Ninth Avenue

by Maxwell Bodenheim

PART TWO

The night became thickly intense, and all the angular details and flat expanses of each street—neither hideous nor beautiful but vapidly and rigidly perched in between—took on the least touch of glamor. Some semblance of a darkly plaintive heart began to sway and quiver within the scene, as though the essence of all these human beings pacing down the sidewalks and sitting or standing in shops, cars, and restaurants, had joined the night and formed another quality—expectations, illusions, and promises, all electric in the air. The harshly dreamless industries and shallow loiterings of the day were replaced by an effort at romance, soiled but persistent, and a sensual pride preening itself with gallantries, and a confusion of cruel or softly dozing confidences.

The moving-picture theaters, in dots of red, yellow, blue, and green light, made proclamations of spurious, quickly attained love, adventure, and suspense; the United Cigar Stores, framed by red and gold, displayed their mild, brown opiates, while within them deferential clerks catered to jovial or importantly sullen men and women; the restaurants, with food heaped in their windows, and glistening fronts, were filled with people intent upon turning a prosy stuffing into an elaborate, laughing ritual; and even the Greek lunch-rooms, with their stools beside half-dirty glass counters, and nickel coffee-urns, assumed a hang-dog grin.

Taxicabs in all the cardinal colors darted about, like feverish insects serving human masters, and the people in them—lazy, or impatient, or bored, or out for a lark—made a blur of faces sometimes glimpsed more distinctly as the cabs stopped or slowed down. Policemen in dark blue uniforms stood at street-crossings, with tired aggressiveness, looking for a chance to invest their flunky-rôles with a rasping authority. Motor-trucks lurched along like drab monsters barely held in leash. Lights were everywhere—in shops, on iron poles in the streets, mellowly staring from upper windows—desperately seeking to dismiss the darkly fearful mystery of the surrounding night, but never quite overcoming it.

Street-cars and “L” trains crawled on, soddenly packed with under-dogs going to their dab of rest or crude pleasure. A roar was in the air, with immediate, sharp sounds trailing out into it—a complaining, shackled savage floating up from the scene. The large buildings were without individuality, except that some of them rose vertically above the others, and in their dull shades of red, brown, and gray, they would all have presented a yawning, meanly barrack-like effect but for the relieving fancy of their lights. Even the perpendicular strength of the skyscrapers was marred by filigreed and overcorniced lines.

To Blanche, the scene was a mêlée of delightful possibilities always just eluding her, and obnoxious intrusions only too ready to seek her arm. She realized the transforming effect of the night and said to herself: “Say, I’d never do all this walking if it was daytime—funny, how everything gets more attractive when the night trots along. Guess you can’t see things so clear then.... Better chance to kid yourself along.”

As she strolled through the outskirts of Greenwich Village her legs began to feel heavy, and the past hour seemed to be nothing more than a long, senseless walk taken within the confines of a large trap. The light, hazy sensation of searching oozed slowly out of her body and was replaced by the old hopelessness.

She stopped in front of a batik-shop window and looked at the soft, intricately veined gaudiness of the smocks, blouses, and scarves. “Sorta crazy, yes, but she’d like to wear them—they suited her mood.” Another girl was standing beside Blanche, and the other turned her head and said: “Aren’t they beauties, though. I’d just love to buy that purple and green smock there in the corner.”

“I like the blue one better—the one right next to yours,” Blanche answered naturally, but she looked closely at the other girl.

It was not unusual for strange girls to speak to you when they were either lonely or just brightly interested in some little thing, but still you had to be careful—sometimes they were “fast” players with men, in need of a feminine accomplice, or grafters intent on securing some favor or loan. The other girl had a slender torso and almost slender legs, with all of her plumpness crowded in the buttocks and upper thighs. She had singed butterflies on her face and they gave a light, fluttering pain to her smiles. She had the rarity of large blue eyes on a duskily pale brown face, and small, loosely parted lips, and a slight hook on the upper part of her nose, and curly bobbed brown hair. In her tan coat trimmed with dark fur, scarlet turban, and multicolored silk scarf, she seemed to be a dilettantish, chippy girl, just graduated from the flapper class.

Blanche noticed something “different” in the other girl and answered her more readily as they continued their talk.

“D’you live in the Village?” the other girl asked.

“No, I’m from uptown,” Blanche answered. “I’ve heard lots about it, though. I’d like to meet some of the int’resting artists and writers down here. There must be all kinds of them in the tearooms and places like that.”

The other girl gave her a pitying look.

“All kinds of fakers, you mean,” she replied. “They know how to brag about themselves, but that’s where it ends.”

“But I thought this was the part of town where real artists ’n’ writers came together,” Blanche persisted. “Of course, I didn’t believe they were all great ones, but I did believe they were all trying to do something, well, different, you know.”

“Oh, there are some down here, but you don’t usually find them in the showplaces or tearooms,” the other girl answered, as she and Blanche walked down the street. “Those places are for the mediocrities, and the pretenders, and the students ... and, oh, yes, the slummers. People from uptown hunting for something gayly wicked.”

“I suppose you think I’m a foolish slummer, too,” Blanche said, “but I’m not. I’ve just been walking along and thinking things over. I didn’t realize where I was.”

“I wasn’t being personal,” the other girl replied. “I sort of like the way you talk. Suppose we introduce ourselves to each other?”

They traded names and the other girl, Margaret Wheeler, went on: “You know, strangers are always supposed to distrust each other, but I can’t be annoyed. Every once in a while I talk to some girl on the street, and I’ve started a couple of interesting friendships that way. I’m not a Lesbian and I haven’t any other designs upon you.”

“Why, I don’t distrust you at all,” Blanche answered. “I can take care of myself and I suppose you can, too. You talk like you were intelligent, and I’d like to know you better, that’s all.”

“Thanks,” said Margaret. “I would be fairly intelligent, if I didn’t let some male make an idiot out of me every few months. I’m in love with some one now, but it’ll wind up like all the others.”

“You make me feel envious,” Blanche replied. “I don’t think I’ve ever really loved any fellow.”

“Are you joking?” Margaret asked.

“No, that’s straight.”

“Well, I’m going on twenty-five now, and I couldn’t count the infatuations I’ve had. I’m not as easy as I used to be, though. Once upon a time, if a man had a straight nose, and blond hair, and could recite poetry and make me believe it was his, that was all I needed. But no-ow, a man must have some real subtlety, and ability, and wittiness, before I pay any attention to him.”

“That’s just the kind I’ve been looking for,” Blanche answered. “Where on earth do you find them?”

“Nowhere in particular—it’s a matter of luck. And don’t forget that a girl must be unusual herself before she can attract unusual men, unless they’re just anxious to have a party with her.”

“Yes, that’s where I’d lose out,” Blanche said, heavily. “I’m just a ha-air dresser in a beauty parlor, that’s all.”

“You certainly don’t talk like one. Maybe you’ve never had much of a chance to be anything different.”

“You said it”—Blanche’s voice was low and depressed.

“Well, I’m only a steno myself,” Margaret answered, “but I’m taking a course in short-story writing at Herbert College—three nights a week. I want to tear off the old veils and tell what people do to each other.”

“Say, maybe I could join it, too,” Blanche replied, eagerly. “I’m not so strong on grammar, though—stopped in my first year at high and went to work.”

“Oh, you can pound that part of it into you. The main thing’s whether you have something to say—something that’s not just ordinary and hackneyed.”

“I think I have, but ... how do I know,” Blanche asked, uncertainly.

They had stopped in front of a tearoom with a multicolored wooden sign under an electric light.

“Here’s Clara’s—one of my hangouts,” Margaret said. “I’m going in to meet my blond-haired devastator. Won’t you come along?”

“Perhaps I’ll be in the way.”

“Nothing of the kind—I’ll introduce you to some of the people I know.”

They entered the place, which occupied the first floor of a two-storey, attic-topped, brick house. Kitchen tables and chairs painted pale green and vermilion lined the walls. Paintings and drawings were hung everywhere—cubistic plagiarisms, slovenly sketches, and illustrations meant for the average magazine’s check book but not quite reaching it—and a semidim light came from stained-glass bowls hung from the low ceiling. Some fifteen men and women were scattered around the two rooms, and a portable phonograph in the corner was whining one of the latest fox-trot insinuations—“He Never Gets Tired of Me, No, Boy, Just Never Gets Tired of Me-ee.”

Three men and a woman at a table effusively greeted Margaret, and after she had introduced Blanche, the two girls sat down with the others. The third girl, Dora Ruvinsky, was an unsymmetrically fat Jewess, with a thin-lipped but salacious face and a shorn disorder of black hair. Her sex had yielded to a cunning nightmare of masculinity, and she wore a stiff white collar, a red cravat, and a man’s vest and coat. She spoke in a husky drawl and perpetually slapped the shoulders of the men beside her. They regarded her with tolerance contending against a slight aversion.

One of them, Max Oppendorf, a blond-haired man of thirty, plied her with whisky from a hip-bottle and strove to trap her into feminine reactions and remarks, as though he were coldly and listlessly playing with a desperately hypocritical insect. His narrow, pale, blue-eyed face glanced around the tables with pity and repugnance somehow fused into its expression. A recognized poet and novelist, he was nevertheless known as a distinguished outcast, ostracized, attacked, and hated by literary and dilettantish groups of every variety because of his skillful-tongued independence, his careless violations of etiquettes and conventions, and the ravages of his unorthodox intellect. His clothes were shabby but not quite untidy, and as he frequently closed his eyes while speaking, he displayed the contradictory guise of an aristocratic vagabond.

Men almost invariably detested him, while the reactions of the women who met him were evenly divided into a distrustful resentment in one camp and a loyal adoration in the other. His armor was invulnerable, save when he became hopelessly drunk, in which condition he either savagely denounced and affronted the people around him or became unwontedly indulgent and gave them simulations of sentimentality and affectionate attention. These abdications sprang from his innate indifference to life and most of its people. Sincerely believing that most men and women were beclouded, unsearching, and cruelly gauche children, alcohol made his indifference to them more indulgently intent upon distracting itself, and, when drunk, he stooped to them with loud, mock-arguments, and exuberant caresses. He felt a moderate degree of tenderness toward Margaret Wheeler, who appealed to him as an honest grappler, more unreserved and mentally edged than most other girls of her age and occupation. She was violently in love with him, and they spoke together in tones that were almost whispers, and stroked each other’s hands.

The second man, Bob Trussel—a gorgeously effeminate youth who was known in Village circles for his not-quite-Beardsleyesque black and whites—conversed with Dora, while the third, Ben Helgin, talked to Blanche.

Ben was a robustly tall man in his early thirties, with a huge, half-bald head, and dark-brown hair inclined to be frizzly. His long, pointed nose, severely arched eyebrows, and widely thin lips gave him the look of a complacent, pettily cruel Devil—a street urchin who had donned the mask of Mephistopheles but could not quite conceal the leer of a boy intent upon practical jokes and small tormentings. He was a master in the arts of dramatic exaggeration and belittling, never quite telling the truth and never quite lying, and his immeasurable vanity made him always determined to dominate any conversation. He had an Oriental volubility, and people would often sit beside him for an hour or more and vainly seek to insert a beginning remark or express an uninterrupted opinion.

One of his favorite devices was to tell anecdotes about men of his acquaintance, in which the men were invariably depicted in a childish, ridiculous, or inferior posture, while he gloated over and embellished the details of their fancied discomfiture, with a great assumption of sympathy for the victims. Living in a dream-world entirely of his own making, he loved to flirt with visions, conquests, world-shaking concepts, and child-like boasts. On one morning he would appear among his friends, describing some plan or idea with a cyclonic enthusiasm, and on the very next afternoon no trace of it would remain within his mind. Again, he would loll in an armchair and announce that a famous actress of forty had implored him to reside with her and to become the leading man in her next play, but he would neglect to mention that the lady in question was renowned for her generous impulses and included truck-drivers and cigar-clerks in her overtures. These impositions caused most people to regard him as an eel-like poseur, when they were removed from the persuasive sorceries of his words, and they failed to see that his gigantic egotism had sincerely hoaxed itself into the rôle of a flitting and quickly ennuied conqueror.

For years he had followed the luring dream of amassing a large fortune through the creation of dexterously dishonest stories, plays, and press-agent campaigns, and while he had accumulated thousands of dollars in these ways, the dream of wealth persistently refused to be captured. He lacked the grimly plodding, blind instinct necessary for such a goal, and his financial harvests were always quickly gathered and dissipated. This babbling immersion in the garnering of money, however, gave him the paradoxical air of an esthetic Babbitt.

His serious literary creations were original and sardonic at their best, but frequently marred by a journalistic glibness which led him into shallow and redundant acrobatics, or facetious saunterings.

He had known Max Oppendorf for nine years, and they had passed through a comical fanfare of recriminations, friendly invitations, sneers, and respects. Oppendorf secretly disliked him but was at times fascinated by his charming pretenses of camaraderie, and the quickness of his mind. At one time, the poet had broken off with Helgin for three years—a withdrawal caused by his discovery of the other man’s peculiar and somewhat incredible sense of humor. Penniless, and afflicted with incipient tuberculosis, Oppendorf had written to his friend and asked for the loan of two hundred dollars. A special-delivery letter had flown back to him, containing an unctuously sympathetic note and announcing the enclosure of a two-hundred-dollar check. The rest of the envelope had been empty, however, and believing that the absence of the check was merely an absent-minded error, he dispatched another letter which apprised his friend of the oversight. In response, Helgin had sent him the following telegram: “It was a nice joke—hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.”

Helgin had a sincere admiration for the other man’s work and a veiled, malicious aversion to the poet’s personal side. To him, Oppendorf’s life held a supreme taunt which had to be demolished with falsehoods and ridicule. The poet’s unbroken flaunting of moralities, conventions, and compromises, reminded Helgin that his own life had not been equally courageous and defiant, in spite of his endless written shots at average people and their fears, and that, in his personal existence, he had frequently prostrated himself before the very observances which he pilloried, or laughed at, in his books and conversation. This specter could only be slain by the effort to jeer at the opposite man’s episodes with men and women, and to hold them forth as clownish and unrewarded capers.

As Helgin sat now, in the boisterous and tawdrily glassy tearoom, he spoke to Blanche with the gracious casualness which he always publicly affected with women. It was a part of his jovially invincible pose to insinuate that he could have been a perfect libertine had he chosen to follow that denounced profession, and that his enormous sexual attractiveness was held in bondage only by his lack of desire and his ability to peer through the entire, violent fraud of sex itself. In the dream-world of his own making, through which he moved, loftily but genially immune to all criticisms, adulations, and importunities, women were the potential vassals whom he disdained to hire.

On the night previous to the present one, his second wife had departed on a visit to her family in a distant city, and he had telephoned Oppendorf and arranged a meeting, prodded by one of the irregular impulses in which his respect for the other man overcame his opposite feelings of envy and aversion. Now, he sat and chatted with Blanche while she listened with an almost abject attention. This great writer, whose pictures she had run across on the literary pages of newspapers, and in magazines, was actually seated beside her and speaking to her—it could scarcely be true! She recalled that Rosenberg had often lauded Helgin, and that a year previous she had read one of the latter man’s novels and had liked its “difficult,” thumb-twiddling style and disliked its patronizing, pitying attitude toward the feminine characters. Well, when men wrote about women, or women about men, they never seemed able to become quite fair to each other. They were always mushy and lenient, on one side, or sneering and unsympathetic on the other. She voiced this thought to Helgin, who advised her to cease searching for an unhappy medium. To him, she presented the figure of a worried, heavily questioning peasant girl, dressed and manicured for a more polite rôle, and he had a whim to lure her into expectant admirations and play with her stumbling hungers and wonderings. Usually, he did not waste his time on such girls—they were more to Oppendorf’s liking—but for the space of one night he could afford to risk the impending boredom in a more unassuming manner.

“You must get Oppie to compliment you,” he said, glancing in the poet’s direction. “He does it perfectly. Women cry for it, babies smile, old ladies jump out of their chairs. Come on, Oppie, say something about Miss Palmer’s hair. What does it remind you of? A startled ghost of dawn, the visible breath of afternoon?”

