Part 12
What he had observed, however, was that the number of customers that came into the store during the morning’s slack hour had pronouncedly increased in the last few days. Before, there had been three or four. Now there were twelve or fifteen. The mysterious thing about it was that their purchases totaled little more than those of the original three or four.
Yesterday and today Tony had elected to be in the store at the time when, on the other days, he had been out. But Gillis had not been overcharging or short-changing; for when Tony waited on the customers himself--strange faces all--he found that they bought something like a yeast cake or a five-cent loaf of bread. It was puzzling. Why should strangers leave their own neighborhoods and repeatedly come to him for a yeast cake or a loaf of bread? They were not new neighbors. New neighbors would have bought more variously and extensively and at different times of day. Living near by, they would have come in, the men often in shirtsleeves and slippers, the women in kimonos, with boudoir caps covering their lumpy heads. They would have sent in strange children for things like yeast cakes and loaves of bread. And why did not some of them come in at night when the new helper was off duty?
As for accosting Gillis on suspicion, Tony was too wise for that. Patronage had a queer way of shifting itself in Harlem. You lost your temper and let slip a single ‘_nègre_.’ A week later you sold your business.
Spread over his soap box, with his pudgy hands clasped on his preposterous paunch, Tony sat and wondered. Two men came up, conspicuous for no other reason than that they were white. They displayed extreme nervousness, looking about as if afraid of being seen; and when one of them spoke to Tony it was in a husky, toneless, blowing voice, like the sound of a dirty phonograph record.
‘Are you Antonio Gabrielli?’
‘Yes, sure.’ Strange behavior for such lusty-looking fellows. He who had spoken unsmilingly winked first one eye then the other, and indicated by a gesture of his head that they should enter the store. His companion looked cautiously up and down the Avenue, while Tony, wondering what ailed them, rolled to his feet and puffingly led the way.
Inside, the spokesman snuffled, gave his shoulders a queer little hunch, and asked, ‘Can you fix us up, buddy?’ The other glanced restlessly about the place as if he were constantly hearing unaccountable noises.
Tony thought he understood clearly now. ‘Booze, ’ey?’ he smiled. ‘Sorry--I no got.’
‘Booze? Hell, no!’ The voice dwindled to a throaty whisper. ‘Dope. Coke, milk, dice--anything. Name your price. Got to have it.’
‘Dope?’ Tony was entirely at a loss. ‘What’s a dis, dope?’
‘Aw, lay off, brother. We’re in on this. Here.’ He handed Tony a piece of paper. ‘Froggy gave us a coupon. Come on. You can’t go wrong.’
‘I no got,’ insisted the perplexed Tony; nor could he be budged on that point.
Quite suddenly the manner of both men changed. ‘All right,’ said the first angrily, in a voice as robust as his body. ‘All right, you’re clever, You no got. Well, you will get. You’ll get twenty years!’
‘Twenty year? Whadda you talk?’
‘Wait a minute, Mac,’ said the second caller. ‘Maybe the wop’s on the level. Look here, Tony, we’re officers, see? Policemen.’ He produced a badge. ‘A couple of weeks ago a guy was brought in dying for the want of a shot, see? Dope--he needed some dope--like this--in his arm. See? Well, we tried to make him tell us where he’d been getting it, but he was too weak. He croaked next day. Evidently he hadn’t had money enough to buy any more.
‘Well, this morning a little nigger that goes by the name of Froggy was brought into the precinct pretty well doped up. When he finally came to, he swore he got the stuff here at your store. Of course, we’ve just been trying to trick you into giving yourself away, but you don’t bite. Now what’s your game? Know anything about this?’
Tony understood. I dunno,’ he said slowly; and then his own problem whose contemplation his callers had interrupted, occurred to him. ‘Sure!’ he exclaimed. ‘Wait. Maybeso I know somet’ing.’
‘All right. Spill it.’
‘I got a new man, work-a for me.’ And he told them what he had noted since King Solomon Gillis came.
‘Sounds interesting. Where is this guy?’
‘Here in da store--all day.’
‘Be here tomorrow?’
