PART IV

The coming of the Reverend Thomas Grayson to the Phosphate Mining Camp created surprisingly little comment at the time. Later, when the man became an all-absorbing topic to both white and black, it was said that he had deliberately misled the Company, from whom he had rented the cabin in which he lived and the larger one near it that he converted into a church. He had come, it was then remembered, in rather shabby clothes, and had been civil-spoken enough, although reticent as to his plans. It is a more plausible theory, however, that he went about his business in a perfectly natural manner, having not the least suspicion that he would encounter any opposition. He attended to his affairs with his characteristic deliberation and persistence, and said very little about them, for the man was not a large talker. It is possible that the season might have contributed to the lack of questioning, for he arrived during that period that lies between summer and fall, when the long pressure of the sultry months had laid a lethargy upon both white and black, reducing their vitality to a point at which they did only what became absolutely necessary with the hands, and waited to reason until the bracing days should come to wake them for their season’s work. Grayson had simply gone to the office and asked whether they had any vacant cabins. They had taken his money for six months’ rent in advance, and, if the tide had been at flood, had continued to doze on the veranda, if at the ebb, to fish in a shady spot on the river bank.

It was not until well into October, when the scrub oaks were commencing to blaze against the dark green of the pines, that the new preacher finished the little belfry that he had erected over the gable end of the larger of his cabins, hung a cheap farm bell in it, installed some benches and a reading desk, donned his vestments, and opened for service.

The negroes, in the meantime, were becoming aware of his presence. He had been visiting quietly among them, talking his strange speech, like that of a white man, telling them of the new church that he was going to open, and inviting them to attend. Slowly their interest in him awakened. He was so utterly unlike any preacher, or negro for that matter, that they had ever seen, that the element of curiosity accomplished for him what no eloquence could have done.

It is likely that Saint Wentworth alone guessed the potentialities of his advent. Grayson had gone to the commissary immediately after his arrival, purchased some supplies, and asked Saint if he could recommend some good woman whom he could get to come and cook for him.

The hour of the visit was a quiet one at the store, and after he had waited on his customer Saint seated himself on the counter with his legs swinging and asked idly: “Going to settle here?”

“Yes,” the man answered, and Saint noticed that he did not use the “sir” in addressing him, “yes, I think I am needed here, and, in God’s name, I am going to do what I can.”

The white man studied him intently from under half-closed lids. Grayson was rather under middle height, about thirty-five years old, and probably a shade darker than quadroon. His face was serious to the point of solemnity, and there were directness and sincerity in his gaze. He spoke with deliberation and with a careful choice of words, but neither then nor at any subsequent time did Saint detect so much as a single gleam of racial humour or imagination in the otherwise strongly marked negroid face.

“Preacher?” Wentworth inquired.

“Yes, but I hope to be a little more than just that. There are so many things that my people need here. I hope to do more than merely preach to them.”

Saint’s interest in the man extended to his attitude. It was different, strange. He was neither servile nor assertive. He seemed to take for granted a relationship that did not exist in the camp. He appeared to think it a matter of course that he and Saint should discuss on an equal basis. Neither respectful nor lacking in respect, he was merely himself. The white man was intrigued and continued his questioning.

“From the North, I suppose?”

“New York City, and I studied divinity in New England. But I don’t like the big cities, I want to get started in the home mission field, and this is my first venture. You will realise that all of this is very new to me,” and he swept his arm inclusively toward the settlement.

Saint felt a pang of pity for his customer, more acute because it was the last thing that he would have wanted of him. He spoke impulsively:

“Say, I’m not much of an advice giver, but you had better go slow around here. Take your good time and learn the lay of the land. There are lots of things you ought to know about. The magistrate, for instance--your rival, Reverend Whaley--the way your own people feel about certain things.”

“That’s very good of you, but, to be quite frank, I haven’t a great deal of money. My mission is not backed by the board, and must get quick results. The people whom I have interested in the venture expect me to open for service in a month. They said up North that ought to be time enough.”

“All right, only remember this isn’t New York. Better watch your step.”

Saint went to the back door and whooped for Davy. The young negro entered smiling. He had a dark intelligent face quick with an irrepressible sense of humour.

“The Reverend wants a cook,” Saint said. “Can’t your ma go and look after him?”

“Ah reckon so, suh.”

“Well, take him along with you and see. She’s level-headed, as well as a good cook, and she knows how things stand around here. You better see something of the Reverend yourself, and, for God’s sake, try to keep him out of mischief.”

Saint smiled at his visitor. For the moment he had spoken in the usual offhand manner employed with the negroes that he knew, but he was now conscious of the fact that it had not been understood by Grayson. The man stood before him, trying in his deliberate way to decide how it had been meant--whether the white man was taking him and his mission trivially. Finally, without answering Saint’s smile, he said briefly, “Thank you,” and went out with his guide.

Saint thought, “He can’t laugh--that’s bad. No matter how bad a tangle things get in out here, if we can laugh together there’s a chance. He can’t get hold here without it-- I wonder.”

* * * * *

The first Sunday in October had the blue cleanness of a tempered blade. It clove the sluggish September vapours to ribbons and rang audibly against the straight, naked boles of the pines.

The new church stood at a little distance from the old meeting house. Brave in a coat of fresh whitewash and topped by its small sky-blue belfry, it stood sharply transfigured by the clear autumnal sunlight.

From a comfortable cabin at the end of the village, the heavy form of the Reverend Quintus Whaley lowered itself into the road, and proceeded ponderously toward the old meeting house. At the same time, Thomas Grayson arrived at the door of the new church. Presently the Sunday silence was sent clattering by the rival clamour of the two bells.

During the last month the Reverend Quintus had elected openly to ignore the presence of Grayson in the village, in private, however, poking sly fun at his speech and referring to him as “Dat Yankee nigger.”

But now the gauge was fairly cast. There was the new church, and there was no denying that its bell had at least as loud a voice as the old one.

Presently the negroes began to leave the cabins and straggle toward the summoning bells. They gathered in little knots midway between the two buildings and discussed the situation. The talk grew in volume and bred excitement. Whaley was by no means a universally popular figure. The men especially distrusted him, and, with that play instinct that is so often their undoing, they now recognised in the situation a game of large possibilities. Eyes rolled toward the old meeting house, where the Reverend could be seen through a window peering hopefully toward them while he tugged away at the bell rope.

They hung on in the middle of the road deliberately, tantalisingly, and emitted explosive bursts of frank African laughter. The laughter increased in shrillness as the women became infected by the spirit of the occasion. No one thought of God now, and His gentle Son. Even the devil was a pallid figure of the imagination. They stood there deliberately baiting the two perspiring divines, and having the time of their lives in the doing of it. They knew what Whaley could give them, and even those who doubted his sincerity had always been proud of his ability to “slap it to them good and hot.” There was no other preacher for miles around who could kick up such a lather in a sermon or shake the timbers as he could with a spiritual. But across the way hid the lure of the unknown.

A quarter of an hour passed, and the hilarity increased rather than diminished. Upon which one should they lay their bets? That was the all-absorbing question. Then a small negro boy came from behind the new church, his eyes showing white. He arrived at the group scarcely able to speak for excitement. Finally he managed to articulate: “Great Gawdamighty! De new preacher done all dress up in a long white shroud, same like uh corpse.”

They had never seen a surplice, Whaley having always preached in his vaunted tail-coat. Now a silence fell upon them. Here was a sensation indeed.

Davy seized the opportune moment and announced: “Ah goin’ to de new church. Come on, folks.” He took his mother by the arm and, followed closely by Maum Vina and Baxter, who had postponed her Sunday morning visit with Mamba in order to be present, started toward the new building. In a moment the whole crowd was stampeded. They jammed their way through the door and stood looking about them. They were impressed by what they saw. The benches had backs, and the reading desk was an imposing structure covered with fair white cloth. Behind the desk stood the preacher in his flowing robe, and at the side of the platform a small organ glistened in a shaft of sunlight.

Across the way the old bell gave up the fight slowly, dying, as it were, by inches--a clap--a wait--a clap--silence. A face was thrust from a window and regarded the new church with an expression that one would have scarcely expected to discover upon the visage of a man of God. Then, after a moment, Whaley emerged like a black and menacing cloud and set off in the direction of the Company’s office.

In the new church Grayson stood face to face with a tremendous opportunity. The congregation was in a state of repressed excitement, and, had he possessed the touch of a true evangelist, he could have bound them to his cause then and there. His rival would have known so well how to go about it. He would have flung the coils of his mellifluous voice about them and released that excitement into the all-possessing rhythm of a spiritual.

But Grayson saw in the moment a miraculous turning to his God from the half-pagan, and wholly undignified, worship of the old church. He saw them as already converted, and asking merely that he lead them. Hymnals and prayer books had been placed in the pews, but as scarcely any of his flock could read they were useless. And so he read the full morning service through by himself. Strange words flowing out over the serried benches--a beautiful rhythm--a vague loveliness of sound--a thing utterly separate and apart from themselves. Slowly the excited faces went cold. Feet commenced to shuffle, benches to creak under shifting bodies. Now and then there was a brief recrudescence of life when Grayson seated himself at the organ and sang the hymns, but in this, no less than in the reading, he was alone, and after the brief animation of each hymn the congregation’s interest went flat.

The sermon was long, for in it he told them of his plans and all that he hoped to mean to them. The collection followed, and was both a financial and social failure. Not that the congregation was stingy. Every one there had a coin for the occasion, but Grayson’s system was new to them. In Whaley’s church this was a moment replete with exquisite humour. It was during the collection time that the great man was truly at his best. A plate would be set before the reading desk, and the congregation would be cajoled, flattered, wheedled, twitted with sly personal allusions, told pointed jokes, until at last, in a gale of high spirits, they would disgorge the last penny and feel themselves well repaid.

Now, when Davy, who had been unwillingly commandeered for the occasion, passed a plate among them, they kept their pennies, hoping against hope that at last the new preacher would break through his restraint and give them the usual final run for their money.

When at long last the service was over, and the recessional hymn sung, it was after one o’clock. The exit was a hasty and a noisy one. They were anxious to escape in a hurry, and they did.

A strange sequel to Grayson’s first Sunday morning service was the fact that he did not in the least realise what had happened. He had triumphed, but he was not vainglorious over it. It had been God’s work. Now it remained for him to till the fertile field. He was up and out early on Monday morning, intent upon launching the first of his schemes for the village. By the merest luck, he hit upon the one thing that could possibly even temporarily have stemmed the tide that had started to ebb the day before, and that would have swept the entire congregation back to Whaley on the following Sunday.

* * * * *

This first inspired act was the installation of a vested choir. Robes for the ten best singers in the congregation! The men had gone to the fields when the new preacher set out to unfold his plan to the village, but the women gathered, and when they heard that the choir was to be given the robes and allowed to sit on the platform with the preacher, their flagging interest was immediately revived. Grayson set an hour during the afternoon for testing voices, and left them to talk it over among themselves.

That afternoon when he went to the church he found practically all the women in the camp present, dressed in their best, rolling their eyes, giggling, and nudging each other. But there was not a man to be seen, proving that his visit to the pits which had followed the talk with the women had been unproductive of results. Well, he would start without bass or tenor, and hope to bring them in later. In the meantime there was no lack of enthusiasm among the women. In fact, Grayson was a little at a loss how to cope with their lack of reverence, and decided that it would be wise to curb it at the start. He stood for a moment looking over the benches with their rows of laughing faces, their gorgeous accidental colour combinations wrought by head kerchiefs, hats, and dresses. Finally, the inevitable occurred, and his gaze was arrested by the vast magenta-clad bulk of Hagar.

“What is your name, my daughter?” he inquired.

She hesitated, then gave her adopted title of Baxter, her broad, ingenuous face wreathed in smiles. Immediately a chorus of giggles burst free among the benches.

Across the irreverent sound the pastor’s voice fell chill and authoritative: “Sing something, please. I want to try your voice.”

Baxter was undoubtedly enjoying the situation. She stood like a child at a party, deliberately hesitating for effect.

“Go on,” he encouraged, “sing anything. I only want to test your voice.”

Instantly from her silence, her deceptive air of embarrassment, she launched full-voiced into song. The voice might have been that of Mamba herself. It had the same depth and tenderness in the lower register, the same whimsical way of catching for an imperceptible beat on the high notes with the effect of laughter broken by a sob. But where Mamba’s voice lacked volume Hagar’s came from her great lungs with the magnitude of organ music. Unfortunately, in common with the other aspirants for robes, she had remained impervious to the reproof in the voice and manner of the pastor, and now her song, beating with the spirit of irrepressible and eternal youth, rolled forth and filled the building:

“My mammy tell me long time ago, ‘Gal, don’t yo’ marry no man yo’ know. Take all yo’ money, steal all yo’ clo’es. What will become of yo’ Gawd only knows.’”

The performance was greeted with whoops of delight from the floor, and cries of “Dat right, Baxter.” “Tell um, Sistuh!” “Gawd know dat de trut’.” And after the general laughter had died down a fresh outburst was provoked by an ancient Gullah negress who called in a high cackling voice: “Dat gal woice loud succa guinea hen.”

