The average sheik would have passed on. Patmore was not the average sheik; and perhaps Linda had smiled a little too sweetly to convey sarcasm. Said he:
“The nex’ one, maybe?”
“I’m leaving after this one,” the girl lied easily.
“My, my. What a shame, both of us wastin’ it.”
He drew up a chair and sat down, his manner indicating clearly that though she might not dance with him, she could have no objection to his sharing her table. And he casually continued the conversation.
“You got a good chance to win the costume prize,” he observed.
Linda silently annoyed, was on the point of rising to leave. His next remark detained her:
“I’m one o’ the judges, y’ know.”
Her brows went up and he knew that now, at least, he had her interest. It quickened his own. A girl who was wise would have answered, “Yea—and I’m Norma Talmadge.”
Linda, instead, exclaimed without irony, “Are they really going to give prizes?”
Patmore grinned within, congratulating himself on his own good fortune. “Ripe in the body and green in the head. What more could a man want?”
“No lie,” he assured her. “And I’m gonna vote for you—unanimous.”
Of course, if you happened to be wearing a costume and unexpectedly found a prize in sight, there was no sense in throwing a chance away. And if this courteous man was a judge, that meant he must be Somebody and not just an ordinary masher as she had supposed.
“I been noticin’ you specially,” he said.
She was decently silent.
“That’s why I ast you to dance. Wanted to find out all about you.” He took out his business address-book, which contained the names and addresses of many prominent Harlemites, and wrote the words which he repeated after her aloud:
“ ‘Miss Linda Young. 309 Court Avenue, Washington Heights.’ Fine. Fine. Miss Young, the first prize is twenty-five dollars, and it’s as good as yours right now.”
“Oh, no—”
“ ’Deed so. Now listen, Miss Young. My name is Patmore—Henry Patmore—and we might jes’ as well be friends. And if you’ll finish this dance with me, I’ll see that th’ other judges gets a good look at you.”
Shine, several yards away, could hear nothing that was said, but he saw the whole thing: first, the girl’s obvious reaction to being approached by a stranger; despite this, the ease with which she had been engaged in conversation; then the promptness with which she had given over her name and address to be written in the new friend’s notebook. Now he saw her smile and rise and let Patmore steer her to the dance floor. In a moment more the pair was engulfed in the stream.
The scene occasioned in Shine a curious reaction: not an intensification of his contempt for Patmore, as might have been expected, but an unaccountably violent revulsion of feeling toward the girl. His inordinate admiration turned to equally inordinate scorn.
“As easy as that!” he scowled. “Well, I be damned!”
IX
Of course, he now fell back on his own unfailing gospel.
“See?” said he to the cockeyed world, “that jes’ goes to show y’, see? One mo’ sheba, that’s all. Mo’ different they look, less different they are. Bet he offered her a stick o’ candy or sump’m. … And here I come near gettin’ excited jes’ lookin’ at her. Can y’ beat it?”
But though this might be only one more instance of a far-reaching general truth, somehow the cynic did not dismiss it with customary casualness. As the evening progressed, he admitted this to himself, indeed could not deny it. For even after he had danced through “Do it, Daddy,” with Babe Merrimac, who vamped him desperately without avail, and through a slow and easy, somewhat disturbing “Shake That Thing” with the voluptuous Lottie Buttsby, the earlier incident still stuck fast in his mind. Babe and Lottie both complained of finding him even less enthusiastic than usual; he was, they avowed, downright leaden, and Lottie specified precisely where anyone interested could find the lead. But neither succeeded in bantering him into promising to see her safely home after the shout.
He caught sight of Linda occasionally, dancing with boys, nice, Sunday-Schoolish boys he did not know, and he blamed these occasional views of her for the persistence in his mind of what he had seen. He began to resent that persistence:
“What the hell I keep thinkin’ ’bout that for?”
Then, by way of excuse, “Well she sho’ is good to look at. Ain’ no sense in a woman bein’ that good-lookin’. Ain’ no excuse for it. Dangerous, what I mean. Ought to be locked up somewheres where she couldn’ do so much harm.”
He encountered Jinx and Bubber and they did nothing to help him forget.
“Boy!” exclaimed Bubber, “ ’member that sheba we seen that mornin’ on Court Avenue?”
Shine grunted assent.
“She’s right hyeh at d’belly-rub tonight, big boy. Sharp out this world. We jes’ seen ’uh—right over yonder. Great Gordon Gin—talk about one red hot mamma! Dressed like a fortune-teller—wish she’d tell mine. Anything she say ’d be awright with me. Tell me I go’n’ die tomorrer, I’d go right on and die happy.”
“I mean,” Jinx agreed. “And when I was dead and buried, all she’d have to do ’d be walk over my grave, see?—and damn if I wouldn’t git up and follow ’uh. Boy, she’s got what it takes, and papa don’ mean maybe!”
“She’s the owl’s bow’ls,” Bubber epitomized.
Shine looked at them scornfully. “You guys,” he observed, “mus’ both have glass eyes.”
When he had glumly departed, they looked at each other a long time solemnly; then they grinned and finally laughed aloud.
“What’s a matter with my boy?” Jinx wanted to know.
“Nothin’. She jes’ done put d’ locks on ’im, thass all.”
“Nothin’ different. And then up and give him lots o’ air.”
“Seems lak,” Bubber grew serious, “our boy has been smote sho’ ’nuff, though, don’ it?”
“Smit,” corrected Jinx.
“Smote.”
“Smit.”
“What you know ’bout language?”
“Mo’ ’n you. Don’ nobody talk language down yo’ home in South Ca’lina.”
“What they talk, then?”
“Don’ talk ’tall. Jes’ grunt.”
“Yea—and so did that man grunt