‘Sure. All day.’
‘All right. We’ll drop in tomorrow and give him the eye. Maybe he’s our man.’
‘Sure. Come ten o’clock. I show you,’ promised Tony.
VI
Even the oldest and rattiest cabarets in Harlem have sense of shame enough to hide themselves under the ground--for instance, Edwards’s. To get into Edwards’s you casually enter a dimly lighted corner saloon, apparently--only apparently--a subdued memory of brighter days. What was once the family entrance is now a side entrance for ladies. Supporting yourself against close walls, you crouchingly descend a narrow, twisted staircase until, with a final turn, you find yourself in a glaring, long, low basement. In a moment your eyes become accustomed to the haze of tobacco smoke. You see men and women seated at wire-legged, white-topped tables, which are covered with half-empty bottles and glasses; you trace the slow-jazz accompaniment you heard as you came down the stairs to a pianist, a cornetist, and a drummer on a little platform at the far end of the room. There is a cleared space from the foot of the stairs, where you are standing, to the platform where this orchestra is mounted, and in it a tall brown girl is swaying from side to side and rhythmically proclaiming that she has the world in a jug and the stopper in her hand. Behind a counter at your left sits a fat, bald, tea-colored Negro, and you wonder if this is Edwards--Edwards, who stands in with the police, with the political bosses, with the importers of wines and worse. A white-vested waiter hustles you to a seat and takes your order. The song’s tempo changes to a quicker; the drum and the cornet rip out a fanfare, almost drowning the piano; the girl catches up her dress and begins to dance....
Gillis’s wondering eyes had been roaming about. They stopped.
‘Look, Mouse!’ he whispered. ‘Look a-yonder!’
‘Look at what?’
‘Dog-gone if it ain’ de self-same gal!’
‘Wha’ d’ ye mean, self-same girl?’
‘Over yonder, wi’ de green stockin’s. Dass de gal made me knock over dem apples fust day I come to town. ’Member? Been wishin’ I could see her ev’y sence.’
‘What for?’ Uggam wondered.
King Solomon grew confidential. ‘Ain’ but two things in dis world, Mouse, I really wants. One is to be a policeman. Been wantin’ dat ev’y sence I seen dat cullud traffic-cop dat day. Other is to git myse’f a gal lak dat one over yonder!’
‘You’ll do it,’ laughed Uggam, ‘if you live long enough.’
‘Who dat wid her?’
‘How ’n hell do I know?’
‘He cullud?’
‘Don’t look like it. Why? What of it?’
‘Hm--nuthin’--’
‘How many coupons y’ got tonight?’
‘Ten.’ King Solomon handed them over.
‘Y’ ought to’ve slipt ’em to me under the table, but it’s all right now, long as we got this table to ourselves. Here’s y’ medicine for tomorrer.’
‘Wha’?’
‘Reach under the table.’
Gillis secured and pocketed the medicine.
‘An’ here’s two-fifty for a good day’s work.’ Uggam passed the money over. Perhaps he grew careless; certainly the passing this time was above the table, in plain sight.
‘Thanks, Mouse.’
Two white men had been watching Gillis and Uggam from a table near by. In the tumult of merriment that rewarded the entertainer’s most recent and daring effort, one of these men, with a word to the other, came over and took the vacant chair beside Gillis.
‘Is your name Gillis?’
‘’Tain’ nuthin’ else.’
Uggam’s eyes narrowed.
The white man showed King Solomon a police officer’s badge.
‘You’re wanted for dope-peddling. Will you come along without trouble?’
‘Fo’ what?’
‘Violation of the narcotic law--dope-selling.’
‘Who--me?’
‘Come on, now, lay off that stuff. I saw what happened just now myself.’ He addressed Uggam. ‘Do you know this fellow?’
‘Nope. Never saw him before tonight.’
‘Didn’t I just see him sell you something?’
‘Guess you did. We happened to be sittin’ here at the same table and got to talkin’. After a while I says I can’t seem to sleep nights, so he offers me sump’n he says’ll make me sleep, all right. I don’t know what it is, but he says he uses it himself an’ I offers to pay him what it cost him. That’s how I come to take it. Guess he’s got more in his pocket there now.’