Grayson stood regarding them in stern silence until the noise abated. Then he pointed out in a few brief but well-chosen words that the occasion was not one for ribaldry and that they were in the house of God. Down, down slid the mercurial spirits of the sisterhood. They sat in solemn rigid rows while one after another of their number was called forward to go through a constrained and self-conscious test on some familiar spiritual.

Finally Grayson singled out ten of the number, including Baxter, and dismissed the others. Then, seating himself at the organ, he commenced to whip the raw material into shape for the début on the following Sunday.

The week that followed was a busy one in the village. Grayson had purchased the entire stock of white longcloth from the commissary, as well as many yards of black cotton goods. He had engaged the services of several women who could sew, and himself supervised the designing and fitting of the vestments. Then, late every afternoon, he called a rehearsal at the church, thus dislocating the supper hours of a number of hungry and tired negro labourers.

But during those days of busy preparation Grayson was not the only energetic divine in the neighbourhood. The huge bulk of the Reverend Quintus could be seen at all hours visiting among the cabins, and to judge by the gales of laughter that attended him wherever he went he must have been in his most entertaining vein. Also he paid several visits to the office of the Company. These last, however, were not humorous in intention, to judge from the denunciatory exclamations that punctuated the conferences.

But when Sunday again dawned, victory returned to perch upon the little sky-blue belfry. Not one shroud now, but eleven! The lure was irresistible. Again the Reverend Quintus swung in vain upon his bell rope. Again the cheerful summons lost heart--clanged--waited--clanged--stopped. Once more an irate face glared from the window.

The service was more effective in holding attention than it had been the previous week. The choir was an unqualified success. It knew the hymns, and even a simple chant, and the presence of the vestments awakened a new awe in the worshippers that held them sitting quietly with solemn faces. When Grayson commenced the sermon they were ready to listen.

He preached upon “the powers of darkness.” He had learned something during the week, and that was the necessity of plain speech. He had flown over their heads, perhaps, but now he would talk to them so simply that a child could understand. Accordingly, with directness and lucidity he struck at the hold of superstition upon the minds of his hearers. Fortune tellers and conjurers were children of hell, and their utterances were lies. Charms were devices of the devil, and those who believed in them were destined for destruction, unless they turned from their evil ways and prayed for forgiveness.

From where Baxter was sitting in the choir she saw a long shudder run through the frail old body of Maum Vina. She looked keenly at her friend and saw her eyes blur under a film of tears. Baxter had been listening to the sermon, but it had been a thing apart from her own needs. She had made no effort to personalise it, to relate it to herself. But Maum Vina, for all her years, took things in with remarkable clearness. What the new preacher was saying was meant for her. Had he not fixed her with his gaze while he talked? She made an heroic struggle to control herself. Baxter felt it, while only dimly beginning to grasp its cause. She got quickly to her feet and half carried her old friend into the open. Then she was shocked at what she saw in the ancient negress’s face. It seemed to have been suddenly extinguished, and there was a sag to the whole body. Then Maum Vina commenced to shake violently, as with a palsy, and to sob in long, weak breaths.

“Yo’ heah what he say, Baxter?” she asked between her sobs.

“Sho, but dat don’t mean nuttin’. Le’s we forget it an’ get ’long home.”

“Yes, it do mean somet’ing. Dat man ain’t like Whaley. He tellin’ de trut’. Ah know dat, an’ Ah ain’t nebber goin’ fin’ dat money in de road what de cunjer ’oman promise me.”

They were joined by several other members of the congregation who had walked out and had been none too quiet in the manner of their going.

“Don’t yo’ b’liebe um, Aunt Viny,” an old negro advised; “go ask Rev’rent Whaley. He know what he talkin’ ’bout.”

Baxter led her friend away, trying to console her with clumsy, tender pats, as though she were a child. Then she noticed that the eager light had gone out of the old eyes, and that they no longer searched the road with their incessant weaving motion.

“Better watch whar yo’ goin’,” Baxter cautioned. “Fus’ t’ing yo’ know, yo’ goin’ miss dat money.”

“’Tain’t no use, gal,” came the answer. “Ah’s goin’ be a care on strangers long as Ah las’. ’Tain’t no use to s’arch no mo’.”

* * * * *

During the ensuing week the new pastor was an industrious parochial visitor. There was something definitely wrong, some maladjustment between himself and his flock that pointed toward disaster if it were not quickly located and rectified. He reasoned that by adroit questioning he could draw his parishioners out and ascertain the trouble. But when he found the negroes at home he had encountered an attitude with which he was incapable of dealing. If they could not avoid him, they greeted him with a sort of negative cordiality. They would smile and ask him to sit, then disappear within themselves, speak only of abstractions, be deliberately vague and noncommittal. When he had touched on the subject of church or religion they had smiled again, and if it seemed the part of politeness to say something in reply, they had, still smiling, remarked that times were certainly hard for a country nigger, that last winter had been unusually cold, or that no food served so well to sweeten the mouth as hominy and a fat fried porgy.

There was nothing to lay hold upon. He began to experience a sense of vast futility. And his money was nearly exhausted. The experiment had been his own idea, and he had had to depend upon what he could raise from private sources. He had hoped to make an instantaneous success that would win full backing for the mission from the board. But now failure was staring him in the face.

Grayson was particularly puzzled by the behaviour of Cora, the mother of Davy, who served him as housekeeper. She had been a regular attendant at church, and when he had talked with her in her small, immaculately kept kitchen, she had a way of looking into his face with a candid and trustful gaze that seemed incapable of concealment or deception. But now, as the momentous week advanced, he noticed that there were long, unexplained absences, and that the dishes often stood unwashed after a meal. Finally, upon entering the kitchen silently, he found her with her face buried in her apron while her body shook with deep elemental sobs.

An overwhelming wave of pity rendered him suddenly speechless. He had tried so hard and so unsuccessfully to be understood that his self-confidence was shaken. This was the sort of opportunity for which he had been hoping, when he might enter into the sorrows of his people and let his heart speak in actions as well as words. But now he experienced a feeling of utter impotence. It came to him that the words that he would speak would be mere empty symbols uttered in a foreign tongue. He crossed the room and dropped a hand gently on the heaving shoulder. The startled woman looked up into his face with an expression that changed from grief to sudden fright.

“Tell me, Cora,” he urged, “what can I do for you?”

“Lemme go home,” she sobbed. “Ah gots to go now.”

“Certainly,” he assured her, “go at once, and I’ll go home with you. If you are in trouble I want to share it with you.”

“No, no,” she cried in panic. “Yo’ stay here. Ah’ll come back. Ain’t nuttin’ yo’ can do.” Then she was gone in a heavy lumbering run down the road in the direction of her cabin.

Two days passed and Cora failed to reappear. Now Grayson’s visits seemed even more fruitless than early in the week, for the village was deserted. For the most part he found only children at the cabins, children and the ubiquitous yellow curs. The pickaninnies gaped at him when he questioned, but the curs with their singular instinct for sensing the moods of their owners followed him to the gates, hanging just out of reach, with their small sharp teeth bared. Finally, on Friday morning, he met Wentworth, who was swinging along the sandy road with a package under his arm.

“I suppose you’re on your way to Cora’s,” hazarded the white man. “It’s too bad about her trouble, and Davy’s badly knocked out by it too. He was devoted to the little fellow, used to bring him to the store pretty much every afternoon.”

“Cora’s trouble?” inquired Grayson, and Saint was surprised by the agitation reflected in his face.

“Why, yes. She lost her youngest child last night. It has been in desperate shape for the week. The whole village has been sitting around out there with her. I thought you might have noticed. I am taking her along some mourning and a little money for the burial saucer.”

While the two had been talking they had proceeded in the direction of the cabin, which lay well beyond the regular confines of the village, and now, through the clear, resonant air they caught the distant strains of a spiritual. Very distinctly the music sounded across the distance, not the robust shouting like that of a Sunday morning service, but the shrill, agonised voices of many women, each of whom had personalised the desolation of the mother and made it her own, and, tramping along an octave below them, the mellow, flexible beauty of a single tremendous bass.

Saint cast a sidelong glance at his companion and saw the broad benevolent face go ashen, the eyes light with a spurt of naked pain. He spoke impulsively: “I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t think you cared so much, and I thought you would have known. They sent for Whaley three nights ago, and he hasn’t left the house since. He is going to hold the funeral services to-morrow afternoon. They don’t change quickly back here, you see, and he knows their ways.”

There was silence except for the sound of singing that shook the air with its unearthly harmonies. Grayson had stopped in the road. Finally, in a shaken voice, he said: “I can’t go on, Mr. Wentworth. My heart is breaking with that woman’s sorrow, and if I went to her I’d only give her pain.”

For a full minute he stood silently, his face working with emotion. Habit had carried his hand to a small gold cross that hung on a black cord from his neck, and he fingered it absently.

Saint could think of nothing to say but a trite, “I’m sorry.” Then he saw the face that he had come to think of as being insensitive, almost stolid, quiver, and the eyes fill slowly with tears. At last, still fingering the little cross with an unconscious mechanical movement, Grayson turned slowly on his heel and commenced to retrace his steps toward his cabin.

From the house of mourning swept the music of the dirge. Shrill, monotonous, unvarying, it throbbed across the sunny afternoon with its burden of human desolation, and always under the shrill grief of the women marched the sustaining beauty and power of the single enormously vital bass.

* * * * *

Sunday morning was ushered in with a triumphant clanging from the old meeting house. Groups arrived, laughing and chattering, and filled the building to its doors. When the crowd had jammed its way in, Reverend Whaley started them off with a rousing spiritual. With one accord they flung themselves into it. It was good to be back with the old agreeable God again, the God who wanted them to sing and shout, to pour their sorrow out in a flood of song, who minded his own business most of the time and had a pleasant, laughing way with him when he touched upon theirs. Yes, they were foolish to have strayed for even a few misguided weeks.

In the new church Grayson sat alone, listening to the uproar with an expression of deep sadness upon his habitually solemn face. Yes, this was the end. They needed so much--and they would not let him give it to them. He had come full of confidence to bring enlightenment. His own people! Now he saw no use remaining in the empty building that was so eloquent a reminder of failure.

He rose to go, then he saw that a woman had entered silently and was sitting on the last bench, just inside the door. He walked down the aisle and stopped before her. Then he saw that it was the woman known as Baxter.

“Have you come to worship with me?” he asked.

Hagar nodded violently but said nothing.

Grayson’s heavy face caught a fleeting gleam from an inner light. “Then we’ll have our service just as though the church was full,” he assured her.

He retired and donned his vestments, then asked her to come and sit just below the reading desk on the front bench while he held service. Vast and submissive, she went forward and took her seat before him.

While he went through the service, omitting only the sermon, she kept her eyes on his face with an expression of dumb, uncomprehending steadfastness.

Grayson pronounced the benediction, then came and sat beside her. Then he said, “I am very grateful to you for coming to-day. You have put new heart into me.”

Baxter was overcome with embarrassment, but she managed to say, “T’ank yo’, suh.”

A silence followed during which the woman’s embarrassment heightened to actual distress.

At last Grayson urged, “You do believe in the God that I preach about, do you not? A God of beauty and light and loving-kindness?”

Baxter’s gaze was on the floor. She was absolutely still. Then suddenly she shook her head in a violent negative.

Grayson almost jumped, so unexpected was her answer.

“Then why did you come in to-day?” he asked.

She had trouble getting started. Words eluded her, and she was trying terribly hard to be honest and yet not hurt him. At last she said, “Ah been lonely a lot too. Ah ain’t likes tuh be by myself in my trouble. Ah done set out fuh de ole church, and when Ah pass, Ah see yo’ here, an’ Ah can see yo’ lookin’ lonely. Den Ah come in. Dat’s all.”

The preacher got to his feet without a word and commenced to close the windows. Baxter sat on, watching him, not knowing what to do next. When finally the building was made fast and only the door remained open he came back to her and held out his hand. Then she saw that it contained a book.

“I want you to keep this to remember me by,” he said. “It is called the Book of Common Prayer. And see, here in the front is my name and address. You must remember it always as that of somebody who is grateful to you, who wants always to be your friend. You have been a real Christian to-day. And now, good-bye.”

He held out his hand, and Baxter took the book; then she dropped an awkward curtsy and said, “Good-bye, suh,” and stepped over the threshold into the bright autumn weather.

* * * * *

At the very moment when Baxter entered the new church, a conference which also bore directly upon the destinies of the Reverend Thomas Grayson was taking place upon the sunny piazza of a bungalow near the Company’s office. It had an appearance of great casualness about it. Two white men had been sitting there since breakfast, enjoying their pipes and the long Sunday quiet. The rattle of a vehicle sounded in the distance, the rumble of hoofs over a wooden bridge, and presently Proc Baggart turned into the private road behind his span of trotters. He alighted, hitched his horses, and stepped up on the piazza.

“Well, gentlemen,” he said, “this is a mighty pretty spell of weather we are having.”