Oppendorf turned from his whisperings with Margaret, and smiled—a patient but slightly threatening smile.

“Are you ordering a tailormade suit or buying a box of cigars?” he asked, sweetly.

“The comparison isn’t quite fair to your poetry, Oppie,” Helgin answered, in the same sweet voice.

“Monseigneur Helgin, apostle of fairness, sympathy, and tolerance—know any other good ones, Ben?”—the poet’s smile shone like a sleeping laugh.

“Your hair is like a tortured midnight—that was a nice line, Oppie,” Helgin answered pensively, as he ignored the other man’s thrust.

“The actual phrase happens to be ‘transfigured midnight,’” Oppendorf said, in an ominously subdued voice. “You substituted the word tortured to make the line meaningless, of course.”

“Sa-ay, wasn’t that tormented night stuff in The Duke of Hoboken, Ben’s last novel?” Dora Ruvinsky asked, poking Oppendorf in the side.

“Yes, among other frantic mendacities,” Oppendorf answered, as he looked compassionately at Helgin. “The ancient Chinese had an excellent proverb: ‘When your stilettos have failed to penetrate the actual figure, erect a ludicrous dummy and belabor it with an ax.’”

“The Chinese usually come to your rescue,” Helgin retorted, “but you don’t seem to realize that The Duke of Hoboken is simply a gorgeous and delirious fantasy. It wasn’t meant to be an actual portrait of you.”

“Yes, you were more innocent than you imagined,” Oppendorf answered, still smiling.

“Oh, stop all of this polite quarreling, Maxie,” Margaret interposed, as she looked at Helgin with an open dislike. “Helgin sits in his little phantom palace, bo-ored and genial, and when you cave in the walls he scarcely hears you.”

“Your own hearing is just a trifle more adoring, isn’t it?” Helgin asked, as he looked at Margaret with an expression of complacent malice.

“Yes, it needs to be, if only to counteract yours,” Margaret replied, tartly.

“Call it a draw, and let’s talk about purple chrysanthemums,” Oppendorf interjected.

When people persisted in clinging to one subject he was always reminded of scrubwomen endlessly scouring a pane of glass, unless the theme was exceptionally complex.

“Dear me, can’t I say something else about the sweet Duke?” Trussel asked, as he stroked his hair with the fingers of one hand. “It’s screamingly amusing, really. Lots of the critics have always attacked Mr. Helgin’s books, you know—called them stilted and, well, overcynical. That sort of thing. But no-ow, dear me, what a change! Why, they’re all simply showering praise on the dear Duke of Hobok’. Of course, there isn’t any connection between this change and the fact that little Dukie is supposed to be a biting caricature of Mr. Oppendorf.”

“No, of course not,” Oppendorf replied, thoroughly amused now. “In the same way, three thoughtful chorus girls were observed last night, floating in a huge balloon as they crossed the peninsula of Kamchatka.”

“People are always talking about the dead,” Helgin said, in a bored voice. “The indecent vagaries of critics are not interesting to me. They might be vastly engrossing to some entomologist, though.”

“Oh, you’re all a lot of bugs,” Dora said, as she caressed Margaret’s arm while Margaret regarded her with a resigned look that said: “Well, I suppose you must do this.”

“You’re crazy, and you take yourselves so darn seriously it gives me a pain!” Dora continued. “Come on, let’s have another drink and act like human beings.”

The conversation changed to a game in which the others bantered with Dora and laughed at her amiable but scoffing retorts. Blanche, who had been bewildered and almost awe-stricken ever since her introduction to these people, began to listen and observe with a clearer, though still strongly respectful, attitude. They were the people whom she had always longed to meet, and they knew much more than she did, and they were bold creators while she was only despairing and partly tongue-tied, ye-es, but still, they were by no means perfect. They wasted so much time in slamming each other as cleverly as they could, and while they were always good-natured about it, you couldn’t fail to spy the malice beneath at least half of their smiles and remarks. They never expressed any whole-hearted liking, or sympathy, or placid interest in their reactions toward each other, and their talk reminded her of a game in which each one strove to make his “comeback” a little “smarter” and quicker than that of the others. Yet Oppendorf alone seemed to be different. The others, with the exception of Margaret, were always trying to twit or arouse him—something about him seemed to plague them almost against their will—and never quite succeeding. His eyes were sleepy and retiring, and he closed them half of the time during his conversation. When he laughed or raised his voice now and then, it was in a jerky way, “like some one else” was pulling some strings tied to him. Funny man ... what had given him this air of tired sadness? Well, at any rate, she could never fall in love with him—he was too much like a careful ghost!

The man whom she loved would have to be robust, and natural, and, well ... sort of eager to be alive, in spite of the fact that he knew all about the shams and meannesses which life held. Yes, that was it ... he’d be glad, and a little hopeful, in spite of all the rotten things he saw and heard.

She began to talk more frankly, her tongue loosened a bit by the two drinks of whisky that Oppendorf had given her.

“Say, why don’t all of you just call each other liars and boobs, and have it over with?” she asked, with a smile.

“At an early age, I was confronted by the choice of using the other side’s tactics now and then or becoming a hermit,” Oppendorf replied, in his deliberate way. “I am still direct enough, however, to be ostracized by practically every literary party or group in New York.”

“I admire your indignation,” Helgin said to Blanche. “Ride us all on a rail and tell us what vicious double-dealers we are.”

He had decided to egg her on for purposes of entertainment. “It wouldn’t have the least effect on any of you,” Blanche answered, composedly. “Besides, I’m only a stranger and I really haven’t any right to criticize. You’re all doing things—real things that amount to something—and I’m just a hair-curler in a Beauty Shop.”

“Listen, here’s a tip—never be modest when men are around,” Margaret said, gayly. “They think little enough of women as it is, and they’re always looking for a chance to walk over us.”

“Oh, it’s too much trouble not to be honest,” Blanche retorted, lightly. “Let them try to wa-alk, for all I care.”

“Have you ever written, or painted?” Oppendorf asked, liking the contradiction of her humble brassiness.

“I have fooled around with ideas of being a writer, but I’m afraid I don’t know English well enough for that,” said Blanche, uncertainly.

“Don’t take up writing, Miss Palmer—it’s only an excuse for laziness,” Helgin said. “That’s probably why so many young people try to toss off stories and verses. They have just a bit of imagination and they don’t like the prospect of slaving in father’s shoe store or helping mother bake the evening pies.”

“There must be a more important reason than that,” Blanche replied, soberly.

“Yes, it’s barely possible,” Oppendorf interjected. “It’s a habit with us to take our profession somewhat flippantly. That’s to avoid giving the impression that we’re too much in love with ourselves.”

“Funny, you do manage to give the impression, anyway,” Blanche answered, as she made a grimace.

Oppendorf and the others laughed, and Helgin said: “So, you’ve been carrying that little dagger all the time. Bright gal.”

“Not at all—just trying to imitate your style,” Blanche retorted, merrily.

The others had been regarding her as a meek and abashed apprentice in their realms, but now they began to pelt her with more respectful badinage, with the exception of Oppendorf, who watched her with a sleepy stare of approval and remained silent. This girl wasn’t half stupid at bottom, but just ignorant of many things.

The group repaired to Margaret’s nearby studio and danced to a phonograph and slipped into varying stages of tipsiness. Helgin did not dance, but sat in a corner and talked to Blanche. He became mellowly garrulous and somewhat less malicious, and he regarded Blanche as a fumbling but slightly diverting barbarian—diverting for a night or two at least. They were mildly interesting as long as they clung to their ferocious sassiness, but they always wound up by becoming girlishly wistful, and pleading, and more disrobed. He began to tell her anecdotes of his past, in which he was always laughing, penetrating, and triumphant at somebody else’s expense, and she listened eagerly. My, but this man certainly knew how to talk! He was always getting the best of people—you had to take at least forty per cent off from any fellow’s claims in that direction—but he really was a great writer, and he knew so many words and handled them so gracefully.

Urged by a perverse whim, he invited Blanche to come with him to a party which he had promised to attend on the following night. The affair was to be a gathering of literary and theatrical celebrities and near celebrities, together with their latest fads and fancies in human form, and it might be amusing to bring this blunt, would-be highbrowish, young hair-dresser and see whether the assembled pedestals would overwhelm her.

While Blanche suspected that he was playing with her and had only the impulse to grasp a flitting distraction, she felt delighted at this second opportunity to meet “famous” writers, and artists, and actors, and as she accepted the invitation she said to herself: “He thinks I’m just a snippy nobody, and he wants to show me off and then see what happens—like letting the puppy run loose in the parlor. Oh, I know. But what do I care? I might make friends at this party with two or three people just as intelligent as he is, and maybe more honest.”

While Helgin left her emotionally unaroused, she was nevertheless dazed by his vocabulary and his mental swiftness, which she frequently had to stumble after, and a little flattered by his talkative attention, in spite of herself. The genially wise-cracking, quizzically aloof, and patronizing air, which he never deserted, irritated her but did not drive away the spell of her attention. After all, he made Rosenberg, the most intelligent man in her past, sound like a stuttering, yearning baby. Funny, how you changed! She had once looked up to this same Rosenberg, as though he were a luring and puzzling god. Well, that was life—listening and clinging to people until you grew beyond them. The only man whom she could permanently love would be one always a little superior to her, and urging her to catch up with him, and kindly waiting a little now and then, so as not to get too far ahead of her.

When she reached her home she felt tired but “up in the air.” A long, hopeless stroll and a chance acquaintanceship had really led her into a new world—it was like a fairy tale, wasn’t it? Helgin had remained in the taxicab, after arranging to meet her at Margaret’s studio on the following night, and hadn’t even attempted to hold her hand ... not that that mattered, though she was a little curious to know how men of this kind “went about it.”

He had refrained from touching her because it would have disrupted his nonchalant posture—the meticulous avoidance of sexual defeat with which he kept his egotism intact. He was like a watchman, ever alert in front of a towering but shaky house of cards.

It was 2 A.M. when she entered her bedroom, but her mind was still spinning and darting about, in spite of her physical weariness, and, moved by an irresistible desire, and a sudden confidence that had been born from her surprising evening, she took a pad of paper from one of her bureau drawers and sat up in bed until 4 A.M., writing a sketch of the tearoom she had visited, and the people within it. The sketch was crude and at times ungrammatical, but it had an awkward sense of irony and humor which clung to small, insufficient words or hugged inappropriately long ones, and it was filled with clumsily good phrases such as: “They made a lot of noise and then whispered like they were ashamed of it,” or “She had small eyes and they got smaller when she talked,” “She was wearing a daisy, georgette thing and she acted like it.” Sturdily, but with little equipment, her thought bent to the novel wrestle with words on paper, and she felt an odd, half-uncertain thrill when she had finished the sketch. Did it have anything to it, or was it entirely bad? Well, she’d show it to Helgin or Oppendorf on the next night and get ready for the old cleaver. Nothing like trying, anyway, and curiously, she felt a beautiful relief now, as though she had emptied herself for the first time in a way that approached satisfaction.

On the next day she was drowsy but cheerful at the Beauty Parlor, managing somehow to stagger through the quick-fingered details of her work, but experiencing a rising strain. This would never do—she would have to be wakeful and at her best for the coming party. It wouldn’t be like going out with some silly man, feigning to listen to his “I am it” gab, and leaving him around midnight, with several yawns and the usual, semievaded kiss and hug. Through using the reliable excuse of serious illness in her family, she succeeded in leaving the shop at three in the afternoon, hastening home and sleeping there until nearly seven. When she sat at the supper-table with the rest of the family, Harry said: “Say, I’ve got some news for yuh. Ran across Joe Campbell on Broadway an’ had a long chin-fest with him. He says he begged yuh to marry him the other night and yuh turned him down flat, but he’s still leavin’ the prop’sition open. Believe me, I wouldn’t, if I was him. He asked me to tell yuh, anyway.”

“How interesting,” Blanche replied. “Suppose you tell your friend, Mister Campbell, to go to the devil.”

“Now, Bla-anie, that’s a nice way to talk,” her mother cried. “I’m ashamed of you, I am. He’s never done you no harm, far’s I know, an’ he’s been acourtin’ you for over two years now, an’ besides, he’s gone an’ made you ’n hon-rable pruposul. You could do lots worse than marryin’ him, you could.”

“Listen, have I got to go through this whole thing over again?” Blanche asked, exasperated. “I wouldn’t marry Campbell ’f he had ten million and owned the subway system, and there’s no sense to this endless jawing match we put on. You can’t understand me and you never will—it’s not your fault, you just can’t, and what’s more, you ought to realize it by this time. I’m going my own way and you might as well leave me alone.”

“Is that so,” her father replied, with a dull, puzzled anger shining in his little eyes. “I-is that so. You’re jest a stranger here, I s’pose, an’ you’ve dropped in tuh have supper with us. Sure, that’s it. I’m not your father an’ I’ve got nothin’ tuh say about you, huh? You’ve got a lot of nerve f’r a person your age, you have.”

“Yeh, she’s gettin’ a swelled head, all right,” Harry said. “Guess I’ll have to beat up ’nother one uh her phony guys, an’ tone her down a bit.”

“Oh, you’re just full of wind,” Blanche answered, indifferently.

Mabel had been listening to Blanche with a mixture of reluctant loyalty and annoyance—this “nut” sister of hers was certainly impossible to understand, but Campbell had “done her dirty” just the same, and Blanche had a perfect right to detest him, and it was about time that the family stopped nagging her on that subject. Mabel’s antagonism against men and her regarding them as a would-be preying sex made it imperative that she should be on her sister’s side in this question, almost against her will.

“I know Blan’s a nut, but stop razzing her about this Campbell stuff,” she said, glancing disapprovingly around the table. “The way you all rave about him a person’d think he was a king ’r something. He’s just like other fellows—waving his dough around an’ trying to put it over on ev’ry girl he meets. What do you want to do anyway—tie Blan up an’ carry her down to the license-bureau? She oughta have some rights around here.”

Taken aback by this unexpected defense from Mabel, and not being able to think of any immediate and adequate retort, in spite of their emotional opposition, the parents and Harry lapsed into a short silence, after which they returned to minor complaints and jovialities. It was easy to battle with Blanche, who outraged all of their petted hopes and ideas, but when Mabel contradicted them, their feeling of innate kinship with her placed them in a temporarily bewildered state in which they wondered whether they might not be slightly wrong. Philip, who had squirmed distressedly in his chair and tried to look unconcerned, according to his custom, secretly prayed for Blanche to revolt and leave home. It would be better for her—she’d be happier then, in her crazy but rather likably independent way—and if she did there’d be some peace around the flat, for the first time.

Blanche, who had felt relieved and a little unwillingly affectionate as she heard her sister’s support, drew back her chair to leave the table.

“Going out to-night?” Philip asked casually, as he rose.

“Yes, I’m invited to ’n exclusive party ... artists and actors—real, famous ones that people talk about,” Blanche replied, not being able to resist the desire to voice her proudly anticipating mood.

“Fa-amous, huh,” Harry said, with a sneer. “Well, you’ll sure be outa place there, ’f they are.”

“Peddle your wise-cracks somewhere else,” Blanche responded, unruffled.

“We-ell, I don’t care what they are ’cept that you’d better not come skiddin’ in after breakfast,” her father broke in, gruffly.

What his girls did was their business as long as no one “had the goods on them” and they kept out of trouble, but at the same time he didn’t intend to stand for any open flaunting of their possible transgressions. If a girl came home just before dawn, at the latest, she might only have been “cutting up” at some wild party or night club, but if she returned later than that, then it was evident that she had stayed overnight with some man.

As Blanche stood before her mirror, engrossed in the half-piteous and half-brazenly hopeful ritual observed by most women—that of applying cosmetics to her face—a lyric rose and fell in her heart, separated by skeptical pauses. At last she had a chance to leap from the greasy, colorless weights of Ninth Avenue, and the cheaply frothy interludes of Broadway ... but was it only a fair-faced dream? Would the people in the other impending world laugh at her, or turn their backs? Again, all of them might turn out to be qualified versions of the group she had met at Clara’s—mischievous, sneering Helgins, weak and pouting Trussels, unwomanly Doras, Margarets indifferent to every one save the men at their sides, and perhaps another approach to Oppendorf—another intriguing but palely distant figure.

