Chapter IX: Part IV (2)

The employer regarded him with a grin. “Oh, so you kicked him out, did you? Go ahead. Who was he, and why?”

Saint told his story briefly, then sat back in his chair awaiting the verdict.

In a voice that gave no indication of his feelings Raymond remarked: “You have your own way of running things rather independently of the Company, haven’t you?” Then, without waiting for a reply, he continued, “Well, I didn’t know about the Bluton kicking. There was something else that I wanted to talk over with you. Yesterday Goodlow chucked his job. War pickings are too fat for him to resist. He’s just the sort who would go in for them. Left us high and dry without a manager for the stores.”

The completeness with which Saint had given himself to his new philosophy was demonstrated in his immediate response. He leaned across the desk, looked point-blank into his employer’s eyes and said: “You’ve got to give me that job, Mr. Raymond. You’ve just got to.”

“And have you kick my customers out of the front door?”

“You’ll have to leave that to me, sir. You’ll have to let me run things my own way. But if you do, I’ll promise to give you everything I’ve got in me.”

The big man got to his feet and held out his hand. “That’s all that an employer can ask,” he said with a smile. “Shake on it, and I’ll be out to-morrow at ten to go over the details with you.”

* * * * *

Nineteen hundred and eighteen--a hectic year. Stupendous energies were hurled into colossal tasks and accomplished miracles over night. Winter--spring--summer trod on each other’s heels in their haste to finish the job. But out in the mining camp dew was still unshaken from the morning grass, sun still poured gracious warmth on laxed bodies, full moons lifted over vast marshes, pulled their flood tides high into salt creeks, then released them to dwindle seaward again. Nothing was changed deeply. It was as though the fossils beneath the feet of the living spoke to them out of their long death, telling them of the transitoriness of human existence, the futility of all human effort in the changeless face of time. The great pines towered above the scattered villages. The broad marshes rimmed their world with silence.

The men who had gone from that district were in a labour battalion. Their letters told of a world full of wonders but little of the horror of war. And, in the meantime, wages were mounting to still higher levels, separation allowances continued to arrive monthly with unfailing regularity, and the smiles of the “gold-tooth mothers” grew always broader and more effulgent. And why not indeed! In the last war had not Mr. Lincoln come South and smitten the chains from their legs with his own hands, as shown in pictures upon many cabin walls? And now, was this war not making them rich? Why then should one be stingy in the dispensing of golden smiles?

Then suddenly a new word crossed the Ashley and made its début in the camp. The word was “Armistice.” It had a ringing sound like smitten brass; it filled the mouth, and it mated well with other fine reverberant words. The Reverend Quintus Whaley heard it first in the office of the mining company, memorised it then and there, and the following Sunday employed it three times with great effect. The first occasion was: “Ah say unto yo’ sebenty time seben, button on yo’ sword an’ armistice, an’ battle wid de debil.” Ten minutes later a subtle change of meaning was revealed in this usage: “An’ dere war t’ree angel singin’ at de golden gate, an’ one been name’ Gabriel, an’ one been name’ Philadelphy, an’ de las’ one, an’ de greates’ ob all been name’ Armistice.” But the final appearance of the glittering new acquisition was at the same time the most audacious and mystifying, for it popped suddenly into the benediction and associated itself upon terms of such intimacy with the Trinity that, had an orthodox believer been present, the result must certainly have been a heresy trial for the Reverend Quintus.

It was a great word. There was no gainsaying that. But later, when its meaning became definitely associated with the cessation of hostilities, there was general disappointment at its obvious temporal limitations.

* * * * *

The Armistice! To not only the Reverend Quintus Whaley did the word reverberate with varied and significant shades of meaning. From the Atlantic to the Pacific it rang from a hundred million throats, clanged from frantic bells, and bellowed from a continent’s factory whistles. Peace. An end to the slaughter. Then, like a starting gun in a stupendous race, it thundered back and launched the country upon its brief and preposterous epoch of post-war extravagance, expansion, and inflation.

Across the Atlantic the masks were off at Versailles. The Fourteen Points, impractical, perhaps, but born of the agonies and aspirations of a people who would have done with war, were being manipulated cleverly as decoys, then, when the exhausted game had fluttered to hand, forgotten. Everywhere nations, business, individuals, in a mad stampede for the spoils. On the exchanges stocks were rocketing, dazzling unaccustomed eyes, piling up illusory fortunes. Over mountains and across the plains the rails were humming beneath vast movements of freight. Wages were soaring. Every one had something to sell--something to buy.

In the little room behind the store at the mining camp sat a very different Saint Wentworth from the self-effacing boy who had entered the employ of the Company as its commissary keeper. The flaring cowlick still played havoc with all attempts at a disciplined part, and gave his hair an appearance of sprouting in various directions from a given point over his left forehead. But the brow seemed to have heightened with his greater maturity, and the old daydreams that had filled his slate-coloured eyes with a vague chaos had made way for a purposefulness that rendered them intensely aware of the physical world upon which they rested. His figure was slender but muscular and lent an air to the sombre and rather undistinguished suit that he wore.