One of the white men motioned toward a chair. “Have a seat, Cap’n, and make yourself at home. Yes, the weather’s set fair, I guess. When you can hear the town bells up here, it usually means a pretty spell.”

Silence then for a moment, except for the far, faint throb of chimes that followed the river all the way from the city, and stirred the air about the men with a soft humming. Baggart lighted a cigar, gripped it in his strong, stained teeth, and smiled his mirthless, muscular smile.

“They tell me that the Reverend Quintus is having a nervous spell,” he commented.

“Yes, and hard luck too,” remarked the taller of his two companions. “The old fellow has put in the greater part of his life working among these niggers, and he ought not to be interfered with.”

Baggart’s eyes met those of the speaker, and his muscular smile broadened into a grin. “Yes, a nigger’s a simple soul,” he remarked, “and he’s got simple ideas on religion. It would be a pity to have them upset. This crowd here’s well behaved and an easy-going lot. They know what’s good for ’em, and they ain’t ready for new ideas yet.” He puffed in silence for a moment, then asked casually:

“How’d that fellow Grayson get in here, anyway?”

The shorter white man flushed slightly under his tan as he explained: “Oh, he came in one day when we were just shutting up and said he wanted to work here. Looked straight enough and laid the money down for the empty shacks. I never thought much about it at the time.”

“What sort of a lookin’ cuss is he--how dark?”

“High yaller, I guess you’d call it. Comes from New York, I hear, and talks like a college president.”

“Bad morals in New York, ’specially among the niggers. Can’t have these God-fearing labourers perverted, as you might say.” Baggart permitted a moment to pass, and a glint in his eyes like the refraction of light from blue granite paid tribute to his humorous subtlety.

The two white men laughed softly, and Baggart’s next question fell casually into the conversation: “Anybody told him yet that it’s pretty unhealthy ’round here?”

One of the men said, “Well, to tell you the truth, Cap’n, we’d rather not mess up in the affairs of the labour. We make it our business to keep hands off in matters that are their own concern.”

“Yes, very wise policy, I am sure, but some kind-hearted citizen ought to warn him. It’s a mighty sickly country for a stranger, ’specially one with a touch of white blood, what with malaria and all that. If you gentlemen would like, I’ll be passin’ through the village to-night, and I could stop and give him a friendly word of advice as easy as not, or I could get Bluton to stop and see him.”

The two white men were obviously relieved. The taller one said, “Well, that’s mighty good of you, Cap’n. And don’t forget, any time we can do any little thing for you, you know where to find us.”

“Sure,” Baggart answered, and his voice was almost hearty. “Always glad to co-operate in any way, and I know you gentlemen feel the same way about it.”

Suddenly all three men sat forward in listening attitudes, then exchanged glances of satisfaction and understanding. From the direction of the village came the full-bodied music of a spiritual, swelling out across the marshes and ringing clear and sweet along the river.

“Hello!” ejaculated the short man who had rented the cabins to Grayson. “Sounds like old Quintus has ’em all back in the fold again.”

Baggart got to his feet and threw away the stump of his cigar. “Sure he has,” he said. “They know what they want better’n we do. Anyhow, I may just as well drop by to-night--never believe in leaving loose ends. Good-day. See you gentlemen again.”

But that night when the trotters pulled up before the cottage in which Grayson had set up his simple housekeeping there was no one to answer Baggart’s peremptory hullo. He got down from the rig and rapped smartly on the door with his whip. Inside the empty house there was a desolate momentary reverberation, then silence.

The trotters were feeling the chill night air and were pawing trenches in the soft sand with their fore feet. Baggart went to their heads and caught a muzzle in each hand with a sudden fierce affection. They whinnied, and he felt the brush of soft, warm velvet against his jaw. “We all know what we want,” he thought. “Niggers--horses. You don’t have to tell a horse to leave spaghetti alone and eat hay.”

* * * * *

The spring of 1917, and half the world in fiery dissolution. America in at last. Money. Ships. Then, suddenly--man power. Up north at Washington the daily minting of beautiful illusory phrases--“A world made safe for democracy”--“Self-determination for all peoples”--“The war that will end war”--The mobilisation of a nation’s advertising power--the press--Committee on Public Information--Four-Minute Men--Ministers of the Gospel gone militant--The flag and the cross side by side on Sunday morning. That indomitable good fellow, the community song leader, abroad in the land--febrile meetings--campaigns--campaigns--campaigns.

Atrocities. Handless children. Violated women. Nuns. “The mad dog of nations” loose, and the clamour of the hunt ringing around the globe. Charleston, the deliberate old city, deliberate no longer, separate and self-sufficient no longer. Fort Sumter forgotten at last, and the futile agonies of the ’sixties. All one people now. One flag.

Again and again, from the stage, the pulpit, the press, atrocities. The women. Smashing like a cannonade against the traditional sanctities. Suppose it were your mother. Your wife. Saint Wentworth’s blood crawled cold to his heart, then flung back in a burning tide, leaving a red haze before his eyes and a taste like brass on his tongue. Now, if ever, he needed the heroic dreams to help him through. But they would not come to him. On the contrary, after the first flush of anger, there were hideous little tremors at the pit of his stomach. But he had certain knowledge of what he must do.

He turned the store over to Davy and went to town. In a week he was back. Crops were essential to victory--phosphates to crops--Saint, according to unanswerable departmental logic, was essential to phosphates. He was told to stick to the mines until he was called.

Back again into the quiet of black Carolina. He could scarcely believe that he inhabited the same planet as his friends a few miles away in town. Out in the wide solitudes of marsh and pine forest the shocks that were being delivered against the inertia of public opinion were muted to a far, faint murmur.

Then slowly the change commenced to come. Invading committees arrived. Groups of negroes from the coloured organisations in town, for the most part. Keen young mulattoes, very much in earnest, discovering their backwoods brethren for the first time, telling them that this was the great opportunity for the race--“A world made safe for democracy.” “After this war--the Negro’s chance”--getting pitiful little contributions to war funds. Then a young white lawyer from town with a gift for oratory, and two lovely girls in nurses’ costumes. The Red Cross. Not vague abstractions now like bond issues and saving stamps, but suffering humanity--the welter of the battlefield--blood--agony--“The Good Samaritan”--Who was going to help? The realism of the speaker was cut short by a piercing scream. A babblement of sobbing filled the room, punctuated by wails of agony. An unsteady voice called, “De blood put he maak on me.” The line was caught up by the packed assemblage, and the spiritual crashed out in the little meeting house.

In twos and threes the congregation commenced to slip out, while those that remained kept the spiritual going. Finally there were only a few left. The young lawyer was frankly disgusted. He had been wasting his time on a bunch of crazy negroes, and they had walked out on him without so much as a single donation. He got into his overcoat, and called the two pretty nurses. There was no use fooling around with this sort of thing.

Suddenly the chorus swelled up again, and he saw that they were coming back. Into the church they packed and commenced to come forward to the platform. Then he saw that they had money in their hands, coppers, nickels, and here and there even a dollar bill. They came and piled it before him. Every penny in the village. They gave their tears, and the outpouring of human sympathy was a presence in the room.

After that, in the black belt, there was the first glimmer of realisation of the stupendous tragedy that was raging beyond the city somewhere out in the void.

Then the draft: thirty prime boys from the camp, dressed in their Sunday clothes, waiting in the road before Baggart’s office, not knowing a great deal about it all--very excited and self-important--boasting inordinately. Women--lots of them, crowding about, with the memory of the Red Cross speech in their minds, and an old, dark jungle terror of the unknown stiffening their faces, widening their eyes, and here and there ripping free in a gust of hysteria. An incredibly ancient crone, whose mind had slipped a cog and snapped back seventy years, peering from half-blind eyes and wailing: “Dey’s goin’ tuh sell um tuh de sugar-cane fields. Ah knows it. Dey’s goin’ sen’ um tuh Louisiana, an’ we ain’t nebber goin’ see um no mo’. Oh, Gawd hab a little pity.”

A month since the men had gone; then, one bright day, Saint called the women to the commissary piazza and distributed envelopes from the government that contained the first separation allowances. Everybody rich now--excitement--laughter--and the dark fear forgotten. The thirty women who had been wept over when the men went away were now objects of envy in the village.

Strange talk in the air--something about “Gold Star mothers”--mystery. Then the spry little dentist who came and explained it all to everybody’s satisfaction. So it was not “Gold Star” after all, but gold-tooth mothers, and the government wanted the women to come to the dentist’s office in town every month and get a gold tooth out of the check--one tooth a month to make them beautiful and to show how long their men had been away. After that, Midas moving through the village--smiles showing wide, and ever wider stretches of glittering yellow metal. And the spry little dentist happening by now and then to see how things were getting along, driving a twin-six that pulled up a great dust cloud wherever he went.

Now the commissary was getting its share of checks that seemed to vie with one another to see how soon they could vanish the day they arrived, and Gilly Bluton, who, strangely enough, had not been called, with his eyes everywhere, keener than ever at discovering unlicensed curs about the yards, and participants in hidden crap games.

Now labour was growing scarce and wages were soaring. The result was obvious: three days a week in the pits for the men who were left, instead of six. Why should a man in his good senses work a whole week when in half that time he could earn enough to keep alive and have a plenty of time to lie perfectly flat in warm sand, absorbing sun, or gossip on the store piazza? And so the camp developed a leisure class that loitered gloriously through the late summer and into the long autumnal quiet.

Letters came from the boys in concentration and training camps which were brought to Saint to read. They were having the time of their lives and sent photographs of themselves with chests straining at bronze buttons. Truly the war cloud that hung over half the world and cast its malign shadow across millions of hearts had nothing for this forgotten corner of black America but a gleam from its silver lining.

* * * * *

But over the old city across the narrow Ashley the shadow was widening. When Saint went to church now with his mother he saw the service flag with its fifty-five stars hanging in the vestibule, and, as the months passed, gold commenced to take the place of the white. Three of his boyhood friends gone now!

He went to headquarters and made another effort to be transferred to active service. He told them the whole truth about his job. But they were too busy now to listen to old stories with new twists to them, and he was sent back to the mines to wait.

Valerie Land wrote from her Red Cross unit in France:

“I wanted you to be in it, dear, until I got here and saw it. But now I am _glad_, _glad_ that you were made to wait. It is not a bit like the posters. At first, in the canteen at Havre, it had the thrill of adventure about it, and I wished for you. But then the boys were going out. Now, here in the hospital, they are coming back, and my heart breaks into little pieces every day. If it were not for two of the old New York crowd who were wounded while serving in a camouflage unit and who are here in the hospital, I don’t know what I would do....”

Then another time she said:

“My boys are getting better, but their nerves are gone. Imagine sending an artist into it! Of course, camouflage is playing an important part in the war, but it is a terrible thing to keep the boys under fire. They are tremendously brave about it, but they have spent their lives learning to see clearly and feel keenly, and they can’t protect themselves as well as the others, and they have to pay so dearly.”

Saint’s fingers closed over the insensate letter as though it were a part of the girl who had written it, and he felt her slipping out of his grasp. For the first time in his life he was furiously jealous. His blood seethed with rebellion. He strode about the little room with fists clenched and angry tears forcing themselves into his eyes, making him feel more useless and futile than ever.

He heard some one rapping on the counter to call him to the store. The sound came as the crowning and ultimate indignity. He flung open his door and stood glaring into the room.

Bluton was leaning against the counter. “Lemme have a coupla cigars,” he called, and like an insult Wentworth heard the metallic ring of silver on wood.

Instead of going behind the counter he crossed the floor, his heels hitting hard, his fists clenched. When he was within two feet of Bluton the negro looked up and saw his face. His expression was one of ludicrous surprise. He backed away several steps, with the white man closing them in upon him. Then the surprise in his eyes gave place to a flicker of fear.

A wave of exultation swept over Wentworth. Exquisite tremors shook his muscles, then passed, leaving them pulled tight. He said in a hard, level voice: “Get out!”

The negro backed rapidly toward the door; then, with the opening at his back, he spoke: “What de matter? Ah ain’t done nuttin’.”

He was palpably afraid, and the knowledge of it flamed through Saint like an intoxicant. He closed the remaining distance that separated them and caught Bluton by the coat collar. The negro went slack in his grasp, waiting, terrified and inert, babbling softly and incoherently with loose lips. Saint swung him around, thrust him through the door, and kicked him squarely off the piazza.

Bluton lit and drew himself together for a bolt.

“Stop,” Saint commanded.

The word brought the negro up like a tautened lariat, catching him in the very act of springing and pulling him about.

Saint looked him squarely in the eyes and said:

“I just want to tell you that I’ve got something on you that will put you up for ten years. It’s all ready for you, and it’s locked up in the office of a town lawyer. If you ever stick a leg in this store again I’ll have you arrested. Get that? And if you take it out on any of my negroes, it’s the same thing. Now, get to hell out of here.”

There was an ashy tinge to Bluton’s complexion. Without a word the man turned on his heel.

