“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.”