The detective reached deftly into the coat pocket of the dumfounded King Solomon and withdrew a packet of envelopes. He tore off a corner of one, emptied a half-dozen tiny white tablets into his palm, and sneered triumphantly. ‘You’ll make a good witness,’ he told Uggam.
The entertainer was issuing an ultimatum to all sweet mammas who dared to monkey round her loving man. Her audience was absorbed and delighted, with the exception of one couple--the girl with the green stockings and her escort. They sat directly in the line of vision of King Solomon’s wide eyes, which, in the calamity that had descended upon him, for the moment saw nothing.
‘Are you coming without trouble?’
Mouse Uggam, his friend. Harlem. Land of plenty. City of refuge--city of refuge. If you live long enough----
Consciousness of what was happening between the pair across the room suddenly broke through Gillis’s daze like flame through smoke. The man was trying to kiss the girl and she was resisting. Gillis jumped up. The detective, taking the act for an attempt at escape, jumped with him and was quick enough to intercept him. The second officer came at once to his fellow’s aid, blowing his whistle several times as he came.
People overturned chairs getting out of the way, but nobody ran for the door. It was an old crowd. A fight was a treat; and the tall Negro could fight.
‘Judas Priest!’
‘Did you see that?’
‘Damn!’
White--both white. Five of Mose Joplin’s horses. Poisoning a well. A year’s crops. Green stockings--white--white--
‘That’s the time, papa!’
‘Do it, big boy!’
‘Good night!’
Uggam watched tensely, with one eye on the door. The second cop had blown for help----
Downing one of the detectives a third time and turning to grapple again with the other, Gillis found himself face to face with a uniformed black policeman.
He stopped as if stunned. For a moment he simply stared. Into his mind swept his own words like a forgotten song, suddenly recalled:
‘Cullud policemans!’
The officer stood ready, awaiting his rush.
‘Even--got--cullud--policemans----’
Very slowly King Solomon’s arms relaxed; very slowly he stood erect; and the grin that came over his features had something exultant about it.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Copyright, 1925, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Copyright, 1926, by Rudolph Fisher.
AN ARMY WITH BANNERS[9]
By KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD
(From _Harper’s Magazine_)
Lewis Hunting, like thousands of other young Americans, was a bond salesman. He had a kind of wayward handsomeness that endeared him to women, together with a deep voice and a gravely pleasant manner--both purely physical attributes--which prevented his good looks getting on the nerves of the men he dealt with. He was moderately successful in business, was always well dressed and provided with the comforts of life. A good many of those comforts, naturally, went into his expense account; but when he was not traveling, he lived with his widowed mother, whom he partly supported, in a commonplace but not uncomfortable suburban house. His mother, who adored him, accepted everything he would give her as the reward of her adoration. His father had hoped to send Lewis to a good technical school, but he died at an unlucky moment for Lewis--at the precise time, that is, when Lewis had finished his high school course and could be considered old enough to earn his living. College would have meant sacrifices on his mother’s part which she would have thought unnatural when she had a son who was six feet tall. Lewis also would have thought them unnatural--for _his_ mother; though he saw the mothers of other young men moving into apartments and doing their own work without thereby disfiguring the noble countenance of Nature.
Lewis Hunting was no moralist. He had to work, and he did work. He was much away from home, and he fell into a few casual adventures that would have shocked his mother hopelessly. These adventures were very few, however; not because Lewis minded doing things that would have shocked his mother, had she known about them, but because even near-dissipation costs money; and he never forget that his financial margin was hers, not his own. The adventures were fairly sordid, as the limited contacts offered to a young man in strange cities are apt to make them, and his cynicism was deepened by them. In his later twenties Lewis was living about as lonely an existence as a young bond salesman can. When he was at the home office, he spent most of his evenings with his mother (she complained a great deal of loneliness)--reading, talking or listening to her phonograph. When he was abroad in the land--which was most of the year--he mitigated the solitude of hotel rooms with visits to movie theaters or pool rooms. Mild flirtations he could find anywhere, owing to his good looks and engaging smile; but he was very wary of anything more intimate or dramatic. He knew very little about women, though he considered that he had plumbed female psychology with an unerring lead line. Most women, he decided, were on the make and no good. Girls he had known at school, who had married his more prosperous comrades, seemed--unless they were sunk invisibly into nurseries--as shameless as the others. One or two of them, indeed, made love to him; and that shocked Lewis almost as much as it would have shocked Mrs. Hunting.