The lyric rose once more and slew the specters. What an expert she was at borrowing trouble! It was quite possible that at least two or three of the people whom she was to meet would act friendly toward her and invite her to other gatherings, or perhaps a really fetching man, more naked and decent than Helgin, would fall for her.

As she walked down Ninth Avenue to the Elevated station, the scene incited tinglings of disgust in her whereas, usually, she regarded it with a passively acceptant dislike, as the great, solid ugliness from which she could not escape. Now, different objects in the scene affected her as though she had been pummeled in the face. The garbage cans at one side of the entrances, frequently overbrimming with decayed fruit, soiled papers, and old shoes and hats; the pillars and tracks of the “L” road, stretching out like a still millipede, with smaller insects shooting over its back; frowsy women, with sallow, vacant faces, shouting down from upper windows; dirt-streaked boys, wrangling and cursing in hallways; drab blocks of buildings cramped together, like huge, seething, shoddy boxes; and clusters of youths on each corner, leering as though they could scarcely control the desire to leap upon her.

All of it scraped against her nerves. Why had she remained so long within it?—it should have become unendurable years ago. Well, what choice had she ever had?—an unpleasant hall room in some rooming-shack. She could not afford more than that. But why, oh, why, was she so depressed on this evening of all others—this evening when for the first time she had something novel and promising to look forward to? The lyric started again and the black pause terminated. She became more in tune with an insidious, dodging gayety that somehow survived the grossness of Ninth Avenue and sounded in the mildly warm air of the late spring evening. In the dark-brown duvetyn dress that stopped at her knees, black chiffon turban, flesh-colored stockings and brown pumps, she could almost have been mistaken for some society girl on a slumming tour.

When she reached Margaret’s studio, Helgin and Oppendorf had already arrived and were immersed in a game of dice for dimes, while Margaret finished her toilette. The studio had a low, broad couch covered with dark green taffeta and batik cushions, and gaudily painted furniture, and a little kitchenette and bathroom adjoined it. Helgin greeted Blanche in the affable boyish way which he could affect for moments—the miraculous atom of humility sometimes flitting to the surface of his poised urbanities.

“Are you prepared to be thrilled?” he asked her, as she seated herself.

“Listen, I’m a hard-boiled egg from Hell’s Kitchen, and I don’t thrill so easy,” she answered, with the impudent desire to shatter his smiling condescension.

“Well, well, little tough Annie from behind the gas works,” he said. “How did you manage to stuff your boxing gloves into that vanity case?”

“Don’t need them—bare knuckles where I come from,” she retorted, smiling back at him.

“Stop it, Ben, you’ve met your match this time,” Oppendorf called out from the armchair where he was pensively eying a tiny glass of gin held in his right hand. “The awkward fighter can always beat the clever one if he stands and waits for Sir Cleverness to rush him.”

“Oppie always instructs me—he can’t bear the thought of my being vanquished,” Helgin replied, lightly.

“Well, I don’t know, I have managed to bear it now and then,” Oppendorf said, before swallowing the gin.

“Didn’t both of you promise me not to be sarcastic for one night?” Margaret asked, as she entered the studio. “If I had the muscle, why, I’d spank the two of you!”

“Start with Ben—it might change his entire life,” Oppendorf said, grinning.

“Oh, you’re not so sweet-tempered yourself,” she replied, as she pinched his cheek.

“You’re quite right, I’m a snarling, vituperative, vindictive man until your smile creates a miracle within me,” he said, as he bowed low to her.

Whenever Oppendorf liked a woman he treated her at times with a whimsical pretense of courtliness and deference, merrily overdone enough to make the whimsicality apparent.

“How easy it would be to believe you,” she responded, with a sigh that carried off the vestige of a smile.

“Emotions are never false—even the masquerade must become real before it can be persuasive,” Oppendorf answered, quickly changing to a mien of abstracted, impersonal challenge. “When the reality survives for a long time it is called sincere and true, and people have faith in it. It may be just as real for a moment, an hour, six days.”

“You’re a sophist and a promiscuous wretch, and I’ll probably wind up by hating you,” Margaret said, as she slid into his arms. “Just as a person begins to depend on you ... you flit away ... I know.”

“Why does a woman hate a man when he departs with an honest abruptness?”—Oppendorf shifted to the inquiry of a distressed child. “Or, why do men hate women for the same reason? I am immersed in you at present because you contain qualities which I cannot find in the other women around me. To-night, perhaps, or in a month from now, I may meet another woman who does possess them, together with other qualities which you lack. In such a case, my immersion would naturally transfer itself. God, how human beings detest everything except the snug, warm permanence which is either a lie or an unsearching sleep!”

“There’s nothing logical about pain, Max,” Margaret said. “It must be deaf, and angry, and blind, and pleading, until it dies down. When a girl’s lover goes off, her mind can say: ‘He revived and stimulated me, and I’m glad I did have him for a while,’ but just the same her heart still cries out: ‘Oh, he’s mean, and selfish, and treacherous, and I hate him!’”

Although she was conversing with Helgin, on the couch, Blanche had caught bits of the other couple’s talk, and they brought a worried tinge to her heart. Oppendorf was wrong—in very rare cases a man and a woman could love each other forever. Of course, the cases were rare simply because people deeply harmonious in every way, from their dancing-steps and tastes in clothes down to the very last opinion in their minds, hardly ever met each other. That was it. It was simply a question of luck as to whether you’d find this one person in a million or not.

Helgin called out: “Well, Don Juan’s defending himself again. He’s more convincing when he doesn’t talk. Come on, Oppie, stop the necking for a while and join us. You’re falling into the boresome habit of dropping into a lady’s arms for hours and spoiling the party.”

“I never object to other people taking the same privilege,” Oppendorf replied, placidly, as Margaret slipped from his lap.

“Perhaps we’re not as impatient as you,” Helgin said, grinning.

“Or perhaps you hide your impatience more patiently—there are so many possibilities,” Oppendorf retorted.

“Say, Oscar Wilde once opened a small-talk shop—the store has been well patronized ever since,” Blanche said, flippantly.

The line wasn’t her own—it had been in the last novel she had read—but she wanted to see what its effect would be on these men, and whether it would impress them.

“The gal’s improving,” Helgin replied. “Come on, take off your little costume. You’re a college-student trying to write, and you thought you’d be more interesting if you posed as a slangy hair-dresser.”

“The best way to fool you people is not to pose at all,” Margaret said, smiling.

“It’s not a bad idea—I’ve tried it myself,” Oppendorf interjected.

“Ti-ti-tum, come on, let’s go to the party,” Margaret interrupted. “You can all keep it up on the way over.”

After they were all in a taxicab and speeding uptown, Helgin said to Blanche: “Didn’t you give Oppie a manuscript at the studio?”

“Yes, it’s something I wrote about the tearoom where we sat last night,” Blanche answered. “He’s such a frank man, and I know he’ll tell me whether it’s just trash, or not.”

“It’s becoming very amusing,” Helgin continued. “Nowadays, if you meet a manicurist you never know when she’s going to stop polishing your nails and draw the great, American lyric out of her sleeve, and the waiter at the café tries to induce you to read his startling, unpublished novel, and the bootblack shoves a short-story under your nose. None of these people would dare to attempt a painting or a sonata. The popular superstition is that literature consists of a deep longing plus thousands of words thrown helter-skelter together.”

“Well, it doesn’t hurt them to try—they’ll never find out what their ability is, ’f they don’t,” Blanche replied, defiantly.

“That’s right, don’t let him razz you,” Margaret broke in. “Masefield was once a bar-room porter, you know.”

“Please pick out a better example,” Oppendorf said.

Then he turned to Blanche.

“Your grammar is atrocious at times, but you have originality, and there’s a razor in your humor,” he went on. “Keep on writing, and study syntax and the declensions of verbs—they’re still fairly well observed by every one except the Dadaists. I’ll have you in several magazines in another two months. And thank God you’re not a poet. If you were, you’d get fifty cents a line, mixed in with profound excuses!”

“Do you really mean it?” Blanche asked, delightedly.

“Of course.”

“Why, I’ll work like a nigger ’f I can really make something of myself as a writer,” Blanche cried, enraptured.

“I hope you’re not giving any pleasant mirages to Miss Palmer,” Helgin said, wondering whether Oppendorf was not merely seeking to flatter her into an eventual physical capitulation. “I know your weakness. When we were getting out The New Age you’d plague me every day with verses from girl-friends of yours, and they were always rank imitations of your own style.”

“You seem to have the delusion that every beginner, with a sense of irony and a deliberate style, is an echo of mine,” Oppendorf replied, undisturbed. “You’d treat these people with a flippant impatience, but I’d rather err on the side of encouraging them, unless they’re saturated with platitudes and gush.”

“Yes, you are apt to make such mistakes, especially in the case of some pretty girl,” Helgin said, with a malicious grin.

“Have it your way, Ben,” Oppendorf responded, indifferently.

Blanche listened with a serene confidence in Oppendorf—he never lied about anything connected with writing: somehow she felt sure of that. Literature was too serious a matter to him.

For a moment Margaret looked a little jealously at Blanche, pestered by the suspicion that Oppendorf might have praised Blanche’s work as a first move toward conquering her—a suspicion which Helgin had known would be caused by his words. Then Margaret remembered how he had viciously assailed her own short-stories just after her first meeting with him, when he had known that she would have prostrated herself before him for the least word of praise, and with the remembrance her doubts perished.

“Be on your good behavior to-night,” Helgin said to Oppendorf. “Vanderin didn’t want to invite you, but I convinced him that you had become a chastened and amiable gentleman. I wouldn’t like to see you thrown down the stairway—it gives smaller people a chance to gloat over you.”

“Are you really as wild as all that?” Blanche asked, looking incredulously at Oppendorf’s subdued pallidness.

“The stairway myth is one in a celebrated list,” Oppendorf replied. “You’ll find many of the others in Mr. Helgin’s affectionate tribute to me—his last novel. The list is a superb one. I deceived some social-radical friends by pretending to defy the draft laws during the war. I faked a broken shoulder and sponged on some other friends. I was caught in the act of attempting to ravish a twelve-year-old girl. I leap upon women at parties and manhandle them while they shriek for mercy, in contrast to the other men present, who never do more than audaciously grasp the little fingers of the same ladies. The amusing part of it is that none of my actual crimes and offenses are on the list. I could give my admirers some real ammunition if they would only ask me for it.”

“But why do they tell such hideous lies about you?” Blanche asked naively.

“I’ll tell you why,” Margaret broke in, indignantly. “It’s because they hate him and fear him. He gets beneath their skins and mocks at all their little idols, and squirmings, and compromises. They want to pulverize him, but he hardly ever gives them any real opportunities, so they’re reduced to falling back on their imaginations and insisting that he’s a clownish monster. It’s a beautiful system of exaggerations, all right! If he happens to be drunk at a party, it’s immediately reported that he was pushed down the stairs, and if he’s seen stroking a woman’s arm it’s always said that he hu-urled himself upon her.”

“It must be troublesome to hear your perfect lover so sadly maligned in spite of his eloquent assertions of innocence,” Helgin said, smiling. “Most of the stories are really told in admiration of his savage gifts.”

“Yes, the admiration is both profound and imaginative,” Oppendorf retorted, with a weary return of the smile.

Blanche listened to the others with feelings of uncertainty and dismay. How could refined, serious, artistic people act so rottenly toward each other? They weren’t so very much different from the toughs in her neighborhood, except that they used words while the gangsters and bullies employed their feet and fists, or fell back on guns and knives. The gangsters were far less dangerous, too. They could only hurt a person for a short time, or else kill him and send him beyond any further injury, but these artist-people with their mean tongues and their sneering stories could damage some one for the rest of his life, in different ways. Oh, well, maybe most people were always alike, except that some of them were clever and had minds, while others were more inept and stupid. What real difference was there between the endless digs which her new acquaintances traded and the catty remarks which she heard every day at the Beauty Parlor? Still, she made a mental reservation in the case of Oppendorf. He had to retaliate or keep quiet, and he never started any of the sarcasm, as far as she could hear, though he certainly could finish it! If he had only been physically stronger, and more blithely animated, she could have fallen in love with him. This ideal man of hers!—she’d probably never meet him. It only happened in story-books. But, at any rate, she intended to apply herself to writing and feel of some importance for a change. How relieved and happy she had been after putting down the last word of her tearoom sketch—it had been almost the first real thrill in her life.

When she entered Paul Vanderin’s large, high-ceilinged studio and spied the Juliet balcony that ran around two sides of it, with rooms leading out on the balcony, and the profusion of statues and paintings—most of them weird or fiercely unorthodox—and the grand piano, and the abundance of luxurious furniture in neutral shades, she sighed and slipped a hand over her eyes. How delirious it must be to live in a place of this kind—big, and high, and filled with conveniences and intensely interesting objects—and how different it was from her own small, ugly room, with the ceiling hemming you in as though you were in a cage. Life was so darned unfair—lavishing favors, and stimulations, and beauties on some people and treating others in the most grudging and miserly fashion. Well, that was an old story—no good to rave over it. You had to beat life to its knees somehow, sharpening your mind and trying to express yourself, and praying for luck.

Several people had already gathered in the studio, and as she walked beside Helgin in the round of introductions, she opened her mouth and felt stunned at the discovery that some of them ... were negroes! This was really astonishing—she had never dreamt that cultured, artistic white people mingled with black and brown men and women on terms of familiar friendship! Her head felt in a turmoil and she couldn’t decide whether these contacts were right or wrong, whether she herself could join them without shrinking. Of course, human beings were all equal and shouldn’t look down upon each other because the color of their skins varied, but ... didn’t it go much deeper than that? Wasn’t there a physical repugnance between the different races—a strong feeling that simply couldn’t be overcome? Certainly, she had always thought so.

She had spoken to negroes, and Japanese, and Chinamen before, and had even joked with them—elevator boys, and porters, and waiters, and laundry-men—but she had never cared for their physical proximity and had always felt repulsed if they happened to brush against her. But still, they had been unrefined and ordinary, while these negroes were intelligent and cultured, and spoke about art and psychology. This was a revelation, as she had never imagined that negroes of this kind existed, except in the ratio of one to tens of thousands. She had heard vaguely of Booker T. Washington, and famous negro lawyers, and, oh yes, a negro writer named Du Bois, whom Rosenberg had always talked about, but she had thought that they were rarities and had even felt a flitting pity for their isolation among their own race.

Of course, she had been foolish and thoughtless—there was no valid reason why negroes should not voice their feelings and search for beauty and uniqueness, instead of always clinging to some business or manual labor. They were human beings, too, and their hearts and minds were probably often much more restless than those of most white people. Besides, since these white writers and artists mixed with negroes, it must be that society was gradually beginning to approve of this union and was losing its prejudice in the matter. Sti-ill, perhaps these negroes and whites simply talked to each other, or danced together, without any sexual intimacies. Surely, there was no harm in that.

As she sat beside Helgin she voiced her perplexity.

“Say, I never knew that black and white people went to the same parties,” she said. “I don’t quite know what to think of it.”

“Oh, yes, it’s the latest fad among white dilettantes,” Helgin replied. “They became weary of their other enthusiasms—finding a tragic, esthetic beauty in Charlie Chaplin and other slapstick comedians, and raving over East Side Burlesque Shows, and making Greek gladiators out of flat-nosed prize-fighters, and hunting for love in Greenwich Village. They are now busily engaged in patronizing and eulogizing the negro race. Vanderin is one of the ring-leaders in the matter. It tickles his jaded senses and reassures him of his decadence, and provides him with material for novels.”

“But isn’t any of it sincere and honest?” Blanche inquired.

“Certainly—negro and white writers and artists are actually starting to tear down the age-old barriers,” Helgin responded. “What begins as a fad can end as an avalanche. I really hope it happens.”

“But ... but tell me, do negro and white men and women have anything to do with each other?” Blanche asked, falteringly.

Helgin laughed.

“Do you see that couple over there?” he asked. “The tall, Nordic kid and the mulatto girl in red. They’re always together at every party. Of course, white men have had negro mistresses in the past, with everything veiled and a little shamefaced, but this is different. It’s out in the open now, and it’s on the basis of deep mental and spiritual understanding.”

