Page:The New Negro.pdf/114

88 A smell of garlic stifled his speech. Nich and Mike Axaminter, late for the night shift at the La Belle, bent over the irate American, deluging him with the odor of garlic and voluble, guttural explosions of a Slovak tongue.

“What t’ hell! Git them buckets out of my face, you hunkies, you!”

Confused and apologetic the two men moved forward.

“Isn’t this an awful fog, Barney,” piped a gay, girlish voice.

“I’ll tell the world it is,” replied her red-haired companion, flinging a half-smoked cigarette away in the darkness as he assisted the girl to the platform.

They made their way to a vacant seat in the end of the car opposite the smoker, pausing for a moment respectfully to make the sign of the cross before two Sisters of Charity, whose flowing black robes and ebon headdress contrasted strikingly with the pale whiteness of their faces. The nuns raised their eyes, slightly smiled and continued their orisons on dark decades of rosaries with pendant crosses of ivory.

“Let’s sit here,” whispered the girl. “I don’t want to be by those niggers.”

In a few seconds they were settled. There were cooings of sweet words, limpid-eyed soul glances. They forgot all others. The car was theirs alone.

“Say, boy, ain’t this some fog. Yuh can’t see the old berg.”

“’Sthat so. I hadn’t noticed.”

Two Negro youths thus exchanged words. They were well dressed and sporty.

“Well, it don’t matter, as long as it don’t interfere with the dance.”

“I hope Daisy will be there. She’s some stunnin’ high-brown and I don’t mean maybe.”

“O boy!”

Thereupon one began to hum “Daddy, O Daddy” and the other whistled softly the popular air from “Shuffle Along” entitled “Old-Fashioned Love.”

“Oi, oi! Ven I say vill dis car shtart. Ve must mek dot train fur Pittsburgh.”