He was sitting again on his porch, after the momentary morbid stir of
curiosity and small funeral, when the unrestrained sweep of his own
emotion overcame him. His appearance had not changed; it was impossible
for his expression to become bleaker; but there was a tremendous change
within. Yet it was not strange; rather he had the sensation of returning
to an old familiar condition. There he was at ease; he moved swiftly,
surely forward in the realization of what lay ahead.
Bella and June Bowman had left the house almost directly after him, and
Markley, finding it empty, with no response to his repeated knocking,
had turned away, being as usual both impatient and hurried. Yes, Bella
had gone and left Flavilla without even a glass of water. But Bella
didn't matter. He couldn't understand this--except where he saw at last
that she never had mattered; yet it was so. June Bowman was different.
There was no rush about the latter--to-morrow, next week would do
equally. There was no doubt either. Lemuel Doret gave a passing thought,
like a half-contemptuous gesture of final dismissal, to so much that had
lately occupied him. The shadow of a smile disfigured his metallic lips.
The following noon he shut the door of his house with a sharp impact and
made his way over the single street of Nantbrook toward the city. His
fear of it had vanished; and when he reached the steel-bound towering
masonry, the pouring crowds, he moved directly to a theater from which
an audience composed entirely of men was passing out by the posters of a
hectic burlesque.
“Clegett?” he asked at the grille of the box office.
A small man with a tilted black derby came from the darkened auditorium.
“Where have you been?” he demanded as he caught sight of Lemuel Doret.
“I asked two or three but you might have been dead for all of them.”
“That's just about what I have,” Doret answered. “Mr. Clegett, I'd like
a little money.”
“How little?”
“A hundred would be plenty.”
The other without hesitation produced a fold of currency, from which he
transferred an amount to Lemuel Doret. It went into his pocket without a
glance. He hesitated a moment, then added: “This will be all.”
Clegett nodded. “It might, and it might not,” he asserted; “but you
can't jam me. You're welcome to that, anyhow. It was coming to you. I
wondered when you'd be round.”
It was not far from the theater to a glittering hardware store, a place
that specialized in sporting goods. There were cases of fishing reels,
brilliant tied flies and varnished, gayly wrapped cane rods, gaffs and
coiled wire leaders, and an impressive assortment of modern pistols,
rifles and shotguns.
“Something small and neat,” Doret told the man in charge of the weapons.
He examined a compact automatic pistol, a blunted shape no larger than
his palm. It was a beautiful mechanism, and as with his silken razors,
merely to hold it, to test the smooth action, gave him a sense of
pleasure.
Later, seated in a quiet cafe, an adjunct of the saloon below, he could
not resist the temptation of taking the pistol in its rubber holster
from his pocket, merely to finger the delicate trigger. There was no
hurry. He knew his world thoroughly: it was a small land in which the
inhabitants had constant knowledge of each other. A question in the
right place would bring all the information he needed. Lemuel was
absolutely composed, actually he was a little sleepy; longing and inner
strife, dreams, were at an end; only an old familiar state, a thoroughly
comprehensible purpose remained.
A girl--she could have been no more than fourteen--was hurriedly
slipping a paper of white crystalline powder into a glass of
sarsaparilla. She smiled at him as she saw his indifferent
interrogation.
“It's better rolled with a pencil first,” he said, and then returned to
the contemplation of his own affair.
The result of this was that, soon after, he was seated in the smoking
car of an electric train that, hurtling across a sedgy green expanse of
salt meadow, deposited him in a colorful thronging city built on sand
and the rim of the sea. It was best to avoid if possible even a casual
inquiry, and Bowman had spoken of Atlantic City. The afternoon was
hot and bright, the beach was still dotted with groups of bathers;
and Lemuel Doret found an inconspicuous place in a row of swing chairs
protected by an awning ... where he waited for evening. Below him a
young woman lay contentedly with her head in a youth's lap; a child in a
red scrap of bathing suit dug sturdily with an ineffectual tin spade.
