Page:The New Negro.pdf/145

Rh muggy, habitation made it giddy, bilious. Swarms of black folk populated it....

Sorry lot. Tugging at the apron strings of life, scabrous, sore-footed natives, spouting saliva into unisolated cisterns. Naked on the floors Chinese rum shops and chow-stands. Nigger-loving Chinks unmoved and unafraid of the consequences of a breed of untarnished. . . seemingly. . . Asiatics growing up around the breasts of West Indian maidens. Pious English peasant blacks. . . perforating the picture. . . going to church, to lodge meetings, to hear fiery orations.

Ant's Nest. On one hand the Ant’s Nest. On the other, the sand-gilt lake. In this fashion it was not an unexpected rarity to find The Palm Porch prospering. Austerely entrenched, the rooms on the ground floor went to a one-eyed baboo and a Panama witch doctor. Gates at the top of the stairs kept intruders off. A wolf hound insured the logic of the precaution.

Around the porch Miss Buckner had unsheathed a strip of bright enamel cloth. From a man's waist it rose to the roof. It was beyond reason for anyone to peep up from the piazza and see what was taking place up there. Of course there were iron bars below the white screen, but Miss Buckner had covered these with crates of fern and violets strung along it. In addition, Miss Buckner had not been without an eye to a certain tropical exactness.

About Miss Buckner the idea of surfeit. . . oxen hips, long, pliable hands, roving, sun-staring breasts. . .took on the magic of reality. Upon the yellow stalk of her being there shot up into mist and crystal space a head the shape of a sawed-off cocoanut tree top. Pressed close to its rim were tiny wrinkles. . . circles, circlets, half-circles. . . of black, crisp hair. It was even bobbed. . . an unheard of proceeding among the Victorian maidens of the Indian tropics. Unheard of, indeed.

Further to confound the canaille a heretical part slid down the front of it. Strangely anti-sexual, it helped, too, to create a brightly sodden air about Miss Buckner in the ramified circles in which she set her being.