“I don’t want to be narrow-minded,” Blanche answered, “but I don’t see how they can love each other—they must be lying to themselves. The races just weren’t meant to have physical relations with each other. There’s something, something in their flesh and blood that stands between, like ... like a warning signal. That’s it.”

As she spoke, though, she had the sensation of uttering sentences which she had borrowed from books and other people, and which did not decisively express her opinions.

“Oh, it doesn’t last long, usually,” Helgin said. “It’s not often that they live permanently together and raise families, but the infatuations are fierce enough while they last. And even intermarriage is becoming more common.”

“We-ell, I’d like to talk to a negro boy, ’f he were intelligent and brilliant-like, you know, but I don’t think I could fall in love with him, even then,” Blanche replied. “You can’t reason about it ... it’s there, that’s all.”

Vanderin walked up and spoke to Blanche. He was a tall, robust man with gray hair and a half-bald head and a ruddy, mildly sensual face. His speech and manners were genially suave and yet reserved, and there was something about his large eyes that resembled the look of a child playing with toys to hide its weariness.

“You don’t mind our mixed gathering, I hope,” he said to Blanche. “I find the negro race to be very congenial, and just beginning to wake up. There are negro painters and poets here to-night who are quite able to stand shoulder to shoulder with white creators.”

“Tell us all about their plaintive, erotic, defiant quality,” Helgin said. “You do it well, Paul—come on.”

Vanderin laughed as he retorted: “You’ll have to read it in my next book, old skeptic. I’m not giving lectures to-night.”

“But won’t you tell me something about them?” Blanche asked, pleadingly. “I’m a frightful simpleton in all these matters, but I do want to find out about them.”

Helgin rose and joined a group, while Vanderin sat down and conversed with Blanche. He fascinated her as he told her grotesquely humorous, slightly bawdy anecdotes of Harlem’s night life and spoke of cabarets where negroes and whites danced and frolicked with a savagely paganish abandonment, and described the motives and longings behind negro music and writing. According to Vanderin, negroes were pouncing upon the restrained and timorous art of America and revitalizing it with an unashamed sensuality, and more simple and tortured longings, and a more grimly questioning attitude of mind.

As Blanche listened to his silkenly baritone voice she reproached herself for her lack of a warm response toward this persuasive, exotic man. His mind intrigued her but her heart still beat evenly. She seemed to sense something of a huge, amiable, carelessly treacherous cat within him—one who lazily and perversely hunted for distractions and amusements, without allowing anything or any one to move him deeply, and who could become cruel or disdainful in the tremor of an eyelash. Why did all of the mentally luring men she had ever met fail to overpower her emotions? So far, her heart had been moderately stirred only by mental weaklings or frauds. Oh, dear, this business of searching for an ideal was certainly a shadowy mess!

Vanderin excused himself to greet some new arrivals, and Margaret dropped into his chair.

“How do you like the hectic fricassee?” she asked, half waving her hand toward a boisterous group of negroes and whites, who stood with arms interlocked.

“I’m very confused about it,” Blanche said. “One part of me, now, it says, ‘Come on, Blanie, be a good sport and don’t be prejudiced,’ but there’s another part, you see, and it sort of shrinks away, and wonders, well ... and wonders how they can kiss and hug each other.”

“Listen, you ain’ seen nothin’ yet,” Margaret answered, jocosely. “I’ve been to parties where white and colored people were doing everything but, and they weren’t lowbrows, either. Real artists, and writers, and actors.”

“Well, how do you feel about it?” Blanche asked.

“I couldn’t do it myself, but I’m not intolerant,” Margaret said. “Some people have this instinctive, physical aversion to other races, you know, and some just haven’t. I’ve talked to colored men for hours and felt very immersed in what they said, but I could never have spooned with them.”

“Well, I’m probably built the same way, but I’m not at all sure about it,” Blanche responded. “I’m not sure about anything, to-night. It’s all too new to me.”

A tall, jaunty, colored youth whisked Margaret away, and a portly, courtly man wearing shell-rimmed spectacles sat down beside Blanche and began to tell her all about an immortal play which he had written, but which the managers were hesitating over because it hadn’t strolled into the box-office. The playwright was garrulous, using his arms as a sweeping emphasis for his remarks, and Blanche wondered whether she was listening to a genius or an untalented boaster. Some day she’d meet a man who didn’t claim to be superb in his particular line ... some day snow would fall in July.

The gathering became slowly silent as Vanderin announced that a poet was about to recite. The poet, a young negro, Christopher Culbert, read some of his sonnets, in a liquid and at times almost shrill voice. He had a round, dark-brown face, and a body verging on chubbiness, and his verses were filled with adored colors and a sentimentality that flirted with morbidity for moments and then repented. He was effeminate and jovial in his manner, and after the reading he returned to his place on a couch beside another negro youth. Then another man, blackish brown and with the body of an athlete, sang spirituals, with a crazy, half-sobbing, swaying quaver in his voice. A curious blending and contrast of elation and austerity seemed to cling to him. As he intoned the words of one song: “Ho-ow d’yuh kno-ow, ho-ow d’yuh kno-o-ow, a-t the blo-od done si-ign mah na-a-me?”, Blanche felt shivers racing up and down her spine. These negroes certainly had something which white people couldn’t possibly imitate—something that made you feel wild, and sad, and swung you off your feet! It was hard to put your finger on it—perhaps it was a kind of insanity.

When the singer had finished, Vanderin announced that Miss Bee Rollins, of the Down South night club would do the Charleston dance. She stepped forward—a palely creamish-brown skinned young negress with a lissom body incongruously plump about the waist, and an oval face, infinitely impertinent and infinitely sensual in a loosely heavy way. She twisted and bobbed and jerked through the maniacal obliquely see-sawing and shuffling steps of the Charleston, with a tense leer on her face, and inhumanly flexible legs. She was madly applauded and forced to several encores. Then the party broke up into dancing and more steady drinking, with different negroes playing at the piano, and the assistance of a phonograph in between.

The dancers undulated and embraced in a way that surprised Blanche—even in the cheap dance halls which she had frequented, the floor-watchers always immediately ordered off all couples who tried to get away with such rough stuff. Well, anyway, it wasn’t the main part of these people’s lives—their only thrill and importance—as it was with the dance-hall men and women. The couples in this studio were only “cutting up” between their more serious, searching labors and expressions, and they were certainly more entitled to be frankly sexual, if they wanted to.

Blanche stepped over the floor with several negro and white men, and enjoyed the novelty of dancing as extremely as the other couples did, though she felt the least bit guilty about it—it certainly was “going the limit.” As she danced with the negroes she felt surprised at her lack of aversion to the closeness of their bodies. Somehow, they danced with a rhythmical, subtle, audacious fervor which her white partners could never quite duplicate, and she was swung into a happy harmony with their movements in spite of herself.

As she was catching her breath between dances, she watched some of the negroes around her. One of them, a short, slender girl in a dark red smock and a short black skirt, was conversing with a white youth in a dark suit, who looked like a solemnly tipsy mingling of clergyman and pagan. She had a pale brown skin, black curls of bobbed hair, thin lips, and a pug nose. She held his hand and gave him distrustfully tender looks.

Blanche caught fragments of their conversation.

“You don’t love me, hon.... You can get white girls prettier than I am—I know....”

“I don’t want them ... you’ve put a song in my blood, right in it.... I’m crazy about you.”

“I don’t think you mean it.... Lord knows, I’d like so to believe you....”

“You will, you will.... I’ll take care of that....”

He kissed her and then she withdrew, saying: “You funny, funny, dear, impatient boy!”

Another young negress with a dark-brown skin and a tall fullness to her body, was laughing violently beside a thin, white man with a little black mustache and a petulant face. She sang: “Mamma has her teeth all filled with goldun bridges ’n’ diamon’s small, but po-oor papa, po-o-or papa, got no teefies at a-all.”

“Not this papa,” he replied. “I’ll prove it to you.”

She drew back, laughing, while he sought to embrace her. They almost collided with a young negress who was dancing with a middle-aged white man. She was slim, with a straight-nosed, creamy face and straight brown hair, while her partner was floridly jowled and had the symptoms of a paunch, and sparse, black hair. They stopped their dance and stood, talking.

“Have you seen the Russian Players?” she asked.

“Yep, went down last night and took in that version of Carmen—‘Carmencita and the Soldier.’”

“Aren’t they a curious mixture of restraint and hilarity? It’s a contradiction—a sort of disciplined madness, isn’t it?”

“Oh, yes, they have dark, strange, patient souls, and yet ... they can be wildness itself. And they’re entirely obedient to the designs of the playwright. They never let their personalities swagger all over the stage at the expense of the author.”

The two walked off, still talking, and Blanche eyed them regretfully as she wished that they had remained within hearing. Most of the men and women at the party seemed to be disinclined to talk about impersonal subjects. Their only aims were drinking, dancing, and making love to each other. Of course, they were tired of their more sober professions and the heavier problems in life, and wanted to forget them for one night at least—but this explanation scarcely lessened Blanche’s disappointment. She was longing to hear discussions on art and psychology—matters that were still semishrouded to her. She had been to tens of parties where people were “running wild” and foxtrotting and mauling each other—it was nothing new to her.

She answered the teasing remarks of the man beside her with abstracted monosyllables, and watched another couple—a tall, dark, negro youth, with the face of a proud falcon, and an ample-bodied white woman in her early thirties, with a round face void of cosmetics but like an angelic mask that could not quite hide the jaded sensuality underneath it. She leaned closely against his side while he stroked one of her arms and looked at her with an almost scornful longing on his face. Blanche gazed intently at them—this was an exception. All of the other mixed couples that she had noticed had consisted of negro girls and white men, and she had been on the verge of believing that the women of her own race were only tolerantly “fooling around” and had no deep response to the colored men. But no, she was wrong. Another white woman and a negro youth were whispering together on the piano-bench, with their heads almost touching and their right hands clasping each other.

How queer it was—even she had succumbed to the spell of the negroes, while dancing with them. They were like wise children—they could be abandoned and serious in such a quick succession, and there was an assured, romping, graceful something about them. Still, loving any one of them would probably be impossible—she still shrank a little from the nearness of their bodies, when the sorcery of the dances was removed.

The teasing man departed, thinking her an odd iceberg, and another man sat beside her. She turned to look at him. He was of her own height and had a muscular body, a pale white skin with the least tinge of brown in it, and straight, light brown hair brushed back. His lips were thin below a narrow nose, and his large, gray eyes seemed to be full of silent laughter, as though the scene were an endurable but trivial comedy to him. In his tuxedo suit, well fitting and distinctive, and with his athletic, graceful body, that was neither too narrow nor too broad, and the high-chinned but not supercilious poise of his head, he could have been mistaken for some movie hero more natural and finely chiseled than most of the other stars in that profession.

He looked at Blanche and smiled—a smile that was respectful but had the least touch of impudence.

“I haven’t been introduced to you—I came in rather late,” he said, easily. “My name’s Eric Starling.”

“Mine’s Blanche Palmer,” she replied.

“Isn’t it rather silly—this trading of names right off the reel?” he asked. “They’re just empty sounds until people get to know each other, and then, of course, they do begin to suggest the qualities within each person.”

“My name’s even more meaningless, if that’s possible,” she answered. “I haven’t done a thing to make it of any importance. Not a thing.”

“Well, you’re not gray-haired, yet—unless you dye it,” he said, with a boyish geniality. “You have still time enough to conquer the world.”

He had a soft and low, but unmistakably masculine voice, that pleased her.

“Yes, a girl can keep on telling that to herself until there’s no time left,” she responded.

“How doleful you sound,” he replied. “Have a heart—you’ll make me confess my own pessimism in a minute, if you keep it up.”

She laughed softly.

“No, you’re still young—you have plenty of time to conquer the wo-o-orld,” she said, mimickingly.

“I was only trying to be pleasantly conventional,” he responded. “Lord knows, I’m a child of night myself—morbid moods, and hatreds, and despairs. I do try to tone it down, though. The world may be a muddled and treacherous place, on the whole, but if you never laugh about it, then you let it interfere too much with your work. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this—you’re probably not interested.”

She liked his tone of quiet self-disparagement and understanding resignation—the absence of the usual masculine: “Look me over, kid, I’m there!”

“Of course I’m interested,” she said. “It’s this way—’f you go around and laugh too much, why, then it’s just like taking dope, and then again, ’f you don’t laugh enough, you see, you get too wise to your own smallness. There’s never any cure for anything, I guess.”

Up to this time he had regarded her only as a handsome girl, a bit more unaffected and humorous than the general run, but now he felt a much keener interest. She had something to say—an intriguing oddity among women. Who was this girl, with her dark red hair in bobbed curls, and her jaunty, Irish-looking face, and her words divided between whimsicality and hopelessness? Perhaps she was a talented person, well-known in her profession and amusing herself with this posture of half-smiling and half darkly wistful obscurity.

“You’re probably quite famous and rebuking me for not having heard of you,” he said, after a pause.

“I don’t think Madame Jaurette would agree with you,” she answered, smiling.

“Mother or dancing partner?”

“She owns the Beauty Parlor where I work—I’m just a common hair-dresser, that’s all.”

He looked closely at her—was she persistently jesting?

“No fooling—come clean,” he said. “You’re not really.”

“Oh, I know, I’m not like my type,” she answered. “I think a little, and I don’t use slang very often, though I like it sometimes. Don’t be deceived so easy.”

“Well, I’ll bet you’re trying to do something different, anyway,” he said, convinced now that she was telling the truth and engrossed in this phenomenon of a seemingly intelligent and searching Beauty Shop girl. “You could tell me you were a scrubwoman and I’d still know instinctively that your job had nothing to do with your ambitions. It’s in all your words and all the expressions on your face.”

She felt glad that his response had not been one of veiled pity, or sexy flattery, or the polite ending of interest, and her heart began to quicken its strokes. Say, could he be the man that she had been looking for? Could he? Silly, oh, very silly dream, and one that could scarcely be changed to a proven reality by a few beginning and possibly misleading words, and yet ... she was attracted by his appearance—stalwart and yet subdued, with no “fizz” about it—and she liked immensely everything he said.

“My family’s poor and I’ve had to work to earn my own living,” she said, simply. “I live in the toughest part of Ninth Avenue—I was born and raised there. The people I come from think that art’s the second word in ‘Thou art bughouse.’ Now you’ve got the whole sad story.”

“Well, seeing that confessions are in order, I’ll spill mine,” he answered. “I was brought up in a neighborhood where they throw paving-blocks at each other to prove the sincerity of their feelings. One of them hit me once, but it didn’t seem able to knock any obedience into me. Oh, ye-es, nice, little neighborhood.”

“’F it’s any worse than Hell’s Kitchen it must be a peach,” she replied, thoroughly unreserved and immersed in him now.

“It is—Peoria Street in Chicago,” he said, smiling. “If I could escape from Peoria Street, you’ll probably be able to get out of Ninth Avenue with one wing-flutter and a little audacity! I’m working for a Harlem cabaret now—Tony’s Club. Publicity man ... writing the blurbs, and arranging the banquets, and getting the celebs to come down.”

“I’m quite sure you’re different from most publicity men, I can just feel it in your words and in the looks on your face,” she answered, in a mocking voice.

“Lady, I’ll never feed you that medicine again—the taste is simply frightful,” he replied.

They both laughed and felt relieved about it.

“D’you know, I’ve got a writing bug buzzing in my head,” she said, after a short pause. “It really started only a night ago—I never dared to believe I could do it before. I was down to Greenwich Village for the first time, and when I came back I wrote a sketch of the tearoom I’d been in. I didn’t think it amounted to very much, but Max Oppendorf, the poet, you know, he tells me it’s really clever and original, in spite of the shaky grammar. I’m going to keep on writing, you see, and he’s promised to criticize my stuff and try to put it over for me.”

“I think I met Oppendorf once,” he replied. “He’s tall and blond, isn’t he?”

“Yes, that’s him—he’s here to-night.”

“You didn’t come with him, did you?”