The day declined, the water darkened and the groups vanished from the
beach. An attendant was stacking the swing chairs, and Lemuel Doret
left his place. The boardwalk, elevated above him, was filled with a
gay multitude, subdued by the early twilight and the brightening
lemon-yellow radiance of the strung globes. Drifting, with only his gaze
alert, in the scented mob, he stopped at an unremarkable lunch room
for coffee, and afterward turned down a side avenue to where some
automobiles waited at the curb. A driver moved from his seat as Lemuel
approached, but after a closer inspection the former's interest died.
Doret lighted a cigarette. “How are they hitting you?” he asked
negligently.
“Bad; but the season ain't opened up right yet. It'll have to soon,
though, if they want me; gas has gone to where it's like shoving
champagne into your car.”
“The cafés doing anything?”
“None except the Torquay; but the cabaret they got takes all the
profits. That's on the front. Then there's the World, back of the town.
It's colored, but white go. Quite a place--I saw a sailor come out last
night hashed with a knife.”
He found the Torquay, a place of brilliant illumination and color,
packed with tables about a dancing floor, and small insistent orchestra.
He sat against the wall by the entrance, apparently sunk in apathy, but
his vision searched the crowd like the cutting bar of light thrown on
the intermittent singers. He renewed his order. Toward midnight a fresh
influx of people swept in; his search was unsatisfied.
The cigarette girl, pinkly pretty with an exaggerated figure, carrying a
wooden tray with her wares, stopped at his gesture.
“Why don't you hang that about your neck with something?” he inquired.
“And get round shouldered!” she demanded. Her manner became
confidential. “I do get fierce tired,” she admitted; “nine till
two-thirty.”
He asked for a particular brand of cigarette.
“We haven't got them.” She studied him with a memorizing frown. “They
are hardly ever asked for; and now--yes, there was a man, last night, I
think----”
“He must have made an impression.”
“Another move and I'd slapped him if I lost my job. They got to be some
fresh when they disturb me, too.”
“Alone, then?”
“That's right. Wanted me to meet him, and showed me a roll of money.
Me!” her contempt sharpened.
“He was young?”
“Young nothing, with gray in his shoebrush mustache.”
By such small things, Lemuel Doret reflected, the freshness that had
fixed June Bowman in the girl's memory, men were marked and followed.
“I told him,” she volunteered further, “he didn't belong on the
boardwalk but in the rough joints past the avenue.”
Paying for his drink Doret left the Torquay; and following the slight
pressure of two suggestions and a faint possibility he found himself in
a sodden dark district where a red-glass electric sign proclaimed the
entrance to the World. An automobile stopped and a chattering group of
young colored girls in sheer white with vivid ribbons, accompanied
by sultry silent negroes, preceded him into the café. He was met by a
brassy racket and a curiously musty heavy air.
The room was long and narrow, and on one wall a narrow long platform was
built above the floor for the cabaret. There was a ledge about the other
walls the width of one table, and below that the space was crowded by
a singular assembly. There were women faintly bisque in shade, with
beautiful regular features, and absolute blacks with flattened noses and
glistening eyes in burning red and green muslins. Among them were white
girls with untidy bright-gold hair, veiled gaze and sullen painted
lips; white men sat scattered through the darker throng, men like Lemuel
Doret, quiet and watchful, others laughing carelessly, belligerent, and
still more sunk in a stupor of drink.
Perhaps ten performers occupied the stage, and at one end was the
hysterical scraping on strings, the muffled hammered drums, that
furnished the rhythm for a slow intense waltz.
Yet in no detail was the place so marked as by an indefinable oppressive
atmosphere. The strong musk and edged perfumes, the races, distinct and
subtly antagonistic or mingled and spoiled, the rasping instruments,
combined in an unnatural irritating pressure; they produced an actual
sensation of cold and staleness like that from the air of a vault.