He had just completed the final reports on his various war work committees--the draft board--the work for the Committee on Public Information--food conservation--agriculture. He had done his best by it all, but now he was glad that it was over. Glad, with the exception, perhaps, of the last. That had been largely his own idea. He had realised the uselessness of attempting to educate the local negroes in the vast abstraction of the European conflict. He had cast around for some one concrete and logical use to which they could be put, and had hit upon the scheme of encouraging them to farm. He had gone to town with his plan and had made arrangements for the financing of a number of small tracts that had been put in truck by negro families. He had become tremendously interested in the experiment, and now that they had been given a start he intended to keep behind the movement for the benefit of the negroes themselves, and to prove to his financial backers that the proposition could be made to pay on its own account.

He glanced around the little room with a rather grim smile. As it had reflected the boy, with its books, guitar, specimens, so now it offered dumb but eloquent testimony upon the man. The centre table had given place to a large flat-top desk, and a filing cabinet stood in the corner once occupied by the bookcase. The guitar, the collection of fossils, the treasured bit of African sculpture, the etchings, had vanished. Valerie had once said that the room was his battlefield. Well, here it was after the first engagement, and, as Saint surveyed it on the day of casting up accounts, there was in his own mind not the least doubt that the fight had gone well. He smiled a little indulgently as he remembered the doubts, the vague gropings, the boyish passion that he had put into the quest for something that always eluded him, something that glimmered now and then from a printed page, that throbbed in a chord of music, that took him sharply when autumn rang against the pines. He was done with abstractions now. He was face to face with something actual, something that yielded results that could be computed upon an adding machine.

He was living in town now, back in the little brick house. Polly had fulfilled her destiny and had done very well for herself. Her husband, already out of olive drab, was back in his substantial law practice in Richmond; and Richmond was one of the very few other cities in America in which a Charleston girl could contemplate existence without an instinctive shudder of repulsion. Then there had been another change in the little house, a sad one from which Saint’s mind still winced when his thoughts touched it. Maum Netta had gone. Almost a year before, when the carnage had been at its height, unknown, except in her tiny orbit, the old woman had joined in the vast migration and answered the call of the only voice that could proclaim her emancipation from the Wentworth family. Now, try as he might, Saint could not become accustomed to the crisp mulatto maid who had come to take her place.

But there were pleasant things to think about. There was the car to be exhibited as a symbol of success and to serve when he went the rounds of the several stores under his control. There also was his desk in the main downtown office. These things meant the realisation of his mother’s definitely patterned dream, and it was also beginning to mean a great deal to him. He was now a gentleman with a Broad Street address and an adequate income. Now he could think seriously about marriage, and next week Valerie’s unit was due to sail from France.

* * * * *

Mamba sat in her window over the old carriage house in the rear of the Atkinsons’ garden. About her everywhere the spring was busy with its splendid occupation of the old city. At the pavement’s edge it had captured a gnarled oak that had not yet waked from its winter sleep, and had buried it beneath the headlong rush of a wistaria vine. Now, from this vantage point, flying columns were being flung to right and left to whelm the chrome and madder of a winter wall beneath invading mauve and purple. During the night the wind had changed. It no longer lashed in from the sea with its wintry tang of salt, but swept across the city from the southwest in a broad languorous tide, heavy with earthy smells from the waking sea islands. It was the season when youth strains forward with racing pulses; when age, disturbed and saddened, takes stock of the past and draws solace from such philosophy as the years may have brought. With elbows on the sill and her face propped between her palms, Mamba looked upon the alarming visage of spring with an expression in which the spirit was still unvanquished but in which fear was held at bay only by her old indomitable look of determination.

Under her feet the years were gathering speed alarmingly now. There were black moments when she would wonder whether she had it in her to hold on until Lissa could take care of herself and make her own way in that strange new world of hers. The Atkinson children were growing too, and no longer needed her care. But she had made no mistake when she had elected the family as her white folk and bound them to herself by an illusory mutual past. As the boy and girl achieved emancipation from her watchful eyes and became absorbed by school, athletics, and the social diversion of the ultra-social old city, she felt herself gradually taking rank as a pensioner of the family. Now the thousand-and-one odd jobs that had engaged her time when she first insinuated herself into the lives of the Wentworths were again her lot. She no longer carried the slipper bag to dances, for Jack, now a breezy lad of seventeen, resplendent in his first dinner jacket, and his sister, who was being beautifully finished at an expensive school, went rolling out of the gate in the big new car that had come to live under Mamba’s room in the old carriage house. But there were still shoes to be shined, flowers to be found, and the front door to be tended on Mrs. Atkinson’s afternoons. She knew that as long as she could hold on, could successfully substitute the illusion of being valuable for actual value, Lissa would fare well. Her large clean room over the garage gave the girl a good home, and her white folks fed her, just as they did Mamba, in their kitchen. But if she failed, now at this most critical of all times for her grandchild, the girl would have no claim on the Atkinsons--and her mother would be less than useless as a guiding hand. Sometimes now on Sundays, after the long hot walk to meet Hagar, there would be moments when she would forget names and faces and the steady light of her purpose would be obscured by blowing mists. Then she would summon her forces and pull her faculties together again, but it was an effort that always left her shaken.