“No-o, don’t be scared,” she said, in raillery. “He’s with a girl friend, Margaret Wheeler, and my, how they’re gone on each other. It always seems to annoy them when they’ve got to talk to somebody else.”

“Who’d you come with?”

“With Ben Helgin, the novelist. I only met him and Oppendorf last night, and I’m only a curiosity to him. He just wanted to see how the slum-girlie would get along in the mi-ighty studio. I hope he’s satisfied now.”

“Do you know, people who patronize and bend down all the time, do it as a hop-fiend sniffs his cocaine,” he said. “They might have to take a close peek at themselves otherwise.”

“Isn’t it the truth,” she answered. “When I think of all the dopes people use to kid themselves along, I get the Jailhouse Blues. I was just as bad myself, two or three years ago, before I commenced to get wise to myself.”

A pause came, during which they looked at each other with a budding and almost incredulous desire.

“By the way, I have another confession to make,” he said. “Close your eyes and take the blow. I’m one of those dreamy, high-handed, impossible poets you’ve heard about. Vanderin likes my stuff and he’s induced Koller, the publisher, to take a first book of mine. I grind it out between the times when I’m slaving down at Tony’s.”

“Three cheers,” she answered, delightedly. “Perhaps we can put our heads together now, and maybe you’ll help me with my work. I know you must have much more education than I’ve got.”

“Oh, I did work my way through two years of college, but I stopped after that,” he said. “It was too dry, and heavy, and, well, conservative, to satisfy me. A million don’ts and rules and rules and boundaries. They’re all right to know but they’re not so sacred to me.”

“Well, I envy you, anyway,” she replied, sighing. “You’ve got to help me with my grammar—that’s the big, weak sister with me.”

“You can bet I will,” he responded, eagerly.

She was certainly an unusual girl—one who had somehow commenced to force her way out of a vicious, muddy environment. Since he had partially freed himself from the same thing, it was a sacred duty to help her. But he wouldn’t do it for that reason alone—he liked the jolly and yet pensive turn of her, and the undismayed and candid twist of her mind, and the soft irregularities of her face, which were charming in spite of their lack of a perfect prettiness, and the boldly curved but not indelicate proportions of her strong body. Of course, it was nonsense to believe that you could fall in love after several minutes of talking, and there was Lucia, the clever little hoyden whom he had gone with for two years now, and Clara, savage, beautiful, and dumb, and Georgie, keen-minded enough but a little hysterical at times, and promiscuous, and.... But after all, none of them except Lucia had ever aroused him to any depth of emotion, and even that had long since begun to wear off. She was mentally shallow—women usually turned out to be that, after you penetrated their little tricks and defenses. Would this girl prove to be of the same kind? Maybe, maybe, but there was one thing about her that he hadn’t found in any other women—the instant, frank, ingenuous way in which she had intimately revealed herself, without all of the wrigglings and parryings common to her sex. They sure did hate to get down to brass tacks.

He was an odd confusion of sentimentalities and cynicisms, and the conflict between them was often an indecisive one. As he looked at Blanche, a fear suddenly shot through him.... Lord, he had forgotten. The old, dirty scarecrow that would probably turn her away from him.

“D’you know, I was certainly surprised when I came here to-night,” she said. “I never imagined that negroes and white people—real, artistic ones, I mean—I never imagined that they went around with each other and made love together. I don’t know just how to take it. How would you feel if you met a good-looking, intelligent, negro girl and she became fond of you?”

He winced and his face tightened up. It was just as he had feared—she had mistaken him for a white man. Of course, he was white for the most part ... just a fraction of negro blood, but he was proud of it just the same, damn proud of it, and if people wanted to repulse him because of this fraction, they could go straight to the devil for all he cared.... Should he tell her now and have it over with? He hesitated. Despite his impatient pride he could not bring the words to his lips, as he had done many times before in such cases. White women often made this mistake, and he was inured to correcting it and bearing their constraint, or their shifting to a careful cordiality, but this time his self-possession had vanished. Sometimes he had failed to tell women, when he had only wanted a night or two of physical enjoyment with them, for then it never mattered, but ... some miracle had happened. This girl really seemed to have cut beneath his skin, and ... yes, he was afraid of losing the chance to see her again.

He didn’t love her now—in the deep, seething way that was the real thing—but he felt that if he continued to meet her he probably would, and this was a rare sensation to him. She would have to be told some time, of course, but ... not to-night. He simply couldn’t run the risk of spoiling this growing harmony between them, of not seeing whether it might flower out into an actual ecstasy. He couldn’t.

Blanche began to wonder at his lengthy silence, and she looked inquiringly at him.

“Please excuse me,” he said at last. “I was sort of ... sort of waltzing in a dream with you for a while.... Negroes and whites are human beings after all, and the fact that a man’s colored shouldn’t make him an inferior animal. But that’s an old story to me. I’ve got it all memorized. Race-prejudice, and fun-da-men-tal repugnance, and all the disasters that spring from intermingling. Oh, yes, these things exist in most people, of course they do, but I refuse to believe that exceptional men and women can’t rise above them. If they can’t, then what is exceptional about them?”

Something in the weary contempt of his words should have suggested to her that he was pleading his own cause, but her delighted immersion in him made her oblivious, and she mistook his words for those of a rarely unprejudiced white man. How eloquently and clearly he talked! He had an unassuming but fervent way that was far more attractive than Helgin’s suave, superior jovialities, or Oppendorf’s tired belligerency, or any of the other postures which she had noticed in different men at the party. Was she really beginning to fall in love with this Eric Starling? Somehow, she felt that no matter what faults she might discover in him afterwards, they would not be huge enough to destroy this present sense of communion with him. You had to trust to your instinct in such matters, and this instinct certainly hadn’t failed her up to date. Hadn’t she always doubted and feared Campbell, and held him at arm’s length, in spite of his smooth protests and promises? But gee, what if she were deceiving herself? This time it would be a real blow.

“I think I agree with you.... I’m not sure,” she answered at last. “I guess no person can tell how he’s going to feel about, well, loving somebody who’s of another race, unless he actually runs up against it himself. I certainly believe negroes and whites ought to talk together, though, and try to understand each other more. There’s too much darn hate and meanness in this little world, as it is.”

“Yes, entirely too much,” he said, in an abstractedly weary way.

Helgin walked up and Blanche introduced him to Starling.

“Found your ideal yet, little gal?” he asked, grinning. “A studio-party’s an excellent place for such delusions.”

“’F I had, I wouldn’t tell you, old boy,” she answered impertinently. “You’d just answer ‘Nice li’l baby, all blind and deaf and everything.’”

“Ideals are out of fashion, Mr. Helgin,” Starling said. “They don’t seem to blend so well with synthetic gin, and the Charleston, and divorces at six for a dollar.”

Helgin countered with one of his bland ironies and then said: “The party’s beginning to break up, now. Are you ready to leave, Miss Palmer?”

“Would you mind if I saw Miss Palmer home?” Starling asked, bluntly, but in a soft voice. “I hope you won’t be irritated at my nerve.”

Helgin laughed.

“Of course not, if it’s agreeable to her,” he replied. “I never have any desire to interfere with blossoming romances.”

“You won’t think I’m being terribly rude, will you?” Blanche asked.

“Go o-on, stop the nervous apologies, child,” he said. “I’m really glad that you’ve found a kindred soul.”

He shook hands with the other two and walked away.

As Blanche and Starling went for their wraps, they ran into Oppendorf and Margaret, and Blanche introduced the two men, who vaguely remembered that they had met somewhere before. Oppendorf looked even sleepier and more distant than usual, while Margaret was in a giggling daze of contentment.

“He didn’t kiss more than two other girls to-night,” she said gayly. “I really think he must be beginning to care for me.”

“I didn’t count more than two in your case, but then we had our backs turned once in a while,” Oppendorf replied.

Blanche promised to visit Margaret’s studio at the end of the week, with another manuscript for Oppendorf’s appraisal, and the two couples separated.

During the taxicab ride to her home, Starling held her hand, but made no effort to embrace her, and although she wanted him to, she felt rather glad at his reserve. How tired she had become of men who desperately tried to rush her at the end of the first night. It almost seemed as though rarely desirable men were never instantly frantic about it—as though their unabashed quietness alone proved their rarity. Naturally, only starved or oversexed men were so immediately anxious for physical intimacies, although ... Starling might have kissed her at least.

As Blanche stood in the dirty, poorly lit hallway, she smiled for a moment as she remembered how often she had been in this same spot, permitting men to kiss and hug her, out of pity or as a small payment for the “good time” that they had shown her. And now she was parting with a man infinitely more cajoling than they had been, and merely clasping hands with him. Life was certainly “cuckoo” all right. She had arranged to see Starling at the end of the week and leave a night of rest in between. As she retired to her bed, the satiated remnants of the ecstasy-herald were shifting slowly, slowly in her breast. The dream had finally peered around the corner ... how nice, how sweet, how terrifying....

On the following day, as she worked at the Beauty Parlor, she was in a sulkily grimacing mood. Oh, this endless ha-air-curling, and face-massaging ... beautifying women and girls so that some male fool would spend his money on them, or offer to marry them, or try to caress them. Gold-diggers, and loose women too passionate to be very efficient gold-diggers, and lazy, decent housewives, and sly-faced wives with a man or two on the side, and kiss-me-’n’-fade-away flappers—take away their bodies and what would be left of them? Less than a grease-spot. Drat this empty, tiresome work. She’d have to get out of it pretty soon or go loony. She wanted to write, and describe people, and live in a decent place, and ... see Eric Starling.

He moved about in her mind; his fingers were still touching her hands. What a strong body and well-shaped face he had. Funny about men’s faces ... they were usually either too weakly perfect—movie-hero-like—or too homely, but Starling’s was in between. And he had a curious quality—not humble but sort of sadly and smilingly erect. What was it, anyway?

During the next two days she treated her family with a greater degree of merry friendliness, and they began faintly to hope that she was coming around to their ways of thinking. In reality, they had ceased to matter much to her, all except her mother, for whom she still felt a weak and troubled compassion. Poor, hard-working, patient, stupid ma. But what on earth could be done to help her?

Propped up against the pillows on her bed, Blanche had written an account of the Vanderin party. With more confident emotions now, fortified by Oppendorf’s praise, and with a little, dizzy ache in her head, her fingers had passed less laboriously over the paper. Her sketch was pointedly humorous and disrespectful, and stuck its tongue out at the different men and women who had attended the party. They might be celebrities and all that, but most of them hadn’t acted and talked much different from the business men and chorines whom she had met at other affairs. She enjoyed the task of good-naturedly attacking them—it was like revenging her own undeserved obscurity.

Her sketch was full of lines such as: “She was fat, and when she did the Charleston with a little skinny fellow, why he looked just like a frightened kid,” and “The negroes and whites, all except the loving couples, they acted like they were trying too hard to be happy together,” and “The party was a good excuse for necking, but they all could have done it much better alone,” and “They introduced him as a poet, but when he started to talk to you, why then you got more uncertain about it, and when he was through talking you were just sure that something must be wrong.”

When she met Starling, on Saturday night, she was in a facetious and tiptoeing mood. Hot doggie, life was perking up again. As they rode in a taxicab down to Margaret’s studio, she showed him the sketch, and he laughed loudly over it.

“You know, the trouble between colored and white people at parties is that they’re both acting up to each other,” he said. “The whites are doing their darnedest to be tolerant and, well, cordial, and the colored people are always a little uncomfortable. They act self-conscious, you know, or too wild, and why? They’re all trying to put their best foot forward, and show that they belong there.”

“But how about all the loving pairs I saw at Vanderin’s?” she asked. “They sure didn’t seem to mind it much.”

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. Of course, she didn’t know that in eight cases out of ten—perhaps more—these pairs had nothing but a passing lust for each other. And what if they did?—that part of it was all right. There was no earthly reason why they shouldn’t want each other’s bodies, unless they were too cruel or sneering about it. God, sex could be a wild, clean, naked, beautiful thing, and people were always hurling mud and denunciations at it, or slinking with it behind closed doors, damn them. But he didn’t want just a flitting affair with Blanche ... he was sure of that now. He had been afraid that the encouragement of night, and the highballs, and the party, might have caused him to throw a false radiance around this girl—he had done the same thing before, though never so severely. But now he realized that his feelings for her were made of more solid stuff—realized it just after he had finished reading her sketch. He liked her upstanding, inquiring, impertinent spirit, and the unaffected smiles and moués that appeared on her face, and the sturdy and yet soft freshness of her body.

Hell was probably facing him. He was a negro, yes, and proud of it, but suppose it caused him to lose this woman? He would almost hate it, then—this streak of black blood which he had always flaunted so defiantly. He wasn’t like other men of his kind—cringing about it, and claiming to be entirely white, and fawning before every white woman they met. Stupid lily-snatchers! Not he! Yet he was sorely tempted to flee to this lie, in Blanche’s case. If he confessed, then all of his hopes and longings might be shot to pieces. He could picture her in his mind, recoiling from him against her will, summoning pleasant and compassionate smiles, trying to soothe the wound caused by her sorrowful determination never to see him again.

Puzzled by his frowning silence, she said: “What’s the matter, Eric?”

“Oh, I was just brooding over some of the injustice in this world,” he replied. “It’s absurd, of course—never does any good. What were we talking about?”

“You said something about negroes and whites always acting up to each other,” Blanche answered, “and then I said that some of the couples I saw at Vanderin’s seemed to be really gone on each other.”

“Of course they are—for a night, or a month. A year’s the world’s record as far’s I know. It’s nothing but surface sex-appeal, you know, and it’s not much different from the old plantation-owners down South, who used to pick out colored mistresses. The only difference nowadays is that white women are starting to respond to colored men.”

“Gee, I wonder ’f I could care for you, ’f you were colored ... I wonder now,” Blanche said, reflectively. “Of course, I’ll never have to bother about it, but it’s interesting just the same. I guess a woman never knows how she’ll feel about anything until she’s got to make a choice. It’s all right to think it over and say ‘I could’ ’r ‘I couldn’t,’ but that’s just because you’ve got to pretend to know yourself anyway. It kind of keeps up your backbone.”

She did not notice the pain that twisted his face. He tried his best to be humorous ... this dark bugaboo was getting on his nerves.

“Mix black and white together and they make gray,” he said. “I never did like that color. Let’s be more gaudy to-night.”

“You’re a terrible liar—you’re wearing a gray suit,” she replied.

He laughed.

“Well, what’s a man to do?” he asked. “You women can put on lavender, and orange, and cerise clothes, but if a man tried it he’d be howled out of town.”

“It’s all your own fault,” she said. “Men just hate to look different from each other, and besides, they’re always afraid that somebody’s going to think that they’re showing some weakness or other. I know them.”

As they continued the conversation, in a vein of mock-chiding and sprightly rebuke, she knew that she was rapidly descending into the depths of a love for him. She had also been afraid that the giddiness of night and a party, plus her own thwarted longings, might have induced her to throw a glamor over him, and that her next meeting with him might turn out to be somewhat disillusioning. But no, his mixture of frowns and deft gayeties, and his clear, incisive way of talking, were causing her emotions to increase in leaps and bounds. Whenever his shoulder grazed hers, a shamefaced tremor was born within her.

After they had reached Margaret’s studio they became more spontaneously mirthful. Margaret was in a frothy mood and Oppendorf seemed to be more affable and relaxed than usual. He read Blanche’s sketch with a broad grin on his face.

“That’s the stuff, rip it into them, old girl,” he said. “When they’re not strapping their pedestals to their backs and setting them up in this place and that, they’re wildly reaching for each other’s flesh. The very thought of an unassuming naturalness, or a frank and good-natured exchange of challenges, would give them heart failure!”

“Don’t worry—they’ll live,” Starling replied.

Oppendorf was aware of the fact that Starling was a negro, and Starling liked the blunt and impersonal way in which the other man treated him. Congenial, and tossing epigrammatic jests about, the party wended its way to Tony’s Club and danced there until 3 A.M. The cabaret was a wild, gargoylish, shamelessly tawdry place, trimmed with colored strings of confetti, and orange and black boxes over the electric lights hanging from its low, basement-ceiling, and atrocious wall-panels of half nude women in Grecian draperies, and booths against the walls, each booth bearing the name of a different state. A brightly painted railing hemmed in the rectangular dance floor, and the jazz-orchestra—one of the best in town—moaned and screeched and thudded, in the manner of some super-roué, chortling as he rolled his huge dice to see who his next mistress would be.