Wentworth opened and closed his fists several times, examining them in an impersonal and detached manner. Then he gave a short exultant laugh and put a question to the pines: “Now, where in the world did I get that from?” He stood pondering the question, his head bowed, his brow furrowed. Slowly the answer came to him. In the beginning he had unthinkingly taken the estimate of others on Bluton. The negroes feared him, and fear is contagious. The white men at the mines believed him dangerous on account of his connection with Baggart, and he had adopted their attitude of tactful and expedient handling. Now, suddenly, he had encountered the negro in a moment when his own rebellion had freed him from an habitual attitude of mind. He had been no one but himself. He had acted spontaneously on instinct, and the result had been electrifying. For the first time in his life he experienced that wonder and elation that comes from a successfully executed bluff. For the first time he realised the advantage that lies with the aggressor.

The two men who represented success to him came to his mind: Atkinson and Raymond. They did not sit waiting on the defensive. They had gone out and taken the world by the collar as he had done Bluton. Very well, he would do the same. If he couldn’t go to France, he would at least get after the job here with hammer and tongs. He would go to town to-morrow and put himself at the service of the central committee for work in the mining district, and at the same time he would drop in and tell Mr. Raymond the straight story of the episode with Bluton.

The following morning, when Wentworth appeared at the general offices on Broad Street, he was shown at once into the sanctum of the manager. Mr. Raymond rose and shook hands warmly. His eyes were quizzical as he rested them on the face of his storekeeper. He never knew quite what to expect from Wentworth. He said: “I have just sent a message out to the mines asking you to come in. Something has happened out there that I want to discuss with you.”

Saint reddened, but he said firmly: “I kicked him out of the store; that’s all. I knew I would have to some day, and yesterday was the day. If you don’t mind I’ll tell you my story now, then leave it to you.”

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----”

Gardinia shocked Lissa’s sensibilities, as she always did when she let herself go, but the girl was conscious of a vague excitement over the idea. Also she was acutely aware of the physical attraction of the girl at her side, whose sheer animal spirits called to something hidden deep within herself.

“I wonder,” she whispered.

“Oh, hell, don’t wonder, come along. Nothin’ ain’t goin’ to happen that you can’t get over. Meet us on the corner by the post office at half-past eight, and we’ll be ready to pick you up and highball up the road.”

“All right. I guess I’ll go. What’ll I wear?”

“The best you got, kid, and your dancin’ shoes. And maybe you better not say anythin’ ’round at the Broadens’ to-morrow night. It ain’t their stuff. But, believe me, it’s got class of its own.”

At the next corner Gardinia bid Lissa a breezy farewell and left her to continue on her way with a chaos of contending emotions as an accompaniment to her thoughts.

* * * * *

Saturday night found Lissa pacing slowly back and forth before the post office. All day she had vacillated between an overwhelming desire to go, and a deep premonitory fear that prompted her to stay with Mamba. When the late dark finally gathered she had dressed with a desperate speed and without telling her grandmother where she was going had kissed her passionately, then rushed out, leaving the old woman’s questions unanswered.

After all, she had arrived at the rendezvous ahead of time, for she had been standing several minutes when St. Michael’s chimed the half hour. About her the streets were quiet, and high over her head mellow tones of the old bells ran their double trill and left the air singing. Lissa caught the faintly throbbing note and held it until the last vibrations fluttered out and died. The corner on which the girl was waiting was one of the most beautiful and significant in the old town. Opposite her the church lifted its straight white spire out of the yellow glow of the street lamps into the cool faint glimmer of the early stars. Diagonally across the way the clusters of lamps were aglow on the City Hall steps, with the building darkling above them like frowning brows over watchful eyes. Behind the City Hall lay the dim quietude of the park, with its stained marble busts and shafts ghost-like under the spreading trees.

Under the spell of the familiar beauty the reckless mood that had finally decided Lissa to come commenced to pass. Her gaze followed the pointing finger of the steeple into the vast serenity of the summer night, and she gave an involuntary start. She was standing out at the pavement’s edge, at the intersection of the two broad thoroughfares, and now, as she gazed up, she realised that they marked the sky off above her into a gigantic cross, its head and foot pointing north and south and its arms dipping east and west into the two rivers.

A fear that was neither superstition nor religion but a little of both assailed her, making her suddenly long to be safely at home with Mamba. What if she cut Gardinia and her crowd now and ran home? They were late, anyway, and that would give her a good excuse.

Then abruptly the moment of quiet was broken and with it the spell that it had woven upon the girl. Several automobiles approached the corner, sounding their claxons. Down the rails from the north a great double-truck trolley hummed and rattled, then passed with a series of deafening jars over the switch.

Two white men came out of the post office and passed close to her, smoking and talking together. One glanced at her curiously in the half light. They sauntered on, and she heard laughter and, very distinctly, the words “high yellow.”

A moment later a dilapidated Ford came to an abrupt and noisy stop before her, and she heard Gardinia’s husky, voluptuous voice.

“Here’s th’ lady friend--all dressed up and bells on, eh, Lissa? Good girl. Meet my friends. This here’s Charlie, and that’s Slim in the back seat. Boys, this is Lissa. No Miss and Mister in this gang. Hop in there with Slim. He’s going to be your feller for to-night. Look him over and see if he ain’t got class.”

Charlie called “Hello, Lissa” from the driver’s seat. Slim jumped out and shook hands. “Glad to know you,” he said, and he held the door open for her to get in. Then they were seated. The machine seemed to crouch for a moment, took a spasmodic leap, then settled down into a brisk steady gait.

The couple on the front seat paid no further attention to their companions but sat close together talking in low voices that were absorbed in the rattle of the vehicle.

At first Lissa could think of nothing to say, and Slim seemed to experience the same difficulty, for he sat well over on his side of the car and let the moments pass in silence. When they drove under the arc lights Lissa took advantage of the transient illumination to appraise her partner. He was dark, a full-blooded negro, with a receding forehead, a broad flat nose, and a very large mouth. Once he looked up, met her scrutiny, and broke into a broad, friendly grin. She saw the whiteness of his teeth spring out against the black, and his eyes laughing shyly into her face. She was reassured and began to feel that they would get along together. There was nothing about him to make a girl afraid. Then the lights were behind them, and ahead the road, a broad grey band of concrete, plunged straight out between dense patches of woodland and nebulous distances of open field.

The car, like a wild creature that has broken long captivity, flung the city behind it and leaped for the open. Gardinia’s voice came back with the whistling wind to the silent couple behind her.

“Hey, there, you two--what do you think this is--a funeral? What’s the matter with you, Slim, you don’t hold that gal in--don’t you know she ain’t use’ to country ridin’?”

Thus encouraged, Slim allowed himself to be bounced over to Lissa’s side of the car and put his arm around her shoulder. For a moment the girl’s body remained rigid. Then, on another bounce, the man’s arm fell lower and closed firmly about her waist. A tremor shook the girl. Then suddenly she relaxed into Slim’s arms and closed her eyes.

“Don’t you worry,” he said in a low husky voice. “Ah ain’t goin’ to let you get thrown out.”

For half an hour the car drove steadily northward; then from the dense shadows of massed live oaks a row of lights leaped out. Charlie jerked the machine hard over. It left the concrete for a rough side road, executed a series of jackrabbit bounds, and brought up short before the door of a dance hall. A rush of talk, laughter, song, and instrument-tuning greeted them, shattering the peace of the night and challenging the new arrivals with a mood of wild gaiety. Slim waited with the girls while Charlie parked the car.

The wide doorway was swarming like a hive; couples came and went between the tawdry brilliance of the room and the piled blackness of night under the live oaks. A group of young bucks lounged near the door, smoking and passing a flask from mouth to mouth.

Charlie rejoined the party just as the music flung its unifying rhythm into the discordant babel. They elbowed their way through the press and entered the hall. The room was a-flutter with tissue-paper streamers of every shade that depended from the rafters and responded with an agitated waving to the sound and motion beneath. There were eight men in the orchestra, and Lissa noted immediately with the colour snobbery of the Broaden set that they were all full-blooded negroes. There were two guitars, two banjos, a fiddle, a cornet, and trombone, and a man with drum and traps. The sound was unlike anything that the girl had ever heard. Strive as she might, she could not recognise the tune. As a matter of fact, it was not an orchestra in a strict interpretation of the term, but merely a collection of eight individuals who had taken some simple melody as a theme and were creating rhythm and harmony around it as they played. Her immediate sensation was one of shock at the crude and almost deafening uproar. Then, as she stood listening, a strange excitement commenced to possess her. Music had never moved her like this before. It had made her cry--and it had shaken her with delight, but this seemed to be breaking something loose deep within her--something that seethed hot through her veins and set her muscles jumping.

The crowd came jamming into the room, black girls with short knappy hair, tall long-limbed negroes from the wharves, sailors from the Navy Yard, dark and heavy, with here and there the pallor and passivity of a Filipino. There were many couples out from town who, like themselves, had the mark of the city on them in their straightened hair and well-made clothes.

Slim caught Lissa closely to him. His shyness had vanished, but to the girl that did not matter, for she was no longer afraid. The music snatched them up, and they were off into the thick of it. It is unlikely that anywhere else in America at that moment there were more and different steps being trod on a dance floor. The old fundamental rhythm of the turkey trot prevailed, but the more sophisticated were dancing a one-step or fox trot. In a corner out of the jam a group of country negroes were dancing singly. The dance was a strange, fascinating, and wildly individual affair. They stood two and two, facing each other, as though dancing in competition rather than together, and the basic step consisted of rising on alternate feet while the free leg was hurled outward and backward, knees touching, and toes turned in, parrot fashion.

Lissa made Slim stop with her to watch, and immediately the desire to dance it possessed her. Slim laughed. “Come along,” he urged, pulling at her arm. “That’s nothin’ but a ole country nigger dance.”

She would not listen. Presently she had the step and started in at the edge of the circle. When the music stopped she was angry. “Oh, I almost had it, Slim,” she exclaimed. “One more try and I’ll get it pat. Why did they have to stop just then?”

Her partner led her out of doors, then slipped his arm around her and guided her toward the automobile. Gardinia and Charlie were there already, and when the four of them were together, Gardinia handed Lissa a flask. “Hit her up, Sister,” she invited.

Lissa hesitated. “What’s it--whisky?”

“Sure--go ahead, ain’t goin’ do you no harm.”

The girl lifted the flask and took a swallow, with the result that she choked and coughed.

They all burst into laughter.

“My Gawd,” Gardinia mocked, “can’t you even take a drink o’ hooch?”

Lissa snatched the bottle back from Slim. “Can’t, eh? I’ll show you.” She wasn’t going to be laughed at by Gardinia, that was certain.

What a night! Life with a red lining. The orchestra was at it again. That new dance. Lissa must master that if she kicked the floor boards loose.

* * * * *

During an intermission, when they crowded to the door for air, a wicked-looking stripped Ford, painted scarlet, jerked itself into the light and stopped. Gardinia grabbed Lissa by the arm. “Here’s Prince,” she cried. “You got to meet him. Hello, Prince, here’s a lady friend I want you to know.”

The new arrival was evidently a favourite, especially with women, for a number ran forward and crowded about the car. He got languidly out and, with casual greetings to right and left, came forward and joined the girls. They met where the shaft of light from the open door stabbed the darkness and splayed out on the gravel. “Lissa, this is the Prince I been tellin’ you about,” Gardinia introduced.

“Glad to know you,” he said, and took her hand, while he slid his glance over her in deliberate and frank appraisal. Then he raised his eyes to her face, and the grip on her fingers tightened. He gave a low whistle and, still gripping Lissa’s hand, addressed Gardinia--“_Some class_, baby; where’d you find her?”

A shudder of repulsion started under the man’s hot, moist clasp, flashed up the girl’s arm, and communicated itself to her whole being. The man sensed it with evident satisfaction, his loose sensuous lips parted, and he gave a low, confident laugh. He bent forward, and Lissa got an impression of a light muddy complexion, heavy-lidded eyes, and a long scar across the forehead close under the hair. The air was heavy with its warning of danger; she felt her skin creep under it. And yet, in spite of the repulsion that she felt at his touch, there was a compelling power that drew her toward him and made her pulses race. She summoned all her strength and snatched her hand away.

Prince laughed again and turned toward the hall. “Me an’ you’s goin’ to be buddies,” he said. “Come on in an’ let’s have a drink on it.”

His glance included Lissa’s party in the invitation, and the four of them followed him across the hall to the gaily decorated booth in the corner where soft drinks were being served.

“What’ll you take?” he asked largely.

They made it “dopes,” and when the glasses stood before them their host produced a silver flask and poured a generous drink in each tumbler.

Charlie exclaimed, “Hot damn! None of dat moonshine rotgut for Prince. Nuttin’ but de bes’.”

Lissa noticed that Slim’s bashfulness had descended upon him again and that he accepted the drink from Prince with reluctance.

The music crashed out, smiting the air with the flat impact of a blow, causing the fluid in the tumblers to quiver. They emptied their glasses in gulps.

Prince drew his hand across his mouth and said, “All right, girlie, le’s go.”

