Page:The Blacker the Berry - Thurman - 1929.djvu/130

 if the fat one could achieve it without seriously endangering those ever tightening stepins.

“Dam’ good, I’ll say,” a slender white youth at the next table asseverated, as he lifted an amber filled glass to his lips.

Arline sighed. Her brother had begun to razz her. Emma Lou blinked guiltily as the lights were turned up. She had been immersed in something disturbingly pleasant. Idiot, she berated herself, just because You've had one drink and seen your first cabaret entertainer, must your mind and body feel all aflame?

Arline’s brother was mixing another highball. All around, people were laughing. There was much more laughter than there was talk, much more gesticulating and ogling than the usual means of expression called for. Everything seemed unrestrained, abandoned. Yet, Emma Lou was conscious of a note of artificiality, the same as she felt when she watched Arline and her fellow performers cavorting on the stage in “Cabaret Gal.” This entire scene seemed staged, they were in a theater, only the proscenium arch had been obliterated. At last the audience and the actors were as one.

A call to order on the snare drum. A brutal sliding trumpet call on the trombone, a running minor scale by the clarinet and piano, an umpah, umpah by the