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Porgy opened his eyes suddenly. The window, which had been luminous when he went to sleep, was now darkened. He watched it intently. Slowly he realized that parts of the little square still showed the moonlit waters of the bay, and that only the centre was blocked out by an intervening mass. Then the mass moved, and Porgy saw that it was the torso and shoulders of a man. The window was three feet in width, yet the shoulders seemed to brush both sides of it as the form bent forward. The sash was down, and presently there came a sound as though hands were testing it to see whether it could be forced up.
Porgy was lying on his back. He reached his left hand over the covers and let the fingers touch ever so lightly the sleeping faces of first the baby, then the woman. His right hand slid beneath his pillow, and his strong, slender fingers closed about the handle of a knife.
At the window the slight, testing noise continued.
It was certainly after midnight when Maria looked from her doorway; for the moon was tottering on the western wall, and while she stood looking, slowly it dropped over and vanished.
The vague forebodings that she had felt when she talked to Crown earlier in the evening had kept sleep from her; with each passing hour her fears increased, and with them a sense of imminence that finally forced her to get up, slip on a wrapper, and prepare to make the rounds of the court.
But on opening her door, she was at once reassured. The square stood before her like a vast cistern brimmed with misty dark and roofed with a lid of sky. A cur grovelled forward on its belly from a near-by nook, and licked one of her bare feet with its moist, warm tongue.
Above her, in the huge honeycomb of the building, someone was snoring in a slow, steady rhythm.
The big negress drew a deep sigh of relief and turned back toward her room.
A sound of cracking wood snapped the silence. Then, like a flurry of small bells, came a shiver of broken glass on the stones.
Maria spun around, and tried to locate the sound; but no noise followed. Silence flowed back over the court and settled palpably into its recesses. The faint, not unpleasant rhythm of the snoring came insistently forward.
Suddenly Maria turned, her face quick with apprehension. She drew her wrapper closely about her, and crossed to Porgy’s door. With only half of the distance traversed, she heard a sound from the room. It was more of a muffled thump than anything else, and with it, something very like a gasp.
When her hand closed over the knob all was silent again, except that she could hear a long, slightly shuddering breath.
Then came a sound that caused her flesh to prickle with primal terror. It was so unexpected, there in the chill, silent night. It was Porgy’s laugh, but different. Out of the stillness it swelled suddenly, deep, aboriginal, lustful. Then it stopped short.
Maria heard the baby cry out; then Bess’s voice, sleepy and mystified. “Fuh Gawd’ sake, Porgy, what yuh laughin’ ’bout?”
“Dat all right, honey,” came the answer. “Don’t yuh be worryin’. Yuh gots Porgy now, an’ he look atter he ’oman. Ain’t I done tells yuh: Yuh gots er man now.”
Maria turned the knob, entered the room, and closed the door quickly behind her.
Night trailed westward across the city. In the east, out beyond the ocean’s rim, essential light trembled upward and seemed to absorb rather than quench the morning stars. Out of the sliding planes of mist that hung like spent breath above the city, shapes began to emerge and assume their proper values.
Far in the upper air over Catfish Row a speck appeared. It took a long, descending spiral, and became two, then three. Around a wide circle the specks swung, as though hung by wires from a lofty pivot. The light brightened perceptibly. The specks dropped to a lower level, increased in size, and miraculously became a dozen. Then some of them dropped in from the circumference of the circle, cutting lines across like the spokes of a wheel, and from time to time flapping indolent wings. Dark and menacing when they flew to the westward, they would turn easily toward the east, and the sun, still below the horizon, would gild their bodies with ruddy gold, as they sailed, breast on, toward it.
Down, down they dropped, reaching low, and yet lower levels, until at last they seemed to brush the water-front buildings with their sombre wings. Then gradually they narrowed to a small circle that patrolled the air directly over a shape that lay awash in the rising tide, across the street from Catfish Row.
Suddenly from the swinging circle a single bird planed down and lit with an awkward, hopping step directly before the object. For a moment he regarded it with bleak, predatory eyes; then flew back to his fellows. A moment later the whole flock swooped down, and the shape was hidden by flapping wings and black awkward bodies that hopped about and fought inward to the centre of the group.
A negro who had been sleeping under an overturned bateau awoke and rubbed his eyes; then he sprang up and, seizing an oar, beat the birds away with savage blows.
He bent over the object for a moment, then turned and raced for the street with eyes showing white.
“Fuh Gawd’ sake, folks,” he cried, “come hyuh quick! Hyuh Crown, an’ he done dead.”