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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 seemed rather some turbulent congress of bright colored, inanimate things, propelled by a force over which they had no control. The couples were like the leaves and petals of flowers strewn thick on a stream; describing little individual figures and turns, circling capriciously in groups here and there, but all borne steadily onward in one common undertrend. Each seemed to answer with a smile the whim of every breeze; all actually obeyed unaware the steadfast pull of the current.

“Marvelous!” duoed the Dunns.

“Wonderful!” said J. Pennington Potter.

“M‑m⁠—” grunted the Hon. Buckram Byle.

“Don’t you think, Penny,” said Noel Dunn, “that your organization would be more specifically defined if it were named The General Negro Improvement Association?”

“Why, yes. Yes indeed. That is, perhaps. As a matter of fact we originally conceived the name as the General Negro Improvement Association. But it was I myself who contended, and without successful contradiction, that any improvement of the American Negro would inevitably improve all other Americans as well. There was therefore⁠—ah⁠—no point, you see, in including the word ‘Negro,’ and I succeeded in having it deleted.”

Mr. Dunn smiled, noting that the trap-drummer was at the moment very amusing.

Meanwhile Miss Agatha Cramp sat quite overwhelmed at the strangeness of her situation. This was her introduction to the people she planned to uplift. True to her word she had personally investigated the G.I.A. and been welcomed with open arms. Certain members of the executive board knew her and her past works⁠—one or two had been associated with her in other projects⁠—and her experience, resources, and devotion to service were unanimously acclaimed assets. And nobody minded her excessively corrective attitude⁠—all new board members started out revising things. Furthermore, the Costume Ball was at hand and that would be enough to upset anybody’s ideas of revision.

Never had Miss Cramp seen so many Negroes in one place at one time. Moreover, never had she dreamed that so many of her own people would for any reason imaginable have descended to mingle with these Negroes. She had prided herself on her own liberality in joining this company tonight. And so it shocked and outraged her to see that most of these fair-skinned visitors were unmistakably enjoying themselves, instead of maintaining the aloof, kindly dignity proper to those who must sacrifice to serve. And of course little did she suspect how many of the fair-skinned ones were not visitors at all but natives.

When she met Nora Byle, for instance, she was first struck with the beauty of her “Latin type.” To save her soul she could not help a momentary stiffening when Buckram Byle, who was a jaundice-brown, was presented as Nora’s husband: Intermarriage! She recovered. No. The girl was one of those mulattoes, of course; a conclusion that brought but temporary relief, for the next moment the debonair Tony Nayle had gone off with the “mulatto,” both of them flirting disgracefully.

It was all in all a situation which robbed Miss Cramp of words; but she smiled bravely through her distress and found no little relief in sitting beside Fred Merrit, whose perfect manner, cherubic smile and fair skin were highly comforting. She had not yet noticed the significant texture of his hair.

“Well, what do you think of it?” Merrit eventually asked.

“I don’t know what to think, really. What do you think?”

“It? Why⁠—it’s all too familiar now for me to have thoughts about. I take it for granted.”

“Oh⁠—you have worked among Negroes a great deal, then?”

Merrit grinned. “All my life.”

“How do you find them?”

That Merrit did not resist temptation and admit his complete identity at this point is easier to explain than to excuse. There was first his admitted joy in discomfiting members of the dominant race. Further, however, there was a special complex of reasons closer at hand.

Merrit was far more outraged by the flirtation between Nora Byle and Tony Nayle than had been even Miss Cramp herself, and with greater cause. His own race prejudice was a bitterer, more deep-seated emotion than was hers, and out of it came an attitude that caused him to look with great suspicion and distrust upon all visitors who came to Harlem “socially.” He insisted that the least blameworthy motive that brought them was curiosity, and held that he, for one, was not on exhibition. As for the men who came oftener than once, he felt that they all had but one motive, the pursuit of Harlem women; that their cultivation of Harlem men was a blind and an instrument in achieving this end, and that the end itself was always illicit and therefore reprehensible.

It was with him a terribly serious matter, of which he could see but one side. When Langdon once hinted gently that maybe it was a two-way reaction, he snorted the suggestion away as nonsense. That he should allow it to disturb him so profoundly meant that it went profoundly back into his own life, as it did into the lives of most people of heredity so diverse as his. The everyday difficulty of his own adjustment engendered in him an unforgiving hatred of those past generations responsible for it. Hence every suggestion that history might repeat itself in this particular occasioned revolt. If there could be no fair exchange, said he, let there be no exchange at all.

He knew that no two ardent individuals would ever be concerned with any such formulas, but the very ineffectuality of what seemed to him so just a principle rendered its violation the more irritating. And in the particular case of Tony and Nora⁠—well, he rather liked Nora himself.

And so beneath his pleasant manner, there was a disordered spirit which at this moment almost gleefully accepted the chance to vent itself on Miss Agatha Cramp’s ignorance. To admit his identity would have wholly lost him this chance. And as for the fact that she was a woman, that only made the compensation all the more complete, gave it a quality of actual retaliation, of parallel all the more satisfying.

“How do I find Negroes? I like them very much. Ever so much better than white people.”

“Oh Mr. Merrit! Really?”

“You see, they have so much more color.”

“Yes. I can see that.” She gazed upon the mob. “How primitive these people are,” she murmured. “So primeval. So unspoiled by civilization.”

“Beautiful savages,” suggested Merrit.

“Exactly. Just what I was thinking. What abandonment⁠—what unrestraint⁠—”

“Almost as bad as a Yale-Harvard football game, isn’t it?” Merrit’s eyes twinkled.