Had she spared herself in any particular in her sacrifices for Lissa, her hardness to Hagar would have been quite without justification, but she had given everything that she had looked forward to in her old age for the girl, and so, as a matter of course, should the mother. When Lissa reached the age of seventeen, so long had it been since she had seen her mother that the figure had first grown vague and then been remodelled in her imagination into at least partial conformity with her new standards. To her friends Ma, who was now “Mamma,” was employed “up state” and sent her the money for clothes, music, and all of the things that enabled her to hold her head up in the Reformed Church set. The girl’s voice was beginning to attract attention. She was doing solos in church, and in programmes given at the new coloured Y. W. C. A. rooms. In appearance she was unforgettable. A large girl for her age, her figure was well developed and straight as an Indian’s, and that almost obscured strain of Indian in Mamba had flared up in the grandchild, as it so often will, and given her a skin of pale lustred bronze through which the colour beat in her cheeks and her full-lipped small mouth. Her hair, fine and straight, was worn after the fashion of the Mona Lisa, and beneath it she held in reserve small close-set ears, which, like her beautifully modelled hands, were a heritage from her mother’s people. But her glory lay in her eyes, which under stress of emotion would deepen and brighten until they glowed like dark amber in sunlight. She had the negro’s faculty of giving her whole being to an emotion, so that under stress every gesture became a graphic interpretation, but her years of hard drilling in music, and her teacher’s directions for posture and platform presence were in danger of overdisciplining the emotions as well as the body. Her early natural charm was becoming a studied attitude. Now, only when she was singing for fun, as she would say, could she let herself go and forget herself in music. But the cultivated air of well-bred restraint was the charm that presently admitted her to the most exclusive circle of negro society in the city.

Among the girls that she knew it was said by many that she was hard--that what she wanted she took regardless of others. But in a set rife with jealousies, and with her conspicuous attainments, talk of this sort was no more than was to be expected.

In the old city that was so strong in its class consciousness among the whites it was singular that there was so little realisation of the fact, that, across the colour line, there existed much the same state of affairs. There were, in the opinion of most of the white residents, two general classes of negroes--those who knew their place, and those who did not--and of late years the latter class was drawing upon the former in lamentably large numbers. If they thought at all of the innumerable distinct segments that comprised negro society it was apt to be with mild and, on the whole, indulgent amusement. For it was well known that the sharp cleavages between full-blooded negroes and mulattoes, between the waning power of the ministerial union and the new secular leaders, the labour element and the young but powerful business class, all served to make any dangerous concerted negro movement improbable.

In the set in which Lissa moved she seldom met a full-blooded negro--the barrier of mistrust and prejudice that rose between her fellow members of the Reformed Church and Mamba’s friends on East Bay was scarcely less formidable than that separating white from black. The atmosphere that she breathed was that of the Victorian drawing room. Music, which had always found a spontaneous outlet in the spiritual and work chant, colour which was flung with a lavish hand over house fronts and clashed and rang in the women’s dresses down in the waterfront district, had, in that rarer air, become “culture,” and found expression in the Monday Night Music Club, and exhibitions of paintings. The untrammelled hilarity and broad humour of Mamba’s friends was here muted to the restrained mirth of the late ’nineties. The pendulum had swung with a vengeance and was then at the limit of its range. Far above, in the life of the aristocracy, the new freedom was beginning to be manifest, smashing conventional usage; talking its Freud and Jung--rearranging moral standards, and explaining lapses in its pat psychoanalytical jargon. But in the Monday Night Music Club ladies were ladies, those who were pale enough blushed, a leg was still a limb--and gentlemen asked permission to smoke cigarettes.

It was all a little absurd, one might say--copybook gentility with its middle-class taboos and reticences. Neither the one thing nor the other in the amazing old city of colourful extremes on the one hand and interesting tradition on the other. But it must always be remembered as a beginning. It was establishing standards, putting a premium on chastity. Drawing-room pioneers, perhaps, but adventurers none the less, and leading the way into a terrain that was new and strange.

* * * * *

The Monday Night Club held its meeting at the home of Thomas Broaden, a fine old frame building of the conventional Charleston type with piazzas along its south façade, overlooking a square of garden on upper Coming Street.

Seen about the street Broaden was an inconspicuous figure, of middle height and age and light in colour. He habitually wore a soft felt hat pulled well down over his eyes, and always walked, although he was known to be exceedingly well-to-do, and a number of his friends now owned machines. In his office of the new negro bank, however, and facing a caller across his desk, he emerged as an individual. Immediately one would notice the high broad structure of the forehead and the deep thoughtful eyes. Mrs. Broaden was a perfect partner--small and delicately made, she carried her fifty years as though they were thirty and managed the home with that consummate skill which conceals itself in its work and gives an effect of effortlessness and ease. Both Mary and Thomas Broaden had taken degrees, but his was from Tuskegee, while she was a graduate of Howard University.

