"And now let's—er—dance," said Willie. "I will dance with the blushing bride, if you don't mind. Let 'er go, Winifred."
Winifred set off the Victrola, and a blare of nasal cacophony broke from the machine imitating a steamboat whistle; then ensued a negroid music of infinite inappropriateness to Forbes' tragic mood. He saw the woman who loved him, and whom he loved, tagged and claimed by a contemptible pygmy, the accidental inheritor of wealth. He saw his beautiful Persis in the fellow's incompetent arms and her body drooping over him as if he had carried her off in a kind of burlesque rape of the Sabines. The music was not Wagnerian epopee, nor were the words something from Sophokles; it was a romping ditty about
'Way down on the lev-ee
In old Alabam-y,
There's daddy and mam-my,
There's Ephraim and Sam-my
On a moon-light night.
Forbes felt Mrs. Neff's presence in front of him. Her wiry arms clutched him and danced him away. She was chattering reproaches because he had not taken her advice and captured Persis for himself. And her unwitting irony ran on against the words that Alice and Ten Eyck were singing as they danced:
Watch them shuf-flin' along,
See them shuf-flin' along.
Go take your best—gal—real—pal,
Go down to the lev-ee,
I said to the lev-ee,
And join that shuf-flin' throng.
Hear that mu-sic and song.
It's simply great—O mate.
Waitin' on the levee, waitin' for the Robert E. Lee.
Forbes felt a ribaldry in the whole situation, an intolerable contumely. He watched Persis darting here and there as Willie urged her. The little whelp could not keep time to the music, and his possession of Persis was as grotesque as the presence of a gargoyle on a cathedral. But cathedrals are thick with gargoyles, and life is full of such pairings.
For the second dance Forbes demanded Persis, and she granted him the privilege with some terror; the look on his face had alarmed her.
The music now celebrated "dancing with the Devil; oh, the little Devil! dancing at the Devil's ball." There was a fiend raging in Forbes' heart, and something infernal in the frenzy with which he whipped Persis this way and that.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he groaned. "Why didn't you warn me? The last I knew was that you and I were to be married. And suddenly that man speaks up and claims you. And you don't deny it. What in God's name does it mean?"
"Not so loud, my love!"