“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 cotton field 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 around the hall, passing along the rows of shadowy faces as if seeking some security that was no longer there.
I’m not a nervous type; nor am I given to panic; but for a moment I was afraid that if the music and the dance didn’t stop, I’d be hysterical. Something was happening all about me. I knew it as well as if I could see into these unknown souls. Things were happening, but one thing especially was leaning over so close that it almost touched us, that it did touch us… I almost screamed as a hand brushed accidentally against my back.
The music stopped. There was applause and protracted cries of encore, but Catherine Jones shook her head definitely at the orchestra leader and made as though to leave the platform. The appeals for more continued—again she shook her head, and it seemed to me that her expression was rather angry. Then a strange incident occurred. At the protracted pleading of someone in the front row, the colored orchestra leader began the vamp of the tune, as if to lure Catherine Jones into changing her mind. Instead she turned toward him, snapped out, “Didn’t you hear me say no?” and then, surprisingly, slapped his face. The music stopped, and an amused murmur terminated abruptly as a muffled but clearly audible shot rang out.
Immediately we were on our feet, for the sound indicated that it had been fired within or near the house. One of the chaperons gave a little scream, but when some wag called out, “Caesar’s in that henhouse again,” the momentary alarm dissolved into laughter. The club manager, followed by several curious couples, went out to have a look about, but the rest were already moving around the floor to the strains of “Good Night, Ladies,” which traditionally ended the dance.
I was glad it was over. The man with whom I had come went to get his car, and calling a waiter, I sent him for my golf-clubs, which were in the stack upstairs. I strolled out on the porch and waited, wondering again if Charley Kincaid had gone home.
Suddenly I was aware, in that curious way in which you become aware of something that has been going on for several minutes, that there was a tumult inside. Women were shrieking; there was a cry of “Oh, my God!” then the sounds of a stampede on the inside stairs, and footsteps running back and forth across the ballroom. A girl appeared from somewhere and pitched forward in a dead faint—almost immediately another girl did the same, and I heard a frantic male voice shouting into a telephone. Then, hatless and pale, a young man rushed out on the porch, and with hands that were cold as ice, seized my arm.
“What is it?” I cried. “A fire? What’s happened?”
“Marie Bannerman’s dead upstairs in the women’s dressing-room. Shot through the throat!”
III
The rest of that night is a series of visions that seem to have no connection with one another, that follow each other with the sharp instantaneous transitions of scenes in the movies. There was a group who stood arguing on the porch, in voices now raised, now hushed, about what should be done and how every waiter in the club, “even old Moses”, ought to be given the third degree tonight. That a “nigger” had shot and killed Marie Bannerman was the instant and unquestioned assumption—in the first unreasoning instant, anyone who doubted it would have been under suspicion. The guilty one was said to be Katie Golstien, the colored maid, who had discovered the body and fainted. It was said to be “the nigger they were looking for over near Kisco”. It was any darky at all.
Within half an hour people began to drift out,
