There was a jangle of voices when the door opened, and high laughter, rough and derisive. Neil rose, ready for battle, but he heard Vestal, like a flute too shrill, inviting, “Certainly, come right in. Enchanted to see you…. Now that was very thoughtful of you!”
At the living-room door there were three black faces and one plastered dead-white, all maliciously merry, and they were Borus Bugdoll of the Jumpin’ Jive, Hack Riley, a dark ex-soldier, a white Polish girl called Faydis—surname forever unknown—and the black rose, Belfreda Gray, bubbling, “I always swore I’d come in the front door here, and by God, I have!”
“And, by God, so you have!” Vestal said sweetly.
Self-assured yet languid, hard as a flyer, his thin nose dark and bold above a race-track tie, a black hawk that liked to kill little birds, Borus winked at Vestal, glanced derisively at the jangled Neil, and said smoothly, “Good evening. My name is Bugdoll. I am a saloon-keeper. I heard there was a new mixed couple in town, and I always call and welcome them to our gang.”
Faydis crowed, “Yeh, him and me are mixed. He used to go with Bel, but her and Hack have clicked, and Borus is my fellow, and I’m just as white as you folks, maybe more so, but do I love my little brown dumpling! Yeh, I’m just like you, Vestal, living with a colored boy, and is it good cuddling—I’ll say!”
Neil drew the breath of one about to repel boarders, but Vestal’s voice, clear, low, only to be caught by a husband, insisted, “No. I want you to see what your intellectual friends are like!” Then, cheerily, “Do sit down, everybody. Belfreda—if I’m not being too intimate—how is everything going?”
She was so placid, so merry, that already she had taken the fuse out of their joke. Borus, an expert in social relations, stood easily, a little taller than Vestal, and he condescended, “You know, you’re a good guy, lady.”
He stared at her with such amusement, as though he knew all her thoughts and snobbishnesses and generosities, knew her in ball-gown or bathing suit, that she flushed and lost the lead. She said hastily, “Neil, I’ll get some drinks for your friends. Will you make them at home?”
He thought how taut, quick, knife-sliding, Borus looked, and he said carefully, with the expectation of trouble, “What do you mean by butting in here?”
“Maybe just to needle you, and maybe to see whether you’re an honest-to-God raceman or another gravy-sermon, race-relations highbrow. We was wondering if you can take it with us coalheavers, Neil?”
He felt that properly he ought to be offended, and found that he was not at all offended; that a lot of fine, high social fences which he had supposed to exist between Captain Kingsblood (of the Kingsbloods) and Borus the black bartender had been shadows, and that he might be lucky to have the friendship of a Borus, when all the Featherings set upon him.