Slim seemed to have suffered a sort of paralysis. When Lissa looked toward him, he said nothing, but stood looking at her with wide mournful eyes. Prince put his arm around her, and she looked into his face with a shaken, reckless little laugh. “I’m on,” she said, and was snatched from the corner into the maelstrom of the dance floor.

They danced three dances together. Prince looked older than the boys with whom they had come, but he could dance circles around them. Lissa was delighted to find that he was an expert in the step that she had just discovered, and she made him go to a corner near the band and teach it to her.

It was while they were there that the musicians broke into a medley of old jazz tunes, launching from their wild syncopated improvisations into that early ragtime classic of the Johnson brothers, “Under the Bamboo Tree.” In Lissa the music ceased to be a thing external, apart. It became a fire in her body taking her suddenly like sheeting flame about a sapling, cutting her off from the others, possessing her, swaying her irresistibly forward toward the players. She did not realise that she was singing until her gaze rested on the face of the leader, and over his fiddle she saw the white flash of his grin and the surprised delight in his eyes. He waved his bow in invitation and called, “Come up, Sistuh. Up here’s whar yo’ b’longs.” Then she was among the swaying bodies, the smashing harmonies of the band. Her muscles twitched to the rhythm, moving her feet and legs in the intricacies of the new dance, her arms were thrown wide with fingers snapping the time. She forgot that there would be a solo in church to-morrow and that her voice needed saving. She remembered nothing except the words and music that came in a rush out of an old forgotten memory, beating out from lungs and throat in a torrent of song.

“If you lika me lika I lika you, An’ we lika both the same, I’d lika say this very day I’d lika change your name....”

On the floor couples were still dancing, whirling more wildly under the added excitement of the song. The drive of the music through the girl wrought in her for the first time the almost miraculous duality which is the gift of only the true artist. It seemed mysteriously to divide her into two separate entities, one of which floated over the heads of the dancers through the wide doorway to go blundering inconsequently about among the soft summer stars. This part of her was concerned only with beauty--with far thrilling things--Mamba’s love--the harbour at dawn--Battery gardens under summer moons--all of these things it must capture and prison in the music that she was making. The quest seemed suddenly more holy than her prayers. It lifted her to the point of exaltation that trembles on the brink of tears. Then there was the other part of her that followed her gaze here and there across the dance floor, cool, deliberate, detached, arresting first one couple, then another, holding them tranced and gaping where they stood. This Lissa was egotistical, supremely self-confident. “I will make them all stop and listen,” it boasted. “I shall possess them all before I let them go. I can. I will.” It was the personification of this second self that stood there on the dais, clad in close-fitting red silk, her sinuous body a fluid medium through which the maddening reiteration of the rhythm beat out to the listeners and forced them to respond, her voice with its deep contralto beauty the very spirit of youth, yet shading the edges of laughter with a shadow of a sob.

When the song ended the leader merged it without an appreciable break into “Yip I aidy I ai I ai.” The choice was an inspiration. Lissa had them all now. Out under the fluttering paper streamers the crowd stood motionless except for those who, while they held their eyes fixed upon the singer, swayed their bodies unconsciously in unison with her own. She had made good her boast. She had captured the last one. The new song with its devil-may-care note of triumph lifted over the weaving accompaniment of the band and beat against the flimsy walls like a living thing. It said: “You are all mine--mine.” It flung it at them arrogantly with a trace of indulgent contempt, then it wavered, softened, and said it again in a torrent of passionate gratitude and love. Her very own--her first audience.

“Sing of joy, sing of bliss, Home was never like this. Yip I aidy I ai....”

With an intoxicating thunder of applause sounding in her ears, Lissa stepped down from the platform. Charlie was waiting there for her, and before Prince could reach her side he slipped an arm about her and elbowed a way for her through the stamping, shouting crowd. When they were finally out of doors they were joined by Gardinia, who flung her arms about Lissa in a hug that left her breathless. “Where did you get it, kid?” she asked in wonder.

“Heaven knows! I guess I was as surprised as you.”

Gardinia gave her a second embrace, then turning to Charlie dismissed him with: “Run along. I got something to say to this sister.”

When he had passed out of earshot she said to the girl: “Look here, bright eyes, you want to watch your step with that feller they call Prince. Did he ask to drive you home?”

“Yes, he did say something about it.”

“Well, I hope you told him no. After all, Slim’s settin’ you up to the party to-night, and he’s got some rights coming to him.”

“All right,” Lissa replied obediently. “I’ll turn Prince down.”

“An’ look here,” the big girl said seriously, “don’t you go losin’ your head over that nigger. He’s free with his money, and he’s always good for a swell time, but the sky’s his limit--watch your step. I ain’t so sure you’re his sort, anyhow. Now, me--that’s a different matter.”

Lissa gave a confident laugh. “Don’t you let that worry you, Sister,” she replied. “I’m a pretty good hand at taking care of myself.”

Charlie and Slim came up and joined them.

“All right,” Gardinia warned, “just watch your step--that’s all.”

It was well after midnight when the Ford bounced out onto the concrete road and headed south with the four revellers. Slim sat in his corner glum and silent. He evidently felt that he had been rather hardly used. Lissa made several attempts to draw him out and finally yielded to a growing exasperation. If he thought that she was going to apologise and eat humble pie, he had another think coming. Her anger rose. He ought to thank his stars that she had even gone with him, she, a member of the Reformed Church, a friend of the Broadens. She did not need to worry. There was Prince, now, ready to show her a good time. The premonition of danger that she had felt toward him at first had abated until it had left only an exciting element of mystery and adventure. She smiled at the memory of Gardinia’s warning. As if she couldn’t take care of herself. No. She was out on her own now, and she didn’t have to ask favours of anybody.

When Lissa entered her room she found Mamba sitting just as she had left her; the lamp was turned low, and the old woman was slouched deep in her big chair, her gaze fixed beyond the open window to where the late fragment of a moon was climbing over the housetops. She did not scold as the girl had expected. Instead she turned her eyes, which had a slight film of weariness over them, in mute questioning toward the door.

Lissa exclaimed, “Why, you ought to be ashamed, Grandma, sitting up at this hour. How come you didn’t go to bed?”

The old figure drew itself together in the chair and spoke. “Turn up dat lamp so Ah can see yo’ an’ come here.”

Lissa did as she was bidden, and Mamba took her hand and drew her down upon her lap, then peered searchingly into her face.

She said, “Yo’ been drinkin’, chile.”

“Oh, nothing much, Grandma, just a couple.”

“Yo’ ain’t been bad?”

The girl laughed and patted the old face lightly.

“Not on your life, Grandma. You needn’t worry about me. I had a swell time dancing, but I’m nobody’s fool.”

“Well, go ’long to bed, an’ in de mornin’ yo’ got to tell me all ’bout it.”

“Sure thing,” Lissa replied, “but you mustn’t wait up for me like this. You need your sleep, you know. I got to take care of this old lady. I can’t get along without her.”

She caught the old woman for a moment in her strong young arms, then got to her feet and commenced to undress.

“Ain’t no use to say dat, chile,” Mamba replied. “When you gone out nights Ah all de time gots a feelin’ you might need me, an’ Ah ain’t likes to take off my clo’es till yo’ gets back home.”

* * * * *

Lissa brought Gardinia to meet Mamba with some trepidation. She feared the impression that her now constant companion would make on the astute old woman. She thought that her grandmother would be easier in her mind if she had only her account of the dances and late motor rides that were becoming more and more frequent as the summer passed.

But one Sunday after morning service the girls were walking together on the Battery and Gardinia came as far as the gate of the Atkinson garden. Suddenly she was seized by one of her characteristic impulses.

“Say,” she exclaimed, “I believe I’ll go in and meet that old grandma of yours you’re always talking about. She must be a rare old dame. I want to know her.”

There was nothing to be done but to accede, and after an imperceptible moment of hesitation Lissa said, “Sure, come on in. I reckon she’s in the room now.”

Gardinia’s glance was busy as they passed through the well-kept garden and to the neat two-storied building in the rear, with the garage below, and a glimpse of clean white curtains showing in the windows above.

“Pretty swell dump,” she admired. “Pretty soft thing you’ve got here, I’ll say.”

“Grandma,” Lissa said on entering the room, “this is my friend Gardinia; she wanted to meet you, so I brought her in.”

Mamba came forward and took the younger woman’s hand. From their network of wrinkles the old eyes looked searchingly into her face. Then she smiled, showing her big white teeth.

“The kid’s been telling me so much about you,” Gardinia explained, “that I just wanted to come in and get acquainted. Guess you think I’m a funny sort of friend for that highbrow gal of yours, eh?”

Mamba murmured something about being glad to meet her. But as is so often the case with first remarks, her words meant little or nothing, serving merely as a screen from behind which each of the women was exploring for the real ego that lay secreted behind words, eyes, lips.

Lissa, watching closely, realised that they liked each other. That in spite of the differences of age and outlook there was a hidden bond of intimacy to which they both responded. It mystified her. She was still too unknowing to recognise it as the sisterhood of the unchaste. It was something that needed no words. There it was in each. In Mamba a thin echo from an incredibly vanished past; in the girl, only yesterday, and perhaps again to-morrow, but across the years it sent its spark of understanding and was tacitly accepted by each. Strange to say, it was not prejudicial. It was a phase of their world, and it was a phase that belonged to the generous, the kind, as well as to the penny-grabbing, the depraved.

Gardinia burst through the reserve that she had been wearing like a strait-jacket. She laughed heartily, her eyes looking into the old woman’s and sparkling mischievously.

“I bet you were a gay one yourself once,” she said. “I’ll bet you knew what it was like to hit the ceiling on a big night--eh, Mauma?”

Lissa was shocked. Mamba had taught her to treat age with great respect. But to her amazement she saw that Mamba was pleased.

She answered with her surprisingly young, vital laugh:

“T’ings was diff’ent in dem days, an’ if Ah is broke loose den dere ain’t nobody libin’ to tell on me now. But nowadays gals gots to behabe.”

“Sure,” Gardinia agreed, as she took a seat and let her admiring gaze take in the cozy and tastefully furnished room, with the sunny garden showing beyond the window. “Sure, and don’t you worry about Lissa. If she’ll just listen to me she’ll have a good time and she won’t get into no trouble.”

She looked around for her friend, but Lissa had gone into the next room to change from her Sunday dress. At the same moment Mamba also noticed that they were alone and immediately took advantage of the opportunity.

“Tell me,” she begged in a lowered voice, “who dis yaller nigger Lissa goin’ roun’ wid? She won’t tell me nuttin’ ’bout um, but Ah seen um t’other day when he come by for she, an’ Ah wouldn’t trus’ um far as Ah could t’row um.”

Gardinia said, “Prince ain’t so bad. He’s too mashed on himself to last long with anybody else. But he flings the long green high and far, and he’ll show her a good time.”

Mamba leaned forward and said confidentially, “Ah ’fraid for my gal. She ain’t like yo’ an’ me, Sistuh--she ain’t seen nuttin’ ob mens, an’ dat yaller nigger gots woman-chaser wrote all ober um.”

“Don’t you worry, Mauma,” Gardinia said reassuringly, “the first thing I did was to put Lissa wise, and besides, she’s one of them cool sisters. Ain’t no danger of her losing her head.”

“Well, all Ah asks is dat yo’ keep an eye on she for me, an’ ef trouble breaks any time let me know. Ah is ole but Ah ain’t no fool at takin’ care ob my chillun.”

“That’s right, old lady, I just bet you ain’t no fool. But there ain’t goin’ be no trouble.”

Lissa came in then, and the three chatted for a few moments. Then Gardinia took her departure.

“Dat’s a good gal yo’ gots fuh friend,” Mamba said when the girl had gone. And Lissa stood wondering just what the definition for good could be in Mamba’s lexicon.

* * * * *

Labor Day--steaming and hot, with an opaque sky and a red sun burning through it. Underfoot the pavements streaming with condensed moisture and flinging back reflections of houses, shop windows, sky, in colours soft and wonderful to see. Summer’s fag end, with its spent ardours behind it, and autumn around the next corner. And for to-day nothing for the negroes to do but to be glad, to leave the wharves, the bakeries, the buildings of the houses, the stoking of furnaces, and tell the world how good a thing it is to be alive, to have laboured, and now to claim a respite.

September weather.

Down in the white residential streets, block after block of closed mansions sleeping away the hot hours in gardens where nature spent her beauty with open hands, and still had more each day to fling over deserted piazzas in a foam of climbing roses, to pour in pools of oleander bloom between moss-hung live oaks. On King Street the fashionable stores dozing behind their drawn blinds. Here was a town that the winter tourist would not recognise, a town claimed for the day by its darker half. Its pavements swarming with noisy ragamuffin black children watching eagerly for the parade. Bands passing across street ends blaring for a moment, then gone. Down on Broad Street the massed trombones and horns of the Jenkins orphanage, assailing the offices of the morning _News and Courier_ with a blast of good will that temporarily paralysed the editorial brains within and traffic without. The parade: all of the unions in line. The dignity of labour might be well enough for the white brotherhoods, but among the negroes the pompous old institution was finding it difficult to maintain its pose. Hand saws, carried over shoulders, fluttered incongruously with coloured ribbons, and hammers were wearing gaudy streamers. The bakers, attired in white aprons and starched chef’s caps, bore aloft a gigantic loaf of bread that was dressed for Mardi Gras. Bands kept the steamy air vibrating, and the crowds sweated and cheered with complete abandon. The afternoon would see an exodus to all of the negro parks, and along the wharves several dilapidated excursion steamers waited in nervous and asthmatic expectancy for their gala freight.

