“And take this nigger headwaiter here. Does he have the decency to ask Glenn, ‘Please, boss, don’t mister me no misters! It makes me ashamed befo’ de white quality’? Not him! You Yankees–-”

And then he said it, he really did say it: “IwastwelveyearsoldbeforeIknewdamnYankeewastwowords.”

“You Yankees have spoiled him and he’ll stay spoiled till he gets a little kind-hearted flick of the bull-whip.”

Neil was saved from bursting out by Lucian’s abrupt, “Oh, don’t talk like a Mississippi Senator!”

“Now that’s all right now! Those Senators may be hicks, but they talk sense on this one subject! Say! I hear this headwaiter has a daughter that’s married to a nigger dentist! Can you imagine that—poking around in people’s mouths with his big black fingers! He ought to be run out of town. Yes, and maybe we’ll do it. Some day you boys may be glad that one man come here and stirred up a little action before any nigger trouble could start!”

Neil was choking inside.

–-God curse all white people, all of them! When shall I speak up? When shall I come out?

Uncle Bodacious Feathering was going on, “Used to be in the South we had a lot of dignified colored waiters that said ‘Sir’ to every white man even if he was a night watchman or what have you, but we had to kick out a good share of ‘em and put in white waitresses, because those anthracites were getting corrupted by hearing the educated Nigras talk about what they called ‘the wrongs of the race’—lot of stuff that never happened. I’d like to hang every buttinsky that helps any nigger to go to college, and deep down in your heart, Firelock, so would you.”

“I would not!”

“Oh, I’m naturally a tolerant guy, myself. I love dogs. But when my dog has been rolling in manure and comes parading in and claims a right to sit right down at the same table with me–-”

Neil heard nothing more. He had risen and walked out.

* * * * *

He sat in the Green Mountain Cocktail Lounge, with its hand-pegged maple furniture, its glass icicles on cartwheel chandeliers. He attentively drank one glass of water, throbbing, “I must come out—I must come out,” in a rhythm that beat and beat on endlessly. As he cautiously went back into the lobby, he saw that a Negro, dark-brown, handsome, slim, in tweeds, was standing at the desk. Neil guessed that he was a doctor or a teacher, and that, with his dove-like brown wife, he had been daring to motor and look at his own country.

The room-clerk was yelling, “Oh, Mr. Tartan, could you step this way?”