On the first night that Lissa attended a meeting of the club, such was her eagerness that she was the first member to arrive at the Broaden residence. Her hostess greeted her affectionately. “I am so glad that you have come early,” she exclaimed. “Now I’ll have a chance to make you feel at home before the others arrive.” Explaining that her husband had been detained at the bank, she took the girl by the hand and led her over the lower floor of the house, through large, high-ceilinged rooms in which periods gave the impression of being superimposed upon each other like geological strata--red plush--horsehair--down to several pieces of beautiful old Hepplewhite and Chippendale--for the Broadens had always been free negroes, and some of the furniture had been in the family for more than a century. Lissa was amazed at all that she saw and heard. Here was a life among her own people that she never knew existed. Finally her hostess stopped before a picture. It exhibited a group of mansions on East Battery at the time of the earthquake, porticos down, and great fissures zigzagging across the walls. She spoke of it sadly as one might of a friend who has received a hurt.

“Say,” said Lissa with a note of surprise, “you really love this old town, don’t you?”

“Why not?” she replied with a smile. “It’s home.”

“That’s funny: most of the crowd in the choir and at the Y. talk of nothing now but a chance to go to New York. That’s where the money is these days--that’s where coloured people have a chance.”

“I wonder,” said Mary Broaden wistfully; then, with a kind earnestness, added, “You mustn’t say coloured people, my dear--that doesn’t mean anything--Japanese, Indian--all are coloured. You are a negro--doesn’t it make you proud to say it?”

Lissa looked at her closely to see whether she was serious.

“No,” she replied; “my friends don’t like that word. It’s a new idea, being proud of it.”

Her hostess gave a light indulgent laugh and patted her on the shoulder. “I am glad that you didn’t wait to say that when the others are here. Frank North, for one, would have withered you with a look.”

“Frank North?”

“Yes; he’s the painter, you know--and he plays the violin too.”

* * * * *

There was a sharp ring at the bell. Mrs. Broaden stepped to the door and opened it. From the drawing room Lissa heard several voices pleasantly blended in a composite greeting. Then they drew apart and she distinguished a suave low-pitched man’s voice, a higher one with a bright vital quality that she decided must belong to the artist, and several women’s voices still interwoven in talk.

When they entered, the owner of the higher man’s voice was at once presented, confirming her guess as to his identity. He was pale and slender, with an eager look in his sensitive face. Not more than twenty, Lissa thought as he held out his hand. Bowing slightly from the hips, he said, “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Atkinson.”

Nella Taylor, her music teacher, was there, and she put her arm around the girl’s waist and faced the others. “This is my star pupil,” she said, “and we’re going to give you a treat this evening--aren’t we, Lissa?”

She felt by the sudden stiffening of the girl that she was embarrassed, and she hurried on with the introductions. They proved to be an interesting group. There was Dr. Vincent, a short motherly woman in late middle life, a graduate of a Northern university who had turned her back on a promising practice in a large city above the line and had come back home to the old town to work at a minimum income among the women and children of her own race.

The owner of the deep, suave voice proved to be Frederick Gerideau, a contractor and builder who was an authority on colonial architecture and who had restored most of the old dwellings in the lower part of the city. He placed a ’cello on the sofa and greeted the girl warmly.

Gardinia Whitmore Lissa already knew--she was the soprano in the Reformed Church choir, a large girl with a magnificent voice and a bold mulatto beauty that she flaunted like a battle flag. Lissa liked Gardinia, and her youth and obvious good-fellowship helped her to feel at ease in an atmosphere that was commencing to have an overpowering effect upon her.

They fell into groups, standing about in the large rooms. Others entered: the secretary of the Y. W. C. A. and a young social worker from the new civic bureau; both were young mulatto women, and both exhibited the flawless approach of the trained worker.

In spite of the fact that Lissa was standing with her teacher, to whom she was devoted, and young North, who was obviously interested in her, she found herself talking in a constrained half whisper. She felt as though they were all playing parts and that she alone was not letter perfect.

North said, “I heard you sing the aria the other night at the Y. concert and have been wanting to congratulate you. The performance was entrancing.”

She could only manage an embarrassed “Thank you very much.” Then was relieved to see that the performers were gathering at the piano. One of the young women was playing first violin, North second. Gerideau seated himself with his ’cello against his knee, and Miss Taylor was at the piano.

“Shall we start with Beethoven?” she inquired with a crisp professional accent. “How about the ‘Moonlight Sonata’?”

There was a turning of sheets on the stands--silence--then they launched into an excellent rendition of the piece. Lissa could see that they were all highly trained musicians, and that technically the performance was of a very high order. But they played with their eyes on the notes, and instead of releasing the music that was prisoned there to fill the room with its magic, they seemed to hold the performance down to a technical demonstration.

Some one asked for Chopin, and Miss Taylor beckoned to Lissa. The girl rose unhesitatingly and crossed the room. Her teacher had been drilling her in the fifth nocturne, and she felt confident of her ability to acquit herself well. The piece was open, ready. She made a striking picture seated before the grand piano.

“Ready?” she asked, then, after a moment, commenced to play. She knew the nocturne by heart, and she loved it, but there was something in the air about her that kept her from throwing herself into it. This wasn’t playing for fun. There was a weighty seriousness about it. She found herself, like the others, reading the page, desperately intent on a finished technical performance, thinking with an intensity that almost hurt, conscious of notes--notes. Bound together by the relentless exactitude of the score they advanced toward its conclusion with a precision that evoked a round of applause. Later Lissa sang Gounod’s “Serenade,” and although it was enthusiastically received she knew that the restraint under which she laboured had rendered it a colourless performance.