“Well,” Miss Cramp demurred, “that’s really quite a different thing, you know.”

“Of course. This unrestraint is the kind that is hostile to society, hostile to civilization. This is the sort of thing that you and I as sociologists must contend with, must wipe out.”

“Yes indeed. Quite so. This sort of thing is, as you say, quite unfortunate. We must educate these people out of it. There is so much to be done.”

“Listen to that music. Savage too, don’t you think?”

“Just what had occurred to me. That music is like the beating of⁠—what do they call ’em?⁠—dum-dums, isn’t it?”

“I was just trying to think what it recalled,” mused Merrit with great seriousness. “Tom-toms! that’s it⁠—of course. How stupid of me. Tom-toms. And the shuffle of feet⁠—”

“Rain,” breathed Miss Cramp, who, since her new interest, had deemed it her duty to read some of Langdon’s poetry. “Rain falling in a jungle.”

“Rain?”

“Rain falling on banana leaves,” said the lady. And the gentleman assented, “I know how it is. I once fell on a banana peel myself.”

“So primitive.” Miss Cramp turned to Mrs. Dunn, who sat behind and above her. “The throb of the jungle,” she remarked.

“Marvelous!” exhaled Mrs. Dunn.

“These people⁠—we can do so much for them⁠—we must educate them out of such unrestraint.”

Whereupon Tony and Nora appeared laughing and breathless at the box entrance; and Tony, descendant of Cedrics and Caesars, loudly declared:

“I’m going to get that bump-the-bump dance if it takes me the whole darn night!”

“Bump the what?” Miss Agatha wondered.

“Come on, Gloria,” Tony urged Mrs. Dunn. “You ought to know it, long as you’ve been coming to Harlem. Mrs. Byle gives me up. You try.”

Mrs. Dunn smiled and quickly rose. “I’ll say I will. Come along. It’s perfectly marvelous.”

“Furthermore,” expounded J. Pennington Potter, “there is a tendency among Negro organizations to incorporate too many words in a single designation with the result that what is intended as mere appellation becomes a detailed description. Take for example the N.O.U.S.E. and the I.N.I.A.W. There can be no excuse for entitlements of such prolixity. They endeavor to encompass a society’s past, present and future, embracing as well a description of motive and instrument. There is no call you will agree, no excuse, no justification for delineation, history and prophecy in a single title.”

“Quite so, Penny,” said Mr. Dunn. “Mrs. Byle, may I have this dance?”

“Certainly,” said Nora, smiling a trifle too amusedly.

“We’re going home after this one,” growled her husband as she passed.

Miss Cramp said in a low voice to Merrit: “Isn’t he a wonderful person?”

“Who?” wondered Merrit.

“Mr. Potter. He talks so beautifully and seems so intelligent.”

“He is intelligent, isn’t he?” said Merrit, as if the discovery surprised him.

“He must have an awfully good head.”

“Unexcelled for certain purposes.”

“I had no idea they were ever so cultured. How simple our task would be if they were all like that.”

“Like Potter? Heaven forbid!”

“Oh, Mr. Merrit. Really you mustn’t let your prejudices prevail. Negroes deserve at least a few leaders like that.”

“I don’t know what they’ve ever done to deserve them,” he said.

Unable to win him over to her broader viewpoint, she changed the subject.

“Mrs. Byle is very pretty, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“She is so light in complexion for a Negress.”

“A what?”

“A Negress. She is a Negress, isn’t she?”

“Well, I suppose you’d call her that.”

“It is hard to appreciate, isn’t it? It makes one wonder, really. Mrs. Byle is almost as fair as I am, while⁠—well, look at that girl down there. Absolutely black. Yet both⁠—”

“Are Negresses.”

“Exactly what I was thinking. I was just thinking⁠—Now how long have there been Negroes in our country, Mr. Merritt?”

“Longer than most one hundred percent Americans, I believe.”

“Really?”

“Since around 1500, I understand. And in numbers since 1619.”

“How well informed you are, Mr. Merrit. Imagine knowing dates like that⁠—Why that’s between three and four hundred years ago, isn’t it? But of course four hundred years isn’t such a long time if you believe in evolution. I consider evolution very important, don’t you?”

“Profoundly so.”

“But I was just thinking. These people have been out of their native element only three or four hundred years, and just see what it has done to their complexions! It’s hard to believe that just three hundred years in our country has brought about such a great variety in the color of the black race.”

“Environment is a powerful influence, Miss Cramp,” murmured Merrit.

“Yes, of course. Chiefly the climate, I should judge. Don’t you think?”

Merrit blinked, then nodded gravely, “Climate undoubtedly. Climate. Changed conditions of heat and moisture and so on.”

“Yes, exactly. Remarkable isn’t it? Now just consider, Mr. Merrit. The northern peoples are very fair⁠—the Scandinavians, for example. The tropic peoples, on the other hand are very dark⁠—often black like the Negroes in their own country. Isn’t that true?”

“Undeniably.”

“Now if these very same people here tonight had originally gone to Scandinavia⁠—three or four hundred years ago, you understand⁠—some of them would by now be as fair as the Scandinavians! Why they’d even have blue eyes and yellow hair!”

“No doubt about that,” Merrit agreed meditatively. “Oh yes. They’d have them without question.”

“Just imagine!” marveled Miss Cramp. “A Negro with skin as fair as your own!”

“M‑m. Yes. Just imagine,” said he without smiling.