Margaret, who also knew that Starling was a negro, glanced curiously at Blanche now and then, and wondered whether Blanche also knew and whether she had found that it raised no barrier. The subject, however, was too delicate to be broached to Blanche on this night.... It would have to wait.

Since she was with a man whom she practically loved, Blanche’s usual wariness toward alcohol—a caution produced by her desire not to become an unconscious prey—left her entirely, and in spite of Starling’s remonstrances, she drank with a reckless glee. When 3 A.M., the closing time, arrived, she was giggling fondly at him, and trying to balance glasses on her nose, and snuggling her head against his shoulder.

When the party reached the street she was barely able to walk, and had to lean against Starling for support.

“Why don’t you two come down to our place?” Margaret asked. “The poor kid’s going to pass out soon, and then you’ll be in a devil of a fix unless she’s safely inside somewhere.”

“No, I’ll call a cab and take her home,” he said. “Thank you just the same. She comes from a stupid family, you know, and they’d probably raise a vicious row if she came back to-morrow afternoon.”

After bidding the other two farewell, Starling hailed a cab and gave Blanche’s address to the driver. She passed out completely in the cab, with her arm around his shoulder and her head on his breast, and as he thought it over he began to regret his decision. He would be forced to carry her to the door of her apartment and wake up her family, and since they were obtuse proletarians, they might imagine that he had plied her with liquor to achieve her seduction. In that case there would be a sweet rumpus, all right! He was not afraid of a possible fight—swinging fists was nothing new to him—but if one did occur, her folks would probably order her never to see him again, or would look him up and discover his negro blood. Again, the ever-blundering “cops” might also interfere in the matter.... In this world it was often imperative to avoid the sordid misinterpretations of other people, for otherwise you would simply be expending your energy to no purpose. No, the best thing would be to take Blanche to his apartment and let her sleep it off, for then she could return home with the usual story of having “stayed over” at some girl-friend’s home. Fearful lies, lies, lies—sometimes he thought that the entire world was just a swamp of them. Well, hell, you’d get very far, wouldn’t you, trying to hold out against it!

He tapped on the pane and told the driver to switch to a Harlem address. After he had paid the driver and was half carrying Blanche over the sidewalk, the man called after him: “That’s the way to get ’em, Bo!” Starling turned and was about to leap at the leering chauffeur, but burdened with Blanche, whom he could scarcely deposit on the walk, and fearing to arouse the neighbors in his building, he ignored the remark.

His apartment consisted of two rooms and a kitchenette, and after he had placed Blanche on a couch in one of the rooms, he closed the door and changed to his slippers and a dressing-gown. Then he sat down in an armchair and grinned, in a sneer at himself, as he lit a cigarette. This was exactly like one of the impossible climaxes in a cheap movie-reel. The handsome hero had the proudly beautiful girl at his mercy, but nobly and honorably refused to compromise her. Oh, rats, why not walk in and take the only crude, gone-to-morrow happiness that life seemed to offer. Otherwise, she would find out about his negro blood, before their achievement of finality, and depart from him or tell him to be “just a dear friend,” and what would he have then?—not even the remembrance of a compensating night. Hell, he ought to regard her as just another blood-stirring girl, and ravish her, and forget her afterwards. If you failed to trick and abuse women, they usually sought to turn the cards on you—he’d found that out often enough.

He arose and paced up and down the room. No, he was a mawkish fool, a sentimental jackass—he couldn’t do it. The dirty nigger couldn’t leap on the superior white girl, damn it. He loved this girl—no doubt about that. She had a clear, honest, stumbling-on mind, and her heart was free from pretenses and hidden schemes, and a unique essence, tenderly simple and defiant by turns, seemed to saturate her. It wasn’t just her body and face—he had known prettier girls by far—but it was something that clung to this body and face and transformed them to an inexplicable but indubitable preciousness. She was unconscious now, and her inert surrender would mean nothing to him except a cheap and empty triumph. He wanted her to come to him joyously, spontaneously, madly, and with quiverings and shinings on her face!

He sat down again in the armchair. Damn his luck, why couldn’t he have fallen in love with another negro girl? He wasn’t like some of the men of his race—always chasing after white girls because it gave these men a thrill to boast of having captured them, and soothed their miserable inferiority complex. He had nearly always stuck to the girls of his own race, and yes, he had loved two of them ... in a way ... but it hadn’t been the surging, frightened, and at times abashed thing that he was feeling now. He was in for it now, oh, how he was in for it! He would undoubtedly be rejected, and pitied, and reduced to every kind of helpless writhing. It was in him to curse the very day on which he had entered the earth.... Good God, why couldn’t he shake off this morbid hopelessness? How did he know what would happen, after all? Perhaps her love for him was as overwhelming as his. Perhaps she would be forced to cling to him, in spite of every enormous warning and obstacle.

He passed into a fitful and often dream-groaning sleep. When he awoke it was noon. His room seemed uglier than usual—the straight, oak furniture, and the worn, brown carpet, and the rose-stamped wallpaper were like slaps against his spirit. Money, money—the devil sure had been in an ingenious mood when he invented it.... And Blanche Palmer was in the next room—all of him tingled incredibly at the thought of her proximity, and his heavy head grew a bit lighter. Then the door opened and she walked out, slowly, with a sulky, half sleepy, questioning look on her face, and rumpled hair, and a wrinkled gown.

“Eric, what’m I doing here—what happened last night?” she asked.

“Sit down, dear, and let your head clear a bit—I’ll tell you,” he answered.

She dropped into the armchair and he drew another chair beside her.

“You passed out in the cab after we left Tony’s, and I decided to bring you here,” he said. “It would have been rather ticklish, carrying you in my arms and waking up your, u-um, intellectual family. Their response might have been just a trifle excited, you know. You’re not angry with me, are you, Blanche?”

She looked steadily at him, with her head too confused and aching for any definite emotion—for the moment—and then, very slowly, she gave him a tenderly rebuking smile. Somehow, she knew that he had left her in peace while she had slept at his place, and funny, this time she would not have minded an opposite gesture. Things never seemed to intrude upon you unless you were seeking to avoid them! Yet, she was touched by this proof that he had not been hiding a mere, ordinary lust for her. Sweet, sweet boy ... how her head swayed and throbbed, and yet, despite the pain, a happiness tried to lessen it.

“You really shouldn’t have brought me here,” she said at last. “My folks’ll raise the dickens with me now. Their system is wink your eye at daughter ’f she gets back any time before 6 A. M., and call her a bad woman ’f she doesn’t. Still, you’d have been in for it ’f you had brought me back, I guess. There wasn’t much choice in the matter.”

“Why don’t you leave that dirty den of yours?” he asked. “You can’t go on sacrificing yourself forever.”

“Oh, I’m going to leave pretty soon,” she answered. “I’d have done it long ago, only I didn’t see much difference between living home and staying in some spotty hall-bedroom, and I’ve never had money enough for more than that. Maybe I can get a fairly decent place in the Village, though. Margaret tells me that rents are much cheaper down there.”

“Yes, you’d better look around,” he said, dully.

He couldn’t ask her to live with him, or to marry him—especially the latter—without telling the secret to her, and once more his courage failed him. While she was bathing and making her toilette, he fixed a simple breakfast in the kitchenette. Afterwards, as they were lolling over the coffee, he said: “You’re looking beautiful this morning. Your face is like ... well, like a wild rose and a breeze flirting with each other.”

“I’m only too willing to believe you, Eric,” she answered, softly. “Don’t make me conceited now.”

An irresistible impulse came to him. He arose, walked around the table, and bent down to her. She curved her arms about his shoulders, and they traded a lengthy kiss.

“I’m in love with you, Blanche,” he said, looking away, after he had straightened up.

She grasped one of his hands and answered: “Why, you’re startling me, Eric—I’d never have guessed it. Would it surprise, you, too, ’f I said I loved you?”

“Say it and find out.”

“Well, I do.”

He bent down and kissed her again. Then he clenched one of his fists and walked away. It would have to be told now ... or never.

“Let’s sit on the couch, Blanche, I want to talk to you,” he said.

After she had acquiesced they were silent for a full minute, while she looked at him and wondered at his nervous remoteness. Then he turned to her.

“I suppose you don’t know that I’m a negro,” he said.

She stared at him with an unbelieving frown on her face.

“A ... what?” she asked.

“A man of negro blood. My grandfather was white and he married a negress, and my mother married another white man. That’s the story.”

As she stared at him she felt too stunned for any single emotion.

“Eric, you’re fooling me, aren’t you?” she asked at last, slowly.

“No, it’s the truth.”

“But ... but, Eric, you look exactly like a white man! It can’t be true.”

“It is, just the same,” he answered, oddly relieved, now that he had blurted the thing out, and stoically waiting for her words to strike him. “I have just a small fraction of negro blood, as you see, and most people, like you, mistake me for a white man. God, how I wish I were coal-black—it would have saved me from the heartache that’s coming to me now!”

She looked away from him for a while, with a veritable mêlée of fear, brave indifference to the revelation, and self-doubt contending within her. Eric Starling was a negro, and she had fallen in love with him, and ... would she be averse to touching him, now? Would it make any difference? She reached for his hand and held it tightly for a moment, almost in an absurd effort to discover the answer to the question. Oh, what were words, anyway? He could tell her that he was negro until he became blue in the face, but he didn’t give her the feeling of one. Somehow, he just didn’t have the physical essence which she had always felt in the presence of other negroes, even those at the Vanderin party. He just didn’t have it. There was a fresh, lovely sturdiness attached to his body, and she wanted to be in his arms, and she couldn’t help herself. She loved him with every last blood-drop in her heart.

But the future, with all its ghastly dangers and troubles. If she married him, or if they lived together, her father and brothers would try to kill him, or injure him—she knew what they would do well enough, the stupid roughnecks—and her mother would weep and shriek, and perhaps try to kill herself, and other people would shun them, or make trouble for them. Even the dirty newspapers might take it up—hadn’t she read last week about a negro who had been hounded out of a New Jersey town because he loved a white girl and they wanted to marry each other? People were always like wolves, waiting to leap upon you if you dared to disregard any of their cherished “Thou Shalt Nots” ... just like wolves. The whole world seemed to be in a conspiracy to prevent people from becoming natural beings and doing as they pleased, even when their acts couldn’t possibly injure anybody. It was terrible.

And she herself, would she have courage enough to defy everything for his sake, and would her love for him continue in spite of all the threats and intrusions? She turned to look at him again. He was slumping down on the couch, with his hands resting limply on his outstretched legs, and his head lowered. All of her heart bounded toward him, and she flung herself against him and cried: “I don’t care what you are, Eric! I love you and I’m going to stick to you. I love you, Eric, dear one.”

With hosannas in his heart, he placed his arms around her, and they passed into an incoherence of weeping, and kissing, and whispered endearments, and sighs, and strainings. A full hour passed in this way before they could slowly return to some semblance of composure. Then, gradually, they tried to discuss the predicament facing them.

“You’re sure that you love me now, dear, but you’ve got to be doubly sure,” he said. “We won’t see each other for the next two weeks, and we’ll have a chance to think things over then. It’ll be hard, hard, but we’ve simply got to do it. Our minds will work better when we’re alone.”

“Perhaps you’re right, Eric,” she said, slowly, “but it wouldn’t change me any ’f I didn’t see you for a year, ’r a lifetime. Don’t be afraid of that.”

“You think so now, and, God, I hope it’s true, but you must realize what we’re going to be up against,” he answered. “Your family will raise hell, of course, and other people will turn their backs on us, and you’ll have to mingle with negro friends of mine and live among them.... Are you sure you’ll be able to face all these things?”

She hid her head on the couch for a while, and then raised it.

“I’ll be honest with you, Eric,” she said. “I’ll love you for the rest of my life, and I’ll never have anything to do with any other man, but I don’t know whether I’m brave enough to marry you and ... and take all the blows you’ve been talking about. I just don’t know.”

“If I were less selfish I’d give you up for your own good,” he answered, moodily.

“How about myself?” she asked. “Don’t you know I’m afraid that my father and my brothers will try to hurt you, ’r even kill you? Why, I can see the anger and the meanness on their faces right now, and it won’t do any good to talk to them! ’F I were less selfish, I’d want to give you up, just to save you, Eric.”

He kissed her again, and they murmured promises and were loath to withdraw from each other. Finally, she rose from the couch and tried to bring a brave smile to her face.

“I’ve simply got to be going now, Eric,” she said. “I’ll come up here the Saturday after next, two weeks from now, dear, ’r I’ll write you ’f I just must see you sooner.... I know I will marry you, Eric, in spite of everything—I know I will—but it’ll be better for both of us ’f we take our time about it.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he answered, as he fondled her cheek. “I’ll spend most of the two weeks writing poems to you, when I’m not in harness down at Tony’s. It’ll be some consolation, anyway.”

She donned her hat, and they exchanged several “last” hugs before they descended to the street, where he called a cab for her and, in spite of her protestations, slipped a bill into the driver’s hands. When she reached her home, the family were seated in the kitchen, smoking, reading the Sunday papers, and occasionally debating on the subject of her whereabouts.

“Well, give ’n account of y’rself, come on,” her father said, gruffly, as she removed her hat and desperately tried to straighten out the wrinkles in her dress. “’F you was out with Campbell again, I’ll make him talk turkey this time. He can’t fool around with one of my girls and not expect to do the right thing by her.”

His little eyes were tense with irritation and suspicion as he watched her.

“Yeh, you’ve got a nerve, all right,” Mabel piped up. “I never come trotting in at three in the afternoon! You’re just losing all respect for yourself, that’s what.”

“Say, listen, I’m not a child, any more,” Blanche answered, wearily resuming the old, useless blah-blahing. “I went to a party down in the Village and stayed overnight at my girl-friend’s studio, Margaret Wheeler, but I don’t see why I have to make any excuses about it. If the rest of you don’t like the way I act, I’ll pack up my things and leave, that’s all.”

“You will, huh?” her father asked. “Well, maybe we’ll tell you ourselves to clear outa here. ’F you can’t show any respect for your folks, then it’s high time somethin’ was done about it!”

“Yeh, that goes for me, too,” Harry said.

He suspected that his sister had rejoined Campbell, and he determined to look Joe up and frighten him into marrying her. The damn fool—she didn’t have sense enough to look out for herself, and if she kept it up, she’d wind up by becoming little better than the easy skirts he knocked around with. He wouldn’t let that happen to his sister—not he.

Kate Palmer stuck to her invariable rôle of peacemaker, though she felt sick at heart at her daughter’s silliness and looseness. She was staying out overnight with men and getting to be a regular bad woman. It was really terrible.

“Of course, we won’t let you leave home,” she said, “but you’re actin’ sim-ply awful nowadays. You’ll be disgracin’ all of us the next thing we know, gettin’ into some trouble ’r somethin’. Won’t you promise your ma not to stay out all night? Won’t you, Blanie?”

“You know I don’t want to hurt you, ma,” Blanche replied, as she stroked her mother’s hair, “but just the same, I’ve got to lead my own life from now on. I’m a grown-up person, ma, and not a slave.”

“You know we’re just askin’ you to act decint-like, you know it,” her mother said, sadly. “We’re none of us tryin’ to hold you down.”

“Yeh, that’s right, you’re getting too bold,” Mabel cut in, with disguised envy.

She scarcely ever “went the limit” with men, and why should her sister be privileged to be more brazen about it.

During all of these tirades, Blanche had wondered at her own indifference—the battle was on again, but now it had only a comical aspect. These pent-up, dense, jealous people—could they really be related to her own flesh and blood? They seemed to be so remote and impossible. None of them, except her mother, stirred her in the least, and even there it was only a mild compassion. Yet, once she had loved them in a fashion, and felt some degree of a warm nearness that even wrangling had never quite been able to remove. What marvels happened to you, once your mind began to expand. That was it—their minds were still and hard, and little more than the talking slaves of their emotions—while hers was restless and separate, and had slowly overcome the blindness of her former emotions toward them.

