he was two years old. Ask him if he wants you to tell him what he can do!”
Ronald Harlan, his dignity offended, grew several years older and looked haughtily at Jim.
“Mind your own business!” he said defiantly, albeit a little guiltily.
“Hear that?” demanded Van Vleck. “My God, can’t you see you’re just a servant? Ronald here’d no more think of asking you to his party than he would his bootlegger.”
“Youbettergetout!” cried Jim incoherently.
Van Vleck did not move. Reaching out suddenly, Jim caught his wrist and jerking it behind his back forced his arm upward until Van Vleck bent forward in agony. Jim leaned and picked the flask from the floor with his free hand. Then he signed Hugo to open the hall-door, uttered an abrupt “You step!” and marched his helpless captive out into the hall where he literally threw him downstairs, head over heels bumping from wall to banister, and hurled his flask after him.
Then he reentered his academy, closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it.
“It—it happens to be a rule that nobody drinks while in this Academy.” He paused, looking from face to face, finding there sympathy, awe, disapproval, conflicting emotions. They stirred uneasily. He caught Amanthis’s eye, fancied he saw a faint nod of encouragement and, with almost an effort, went on:
“I just had to throw that fella out an’ you-all know it.” Then he concluded with a transparent affectation of dismissing an unimportant matter—”All right, let’s go! Orchestra—!”
But no one felt exactly like going on. The spontaneity of the proceedings had been violently disturbed. Someone made a run or two on the sliding guitar and several of the girls began whamming at the leer on the punching bags, but Ronald Harlan, followed by two other boys, got their hats and went silently out the door.
Jim and Hugo moved among the groups as usual until a certain measure of routine activity was restored but the enthusiasm was unrecapturable and Jim, shaken and discouraged, considered discontinuing school for the day. But he dared not. If they went home in this mood they might not come back. The whole thing depended on a mood. He must recreate it, he thought frantically—now, at once!
But try as he might, there was little response. He himself was not happy—he could communicate no gaiety to them. They watched his efforts listlessly and, he thought, a little contemptuously.
Then the tension snapped when the door burst suddenly open, precipitating a brace of middle-aged and excited women into the room. No person over twenty-one had ever entered the Academy before—but Van Vleck had gone direct to headquarters. The women were Mrs. Clifton Garneau and Mrs. Poindexter Katzby, two of the most fashionable and, at present, two of the most flurried women in Southampton. They were in search of their daughters as, in these days, so many women continually are.
The business was over in about three minutes.
“And as for you!” cried Mrs. Clifton Garneau in an awful voice, “your idea is to run a bar and—and opium den for children! You ghastly, horrible, unspeakable man! I can smell morphin fumes! Don’t tell me I can’t smell morphin fumes. I can smell morphin fumes!”
“And,” bellowed Mrs. Poindexter Katzby, “you have colored men around! You have colored girls hidden! I’m going to the police!”
Not content with herding their own daughters from the room, they insisted on the exodus of their friends’ daughters. Jim was not a little touched when several of them—including even little Martha Katzby, before she was snatched fiercely away by her mother—came up and shook hands with him. But they were all going, haughtily, regretfully or with shame-faced mutters of apology.
“Good-by,” he told them wistfully. “In the morning I’ll send you the money that’s due you.”
And, after all, they were not sorry to go. Outside, the sound of their starting motors, the triumphant put-put of their cut-outs cutting the warm September air, was a jubilant sound—a sound of youth and hopes high as the sun. Down to the ocean, to roll in the waves and forget—forget him and their discomfort at his humiliation.
They were gone—he was alone with Hugo in the room. He sat down suddenly with his face in his hands.
“Hugo,” he said huskily. “They don’t want us up here.”
“Don’t you care,” said a voice.
He looked up to see Amanthis standing beside him.
“You better go with them,” he told her. “You better not be seen here with me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re in society now and I’m no better to those people than a servant. You’re in society—I fixed that up. You better go or they won’t invite you to any of their dances.”
“They won’t anyhow, Jim,” she said gently. “They didn’t invite me to the one tomorrow night.”
He looked up indignantly.
“They didn’t?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll make ‘em!” he said wildly. “I’ll tell ‘em they got to. I’ll—I’ll—”
She came close to him with shining eyes.
“Don’t you mind, Jim,” she soothed him. “Don’t you mind. They don’t matter. We’ll have a party of our own tomorrow—just you and I.”
“I come from right good folks,” he said, defiantly. “Pore though.”
She laid her hand softly on his shoulder.
“I understand. You’re better than all of them put together, Jim.”
He got up and went to the window and stared out mournfully into the late afternoon.
“I reckon I should have let you sleep in that hammock.”
She laughed.
“I’m awfully glad you didn’t.”
He turned and faced the room, and his face was dark.
“Sweep up and lock up, Hugo,” he said, his voice trembling. “The summer’s over and we’re going down home.”
Autumn had come early. Jim Powell woke next morning to find his room cool, and the phenomenon of frosted breath in September absorbed him for a moment to the exclusion of the day before. Then the lines of his face drooped with unhappiness as he remembered the humiliation which had washed the cheery glitter from the summer. There was nothing left for him except to go back where he was known, where under no provocation were such things said to white people as had been said to him here.
After breakfast a measure of his customary light-heartedness returned. He was a child of the South—brooding was alien to his nature. He could conjure up an injury only a certain number of times before it faded into the great vacancy of the past.
But
