VIII

Downstairs at one point on the terrace were Jinx and Bubber, oblivious to everybody, arguing heatedly over the relative speed of corn and gin as intoxicants. Neither had either. At another point a group of girls dressed as gypsies sat laughing around a table. The prettiest of these was Linda, not the dry and quiet Linda that served Agatha Cramp her meals, but a vivacious lighthearted child, out on a lark, being herself. Not far away, leaning against one of the pillars that supported the tier of boxes, stood Henry Patmore, calculatingly watching Linda. Further back, unnoticed, like a great shadow against the wall, Shine stood with his hands in his pockets, motionless, watching Patmore.

He had not long to wait before what he anticipated began to happen.

Henry Patmore was acknowledged among his friends a perfect ladies’ man. He had all the qualifications: money to burn, with a constant large supply of banknotes on his person, after the fashion of bootleggers; excellent taste in dress, as exemplified tonight by a sack suit of light greenish gray, a shirt of slate radium silk with collar to match, a bright green satin cravat caressing a diamond question mark, and a breast pocket polka dot handkerchief, whose crêpe border matched the tie. He was large and self-assured with an engaging manner and a flashing smile. Some people might not have cared for the fishy blankness of Patmore’s gray eyes, nor for his tough-looking tan skin, thickly bespecked with small brown freckles, nor for his rather heavy jowls nor his rather thick neck with its two deep transverse creases behind. But so courteous was his manner with ladies, so deferential, so flatteringly humble his approach, that almost never did a girl deny his request for a dance, whether she knew him or not.

Further, there was about him the reassuring deliberateness of complete self-confidence. He was thirty-five years old, as free of the uncertainties of youth as of the infirmities of age; on the one hand debonair but not dashing, on the other, solid but not set. He had reached a point where his person might still inspire admiration while his maturity dismissed apprehension. Never did Patmore’s manner suggest his motive.

It follows that Patmore’s conquests were many and his reputation enviable. Nor can it be denied that he made the most of this reputation among his fellow men, taking little pains to conceal either the nature of his activities or the identity of their object. He even allowed it to be suspected that there were dickty homes where he made it convenient to deliver liquor only during the hours when the head of the house was absent. Of this he did not openly boast, of course⁠—not, at least, when he was sober. That would have been bad business indeed, just as it would be bad business tonight to mount the stairs and try to mingle with his many patrons in the boxes. Occasionally, however, his own liquor did make him excessively talkative. He would stride into his establishment proclaiming his own excellence in this or that particular, and not infrequently the particular was conquest of ordinarily inaccessible women. Accordingly, his fellows declared him to be a “jiver from way back.” And while, drunk or sober, he did not deny this, still he always insisted that he was business man first of all.

For today however his business was done. He had provided more of the life of this party than any other single person, and he now fell back with a clear conscience upon the pursuit of his avocation.

As a field for such an avocation, the uniqueness of Harlem is that there are always new realms to conquer. Incredible, bewildering variety. Consider the mere item of complexion, you whose choice may run only from cool white to warm rose-and-olive. Harlem offers its cool white too, with blue eyes and flaxen hair, believe it or not; proceeds on through the conventional shades to the warmth of rose-and-olive; and here, where the rest of Manhattan ends, Harlem has just begun: on through the creams, the honeys and high-browns, the sealskins and chestnuts⁠—a dozen gradations in every class, not one without its peculiar richness. And if white be cool and olive warm, must not chestnut be downright fever? Harlemites swear that the Queen of Sheba was without doubt a sealskin brown and further insist that Cleopatra could have been but a honey at the fairest. And for evidence they will point out a dozen Shebas and any number of Cleopatras in the flesh.

Here is every variation of skin-color, every variety of feature-form, every possible combination of these variations and varieties. And of course every imaginable result, from the most outrageous ugliness to the most extraordinary beauty. Harlem is superlatively rich in diversity.

Accordingly Henry Patmore enjoyed almost boundless choice, and it was no mean tribute to Linda’s beauty that tonight his wandering eye fell and lingered upon her. He saw that she was with other girls and therefore probably unattended⁠—legitimate prey. And if he caught something vaguely different about her, it but served to heighten his interest.

Shine too had seen Linda and recognized her as the girl of the Court Avenue comments. It had given him strange and moving sensations, this recognition, had made him stare again just as foolishly as he had stared that morning a fortnight before. For him the rest of the picture thereupon faded into background, grew abruptly distant⁠—people, laughter, shouting, music⁠—while this dark-eyed girl in her gypsy attire, scarlet, gold, and black, became and remained the center and reason of it all.

Joshua Jones, be it confessed, was himself no cipher among the ladies. There had been girls aplenty: Sarah Mosely, Babe Merrimac, Lottie Buttsby, Becky Katz, Maggie Mulligan, and others. An acknowledged master of men is usually attractive to women, and in his world of sinew and steel, Shine had the necessary reputation; there was no end of stories about what he could do with his hands.

But his general philosophy of conduct, of being impenetrably hard, of repudiating sentiment and relaxing toward no one and nothing, shielded his spirit if not his body from the women he so far had known, and while he might have claimed some excellence as a man of affairs if he had so chosen, it would not have been the same in degree or kind as that attributed to Patmore. Patmore’s victories had been achieved, Shine’s had been thrust upon him, and what the one would have eagerly pursued the other intentionally eluded.

“Women,” Shine had often said, “don’t mean a man no good. Always want sump’m. Always got they hands out. Gimme. Any bird that really falls for a sheba is one half sap and th’ other half sucker.”

It did not matter that he had derived this conclusion from observation rather than experience. He believed it firmly. And so it was that triumph to Patmore would have been defeat to Shine, and the former’s reputation was to the latter nothing at all to brag about. Indeed, this reputation of Pat’s was one of the things about him that Shine most disliked. It summed Pat up as less of a man to be so much of a sap.

A new dance began, and from the orchestra, keyed up now to its very low-downest, there issued a current of leisurely, compelling rhythm, a rising tide of rhythm which floated couple after couple off the bank into midstream. Presently Linda was left alone at her table.

Henry Patmore went forward. To request the dance, less accomplished beaus would have simply extended a hand toward the girl, an audacious gesture, bordering on the presumptuous. Not Patmore. In addition to the slightly extended hand, he bent forward in a most ingratiating bow, smiled the metallic smile which revealed so much of his wealth, and said earnestly:

“Would you do me the favor, miss?”

Linda, however, knew how to dismiss strangers. She looked up, smiled very, very sweetly, and said with great finality, “No, thanks.”

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!”