He sought these phantoms fruitlessly for weeks, until he discovered that he might find them only on Sunday morning, tossed like heavy sacks across one another, in the fetid dark of a tenement room, a half-dozen young men and women, in a snoring exhaustion of whisky-stupor and sexual depletion.
One Saturday evening, in the fading red of a summer twilight, he returned to one of these tenements, a rickety three-story shack, that cropped its two lower floors down a tall clay bank at the western ledge, near the whites.
Two dozen men and women lived here.
He was on the search for a woman named Ella Corpening.
He had never been able to find her: she was weeks behind in her subscriptions.
But her door stood open to-night: a warm waft of air and cooking food came up to him.
He descended the rotten steps that climbed the bank.
Ella Corpening sat facing the door in a rocking chair, purring lazily in the red glow of a little kitchen range, with her big legs stretched comfortably out on the floor.
She was a mulatto of twenty-six years, a handsome woman of Amazonian proportions, with smooth tawny skin.
She was dressed in the garments of some former mistress: she wore a brown woollen skirt, patent-leather shoes with high suede tops pearl-buttoned, and gray silk hose.
Her long heavy arms shone darkly through the light texture of a freshly laundered white shirtwaist.
A lacing of cheap blue ribbon gleamed across the heavy curve of her breasts.
There was a bubbling pot of cabbage and sliced fat pork upon the stove.
“Paper boy,” said Eugene.
“Come to collect.”
“Is you de boy?” drawled Ella Corpening with a lazy movement of her arm.
“How much does I owe?”
“$1.20,” he answered. He looked meaningfully at one extended leg, where, thrust in below the knee, a wadded bank-note gleamed dully.
“Dat’s my rent money,” she said.
“Can’t give you dat.
Dollah-twenty!” She brooded.
“Uh! Uh!” she grunted pleasantly.
“Don’t seem lak it ought to be dat much.”
“It is, though,” he said, opening his account book.
“It mus’ is,” she agreed, “if de book say so.”
She meditated luxuriously for a moment.
“Does you collec’ Sunday mawnin’?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“You come roun’ in de mawnin’,” she said hopefully.
“I’ll have somethin’ fo’ yuh, sho.
I’se waitin’ fo’ a white gent’man now.
He’s goin’ gib me a dollah.”
She moved her great limbs slowly, and smiled at him.
Forked pulses beat against his eyes.
He gulped dryly: his legs were rotten with excitement.
“What’s — what’s he going to give you a dollar for?” he muttered, barely audible.
“Jelly Roll,” said Ella Corpening.
He moved his lips twice, unable to speak.
She got up from her chair.
“What yo’ want?” she asked softly.
“Jelly Roll?”
“Want to see — to see!” he gasped.
She closed the door opening on the bank and locked it.
The stove cast a grated glow from its open ashpan.
There was a momentary rain of red cinders into the pit.
Ella Corpening opened the door beyond that, leading to another room.
There were two dirty rumpled beds; the single window was bolted and covered by an old green shade.
She lit a smoky little lamp, and turned the wick low.
There was a battered little dresser with a mottled glass, from which the blistered varnish was flaking.
Over the screened hearth, on a low mantel, there was a Kewpie doll, sashed with pink ribbon, a vase with fluted edges and gilt flowers, won at a carnival, and a paper of pins.