He did not shrink so much, beneath the menace of the family fist. He was more happily unmindful of his own unworthiness.
Assembled with three or four of the carriers in the lunchroom, he learned to smoke: in the sweet blue air of Spring, as he sloped down to his route, he came to know the beauty of Lady Nicotine, the delectable wraith who coiled into his brain, left her poignant breath in his young nostrils, her sharp kiss upon his mouth.
He was a sharp blade.
The Spring drove a thorn into his heart, it drew a wild cry from his lips. For it, he had no speech.
He knew hunger. He knew thirst. A great flame rose in him. He cooled his hot face in the night by bubbling water jets. Alone, he wept sometimes with pain and ecstasy. At home the frightened silence of his childhood was now touched with savage restraint. He was wired like a race-horse. A white atom of inchoate fury would burst in him like a rocket, and for a moment he would be cursing mad.
“What’s wrong with him? Is it the Pentland crazy streak coming out?” Helen asked, seated in Eliza’s kitchen.
Eliza moulded her lips portentously for some time, shaking her head slowly.
“Why,” she said, with a cunning smile, “don’t you know, child?”
His need for the negroes had become acute. He spent his afternoons after school combing restlessly through the celled hive of Niggertown. The rank stench of the branch, pouring its thick brown sewage down a bed of worn boulders, the smell of wood-smoke and laundry stewing in a black iron yard-pot, and the low jungle cadences of dusk, the forms that slid, dropped, and vanished, beneath a twinkling orchestration of small sounds. Fat ropes of language in the dusk, the larded sizzle of frying fish, the sad faint twanging of a banjo, and the stamp, far-faint, of heavy feet; voices Nilotic, river-wailing, and the greasy light of four thousand smoky lamps in shack and tenement.
From the worn central butte round which the colony swarmed, the panting voices of the Calvary Baptist Church