You see him, then--young, bewildered, faintly unhappy and vaguely aspiring beneath the cynicism that kept its visible smoothness in the face of the smuttiest story or the most shameless of feminine advances. The fact was that Lewis would have expanded most naturally in the society of the nicest people, and he never met them. Mrs. Hunting made it a virtue to be too delicate and too sorrowful for social contacts, and he had no relations that would have knit him up, in this or that city, with the local aristocracy. He was diffident with men who had been through college--probably no one ever knew how he had grieved over the frustration of his and his father’s hopes--and his diffidence took the form of refusing, with such, to mix business and pleasure. So even old customers, once rebuffed, did not ask him to their homes. Being, on the whole, irreligious, he eschewed all sociabilities that had a sectarian tinge.
Not a very strong person to stand up against circumstances or events or other people’s desires. That cynicism of his, after all, was only skin-deep, and the boy beneath was soft. When Netta Jacobs decided to marry him, he was virtually helpless, for Netta was not only supple and alluring--she was clever. When I say clever, I do not mean to praise her understanding or her wit. She was clever like a very clever animal: she had the instinct of self-preservation so strongly developed that she selected without difficulty the tone, the gesture, the look that would serve her purpose. She was a finished egotist, if you like, though “egotist” seems too big a word for her. It implies cerebration, and Netta had no cerebration. She had the protective coloring of the white ermine, the adaptability of the giraffe that can lengthen its neck to crop the topmost leaves, of the creature that has developed a lung fit to breathe both air and water. Only, unluckily, she was neither giraffe nor fish; she was human and capable of passion--of that complicated emotion which does not afflict the lower mammals. The lion stalking his prey is far less terrible than the person who wants to possess another human being, not only physically and financially but socially, mentally, and morally. Netta never put it to herself in that way, but it was so. She fell in love with Lewis Hunting, and her whole organism set itself automatically to the task of acquiring him. It is not often that one person desires another with the totality of his being. Thus Netta desired Lewis. She had no moral sense; but if she had had one, that too would have clung to him. Lewis, of course, had not the faintest chance against her; and between the hour when he first saw her in Jere Wheaton’s office, and the hour of the wedding among dusty palms and withering blossoms in the living room of her married sister’s apartment, only four months elapsed.
They lived with Lewis’s mother in the not uncomfortable suburban house. Netta intended to change all that; but the best equipped organism recognizes impossibilities--temporary ones. In order to get his mother to consent to the marriage at all, Lewis had had to make absurd and vast concessions. She made it clear to him that if he chucked her and married without her consent, he would literally end her life. Besides, there was the question of money. Either Netta would have to live with Mrs. Hunting, or Mrs. Hunting would have to go to a cheap boarding-house. Netta, who would not have cared in the least if Mrs. Hunting had had to live in a Salvation Army Home or the State penitentiary, realized that she would have to give in. For the time being, Lewis was not yet completely her creature, and you might as well ask him to break a blood vessel as to turn his mother by force out of her house. Nothing would be easier for her than to make--after marriage--the situation impossible.
That, of course, she proceeded to do, though it took a fairly long time on account of Lewis’s protracted absences from home. Given Mrs. Hunting, it was quite easy. Lewis’s mother, deprived of her dominance, was acutely uncomfortable. She hated Netta, she thought Lewis deluded and doomed, and she kept herself within bounds only because she knew she was playing a losing game. If Netta had been a gentle soul, Mrs. Hunting would probably have made her supremely unhappy. Netta was not a gentle soul, and she made Mrs. Hunting unhappy instead. When Lewis was at home, both women made him feel them pathetic--suffering untold things for love of him. Netta managed that, too, better than her mother-in-law.