Mrs. Broaden called the girl to her and made a place on the sofa beside her.

“We shall be very proud of you some day, my dear,” she said. “You have genius, and we will all be telling that we knew you when you were a young girl.”

Some one suggested spirituals. Lissa had learned dozens of them from Mamba, and still sang them with the old woman in their room. She saw the ice breaking at last and rose impulsively. “Oh, do let’s sing them,” she cried. “Do you know ‘Play On Your Harp, Little David’?”

“You will find the Burleigh arrangements at the back of the piano, Nella,” Mrs. Broaden called. “There is a quartette of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ that is quite charming.”

North, Gerideau, and two of the young women took the parts, and Miss Taylor accompanied.

Lissa took a seat beside her hostess and told herself quite positively that she was realising a cherished ambition, that this life was the thing that she most greatly desired, and, finally, almost argumentatively, that she was enjoying the evening immensely. She wondered about the others. They were so different from her childhood associates. What were they thinking, feeling, behind their drawing-room reserve? North, for instance. She raised her eyes and met his singularly intense, bright gaze. It gave her a faint pleasurable shock, and for a moment they sat with the breadth of the room between them, and a tingling sense of each other’s presence bridging the distance, drawing them subtly together. Then he smiled and dropped his eyes to the music. Lissa’s face grew hot, she looked quickly away and noticed Gardinia Whitmore observing her with open and mocking amusement. Gardinia was seated alone in a shadowed corner and with her full, dark body held in forced inertia seemed literally to smoulder in the gloom. But her smile was not only for Lissa, the girl noticed. From her retreat it took in all of them one by one. There could be no doubt about it--she was deliberately laughing at them all. The eyes of the two girls met, Gardinia’s openly inviting Lissa to share her amusement. For a fraction of a second there was an instinctive response, then Lissa’s look changed. It became deliberately unresponsive, obtuse, ranging her definitely on the defensive and with the club. What right had Gardinia Whitmore to be pretending a superiority? she thought angrily. She was lucky to have been taken up by them. She ought to be thanking her stars.

When the music ceased Mrs. Broaden smiled upon Lissa.

“You see, my dear,” she said, “what our race is accomplishing artistically--when we have Burleigh, a poet like Paul Laurence Dunbar, and in painting, Tanner, to speak for us, we have something to be proud of; and, by the way, you must ask Frank to tell you about Tanner. He has some photographic reproductions of his pictures, I believe.”

They lingered awhile over ice cream and cakes, and then, to her relief, the girl found herself out under soft spring stars with the April night cool against her face. North had asked to see her home, and they took their way downtown through the deserted streets. Lissa sighed and stretched her arms in a wide and deliberately undignified gesture. Then she stole a glance at her companion. He seemed to have brought the atmosphere of the room with him, and was regarding her with polite inquiry in his face.

She said, “If I ask you a straight question, will you give me a straight answer?”

“Why, of course,” he assured her.

“This evening--was that your idea of a good time?”

North was mildly shocked. “I thought the evening was a great success,” he said on a note of reproof. “What’s your idea of a good time?”

“Oh, I don’t know--I thought I’d rather sing than anything else, but it doesn’t seem to be the fun that it used to. Don’t let’s talk about it any more. Tell me about yourself and who was it?--oh, yes, Tanner.”

“You know his work?” he said eagerly, taking up the end of her request first. Then, without waiting for an affirmative, he plunged into a description of the artist’s triumphs and methods.

Lissa was sorry that she had started him, it kept the drawing-room atmosphere tagging along with them. When he paused she asked, “Now tell me about yourself.”

“Oh, there isn’t much to tell,” and she was relieved to notice that he was embarrassed. “Graduated from Avery here in town and Dad gave me two years in an art school in New York. Now I am going in for portraiture. I want to paint my own people, and they are good about sitting for me.”

Their way had led them through wide unpaved back streets under large shade trees. A faint air smelling of the sea moved through the young leaves and made them whisper. At a far street intersection a big double-truck trolley passed. Lissa heard the clank-clank--clank-clank and the hum of the motors as it drew away in the distance. Then she became cognizant of another sound: the unmistakable rhythm of a spiritual. “Where is that coming from?” she asked.

“I believe I heard that a church near the jail was having a revival this week,” he said without interest. “We can go that way if you want,” and he turned into a dark and rather forbidding byway.

Beyond her Lissa saw the menacing battlemented tower of the jail against the soft stars. Soon they arrived at the church, a small frame building behind a fence of whitewashed palings. The door and windows were wide to the spring night, and the building was jammed with black humanity. The service was well advanced, and the congregation was swaying to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” This was not the Burleigh arrangement. Thought had little to do with this performance. The air rocked to a deep solid chorus, yet a chorus of individuals each creating his own part--shaving harmonies with fractional notes so fine and so spontaneous that no written page could ever capture and prison the sound.

Lissa gripped the palings with her hands. She was trembling with excitement. “There,” she said, “that’s what I mean. They’re having fun when they sing. They don’t care whether the notes are right or not. They are just naturally cutting loose, can’t you feel the difference?”