Doret ordered beer in a bottle, and watched the negro waitress snap
off the cap. He had never seen a café such as this before, and he was
engaged, slightly; its character he expressed comprehensively in the
word “bad.”
A wonderfully agile dancer caught the attention of the room.
The musicians added their voices to the jangle, and the minor
half-inarticulate wail, the dull regular thudding of the bass drum were
savage. The song fluctuated and died; the dancer dropped exhausted into
her chair.
Then Lemuel saw June Bowman. He was only a short distance away,
and--without Bella--seated alone but talking to the occupants of the
next table. Lemuel Doret was composed. In his pocket he removed the
automatic pistol from its rubber case. Still there was no hurry--Bowman
was half turned from him, absolutely at his command. The other twisted
about, his glance swept the room, and he recognized Doret. He half
rose from his chair, made a gesture of acknowledgment that died before
Lemuel's stony face, and sank back into his place. Lemuel saw Bowman's
hand slip under his coat, but it came out immediately; the fingers
drummed on the table.
The careless fool--he was unarmed.
There was no hurry; he could make one, two steps at Bowman's slightest
movement.... Lemuel thought of Flavilla deserted, dying alone with
a parched mouth, of all that had gone to wreck in the evil that had
overtaken him--the past that could not, it appeared, be killed. Yet
where Bowman was the past, it was nearly over. He'd finish the beer
before him, that would leave some in the bottle, and then end it.
With the glass poised in his hand he heard an absurd unexpected sound.
Looking up he saw that it came from the platform, from a black woman in
pale-blue silk, a short ruffled skirt and silver-paper ornaments in her
tightly crinkled hair. She was singing, barely audibly:
_“Oh, children ... lost in Egypt
See that chariot....
... good tidings!”_
Even from his table across the room he realized that she was sunk in
an abstraction; her eyes were shut and her body rocking in beat to the
line.
“Good tidings,” she sang.
A negro close beside Doret looked up suddenly, and his voice joined in a
humming undertone, “See that chariot, oh, good tidings ... that Egyptian
chariot.”
A vague emotion stirred within Lemuel Doret, the singing annoyed him,
troubled him with memories of perishing things. Another joined, and the
spiritual swelled slightly, haltingly above the clatter of glasses and
laughter. The woman who had begun it was swept to her feet; she
stood with her tinsel gayety of apparel making her tragic ebony face
infinitely grotesque and tormented while her tone rose in a clear
emotional soprano:
_“Children of Israel, unhappy slaves,
Good tidings, good tidings,
For that chariot's coming,
God's chariot's coming, ... coming,
........... chariot out of Egypt.”_
The magic of her feeling swept like a flame over the room; shrill mirth,
mocking calls, curses were bound in a louder and louder volume of hope
and praise. The negroes were on their feet, swaying in the hysterical
contagion of melody, the unutterable longing of their alien isolation.
“God's chariot's coming.” The song filled the roof, hung with bright
strips of paper, it boomed through the windows and doors. Sobbing cries
cut through it, profound invocations, beautiful shadowy voices chimed
above the weight of sound.
It beat like a hammer on Lemuel Doret's brain and heart. Suddenly he
couldn't breathe, and he rose with a gasp, facing the miracle that had
overtaken the place he called bad. God's chariot--was there! He heard
God's very tone directed at him. Borne upward on the flood of exaltation
he seemed to leave the earth far, far away. Something hard, frozen, in
him burst, and tears ran over his face; he was torn by fear and terrible
joy. His Lord....
He fell forward on his knees, an arm overturning the bottle of beer;
and, his sleeve dabbled in it, he pressed his head against the cold edge
of the table, praying wordlessly for faith, incoherently ravished by the
marvel of salvation, the knowledge of God here, everywhere.
The harmony wavered and sank, and out of the shuddering silence that
followed Lemuel Doret turned again from the city.