Presently the colored orchestra arrived, followed by the first trickle of the dance crowd. An enormous red-faced man in muddy knee boots and with a revolver strapped around his waist, clumped in and paused for a moment at our table before going upstairs to the locker-room. It was Bill Abercrombie, the Sheriff, the son of Congressman Abercrombie. Some of the boys asked him half-whispered questions, and he replied in an attempt at an undertone.
‘Yes … He’s in the swamp all right; farmer saw him near the crossroads store … Like to have a shot at him myself.’
I asked the boy next to me what was the matter.
“Nigger case,’ he said, ‘over in Kisco, about two miles from here. He’s hiding in the swamp, and they’re going in after him tomorrow.’
‘What’ll they do to him?’
‘Hang him, I guess.’
The notion of the forlorn darky crouching dismally in a desolate bog waiting for dawn and death depressed me for a moment. Then the feeling passed and was forgotten.
After dinner Charley Kincaid and I walked out on the veranda—he had just heard that I was going away. I kept as close to the others as I could, answering his words but not his eyes—something inside me was protesting against leaving him on such a casual note. The temptation was strong to let something flicker up between us here at the end. I wanted him to kiss me—my heart promised that if he kissed me, just once, it would accept with equanimity the idea of never seeing him any more; but my mind knew it wasn’t so.
The other girls began to drift inside and upstairs to the dressing-room to improve their complexions, and with Charley still beside me, I followed. Just at that moment I wanted to cry—perhaps my eyes were already blurred, or perhaps it was my haste lest they should be, but I opened the door of a small card-room by mistake, and with my error the tragic machinery of the night began to function. In the card-room, not five feet from us, stood Marie Bannerman, Charley’s fiancée, and Joe Cable. They were in each other’s arms, absorbed in a passionate and oblivious kiss.
I closed the door quickly, and without glancing at Charley opened the right door and ran upstairs.
A few minutes later Marie Bannerman entered the crowded dressing-room. She saw me and came over, smiling in a sort of mock despair, but she breathed quickly, and the smile trembled a little on her mouth.
‘You won’t say a word, honey, will you?’ she whispered.
‘Of course not.’ I wondered how that could matter, now that Charley Kincaid knew.
‘Who else was it that saw us?’
‘Only Charley Kincaid and I.’
‘Oh!’ She looked a little puzzled; then she added: ‘He didn’t wait to say anything, honey. When we came out, he was just going out the door. I thought he was going to wait and romp all over Joe.’
‘How about his romping all over you?’ I couldn’t help asking.
‘Oh, he’ll do that.’ She laughed wryly. ‘But, honey, I know how to handle him. It’s just when he’s first mad that I’m scared of him—he’s got an awful temper.’ She whistled reminiscently. ‘I know, because this happened once before.’
I wanted to slap her. Turning my back, I walked away on the pretext of borrowing a pin from Katie, the negro maid. Catherine Jones was claiming the latter’s attention with a short gingham garment which needed repair.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Dancing-dress,’ she answered shortly, her mouth full of pins. When she took them out, she added: ‘It’s all come to pieces—I’ve used it so much.’
‘Are you going to dance here tonight?’
‘Going to try.’
Somebody had told me that she wanted to be a dancer—that she had taken lessons in New York.
‘Can I help you fix anything?’
‘No, thanks—unless—you can sew? Katie gets so excited Saturday night that she’s no good for anything except fetching pins. I’d be everlasting grateful to you, honey.’
I had reasons for not wanting to go downstairs just yet, and so I sat down and worked on her dress for half an hour. I wondered if Charley had gone home, if I would ever see him again—I scarcely dared to wonder if what he had seen would set him free, ethically. When I went down finally he was not in sight.
The room was now crowded; the tables had been removed and dancing was general. At that time, just after the war, all Southern boys had a way of agitating their heels from side to side, pivoting on the ball of the foot as they danced, and to acquiring this accomplishment I had devoted many hours. There were plenty of stags, almost all of them cheerful with corn-liquor; I refused on an average at least two drinks a dance. Even when it is mixed with a soft drink, as is the custom, rather than gulped from the neck of a warm bottle, it is a formidable proposition. Only a few girls like Catherine Jones took an occasional sip from some boy’s flask down at the dark end of the veranda.
I liked Catherine Jones—she seemed to have more energy than these other girls, though Aunt Musidora sniffed rather contemptuously whenever Catherine stopped for me in her car to go to the movies, remarking that she guessed ‘the bottom rail had gotten to be the top rail now’. Her family were ‘new and common’, but it seemed to me that perhaps her very commonness was an asset. Almost every girl in Davis confided in me at one time or another that her ambition was to ‘get away and come to New York’, but only Catherine Jones had actually taken the step of studying stage dancing with that end in view.
She was often asked to dance at these Saturday night affairs, something ‘classic’ or perhaps an acrobatic clog—on one memorable occasion she had annoyed the governing board by a ‘shimee’ (then the scapegrace of jazz), and the novel and somewhat startling excuse made for her was that she was ‘so tight she didn’t know what she was doing, anyhow’. She impressed me as a curious personality, and I was eager to see what she would produce tonight.
At twelve o’clock the music always ceased, as dancing was forbidden on Sunday morning. So at eleven-thirty a vast fanfaronade of drum and cornet beckoned the dancers and the couples on the verandas, and the ones in the cars outside, and the stragglers from the bar, into the ballroom. Chairs were brought in and galloped up en masse and with a great racket to the slightly raised platform. The orchestra had evacuated this and taken a place beside. Then, as the rearward lights were lowered, they began to play a tune accompanied by a curious drum-beat that I had never heard before and simultaneously Catherine Jones appeared upon the platform. She wore the short, country girl’s dress upon which I had lately labored, and a wide sunbonnet under which her face, stained yellow with powder, looked out at us with rolling eyes and a vacant negroid leer. She began to dance.
I had never seen anything like it before, and until five years later I wasn’t to see it again. It was the Charleston—it must have been the Charleston. I remember the double drum-beat like a shouted ‘Hey! Hey!’ and the familiar swing of the arms and the odd knock-kneed effect. She had picked it up, heaven knows where.
Her audience, familiar with negro rhythms, leaned forward eagerly—even to them it was something new, but it is stamped on my mind as clearly and indelibly as though I had seen it yesterday. The figure on the platform swinging and stamping, the excited orchestra, the waiters grinning in the doorway of the bar, and all around, through many windows, the soft languorous Southern night seeping in from swamp and cottonfield and lush foliage and brown, warm streams. At what point a feeling of tense uneasiness began to steal over me I don’t know. The dance could scarcely have taken ten minutes; perhaps the first beats of the barbaric music disquieted me—long before it was over, I was sitting rigid in my seat, and my eyes were wandering here and there