“But I’m scared of being found out—and by people for whose opinions I don’t really care a damn.”
“If you need a refuge, at least verbal, Mr. Kingsblood, I shall be glad if you’ll come here.”
“I certainly shall. Good night, Ash.”
Dr. Davis distinctly hesitated before he said, “Good night—Neil.”
* * * * *
As he tramped on home, a good-looking but stolid-looking youngish man, through streets where clerks and foremen lived, streets like the aisles between boxes in a dark warehouse, there was more hope than apprehension in him. If he was still nervous about a conceivable future as a Negro, he no longer hated anything in it; in spirit he was on the side of the bars with Ash and Sophie and Ryan and Clem.
When he came dubiously into the bedroom, Vestal woke only to jeer, affectionately, “Some evening you vets must have had!” and went back to sleep.
It was astonishing, he thought, that his beloved wife did not instantly perceive that this evening had been the most critical in his history. Would Sophie have seen it?
* * * * *
Vestal and Neil were off for their two-weeks summer vacation in a rented cottage on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Before they went, Mr. S. Ashiel Denver, cashier of the Second National, gave them a dinner at the Pineland Hotel, to celebrate the glory and profitableness of the Veterans’ Center. In the pink glow from the rose-shaped wall-brackets against the Pompeian frescoes of the Fiesole Room, they were ushered to their table, handsome with silver and roses, by the senatorial Drexel Greenshaw, with his dark-brown dome, his clipped white mustache.
As they toyed with sardines lying exhausted on little couches of cold toast, Vestal looked after Mr. Greenshaw’s majestic back, and admired, “He’s quite the old-fashioned darky, isn’t he! I bet he loves pork chops and watermelon and shooting craps.”
Mr. Denver agreed, “Yes, he’s a fine old fellow. Never gets fresh or tries to act like he was white. He knows his place and does just what he’s told and says ‘Thank you,’ instead of trying to make you think he owned the hotel, like some of these flip young niggers would.”
But Mrs. Denver was not quite sure that she could grant Drexel a license to live. “He gets a little too friendly, for my taste. I do think one has to keep up standards in these critical days, with the breakdown of morale and all, and I can’t say I enjoy seeing a colored waiter acting like he belonged to the family. I don’t see why they don’t get rid of all the nigger help, in a place that claims to be so highclass, and hire some nice waitresses—but American ones, not all these thick Scandinavians.”
“Oh, I think all these darky waiters mean well. Only thing that bothers me about them is, I simply can’t tell them apart,” Vestal said broadmindedly, looking at the three waiters now in sight, one squat and black, one slim and coffee-colored, one very tall, very pale, and spectacled. “Can you, Neil?”