Free The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories by Nella Larsen, Charles Larson, Marita Golden

I’ve made up my mind to leave. Today.”
    A short, almost imperceptible silence, then a deep voice of peculiarly pleasing resonance, 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 beautiful. But I—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 window, blatantly unconcerned with her or her answer. 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 sneaking, and petty jealousy. Naxos? It’s hardly a place at all. It’s more like some loathsome, venomous disease. Ugh! Everybody spending his time in a malicious hunting for the weaknesses 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 always 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, unexpected appearance. A little frightening.”
    The man said kindly: “Ah, you’re unhappy. 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 of the work. And I’m not, not if it means suppression 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. Someday you’ll learn that lies, injustice, andhypocrisy 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 mystifying yearning which sang and throbbed in 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 notion 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 knew that she would stay. “It’s an elusive something,” he went on. “Perhaps I can best explain it by the use of that trite phrase, ‘You’re a lady.’ You have