scent of exploded gasoline that mingles with them is faintly sweet. Mellow stone mansions overshadow clapboard homes which now resemble Negro shanties in some southern alley. Bona and Paul, and Art and Helen, move along an island-like, far-stretching strip of leaf-soft ground. Above them, worlds of shadow-planes and solids, silently moving. As if on one of these, Paul looks down on Bona. No doubt of it: her face is pale. She is talking. Her words have no feel to them. One sees them. They are pink petals that fall upon velvet cloth. Bona is soft, and pale, and beautiful.

“Paul, tell me something about yourself⁠—or would you rather wait?”

“I’ll tell you anything you’d like to know.”

“Not what I want to know, Paul; what you want to tell me.”

“You have the beauty of a gem fathoms under sea.”

“I feel that, but I dont want to be. I want to be near you. Perhaps I will be if I tell you something. Paul, I love you.”

The sea casts up its jewel into his hands, and burns them furiously. To tuck her arm under his and hold her hand will ease the burn.

“What can I say to you, brave dear woman⁠—I cant talk love. Love is a dry grain in my mouth unless it is wet with kisses.”

“You would dare? right here on the Boulevard? before Arthur and Helen?”

“Before myself? I dare.”

“Here then.”

Bona, in the slim shadow of a tree trunk, pulls Paul to her. Suddenly she stiffens. Stops.

“But you have not said you love me.”

“I cant⁠—yet⁠—Bona.”

“Ach, you never will. Youre cold. Cold.”

Bona: Colored; cold. Wrong somewhere.

She hurries and catches up with Art and Helen.

IV

Crimson Gardens. Hurrah! So one feels. People⁠ ⁠… University of Chicago students, members of the stock exchange, a large Negro in crimson uniform who guards the door⁠ ⁠… had watched them enter. Had leaned towards each other over ash-smeared tablecloths and highballs and whispered: What is he, a Spaniard, an Indian, an Italian, a Mexican, a Hindu, or a Japanese? Art had at first fidgeted under their stares⁠ ⁠… what are you looking at, you godam pack of owl-eyed hyenas?⁠ ⁠… but soon settled into his fuss with Helen, and forgot them. A strange thing happened to Paul. Suddenly he knew that he was apart from the people around him. Apart from the pain which they had unconsciously caused. Suddenly he knew that people saw, not attractiveness in his dark skin, but difference. Their stares, giving him to himself, filled something long empty within him, and were like green blades sprouting in his consciousness. There was fullness, and strength and peace about it all. He saw himself, cloudy, but real. He saw the faces of the people at the tables round him. White lights, or as now, the pink lights of the Crimson Gardens gave a glow and immediacy to white faces. The pleasure of it, equal to that of love or dream, of seeing this. Art and Bona and Helen? He’d look. They were