Lissa was awakened early by the laughter and talk in the street. For a while she lay luxuriously in her bed and through the morning haze watched pigeons strut and gossip on the wet purple of a slate roof. How different the day was from the usual workdays. She felt a pleasurable excitement in the air. Everybody would be having fun to-day--cutting loose--forgetting troubles--just living.

Mamba lay in her bed across the clean airy room with heavy sleep still upon her. With her eyes closed and her alert spirit off guard, how different, how shrunken and old, she seemed. Why, she wasn’t Mamba at all. Lissa wouldn’t look at her like this. It made her feel suddenly alone and unprotected--out of key with the day. Soon that strange, quiet figure would open its eyes again, and then the person Lissa knew would return, watchful and sure, to see that nothing could harm her.

The girl stretched lazily, got out of bed, and went to the window. Outside the lawn lay wet and sweet with dew. The sunlight was a faint pink now, and the shadows purple. It was going to be a hot day, a mild sea air moved the curtains and fanned her skin through her sheer nightdress. She conquered a sudden impulse to strip off the garment and yield her body to its seductiveness: to let its soft fingers stroke her breasts and follow the curves of hip and thigh. No, Mamba wouldn’t like that. It was the sort of thing that she mustn’t do.

Well, she had a lot to be thankful for, more than most of the girls she knew. The Atkinsons were away at Flat Rock cooling their heels in the mountains for the month and had left Mamba to look after the house. It was almost like their own now, with the kitchen to prepare their meals in, and the lovely things in the big dim rooms to be looked at and enjoyed at leisure.

She had a full day ahead of her. Dinner at two with the Broadens, and after dinner the other members of the Club would come in for some music. Then at night a party up the road with Prince. They would dance that exciting dance together. Funny--that story she heard, that they were taking it up now in New York--calling it the Charleston. White folks going wild over a black folks’ dance. Well, she for one could understand that. Then home when the night was late and cool--splitting the air in Prince’s red racer--“Life,” as Gardinia would say, “with a red lining.” But she mustn’t talk too much about that. Mamba had a way of worrying when she went to a dance, and she didn’t want to fret her.

And yet, for all of its bright prospects, when Lissa came in to supper she had the feeling that, so far, at any rate, the day had been disappointing. She had set out early for her dinner engagement, planning a long leisurely walk through the more shady of the streets, but at the intersection of one of the main thoroughfares she had run foul of the parade. At first she was annoyed. The jostling crowds of negroes, the impact of small black, sweating bodies offended her senses. Why couldn’t they enjoy themselves quietly and decently, anyway--why did they have to be so dirty? But it was impossible to cross the street, and she was forced to be an onlooker. She supposed, after all, that people had a right to enjoy themselves in their own way. But what a racket they made. The carpenters passed, with their absurd ribbons fluttering from work-scarred tools, grinning and calling to friends in the crowd. Then a band went crashing by, giving her a funny twist inside and plucking at the muscles of her legs and feet. She started to mark time and unconsciously to drift in unison with the crowd. When the masons came abreast of her she looked up and met the eyes of a bright-faced young negro. He had a large trowel in one hand and a small one in the other, and he was beating time in rhythm with the band. “Hello dere, Sistuh,” he called with a grin. There was something infectious about that grin with its gleaming teeth and full dark lips. She laughed back with sudden camaraderie, “Hello yourself!”

He stopped for a second before her and said boldly: “What boat yo’ goin’ on dis ebenin’? De _Planter_, de _Pilot Boy_? Le’s make it de same.”

Still laughing, she shook her head, and the marchers swept him away while he looked back with a rueful glance.

She came to herself and glanced around sharply. Had any one she knew seen her? But what fun they did have! A sudden pang of envy assailed her. She wrenched herself out of their holiday mood and stemmed the tide in the direction of the Broaden home.

Later, all through the eminently polite conversations, the excellently rendered music of the club, the artistic pronouncements of North, she kept seeing the face of the young mason, and picturing him dancing on the deck of the excursion boat--eating watermelon and spitting seeds over the rail, grinning boldly at the girls. “Hello dere, Sistuh, what boat yo’ goin’ on dis ebenin’?” and his comical, rueful face as he passed out of sight.

* * * * *

During supper Lissa was silent and preoccupied. Mamba studied her closely with anxiety showing in her keen old eyes. At last she asked, “Yo’ goin’ out wid dat nigger Prince to-night, chile?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“How come yo’ nebber bring him to meet me like yo’ done promise long ago?”

“Oh, that’s so--you did ask me to, ’way back in July. I’ve been meaning to bring him, but I keep forgetting.”

Mamba spoke sadly: “Yo’ ain’t forget, Chile. Ah ask yo’ in July, an’ Ah ask yo’ in August--an’ yo’ ain’t de forgettin’ kin’. Why yo’ don’t want fo’ me to see um?”

Lissa looked up into the old woman’s face. “All right, Grandma,” she answered, “since you put it that way, it’s because you wouldn’t like him and he wouldn’t like you. He’s different. He’s new time--you’re old time. You’d be thinking things about him that aren’t so. I’ve known him three months now--I know just where he begins and just where he leaves off. We had a good talking out, and since then we haven’t had any fooling--just a good time--dancing, riding in his car--that’s all.”

“Ah saw um at de gate once,” Mamba told her. “It been half daak, but Ah could see woman-chaser writ all over um. Ah ain’t want yo’ fuh know dem kin’.”

The girl sprang up impulsively, ran around the table, flung herself into Mamba’s lap, and gave her a hug.

“Oh, quit worryin’, Grandma,” she begged. “I’m just as hard as nails, I tell you. I never saw a man yet who could keep me from coming back home to you. But I’m not an old woman--I’ve got to play a little bit--I’ve got to dance and cut loose now and then, and Prince is the swellest sport between Savannah and Norfolk--and he sure can show a girl a time. Now, you leave him to me.”

Mamba said nothing more then, only patting the head that was buried against her breast, and swaying a little in her chair, as though she were rocking a small child in her arms. But an hour later, when Lissa left the room attired in her red party frock, the old woman lock-stepped her down the stairs and out to the car that stood at the curb beyond the Atkinsons’ garden. She was going to have a look for herself.

What she saw was a small evil-looking scarlet roadster with two low seats side by side, and in one of them, with his legs extended indolently before him, a man who looked as though he had lived about forty years and had lived them hard. In the faint glow of a street lamp she could see that there were pouches under his eyes. The eyes were shadowed beneath the visor of a checked cap where they could tell no secrets, but when he turned toward Mamba she felt that they were laughing at her from their safe retreat.

Lissa must have sensed it too, for her body stiffened, and she pressed defensively against the old woman.

Mamba and Prince looked at each other for a moment of silence, then Mamba said: “Yo’ been seein’ a lot ob my gal.”

She was answered by a low confident laugh, and: “A lot’s a big word, ole lady. Ah ain’t seen nuttin’ of her yet.”

That the sinister implication of the reply was not lost on Mamba was evidenced by a tremor of the hand that she closed upon the side of the car as she leaned over and spoke directly into his face.

“Ah ain’t expectin’ no hahm to come to she, an’ Ah ain’t tryin’ to baby my gal. Ah trus’ she anywhere wid anybody any time. But when she go away from here wid yo’, yo’s ’sponsible for she. Ef enyt’ing happen to she yo’ gots me--Mamba--to settle wid. Yo’ gets dat?”

The man looked her up and down. It was not in him to feel the spiritual power that animated the fragile old creature who hung to the side of his car. He could only see a rather comic little figure with great false teeth gleaming in the lamplight against the black of her face, and a hand that trembled absurdly and impotently on his car. He laughed at her frankly, throwing his head back so that she saw the insolent challenge in his eyes, and a livid scar that crossed his forehead like a long centipede.

Lissa put her arm around the old woman and drew her close to her side. “Here, cut that out,” she cried sharply to the man. “Nobody’s going to laugh at Grandma and take me out--you can just get that straight now.”

Prince’s change of front was almost comical in its suddenness.

“Me laugh at de ole lady?--Honey, yo’ don’t know me. Ah jes laugh because she think anything can happen while Ah takin’ care of yo’.”

He reached over and patted Mamba’s hand reassuringly. “Don’t yo’ worry, Gran’ma. Make your min’ easy. Your gal ain’t never been so well fix’ befo’.”

During the brief parley the engine had been running slowly. Now he advanced the accelerator, and the sound swelled suddenly and ominously in Mamba’s ears.

“Get in, Lissa,” he called. “We’s late enough already.”

But there was no disguising the fact that he had laughed at Mamba. He had not supposed that Lissa would care, and he had taken the chance. Now the girl stood with her arm tight about the old woman and hesitated, looking at him with anger and distrust in her eyes. For a moment it seemed as though she would let him drive away alone. But she had longed so for the night to come. The mason in the parade that morning had started a hunger in her for youth that could forget itself and send worries flying--and she had been such a lady all afternoon--and there, half an hour away, were waiting music--dancing--throbbing young bodies--“Life with a red lining.”

She caught Mamba to her, half smothered her with kisses, and sprang into the machine beside Prince. There was a hoarse triumphant cry of metal as the gears meshed, and the red car lunged northward.

Mamba stood and watched it go, first a crimson blotch that came and went as it passed under successive arc lights, then only a tiny red spark that zigzagged around other cars and went out slowly like a star in blowing smoke.

* * * * *

Mamba sat at the open window. There was a tensity about her attitude as though she were waiting by prearrangement for a certain occurrence and that she was unsure only of the hour. St. Michael’s chimes had spoken to her every quarter hour, and each time at the first mellow note she had sat forward, counted with an inaudible movement of the lips, then, in the ensuing silence, let herself go slowly back in her chair to wait for the next. She was fully clad, even to the sedate black straw bonnet which was an emblem of respectability without which she was never seen upon the street.

Midnight had passed, heavy-footed and weary, then, almost staccato by comparison, came the single clear note announcing the new day.

A ramshackle automobile rattled noisily up the quiet street and stopped with a sigh before the Atkinsons’ gate. At the same moment that Mamba’s form strained from her window, Gardinia Whitmore arrived breathless on the grass below.

“Lissa home yet?” she asked.

Mamba disappeared immediately and a moment later stood beside the young woman, her fingers closed in a grip that was almost painful about Gardinia’s arm.

“No,” she said briefly; then: “Ah been waitin’ fer yo’ to come fo’ me. Whar yo’ t’ink she gone?”

Gardinia’s voice was edged with hysteria. She had been drinking, and exhaled an effluvium of corn whisky.

“I swear to Gawd I didn’t have nothin’ to do with it, Gran’ma,” she began. “I did just like I promised, I kept an eye on her, but there was something about that licker of Prince’s. It knocked me out, an’ it knocked out Slim, an’ we ain’t no babies. When I come ’round, the first thing I looked for was Lissa and Prince, and when I ain’t seen them I made Slim burn it down here to you, just like I promised.”

Mamba’s voice came urgent, steadying: “Where dat nigger Prince lib? Tell me all yo’ know ’bout um, gal.”

“Nobody don’t know much about him, and he’s such a liar, you can’t count on what he says about himself. All I know is he lives across the bridge. He says he runs a big truck farm and a lot of stores over there.”

“What he name? He mus’ hab more ob a name dan jus’ Prince.”

Gardinia stood silent, trying to remember. Then she called Slim. With maddening deliberation he detached himself from the car and slouched indolently forward.

“What’s Prince’s real name?” the girl demanded.

The man stood shuffling one foot backward and forward on the grass, his mouth sagging open, while he pursued the glimmer of a memory through the labyrinth of his befuddled brain. At last he announced, “Ah got it. Ah done heard some of the mens call him Bluton--Gilly Bluton.”

The word shocked Mamba into instant activity. She spun around and re-entered the house, emerging a moment later with a big old-fashioned pocketbook in her hand. She took each of the young people by an arm and propelled them toward the gate, her body rocking with her speed and the intensity of her purpose. At the car she stuffed a bill into Slim’s hand. “Ober de bridge, boy,” she ordered, “an’ fuh Gawd’ sake hurry.”

Then, while he was obediently cranking the car, she turned and laid a hand on Gardinia’s shoulder. “Go home an’ sleep it off, gal,” she said in a gentle voice. “Yo’ ain’t a bad gal, an’ yo’ done what yo’ can.”