And now ... ah, if they had only known what they really had to rave about. How they would have pounced upon her! The sick fear returned to her as she reclined upon the bed in her room. Perhaps it might be wiser to pack up and leave home immediately. Yet, that would only be a breathing spell. If she married Starling, or lived with him, they would inevitably investigate and discover his negro blood, and the storm would burst, anyway. She tossed about in a brooding indecision.

During the next week she surprised her family by remaining in her room each night. What had come over her?—she must be sick, or in some secret difficulty. When a girl moped around and didn’t care to enjoy herself at night, something must be wrong, especially a girl like Blanche, who had always been “on the go” for the past four years. They suspected that Campbell or some other man might have given her an unwelcome burden, and they questioned her in this respect, but her laughing denials nonplussed them. Harry had an interview with Campbell, and had grudgingly become convinced that Blanche was no longer going out with him. The Palmer family finally became convinced that she had really taken their objections to heart and had decided to become a good girl.

Blanche wrote feverishly in her room, every night, with a little grammar which she had purchased to aid her—descriptions of places which she knew, such as cafeterias, dance halls and amusement parks. Her anger at human beings, and her sense of humor, fought against each other in these accounts, and the result was frequently a curious mixture of indignations and grimaces. Starling was ever a vision, standing in her room and urging on her hands ... she was writing for his sake as well as her own. If the rest of her life was to be interwoven in his, she would have to make herself worthy of him, and try to equal his own creations, and give him much more than mere physical contacts and adoring words. Otherwise, he might become quickly tired of her!

Her courage grew stronger with each succeeding night, and a youthful, though still sober, elasticity within her began to make plans that slew her prostrate broodings. Eric and she would simply run off to some remote spot—Canada, Mexico, Paris, anywhere—and then the specters and hatreds in their immediate scene would be powerless to injure or interfere with them. What was the use of remaining and fighting, when all of the odds were against them, and when the other side was so stubbornly unscrupulous, so utterly devoid of sympathy and understanding? In such a case, they would only be throwing themselves open to every kind of attack and intrusion, if not to an almost certain defeat. Eric might be a “nigger,” yes, but he certainly didn’t look like one, and he was better than any of the white men she had ever met ... dear, sweet boy ... and she loved him with every particle of her heart. She was sure of that now. She had never before felt anything remotely equal to the huge, restless emptiness which her separation from him had brought her—a sort of can’t-stand-it-not-to-see-him feeling that rose within her, even when she was in the midst of writing, and kept her pencil idly poised over the paper for minutes, while in her fancy she teased his hair, or chided some witticism of his. She’d go through ten thousand hells rather than give him up!

After a week and a half had passed, she determined to visit Margaret and “talk it over” with the other girl. It wasn’t that Margaret could convince her one way or the other—she had made her decision—but still, she craved the possible sympathy and encouragement of at least one other person besides Eric. It was hard to stand so utterly alone.

After telephoning, and finding that Margaret would be alone that night, she hurried down to see her.

The two girls sparred pleasantly and nervously with each other for a while as though they were both dreading the impending subject—which Margaret had sensed—and futilely trying to delay its appearance. Finally, Blanche blurted out, after a silence: “I suppose you know I’m in love with Eric Starling, Mart. You must have guessed it, the way I fooled around with him at Tony’s.”

“Yes, I’ve been worrying quite a bit about that,” Margaret answered. “Do you know that he’s, well—”

“Yes, I know that he’s a negro,” Blanche interrupted. “It’s true, Eric has just a little negro blood in him, but you must admit, dear, that he’s the whitest-looking one you ever saw.”

“Of course, he’d have fooled me, too, when I first met him, if Max hadn’t told me about it,” Margaret said. “I like him, too. He’s certainly not fatiguing to look at, and he has a lovely sense of humor, but still, can you quite forget about his negro blood when ... oh, when you’re petting together, I mean.”

“Can I forget it?—why, I go mad, stark mad, ’f he just puts his hand over mine,” Blanche cried. “I’ve never fallen so hard for any man in all my life—I mean it, Mart. I arranged not to meet him for two weeks—just to see ’f I wouldn’t cool down about him, you know—but it’s only convinced me all the more. I’ll never be able to get along without him ... never.”

“Well, after all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a little affair with him, if you’re careful about it,” Margaret replied.

“But it’s much deeper than that,” Blanche said slowly. “We’re both perm’nently in love with each other, we really are. It’s a big, precious thing, and not just ... well ... not just wanting to have a few parties, you know. I’m going to live with him for years and years, and maybe marry him right now. It’s the first time I’ve ever loved any one.”

“But, Blanche, you’re going to let yourself in for an endless nightmare, if that’s the case,” Margaret replied, sorrowfully. “Your people will simply raise the roof off, if they’re anything like you say they are. And then, all the other things—children, and living among his negro friends, and getting snubbed right and left.... Are you really sure you love him enough for all that? Are you, really?”

“Yes, I am sure,” Blanche said, in a slow, sick-at-heart, stubborn voice. “I’ve thought of everything, don’t worry about that, and it hasn’t given me much rest, either. Oh, how I hate this blind, mean world of ours!”

“Yes, I know, but hating it never solves anything,” Margaret answered, dully.

“Well, I’m going to solve it by running off with him,” Blanche continued. “We’ll go far away, to Paris or London—some place where nobody’ll know that Eric’s a negro, and we’ll stay there for the rest of our lives, that’s all. I don’t care ’f we both have to wash dishes for a living, I don’t. It’s all right to fight back when you’ve got a chance, but not when everything’s against you.”

“Funny, I never thought of that,” Margaret said, more cheerfully. “It might work out that way. Of course, it is cowardly in a way, but after all, there’s little sense to being brave in the lions’ den and getting devoured. It might work out fine, if you’re both certain your love’s going to last. Somehow or other, it’s hard for me to believe in a permanent love. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it in any of the people around me. Are you sure you’re not just in a sentimental dream, Blanche?”

Blanche reflected for a while.

“Well, ’f we’re both making a mistake, we’ll be happy, anyway, till we find it out,” she said at last. “Good Lord, ’f you never take any risks in life, why then you’ll be sad all the time, and you won’t have any happiness at all, no matter how short it is!”

“Yes, I agree with you there,” Margaret answered, with a sigh.

They fell into a discussion of the practical details of Blanche’s possible departure, and the money that would be required, and the difficulty of earning a living in Europe, both trying to lose themselves in a bright animation. When Blanche parted with Margaret, a little after midnight, she felt more confident, and almost light-hearted. After all, if two human beings were wise, and brave, and forever alert, they simply couldn’t be separated from each other, no matter what the dangers were.

The mood remained with her and grew more intense each day, and when she rang Starling’s bell at the end of the week, she was almost fluttering with hope and resolution. For the first hour they did little more than remain in each other’s arms, in a daze and maze of kisses, sighs, and simple, reiterated love words. To Starling, huge violins and cornets were ravishing the air of the room, and the street sounds outside, floating in through an open window, were only the applause of an unseen audience. After all, only times like this gave human beings any possible excuse for existing—the rest of life was simply a series of strugglings, and dodgings, and tantalizings, and defeats. The least pressure of her fingertips provoked a fiery somersault within him, and the grazing of her bosom and face against his aroused revolving conflagrations within his breast. Blanche had become a stunned child, scarcely daring to believe in the compensations which were ruffling her blood to something more than music, and yet desperately guarding them, incoherently whispering over them, endlessly testing them with her fingers and lips, lest they prove to be the cruellest of fantasies.

When Blanche and Starling had made a moderate return to a rational condition, they began to discuss their future.

“Don’t you see that we must run away, Eric, dear?” she asked. “We’ll just be crushed and beaten down, otherwise. My brother Harry, he’d never rest till he’d put you in a hospital—oh, but don’t I know him—and he might even try to do worse. I get the shivers when I think of it.”

Her words were an affront to his courage, and he said: “Listen, I can take care of myself—I’ve been through a pretty tough mill.”

“Of course you can, but they wouldn’t fight fair,” she answered, impatiently. “They’d just proceed to get you by hook or crook. And that’s not half of it. Why, I can just see ev’rybody turning their backs on us, ’r making nasty remarks, ’r trying to poison us against each other. We’ve just got to run away and live where nobody knows us!”

“No, it would be too yellow,” he replied, stubbornly. “All the things you mention will only be a test of our love for each other. If we can’t stand the gaff, then our love isn’t what we thought it was.”

“I’m not afraid of that,” she said. “I’d go through anything with you ’f I thought it was the best thing we could do, but why should we stay here and run up against all kinds of suff’rings and insults, and dangers, too, just to show how darn brave we are? It’s not cowardly to run off when everything’s against us—it’s not.”

“Well, let’s think it over for another week, anyway,” he answered, slowly. “I don’t like to slink away, with my tail between my legs, but maybe it’s the only thing to do. If we were only starting a little affair, like most of the mixed couples that hang out at Vanderin’s shack, then it would be different, of course, but we’re probably facing a whole lifetime together, and it’s a much more serious matter. The trouble is I’ve a great deal of pride in me, honey, and it always wants to fight back.”

“I have, too,” she said, “but in a time like this it’s just foolish to be so proud—it’ll only help other people to make us unhappy, that’s all.”

They were silent for a while, and then he said, with a smile: “Good Lord, we’re getting morbid and theatrical. The whole thing may not be half as bad as we think it is. Anyway, let’s forget it for one night, at least.”

They spent the remainder of the evening in an idyllic way. He read her his sensuous, symbolistic poems, and talked about them, and told her exciting stories of his past life, while she tried to describe some of the struggles and hesitations which had attended the birth of her mind, and her search for happiness in the face of sordid punches, and stupid jeers, and all the disappointments with which ignorance slays itself. They resolved not to become complete lovers until they were really living together and removed from fears and uncertainties. When they parted at 2 A. M. they were both wrapped up in a warmly exhausted but plotting trance. They arranged to meet on the following Wednesday, at Tony’s Club, and Blanche felt feathery and on tiptoes, as she rode back to the uninviting home which she would soon leave forever.

The next four days were excruciating centuries to her, and she was barely able to stagger through the nagging, drab details of her work at Madame Jaurette’s. She spent her nights writing in her room, and the even trend of her days remained uninvaded until Tuesday evening, when she found a letter waiting for her at home. It was from Oppendorf, who told her that he had polished up her account of the Vanderin party and had sold it to a New York magazine of the jaunty, trying-hard-to-be-sophisticated kind. She was overjoyed as she stared at the fifty-dollar check which he had enclosed, and she could scarcely wait to tell the news to Eric. Now she had proved her mettle, and was on the road to becoming a creative equal of his—blissful thought.

When she met him at Tony’s, she gayly extracted the check from her purse and waved it in front of his face.

“Now what do you think of your stupid, hair-curling Blanche?” she asked elatedly.

He laughed at her excitement as he led her to a table.

“You haven’t made me believe in your ability just because you’ve been accepted by a frothy, snippy magazine,” he said. “I knew all about it the first night I met you.”

“Never mind, this means I’m going to make a name for myself,” she answered, proudly.

He gave her a fatherly smile—what a delicious combination of naïvetés and instinctive wisdoms she was.

“I felt the same way when I first broke into print,” he said. “The excitement dies down after a while, and then you don’t care so much whether people like your stuff or not. You get down to a grimly plodding gait, old dear, and you start to write only for yourself. Then each acceptance means only so many dollars and cents.”

She retorted merrily: “Wet ra-ag—don’t try to dampen my spirits. It can’t be done.”

The brazenly sensual clatter and uproar of Tony’s pounded against their minds, and even Starling, more skeptically inured to it, and knowing every hidden, sordid wrinkle in the place, became more flighty and swaggering as he danced with Blanche. It meant something, now that the girl whom he really loved was stepping out beside him, and it had become something less gross than a collection of rounders, sulky or giggling white and colored flappers, fast women, and hoodwinked sugar-papas spending their rolls to impress the women beside them. Now it was an appropriate carnival-accompaniment to his happiness.

Immersed in Starling, Blanche did not notice the group of newcomers who had seated themselves two tables behind her. They consisted of her brother Harry, another wooden-faced, overdressed man of middle age, and their thickly painted, sullen-eyed ladies of the evening. Harry was settling the details of a whisky-transaction with Jack Compton, the other man.

“We’ll have the cases there by midnight on the dot,” he said, in a low voice. “I’ve got a cop fixed up, an’ he’s gonna stand guard for us an’ say it’s K.O., ’f any one tries to butt in. We’ll have to hand him a century, though.”

“That’s all right with me,” Compton replied. “You put this deal through without slipping up and there’ll be a coupla hundred in it for you.”

“It’s as good as done,” Harry answered, with a heavy nod.

Then, glancing around, he spied Blanche at the other table.

“Say, there’s my crazy sis, Blanche,” he said, pointing to her. “In the red pleated skirt, two tables down by the railing. See her, Jack?”

“Yeh ... she’s a good looker, Harry,” Compton replied.

“Say, I know the fellow with her,” one of the woman broke in. “He works here—he’s public’ty-man for the joint. Name’s Starling—Eric Starling. I met him down here about a week ago. What’s your sister doing out with a nigger, Harry? She seems to be mighty thick with him from the way she’s cutting up.”

“Go o-on, he looks damn white to me,” Harry answered, intently scowling toward the other table.

“Well, he is a nigger just the same,” the second woman said. “It’s known all around here—he don’t deny it any. I’ve seen them like him before. They’re only about one-eighth black, I guess.”

“Can’t your sister get any white fellows to go around with?” Compton asked. “She must be hard up, trotting around with a shine.”

“Yeh, she’s sure crazy about dark meat, I’ll say,” the first woman commented, with a laugh.

The taunts pierced Harry’s thick skin, and a rage grew within him. He’d stood for her going with Jews, and wops, and dopey weak-sisters, but a nigger was too much! It affronted his family-pride and erectness, and made him feel that his friends had been given a chance to ridicule him in an indirect way. For all he knew, Blanche might be having intimate relations with this coon, or might be even fixing to marry him. The thought was like a red-hot iron. His own sister, acting like a slut, in a black-and-tan dive, and consorting with a nigger there, or maybe with more of them.... By God, he wouldn’t stand for that!

“I’m gonna go over an’ bust him in the nose,” he said, half rising from his chair. “He’ll be leavin’ white girls alone after I’m through with him!”

Compton pulled Harry back to his chair.

“Keep your shirt on, d’you hear me,” he said. “If you start a scrap here you won’t have a chance—every bouncer ’n’ waiter in the place’ll be right on top of you. I’ve seen them in action before, and believe me, they work just like a machine.”

“Well, I can get in a coupla good cracks at him before they throw me out,” Harry persisted. “I want to show that dirty shine where he gets off at, makin’ a play for a sister uh mine!”

“You won’t show him this way,” Compton retorted. “You’ll land in the hospital, and you’ll land there quick, too. This gang down here don’t like a white man’s looks anyway, and they’ll give you the leather, just for good luck. Come on, let’s all clear outa here. You can lay for him to-morrow night, if you want to, ’r else give your sister a good bawling out when you get her home, an’ make her stay away from him.”

“Well, they can’t do nothin’ ’f I go over an’ bawl her out now,” Harry said, with a drunken stubbornness.

“Aw, keep your head, Harry, we don’t want to get the girl-friends here into no trouble,” Compton replied. “Come on, let’s beat it, Harry.”

The women added their persuasions, and Harry finally gave a reluctant assent. He departed with his friends, after vowing to settle the matter during the next few days.

Blanche and Starling continued their entranced capers until the closing hour, and when they rode to her home, they were steeped in a tired and lazy fondness, with their arms around each other and their heads close together. The apparitions and doubts had disappeared from their situation, as far as they were concerned, and nothing remained but a deliciously overheated and rumpled nearness to each other. They arranged to meet on the following Saturday night, and exchanged several farewell kisses, in the cab, before they reluctantly parted.