The rhythm beat in waves against the soft spring night--the air was heady with the faint, indefinable, yet intoxicating odour of untamed bodies rocking in a close mass, one with the song that they were creating.

North’s voice, held on a deliberately casual note, cut across the music. “Oh, that’s all right for these ignorant negroes, I suppose, but where’d we be if we stopped at that? We’ve got to go beyond it. We’re living in a civilised community.”

“Oh, hell!” the girl cried, “forget it, will you?” She caught him by the arm and urged him forward. He was so amazed at the change in her that he went a step before he collected himself. Then he stopped and looked at her. But she kept on tugging at his arm and pleaded, “Oh, let’s step in and cut loose just once--listen to that,” and she started to hum the tune. “How can you stand there like a dummy with a chance to sing like that?”

She felt his arm relax for a moment in her fingers. “Good boy,” she said, “here we go.”

Suddenly he pulled back sharply. “No,” he said sternly. “It won’t do--we’ve got to get away from here. I must get you home. This isn’t our sort of crowd, and we must stand for something, you know. Think what Mrs. Broaden would say if she heard that we were seen at a revival--shouting our heads off with a lot of dirty negroes.”

He took her firmly by the arm and was surprised at her sudden and complete capitulation. She turned away and walked without a word by his side. Only a few more steps and they were passing the jail. Above them the high buttressed wall soared, cutting the sky away almost to the zenith, and above the wall the loom of the battlemented tower hanging dizzily in sharp outline against the milky way.

Lissa looked up, and the black wall seemed to swoop forward and hang poised above them. The night was suddenly dank with the suffering of the thousands who had lain there in the cages--slaves, freemen, her own people. Her mother’s face sprang vividly up before her, and she thought that she must go to see her with Mamba next Sunday morning.

Then they were under a bleary gas lamp. She had not said a word since leaving the church, and now North looked at her curiously. “Why, you’re crying,” he exclaimed. “What in the world’s the matter?”

“I am lonely,” she said in a trembling voice. “I’m the loneliest girl in the world, I reckon. Just let’s hurry, please: I want to get home.”

* * * * *

But the following Sunday found Lissa at church as usual, where she had a small solo part in the offertory selection. She had forgotten all about it that night when she had that strange brain-storm near the jail and had decided to cut church and go to see her mother. She would go some time, of course, but this was her career. Mamba said that her mother would be the last person to want her to miss an opportunity to sing.

The solo went well, she did not feel the restraint in church that she had experienced at the Broadens, and she let herself go into the music. Everybody spoke about it when service was over and the congregation went streaming out into the spring sunshine. Absurd, that fancy of hers that she was lonely. Why, no girl ever had more friends.

North came and asked her to join a party that was going to his studio to see his pictures, and she found herself stepping into a closed car with several well-dressed men and women. North introduced her to Mrs. Prescott, and then, with punctilious observance of the social code, presented Mr. Prescott to her. His introductions were always ceremonious.

The Prescotts occupied the front seat, and the man’s large, faultlessly gloved hands lay in an attitude of easy familiarity upon the wheel.

Lissa had never touched such luxury before. The handsomely dressed woman gave her a welcoming smile over a cloudy fur collar. The car exhaled a faint but pervasive violet perfume.

North and Lissa crowded into the rear seat with another young couple, and while the car glided smoothly over the asphalt he told her how their hosts had made their money. Prescott had started out as a carpenter, then climbed into a small contracting business, and now owned several blocks of negro tenant houses which yielded him a handsome income. They had just returned from a visit to New York where they had heard Roland Hayes in a recital, and had seen Paul Robeson in an O’Neill play, and North asked Mrs. Prescott to tell them about it. Lissa listened greedily while she told of the successes of the new negro artists, and the life in Harlem with the theatres and concert halls, its dances, and its emerging intellectual group.

“Some day I am going there to have my try,” the girl said with flashing eyes.

“Of course you are, my dear,” Mrs. Prescott assured her; “you can’t bury a voice like yours here forever, you know.”

North pressed her arm and smiled. “That’s what I’ve been telling her,” he said, “but she wouldn’t believe me.”

The studio was a large airy second-story room, and a number of portraits were already hung, while many more were stacked against the walls. The group scattered, examining the paintings and exclaiming over them. Lissa was left standing alone before two portraits, a man and a woman in middle life. Then she recognised them as the Broadens. She wondered why she had been so slow in knowing them. The likenesses were good, she could see that the features were those of her host and hostess of a few nights ago. What was the difference? She turned and examined other portraits that hung near, puzzling out the problem as she looked from one to another. Then in a swift revealing moment she had the answer. In spite of the fact that the drawing was well done and the features characteristically negro, they gave an effect of not being negroes at all, but white people painted in darker shades--some subtle racial element was lacking. While she pondered, this inexplicable lack commenced to associate itself with other impressions in her mind--the Broadens’ drawing room, the music that she had heard there that night.

North came and stood beside her, looking eagerly at her face for her verdict. She tried to find words for her inchoate impressions.