Slim sat silent, giving his whole attention to the task of getting the utmost out of his dilapidated machine. Mamba’s thoughts wrestled with the problem that confronted her. It was useless to plan. She would have to depend on Hagar, who knew the ground. But she had an almost superstitious fear of the consequences that might result from such a dependence. Always it had been the well-meant bungling of her great awkward daughter that had precipitated trouble. She remembered vividly the summer dawn when Hagar had sent for her to come to the East Bay tenement after she had jeopardised all of her hopes for Lissa by rescuing Bluton and bringing him to the city to be found and cared for by the police. The malign and ironical fate that prompted Hagar’s good impulses had never played a more cruel joke on her than that. She had risked everything to save Bluton--for what? To attempt the ruin of her own daughter. The thought stabbed the old woman like a blade, and she broke her silence, urging Slim to greater speed.

It must have been between two and three o’clock when Mamba reached the cabin in which Hagar lived with old Vina. Overhead the great void of sky was filled with drifting mist, dark to the east, and showing a luminous area over the western treetops where the moon was tilting toward the horizon. In the faint light the cabin had a ghostly, deserted look. Mamba sprang from the car, and knocked upon the door, calling urgently, “Hagar--Hagar!”

Almost instantly the door was opened, and the woman stood in her white nightdress, looming huge against the dark.

“Lissa’s ober here with dat damn’ nigger Bluton,” Mamba shot at her; then she strove by repetition to drive the idea into the sleep-dulled brain. “Here--here--do yo’ unnerstan’?--wid Bluton.”

“Can’t be, Ma--not Lissa.”

“Ah tell yo’ she is. We got to find her quick. Where’d he take her? Yo’ knows him, yo’ know his ways wid women.”

Hagar was awake now, and she responded to Mamba’s old power over her. It was almost as though the older brain had assumed control of nerve and muscle in the big body, telling them what to do. Hagar reached into the room and caught up a cloak that she flung over her nightdress; then, with Mamba, she sprang for the car.

* * * * *

Over the uneven road the machine bounded, plunging through tunnels of blackness under live-oak avenues, racing between broom-straw fields under a wide emptiness of sky. And always Hagar, sitting on the rear seat and leaning forward with her face at Slim’s shoulder, told him which turnings to take. About them the night, under its shroud of mist, lay as quiet, as indifferent to human urgency, as death. The steady pulsing of the motor and the rattle of the vehicle served only to accentuate the awful loneliness of the country.

They rocketed past the huddled cabins of a settlement and struck a narrow dirt road that led out through a stand of yellow pine toward the swamp that lay black and solid against the horizon. Hagar’s fingers clamped down on Slim’s shoulder.

“Stop,” she whispered.

Under her hand the machine seemed to die in midair, gasping, and settling suddenly to earth. The trees that had been rushing past them stopped in their tracks, crowded close, and looked down on the three intruders.

“We got to get out here an’ walk,” Hagar said. “Come on, we ain’t got no time to lose now.”

But the man did not leave his seat. Mamba turned back and asked why he waited.

He settled forward in the seat, his body relaxed, his head propped against the back.

“Nuttin’ doin’, Gran’ma,” he drawled. “Ah’s a hired driver. Ah ain’t got nuttin’ against Prince. Ah ain’t see nuttin’. Ah ain’t hear nuttin’. When yo’s ready to go home, yo’ can wake me up.”

But now the initiative had passed to Hagar. She caught Mamba by the arm and urged. “Come on, Ma, we ain’t need no man to help.”

They would soon be there now, Hagar explained as she hurried the old woman forward. This was the place where Bluton ran his crap game. A little farther, at the swamp’s edge, they would find the cabin. Then they were upon it. There was a small opening in the trees, and through it the sky let down a dim grey light. The cabin was a black cube with one candlelit window. Before the door in spidery outline stood the red racer.

Not until the women were at the door did they hear the first sound. Lissa’s voice in a sort of desperate monotony: “Not that, Prince--not that--not that.”

Hagar kicked the door open, and they entered together. Lissa was seated on the floor with her back to the wall, her knees drawn up, and her chin on them. Her arms were locked about her legs below the knees. The candlelight flickered upon the golden brown of her shoulder and upper arm where her dress had been torn. Bluton was hanging over her in a threatening attitude.

At the entrance of the women both faces were flung toward the door.

With a shrill cry Lissa was up and in Mamba’s arms. Between them and Prince stood Hagar, her feet planted wide apart. Her arms held akimbo under the full coat exaggerated her already massive bulk to a preposterous breadth, and her head, held low and thrust menacingly forward, was scarcely visible to the women who stood in the shadows behind her. No word had been spoken. There had been no sound except Lissa’s cry, and the waiting silence of the night had seemed to suck the shrill note from her lips and leave the four occupants of the room suspended as though in a vacuum. From the swamp came the demoniac scream of a cat--a struggle--a strangling death wail--and again silence. A subtle change became manifest in the appearance of the girl. She ceased trembling. Her form drew to its full height. A ripple of tautened muscle stirred under the smooth bronze of her skin where the shoulder rose above her tattered clothing. Then in a flash she was out of Mamba’s arms, past the gigantic form of her mother, and upon the cowering man. Words that rose to her lips were broken there into strange, savage utterance unintelligible as speech, but more eloquent--more terrifying. One slender hand clawed downward and four livid streaks followed the flensing nails from forehead to chin. Hagar reached out an arm and caught the girl in its curve, pressed her to her side for a moment, then passed her back to Mamba.

As suddenly as it had come, the girl’s passion left her. Her head went down on the old shoulder. “Oh, Grandma, he tried to--he tried to----” and her voice broke into uncontrollable sobbing.

The deep compassionate voice soothed her: “Ah know, Chile, Ah know--but dat all done now, yo’ wid Mamba now.” She drew the shaking girl from the room and into the heavy stillness of the night. There was something terribly complete about those two, about their entire sufficiency to each other. The enfolding devotion of the old woman covering the girl and isolating her from every evil, every alien touch--Mamba and Lissa--no one else.

Hagar stood for a moment like one who has been blinded by sudden intense light. Her eyes still held the image, quiveringly alive, of the splendid thing that was her child. The dream pattern that she had treasured of the slender little girl was shattered, and as yet she could not take in this new and marvellous being. She was dizzy from the revelation. She was also vaguely conscious of a loneliness deeper than any that had gone before.

The chaos of her mind was shot through by an instinctive warning. Suddenly her brain cleared, her body tensed. She spun around and faced Bluton. The naked fear in his face gave her an exquisite pang. Something deep and elemental broke free inside of her. She stood watching him, catlike, as he moved along the wall in the direction of the crap table which stood at the farther end of the room.

She knew what he wanted now. She let him get almost to the drawer with its brass knobs, her eyes and his locked all the time. She saw his face change, glimmer with hope, relief. Then she was before him, with the table at her back. As he had advanced slowly, with his studied attempt at casualness, so now he retreated before her, while she closed the distance between them. It was like some ghastly rehearsal, carried out with utter absorption, for some momentous event that was set for the future. It was so deliberate, so mechanical in its studied advance and retreat. Then at last the wall was against the man’s shoulder blades.

The touch of the unyielding timber seemed to turn his limbs to water. His knees gave, and he had difficulty propping his body upright. He raised his arms before his face in a weak defensive gesture.

Hagar said, “Yo’ rattlesnake! Yo’ would be dead now ’cept fuh me--an’ now--my own gal Lissa----” Then, after a pause, “_You!_”

The man found voice in a screech. It was so weak that it scarcely filled the little room--at its peak it plunged suddenly into silence.

* * * * *

Mamba wanted to be going. She wanted to get Lissa away from that horrible place, back into the ordered peace of streets and houses. But Hagar did not come. Why couldn’t the woman hurry and let them get to the automobile and away? She put the girl, who was quiet at last, out of her arms and started back to the shack. The door was open, and the draught played with the candle flame, peopling the room with lurching shadows and half lights.

The old woman entered, with Lissa peering fearfully over her shoulder. Hagar stood with her back to them, her arms hanging straight and long at her sides, her bullet head thrust forward. Her huge shoulders flung a black arch of shadow over half of the wall before her. Bluton lay in a huddle at her feet. His head was twisted at a preposterous angle. The yellow of his face had gone a dark purple, and the candle flame was flung back in two cold high lights from his wide, unblinking eyes.

Lissa screamed. Hagar turned heavily in her tracks and looked at them dully from raised eyes under lowered brows.

Mamba advanced toward her. In her extremity her voice seemed heavy with hatred for her big bungling daughter.

“Yo’ damned fool,” she said. “See what yo’ done now, eberybody at dat dance know Lissa been wid Prince. People seen me come out here. Ah ought to ha’ known if Ah turned my back on yo’, yo’d play hell----”

Hagar buried her face in the crook of an arm and commenced to sob. “Oh, Gawd, Ma, Ah ain’t stop to t’ink. Ah only know he been hurt Lissa.”

Mamba wasted no sentimental pity on the broken thing upon the floor. Her whole being was focussed on the staggering predicament that confronted her.

“Get outside,” she ordered. “Ah got to t’ink.” She blew out the candle and followed them into the open, thinking aloud: “Ah got to sen’ Lissa away quick, an’ she got to go far. But Ah can’t let she go alone, an’ she ain’t got no frien’ to go to.”

Between broken sobs Hagar said surprisingly, “Ah got a frien’.”

Mamba looked at her skeptically. “Yo’ has? Where?”

“Ah got a frien’ what’s a Reverent, an’ he lib in Noo Yo’k.”

“Yo’ know whar he house is?”

Hagar was getting herself in hand now and had stopped crying. “Ah got it writ in a book he gib me. He a good man--yo’ needn’t be ’fraid to sen’ Lissa to he.”

“Oh, he dat Yankee nigger what use’ to be down here?”

Hagar nodded assent.

“Come, den,” Mamba commanded. “We ain’t got no time to lose.”

They waked Slim, who grinned sleepily and leered when he saw the girl, and started him back to the village. When they reached Hagar’s cabin she ran inside and returned in a moment with a small black book in her hand. She pressed it on Mamba, who had followed her to the door.

“De name an’ number is writ inside,” she said. “Lissa can tell he dat she Baxter gal--an’ to ’member what he say ’bout always bein’ my frien’.”

Then Mamba handed Hagar a ten-dollar bill from her pocketbook and gave her instructions: “Listen! Ah been t’inkin’ hard. Now yo’ hit it out an’ hide. Dat’s bad, but if yo’ stay roun’ here, you’ll be gibbin’ yo’self away by mornin’; so dere ain’t nuttin’ fo’ it. If Baggart catch yo’, keep yo’ mout’ shet. Don’t say so much as yes or no ’til Ah sen’ my boss or Mr. Saint to talk for yo’. Ef yo’ open dat fool mout’ ob yourn, nottin’ Ah can do’ll sabe Lissa. Now you unnerstan’?”

Full of her plan-making, Mamba turned to leave her daughter. She felt a gentle tug at her sleeve and faced Hagar again, impatient at the delay.

“Well,” she snapped, “what yo’ want now?”

Hagar made one of her gauche childish gestures toward the automobile. “She wouldn’t care so much--ef Ah go an’ tell she good-bye?”

Mamba caught her breath sharply, and suddenly she was no longer merely the fierce intelligence that drove that inarticulate, powerful machine in the service of the grandchild, but Hagar’s own mother, feeling her child’s loneliness and sorrow in her own spirit.

She took one of the big, beautifully made hands and drew Hagar forward, speaking gently as they plodded through the heavy white sand: “Ah sorry, Daughter, Ah mighty sorry--Ah get t’inkin’ so hahd Ah fuhget. Ah say hahd t’ings Ah ain’t mean. It ain’t fuh me--Ah jes study all de time ’bout dat gal, an’ my mind seem like it dry up on odder t’ing.”

Hagar stopped beside the car. The girl sitting alone on the rear seat looked up, and the eyes of the two met. For a moment they stood so in a silence that was eloquent with emotions that speech could only have cheapened and tarnished. So long since the cord had been severed. Centuries lay between them now--and yet, in that fractional part of a minute life beat out again from the heart of the big black woman, throbbed in her child, and coursed refluent and warm back through her own being. Hagar lifted one of Lissa’s hands and humbly, yet with a certain possessive pride, kissed it upon the open palm. But in a sudden tumult of emotion the girl snatched her hand away, flung her arms around her mother’s neck, and kissed her again and again.

The car gave a warning shudder, and the women separated. Hagar said, “Good-bye, chile. Don’t be ’fraid. Nuttin’ goin’ hahm yo’.” And the next moment they were gone among the mists and shadows.

* * * * *

Saint Wentworth sat in the lobby of the Pennsylvania Hotel and impatiently watched the hands of a clock that seemed to have been stricken with creeping paralysis. At noon he was to meet Valerie over on the Avenue and select the ring. It was a terribly complicated business, getting married in New York. Saturday they had got the license. Simple enough, he had been told--a few minutes at the Municipal Building--that was all. They had gone together, blinded by a new glamour in the air, and feeling themselves marked for public notice by the magnitude and unusual nature of the step that they contemplated. But upon their arrival at the vast downtown structure, they had been both reassured and chagrined to find themselves in a queue half a block long, sandwiched between a frankly infatuated negro couple and a pair who made love in foreign liquid syllables. It was odd how many people had the same idea. Then there was the big room with long tables where couples sat, while Eros, in the guise of an officious elderly man, leaned between them and explained in lucid and complete detail the meaning of certain perfectly obvious and embarrassingly personal questions. Saint, very red, tried to forestall him by explaining that they both understood. It was no use. The man was filled with the zeal of a public servant who glories in doing well and conspicuously work that occasions no effort.