Blanche slept until noon, since the day was a holiday—Memorial Day—and when she awoke, the other Palmers were eating a late breakfast around the kitchen table. As she entered the kitchen, in her kimono, the family turned and surveyed her, each bearing a frown on his face. Taken aback, and suddenly prodded by an instinctive fear, Blanche advanced slowly toward the table. How could they know anything about Starling—nonsense. They were probably “sore” at her for some other reasons.

After she had seated herself at the table, the bombardment commenced.

“Who was you with last night?” Harry asked, with a sneer, to see whether she would lie.

“It’s none of your business,” Blanche replied, coolly, her fears soothed now.

“We-ell, that’s a hot one—going around with a nigger is none of our business, huh?” Mabel queried, in a shrill voice.

“What do you mean?” Blanche asked, mechanically—the blow had come, just when she had least expected it!

She became sick at heart, and dreaded the impending assault, and scarcely knew what she could answer. If she became defiant, it would only enrage them all the more, and it would be useless, besides ... what could she do, oh, what? To attempt to explain matters to her family would be ridiculous.

“You know what we mean all right,” her father cried. “You’ve been goin’ out with a shine—Harry saw you together last night down at Tony’s Club. For all we know you may be hooked up with him in the bargain. ’F I was sure of it, by God, I swear I’d take a swing at you, daughter ’r no daughter!”

Blanche remained silent—what they said to her didn’t matter, and she wasn’t afraid of them, but Eric, Eric ... they might kill him, or cripple him for life. They were really aroused now as they had never been before—she knew them well enough to tell when they were merely blustering and when not—and they felt that she was on the verge of disgracing and insulting everything that supported their lives—the cruelly proud, angry delusion of blood superiority, which they clung to as a last resort against all of the submissions and lacks in their existences. In their opinion, Eric was little better than a rat, who had tried to break into the sacred family kitchen.

Her mother began to speak, through fits of weeping.

“Oh, Blanie, Blanie, what’s come over you? You must be outa your head, you must. You’ve just got to give up that nigger you’re goin’ with, ’r you’ll be breakin’ my heart.... Blanie, Blanie, promise your ma you’ll never give yourself to nobody but a white man ... promise me, Blanie.”

“See what you’re doing to ma,” Mabel said. “You’re just bringing her to her grave, that’s what!”

“Well, I’m gonna take a hand in this,” her father cried. “You’ll stay away from that fellow from now on, ’r I’ll land in jail f’r manslaughter. I’m not kiddin’ any this time. You’ve been havin’ your own way, an’ stickin’ up your nose at us, an’ we’ve let you get away with it, but you never put over anythin’ like this—hookin’ up with a lousy nigger! What have you got to say f’r yourself, huh?”

“Yeh, that’s what I wanta know,” Harry said, as he glowered at her.

The promptings of cunning began to stir in Blanche’s brain. To save Eric, she would have to lie, abasing, tricky lies. No other answers were possible. If she strove to argue with her family now, or if she showed a hairbreadth of independence, they would instantly seek Eric out, and even his life might be in danger. She was certain of that.

“I’ve only gone out with him twice,” she said. “I didn’t know he was a negro, I swear I didn’t. I only found it out last night, just before I left him. He told me he was then, and I was good and mad about it. I called him down for daring to make up to me, and I told him I’d never, never see him again. He looks just like a white man, and he’d fool almost anybody. I swear he would.”

“Bla-anie, I mighta known it was somethin’ like this,” her mother cried, joyously. “’Course you won’t see him no more, now you’ve found out, ’course you won’t.”

“I should say not,” Blanche answered, vigorously. “I’m not picking out negroes this year, unless I don’t know what they are.”

Blanche hated herself for the groveling words which she forced from her mouth, and yet she felt that she had given the only shrewd answer that could possibly placate the stupid viciousness assailing her. She’d be willing to become a carpet, for Eric’s sake, any day in the year, no matter what nausea might be attached to the proceeding.

“Well, all right then, we’ll let it rest,” her father said, in a growling voice; “but just the same, Harry an’ me’ll keep a close watch on you. ’F you’re not tellin’ us a straight story, it’ll be bad for this Starling guy. We’ll put him in a nice, tight hotel, all right.”

“I’m with you there,” Harry broke in. “What I’d like to know is why she didn’t speak up when we started to ask her about it.”

“Gee, you were all on top of me like a ton of bricks,” Blanche answered. “I didn’t have a chance to say anything. Besides, I was ashamed of the whole thing.”

“Sure, I can understand that,” Philip said, eagerly, glad that his favorite sister had not been intending to disgrace them after all. “Didn’t Harry say this morning that it was hard to tell this Starlun guy from a white fellow? Blanche was just taken in, that’s all.”

“’Course she was,” Mrs. Palmer affirmed.

“Well, I’m not sayin’ she wasn’t,” her father replied. “We’ll just keep tabs on her, anyway, an’ make sure of it.”

Blanche continued her meek explanations and protests of innocence, and her family gradually calmed down and resumed a surface quietness. She knew that the suspicions of her father and Harry were still smoldering, and that these two would probably shadow her for some time, or use some other means to become cognizant of her nightly destinations and companions. She noticed also the speculative looks that Mabel gave her now and then. Mabel was too expert a liar not to doubt her sister’s tale, and she determined to do a little “snooping around” herself. You never can tell about Blanche.

The remainder of the day and night held a nightmare to Blanche. She had to affect a nonchalant mien—they would doubt her again if she showed any sadness or depression—and the strain was infinite, like holding up a boulder. Visions of Eric’s lifeless body dodged in and out of her mind and made her shiver helplessly. Harry and his gangsters could “get” poor Eric without half trying, and it would be useless to attempt to flee with him now, since she would be under the severest of scrutinies, where any false move might bring misfortune. Still, wasn’t there another way out of it? Why couldn’t they remain scrupulously apart from each other for half a year, or even longer, and then, when all of the suspicions and spyings had completely vanished, suddenly run away together? By that time her family would certainly have forgotten the matter, and in the interim, she could go about with other men—somehow compelling herself—and outwardly maintain her normal ways. A wan approach to cheerfulness possessed her, and late that night, she sat up in bed and wrote to Eric:

My Dearest Boy:

My brother Harry saw us at Tony’s last night, and this morning they gave me hell. It was no use to argue with them and make them even nastier—just no use. They said they would kill you, dearest, and I know they were not fourflushing when they said it. They’re cruel and stupid, and to their way of thinking, I’d disgrace and humiliate them if I ever married you. It’s what they cling to when everything else shows them how small they are—this snarling, keep-off pride in being white.... I lied to them and said I hadn’t known that you were colored, and swore I’d never see you again. Please, please forgive me, Eric. They’d have killed you if I hadn’t lied. And please, Eric, you must do as I say. This is the plan I have. We won’t see each other for exactly six months, and then we’ll suddenly run away together. Everything will be quiet then, and before they know what’s happened, we’ll be hundreds of miles away. If we tried it now we wouldn’t have a chance. Please, dearest boy, write and tell me you’ll do as I say. I love you more than anything else in life, and you’re like a prince walking through some rose-bushes, and you fill all of my heart, and I’ll never give you up—never be afraid of that. Answer me at once and address the letter to Madame Jaurette’s. I’m sending you a thousand kisses, dearest boy.

Blanche.

After finishing the letter, she felt woebegonely relieved and slightly hopeful, and the mood stayed with her through the following day of work at the Beauty Shop. She had placed a special-delivery stamp on the letter, and he received it in a few hours. After he had read and reread it several times, with a touch of anger lurking in his numbness, he began to pace up and down in his room, as though striving to goad himself into life again. Was she really giving him up, and trying to hide the blow with promises of a future escape? Was she?... No, Blanche was too inhumanly honest for that—even if she had wanted to lie, she could never have induced herself to put the words on paper. If he were wrong in this belief, then he would lose all of his faith in his ability to peer into human beings, and would call himself a fool for the remainder of his life! Somehow, a tremor of simple sincerity seemed to run through her letter—he couldn’t be mistaken.

Well, what then? If he persisted in running off with Blanche now, it might lead to melodrama. White gangsters such as her brother would not hesitate about attempting to “croak him off.” He wasn’t afraid of actually fighting them, but any man was always defenseless against a sudden bullet or knife-thrust, and he certainly didn’t care to die that way. B-r-r, the thought brought a fine sweat to his temples. No, these whites were little better than rodents, when their angry pride was aroused, and you had to use some of their own tactics, or perish.

They regarded him as a dirty nigger, these lily-pure, intelligent, lofty, noble-hearted people. What a nauseating joke! But, joke or no joke, it had to be grappled with. Blanche was right after all—when you were in a trap you had to gnaw slyly at the things binding you. It was galling to your erect defiance to admit it, but often, in a dire crisis, an imbecilic bravery brought you no gain, and caused your extinction. Yes, Blanche was right—it would be best for them to separate for half a year and then take the other side by surprise, with a thumb-twiddling swiftness. They would have to be patient—splendidly, grimly, bitterly patient—and somehow control the aches and cries in their hearts.

Of course, during the coming months, he would go out with women now and then, or chat with them—as a feeble diversion—but he would shun any intimate relations with them, if it were humanly possible. A pretty, well-shaped girl could always affect a man, in a purely physical way—he wasn’t trying naively to delude himself on that score—but just the same he intended to try his damnedest to remain faithful to Blanche. She invaded and stirred him as no other woman had, and if he consorted with other girls now, it would be a taunting and unanswerable aspersion against the depth and uniqueness of his love for her. In such a case he would be forced to admit that all of love was only an easily incited lust—but it wasn’t true. He would remain faithful to her.

He sat down and wrote a hopeful, agreeing letter, expressing his implicit belief in her, and swearing that he would remain true, and urging her to emulate his jaunty fortitude.

When she received the letter on the following afternoon, a surge of youthful determination almost drove the darkness out of her heart. If he had written morbidly, or in despair, her tottering and beleaguered feelings would have been crushed, but now she felt armored and half-way restored to her former happiness. After all, they were both very young, and six months now were little more than six hours in their lives.

During the next month she went to cabarets and theaters with other men, and wearily repulsed their inevitable attempts to embrace her afterwards, and preserved a careful attitude toward her family—not too friendly and not too ill-tempered. They would have suspected her of playing a part if she had suddenly seemed to become too pliable and harmonious. She saw Margaret and Oppendorf once, but did not tell them anything concerning the developments in her relations with Eric. She feared that they would advise her never to see him again, and she didn’t care to pass through the futile torments of an argument. She had made up her mind, and no human being could change it.

When a month had passed, however, a restlessly jealous mood stole imperceptibly over her. Perhaps Eric was running about with other girls now; perhaps his head was pressed against the smooth tenderness of their bosoms, or perhaps he had found another girl, far more beautiful and intelligent than any Blanche Palmer. The mood reached a climax one Sunday afternoon, as she boarded an “L” train and rode down to the Battery. Yes, of course, he must have forgotten her by now. He met tens of women every night down at Tony’s, and among all of them it would be easy for him to find a quick-minded, tempting girl—perhaps one of his own race, who would not lead him into staggering troubles and difficulties.

She sat on a bench facing the greenish-gray swells of dirty water, and watched the bobbing boats, and the laboriously swaying barges, and the straining, smoky tugs. A mood of plaintive, barely wounded peace settled about her, in spite of the jealous ranklings underneath. For an hour she sat draped in this acceptant revery, with her mind scarcely stirring. Then, glancing up, she saw that Eric was standing beside her.

For almost half a minute they stared at each other, without shifting their positions.

“Eric ... darling ... what are you doing here?” she asked at last.

“I never dreamt I’d see you,” he answered. “I was walking along and trying to forget my blues when I caught sight of you. I tried hard to turn around then and avoid you, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t.”

“I’m so glad you didn’t,” she said, as he sat down beside her. “Eric, my boysie, what’s been happening to you?”

“Oh, I’ve been plodding along, and writing poems to you, and extolling the barbaric charms of Tony’s,” he replied. “I’d get worried and hopeless every now and then, thinking you were in some other man’s arms ... just like a boy who doesn’t know whether he’s going to be whipped or petted.”

“That’s exactly how I felt,” she cried. “Why, say, I had you falling in love with every snippy, doll-faced girl in New York!”

They laughed—softly, ruefully, and with a relaxing weariness.

“How about your exquisite people?” he asked, after a pause. “Do they still keep a close watch on you?”

“No, I think they’re completely deceived by now,” she said. “I’ve played a foxy game, you know—going out with other men, and bragging about them, and hiding my feelings all the time. I was so afraid that somebody you know would see me with some fellow and tell you about it. I just couldn’t help it, darling. One little break might have given me away, and I just had to fool my folks. There wasn’t any other way.”

“Sure, I understand,” he replied, as he stroked her hand and looked at her with the expression of a man relievedly twitting his past fears and pains.

They were silent for a while, reveling in the unexpected, warm nearness to each other and feeling a giddy swirl of revived faiths and hopes. Their first little rush of reassuring words had aroused all of the deferred plans and buried braveries within them, but the awakening was not yet articulate enough for spoken syllables. They longed to embrace each other with an open intensity, and the effort needed to control this desire also served to prevent them from talking. Then Blanche remembered a fear which she had experienced during the previous week.

“Eric, did you ever see a play called ‘God’s People Got Wings?’” she asked.

“No, but I’ve heard about it.”

“Well, it certainly made me shiver,” she said. “One of Oppendorf’s friends took me down to see it, and I’ve never had such a dreadful time in my life. It was all about a colored man marrying a white girl. It ended up with the colored boy killing his wife and then committing suicide—think of it!—and I was just gripping the sides of my seat all the time.”

“Were you afraid it might have some connection with us?” he asked, gravely.

“No, no, of course not,” she answered, as she clutched his hand. “D’you think I’m silly enough to let some prejudiced man tell me whether I’m going to be happy or not? No, Eric, it wasn’t that, but I did feel angry and upset, and, we-ell ... it set me to wondering. Why do all these writers now always insist that colored and white people weren’t meant to get along with each other—oh, why do they?”

“Mister Shakespeare revived it with his Othello and it’s been going strong ever since,” he replied, with a contention of forlorn and contemptuous inflections in his voice. “It can’t be argued about. Most of them are perfectly sincere, and they really believe that people of different races always hate and fear each other at the bottom. You could get yourself blue in the face telling them exceptional men and women aren’t included in this rule, but it wouldn’t make the slightest impression.”

“But why are they so stubborn about it?” she asked.

“That’s easy,” he answered, wearily. “They don’t want to admit that there’s the smallest possibility of the races ever coming together. It’s a deep, blind pride, and they simply can’t get rid of it. They’re hardly ever conscious of it, Blanche, but it’s there just the same. Why, even Vanderin isn’t free from it. Take that latest book of his—Black Paradise—and what do you find? What? He’s just a bystander trying to be indulgent and sympathetic. It’s the old story. Negroes are primitive and sa-avage at the bottom, and white people aren’t ... white people like your brother, I suppose.”

He had been unable to restrain the sarcasm of his last words because his wounds had cried out for a childish relief. She had listened to him with a fascination that was near to worship ... what a dear, wise, eloquent boy he was! When he talked, even the ghosts of her former specters fled from her heart. Let the world call him a nigger—what did it matter? They didn’t care whether he was beautiful or not—all they wanted was to “keep him in his place,” these in-tel-li-gent people, just because he happened to have a mixture of blood within him.

“Oh, let’s not talk any more about it,” she said. “We’re in love with each other, Eric, boysie, and ... ’f other people don’ like it they can stand on their heads, for all I care!”

He fondled her shoulder, gratefully, and an uproar was in his heart.

“Blanche, what’s the use of waiting and waiting?” he asked at last. “We’re only suffering and denying ourselves when there’s no reason for it. Let’s run off to-morrow and marry each other. If we wait too long we’ll feel too helpless about it—it’ll grow to be a habit with us. I can’t exist any longer without you, Blanche—it’s just impossible ... impossible. I’ll draw out the thousand I have in the bank and we’ll hop a train for Chicago to-morrow afternoon. Don’t you see it’s useless to keep postponing it, Blanche?”

His eagerness, and her longing for him, expelled the last vestige of her fears.

“Yes, dear, I’ll go with you to-morrow,” she said.

Their hands gripped each other with the power of iron bands, and they stared hopefully out across the greenish-gray swells of water.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.