“I can see you know a heap about painting. Those pictures are just like Mr. and Mrs. Broaden, only they don’t look just like coloured people and the Broadens do.” North was slightly dashed in spirit. “That’s a matter of artistic technique,” he explained. “You learn to paint in the academy by a certain method, a method that has been used by great artists, then you apply that technique to your own subjects. After all, if the pictures look like them, that’s about all that we can do, isn’t it?”

The girl noticed a defensive tone in his voice and hastened to reassure him. “Oh, I think they’re fine. And I know what you mean about technique. It’s the same with music. You are awfully smart to catch them so well.”

They were joined by Mrs. Prescott, and the girl returned at once to the subject of New York.

“I wish you’d tell me some more about the coloured people up North,” she begged.

“Certainly, my dear. And Frank must listen too. Things have changed a lot even in the three years since he has been there.” She stepped between the young people and slipped her arms through theirs. “Come and sit down,” she said. “Frank can leave his pictures to entertain his guests for him. That’s the good of being a painter.”

“Those men you told me about. Do white people go to hear them sing?” Lissa asked.

The older woman laughed. “Do they? Why, my dear child, if a negro wants to hear one of his own colour he has to get a seat in the gallery. We are not good enough to sit in the orchestra yet, but they will pay three dollars a piece to hear us sing or act.”

North said, “When I was there Charles Gilpin was about the only one. I saw him in _Emperor Jones_.”

“That’s ancient history,” she asserted. “Why, there are a dozen or more top-liners now, and lots of capable artists earning handsome incomes.”

“I suppose it would take an awful lot of money to go on and study?” Lissa queried.

“Yes, that’s the big trouble with us here in the South. It takes so much to even reach a starting point, and there is so little to do it with.”

Lissa hesitated on the edge of a vital question, then framed it, with her wide warm gaze on the woman’s sympathetic face:

“How much money do you think it would take?”

Mrs. Prescott considered a moment. “Oh, I suppose it would take at least a couple of years to do it properly--even to get a good start, and living is high up there, somewhere between two and three thousand dollars, I imagine.”

Lissa received the information in blank silence. The older woman saw the disappointment in her face and patted her hand sympathetically. “But don’t you worry about that. Something is sure to turn up sooner or later.”

They were joined by several others, and the talk turned on North’s paintings. Presently the party commenced to break up and leave, and Lissa’s new acquaintance asked if she would like to be dropped at home, as they were driving downtown and would pass near the Atkinsons’.

In the privacy of the comfortable sedan the girl seemed wrapped around with an atmosphere of security and luxury. Looking out upon the familiar streets from such a vantage point anything seemed possible, even a New York career, even two thousand dollars. She talked to the others, a light answer here, an inconsequent question there, but beneath the surface, her mind hung blinded in a dazzle of radiance, possessed by a dream and deluded by a dreamer’s illusion of actuality.

The car came to a standstill at the curb, and Lissa met the questioning eyes of her friend. “Yes, this is the house,” she said, “and thank you so very much for bringing me home.”

She stepped out and closed the door behind her, then stood for a moment waving farewell as the car drew away. Across the street a group of white people were standing before a handsome Georgian dwelling. Lissa looked up and caught their gaze fixed upon her with that frank amusement which in the old city is always provoked by the sight of a negro attempting what they would have described as putting on airs. There was nothing inimical in their regard. The girl was merely very amusing.

The effect on Lissa was actually physical, like that produced by the violent awakening of a hypnotic subject. She swayed slightly, pulled herself together with an effort, and climbed the stairs to the room over the garage.

Mamba was sitting on a large chair, her eyes fixed on a sun-drenched roof across the way upon which pigeons were strutting and making soft drowsy talk. Her hands lay in her lap, and between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, much as a reader might pause and rest, spectacles on lap, she held Judge Harkness’s large gleaming teeth.

Lissa flung herself down beside the old woman, buried her face in her lap, and burst into a storm of weeping. The paroxysm was so violent and so unexpected from the habitually self-restrained girl that Mamba was frightened. She patted Lissa’s head with her gnarled brown hands and begged her with tremulous urgency to tell her of her trouble.

Finally Lissa looked up into the familiar face that was dimming a little now with the advancing years. The girl was getting herself in hand again. The sobs ceased, and a bitter little smile thinned and stiffened her full lips.

“It’s no use, Grandma,” she said, and there was a new hard tone in the low-timbred voice. “I’ve just been wanting something like hell that I’m never going to get. There’s no use breaking our hearts over it. You better forget it, and not let it fret you.”

“But all dem new frien’ yo’ got--ain’t dey yo’ kind? What’s de matter wid dem?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Lissa said wearily. “They seem to spend all their time saying how glad they are to be negroes and all the time they’re trying their damnedest to be white.”

“Hush yo’ mout’, chile,” Mamba chided. “Ain’t yo’ knows swearin’ ain’t fuh ladies?”

“I’m not so sure I want to be a lady, after all,” Lissa exclaimed. She got to her feet and strode to the open window, then turned and faced Mamba again. Her body was drawn taut against the brilliance of the Southern noon, her fists were clenched at her sides and shaking slightly from their muscular tension.

“Oh, I don’t know what the hell I want,” she flung out in a reckless voice, “but if I don’t find out soon and get it I’m going crazy.”

