“Dat’s my rent money,” she said. “Can’t give you dat. Dollah-twenty!” She brooded. “Uh! Uh!” she grunted pleasantly. “Don’t seem lak it ought to be dat much.”
“It is, though,” he said, opening his account book.
“It mus’ is,” she agreed, “if de book say so.”
She meditated luxuriously for a moment.
“Does you collec’ Sunday mawnin’?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“You come roun’ in de mawnin’,” she said hopefully. “I’ll have somethin’ fo’ yuh, sho. I’se waitin’ fo’ a white gent’man now. He’s goin’ gib me a dollah.”
She moved her great limbs slowly, and smiled at him. Forked pulses beat against his eyes. He gulped dryly: his legs were rotten with excitement.
“What’s — what’s he going to give you a dollar for?” he muttered, barely audible.
“Jelly Roll,” said Ella Corpening.
He moved his lips twice, unable to speak. She got up from her chair.
“What yo’ want?” she asked softly. “Jelly Roll?”
“Want to see — to see!” he gasped.
She closed the door opening on the bank and locked it. The stove cast a grated glow from its open ashpan. There was a momentary rain of red cinders into the pit.
Ella Corpening opened the door beyond that, leading to another room. There were two dirty rumpled beds; the single window was bolted and covered by an old green shade. She lit a smoky little lamp, and turned the wick low.
There was a battered little dresser with a mottled glass, from which the blistered varnish was flaking. Over the screened hearth, on a low mantel, there was a Kewpie doll, sashed with pink ribbon, a vase with fluted edges and gilt flowers, won at a carnival, and a paper of pins. A calendar, also, by courtesy of the Altamont Coal and Ice Company, showing an Indian maid paddling her canoe down an alley of paved moonlight, and a religious motto in flowered scrollwork, framed in walnut: God Loves Them Both.
“What yo’ want?” she whispered, facing him.
Far off, he listened to the ghost of his own voice.
“Take off your clothes.”
Her skirt fell in a ring about her feet. She took off her starched waist. In a moment, save for her hose, she stood naked before him.
Her breath came quickly, her full tongue licked across her mouth.
“Dance!” he cried. “Dance!”
She began to moan softly, while an undulant tremor flowed through her great yellow body; her hips and her round heavy breasts writhed slowly in a sensual rhythm.
Her straight oiled hair fell across her neck in a thick shock. She extended her arms for balance, the lids closed over her large yellow eyeballs. She came near him. He felt her hot breath on his face, the smothering flood of her breasts. He was whirled like a chip in the wild torrent of her passion. Her powerful yellow hands gripped his slender arms round like bracelets. She shook him to and fro slowly, fastening him tightly against her pelt.
He strained back desperately against the door, drowning in her embrace.
“Get-‘way nigger. Get-‘way,” he panted thickly.
Slowly she released him: without opening her eyes, moaning, she slid back as if he had been a young tree. She sang, in a wailing minor key, with unceasing iteration:
“Jelly Roll! Je-e-e-ly Roll!”—
her voice falling each time to a low moan.
Her face, the broad column of her throat, and her deep-breasted torso were rilled with sweat. He fumbled blindly for the door, lunged across the outer room and, gasping, found his way into the air. Her chant, unbroken and undisturbed by his departure, followed him up the flimsy steps. He did not pause to get his breath until he came to the edge of the market square. Below him in the valley, across on the butte, the smoky lamps of Niggertown flared in the dusk. Faint laughter, rich, jungle-wild, welled up from hived darkness. He heard lost twangling notes, the measured thump of distant feet; beyond, above, more thin, more far than all, the rapid wail of sinners in a church.
23
Εντεὓθεν ἐξελαύνει σταθμὸυς τρεὶς παρασάγγας πεντεκαίδεκα ἐπὶ τὸν Εὐφράτην ποταμὸν.
He did not tell the Leonards that he was working in the early morning. He knew they would oppose his employment, and that their opposition would manifest itself in the triumphant argument of lowered grades. Also, Margaret Leonard, he knew, would talk ominously of health undermined, of the promise of future years destroyed, of the sweet lost hours of morning sleep that could never be regained. He was really more robust now than he had ever been. He was heavier and stronger. But he sometimes felt a gnawing hunger for sleep: he grew heavy at mid-day, revived in the afternoon, but found it difficult to keep his sleepy brain fixed on a book after eight o’clock in the evening.
He learned little of discipline. Under the care of the Leonards he came even to have a romantic contempt for it. Margaret Leonard had the marvelous vision, of great people, for essences. She saw always the dominant color, but she did not always see the shadings. She was an inspired sentimentalist. She thought she “knew boys”: she was proud of her knowledge of them. In fact, however, she had little knowledge of them. She would have been stricken with horror if she could have known the wild confusion of adolescence, the sexual nightmares of puberty, the grief, the fear, the shame in which a boy broods over the dark world of his desire. She did not know that every boy, caged in from confession by his fear, is to himself a monster.
She did not have knowledge. But she had wisdom. She found immediately a person’s quality. Boys were her heroes, her little gods. She believed that the world was to be saved, life redeemed, by one of them. She saw the flame that burns in each of them, and she guarded it. She tried somehow to reach the dark gropings toward light and articulation, of the blunt, the stolid, the shamefast. She spoke a calm low word to the trembling racehorse, and he was still.
Thus, he made no confessions. He was still prison-pent. But he turned always to Margaret Leonard as toward the light: she saw the unholy fires that cast their sword-dance on his face, she saw the hunger and the pain, and she fed him — majestic crime! — on poetry.
Whatever of fear or shame locked them in careful silence, whatever decorous pretense of custom guarded their tongues, they found release in the eloquent symbols of verse. And by that sign, Margaret was lost to the good angels. For what care the ambassadors of Satan, for all the small fidelities of the letter and the word, if from the singing choir of earthly methodism we can steal a single heart — lift up, flame-tipped, one great lost soul to the high sinfulness of poetry?
The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishably mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.
By the beginning of his fifteenth year Eugene knew almost every major lyric in the language. He possessed them to their living core, not in a handful of scattered quotations, but almost line for line. His thirst was drunken, insatiate: he added to his hoard entire scenes from Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell, which he read by himself in German; the lyrics of Heine, and several folk songs. He committed to memory the entire passage in the Anabasis, the mounting and triumphal Greek which described the moment when the starving remnant of the Ten Thousand had come at length to the sea, and sent up their great cry, calling it by name. In addition, he memorized some of the sonorous stupidities of Cicero, because