And now to-day there were more details--more complications. The minister had to be seen again, and forms prepared. Saint had telegraphed home for a copy of his birth certificate and had not received a reply. It seemed that you could not be married in New York without documentary evidence that you had been born. The fact that you could be seen, touched, even separated from a fee, were inconclusive evidences of existence. Only eleven-twenty. No use to start yet and have to cool his heels on the Avenue.

His thoughts drifted to another matter.

He was brought to earth by the sound of his own name droned in a loud monotonous voice. Good: that would be the wire about the certificate. He signalled the boy and tore open the envelope. The telegram was from his mother. It said:

Mamba’s granddaughter Lissa in trouble arrives New York noon train. Mamba begs you to meet and assist her.

Good God: Couldn’t he even be safe from the old responsibilities here, and at the one time in life when a man should be free? And Val--just about their biggest moment--buying the ring--then blissful hours at the stores and decorators, planning for the new furnishings. And now at the exact hour when she would be awaiting him he was expected to respond to this unreasonable and insane summons. Well, he’d be damned if he would. Mamba, yes--but not to the third generation.

Perhaps he could still catch Val by ’phone and postpone the engagement. But why think of that when he had decided against going? He tore the yellow slip, balled it up, and volleyed it at a waste-paper basket. Then he went through an instinctive hand-washing gesture. Well, that was that.

He got up and strode restlessly about the vast lobby. When he came to a standstill he found to his dismay and anger that he had paused before a telephone booth. “Go to hell!” he apostrophised it fiercely under his breath, and turned away. But a power that he was at a loss to explain kept dragging him back, filling him with a deep and inexplicable misery as long as he moved away. Mamba out of the long past with the funny string-wrapped hair, the solitary fang--her savagery--her understanding tenderness. Mamba with her one idea and her everlasting persistence. What did she care if it upset his plans?--Lissa--Lissa! He was reminded of the time she had made him take Hagar in at the mines. Would he never be free of Mamba’s daughters? What was there about her that could hound a man across the miles and make him feel like a cur until he did her bidding? A comical old negress a thousand miles away, and yet, somehow, he felt that he dare not go back and meet her eyes unless he had responded to her summons for help.

He found himself calling a familiar number. Valerie’s voice--even over the ’phone, that dewy early morning quality that made his heart hang a beat. Good God! he hadn’t thought yet what to say. How could he put it?

“Val, I’m desolated, broken-hearted. Promise you’ll forgive me for what I am going to say. No. Not that--not that--I am sorry I scared you. It’s that I can’t meet you at noon. There’s something else I have to do.... Well, it’s awfully hard to explain over the ’phone. There’s a girl coming up from Charleston I’ve got to go and meet.... Mamba’s granddaughter Lissa. You remember her, don’t you?... Yes, she’s in some sort of trouble, and Mamba has gotten Mother to telegraph asking me to meet her at the noon train.... Jove, you’re a dear. Three o’clock, then--at Tiffany’s. You’re an angel, Val.”

Wentworth did not at once recognise his protégée when she came up the stair from the lower level in the stream of passengers. He had been looking for the girl whom he remembered vaguely as being slender and pretty with eyes like those of Mamba and Hagar, and who, alas, would now be in trouble. It was not until he could have touched her with his hand that he recognised her. Taken from her familiar matrix and placed before Saint against the novel setting of the vast station, she stood out for the first time, not as Mamba’s grandchild to be taken as a matter of course, but as Lissa Atkinson, with an individuality of her own. Wentworth was startled. It was as though he saw her for the first time.

She was clad in a modish tailored suit of dark blue with a flash of bright embroidery on collar and cuffs, and carried a small blue silk umbrella suspended from her wrist by a loop. Wentworth’s glance took in the slender, superbly carried figure and the expressive face with its small full-lipped mouth and Mamba’s eyes.

She met his gaze and flashed him a look of surprised, almost incredulous, recognition. “Why, Mr. Saint!” she exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Hello, Lissa,” he answered. “Didn’t you know that Mamba sent me a message to meet you and help you get settled?”

“Why, no. You see I left in a hurry. She must have heard of your being here after she told me good-bye. That’s just like Grandma. She thinks of everything.”

The girl’s self-possession was colossal, almost disconcerting. Saint took her small valise. There was something at once flattering and embarrassing about the unquestioning way that she put herself in his hands.

They stood under the vast dome, with scurrying humanity brushing past them, and Wentworth wondered what to do next.

“Have you any place to go?” he asked.

Lissa opened her handbag and produced a Book of Common Prayer. Then she opened it at the flyleaf and presented it to Saint.

He studied the inscription for a moment. Of course--the Reverend Thomas Grayson. In his mind’s eye arose a picture of a broad imaginative face with heavy earnestness of purpose.

“What luck!” he exclaimed, his expression clearing. “We’ll hop in a taxi and go right up.”

Safely in the cab, which was threading its way toward Harlem, Wentworth was free to give his whole attention to the problem of his travelling companion.

“What’s the trouble, Lissa?” he asked.

She sat back in her corner and with that complete faith in his willingness to assume her responsibilities that had embarrassed him in the station, told him simply and with complete self-possession what had occurred.

When she had finished he gave a low expressive whistle.

“Well, I must say,” he commented, “you don’t seem to be afraid of the consequences as far as you are concerned.”

“I am not,” she replied confidently. “Grandma and Mamma’ll fix it at home; there’s nothing they can’t fix. And I have you to look after me here.”

This alarming surrender to his care provoked a very pertinent question.

“How are you fixed for money?” he asked bluntly.

She opened her handbag and gave him a roll of bills and a pass book on a Charleston bank. He counted the money--three hundred dollars. Then he opened the pass book. It showed an account in the name of Lissa Atkinson that had been opened nineteen years previously. He spun the pages that exhibited columns of deposits of one dollar--sometimes two--here and there a week was skipped. That was when Hagar was up for a fine, he thought. After each of these eloquent breaks the amounts would run to one fifty or even two fifty until the deficit had been made good. He came to the final page and found the balance: fourteen hundred and twenty-five dollars. For a moment he sat struck dumb by the utter beauty of the thing that lay behind the prosaic columns of figures. Mamba--a maker of bricks without straw, a disciple of a single transcendent ideal, in the name of which she had worked her obscure miracles, with none to know, none to applaud.

Wentworth turned with a new curiosity to examine the girl who had been the cause of such devotion. The very magnitude of the sacrifices which she represented endowed her with an importance out of proportion to herself as an individual. She was a symbol into which had gone the blind upward urges, the stumbling aspirations, the great fantastically conceived dreams of the old woman, and behind Mamba, of millions of her inarticulate kin.

During the brief space of time that he had been with the girl Wentworth had been conscious of a growing annoyance at her calm acceptance of the sacrifices that were being made for her, at the coolness with which she had precipitated a wreck, then left the débris for others to clear away. Mamba, Hagar, Grayson, himself, would attend to details. Why should she worry? Now the little book that he held suddenly explained her attitude. It went farther and convinced him in some inexplicable fashion that her assumption was justified.

Lissa would attain her goal because she, like her grandmother, had never once removed her gaze from it. He knew, of course, of the girl’s reputation in coloured circles as a singer, and of Mamba’s faith in her future. Now he saw that this faith was the only thing that mattered in their lives. It had been born and bred into the girl. Her own belief in herself was supreme. Of the great faith that she and Mamba held in common there were certain articles that she must perform. Mamba had others. It was their job to carry through together: the job of believing in a thing so intensely, so single-mindedly, that the day would come when that belief should become an accomplished fact. If Lissa hesitated now, if she removed her gaze from the steady light to which it had become accustomed, and turned back, dazzled and blundering, she would have broken faith with Mamba. She would be guilty of unpardonable weakness. She must look only forward, and leave the road that she had travelled to the watchful eyes of the old woman.

A pang of envy assailed Wentworth. Of late he had been enormously pleased with himself. He was a success. Charleston said so, and, as it had watched him from boyhood, it ought to know. The symbols of conquest were his. Next week he would return to town with Valerie; then comfort--love--probably children--an ordered and beautifully complete existence. Yet there he sat envying an unknown mulatto girl, and seeing with a sudden and terrible clarity a seedy youth in a country store hunched over a guitar, groping for the unattainable with eager, clumsy fingers. But the past had reached dead hands after him, guiding him imperceptibly this way and that. Forces that had driven forward in grooves for generations had pulled against his amorphous longings, his only half-realised dreams--had held him true to form and tradition. Behind Lissa there had been nothing; before her, Mamba’s one immovable idea. An old loneliness that he had known in that far-gone time stabbed up through his complacence, and now he knew that it had been a singular and beautiful thing, and that there exists for certain solitary spirits a loneliness that holds more ecstasy than the delight of any human companionship. And so to-morrow was to be his wedding day. And there was Lissa following her dream.

He realised that his hands were trembling, and he tensed them savagely. He was a sentimental fool. His mother had been right. Val had been right. Life would still be an adventure.

He stole a glance at his companion and realised that she was no longer conscious of his presence. She was sitting forward with her gaze fastened upon the crowds, the towering buildings, the surging traffic. Over their heads the Elevated hurled its mechanical thunders. From a yawning excavation almost directly under their hurrying wheels thudded the heavy detonations of blasting. Faces hurtled by in taxis. Faces intent and watchful swept in full tide along the pavements. After a while the girl turned toward Saint, and in her first remark showed that already she had sensed a thing that the Southern white man had never felt, that in the vast unconcern of this city there was escape; that in the very heart of this crowd there was a strange and private hiding place where no one had time to wonder who you were or what you were doing.

“This is where I belong, Mr. Saint,” she said. “Nobody here has time to wonder whether I am even white or coloured.”

Presently they were on Lenox Avenue north of the line, and the white faces were behind them. Lissa saw the change instantly, and her composure vanished. She clapped her hands with a delight like that of a child. “Here are my folks, Mr. Saint,” she exclaimed. “See, everywhere--and such big houses.”

The taxi swerved to the right, and they were in a street that showed a glimpse of the East River under the high-flung bridge of the Elevated. Then they drew to the curb and stopped.

Wentworth awakened to the realisation that he was sitting with Lissa’s money and bank book still in his hands. He put them hastily back into her bag, took the valise, got out, and discharged the driver.

They found themselves on the pavement before a three-story brownstone building. Over a push button beside the door was a brass plate which stated: “Rectory of St. John’s Episcopal Church.”

The mulatto maid who admitted them said that the Reverend Thomas Grayson lived there, was at home, and would be with them presently.

In the few minutes during which they sat in the quietly furnished room Saint was again impressed by Lissa’s ease and appearance of belonging. Once their eyes met, and she gave him the bright transfiguring smile that linked her with Mamba and Hagar, but, except in that moment, he felt she was already at home in the alien metropolis and that he was the provincial visitor.

Grayson entered, holding Saint’s card in his hand. He was older than as Wentworth remembered him, and his expression of seriousness had deepened almost to one of solemnity. His shoulders and chest had grown heavy with his greater maturity. The large head set firmly on his short neck gave an impression of rock-like solidity to the figure. His ears were small and close-set, and the closely clipped graying hair revealed the lines of his skull and stressed the negroid formation. The years that had passed since his residence in the South had produced in some subtle way an appearance more characteristically negro, a race consciousness that had become definitely assertive. He conveyed a sense of power, but it was the power of one who moves slowly, predicating action upon a laborious logic, not to be swayed by an appeal to the emotions until the matter had been thoroughly weighed. Knowing his history, one would have said that his experience in the South had taught him to fear and distrust emotional hysteria, and had swung him to pure reason as a basis for behaviour. As a result his position in Harlem was one of unique importance, for his church had attracted the rising intellectual element, and through them he was in contact with the leaders of advanced thought among the white people of the metropolis, thus profiting by this first opportunity of the race in America to meet the Caucasian upon an equal basis of give and take.

Grayson showed no surprise at the visit, and sat in an attitude of easy attention while Lissa told him her story. Then the girl drew the little prayer book from her bag, opened it at the flyleaf, and handed it to him.

“My mother said to show you this,” she said simply, “and ask you to look out for me.”

He sat looking at the page for a moment, then he raised his eyes to Saint’s. “The mills of the gods, Mr. Wentworth,” he said; “perhaps my venture into the mission field has borne fruit after all.”

He turned to Lissa. “And you will stay here for a while, at any rate, with my wife and me. We have no children of our own. She will be glad.”

Saint thanked him and, feeling an enormous relief from the burden of responsibility, took his departure.

The maid appeared to show him out, and while she was handing him stick and hat he caught from the drawing room a fragment of conversation that he was never to forget: the deep voice of Grayson said, “And you, my child, have you any plans? Is there anything that you can do?” And immediately into the ensuing hush like the cry of a bird at dawn came the answer:

“I can sing.”