* * * * *

Lissa had never been on intimate terms with Gardinia Whitmore. This was strange, because their music had thrown them together constantly, and as their voices were perfectly suited to each other’s they were always in demand for duets at recitals and concerts. The explanation probably lay in Lissa’s instinctive good taste. She was not herself aware that she possessed such a characteristic. But she realised that, while she was attracted by the flamboyant personality of the popular soprano, she experienced an involuntary withdrawal into herself at the other’s frank advances. She knew also that Gardinia did not hold the same position in society that she did, for while Gardinia was accepted everywhere on account of her voice, it was obvious that she did not belong.

Seen in the Broadens’ drawing room Gardinia immediately made one think of a Bengal tigress in a zoo. She was magnificently proportioned, with a slack sinuousness of body and dark, heavy-lidded eyes in which the banked fires of desire smouldered and glowed. She seemed at times to move among the furniture with a desperate and scarcely veiled hostility. By turns she would be seized by a gaiety so reckless that it seemed almost violent; or sit watching the others with her sardonic and sultry gaze. But over her lay, like a transparent gauze, a surface sleekness which, while it did not in the least disguise her essential self, gave her hostesses something upon which to fix their attention while they introduced her to their friends. But when Gardinia sang, everything was forgotten, and people ceased explaining her even to themselves.

It would have been difficult to find a more interesting contrast than that which the two girls presented in one of their appearances in a duet. They were of the same height, but Lissa was more slender and showed a greater refinement of form and feature. She gave the impression of holding her powers in reserve, and there was behind her art an indefinable suggestion of tragedy that made even her lighter numbers poignant. Gardinia, on the other hand, was an emotional geyser, and except when she was under the rigid discipline of the Monday Night Musical Club, she captured her listeners with a power that was almost physical.

The Sunday following Lissa’s outburst to Mamba she found herself on the pavement before the Reformed Church, with the congregation from the morning service streaming past her. The week had increased rather than diminished her feeling of unrest. In spite of Mamba’s entreaties, she had not confided in her. In the first place her own feelings were too vague to put into words. There was no use to tell her grandmother that she wanted two thousand dollars with which to go away. She knew that the old woman had been putting something aside for her every week, every cent that she could spare, in fact. It was to be hers to help her along when she no longer had the loving care of the shrewd old head and busy hands. She had never let herself think of it, for to do so brought the tragic prescience of the human loss that it would imply. And what would that pitiful sum amount to, anyway? No, she could not ask Mamba for money, and what the other things were that she wanted she did not know.

Overhead, the portico of the church hung against a soft gray-blue sky, and the air was voluptuous with the warmth of early summer. About her many feet shuffled on the pavement, friendly greetings filled the air. A girl slipped an arm through hers--“Going my way?” Lissa shook her head, and the girl moved on.

The crowd was thinning, breaking away in ones and twos, laughing in the bright summer weather that the negroes loved, bound for Sunday dinner, or long idle walks through the quiet street. Lissa saw the Prescotts getting into their car. North was with them again, and Nella Taylor, her music teacher. They all saw her together and beckoned and waved. Lissa shook her head and watched them drive off with a feeling akin to relief. Then she heard Gardinia’s voice behind her. She had a heavy, rather husky speaking voice. “What’s the kid waiting for?” she asked. “Got a date?”

“No, I am going home. Just waiting for the crowd to scatter. I hate crowds.” Then she gave Gardinia a faint smile and added, “But I am surprised not to see you with a feller. Thought you always had one on a string.”

“Did, but I forgot my umbrella and had to go back for it. Now he’s gone. I bet that yeller cat Lila snitched him while I was inside.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be going,” Lissa opined.

“Say, you ain’t so chummy, are you?--regular chilly sister. But I’m going downtown too, and I just as lief trot along with you.”

“Sure, glad to have you.”

They walked in silence for a while, then Gardinia turned and looked with frank curiosity into Lissa’s face.

“Do you know,” she said, “I can’t somehow make you out. You look just like a human bein’--got hands and feet ’neverything, but you don’t seem to get no kick out o’ life. All bus’ out with the blues all the time. Say, what do you do nights, anyway?”

Thus challenged Lissa gave the matter thought. “Oh, I don’t know,” she answered. “Of course, there’s the Monday Night Musical----”

“Good Gawd!” her companion exploded. “You don’t call that life, do you?”

“Well, most nights, when I am not singing, I just sit round with Grandma and talk.”

“You little hell-raiser,” Gardinia mocked. “Aren’t you ’fraid the cops’ll get you?”

“Sometimes Frank North comes around, and we walk out.”

“Frank North--so that’s it! Don’t you know, bright eyes, if you keep that up you’ll end highbrow?”

Lissa drew away and regarded her companion coldly. “Look here,” she challenged. “You’ve a great way of throwing off on my friends. Frank’s the only boy I know who’s got something to talk about. You could learn a lot from him yourself.”

Gardinia refused to accept the challenge. She remained silent for a moment, then yielded to an impulse.

“Say, kid, wouldn’t you like to try just one real party? You think you’re gettin’ life with that highbrow crowd, just because you don’t know what life’s like. What you say I fix up a date for a dance with a coupla fellows for next Saturday night? What you say? You jus’ try it once, life with a red lining, and night turned on bright----”