A year, two years wore away, and Lewis began to know despair. Netta was all his, and her kisses made it clear. But she hated his mother, she hated their mode of existence; she was moving slowly but surely to the total elimination of Mrs. Hunting from their lives. So much, for a time, was he Netta’s that if she had asked anything less, she might have had it. But what she asked of him, he felt, was to kill his mother. Even for Netta he could not slay. And there came, inevitably, a time when he criticized her for asking him to.
They had it out at last, one evening in their own room, when he was just back from a month’s trip in the South. Lewis, who had been listening to mocking-birds and smelling cape-jessamine--his sojourns were seldom in such romantic lands--came back with reawakened yearnings, the old hope of beauty revivified in his foolish heart, to find his home uglier than ever. His mother was querulous and plain, and his wife--though as she caught him to her breast in greeting and let her bright eyes and hair shimmer above him, he was ravished again--seemed hard, for all the cheaply perfumed softness of her body. He felt that there was no kindness in her and wondered, for the first time, if Netta would ever develop that tenderness which is the loveliest by-product of passion.
Lewis bent over his suitcase, unpacking things and flinging them about; while Netta, standing between the twin beds, removed and folded counterpanes and pillow covers and wound the clock on the bed-table. Little, intimate, beloved gestures ... but somehow tonight he did not love them. If he closed his tired eyes, he could smell the jessamine. Netta’s rustlings forbade him to hear the mockingbird.
He straightened himself finally and snapped the suitcase shut. Netta came towards him in all the luxury of orchid négligée and cap.
“Tired, honey?” She stretched her arms and yawned a little.
The answer to that was “No.” If he said “Yes,” she would be close to him, enfolding him, comforting him, making him forget everything but the physical fact of her. That, he did not wish. “I’ve got a beastly headache,” he said quietly.
The barrier was now built between them, and she walked away to her dressing-table. “Want some aspirin?” she asked over her shoulder.
“No, thanks.” Lewis often made these little mistakes. By his refusal of aspirin he revealed to her that he had no headache.
“Oh--just cross.”
“Isn’t it enough to make anybody cross--the kind of thing I come back to?”
“I’m very sorry you have to come back to it, Lewis. But you would have it that way, you know.”
“You certainly don’t try to make it any better.”
“You’d better drop that right now,” she warned him. “It doesn’t seem to occur to you that, at least, when you come back to it, I’m here. I live with it, weeks on end, when you aren’t here.”
“If you mean, Net, that it’s all mother’s fault, you’re wrong. She wasn’t like this until you came and made her so. What makes the house so deadly is that you quarrel with her all the time. I’m always having to apologize to one of you for the other. I’m about fed up with it.”
“Oh, you are, are you? And what about me? I’ve been pretty patient, I think, but if you’re going to crab things, I think I’ll have my say. I tell you I live with it all the time. It’s a good deal worse when you’re not there, because she’s afraid of you. And I don’t intend to live with it much longer.”
He didn’t want to quarrel, he reflected wearily. Why did he have to? But his exacerbated nerves spoke for him. “I honestly believe it’s more your fault than hers, because you’re young and strong and she’s old and weak. She’s a sick woman, half the time--has been for years. It won’t be for long, Netta.”
“You can bet it won’t be for long,” she murmured intensely. She, too, was irritated; irritated because, as always, his figure there before her set her heart to beating. She did not want to quarrel, either; she wanted him to make love to her. He wouldn’t; and therefore they quarrelled. But Lewis surprised her. Standing there with folded arms, looking gravely across at her, he went on, “If you’d have a kid, Netta, I believe everything would come straight. Mother would forget all about both of us if she had a grandchild to fuss over. And you’d be too busy and happy to mind little things.”
She did not recover at once from her astonishment. “You honestly mean that, Lewis? You’d like me to have a baby?”
“I’d like us to have a baby, of course,” he answered quietly. “What did you suppose?”