“Mr. Patmore said you were just a dirty rat.”
At first the words merely stuck in his ears unrealized and meaningless, like the monotonous pulse of the orchestra’s bass drum. Then suddenly, as if their beating had finally broken through a wall, they burst full into consciousness and throbbed in his head like pain.
He stood quite still, experiencing new and terrible feelings. Rat. Well enough from an equal—but from this girl—Rat. Dirty rat. Patmore said you were just a dirty rat.
Linda saw the change come over his face; saw the brows contract, the eyes gleam, the jaws tighten, the lips set; saw his body go taut like a rope under tension and the bronze skin lose its life and turn dirty copper. Linda had not the sophistication nor the cultivated self-protective cruelty of most beautiful women. She did not see that she had achieved her purpose, had effected a serious wound, and could now perhaps go on her way unafraid. She saw only that her thrust had gone too deep and said impulsively:
“Oh, I’m sorry—I didn’t really mean that—”
Then in a flutter of contrition and fright she whirled about and fled.
For yet a while longer he did not move. Music, dancing, laughter—tumultuous silence, uproarious, crowded solitude. Presently he was aware of a voice periodically snarling “R‑r‑rat!” and after a while realized that the trap-drummer was executing a series of rolls each swelling to a terminal snap like the epithet. “R‑r‑rat!”
That woke him. The stupor had been the recession of a wave, withdrawing only to gather new impetus. Now again it rushed over him, hot and impelling. He looked about a little madly and very grimly, and he said aloud:
“Judge. Hmph. Show me that judge. I’m go’n’ give ’im sump’m to judge.”
X
Upstairs in the box of J. Pennington Potter, who was one of the dozen vice-presidents of the General Improvement Association, an incredibly ill-chosen variety of personalities squirmed. It was J. Pennington Potter’s conviction that only admixture produced harmony between races. He argued quite logically. Prejudice and misunderstanding were due to mutual ignorance and ignorance due to silence. This silence must be broken. How break it save by acquaintanceship—how acquaint save by admixture? Social admixture—there was the solution to all the problems of race.
And so he proceeded to admix. There was himself, proud, loud, and pompous, and his wife, round, brown, and expansile, who always seemed bursting with something to say, but had never been known to say it; a woman so inflated with her husband’s bombast that one felt she’d collapse at a single thrust. There was the Hon. Buckram Byle, an ex-alderman from the twenty-ninth district, whose presence was intended to give the party some notion of the dignity of a Negro public servant. This he assuredly did, his habit being to stand apart, alone, with folded arms, motionless, silent, scowling, in the deeps of meditation. But few suspected the real basis of this air: that Mr. Byle was simply very angry at his young and pretty wife, Nora, who had managed to elude his jealously watchful eye all evening; and that the scowl, as usual, evidenced his resolution to take her straight home the moment she should reappear. There was Noel Dunn, the Nordic editor of an anti-Nordic journal, who missed no item of scene or conversation that he thought he could use for copy. Dunn’s readers gobbled up pro-Negro pieces, not because they were pro-Negro so much as because they were anti-White, and he and Mrs. Dunn were frequent visitors to Harlem, finding the Pennington Potters convenient wedges in effecting several profitable entrances.
The Potters were very proud of this friendship, and J. Pennington never missed a chance to mention, parenthetically of course, that Mr. and Mrs. Noel Dunn were up to dinner the night before last. The Dunns were known among their friends to mention these excursions also, but not at all parenthetically. The Dunns always explained elaborately about the “wealth of material” to be found in Negro Harlem, and they punctuated their apologies with different intonations of the word “marvelous.” Everything in Harlem, to the Dunns, was simply “marvelous!”
A friend of the Dunns, one Tony Nayle, who was visiting Harlem for the first time, was absent from the box at the moment. He had found the music and Nora Byle an irresistible combination; and Nora admitted later that she had continued dancing with him not merely to aggravate her jealous spouse, but also to verify what at first she could hardly believe. Nora always insisted that fays danced with a rhythm all their own, if any. She found Tony Nayle to be the first fay partner she’d ever known, so she said, to dance as though he was paying any attention to the music at all.
And finally, side by side in the front of the box, sat Fred Merrit and Miss Agatha Cramp.
It would have been enough to kill the spirit of any party just to have the inarticulate Mrs. Potter as its hostess; enough to distress any company just to inject into it a chronically jealous husband like Byle, let alone bringing his pretty wife, Nora, into contact with the attractive and willing-to-learn Tony; enough to insure discomfort in any group to include guests whose purposes were so different—amusement, profit, uplift; difficult enough to bring together unacquainted, dissimilar people without attempting to mix diverse motives as well. But to have put Fred Merrit and Miss Agatha Cramp side by side—this was the master touch; only a J. Pennington Potter could have done that.
One view only did they all have in common, the scene on the floor below.
“Marvelous!” said Mr. Dunn.
“Marvelous!” echoed Mrs. Dunn.
“Wonderful!” said J. Pennington Potter with a certain air of discovery.
So dense was the crowd of dancers, so close each couple to the next, that an observer from above might easily have lost the sense that these were actually people. They
