He harried his deficient subscribers for payment, with a wild tenacity.
He accepted their easy promises without question; he hunted them down in their own rooms, or in the rooms of a neighbor, he pressed so doggedly that, at length, sullenly or good-humoredly, they paid a part of their debt.
This was more than any of his predecessors had accomplished, but he fretted nervously over his accounts until he found that he had become, for the circulation manager, the exemplar for indolent boys.
As he dumped his desperately gathered pile of “chicken feed” upon the man’s desk, his employer would turn accusingly to a delinquent boy, saying:
“Look at that!
He does it every week!
Niggers, too!”
His pallid face would flame with joy and pride.
When he spoke to the great man his voice trembled.
He could hardly speak.
As the wind yelled through the dark, he burst into maniacal laughter.
He leaped high into the air with a scream of insane exultancy, burred in his throat idiot animal-squeals, and shot his papers terrifically into the flimsy boarding of the shacks.
He was free. He was alone.
He heard the howl of a train-whistle, and it was not so far away.
In the darkness he flung his arm out to the man on the rails, his goggled brother with steel-steady rail-fixed eyes.
He did not shrink so much, beneath the menace of the family fist.
He was more happily unmindful of his own unworthiness.
Assembled with three or four of the carriers in the lunchroom, he learned to smoke: in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth.
He was a sharp blade.
The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a wild cry from his lips.
For it, he had no speech.
He knew hunger.
He knew thirst.
A great flame rose in him.
He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets.
Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy.
At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint.
He was wired like a race-horse.
A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad.
“What’s wrong with him?
Is it the Pentland crazy streak coming out?” Helen asked, seated in Eliza’s kitchen.
Eliza moulded her lips portentously for some time, shaking her head slowly.
“Why,” she said, with a cunning smile, “don’t you know, child?”
His need for the negroes had become acute.
He spent his afternoons after school combing restlessly through the celled hive of Niggertown.
The rank stench of the branch, pouring its thick brown sewage down a bed of worn boulders, the smell of wood-smoke and laundry stewing in a black iron yard-pot, and the low jungle cadences of dusk, the forms that slid, dropped, and vanished, beneath a twinkling orchestration of small sounds.
Fat ropes of language in the dusk, the larded sizzle of frying fish, the sad faint twanging of a banjo, and the stamp, far-faint, of heavy feet; voices Nilotic, river-wailing, and the greasy light of four thousand smoky lamps in shack and tenement.
From the worn central butte round which the colony swarmed, the panting voices of the Calvary Baptist Church mounted, in an exhausting and unceasing frenzy, from seven o’clock until two in the morning, in their wild jungle wail of sin and love and death.
The dark was hived with flesh and mystery.
Rich wells of laughter bubbled everywhere.
The catforms slid.
Everything was immanent.
Everything was far.
Nothing could be touched.
In this old witch-magic of the dark, he began to know the awful innocence of evil, the terrible youth of an ancient race; his lips slid back across his teeth, he prowled in darkness with loose swinging arms, and his eyes shone.
Shame and terror, indefinable, surged through him.
He could not face the question in his heart.
A good part of his subscription list was solidly founded among decent and laborious darkies — barbers, tailors, grocers, pharmacists, and ginghamed black housewives, who paid him promptly on a given day each week, greeting him with warm smiles full of teeth, and titles of respect extravagant and kindly: “Mister,” “Colonel,” “General,” “Governor,” and so on.
They all knew Gant.
But another part — the part in which his desire and wonder met — were “floaters,” young men and women of precarious means, variable lives, who slid mysteriously from cell to cell, who peopled the night with their flitting stealth.